Vanessa was the wife of Wilson Fisk, also known as the Kingpin. She loved him deeply, but sometimes disagreed with his ways of crime. Together they had a son and named him Richard. At some point during the pregnancy she once took a sewing needle and pressed it against her belly in fear of bringing her baby into a world of violence and crime.^[1] When their son was older they sent him away to Switzerland for his education. Richard came back at one stage wanting to take over his father's empire as the Schemer and faced both his mother and father.

Vanessa once split up with Wilson Fisk, but she returned to New York when she found out her son had tried to kill her husband. Richard had teamed up with an old friend of his Sammy Silke and others in order to assassinate his father Wilson. Furious, she started cleaning up the underworld, starting with the murder of a small time hood named Falzone. Then eventually she confronted her son Richard who after an exchange of words, she promptly killed.^[2] After this she took her husband away to recuperate. She was recuperating for a while in Switzerland but succumbed to her disease that developed from the pain of killing her son and died. Prior to that she was the ringleader of the operation that relating to Murdock and her husband's arrest by the F.B.I., as well as faking Foggy Nelson's murder, and hiring Iron Fist to pose as Daredevil in Hell's Kitchen and using Tombstone and Lily Lucca to lead Murdock on a journey throughout Europe. She did this out of revenge, blaming both Daredevil and Wilson for her current situation.

Sometime after her death, Murdock would honor her last wish and get the charges against the Kingpin dropped, under the condition that Wilson give up his U.S. citizenship.