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 Ever Murder. I'm Kristin Dilly and I'm
Bill Thomas. How are you doing today there, mister Thomas.
A wonderful, beautiful day out there in Connecticut.
Speaker 2: It's just fine. We're just back from a few days
offer at Cape cod In a wonderful time and visit
a family. Very relaxing and I tried to do as
little as possible. That was actually a good goal.
Speaker 3: It is the best goal when you're going to the beach,
you should do as little as possible. And I say
that having just gone to the beach myself and made
a point of doing as much as possible.
Speaker 2: Wait a minute, as much or as little.
Speaker 3: I ultimately I'm one of those people that when I
get to a place, I like to go places. So
I went to three different beaches to shell hunt. I
went for a five mile run around the right Memorial,
which commemorates Orvilen wilbur Wright's first flight. I mean, I
called my significant other and he was like, why would
you go for a five mile run when you're supposed
to be relaxing, And I just don't feel right sitting still.
Even though I was supposed to be relaxing, I did
more than I probably ought to have, considering that it
was just supposed to be go to the beach, hunt
for shells and have fun.
Speaker 2: A five mile run, though for an athlete such as yourself,
was probably relaxing.
Speaker 3: It was a nice challenge to try to run up
the monument. It's a rough hill, so I did run.
I would say about orian three quarters of the way up.
In the last quarter I had to walk because it
was a hard run.
Speaker 2: This is the hill where they flew the airplane.
Speaker 3: There's a really wonderful, really beautiful monument up at the top,
and say, you can walk up the hill a number
of different ways and then get to the monument at
the top, and then you can see all the way
down the hill on the path where they took their
first flight. It's really great. For anybody who's local who
hasn't gone down to the right memorial, go, It's wonderful.
It's a nice monument to an important moment in history.
Went for a run up the hill.
Speaker 2: Now, in my mind, never having been to the location,
seen movies and that sort of thing, I picture this
as being out in the dunes and still in its
wild natural state. Is that the case.
Speaker 3: It's a National Park Service site, so there is a
visitor center and everything like that, but the actual memorial
itself is it's out there. They built the visitors center
away from the hill, so you do have to walk
to get out there. It is very pretty. It's not
actually in the dunes. The dunes are a little further
out Jackie's Ridge, which is the largest sand dune in
the area. That's a little further away. Once you get
to the top of the monument. You can see the
ocean from there, which is pretty cool. You can see
it on all sides, and it's very nice. You do
need to come to the Outer Banks at one point
or another. I've gone to see you. You need to
come down here anger to the Outer Banks. It's wonderful.
Speaker 2: It's on our list. We would very much like to
go to the Outer Banks, based on the reports we've
heard from you and many other people who love the
Outer Banks.
Speaker 3: Now we've reached the end of our summer here, no
more vacation for either of us, and as we go
about trying to figure out what topics are we going
to cover as I head into the new school year
and Bill continues his tireless work on the Colonial Parkway
murders case and other cases, we kind of have to
start thinking what is it that we're going to be
presenting our audience with as we move in to fall
and then winter. And we had been spinning our wheels
on a specific topic that we thought would be very
interesting for our audience. We just weren't entirely sure how
to go about presenting it. I thought it would be
neat for us to cover the profile of a presidential
assassin or it would be presidential assassin. But considering that
neither Bill nor I are profilers, we were trying to
figure out who do we tap in to do the
reporting on this? Do we get Jim Fitzgerald, Do we
get Jim Clemente, Do we get doctor Ray Carr? Who
do we get? And lo and behold, The New York
Times magazine published a piece that really solved the problem
of how do we talk about this? For us? And
The New York Times magazine on July twenty fifth, twenty
twenty four, put up a very interesting piece of long
form reporting from a reporter named Mark O'Connell. This was
the lead story in The New York Times magazine and
it is titled John hank and the Madness of American
Political Violence. John Hinckley Junior, of course, is somebody that
I think we're all familiar with. Bill. Do you remember
where you were when Reagan was nearly assassinated?
Speaker 2: If I can tell you specifically where I was at
that moment, But I do remember when we heard the
shocking news that Reagan had been shot. At the time
it was initially reported, I'm not sure they said whether
President Reagan had been badly enough injured to threaten his life,
but we knew it was very serious, and we knew
that multiple people had been shot. A couple of weeks ago,
when former President Trump was shot at in Butler, Pennsylvania,
that brought some of these memories back in pretty sharp
relief because the very disturbing news. It comes to such
a shock when something like this happened, and then you're
very concerned about was the president or former president injured?
Were other people injured which happened in the Butler, Pennsylvania shooting.
It seems like such a peculiarly American phenomenon, and it
just sad me so profoundly to see these things happening
over and over again. I know we've talked about it
a little bit before on Mind over Murder, and Mark O'Connell,
the writer here, talks about how this type of political
violence directed at our leaders is one thing, and then
there's so many similarities between this and mass shooters, of
which we've seen so many here in the US. It's
a very disturbing, long term trend that's certainly been going
on for decades.
Speaker 3: One of the I don't think side effects is quite
the right word but that's what I've got in my
brain right now, so we'll go with that. One of
the interesting side effects of growing up in Williamsburg, Virginia
is we have two i would say, really famous or
maybe notorious criminal cases associated with this area. One of course,
brought me to you, Bill, is the Colonial Parkway murders.
But the other, hey is that you really can't help
hearing about if you grow up here in Williamsburg, Virginia,
is about John Hinckley Junior, because for as long as
I can remember, he has been granted leave to leave
Saint Elizabeth's Hospital, where he was confined after being found
not guilty by reason of insanity. He has been granted
leave from the hospital to come visit his parents. And
that is something that I was aware of pretty much
all my life. And then, of course, several years ago,
when all of the restrictions on John Hinckley were lifted
and he came to live here permanently full time, that
is something that we spend a little bit of time
talking about here on the podcast. John Hinckley Junior is
a name that really is just intertwined with Williamsburg in general.
For those of us who have lived here most of
our lives, as I have, That's just a name that
you become familiar with, just as you become familiar with
the Colonial Parkway, and just as you become familiar with
other things unrelated to crime, like Bruce Hornsby, who is
our resident rock musician. John Hinckley, is just someone that
if you live here, you're familiar with that name. And
so when I saw this article, I was particularly interested
in the author's reasoning behind writing it right now and
what he had to say about this very uniquely American
phenomenon of American political violence and shootings. What we wanted
to do today, We did want to share it with everybody,
and we wanted to take some time to go through
the article and then offer some color commentary on our
thoughts on the material, because it is very interesting and
he ties in all the various intersections between politics, pop
culture and violence in crime, and it's a very interesting
and engaging article that we wanted to make sure you
are listeners were able to to spend a little bit
of time with. So I think what we'll go ahead
and do today, This is definitely going to be a
chew episode er because it is quite a long piece
of reporting very well done. And so what we'll do
is we'll go ahead and we will go through and
do this paragraph by paragraph, offer color commentary as needed,
and further discussion as warranted, and we'll go from there.
We will put a link to this article in our
show notes, but for anybody who wants to search it
up immediately to follow along with us. It is from
the New York Times magazine, the July twenty fifth issue,
twenty twenty four and the title of the article is
John Hinckley Junior and the Madness of American Political Violence.
Speaker 2: Before we start, just a quick reminder we had discussed
John Hinckley Junior once before with our friend Mark Olshaker
in an earlier episode of Mind Over Murder, which is
a very interesting discussion, and we'll link to that in
the show notes as well.
Speaker 3: This piece is from author Mark O'Connell. He is a
writer from Dublin who actually came to Williamsburg and spoke
to John Hinckley Junior over the course of three days
to do this article in September twenty sixteen, three and
a half decades after he shot President Ronald Reagan in
a deranged bid to impress the actress Jody Foster, a
crime for which he was found not guilty by reason
of insanity. John W. Hinckley Junior was released from Saint
Elizabeth's Psychiatric Hospital in Washington, d c. From there, he
moved to Williamsburg, Virginia, where he lived for some years
with his elderly mother, Joanne, and a large house overlooking
the thirteenth pole of a golf course. The federal court
that granted his release did so on certain conditions. One
of these was that he must not speak to the media.
Another was that Hinckley, who was a songwriter for some
years before the failed assassination attempt, and who continued to
play music as part of his psychiatric treatment, must not
release for public consumption, even anonymously, any of his work
without the specific approval of the treatment team interest with
his care. If I'm remembering correctly, Bill, that is referencing
the Son of Sam law, which says that someone who
has been convicted of a crime cannot benefit from their work.
Speaker 2: That's my recollection as well. And I also remember Mark
Olshaker weighing in very strongly that he felt that Hinckley
should not be released back in twenty sixteen, that he
thought it was a terrible mistake. I do find it
odd that a man who shot four people, one of
whom ultimately died from his injuries. James Brady, the former
president's press secretary. I'd have to agree with Mark that
I find it really difficult to accept the fact that
Hinckley's out and about, but so be it so, continuing
the article. After his arrest, Hinckley was diagnosed with, among
other conditions, atypical psychosis and severe narcissistic personality disorder. His
extravagantly strange and violent actions have been bound up in
a toxic fascination with celebrity and an egomaniacal glee at
the fame those actions brought him. Although Hinckley's treatment was
successful and the judge was satisfied that he presented a
very low risk of reoffending, the restrictions were intended to
ensure that he neither courted nor was courted by the media,
and that his mental stability would not be threatened in
the immediate aftermath of his release by widespread attention.
Speaker 3: I was always a little surprised by the fact that
there was not much coverage outside of a couple of
articles about the fact that Hinckley had been released. I
have always been surprised. I keep waiting for the day
that he's going to find his way onto someone's true
crime podcast. There have been people who my own parents
have asked, have you ever thought about like interviewing John
Hinckley Junior for your podcast? And I've told them I
can't think of a circumstance under which I actually want
to talk to him. I don't know that I want
to spend time chatting with a man who tried to
assassinate the president. I just I don't know that I
have that in me to do. How would you feel
about it?
Speaker 2: I can't see us doing it either. And then there's
something about it. If we talk about someone's new book
or a film project or television series or whatever, I
think there's an implication that we feel this is worthwhile,
that we feel this is worth bringing some attention to,
and that we want to talk to this person because
we think they've got something to contribute to the larger conversation,
not just here in mind over Murder. I think there's
an implied endorsement when we say Catherine Miles' book Trailed
is worth reading, or you should check out this new
book by this author or that author. I wouldn't want
anyone to ever think that you and I were somehow
promoting or supporting John Hinckley. And they talk about this
in the article. We'll get into more details. He's an
aspiring singer songwriter. It's been for a number of years,
and he's actually attempted to go out on tour. He
was supposed to be up here in the Northeast doing
tour dates. I don't know. There's something about it that
just gives me the creeps, and I think to myself, well,
I have no doubt that the conversation with Hinckley might
be interesting. I don't want to do anything that's going
to promote that guy, or that's going to say we
think this guy is particularly worth spending forty five minutes with.
Speaker 3: Now, I'm sure that there are people who are going
to say, okay, but then why are you spending time
talking about this article about him. There's a whole lot
more I think that needs to be examined, and this
author is doing it through the lens of Hinckley because
he is a he's a living political assassin. He's not incarcerated,
he was not killed. He is here, he is out,
he is among us. The way that he is examining
Hinckley and his motivations for attempt to intershoot the president,
I think are very They say a lot larger things
about our culture than just about him by himself, and
that is why we're willing to have a conversation about
this article, but not with Hinckley himself. In twenty twenty two,
not long after his mother died, the last of those
restrictions were lifted, more than four decades after shooting Ronald Reagan,
along with a secret Service agent named Timothy McCarthy, a
police officer named Thomas Delante, and Reagan's press secretary James Brady,
who was left permanently disabled. He was, at sixty seven
years of age, truly free. Hinkley had by then opened
a Twitter account and amassed thousands of followers. On June fifteenth,
twenty twenty two, the day the restrictions were lifted, he
posted the following quote after forty one years, two months,
and fifteen days freedom at last end quote. His following grew,
and he quickly began to use his platform to release
music and promote upcoming gigs. He announced a total of
a dozen performances. Unsurprising, these shows got a lot of
attention and began to sell out, but every single one
of them was canceled before he could play as a
result of backlash, including an anonymous threatening emails received by
the venues. And I remember very distinctly when our own
Williamsburg Regional Library up here, which has a beautiful auditorium,
was advertising on their page, Hey, John Hinckley is going
to do a concert here. There was immediate backlash from
the entire community. They were like, why would you put
him on your stage? Why would you do that? The
man tried to assassinate the president. Why would you put
him on there? And almost immediately they had to cancel
the show.
Speaker 2: I understand it. When they put other dates in other
parts of the country, people push back hard, and I
get it. I'm not a proponent of cancel culture or
any of that makes me roll my eyes a bit.
I get why people were upset. This guy is a
presidential assassin. He shot for people, And I don't know why,
of all the people on the planet and all the
singer songwriters, why do we have to promote John Hinckley.
I completely understand it. So the article continues. This made
Hinckley a figure of Purian interest on social media. When
he posted about his excitement for an upcoming show, for instance,
along with a selfie in which he stared directly at
the camera with a glazed and entirely effectless expression. I
just picture him with no emotion. The replies were a
chorus of ironic quips and jokes. Someone replied with a
jiff of Travis Bickle, that's the killer in Taxi Driver clapping,
a reference to Hinckley's most famous inspiration for his crime
and obsession with Taxi Driver and with Jody Foster, who
played the teenage prostitute Iris in the film. Quote haven't
heard his new stuff, but I like his earlier work.
Unquote read another jokes about Hinckley's early work follow him
everywhere online. For a majority of people who encountered his
internet presence, Hinckley was an absurd and quintessentially American aberration,
a guy who shot and very nearly killed president and
was somehow still alive to sing his songs about peace
and love and redemption.
Speaker 3: It's a unique place that he finds himself in. I
think I would put it right on par with say
Leslie van Houghton, who received parole a year ago, the
last of the Manson family killers, or the most recent
of the Manson family killers to be paroled. I think
that would be tantamount to Leslie van Houghton deciding to
go on speaking to her, Why do you want to
support someone who has done these horrible things? And yet
it does amaze me that he has this many followers
on social media. I saw the face you just made.
There's an ick factor to it almost.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's cringey.
Speaker 3: It really is to use the word the youth would use.
You said, Actually, I've been told that the youth are
no longer using cringey.
Speaker 2: What are they saying cringe?
Speaker 3: I don't actually even know, But whatever it is, I'm
going to have to adjust my slang accordingly.
Speaker 2: You're going to be surrounded by young people in what
a week?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm going to have to learn all the newest
pieces of slang and so on and so forth. And
even if I don't like, actually go out and look
for it. It's going to find me. Nonetheless, this is
what happens when you work in a high school exactly.
Speaker 2: So if cringe is not the word, I'm sure you'll
find out what it is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, at some point or another. But I will still
continue to use cringe and cringe, and that will usually
make them roll their eyes again, missterillane. Nobody says that anymore,
all right. The article continues. In forty three years after
that near assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania, a twenty year old
loaner named Thomas Matthew Crooks took several shots at Donald
Trump with a semi automatic rifle, wounding the former president's
right here and plunging an already darkened Catoch world even
deeper into darkness and chaos. Hinkley now became the focus
of a different kind of interest. After the shooting, he
posted the following message on the platform now known as
X quote violence is not the way to go. Give
piece a chance. He was quoting his old hero John Lennon,
who was himself murdered by a strange and sick and
lonely young man with a gun. The tweet provoked a
by now predictable response. There were gifts of Jodie Foster
looking haunted, hope she sees this bro and of Travis
Bickle talking to himself in the Mirror. There was an
article in the Guardian headlined man who tried to assassinate
Reagan says violence is not the way to go. Mostly
people seemed to be able to respond to the message
only as evidence of the further derangement of things.
Speaker 2: I get the derangement response, because, man, is it rich
listening to Hinckley quote John Lennon, who was himself assassinated
in nineteen eighty. That's another situation where I remember exactly
where I was and.
Speaker 3: Where are you. I'm just curious.
Speaker 2: I was at home and the news came in that evening.
It was December eighth, I believe, nineteen eighty, and I
just remember being so profound saddened by this news. John
Lennon never did anything to anybody and was supposedly someone
that Mark David Chapman, his assassin, looked up to. The
whole thing is just so profoundly sad. There's something that's
really almost offensive about Hinkley quoting John Lennon. He's right,
violence is not the way to go. I'm not sure
he's the right messenger here.
Speaker 3: No exactly.
Speaker 2: Hinkley might agree in a sense, he had long held
the belief that the country was too divided and there
were too many guns. Quote. The political climate here in
America is just so volatile, he told me. When I
got him on the phone, I asked him how he
felt about the whole thing. There was a long silence,
and eventually I heard him sigh. He's a slow talker
who often pauses at length between thoughts, and in the
short time I had known him, I had learned to
write out the silences to let him continue at his
own pace. He said, then, in a tone of stoic resignation,
I wish it hadn't happened.
Speaker 3: It was a couple of days after the shooting, late
at night in Dublin, where I live, and early evening
in Williamsburg. He was getting a lot of media requests,
he said, but had so far turned them all down.
He was an object once again of intense curiosity, as
though having shot at a president and lived, he was
somehow a proxy for crooks who was killed just seconds
after his attempt on Trump's life. It's possible, after all,
that we will never know what led crooks to try
to kill the former president. But in Hinckley we are
presented with a kind of living antecedent through whose former
delusions we might begin to understand the currents of violence
and culture wide madness that seemed to act so strongly
on certain solitary and obsessive men who continued to cause
such turbulence in the flow of American history. That line.
At that point, when I started reading this article, I
was like, Oh, this is exactly what I wanted us
to talk about. I could not have articulated it in
such a coherent and cohesive manner. Props to Mark O'Connell.
This is exactly what I wanted to say, but I
didn't have the capability to say it that way. I
was so excited to read this article. I was all
in at this point.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's beautifully written. You're listening to mindover Murder. We'll
be right back after this word from our sponsors. We're
back here at mindover Murder. Before we get back to
the podcast, just wanted to remind you that we have
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is designed to help us raise funds to help promote
Mind over Murder and specifically to push the Colonial Parkway
murders investigation forward. We'd love it if you could support
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the show notes and in our social media pages. As always,
thanks for your support. Now back to mind over Murder.
This tragedy recently with Thomas Matthew Crooks and his attempted
assassination of former President Trump. I know they're investigating what
happened that day and the failures of the Secret Service
how Crooks was allowed to get within one hundred and
fifty yards or so of the former president. Although he
didn't kill Trump, he did kill a former firefighter who
was there with his family, and then terribly injured two
other people who were also listening to former President Trump's speak.
There's intense curiosity as to what Crook's motivations may have been,
and I was reading an article this morning preparing for today.
This doesn't even seem to be something that was politically motivated.
When it comes to Crooks, he was a registered Republican,
but he'd given a small amount of money, I think
fifteen dollars to a group that promotes progressive values. He
had researched both former President Trump's whereabouts as well as
current President Biden's whereabouts, and even looked into senior people
within the Biden administration. It almost feels apolitical somehow. On
Crooks's part, he died almost immediately within seconds of shooting
at the former president. He was dead shot by a
Secret Service sniper. I know that there are a lot
of people, including the team that's currently investigating what went
wrong here, that would dearly love to have talked to Crooks,
but obviously that can't happen. We find ourselves returning to
have conversations with people like Hinckley. I understand the intense
curiosity and our desire to learn more. Can we make
any sense out of any of this?
Speaker 3: I had by then been talking to Hinckley for three
and a half months since a New York Post story
about the cancelation of his shows, in which he'd called
himself a victim of cancel culture, had gained widespread attention online.
This exact pattern. Hinckley announces a concert, online, commenters make
jokes about his early work, the venue receives backlash and cancels.
The show had played out a dozen or so times
since Hinckley's restrictions were lifted. It struck me as both
farcical and poignant, the way that he kept being thwarted
in his efforts to share his music with the world.
Speaker 2: The song crimea River comes to mind, doesn't it.
Speaker 3: I was thinking world's smallest violin exactly in the world's
sadist story.
Speaker 2: In mid May, I went to Virginia, this is Williamsburg
Now to spend time with him. We talked about his music,
and about his strange and terrible past, and about his effort,
at age sixty nine, to move on from it. I
talked to people who collaborated with him on getting his
music out to the world. A promoter, a guitar teacher,
a graphic designer who worked on his records and merchandise,
a woman whom he referred to as his assistant. When
I thought about the disturbing things he did nineteen eighty one,
there was a distinct sense of cognitive dissonance. I found
it hard to square that twenty five year old mad
man with the quiet and melancholy older fellow who just
wanted to put out what he called his quote, message
of peace unquote. They were different men, but also were
very much not I think.
Speaker 3: This dichotomy of Hinckley, where there is here is what
he did versus what he is now. I find that
really compelling and interesting. I don't know that Hinckley is
the sort of person if I saw him in Williamsburg,
And interestingly enough, I have never had a John Hinckley sighting. Bill.
I remember one of the first times that you were
down here, you and I had a Bruce Hornsby sighting,
and I call it Bruce in the wild. Bruce Hornsby
just happened to be sitting at a booth at Plaza
Azteca where the two of us were having dinner, which
is pretty jazzy thing for both of us. It was neat.
I've lived here my whole entire life. I see Bruce
Hornsby a lot. My dad actually sees him even more.
He's on a first name basis with him, which is
it's pretty cool. But I have never had a John
Hinckley sighting. Part of me does wonder why that might be.
I am constantly out and about running errands and stuff
like that. But I've officially seen Bruce Hornsby out in
the wild more often than I've seen John Hinckley out
in the wild. And I'm always a little curious about
why that is. I am wondering how low a profile
he actually keeps.
Speaker 2: I see Bruce Hornsby as a force for good music
and lots of worthwhile social causes. I've also met and
spent the day with Bruce Hornsby some years ago when
I was working for ASCAP. If I had the opportunity,
I might reintroduce myself to Bruce and remind him where
we met. But I wouldn't do it at dinner, because
you don't interrupt someone when they're having dinner at Plaza ASTech.
Speaker 3: How you said Plaza Azteka.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I see Bruce Hornsby as nothing but a great
ambassador for the community of Williamsburg. I guess if you
hung out even more than you do now in bookstores
and music stores, you might run into Hinckley. I wouldn't
go out of my way for the guy.
Speaker 3: But it is interesting though, that, because this is still
a relatively small town. Like all things considered, Williamsburg still
a small town. It's a big, little small town, but
it's still small town. I had initially worried it would
be hard to write about Hinckley in a way that
wasn't exploitative or otherwise morally compromising. What if he was
still in some way mentally unstable. What if he was
so heavily medicated or so badly damaged by his own
past that it would be impossible to conduct the sort
of conversation I needed to have with him in order
to write about him.
Speaker 2: Over the conversations I had with Hinckley, these doubts fell away.
I eventually came to think of him as a rip
van Winkle figure who had been confined for almost the
entirety of the era of modern telecommunications and had not
directly experienced the seismic ships that had taken place in
the culture he was emerging back into. And that culture
is one where Hinkley's particular derangements, obsessive identification with fictional
characters and celebrities, delusion of grandeur, the conjuring of rich
alternative realities had become strangely normalized, at least on the
platforms where Hinckley now interacts with his fans, platforms where
it must be said, a sufficiently committed loner can become
infamous overnight without firing a single shot. And the more
I considered him, the more strangely, serene Hinckley seemed to
me against the context of everything that was going on,
at least not the inscrutable political violence of which he
himself was such a highly charged symbol.
Speaker 3: It is very interesting Hinckley went into Saint Elizabeth in
nineteen eighty one eighty two, the year I was born,
and he finally was released from all restrictions on that
two years ago. So that is a really long stretch
of time to be out of sync with the As
mister O'Connell puts, some seismic shifts in culture that happened.
I'm from the generation I'm I guess xeniel is how
you call me. I'm a gen X slash millennial at Xeniel.
I remember having a childhood without internet and then going
to college with it being full steam, and now I
can't imagine a situation in which I wouldn't have an
Internet connected device somewhere. Hinkley never got any of that.
He was in Sant Elizabeths the whole entire time. It's
got to be I think the Rip van Winkle reference
is accurate. And of course the English teacher and me
loves that the literary character took a nap for many years.
I think that's really apt. And so I think this
is a very interesting paragraph here about Hinckley and reminding
everybody this is a guy who went to institutionalization for
this horrible crime, and when he came out, the entire
world had changed.
Speaker 2: He was in St. Elizabeth's for your entire life basically
pretty much.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And as I said earlier in the podcast, growing up,
we would always hear because the local newspaper report on it.
Hankley is out in a supervised visit with his parents.
There was a huge to do when he was allowed
to have weekend visits and then longer and longer, and
there was quite a bit of coverage when he was
finally released from all of the restrictions at Saint Elizabeth
and was allowed to live here permanently. I'm sure that
there was a heck of a flap in King's Mill
that what a conversation to have the neighborhood assassin is
coming home to live. That had to have been an
interesting conversation. Okay, article continues. I come from Ireland, a
country with a long and complicated history of political violence.
For most of this history, which stretches back through centuries
of colonial dispossession. Such violence arose, in one way or
another out of a struggle for national self determination. When
what are now called non state actors committed deeds of
terror and violence, they did so by and large within
the context of a coherent political project. Say what you like,
for instance, about the IRA's failed attempt in nineteen eighty
four to assass Margaret Thatcher by blowing up a hotel
in Brighton, but you can't say that it was totally inexplicable.
You didn't have to agree morally with the aims or
the methodologies of violence to understand them.
Speaker 2: What is disturbing for me is that these political assassins
here in the United States, so much of it just
seems aimless and baseless and completely pathetic. I understand why
the people of Ireland, and particularly Northern Ireland may have
wanted to kill Margaret Thatcher. I'm not saying I think
that was a good idea or that she necessarily deserved it.
At least there's a political means to an end here.
Political assassinations in the United States, for the most part way,
particularly when the assassin survives and has an opportunity, perhaps
to be heard in court or speak. At some point,
none of it ever seems to make any sense to me.
It's all about self aggrandizement. They're pretty pathetic and this
is just their way of achieving fame infamy perhaps.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there was an excellent podcast out a couple of
years ago from our friends over at Tenderfoot TV called
the RFK Tapes, and that was a lot of discussion
about Robert Kennedy's assassination at dvances and the motivations behind
that one have been hotly debated. Very interesting stuff. But
I like your characterization of the aimless. It feels like, well,
what is the point in this? I don't know enough
about RFK and his political ideology to be able to
pinpoint or reason why it would have wanted him dead.
What was the point of that he was universally beloved
as far as I can tell. What is the point
in taking out this guy who was really only trying
to do good things for the country. I will never
understand it, agreed.
Speaker 2: O'Connell continues, and this picks up on some of these themes.
The tradition of political violence in the United States is
of an entirely different way, and it seems to me
to arise out of the conjoined American traditions of entrepreneurial
individualism and gun ownership. The presiding archetype of such violence
in American life is not a revolutionary in a balaklava
backed by a paramilitary organization, but a lonely oddball with
a firearm fixation and a complex of conspiratorial grievances, whose
relationships of the political dynamics of his country is often
highly inscrutable or in any case, disconnected from any organized
political project. This is a confused and confusing figure. Lee
Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, these non entities who seized
for themselves a place in history, even a kind of
perverse greatness, by murdering great men.
Speaker 3: Could not have said that or articulated that any better.
Speaker 2: No, it's beautifully written, and he's really capturing the sense
of something that I think we need to be thinking about.
Crooks is another person in this long list of kind
of bizarre nobodies that are going to try to kill
political leaders in a way that doesn't even seem to
make sense. There's no philosophical underpinning here. They just want
to kill this individual to claim their what fifteen minutes
of fame from behind bars.
Speaker 3: John Henckley Junior was both an extreme and an imperfect
example of this archetype, not least because he failed on
a psychological level. He had less in common with practitioners
of political murder from other cultures and times the unknown
assassin of the revolutionary leader Michael Collins during the Irish
Civil War, say Or Carillo princip the Serbian nationalist who
sparked the First World War by killing Archdupe Franz Ferdinand,
than he did with the other major avatar of American carnage,
the mass shooter. He was a lonely and tormented boy
whose mental illness absorbed and intensified many of the dark
energies of American culture, the interplay between cinematic and actual violence,
the devotional relationship with fame, and the conviction that heroic
self definition can be achieved through an act of violence.
His motives were not exactly obscure, but his politics were
incoherent and largely irrelevant to his deed.
Speaker 2: The same can't be confidently said of Thomas Matthew Crooks,
who came within inches of assassinating a former and perhaps
future president not yet at least for the simple reason
that almost nothing can confidently be said of him. Reporters
are sketched a broad outline of his life. Crooks came
from a middle class suburb of Pittsburgh, and high school
classmates described him as intelligent, geeky, and a bit of
a loner. He liked playing video games and shooting guns.
We know that he was a registered Republican, but we
also know that he donated fifteen dollars to any nonprofit
dedicated to increasing voter turnout for Democrats. Having unlocked his phone,
the FBI found that he searched for the date of
both Trump's rally in Butler and the Democratic National Convention,
and for pictures of Biden and Trump, as well as
high level federal appointees in the Biden administration. Maybe there's
a version of this story yet to be told in
which Crooks and his actions do make sense. Maybe investigators
find some detail buried deep in the data hoard, some
glimmering chard left behind in the digital recesses that somehow
illuminates it all. But also maybe not. Maybe unimaginable chaos
was nearly unleashed on the United States for no better
reason than that Butler was a little over an hour's
drive from his parents' house, and maybe Crooks remains legible,
if at all, only as a late and sad entry
into the canon of the lonely American man who takes
a shot of the President, an archetype of which John
Hinckley Junior was until very recently the most vivid contemporary example.
Speaker 3: I don't know where, exactly, if anywhere, it would make
sense for Hinckley to be living in Freedom forty three
years after shooting Ronald Reagan, but Williamsburg, the former capital
of the Virginia Colony, with its restored eighteenth century buildings
and its tourist economy, feels like a particularly strange outcome.
The town, whose historical center bills itself as the world's
largest living history museum, amounts to a sort of immersive
infotainment experience on the theme of America's colonial period. During
my visit there in May, I saw many men in
period garb waistcoats, breeches, tricorn hats, addressing clusters of tourists
in stentorian fashion about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. There
are frequent outdoor performances by Fife and drum outfits. There
are I would guess, more gift shops per capita than
any American town other than Orlando. I would take exception
with that.
Speaker 2: By the way, I did laugh when I read that, though.
Speaker 3: I don't think that's true. As I walked the broad
promenades of the Historical Center, the only traffic on which
was horse drawn carts full of tourists, I encountered several
groups of small boys fighting pitched battles with wooden swords
and toy muskets. He's not wrong on that part. I
do take a little bit of umbrage on behalf of
my city. We don't have that many gift shops.
Speaker 2: Okay, if you say so, I like Williams work. Just fine.
Speaker 3: I was gonna say, you've been here, Yes, are we
crawling with gish?
Speaker 2: Not that I recall, but perhaps for a Dublin or
it might have felt that way.
Speaker 3: Okay, true enough, true enough, Okay. There is so much
interesting discussion and conversation to continue unpacking with this article
that we are going to bring it to a close
right now. We're about halfway through the article. And for
anybody who thinks that maybe we're taking a little too
long to read this. You can actually have someone at
the New York Times read this to you. There is
a link to the article and that is forty full
minutes long without any of our sparkling and incisive commentary.
So we actually think you're getting the better part of
the deal by listening to the both of us.
Speaker 2: That's true. And I'll bet we charge more reasonable rates
than The New York Times.
Speaker 3: Probably we do. As someone who pays for the Times
every single month, I think we have much more reasonable rates.
We will continue this dissection of this particular piece of
writing in our very next episode. Matt is going to
do it for this episode of mind Over Murder, but
stay tuned for the next one. 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.
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