Full Name: Reverend William Stryker (Master Sgt., US Army, ret.)Stryker fell into despair and alcoholism for months, until his was finally discharged by the Army for reasons of conduct. Shortly thereafter, however, Stryker read an article by Charles Xavier about mutants and knew what his son was. Then he found religion and blamed his wife for their offspring's mutation, turning his righteous fury (and shame) into a 25-year-long Crusade against mutants, claming them to be less than human and against God. Stryker quietly garnered tremendous popular support and immense amounts of money, which he used to fund his armed and armored Purifier death squads. The Purifiers searched out and murdered mutants and their families in cold blood, leaving little or no evidence for police to follow up.
Eventually, Stryker researched Xavier and his X-Men and built a doomsday machine to finish off all mutants. To set up his plan, he first debated Xavier on "Nightline" and then had the Purifiers attack Charles's limo on the way home, kidnapping Xavier and his attending students Scott Summers and Ororo Munroe, faking their deaths in an auto accident. Xavier was key to Stryker's plans, so Stryker had the mutant leader subjected to hallucinatory drugs and sensory deprivation, turning him into a suggestible automaton. Stryker then "programmed" Xavier to do his bidding and strike at his students, apparently killing them. (It should be noted that Charles resisted the programming on a deep level, and did not actually kill Cyclops and Storm, but only reduced their lifesigns to bare minimums).
Stryker's plan revolved around his biggest rally, a sermon at Madison Square Garden in New York City. He hooked Xavier into a machine based on Cerebro that was located backstage. The machine channeled Xavier's mental energy into waves that were destructive to mutants. As soon as the machine activated, Xavier's mind started affecting mutants in the area, including the X-Men, giving them nausea and nosebleeds. However, soon after Stryker began his sermon, Magneto made his appearance, lifting off the arena roof, then gently replacing it to confront the bigot in person. Stryker channeled the full power of Xavier through the machine into a concussive beam, knocking Magneto out of the air, but Magneto still spoke out. Then Stryker's top aide, the Purifier named Anne, began to exhibit symptoms from Xavier's onslaught, indicating that she, too, was a mutant. Stryker denied her allegiance and pushed her off the stage, cracking her neck on live television.
The X-Men finally got past Xavier's defenses and destroyed the machine, then confronted Stryker on stage. Stryker tried to sway the crowd, using Nightcrawler as a prime example of mutantkind's monstrous nature. Ariel defended her friend, and the enraged Stryker picked up Anne's gun and pointed it at the mutants, whereupon a cop on guard duty in the stadium shot the Reverend in the shoulder.
Stryker was convicted of murder and sent to prison, his Crusade crashing in confusion and lack of public support. During his prison term, he ingratiated himself to the penal system by offering his services as preacher to doomed death row inmates. At times the corrections officers would even transport Stryker to other facilities to minister to the inmates. On one such trip, Lady Deathstrike snuck aboard the airplane carrying Stryker, murdered the guards and crashed the plane, taking Stryker with her. On a previous confessional trip, Stryker was notified of a great mutant menace that had destroyed a town called Mount Haven. For some reason, Stryker and Lady Dee then captured Shadowcat, but on their way to their next destination, Deathstrike was co-opted by a mysterious virus and began to slaughter everyone around her. Stryker got away by activating adamantium-based protection suits around himself and Kitty and using her natural intangible state to phase away.
They ended up in Mount Haven, where Stryker discovered the remains of hundreds of humans, the town's original population. He then confronted Reverend Paul, the town leader and Shadowcat with his discovery. Stryker argued for terminating Paul, who was being controlled by a machine intelligence that thought that baseline humans were not real people and who was co-opting the nervous systems of his mutant charges with nanotechnology and bringing them into a hive mind. He pushed Kitty into Paul, short-circuiting him, but they both survived. Kitty argued for educating Paul, especially since killing him would have killed every mutant that was integrated into his network. In the end, Stryker chose to merge with Paul and teach him morality, and he locked himself into a suspended animation machine for a thousand years.
Somehow, however, Stryker was awakened prematurely, perhaps by the Nimrod (II) Sentinel that traveled to our present from the future. The Nimrod was damaged, and Stryker was able to access its files to see what would become of mutantkind. He found that the ex-mutants created by M-Day and the "New X-Men" would finally garner enough sympathy to integrate mutants into society, so he planned to destroy them. Finding people who died in accidents in Nimrod's files, he put himself in the right time and place to save them, telling them it was a miracle and convincing them that he knew God's plans for them.
Over the next year or so, Stryker equipped a new batch of Purifiers, and began his assaults, slowly at first, leading the Cabots to the mechanized armor units that seemingly killed Icarus and caused Julia Cabot to suicide. With Jay's guilt assured, Stryker continued to train his Purifiers until just before M-Day, when he contacted Icarus and convinced him that he wanted to help mutants be normal. After M-Day, Stryker had Jay's wings amputated, canceling his healing factor, then sent him back to the Institute. Jay then phoned Stryker, informing him of when the last ex-mutants were leaving on a bus. However, instead of preventing the bombing of the bus as he had told Icarus, Stryker ordered the bomb launched. With each move, Stryker saw the Nimrod files of the future change, and he got to the point where he could see only a few mutants left who could stop him.
Stryker then ordered Wallflower's assassination (sniper bullet to the head) and then had Icarus tell Dust to meet him at Stryker's headquarters, as he planned to kill her there, since she was the key player in the Nimrod files who stopped his assault on the Institute. When Jay returned, though, his presence activated Nimrod. Stryker had Jay shot and left him for dead. Using one of Nimrod's forearms as a gauntlet on his arm, he led the attack on the Institute, using the advanced technology to disable the Sentinels. While he thought Dust was being killed, he led the Purifiers against the X-Men. However, he was wrong, as X-23 subdued Dust and wore her roommate's burkha to his HQ, taking out the guards who thought they had killed her. Back at the Institute, Stryker was dismayed to see that his predictions of victory were not being supported by the Nimrod files, though they had taken down the X-Men and the students. Dust then awoke and cut a bloody swath through the Purifiers, and then Elixir overheard Stryker say that he had ordered Wallflower's death. Elixir went berserk and grabbed Stryker's head, causing it to break out in boils and other blisters, possibly due to disease or cancer-like symptoms and Stryker died as a result.
505