Colorado GOP Candidate Won't Say How Many People He's Killed

When a television anchor asks you point-blank how many people you’ve killed, there’s probably a good reason to answer directly. Gubernatorial candidate Victor Marx apparently didn’t get that memo.

During a May 27 interview on Denver’s 9News with anchor Kyle Clark, the frontrunner in Colorado’s Republican primary for governor found himself in deeply uncomfortable territory. Clark pressed Marx on a 2015 claim he’d made on PBS Hawaii’s Long Story Short With Leslie Wilcox—that his abusive stepfather had forced him to fatally shoot a man in the head when he was just 7 years old. When asked if that was the only person he’d killed, Marx paused for ten seconds, took a deep breath, and opened a door most candidates would keep firmly shut. He acknowledged the childhood incident but then admitted to possibly killing people as an adult in other countries while defending himself, before adding the chilling qualifier:“There’s no count on that. There’s no photos.”

Clark, showing admirable persistence, rephrased the question:“Do you think that you’ve killed people as an adult?”Marx’s response was a deflection wrapped in a question mark:“Does it matter?”When the anchor pointed out that yes, actually, taking someone’s life is“a pretty weighty thing,”Marx countered by distinguishing between murder and combat or self-defense. Fair enough on the surface. But then came the moment that will define this interview: When Clark asked one final time how many people he’d killed, Marx replied with a smirk,“Well, if I did, I wouldn’t be telling a reporter sitting here in my training center.”He called the question“odd.”

This wasn’t just awkward television—it was a masterclass in evasion at exactly the moment transparency matters most. Marx is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and founder of All Things Possible Ministries, which works to protect orphaned children in Haiti. His military background gives him some rhetorical cover when discussing combat deaths. But his refusal to engage seriously with a straightforward question about his personal history sent a very different message than he probably intended.

The stakes here are real. Marx is competing against Colorado Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer and Rep. Scott Bottoms in the GOP primary, scheduled for June 30, ahead of the November 3 gubernatorial election. Both opponents have already said they won’t support Marx if he wins the primary. Kirkmeyer called him unfit to be governor and said he’d be“a disaster for our state,”while Bottoms labeled him a“con man”and accused him of lying. Marx, for his part, sat out the debate where these attacks occurred and later accused his opponents of putting“their own egos and ambitions ahead of the party and the state.”

The interview exposed something harder to spin away: a candidate who seems more comfortable deflecting than answering. In politics, how you respond to tough questions often matters as much as what you say. Marx chose to dodge, joke, and question the relevance of the question itself. Voters will have to decide whether that’s the kind of evasiveness they want in their governor’s office.