Читать книгу Stalkers - Jean Ritchie - Страница 8
ОглавлениеTHE EIGHTH OF DECEMBER 1980 was the day that stalking was blasted into public awareness by a snub-nosed five-shot revolver. As John Lennon followed his wife back into the Dakota Building, the famous New York apartment block where they lived, a fat bespectacled youth called Mark Chapman approached him. Chapman had for a few days been one of the regular fans who hung around hoping to glimpse the ex-Beatle, but by 8.30 p.m. on a cold dark night the others had all drifted away. The doorman of the exclusive apartment block had been chatting normally to the young man only minutes before, and said afterwards that Chapman was calm and rational.
As Yoko Ono swept passed him Chapman said ‘Hello’. Lennon, who was behind her, stared for a few seconds at his nemesis. Earlier that day he had signed his autograph on an album sleeve for Chapman, but he showed no sign of recognition. As Lennon started to enter the building Chapman stepped sideways, pulled the pistol from his pocket, held it straight in front of him with both arms outstretched, and fired all five bullets at his hero. The two bullets that hit Lennon in the back caused him to spin round, and two more ripped into his chest. One went wide of the target.
The most famous pop star in the world staggered up five steps to the Dakota office, where he collapsed in front of the night-duty man. The man who was about to become one of the most famous assassins in the world dropped his gun and stepped back into the shadows. He did not try to run away, but calmly pulled out his well-thumbed copy of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and started to read it while he waited for the police to arrive and arrest him.
The news of John Lennon’s death flew electronically around the world, and everywhere there was a reaction of shock. The Dakota was besieged by fans and inundated with flowers, radio stations played Lennon music for twenty-four hours a day and a worldwide ten-minute silent vigil was held six days later.
But while Lennon fans were stupefied by the death of the man they regarded as the next thing to God, others around the world were shocked by something else: the man who had murdered Lennon was one of his fans. The killer was a devotee of his, one of those who claimed to worship him. To those outside the closed world of megastardom, it seemed preposterous. Kennedy and Martin Luther King had both been assassinated, but there was some perverted political sense to their killings. It would have been easier to comprehend if Lennon’s killer had been bent on attracting international attention to some cause or other, if the murder had been a kamikaze publicity stunt. But the only thing that Chapman wanted to draw attention to was himself.
The risk from deranged fans had been known for years to those in the public eye. They received nutty mail in with the thousands of genuine, innocent adoring fan letters; they received death threats, they felt uneasy about certain persistent hangers-on at their gates. But it was Lennon’s death that publicly marked the extent of the risk, and brought celebrity stalking into the open. It was Lennon’s death that floodlit the dark, strange, obsessional world of the fanatical fan.
Mark Chapman’s decision to kill his hero John Lennon may have been triggered by a perceptive article in Esquire magazine, published in October 1980. The piece examined Lennon’s life, which was that of an eccentric semi-recluse, dominated by his Japanese wife Yoko. Their married life was bizarre, their relationship with their son Sean (born by Caesarean operation so that his birth date was the same as his father’s) was unconventional. The magazine article examined how Lennon’s life measured up to the peace and love philosophy that he had expounded for so long, and found it wanting. He did not emerge as an idealist who put his money where his mouth was, but as an extremely rich 40-year-old who watched daytime television and amused himself speculating in property.
Many devoted fans must have read the article and rejected it, others will have felt betrayed by Lennon. Critics of John and Yoko will have felt vindicated. But Chapman went further. He felt so deeply upset by his icon that he decided to kill him. It took a few weeks, but he managed it – one of the few times that Mark Chapman lived up to his own expectations.
Chapman was twenty-five at the time he killed Lennon. He was an unremarkable-looking young man who had managed to conceal the full extent of his mental disturbance from a lot of people for a long time. The son of a nurse and an ex-army sergeant, who divorced when he was still a child, he was born in Texas and brought up in Atlanta, Georgia, alienating his family in his early teens when he adopted a hippie lifestyle and experimented with marijuana, LSD, amphetamines and barbiturates. He acquired a criminal record for minor offences, most of them connected with drugs. During these years he idolized Lennon. At seventeen he cleaned up his act after he claimed to have met Jesus Christ, who came into his room and stood by his left knee, starting a tingling which spread ‘from the tip of my toe to the top of my head’. Chapman became a smartly dressed, clean-shaven, short-haired Bible freak, conventionally dressed apart from the large cross he always hung around his neck. He dropped out of school – where his record had not been good – to follow Christ. He joined a Pentecostal church, and walked the streets accosting passers-by and trying to convert them. His Christianity was fundamental: God represented the forces of good and the devil represented the forces of evil, and the world was a battleground in which the two sides fought each other. His feelings about Lennon became ambivalent; on one hand he still listened to and enjoyed the music, but on the other he suspected Lennon of being the anti-Christ because he had said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus.
Chapman became involved with the YMCA, and attended their summer camps, acting as a counsellor to young children. He felt a great rapport with children, and was popular with them. When he felt his Christian calling was bigger and that he should be doing something more dramatic for his faith, in 1976 he went to Beirut with a group of other volunteers from the YMCA, but was rapidly recalled back to the States because of the war in the Lebanon.
At this stage Chapman was, by his own lights, doing well. He had an attractive, bright girlfriend who shared his evangelical Christianity. He was very well thought of by the YMCA bosses, and it was at their suggestion that he went, with his girlfriend, to college in Tennessee in the hope of getting some qualifications so that he could take up a full-time post with the organization. But he hated academic work, and before the first term was over he had had a breakdown, walking out on the course and his girlfriend. He blamed the staff and the other pupils, describing them as ‘phoneys’ – the favourite description used by Holden Caulfield, the main character in The Catcher in the Rye, for his enemies. The book, a seminal work about teenage alienation from the adult world, spoke to Chapman at a deep level, and he identified with the hero who believed that childish innocence was more precious than maturity.
His family were not sympathetic after he dropped out and Chapman, twenty-one years old at the time, found a job as a security guard to support himself. He was given some rudimentary training in the use of a pistol; Chapman proved to be a good marksman. But being a security guard was, he felt, only a stop gap, and in a desperate bid to get some better qualifications he enrolled once more in college. When he failed to keep up with the academic work once again he felt a complete failure, and decided that he would end his own life. But he wanted to do it in style and in his own time; he had read somewhere that the Hawaiian islands were as close to paradise as you can get on earth, so he decided to commit suicide only after he had visited them.
Six months later, having travelled all around the islands, he decided that the appointed time had come, and fixed a hosepipe from the exhaust of his car. But he was no more competent at suicide than he was at college work; he was found and taken to hospital. After his physical problems were sorted out he was transferred to a psychiatric ward where he was treated for severe neurotic depression, a diagnosis which shows how clever he was at masking the extent of his symptoms, because by this time Chapman was certainly psychotic. He was preoccupied by the fight between God and the devil, which he hallucinated about constantly. He believed his brain could pick up the commands of the opposing armies, so that he refused a confusion of signals urging him to do good and then to do evil.
Perhaps he recognized his own need for help and treatment: when he was discharged he took an undemanding clerical job in the hospital and worked as a volunteer in the psychiatric unit. He saved his earnings assiduously, and started to plan a six-week holiday, in which he intended to see as much as possible of the world. The travel agent who helped him plan his holiday, which started in Tokyo, was a Japanese girl working in a Honolulu agency. She was the daughter of a prosperous baker. While he was away Chapman sent her postcards, and when he returned they started going out together. Gloria was a Buddhist who believed in fortune-telling and astrology, a combination at odds with Chapman’s born-again evangelical Christian faith, but theirs was a genuine romance and in June 1979 they were married.
Gloria had a comfortable life; her father was wealthy and she had her own salary. Chapman, who was still working at the hospital, began to enjoy a lifestyle he had never previously aspired to. He harboured dreams of grandeur, seeing himself as an art connoisseur. But his taste in pictures was esoteric and no doubt governed by the religious battleground his brain had become; he coveted a Salvador Dali representation of the crucifixion of Christ overlaid with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Death was becoming a fixation of his.
By the time he had been married for six months, Chapman had walked out on his job at the hospital in a fit of pique because he did not get a promotion he wanted. He became a security guard again: it was a job which gave him less responsibility and paid him less money, and he recognized it as a downward step. Money was no problem, though, because he had access to a shared account with Gloria.
For the whole of 1980 Chapman’s behaviour was odd, although obviously not odd enough to alert anybody. He bullied Gloria, was inordinately possessive about her, and was extravagant with their money, spending far more than he contributed to the household. Opposite the apartment where he and Gloria lived was an office of the Church of Scientology, a cult which recruits with promises of self-improvement. Chapman disapproved of the organization, and could be seen marching up and down repeatedly outside their offices, muttering to himself. The office began to receive threatening phone calls, sometimes as many as forty in a day. The phone would ring, the receiver be picked up, and a male voice would whisper ‘Bang, bang, you’re dead.’ Chapman later admitted he was the caller.
At home Gloria was becoming increasingly worried about him. He had always played lots of Lennon music, but the signs were there that he was developing into more than a fan. In August he wrote to a friend, said he was going to New York on a mission, and gave his address as the Dakota. His beloved Bible had an addition that he had scrawled in himself: ‘The Gospel According to John’ became ‘The Gospel According to John Lennon’. He read everything he could get his hands on about the star. After reading the Esquire article in October, his attitudes to Lennon hardened. He would sit in a darkened room, naked, in the lotus position, listening to speeded-up Beatles and Lennon tapes, and chanting ‘John Lennon, I’m going to kill you.’
‘It was hideous,’ he said later from his prison cell at Attica, ‘I would strip naked, gritting my teeth and summoning the devil and wild things into my mind. I was sending out telegrams to Satan, “Give me the opportunity to kill John Lennon.”’
He had, he would reveal later in prison, already thought about and discounted killing Jackie Onassis, Ronald Reagan, David Bowie and Elizabeth Taylor, among others. But once he hit on Lennon, everything he read and heard about the man whose music he revered confirmed that Lennon was ‘a phoney’. There was a time when Chapman’s delusions made him believe he was Lennon: when he gave up his job on 23 October he signed off as John Lennon, then scored the name out. But more telling, and more fundamental, was the belief that he was Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye.
Four days after finishing at work, Chapman bought a gun. It was not hard. He walked into a shop in Honolulu where the slogan above the door said ‘Buy a gun and get a bang out of life’ He paid $169.00 for .38 calibre pistol, which he chose because it was small enough to conceal in a pocket. He flew to New York on a one-way ticket, telling his wife Gloria that he was going ‘to make things different’. Arriving on 30 October, he became Holden Caulfield, retracing his fictional hero’s steps through the city with his well-thumbed copy of The Catcher in the Rye in his pocket. He went to the spots in Central Park that Salinger mentioned in the book and he went to the Museum of Natural History, another place Caulfield visited.
In between his pilgrimages, he joined the small knot of fans who hung around the Dakota building, hoping for a glimpse of their idol. He moved hotels, to be nearer to his stakeout, never giving any clue to the others that he was any different from them in his devotion to the star. He was even ‘normal’ enough to go out on a date with a girl he met in Central Park, where she worked in a café. The only clue she had about his state of mind came when he angrily lashed out at New York gun laws: he had discovered he could not buy bullets in the city. He contacted an old schoolfriend, a policeman back in his home state, Georgia, who agreed to supply him with ammunition. He flew to Atlanta to collect five hollow-nosed dumdum bullets.
Back in New York, Chapman was listening hard to the warring factions in his head. One side told him to kill Lennon, the other told him not to. The first victory went to the goodies: he phoned Gloria in Honolulu and told her that coming to New York had been a mistake. He revealed to her that he had been on a mission to kill Lennon – it was the first she had heard of his plans – but that he had won ‘a great victory’ and was on his way home. For three weeks he sat around the Honolulu apartment watching television. On the wall of the apartment was a plaque inscribed with the Ten Commandments, and as he walked past it Chapman saw ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ leap out at him; a sign, he believed.
But the battle was still raging and he needed to get back to New York, to be near Lennon. He told Gloria that he had thrown the gun and the bullets into the sea, and that she was not to worry that he would do anything silly. He even made an appointment with a psychotherapist who had treated him before for depression, but he never turned up. When he should have been getting professional help coping with his delusions, he was on a plane to New York.
He stayed at the YMCA for the first night, staking out the Dakota during the days. His second day in New York was, probably more by coincidence than planning, Pearl Harbor day, the anniversary of the Japanese attack on the American fleet which led to the US entering the Second World War. Both Lennon and Chapman had Japanese wives. That night, the eve of Lennon’s assassination, he went into his Holden Caulfield role-playing mode again. He moved from the YMCA to a hotel, booking a room for seven nights on his Visa card. On a table he laid out his must valued possessions: tapes by the Beatles and by guitarist Todd Rundgren, his New Testament in which he had written ‘Holden Caulfield’, a picture of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and some photos of himself when he worked at YMCA summer camps with young children. Then, like Caulfield, he hired a prostitute and re-enacted a scene from the book: talking to the girl, massaging her and being given a massage, but not having sex.
The next day, on his way to the Dakota, he bought a new copy of the book. On the title page he wrote ‘This is my statement.’ He took a copy of Lennon’s new album, Double Fantasy, and was mingling with the other fans by lunchtime. He had dressed carefully for the cold New York winter, wearing long thermal underwear, a coat buttoned up to the neck and a Russian fur hat. With his chubby cheeks he looked as though he might be a refugee from behind the Iron Curtain. The first member of the Lennon clan who he saw was Sean, John’s 5-year-old son, who came out of the Dakota with his nanny. Holden Caulfield liked kids, so did Mark Chapman. It was another fan, one of the regulars, who introduced Sean to Chapman, who knelt on one knee before the little boy and put his hand in the child’s. He told Sean he had come all the way from Hawaii, and that he was honoured to meet him. Then he added that Sean should take care of his runny nose. ‘You wouldn’t want to get sick and miss Christmas,’ said the man who was planning to make sure there would be no happy family gathering in the Lennon apartment on Christmas Day that year. Afterwards Chapman described Sean as ‘the cutest little boy I have ever seen’. It was 5.00 in the afternoon when Lennon first appeared, and all Chapman did was thrust his copy of Double Fantasy in front of the star for an autograph. ‘John Lennon, December 1980’ was scrawled across the cover. An amateur photographer, Paul Goresh, who was hanging around hoping to get some good pictures, took one of Lennon with Chapman in the background; it would later appear all around the world.
The other fans got tired and drifted away. At 8.00 p.m. Goresh, who had been chatting with Chapman, said he was calling it a day. Chapman tried to persuade him to stay: ‘You never know, something might happen. He might go to Spain or something tonight – and you will never see him again.’
It was as near as he could get to inviting Goresh to record on film the murder of John Lennon. The photographer did not pick up on it, and missed the scoop of a lifetime. For a couple of hours Chapman chatted with the Cuban doorman at the building. He seemed, the doorman said later, sane and normal. It was ten minutes to eleven when the Lennons returned. A few seconds later mayhem broke loose. Lennon, blood pouring from his mouth and chest, staggered into the building. Yoko screamed and screamed. The night-duty man hit a panic button, and within minutes two police cars, sirens screeching, were at the scene. John was taken to hospital, barely alive. He died shortly after, despite the desperate efforts of a seven-strong medical team.
Chapman, while all this was going on, had taken off his coat and hat to show the police officers that he was no longer armed. He waited quietly for them to arrive, exchanging a few words with the devastated doorman, the Cuban to whom he had been talking earlier, who shook the gun from his hand and kicked it into the street. Chapman even apologized for what he had done, and when a woman who had heard the shots came running up, he told her to get out of there for her own sake. Then he took out his copy of Catcher and started to read. Not surprisingly, when the police arrived they went to arrest the wrong man, turning towards the young night-duty man, not fifteen-stone Chapman who was hanging back in the shadows.
Chapman’s original intention was to say nothing and hand over the book, with the inscription ‘This is my Statement’ to the police, but his resolution failed him when the police grabbed him.
‘Please don’t hurt me,’ he pleaded, reassuring them that ‘I acted alone.’
In the police car being taken into custody one of the cops asked him if he knew what he had just done. He replied: ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know that he was a friend of yours.’ He was just as polite and restrained when he phoned his wife Gloria in Honolulu. He gave her concise and clear instructions about getting the police to protect her from the journalists who were already gathering outside the apartment. She said she loved him and he said he loved her.
He later explained the conflict that went on in his mind at the time of the killing, by seeing himself as two people, a child and an adult. He said the child and the adult went together to the Dakota that day, and the adult wanted to get in a cab and go home.
‘Then the child screams “No! No! No! Devil! Help me, Devil! Give me the power and strength to do this. I want this. I want to be somebody.”’
He placed great emphasis on the fact that neither Yoko nor John spoke to him, as if a smile and a ‘hello’ might have saved John’s life. In his disturbed state he did not see Lennon stagger into the building, and when he realized there was no body in front of him he was not sure that he had actually done it.
‘I was kind of glad that he wasn’t there because I thought I had missed him or didn’t kill him or something. I just wanted the police to hurry up and come.’
The death of the pop icon caused such an uproar that police insisted Chapman wore a bullet proof vest before his trial, and they painted the windows of his cell black so that he would not be shot by snipers. He refused to plead an insanity defence at the trial, instead admitting his guilt. The trial was therefore over quickly, with Chapman sentenced to between twenty years and life, with an order that he should receive psychiatric treatment. Because of the crime and the emotions it stirred up, it is likely that life will mean life. His own lawyer asked the judge not to impose a minimum sentence (after which Chapman could have been released) because, he said, ‘All reports come to the conclusion that he is not a sane man. It was not a sane crime. It was … a monstrously irrational killing.’ When Chapman was asked if he wished to say anything in his own defence he read out a passage from The Catcher in the Rye.
Chapman lives in Attica Prison, New York, segregated from the other inmates. Attica is notoriously violent, and amid its shifting population there are always some who would relish the fame of being the man who killed the man who killed John Lennon.
Gloria, Chapman’s wife, has not divorced him. For three years she lived near the prison, visiting him regularly. But she then moved back to their Honolulu home; he has said he no longer wants her to visit. She sends him money regularly.
In a television documentary, shown in Britain in 1988, Chapman showed no remorse for killing Lennon, only regret that the star did not die immediately and that Sean was left without a father. In a television interview in 1992 he said that when he shot Lennon he did not believe he was killing a real person, he was killing an image, a record cover. He said he had undergone an exorcism performed by a priest in his prison cell, and that his demons had left him. He said he did not expect to ever be forgiven for ‘taking away a genius’.
A psychiatrist involved in his care diagnosed Chapman as exhibiting ‘the symptoms of virtually every malady in psychiatric literature’.
Astonishingly, Mark Chapman, who stalked and murdered John Lennon, now has his own collection of would-be stalkers, weird letter writers who mail him their assorted fantasies. He gets plenty of straightforward hate mail from Lennon fans, but he also gets love letters from women he has never met, and letters applauding what he did.
He spends a lot of time answering them. He also spends a lot of time reading The Catcher in the Rye.
If the death of Lennon put stalking into the public eye for the first time, it was the shooting of President Reagan by a Jodie Foster fan four months later that proved to the world that Lennon’s murder was not an isolated tragedy. The cliché ‘the price of fame’ began to have real meaning to a public which had smiled cynically every time a celebrity complained about invasion of privacy or harassment by fans. To those on modest incomes who helped their idols amass million-dollar bank balances by buying their records, watching their films or getting hooked on their TV soap characters, the stars’ whinges had always been a bit hard to take. Now, within four months, the real fear that stalked the stars had been brought out into the open. When celebrities complained about fans it was not, as their public had imagined, out of frustration at autograph hunters disturbing them in the middle of restaurant meals, or because they were unable to walk down a shopping mall without being mobbed; it was an ever-present knowledge that somewhere out there was a mentally deranged fan who had them in their sights. All they could hope was that the sights were not attached to a rifle.
John Hinckley, who shot Reagan in the chest and seriously injured his press secretary James Brady, as well as wounding a policeman and a secret service agent, did it, he claimed, for Jodie. In his shabby motel room in Washington police found a letter to the star:
Dear Jodie
There is a definite possibility that I will be killed in my attempt to get Reagan. This letter is being written an hour before I leave for the Hilton Hotel [where Reagan had been lunching]. Jodie, I’m asking you to please look into your heart and at least give me the chance with this historical deed to gain your respect and love. I love you forever,
John Hinckley
At the time Jodie Foster was eighteen, in her first year at Yale University. She was a well-established actress, having shot to fame as a child in films like Bugsy Malone. Hinckley’s attempt on Reagan’s life largely mirrored the plot of one of her films, Taxi Driver, in which she played a teenage prostitute. The other star, Robert de Niro, played a character described in the publicity material for the film as ‘a loner incapable of communicating’ who spent ‘his off-duty hours eating junk food or sitting alone in a dingy room’. When the taxi driver is rejected by the prostitute, he sends her a letter before setting out to assassinate the President. There’s no doubt that Hinckley had seen – and been influenced by – the film, because about six months before he shot Reagan he wrote to the film’s scriptwriter, asking for an introduction to Jodie Foster. The actress also knew his name well before she heard it on the news bulletins about the shooting; he had been pushing letters under the door of her room at Yale.
Hinckley, who was twenty-five at the time of the shooting, was a desperate, deluded and dangerous misfit. Unlike Mark Chapman, he had never really established any long-lasting adult relationships; one of the most telling comments about him came from his landlord when he was in college, who commented that in all the time he had known Hinckley, he had only once seen him in the company of another human being. But there was nothing in his early life to suggest that the kid from the well-off Texan background would end up a notorious would-be assassin, no signs of deep emotional or mental disturbance in his childhood. He didn’t come from a broken home, he wasn’t brutalized by poverty. There were some traumas to cope with, like living in the shadow of a successful and popular sister in school, but the majority of youngsters cope with problems of that scale.
Hinckley even managed to conceal his solitariness throughout high school, although in retrospect no close friends stepped forward and claimed to have shared his confidences. But to the rest of his classmates he appeared normal: ‘So normal that he appeared to fade into the woodwork,’ said one girl who was in his year. After school, though, and after moving away from his parents’ home, his life began to gradually disintegrate.
John Hinckley was the third and last child of the family. His father was an oil engineer, who moved the family to the capital of America’s oil industry, Dallas, when his son John was two. They were an America adman’s dream of a family: good-looking, churchgoing, hardworking parents with three blonde, blue-eyed, attractive children. Even in the looks-conscious environment of middle-ranking Dallas society, the only girl, Diane, stood out for her prettiness. Scott, the oldest boy, seven years older than John, did well at school and at sports and eventually went into his father’s business. John, as a child, was very cute, average at his schoolwork, and very good at basketball – the best in his elementary school team.
When he was eleven his parents moved to the most swanky suburb of affluent Dallas, to a large house with a sweeping drive and a swimming pool. He seemed to fit in at high school, again becoming very involved in basketball, and a keen supporter of all the school’s other teams. He even joined in with school activities like the Rodeo Club, which organized barbecues, square dances and trips to rodeos. The only shadow over his school career – which was academically undistinguished but OK – was the popularity of his sister, who was three years older than him. She was good at everything: a star in class, head cheerleader, in the choir, in a school operetta production. She was also very attractive. But if John felt oppressed by her presence, his classmates saw no sign of it.
By the time he was fifteen his father had amassed enough capital to start his own business, Hinckley Oil. He was successful, and when his oldest son Scott finished his engineering degree he joined the company. Five years later the company – and the Hinckley family – moved to the town of Evergreen in Colorado, again to a quiet, well-to-do area. By this time John Hinckley was studying for a business degree at Texas Technical University in Lubbock, Texas. He was registered at the Tech for the next seven years, changing from business to liberal arts, but never completed his degree and only attended classes sporadically.
It was at this stage that his life began to fall apart. He did not take part in any of the university social activities, and journalists who trawled through every aspect of his life after the assassination attempt failed to find any friends, close or casual, in Lubbock. Nobody really noticed him, and the only thing he did which in retrospect is revealing was to choose Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the Auschwitz concentration camp as two of his study projects in his German history course. The room where he lived – where his landlord only once saw him with another person – was always full of burger boxes and ice-cream cartons.
‘He just sat there all the time, staring at the TV,’ said his landlord. The picture of the De Niro character from Taxi Driver was starting to emerge. He dropped out of college in 1976 and went to hang around Hollywood, staying in cheap rooms in the red-light district. He went back to college in 1977, but did not last the year. He became involved with the National Socialist Party of America, a neo-Nazi group, but in the end he was kicked out: he was too extreme even for these right-wing extremists, and when he started to advocate shooting people they decided he had to go. The president of the party later told a journalist that they decided that Hinckley was ‘either a nut or a federal agent’.
The American academic system means that students can drop a course and pick it up again whenever they like, without losing the credits they have already gained for previous work. Hinckley, having been away for more than a year, started back at Texas Tech in 1979. In the same year he started to buy firearms; in the small redneck town of Lubbock he was easily able to buy a .38 pistol and two .22 pistols. By this stage his parents must have been aware of the disintegration of his personality, because from time to time, back at the family home in Evergreen, Colorado, he visited a psychiatrist.
He finally left college in the summer of 1980, aged twenty-five, and started a strange chaotic ramble around America, as if he felt that by keeping moving, by never spending too long in one place, he could hold his fragmenting personality together. When he found himself in conversation with strangers he would boast of being a close friend of Jodie Foster’s, sometimes saying he was her lover. He turned up at Yale, where she was studying, and left several notes for her. He went to Nashville and was arrested as he tried to fly out to New York; his luggage contained three handguns and fifty rounds of ammunition. President Carter was due to fly into Nashville that day, but Hinckley’s name – which should have been passed on to the secret service – slipped through the net. Four days later he was in Dallas, buying two more pistols from a store with the slogan ‘Guns don’t cause crime any more than flies cause garbage’ in the window. He bought the bullets, appropriately named ‘devastator bullets’ from a store in Lubbock, the town where he had been in college. They cost ten times as much as ordinary bullets and exploded on contact, like dumdum bullets. Seven days after this shopping trip he was in Denver, applying for jobs. Then it was Washington, then Denver again, then back to New Haven (to be near Jodie at Yale), then Washington again.
By the beginning of March 1981 he was sticking more letters through Jodie Foster’s door at Yale, and by this time she was so concerned about them that they were handed to the college authorities. Hinckley then returned to Denver. He applied for jobs and pawned his possessions to pay for his motel room. His restless moving around the country continued: he went to Los Angeles via Salt Lake City by plane, only to board a bus back to Salt Lake City the next day. It was from there that he moved on to Washington, and his date with President Reagan.
It took him three days to get to Washington, travelling by Greyhound bus, arriving on Sunday 29 March. He ate a cheeseburger at the bus station, and walked about impatiently; other travellers thought he was waiting for someone to pick him up. Then he walked to a hotel two blocks west of the White House, where he checked into a $42-a-night room. He stayed in the room all day, making a couple of local phone calls. Next day he left early, and returned about noon, asking the receptionist if he had received any telephone messages while out. There was none for him. A chambermaid who tidied his room that morning noticed that among his possessions scattered around the room was a newspaper cutting about President Reagan’s timetable. It showed that Reagan would leave the White House at 1.45 p.m., after spending the morning with some prominent figures from the Hispanic community, and would then travel to the Washington Hilton to give a speech.
Hinckley wrote his letter to Jodie Foster and then walked to the Hilton, which was less than a mile from his hotel. He wore a raincoat, and he mingled with the photographers and reporters outside the hotel, giving at least one of them the impression that he was a secret service man. Inside, Reagan, the great communicator, was not on good form. His speech to 3,500 union delegates was not one of his best, but there was one line in it that the newspapers pounced on the following day: ‘Violent crime has surged by ten per cent, making neighbourhood streets unsafe and families fearful in their homes.’
As he stepped outside the hotel, violent crime surged again. Turning to wave at the crowd, Reagan smiled broadly. Hinckley pulled out his pistol, aimed, fired. Two bullets, then a pause, then four more. One of the secret service men pushed Reagan into the waiting limousine and dived on top of him, urging the driver to take off. Behind them, Reagan’s press secretary Jim Brady slumped to the ground, blood pouring down his face. A bullet had gone into his head, an injury which would leave him permanently disabled. A Washington policeman was shot in the chest and a secret service agent also received a chest wound. It was a matter of minutes before Reagan and the agent with him in the back of the car realized that the President, too, had been shot in the chest.
Hinckley was pounced on and disarmed within seconds, handcuffed to an agent and thrown into the back of a police car. At Washington police headquarters he hardly spoke. ‘Does anybody know what that guy’s beef was?’ President Reagan asked, as he lay in his hospital bed.
Jodie Foster did not know the answer, although she knew she was in some macabre way the inspiration for Hinckley’s actions. Twenty-one months later she wrote a perceptive account of how Hinckley’s fixation with her, and his subsequent actions, affected her. She had overcome the initial reaction to her when she started at university, the curiosity about her because of her Hollywood background, the resentment of her. She had even, according to one journalist who interviewed her peers, changed her style of dress to blend inconspicuously in with the group. And then John Hinckley had come along and let her know that for her – and for other stars – there could be no normal, no blending in.
Why me? was the theme of the article she had published in Esquire magazine. It explored the terrifying events that followed Hinckley’s arrest. Jodie was appearing on stage in a college production, and she was determined to go ahead with it. She had been moved from her shared dormitory to a single room that could more easily be protected by security men, there were security men screening the audience for the play, and at Jodie’s request cameras were banned. A whole pack of photographers had descended on Yale as soon as the news of Hinckley’s obsession with her had broken, and she wasn’t prepared to face any more. But a camera did get in; she could hear the familiar rhythmic click of a motor drive in the darkened auditorium. She looked hard at the area of the audience the sound was coming from and locked eyes with a bearded man who was watching her unflinchingly. He was there again the next night, in a different seat. The following night a note was found on a bulletin board: ‘By the time the show is over, Jodie Foster will be dead.’ It turned out to be a hoax.
But a few days later a real death threat was pushed under Jodie’s door. This time the police swung into action and caught up with her second stalker, Edward Richardson, within hours. He was arrested in New York, with a loaded gun, and he told police that he decided not to kill Jodie because she was too pretty; he was going to kill the President instead. He had also telephoned a bomb threat, demanding the release of Hinckley and secret service agents had to search all the college rooms that Jodie used. Richardson had a beard, just like the man in the audience. A year later he was released, on parole.
After his arrest, Jodie says a great change came over her – or so she was told by those around her. ‘I started perceiving death in the most mundane but distressing events. Being photographed felt like being shot. I thought everyone was looking at me in crowds; perhaps they were. Every sick letter I received I made sure to read, to laugh at, to read again.’
She was not sleeping properly, her pride in her appearance went. She felt bitter about the way other students had, she felt, betrayed her by telling journalists all about her and, in one case, selling an article to a magazine about her. In her own intelligent well-written article she describes the pain and anger that she, at eighteen, suffered because of her two stalkers. Her anguish was heightened by the media pursuit of her, but the feelings of isolation, desperation and frustration she felt at being unable to control her own life are common to all victims.
The security that surrounded Hinckley as he waited for his trial was greater than any that Jodie Foster had. The security services recognized that, as with Mark Chapman, Hinckley was a natural target for plenty of glory-seekers. It caused a sensation when Hinckley was found not guilty of attempting to murder Reagan, because of his insanity. But the net result for the American people was the same: he went behind bars, with very little prospect of ever being released.
It was surprising, therefore, to find him being considered for unsupervised release to spend a weekend with his parents only six years after the shooting. His application to be allowed home – he had already been back to Colorado in the company of a nurse – was supported by staff who had been involved in his care and treatment.
At a court hearing to consider his application it was revealed that he had written a sympathetic letter to Ted Bundy, one of America’s most notorious serial killers who is on Death Row in Florida. Hinckley ‘expressed sorrow’ at the ‘awkward position you [Bundy] find yourself in’. He had also written to a college student, asking her to kill Jodie Foster for him and to send a pistol by post to him so that he could escape from jail. He then told the girl to hijack a jet and demand that Hinckley and Jodie Foster both be taken aboard it. Hinckley had also received a letter from a woman in jail for trying to kill President Ford; she suggested Hinckley write to Charles Manson. To hear about the networking that was going on between long-term prisoners was almost as shocking to the law-abiding public as the whole idea of stalking.
Hinckley’s application to go home alone was turned down, and has been turned down ever since. When Hinckley’s application came up again in 1988, the court heard that staff had intercepted a letter from him to a mail order company that was selling pictures of Jodie Foster; his obsession was undiminished. In 1993, twelve years after committing the crime, he applied for parole. The answer was no.
