Speaker 1: You're listening to the Mind over Murder podcast.
Speaker 2: My name is Bill Thomas. I'm a writer, consulting, producer,
and now podcaster. I am now trying to use my
experience as the brother of a murder victim to help
other victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book
on the unsolved Colonial Parkway murders and I'm the co
administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 3: My name is Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 4: I'm a writer, a researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate,
as well as the social media manager and co administrator
for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner
in crime, Bill Thomas.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Mind of a Murderer. I'm Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 2: And I'm Bill Thomas.
Speaker 3: And he tried to make me laugh right before he
pushed the button. Folks, That's why I love my partnership
with him.
Speaker 2: Now throw me off my game. Now, why in the
world would you ever make such a false claim?
Speaker 3: Oh, why would I ever?
Speaker 2: I just mentioned that I might have Raisins stuck in
my team.
Speaker 3: That's a great one with a great way to say
that and just be like, no, be serious now my crime.
Now go talk about crime, do it now? Yeah? This
is this is behind the scenes that mind over murder. Guys,
this is what you get.
Speaker 2: You handled it well. I thought you together. You rejected
my attempt to throw you off. And here we are, and.
Speaker 3: Here we are. This is exactly what our partnership is.
Speaker 2: Like you generated into.
Speaker 3: We are back, and we are covering the second half
of a wonderful article from the New York Times magazine
July twenty fifth issue from author Mark O'Connell. Mark O'Connell
was writing about the intersection of crime, entertainment and politics
as seen in the figure of John Hinckley Junior assassin
or would be assassin rather on President Ronald Reagan and
three other people back in the early nineteen eighties. We
are going through and offering our incisive and color commentary
on this article as we proceed through it. And we
started this in part one of this episode which aired
last week, and we are continuing today in part two.
So the article is called John Hinckley Junior and the
Madness of American Political violence.
Speaker 2: Bill.
Speaker 3: What would you say? Is like the big takeaway from
last episode for anybody who just for whatever reason doesn't
want to go back and listen to it.
Speaker 2: So far, I'm very struck by how a political some
of these assassins scene. When you read about political assassinations
in real life or in creative work, it often seems
like these assassinations are for a political purpose or to
a political end. What seems to be an emerging theme
so far isn't always that. This almost seems like some
sort of desperate grasp at fame. Even the subhead is
very interesting. Forty three years ago he shot the president
in a delusional bid for attention, One in a long
line of disturbed young men who have bent the arc
of the nation's history.
Speaker 3: Very interesting and evocative. As soon as I read this
piece in the New York Times magazine, I sent this
to you and said, I think we need to cover this.
I really like mister O'Connell's article here because I think
he is able to articulate what I think a lot
of us are curious about when it comes to political
assassination or attempted political assassination. What makes someone do something
like this? Is it necessarily about the politics of the person,
or is there something more to it? As you said,
it's very clear that with Hinckley the object was not
I want to kill Ronald Reagan because I don't agree
with his politics. The object was I am fixated on
Jodie Foster and wished to get her attention, which I think.
Speaker 2: A lot of people forget that. This is all brought
about by his obsession with a young actress who was
then headed off to college, and he actually studied Jimmy
Carter and stalked Jimmy Carter in a very scary example.
After Carter left office and Ronald Reagan took over as president,
he just shifted his focus from a Democrat to a Republican.
So this was never about political parties or position on
the issues. This is more about a highly disturbed twenty
five year old who's obsessed with a pretty amaze performance
by a young actress and his desire to impress her
in his own mentally ill way.
Speaker 3: We'll go ahead and pick up at this article and
we start with the author, Mark O'Connell, actually meeting John
Hinckley in person. So the article begins when I first
met Hinckley in person, I commented to him that Williamsburg
was an interesting place for him to have wound up.
He liked it, he told me, because people basically left
him alone. But its lack of a music scene was
becoming an issue for him, he said, and he'd started
to think of relocating to somewhere closer to the action, Nashville,
Los Angeles, maybe even New York.
Speaker 2: I'm basically a struggling musician, he said, speaking softly and
with a slow text and drol. I've had a lot
of people say to me, John, you're like so many
other struggling musicians, and it's true. I am Hinkley, a
heavy set and balding man whose slightly somnolent airy belies
a clarity of thought and an obvious intelligence, was sitting
at a booth in a sports bar just outside the
colonial center of town, addressing himself with intermittent deal to
a large and succulent hamburger and diet doctor pepper.
Speaker 3: He didn't elaborate on the ways in which he was
like so many other struggling musicians, but perhaps he didn't
need to. Hinkley did not strike me, in any case
as much of an elaborator. He spoke in a plain
and straightforward manner, and it was not his custom to
digress or add unnecessary detail. He conceived of his music
in explicitly redemptive terms. Despite the fact that he was
never convicted of a criminal offense, he spoke frequently of
what he called my crime, by which he meant both
the shots he fired outside the Washington Hilton on March thirtieth,
nineteen eighty one, and the long years of obsession in
stalking that led there. These deeds, as Hinckley now understood them,
unleashed a great deal of pain and darkness into the world.
He terrorized a young woman, and he very nearly succeeded
in killing the American President, in the belief that it
would gain her favor. He put a bullet in the
head of James Brady, who from that day on lived
with cognitive damage and used a wheelchair, and whose death
many years later was deemed a direct result of his injuries.
And I think maybe people don't know that when James
Brady died, it took him a long time to succumb
to the injuries, but it was as a result of that.
Speaker 2: And I believe that Hinckley should have been charged with
murder as well, because his actions led directly to the
death of James Brady agreed Bully. The article continues quote.
People have different definitions of redemption, Hinckley told me, my
definition of redemption is to make amends for all the
negativity that I created in nineteen eighty one. I'm trying
to redeem myself through positive music, through a thing that
people really liked, as opposed to things they really hated
about me in nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 3: On my first exposure to Hinckley's songs, I found them
difficult to listen to, not because they were bad. They're
pretty catchy and have a melancholy charm to them, but
because to listen to them with any degree of attention
is to confront the pain and vulnerability of a man
whose mental illness had caused so much suffering to himself
and many others. You might be able to look at
a painting by Caravaggio without constantly thinking of the fact
that he killed a man in a duel, and you
might be able to listen to the sex pistols without
thinking about Nancy Spungeen's awful death. But Hinckley remains uniquely
impervious to any and all attempts to separate art from artists.
This has partly to do with the sheer extremity and
strangeness of his deeds, and partly to do with the
fact that those deeds were committed in service of a
hunger for fame and notoriety.
Speaker 2: For all that, I found the honesty and directness of
the songs unexpectedly moving and piercingly sad. Found it impossible
to detach the thin, somewhat faltering voice that sang those
songs from that of the much younger man who described
his shooting of Reagan as quote the greatest love offering
in the history of the world. Pardon me while I
throw up in my mouth. And one reason I found
that songs at first difficult and even painful to listen
to is that they seemed haunted by the ghost of
another possible life. To come to know Hinckley, even just
a little, as I did in writing about him, is
to see that the act that now defines his life
was not predestined, but so many things in history entirely
contingent the outcome of complex dynamics of chance and madness.
Speaker 3: Very interesting how far he's taking us down. It's it
feels almost like a rabbit hole that if you want
to explore the intersections of political violence with entertainment and politics.
You really have to dive deep into understand Hinkley himself
and everything that led up to it. This is complex
storytelling here. I was very impressed with this. Hinkley grew
up around Dallas, loving the Beatles, and he idolized John
Lennon in particular. He wanted to be a singer. He
wanted to be a star, but he was a quiet
kid and one who had a hard time finding his way.
His older brother, Scott went into the family oil business.
Their father wanted John to follow suit, and he was
frustrated and unnerved by his younger son's vague artistic ambitions.
John enrolled in various college courses, but nothing really took,
and he kept dropping out of one thing after another. Eventually,
he sold his car, an old red Camaro, and used
the money to get himself to Los Angeles, where he
rented a room a couple of blocks from Sunset Boulevard.
The plan was that he would finally make a go
of his music, but he was too depressed and listless
and lost to make anything happen.
Speaker 2: I would just walk all the time, he told me,
up and down Sunset up and down Hollywood Boulevard. He
was trying to walk himself into the dream of Hollywood,
as though through sheer physical proximity to the symbolic heart
of American entertainment, he might be absorbed directly into its bloodstream.
I was so naive, he said. I sat in my
room and made a tape of my songs. I walked
to the lobby of the Capitol Records building and just
handed it to the receptionist and asked if she could
give it to the A and R guy. Telling me
all this, he laughed and shook his head, and for
some reason, I still didn't make it. He said.
Speaker 3: What's an R, mister entertainment guy.
Speaker 2: Oh An R stands for Artists and repertoire. They are
the people, usually men, but not always, who sign artists
to record deals and work with them on the repertoire.
That is what they will record these days. In the
rock era, pop, hip hop, etc. Many people write there music. Originally,
when the artist and Repertoire title was created, that was
at in time when more people did it completely outside songs,
you were brought on board as a recording artist, as
a singer. They went out and found the songs for
you artists and repertoire gets shortened an R.
Speaker 3: And it's my guess that you do not take your
tape to the Capitol Records building and hand it off,
and you'll immediately get discovered. I assume that's not how
you do it, correct.
Speaker 2: I can't say that it's never happened, but it's a
real long shot way of going about things. Because the
labels received thousands of submissions per year, and unless they
are given a compelling reason to listen to a demo tape,
it's mostly going to end up in a box, and
then that box is going to end up in a dumpster.
Speaker 3: Keep in mind, for anybody who is new to mind
have a murdered that Bill has actually worked in the
music industry for quite a while. That was nineteen seventy six,
the year he turned twenty one. He spent the day
of his birthday walking up and down set alone and
immersed in his own increasingly tormented reveries. It was also
the year The Taxi Driver came out. He saw it
for the first time that summer at Grammin's Egyptian Theater
on Hollywood Boulevard. Then he went back to see it again.
He watched it, by his reckoning, fifteen times. Something about
it had spoke to him in a way he couldn't
account for. He connected at a deep limbic level with
its violent poetry of male rage, loneliness, and inarticulate longing.
Speaker 2: By that point, he had run out of the money
he took with him to Los Angeles and was no
longer able to afford rent. He'd been out of touch
with his parents for weeks. He'd lost his room and
wound up homeless. He spent his days walking the streets,
his nights in a sleeping bag on the flat roof
of a building off sunset. The longer he spent on
the streets, the deeper his identification with Travis Bickle became.
Speaker 3: And it was out of that identification that his obsession
with Jody Foster arose. He seemed to have wanted to
be the protagonist of Taxi Driver, and so perhaps the
logic of his illness, with its blurring of the boundary
between real and imagined worlds, dictated that he would desire
a person, a character who was close to that protagonist.
In the same way he bought himself a military jacket
and a pair of boots just like Nickles, and started
drinking the same peach brandy. He came to believe himself
to be in love with Jody Foster.
Speaker 2: This was only one strand in a garish fabric of
deranged mimasas he wove around himself in the years that followed.
Like so many lonely and frustrated white American men before
and after him, he began to fixate on racial minorities
as the source of his personal failures and those of
his country. He made desultory and feudal efforts to find
work in Los Angeles. Quote it's a miracle I still
have my sanity, he wrote to his parents after putting
up with screaming kids and endless lines of Blacks, Mexican, Chinese,
and god knows what else. He apparently wrote the letter
before seeing Taxi Driver, which is striking because it now
reads almost as a pastiche of Bickle's voiceover, as though
Hinckley were anticipating in a letter to his own mother
and father some version of Travis Bickle's revolutionary nihilism quote,
all the animals come out at night, whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies,
Doper's Junkies Sick Venal.
Speaker 3: After he returned to Texas, he became briefly involved in
the American Nazi Party in Dallas. The following year, he
founded something called the American Front, a right wing extremist
faction of which, according to Lincoln Kaplan's nineteen eighty four
trial report in The New Yorker, he was director, sole
newsletter contributor, and indeed sole member. Hinkley now thoroughly disavows
this turn toward white supremacism, as thoroughly as he disavows
everything else he did in those years of madness in
coate rage and desire. But it remains noteworthy because it
was as though he had read between the lines of
Bickle's fury and contempt and decoded without sensitivity to the
film's complexities, the racial animosity that lay within it. In
Paul Schrader's original screenplay, Iris's Pimp was in fact a
black man, and the man Travis kills in the end
were all black, And perhaps in reading between the lines
of Taxi Driver, Hinckley was in fact reading between the
lines of his country, its history, and its present.
Speaker 2: He was receiving signals from many sources and they were
all pointing in one direction. At Rocky's pawn Shop in
Dallas in September nineteen eighty, he bought a Rome RG
fourteen twenty two caliber revolver, the weapon he would use
to finally make something of himself. By that point, he
was spending a lot of time on the firing range.
The year before, he went to see a doctor about
dizzy spells, fatigue, and heart palpitations. The doctor, noting Hinckley's
flat effect, described him an antidepressant, which didn't do much
other than make him drowsy. In a letter to his sister,
he wrote, quote, my nervous system is about shot. By
the end of the summer, I should be a bonafide
basket case. Another visit to the doctor scored him a
valium prescription. Later, his parents sent him to see a
psychiatrist who had done some work with Jack's oil company.
The psychiatrist didn't seem much wrong with him that wouldn't
be set to rights by a little tough love. What
was needed here, he said, was for this twenty five
year old to be given a push to stand on
his own two feet.
Speaker 3: Hinkley told his parents about a creative writing class he
wanted to attend at Yale University, and they gave him
some money and sent him on his way to new Haven.
There was, in fact no creative writing class, and Hinckley
had no reason to be in new Haven other than
that he read in a magazine that Jodie Foster had
enrolled at Yale. He got the phone number of the
house where she was living on campus and called a
couple of times. She was polite and noncommittally pleasant, in
the manner of a famous young woman who had presumably
become very used to unwanted male attention. In the written
notes he left for her, he was more intense, less shy.
I love you six trillion times. Don't you maybe like
me just a little bit? You must admit I am different.
Speaker 2: This is all caps, by the way, he's behaving like
a stalker at this point. He's followed Jody Foster at
this point as an eighteen year old Yale freshman under
false pretenses. He's lied to his parents. He said he's
going to take a creative writing class at Yale. They
give him money. Here he is in new Haven and
he's literally stalking her. The whole thing is very disturbing.
It's not a surprise that, even without the attempt on
Reagan's life, that he ended up in a mental institution.
As the weeks went on, he became more and more frustrated,
more and more deranged in his attempts to gain her attention.
He wrote in an one mus letter to the FBI
informing them of a plot to abduct the actress Jody
Foster quote all caps for romantic reasons unquote. So he's
going to kidnap her, but it's for romance. And he
began to think about shooting the president to force Foster
to pay attention. This was nineteen eighty and Jimmy Carter
was still in the White House. Hinkley followed him for
a time on the campaign trail and at a rally
in Dayton, Ohio. This part was very chilling. Let me
start again. This was nineteen eighty and Jimmy Carter was
still in the White House. Hinkley followed him for a
time on the campaign trail and at a rally in Dayton, Ohio.
In a strange restaging of the scene in Taxi Driver
in which Travis comes close to assassinating a senator, got
within arm's reach of him, close enough to get a
clear shot. In footage taken at the Dayton rally, amid
a scrum of happy supporters surround founding Carter, a pale
and fair haired young man can be seen staring with
unsmiling intensity at the president. It is unquestionably inklely mis chilling. Yeah,
it really is chilling, and I had never heard that before.
Speaker 3: A lot of this is new to me, and I'm
wondering how new this is to some of our readers
as well. Growing up in Williamsburg and knowing the notoriety
of Hinckley, you don't always get the nuances of the story,
so some of this is very new material for me. Hinckley, however,
was unarmed, having left his bag with his guns in
a locker at the bus station. He was treating this
rally as a dry run to prove to himself that
he was capable of doing this thing. Carter lost the election,
and in the new year of nineteen eighty one there
was a new president, a Republican. It didn't matter either way.
To Hinckley, one president was as good as another.
Speaker 2: That in and of itself says something very powerful. He
didn't care about politics. He didn't care about Arders a Democrat,
Reagan's a Republican. It didn't matter in the least.
Speaker 3: It was all about the notoriety for him. Angley wrote
strange and acrid poetry which he showed to no one
and did nothing with. One called guns are Fun contained
these lines, This gun gives me pornographic power. If I wish,
the president will fall and the world will look at
me in disbelief, all because I own an inexpensive gun.
In early March nineteen eighty one, he spent another short
and aimless period in Hollywood. He was severely depressed and
had for some time been contemplating suicide, then drifting on
a listless tide towards some act of as yet undefined violence.
He got in a cross country bus to Washington, and
he checked into a hotel close to the White House.
He barely slept that night. On the morning of March thirtieth,
he glanced at a local paper and saw the new
president's itinerary for the day, Reagan was given a speech
at the Washington Hilton. He knew then what his great
gesture would be in his stalking of Foster and his
targeting of the most powerful man on the planet. He
was imposing a coherence on his loneliness and confusion, arranging
it all into a system of which he himself was
at the center.
Speaker 2: He wrote a final letter to Foster, quote Jody, I
would abandon this idea of getting Reagan in a second
if I could only win your heart and live out
the rest of my life with you, whether it be
in total obscurity or whatever. He put the letter in
an envelope and left it in his hotel room, hocketed
his revolver and got a taxi to the Hilton. He
waited there in a large crowd for the President to
come through a side entrance at the hotel. At two
twenty seven that afternoon, Reagan emerged, surrounded by a cluster
of Secret Service agents, handlers, and police officers. Hinkley pulled
out his roam and fired off all six bullets. The
first hit Reagan's press secretary, entered his forehead right over
his left eye. The second hit Della Hunty, the police officer.
The third shot went directly over Reagan's head. The fourth
hit McCarthy, thecret Service agent, who was by that point
shielding the president. The fifth and sixth bullets ricocheted off
the limo's armored surface, one came to rest, and the
President's right lung perilously close to his heart less than
an inch in fact. From rewriting the plot of history,
this is the part where it's just amazing, and this
is another secret Service laps that they allowed someone armed
with a handgun to get that close to President Reagan.
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Speaker 3: After he was arrested, Hinckley was held at the Federal
Correctional Institution in Butner, North Carolina. There he bassed in
the glow of his new celebrity, which made him, if
not the equal of Jodie Foster, certainly likewise a person
of note. At Butner, he wrote every day in a
journal that he labeled the Diary of a person we
all know, a strangely inspired title. You have to admit,
a man who shoots the American President successfully or otherwise
is a person we all have no choice but to know.
Speaker 2: The terms in which Hinckley viewed himself and his deed
were self consciously mythic, and this conflation of fiction and
reality is among them the most haunting aspects of his
years of madness. Hinckley was inspired by a movie to
shoot the president. Paul Schrader had based Taxi Driver partly
on the diaries of Arthur Bremer, who shot George Wallace,
the Alabama governor, when he campaigned for president in nineteen
seventy two, and in those diaries, Bremer wrote that he
was inspired to assassinate George Wallace while watching Stanley Kubrick's
A Clockwork Orange, one of the great cinematic explorations of
brutality and of violent media and its effects on the mind.
A film inspires an attempted political assassination, which in turn
inspires a film, which in turn inspires an attempted assassination.
A feedback loop of real and imagined violence.
Speaker 3: This is the part where as a film teacher, I
find this massively intriguing. Obviously it's nothing I could cover
with my students, but I find it very intriguing. And
as someone who has an interest in true crime, in history,
in all of this stuff, this is checking all of
these really interesting boxes that are lighting up for me.
I know this was the part that was really interesting
to you as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, as you said that, Chris, and I was thinking.
And then the last thing you'd want to do is
extend that feedback loop one more time. Yeah, your film class,
perhaps exploring these themes would inspire a young person to
have to commit an act of violence. Now we're going around
and round again. This is amazing the way reality is
inspired by in this case, film followed by reality inspired
by film, it just goes round and round. For those
of us that don't have the capability to sort fact
from fiction, truth from reality and descend into madness like
Hickley did, this is where we end up This is
where I'm not sorry that Thomas Matthew Crook was killed
by a sniper when he attempted to attack former President Trump,
But man, I would love to be able to question
him and find out what his real motivations were.
Speaker 3: There is, in other words, something vertiginously postmodern about what
Hinckley called his historical deed and the madness in which
it was cultivated. He was channeling at John Wilkes, Booth, Lee,
Harvey Oswald, Mark David Chapman, Travis Bickle, the great loser
antagonists of American history in cinema, and his target, however, incidentally,
was himself an actor who learned his trade in westerns
before going on to distinguish himself in the role of
a folksy, reassuringly paternalistic politician.
Speaker 2: And if Hinckley's intended victim was the Hollywood president, then
Crook's intended victim was the reality television and Twitter president,
a man who mastered two of our most sophisticated contemporary
mediums of self creation. Brooks was born in two thousand
and three. He was just four months old when Facebook
first went online and thirteen years old when Trump became president.
The advanced dissolution of the boundaries of which Trump is
such a potent symbol between politics and entertainment and between
personal and political identity, and to which so many of
us are still struggling to accommodate ourselves. Was the only
reality Crooks ever knew.
Speaker 3: It is really interesting that he brought that up, because
for people like you and me, we had associations of
Donald Trump with things other than politics long before his
political career. I remembered him from I'm really going to
date myself on this one. I'm so sorry. But anyone
else who's my age, we'll probably remember this too. I
largely was first exposed to Donald Trump when he had
a cameo role in Home Alone Two. Kevin is in
the middle of the Plaza hotel and he passes Donald
Trump and asked Trump where something is in Trump points
him in the direction of it. It's just a very
brief cameo, but that is how I was introduced to
Donald Trump. Of course, I learned many years later real
estate mogul, businessman or of the deal. That sort of
thing for me growing up when I did I never
thought of Trump as a politician. I always thought of
him as an entertainment figure. Crooks only ever knew him
as this combination of those two things, right. I do
sometimes have to remind myself the reality I mentioned last
episode that I was in Exennial, I think is how
we say at gen X or Millennial, I cross both.
I have to remind myself that I've experienced multiple types
of realities in my day. I remember a time. It
always blows my kid's minds when I tell them this.
I remember a time when you could actually walk someone
to the gate in the airport. You didn't have to
go through security, you didn't have to take off shoes
and belt. And it blows my kid's mind whenever I
tell them there was actually a time before you had
to do all of that with TA. Their reality, though,
is only tsa security lines and everything else. I think
we forget sometimes that with younger kids, younger people, they
have not experienced whole cataclysmic shifts like we have.
Speaker 2: It's the only reality they've known, and Crooks is a
good example of that.
Speaker 3: Then again, we don't know much else about Crook's world.
We know he played video games and that he had
an account on Discord, a social platform popular with gamers.
That leaves a little doubt that he was familiar with
the concept of NPCs, or non player characters, the figures
in video games who are programmed into the background of
the virtual world, controlled by no one but their code.
It has become a popular insult online in recent years,
and an unsettling and humanizing one, revealing a dangerously solipsistic
worldview in which everyone around you is essentially fake and
only you are fully real. It's hard not to see
it as a direct byproduct of social media, where this
is literally true from any ENDIVI viual user's point of view,
and as with so many insults and accusations, it's a
kind of projection. The people who use it most vociferously
do so out of a fear that they themselves are NPCs.
In a nation underpinned by the ideology of individualism, there
is no fate worse. In a culture so driven by
the dynamics of consumer capitalism, there is nothing easier to become.
Speaker 2: There's a meme that is sometimes used online to illustrate
the NPC, A simplistic cartoon of a gray and expressionless face,
entirely devoid of character and in Krook's placid features, I
could not help see its crude lineaments, and perhaps we
might interpret his last act as an abject bid for agency,
an effort to become the main character by grabbing a
semi automatic rifle and defeating the final boss, the very
personification of fame and power for his entire adolescence. Was
this seemingly political act in fact entirely nihilistic and self interested.
If so, he had at least this much in common
with Hinkley.
Speaker 3: This is where I really want one of our profiling
friends to weigh in on this and go, what do
you think? I think this is when it's explained like this,
and this is nothing that would have occurred to me,
especially because I was not familiar with the concept of NPCs.
I am not that cool. I am not that familiar
with things like that. Listening to mister O'Connell explain this
in this really interesting and compelling way, and it makes
a huge amount of sense to me. I am curious, though,
if our profiling in psychology friends would look at this
and go, yeah, man, right on.
Speaker 2: I think it'd be an interesting conversation for us to
set up. When the opportunity presents.
Speaker 3: Itself, absolutely Hankley finds it difficult now to identify with
the person he was in nineteen eighty one. He was
out of his mind, driven by strange delusions toward increasingly
extreme ends. He remembers it clearly, all of it, but
in the way that a person might remember a vivid
and violent dream. He can tell you what he did,
but not why he did it. But I had no judgment,
as he put it to me, at one point, I
was so sick over dinner in my last evening in Williamsburg.
I asked him what he remembered about his brief encounters
with Jodie Foster. He was silent for a long moment.
I did meet her once, he said. I spoke to her,
just very briefly.
Speaker 2: He found out that her real name was Alicia and
figured she would be registered under that name. So he
called the accommodation office at Yale and said he was
looking to visit his friend Alicia Foster, and they gave
him her address. I don't think this would happen, by
the way, in twenty.
Speaker 3: Twenty four, oh my gosh. No.
Speaker 2: But apparently in nineteen eighty one they were much more relaxed.
It was a Sunday morning when he saw her She
was in front of her dormitory building, exercising and doing stretches.
I walked up to her. He said, I didn't really
know what to say. I said, do you know where
the library is? And she pointed me towards it and
I left parenthesis. Jodi Foster did not respond to a
request for comment.
Speaker 3: He left a little and shook his head. That's something
I totally regret, he said. I asked him why, and
he said that it was just a stupid thing to say.
Given everything he went on to do, it seems strange
to me that this encounter would embarrass him to think
of even now. It was possible that this signaled an
unsettling continuity with the person he was back then, But
it was equally possible that it indicated the extent to
which he'd been cured of his mania and obsession. Who
among us, after all, is not haunted by some random
stupid things said many years ago.
Speaker 2: Despite the shame he feels about his past actions, Hinckley's
strange status as a failed presidential assassin means perversely that
he has little choice but to live in the public eye.
It wouldn't quite be true to say he's capitalizing on
his infamy, but he's not exactly going out of his
way to avoid it either. This part I disagree with
the author on the attention his music gets is unquestionably
on a different level than it would be if he
had not shot Reagan. He sells paintings of his orange
tabby THEO on E I don't know how many, but
it's surely more than he would have sold if he
was just some guy. His small run of John Hinckley
for President T shirts and bumper stickers sold out, and
I suspect it wasn't just because some people thought the
typeface was cool.
Speaker 3: I do find that very interesting, and I think he
is right. Nobody would be walking around with John Hickley
for President bumper stickers if it weren't for the fact
that John Hinckley shot a president.
Speaker 2: And we've talked about this before on Mind over Murder.
I find the glorification of individuals like this really reprehensible,
and much in the same way I object to people
wearing serial killers on their T shirts and other articles
of clothing, which is a way of more than endorsing
someone as hip and cool, so cool that I'm going
to wear it on a T shirt. Yeah, I feel
the same way about the John Hinckley for President T.
Speaker 3: Shirts, which, interestingly, I've never seen any of those around
town either. But I know, maybe I don't, maybe I
don't get out much.
Speaker 2: I don't know, and I don't think you have to
be a Reagan fan to find a John Hinckley for
President T shirt.
Speaker 3: Kind of gross, and those T shirts and stickers are
an indication of the liminal register of his current fame.
Quite a lot of his fans, unsurprisingly, are hardline Internet ironists,
whose engagement with his music in his various social media
posts mostly amount of compliments and encouragements of dubious sincerity.
Presidents hate this man, reads one fairly typical YouTube comment.
Thank you for literally everything you've ever done, reads another.
But many of his new fans seem to be entirely
in good faith. They seem, that is, to admire his
songwriting talent, his resilience, and his desire in the face
of his traumatic past and his current infamy, to write
his songs and sing them for the world. They see
in him and in his post release career such as
it is the potential for a redemptive narrative arc. Even
the most damaged and dangerous of people can, given time
and the right kind of care, change the stories of
their lives and strive for some kind of ending that is,
if not quite happy, then not exactly terrible either.
Speaker 2: Such an outcome was never anything close to a given
for Hinckley. His trial remains among the most famous uses
of the insanity defense in legal history. The psychiatrist William T. Carpenter,
who examined Hinckley, testified that the defendant's unstable use of
his own reality led him to construct an identity from
fictional characters. He was incapable of understanding the moral weight
of his actions. The jury's decision not guilty by reason
of insanity for each of the thirteen charges against him,
and the judge's ruling that Hinckley should be sent to
a psychiatric facility were extremely controversial. In an ABC News
poll conducted after the verdict, eighty three percent of respondents
said they felt justice was not done. The public outcry
led to restrictions put in place by Congress and by
most states on the use of the insanity defense.
Speaker 3: It's very interesting too, there is a pick sure right
underneath this of Senators Edward Ted Kennedy strom Thurmond, Joseph Biden,
and Paul Lexalt after approval of a sweeping crime bill,
but among other changes, made it more difficult for defendants
to use the insanity defense. You get a very intense
looking Ted Kennedy. I don't think I've ever seen that
picture of Kennedy before. That was very interesting when strom
Thurman looked about a thousand years old even then.
Speaker 2: But clearly a bill with bi borrows support. As you see,
prominent Republicans and Democrats were pushing this crime bill forward.
I understand, and I remember how upset people were when
the Hinckley defense came down as not guilty by reason
of insanity. I still find this reprehensible.
Speaker 3: Hinckley seems to me to have been treated with uncommon
benevolence by the American criminal justice system. It helped, no
doubt that his parents were well off and were able
to pay for capable lawyers. He received effective and humane
treatment in his time at Saint Elizabeth. Music and music
therapy were a small but significant part of this. When
I was in the hospital, he told me the one
thing they let me have all the way through was
my guitar. I don't know that it could ever make
sense to describe a person who's been so seriously ill
as cured. But Hinckley was manifestly no longer dangerous or
sick in the way that he had once been.
Speaker 2: Only on one occasion did I glimpse a brief flickering
of what might be considered the old self reverential narcissism.
It was the morning of my last day in Williamsburg.
We had been talking at the small windowless office he
rents about a fifteen minute drive from the town for
the purpose of managing his somewhat incidental seeming business affairs,
selling vinyl records and first edition books, along with various
administrative chores around getting his music and his paintings and
his merch out into the world. When we finished our conversation,
he asked me how I was getting back to my hotel,
and I told him I would gladly accept a lift
from him if he was going that way. He said
he wasn't, but he would run me out there anyway.
As he was pulling out his old, shapeless, sand colored
Toyota minivan out of the parking lot, he turned to
me with a humorous glint in his eye. I'll bet
you never thought you'd find yourself getting a ride back
to your hotel from John Hinckley Junior. He said.
Speaker 3: I laughed at the time because it was a funny
thing to say. I still think it was a funny
thing to say. In one sense, it seemed obviously a
little grandiose and arguably in poor taste. If you squinted
at it hard enough, you could probably see it as
evidence that he was still indulging some of the same
tendencies that led to him shooting a president. But I
do think you would have to squint a little too
hard for comfort. For all his strangeness and all the
terrible darkness of his past, I could not help liking him.
As odd as it might sound to say, John Hinckley
Junior seemed to be not a bad man, but a
man who was once very sick and now was not.
Speaker 2: Later that day, after he dropped me to my hotel,
we met again, and I noted that he had invoked
God frequently in our conversations. I asked him about his
religious faith. He was raised Episcopalian. He told me this
was the church his parents had belonged to, and although
he had not attended his service in many years, he
still considered himself a Christian. He had prayed to God
every day in the hospital and continued to do so
now that he was out.
Speaker 3: I asked him then whether he believed in heaven, and
he seemed politely taken aback, as though I had asked
him whether he believed in the existence of Delaware. Sure
I do, he said, I hope I can get there.
I'm going to have to do a lot of explaining
at the gate, but I hope I can sneak in.
I'll say, Saint Peter, I got a story for you.
Just give me a little time to tell it. End
of article.
Speaker 2: Good luck with that entrance into the gates of Heaven.
Somehow I'm not seeing it.
Speaker 3: There's a roller coaster ride here of an article. I
could easily see this becoming a book. I could see
this becoming let's talk about the intersections of crime and
politics and entertainment and assassination and violence. Say, I could
see this becoming a much bigger thing than it already is. Boy,
was this interesting. And that was as soon as I
read it. Actually, the day that it came out, it
was Sunday New York Times magazine. I laid there in
bed for forty five minutes reading it, and immediately I
sent this off to you when I was done, and
I was like, we got to cover this. It is
really very interesting. I'm still not holding the opinion that
Hankley should be out of Saint Elizabeth. I am also
not a psychologist, a psychiatrist, I'm not a therapist. I
am not an expert in any of these things, so
I don't have the capacity to judge that. But I
do think it's interesting and noteworthy that an author took
the time to really spend the time with this guy
and try to figure out in good faith what happened here,
what happened to you, and why are there so many
similarities between you and other loser loaner mail assassins who've
tried to leave their mark on history. I applaud what
he was doing with this article, I really do.
Speaker 2: I found it fascinating. At the same time, at the
end of the article, I can't help thinks, gee, now
that you're saying you should go back in and serve
a life without parole or the murder of James Brady,
which you're directly responsible for, and the idea that he
would be able to serve forty plus years in a
mental institution and then be free just doesn't sit well
with me at all.
Speaker 3: No, it never has with me. It definitely did not
with our friend Mark Olshaker, who we had on to
talk about this. After Hinckley was released with no restrictions
in the interests of justice being served. It does not
feel that it was served, especially for James.
Speaker 2: Brady, without question. The article is John Hinckley Junior and
the Madness of American Political Violence in the New York
Times magazine. It debuted on July twenty fifth, twenty twenty four,
and will of course link it in our show notes.
Speaker 3: That is going to do it for this episode of
Mind Never. Thank you so much for listening. If you
like what we're doing, please make sure you leave a
five star rating and review on any of our podcast platforms.
Do make sure that you buy some of our merch
over at to Public and look for upcoming social events
and live events where you can come see us in
various places, both here in Williamsburg and maybe even up
in Connecticut. Maybe I'll come up and visit you and
we'll do a little something up there. How would that be,
mister Thomas sounds great. That's going to do it for
this episode of mind Over Murder. Thank you so much
for listening. We'll see you next time.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and
Another Dog Productions.
Speaker 2: Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley.
Speaker 1: Our logo art is by Pamela Arnois.
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Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder.