A drawing of Walt Donovan.
Walter Donovan was an industrialist and collector of antiquities who allied himself with the Luciano crime family in order to obtain the Holy Grail, which he sought to sell on the black market in exchange for a fortune.
Biography[]
Walter Donovan was an Irish-American of Italian descent multimillionaire who was born March 27, 1894/106 BH in Manhattan, New York City who made several generous donations to the Old World Museum. He and his wife lived in a fancy apartment in NYC. By the late 1930's, Walter Donovan had fallen in with NYC’s second most powerful Cosa Nostra family called the Luciano crime family, so that he could help them locate the Holy Grail in the Middle East. With him as their most powerful associate, the Luciano crime family could easily rise from the last to first within the pecking order of NYC’s Five Families. By late 1937, Walter Donovan hired Grail lore scholar Henry Jones Sr. to locate the Holy Grail. As such, he was partnered with an Austrian archaeologist named Elsa Schneider. After they went to Venice, Italy and Henry Jones Sr. discovered that Elsa was affiliated with the Luciano’s, he was made to “mysteriously disappear” while held hostage at Castle Brunwald near the border of Austria and Germany. Walter Donovan used the removal of Henry Jones Sr. to lure in his son named Indiana Jones into helping him piece together vital clues leading to the location of the Grail. Indiana Jones was lured into the exact same trap, only in this case, he discovered Luciano crime family capo Ernesto Caprione holding Elsa at gunpoint only to find out that they were affiliated after locating his father. From that point forward, it was a race between both Joneses and their friends named Sallah and Marcus Brody against the Lucianos and their two most valued associates for the grail. Once they finally got to the temple where the Grail was located, Walter Donovan shot Henry Jones Sr. in the stomach. Sallah and Marcus Brody watched over the wounded elder Jones, pleading him to stay alive as Indy raced Elsa and Walter to the Grail. After coming to the correct room, a grail knight told them that whoever drinks from the right grail will be granted eternal life but whoever drinks the wrong one will have their life taken from them. Walter was tricked by Elsa into drinking the wrong one, the gold one. He turned 203 years old rapidly and shattered into dust, dying.
Book and Street Smarts[]
- Book Smarts: Superior
- Street Smarts: Higher than average
Trivia[]
- In Demon Redwood (aka Squirrely)'s canon, he is the grandfather of Don Donovan.
- If he were not of human specie and rather an Outworlder, Demon, Saurian or basically any other specie with a much longer lifespan, it is possible he could've had survived the rapid age and still be alive.