Stalkers. Jean Ritchie

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СКАЧАТЬ 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. СКАЧАТЬ