Walter White

Walter Hartwell White Sr. was born on September 7, 1958, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and died on his 52nd birthday in 2010. To the general public for most of his life, he was known as a brilliant but severely underachieving chemist. After earning his chemistry degree from the California Institute of Technology, he co-founded Gray Matter Technologies with Elliott Schwartz. However, he abruptly sold his shares for just $5,000 due to personal complications, completely missing out on the company's eventual multi-billion-dollar success and Nobel Prize-winning research. He later worked as a chemical engineer at Sandia National Laboratories before shifting his career entirely to education. For years, he lived a quiet, cash-strapped life as an overqualified high school chemistry teacher at J. P. Wynne High School, while simultaneously working a humiliating part-time job as a cashier and car washer at the A1A Car Wash to support his family, including his pregnant wife Skyler and his son Walter Jr. Everything changed post-exposure when federal law enforcement uncovered his double life as the notorious drug kingpin known as "Heisenberg." Walter White became the target of a massive FBI and DEA manhunt for manufacturing 99.1% pure blue methamphetamine, running a massive narcotics empire, money laundering through the very car wash he used to clean, and conspiring in multiple murders. Operating alongside his former student Jesse Pinkman, corrupt lawyer Saul Goodman, and cartel kingpin Gustavo Fring, his criminal enterprise eventually collapsed after he entangled himself with a violent neo-Nazi brotherhood. By the time of his death from a gunshot wound at a compound, his actions had left his brother-in-law, DEA Assistant Special Agent in Charge Hank Schrader, dead, his wife Skyler facing federal charges, and his children, Walter Jr. and Holly, inheriting a completely ruined family legacy.