| Minor Character: Miami | |
| Name | Alexis Taymor |
| Alias | Monica Dow (alternate personality) |
| Gender | Female |
| City | Miami |
| Occupation | Visual Artist College Student |
| Status | Alive |
| Portrayed By | Kristina Apgar |
| First Appearance | Paint It Black |
Alexis Taymor aka Monica Dow is a college student and gifted artist who's afflicted with dissociative identity disorder after childhood trauma. She was briefly framed for the murder of her best friend, Corinne Palmer, who was helping Taymor recover when Palmer was alive.
History[]
Taymor's parents died in a plane accident when she was still a child. As an orphan, the trauma scarred her so badly, much of her hopes and fears dissociated into what would form an alternate state she'd switched between, under the name of Monica Dow. Dow was timid, more personal, and, as Taymor felt, a much more gifted artist than her, as painting was one of Taymor's most beloved passions. In college, her best friend and most sympathetic supporter was Corinne Palmer, her roommate in her dorm who cared about her as much as she did her alternate personality and hoped to associate her psyche together into one full conscious/subconscious to treat her condition. Her medication stopped working, and where Dow would show once or twice a month before college, she was more prevalent when she got to college. Unfortunately, the gala head where her art was being shown, William Oslo, adored Taymor paintings in her Dow personality and saw her alter as mental issues she channeled into stunning creative expression. He paid Palmer's boyfriend Jared Hatch $500 to leave Taymor with sugar capsules and not her pills so her condition would worsen when Dow took over more. When that didn't work, Oslo decided Palmer should die to keep Dow around and Taymor nonexistent. Feeling her creativity was being smothered and eradicated by Palmer's assistance on Taymor's therapy, he hoped to kill her for a big event Dow's art was planned to be shown in. To that end, when lacing Palmer's computer keys with thallium failed, he stalked the two women when they were at the pool together. As they were laughing about the usual stuff they liked to joke about, Alexis in her own conscious personality hears rustling and says she feels like she's being watched. Palmer comforts her, but Taymor insists on calling campus security, so she leaves the pool to find her phone. She comes back to find Oslo's drowned and stabbed Palmer to death. Seeing her dead horrifies and devastates Taymor into her own mind, causing Dow to come forward and call 911. She gives her statement to the CSI team best she can, but she loses train of thought regularly and grapples with putting her memories together. Oslo, feigning obliviousness over Palmer's murder, says Dow needed to attend her reserved gala, but Frank Tripp and the rest of the team agreed only if she took a polygraph test to check her memories. Dow's results are shaky, showing some results that she's lying sporadically, but it appears to be memory loss to protect herself from the trauma of Palmer's death. She later calls Horatio Caine, fearing something horrible was about to happen to her. She's later found in her apartment, severely cut up and with several bruises, including a black eye. But the shocking and horrific twist is despite her saying an intruder broke in and started brutalizing and maiming her, the wounds are self-inflicted. More specifically, her weaker side is targeting her more dominant and developed one. They start to catch on to her illness when they realize Dow has legitimate records on campus, but she doesn't have a social security number. On top of that, Taymor, despite having a third dorm room to herself, has an apartment off campus, where a journal was found with both Taymor's and Dow's handwriting. They finally realize what's going on: Dow's the alter personality, but she's taking over. Taymor's fighting to get rid of Dow so she can come forward as herself in full sanity, take her life back, and provide real-time accounts to answer to her friend's death. Dow's confronted with a newspaper clipping showing her parents' plane crash deaths, which makes sense to her since she never felt a full grip on reality. They take it a step further: with headphones and a computer montage, a manically complied exposure of images and sounds throughout Taymor's timeline flash in her eyes and ears to break Taymor out in a psychological provocation. it work when Taymor slams the headset down, calls the team sick for arranging the experiment, and ties her hair back. She confesses to Dow and how her personality was coming out more and more as she went into college, and she flatly but candidly says amidst her nerves that she has know idea what happened to Palmer and only found her dead before Dow took over. They eventually trace Palmer's killer: Oslo, the gala owner. Despite trying to frame Hatch by leaving the murder weapon, a paint knife in his supplies, the CSIs catch him by testing his coat cuff for chlorine from the pool he drowned Palmer in. He confesses and rants about all the notorious artists who were unstable, saying Dow's rare gift should only be encouraged and her illness and Palmer's life are worthy prices to pay for it. After he's arrested, Taymor, as herself, watches her name go up for the exhibit of her art. Caine's there with her, complimenting her talented passion and wishing her the best of both luck and health.