BIOGRAPHY -- Page 8
As he ruminated at home about the mess he made of his personal life, Matt Murdock was attacked by a plastoid robot intent on killing him. The assassin was invented by the criminal roboticist Starr Saxon, who sold his services to Biggie Benson to get revenge on Daredevil. The plastoid ran on scentolator circuits that allowed it to identify its target Daredevil by scent, and it had no forgiveness for secret identities. Matt held off the plastoid as best he could, but it was designed to increase its power levels when faced with adversity, and soon grew into a giant. 
Finally, Daredevil short-circuited the robot using a fuse box, causing it to return home for repairs. Trailing the plastoid, Daredevil discovered Saxon’s secret laboratory. As they struggled, Saxon tried to reboot the plastoid by loading another aromagraph into the scentolator. In the confusion, though, he accidentally reprogrammed the plastoid to go after Biggie Benson instead. Daredevil was forced to abandon Starr Saxon and pursue his creation, or else Biggie would be killed.
At the prison, Daredevil overtook the plastoid and tried to get Biggie to safety. Biggie thought the plastoid was trailing Daredevil as it was supposed to, and so he clocked Daredevil in order to leave him helpless. Instead, Biggie was the helpless one when the robot arrived and murdered the very man who hired its services. The threat from the authorities and a recovering Daredevil had caused the robot to grow to enormous size, but it froze up after its “mission” was completed. 
Meanwhile, Starr Saxon had traced the original path of his plastoid and discovered the previous battleground in Matt Murdock’s apartment. Becoming suspicious, Saxon located the hidden compartments with Daredevil gear and deduced Matt’s secret identity. He activated a remote destruct mechanism in the plastoid, but Daredevil’s senses detected the arming of the bomb at the prison and he used his incredible sense of touch to disable it.
Having overcome his trials, Daredevil reached out to Karen and Foggy to make amends with his friends. Although things seemed on the rise, Matt was also feeling a strange dizziness. He was too disoriented to do anything when Starr Saxon approached him on the street and revealed he knew Matt’s secret. At dinner with Karen, a distracted Matt cut his hand on a glass and fled from the restaurant without his cane. Saxon met with the confused Karen and lured her away back to Matt’s apartment, taking her as a hostage. As it happened, the prison’s Doctor Roberts, who checked out Daredevil after the battle, got the hero’s blood tests back and learned a deadly radioactive element had infected Daredevil’s bloodstream. He reached out to the D.A.’s office and Foggy in turn met with Black Panther of the Avengers. He explained the situation and how Daredevil was in dire need of medical attention, so T’Challa agreed to hunt the man.
A delirious Matt had his super-senses cutting in and out on him, unaware of his full danger. Running back to his apartment, he found Starr Saxon was holding Karen at gunpoint. Daredevil and Black Panther both entered the apartment, making quick work of the evil but otherwise unimpressive criminal scientist. Nelson and the doctor soon arrived, and Doctor Roberts remarked that Daredevil was recuperating remarkably. Apparently, a cut on his hand drained enough of the irradiated blood to weaken the effects long enough for treatment. Daredevil sharing the same cut 
as Matt Murdock caught Karen’s attention, but Starr Saxon recovered and made a dramatic exit that drew away everybody’s focus. Daredevil pursued Saxon, but the scientist blackmailed Murdock with knowledge of his secret identity. Realizing most of the evidence of Saxon’s crimes disappeared in his burning lab, Matt reluctantly let him go until he could find enough proof to put Saxon away for good. [Daredevil (1st series) #49-52]
Matt tried to reason out the best way to deal with the threat posed by Starr Saxon, and he decided to fake his own death. He arranged for Matt Murdock to seemingly die in a plane crash, and 
hoped to establish a new civilian identity which Saxon was unaware of. Although he now hoped to marry Karen once he established this new identity, Matt continued to lie to her as Daredevil for the present. Saxon had left Daredevil’s billy club (in the form of Murdock’s cane) behind when he kidnapped Karen. Daredevil tried to retrieve the cane from Karen and, when she refused to part with one of the last reminders she had of dear dead Matthew, he snuck into her house at night to steal it.
While hunting down Saxon, Daredevil was challenged over the air waves by his old foe, Mr. Fear. Looking for a rematch now that he was out of prison, Fear dared Daredevil to meet him in a fight in exchange for making a donation to charity. Mr. Fear was outfitted with new tech, such as his repello-ray and personal flying platform, but Daredevil was confident he could beat Drago. As Daredevil tried to scale the flying disc with his billy club, Mr. Fear claimed he had the new power 
to induce fear at will. Indeed, he merely gestured at Daredevil and Matt was suddenly overwhelmed with panic and a fear of heights. Daredevil lost his nerve and tumbled gracelessly to the ground, to the joy of Mr. Fear and the dismay of the crowd watching the fight. Daredevil tried to recover from this embarrassing loss of face in the public eye. However, he would experience another attack of nerves while confronting criminals and began to question his own resolve.
Reasoning through the problem, Matt made some inferences which turned out to be correct. He touched base with Foggy (as Daredevil) and used the D.A.’s resources to confirm his suspicions. It turned out Zoltan Drago had died shortly after leaving prison. The current Mr. Fear was actually Starr Saxon, who murdered Drago and stole his equipment. Daredevil’s panic attacks were being triggered by fear gas capsules hidden in his billy club by Saxon, during the brief period he had 
control of the weapon. Armed with the truth, Daredevil interceded on “Mr. Fear’s” crime-wave in action, redeeming his reputation and revealing Saxon for who he was. Caught off-guard when his trump card failed, Saxon lost his balance while lunging for Daredevil’s billy club and fell to his death from his own flying platform. Matt Murdock’s secret identity died with the second Mr. Fear, leaving Daredevil to pick up the shattered remnants of his life. [Daredevil (1st series) #53-55]
Hoping to reconnect with Karen and perhaps even propose to her, Daredevil sought out the D.A.’s office again only to learn Karen had returned home to Connecticut. DD learned for the first time that Karen was the daughter of Paxton Page, the disgraced inventor of the cobalt bomb who was branded traitor when he refused to sell his secrets to the government or military. Daredevil learned that Paxton had disappeared, and now Karen and her mother were being tormented by a ghostly figure out of Sleepy Hollow called Death’s Head. Daredevil helped Karen uncover that Death’s Head was actually her father, gone insane over the loss of his reputation. Paxton experienced a 
moment of rationality and pushed Karen and Daredevil to safety when a vat of molten cobalt in his hidden lab toppled over, ending the life of Karen’s father. Having lost her father and the man she loved in a matter of days, Karen was on the verge of breaking down when Daredevil finally removed mask, revealing that Matt Murdock was alive and also had always been the Man Without Fear. [Daredevil (1st series) #56-57]
Matt explained the whole sordid history of his lies regarding Daredevil and Mike Murdock. As Karen came to terms with the return of the man she loved, Matt also went into action reversing his recent demise. He “emerged from hiding,” claiming his death had been faked with the help of the D.A.’s office to capture Mr. Fear. Foggy went along with it because he also wanted Matt by his side as Special Assistant to the D.A. in the city’s war on Crime-Wave, a new criminal organizer hiding in the shadows. Back in the courtroom, Matt Murdock went to work getting verdicts against Crime-Wave’s underlings the police caught. In the meantime, he tried to convince Karen that their 
lives together wouldn’t be constantly fraught with peril and promised to retire as Daredevil after his planned appearance at a city parade. Before he could give his big announcement, however, Daredevil was attacked by a motorcyclist named Stunt-Master, hired by Crime-Wave to attack the Man Without Fear. The action convinced Daredevil he was still needed in the city, regardless of Karen’s feelings. Because of this, Karen refused Matt’s proposal. [Daredevil (1st series) #58]