Leroy Jethro Gibbs - Relationships - Marriages and Liaisons

Marriages and Liaisons

Gibbs has been married four times, and divorced three. His first marriage was kept a secret from nearly every one of Gibbs' current acquaintances until the episode "Hiatus (Part I)". The first hint of Gibbs' first family comes in the episode "Kill Ari (Part I)". During "Honor Code", Gibbs looks after the six-year-old son, named Zach, of a kidnapped Navy officer, much to the admiration of his fellow agents and even his boss, who points out how well Gibbs works with kids and asks if he has ever considered having any of his own. The episode concludes with a brief montage of flashbacks of Gibbs spending time with the boy in his basement working on a boat that he has been building, with the boy wearing an old NIS sweatshirt, and then finally a clip of a younger Gibbs wearing his Marine uniform, holding a young girl, sanding the hull of a boat in Gibbs' basement, similar to the image seen of Gibbs and Zach. By the start of season 3, Gibbs asks Ziva if she has prepared a dossier on him, and whether she knows of his "first wife and daughter". She answers "Yes."

In the episode "Heartland", it is revealed via flashbacks that Gibbs met his first wife, Shannon, while waiting at the Stillwater, Pennsylvania train platform in 1976, at which point she tells him about her rules for life; these rules would inspire a similar set of Gibbs' own that he now teaches to his subordinate agents at NCIS.

Shannon, along with their eight-year-old daughter Kelly, was murdered by a Mexican drug dealer named Pedro Hernandez on the last official day of Operation Desert Storm (February 28, 1991, although the temporary internment markers seen in Gibbs' flashbacks during "Hiatus", as well as the dates of death in the NCIS files on their murder, place their deaths on the nonexistent February 29, 1991); Gibbs had been an active member of the Marine Corps at the time and was still overseas when they were killed. In "Hiatus (Part II)" Jenny tells Dr. Donald "Ducky" Mallard—who apparently never knew—that Shannon had witnessed a murder of a Marine at Camp Pendleton. She identified the murderer as Mexican-born drug dealer Pedro Hernandez. Hernandez apparently killed the NIS agent driving their minivan in a sniper attack. The subsequent crash took their lives. In the episode when Jenny tells Ducky that attempts to extradite Hernandez had failed and that the case remained open, Ducky responds that the case is closed. He correctly guesses that Gibbs would have later killed Hernandez for revenge. According to the pilot episodes of NCIS: Los Angeles, Gibbs was suspected and, in fact, investigated in connection with Hernandez' murder, but the agent leading the investigation, Lara Macy (Louise Lombard), decided not to prosecute despite sufficient evidence, as she considered the killing justified. (She herself would later be murdered on the orders of Col. Merton Bell (Robert Patrick).)

Even pathologist Ducky and Director Shepard, who had known Gibbs for many years longer than the rest of his team, had not known about Shannon until they discovered the file about her murder during Gibbs' coma in "Hiatus".

One of his ex-wives, Diane Sterling (Melinda McGraw), later married FBI Senior Special Agent Tobias Fornell (Joe Spano). As she did with Gibbs, Diane drained Fornell's bank account upon leaving him. Fornell and Diane have a daughter, Emily, effectively forcing him to continue to interact with his ex-wife. Fornell often laments this fact, with Gibbs stating that he had warned Fornell of Diane's nature.

In a discussion with Diane in the season 9 episode "Devil's Triangle", Gibbs tells Diane that he liked her - he always liked her, and still likes her. (Diane tells him that their marriage fell apart because she was in love with him, but she couldn't compete with Shannon.)

Gibbs' wife Stephanie Flynn (Kathleen York) lived with him during his service in Moscow, Russia for about a year. Each wife was a redhead like Shannon. Ducky claims in the episode "Mind Games" that Gibbs' wife found it impossible to stay in their marriage when Gibbs was originally hunting serial killer Kyle Boone, but which wife he was referring to was never specified. According to Gibbs, she was the one who left him.

In the first season, Gibbs tells a suspect that he once caught his wife in bed with another man after he returned home from a "three month float in the Med", after which he divorced her.

Gibbs also had a past romantic relationship with the (now deceased) director of NCIS, Jenny Shepard who was also a redhead. In the first, second, and once during the third season, he was seen in the company of a mysterious (and never-identified) redheaded woman. In season four, he has a steady, serious relationship with Army CID agent Lt. Col. Hollis Mann, but their relationship is revealed to be over at the beginning of season five, when Shepard reads a brief announcement in a military newsletter that Mann is retiring to Hawaii.

After Shannon's and Kelly's death and before he married his second wife, Gibbs is suggested to have had an affair with a woman named Rose in Colombia. He was on a drug interdiction mission as a Marine Scout Sniper, and was wounded during the mission. In the episode in which this is revealed, Rose's son is introduced as a person of interest in a case after Gibbs' Marine service number was found written in blood at a crime scene. Gibbs was suspected (by his team) of being the boy's father; but Gibbs later reveals to Rose's son that she was already pregnant with him when he came to their village, but leaves out that the drug lord Gibbs was sent to assassinate was, in fact, the boy's father.

In Season 7, Gibbs meets lawyer Margaret Allison Hart (Rena Sofer), who was sent by an old enemy (Col. Merton Bell) whom Gibbs had locked up in a Mexican prison. Though Gibbs and Hart oppose each other over many cases, they are also attracted to one another. In the end, when it turned out that Bell was responsible for the death of Lara Macy in connection with the long-ago murder of Pedro Hernandez, Hart turned her back on him, showing that she cared more for Gibbs than for her boss. She later prevented the report incriminating Gibbs for Hernandez's murder from reaching Mexico and gave it to him.

In the episode "Borderland", an unknown conspirator manipulates events so that Abby ends up investigating the murder as a cold case and finds irrefutable proof that Gibbs is responsible. Despite this, she is conflicted on whether to drop the case or pursue it. Lara Macy was found dead in the episode "Patriot Down". It was later revealed that these events were manipulated by Hernandez's now-grown children: Paloma Reynosa, the head of the Reynosa drug cartel, and Alejandro Rivera, a high-ranking official of the Mexican Justice Department. In the episode "Spider and the Fly", Gibbs manipulates Alejandro into killing Paloma, and Alejandro is subsequently arrested. Shortly thereafter, Director Vance files Abby's report deep in the NCIS evidence room.