A Drifter Who Stalked Success

“Something happened to that boy in the last six years”

It cannot be said fairly that John Warnock Hinckley Jr., 25, was destined for infamy.

He is accused of a shooting that, perhaps even to him, is a surprise; the first openly extraordinary act of his life. This son of Sunbelt affluence —blond, blue-eyed, with the fleshy good looks of a country club lay-about—had never been outwardly quirky or unpleasant. His unremarkability confounds the desire for tidy, comforting explanations.

Says a family friend: “There but for the grace of God goes anyone’s kid.” Beverly McBeath was no friend at Highland Park (Texas) High School, but she speaks for all her schoolmates when she recalls that John Hinckley was “so normal he appeared to fade into the woodwork.” Nonetheless, some time in the barren years since his 1973 graduation from high school, Hinckley went beyond mere ordinariness. His solitude and fecklessness became chronic, and he started drifting:

to seedy neighborhoods in Los Angeles and Denver, toward fascism, and then to his climactic infatuations with handguns and a teen-age movie star. Says his father’s business associate Clarence Netherland: “Something happened to that boy in the last six to eight years to break him from the family tradition and the family life-style.” In fact, John Hinckley’s past years seem not to constitute a break so much as Hollywood’s slow fade to black.

John Jr. was Jack and JoAnn Hinckley’s last child. He was born on May 29, 1955, in the southern Oklahoma town of Ardmore, where his father worked as a petroleum engineer. Two years later Hinckley Sr. took a job in Dallas, 100 miles south. The growing family was good-looking and healthy and Protestant, and all five settled down to life in Uni versity Park, a moneyed Dallas suburb of broad lawns and handsome houses. The Hinckleys are “a fine Christian family,” according to one friend, and regular churchgoers; it was fitting that their first home in Dallas was a former parsonage.

Scott, now 32, ever the good eldest child, sought and won parental approbation; Diane, now 28, was exceptionally blond and pretty in a neighborhood of blond, pretty little girls; and John, never a problem, joined the Y.M.C.A.’s Indian Guides and distinguished himself in grammar-school sports. Recalls Jim Francis, John’s basketball coach for three years during elementary school: “He was a beautiful-looking little boy, a wonderful athlete, really a leader. He was the best basketball player on the team.” No wonder the fa ther of such a child, told years later that his son was being held as an assassin, would scowl in disbelief:

“It had to be a stolen ID.”

In 1966 the Hinckleys traded up: they moved to Highland Park, the neighborhood-of-choice for haute Dallas. The house on Beverly Drive where John Jr. spent the years of his adolescence is large, with a sweeping circular driveway in front and a swimming pool out back.

He was not a troublesome teen-ager or even a loner. Indeed, in the seventh and ninth grades he was elected president of his home room, and as an eighth-grader managed the basketball team. John Hinckley was no aloof oddball then. Says his junior-high friend Kirk Dooley: “No one rooted louder than Hinckley for the Highland Park Red Raiders.”

By 1970 John’s father had amassed capital of $120,000 and set up his own oil exploration business. Hinckley Oil, now known as Vanderbilt Energy Corp., affirmed the man’s entrepreneurial mettle. And Son Scott, an engineering major at Vanderbilt University, would soon join his dad’s wildcat enterprise.

In the fall of 1970, John Jr. began classes at Highland Park High School, where his sister was a senior. That year Diane Hinckley apparently burst forth as a campus star; she performed in a school operetta, she was head cheerleader, homecoming queen candidate, vice president of the choir, member of both the student council and the A-students’ National Honor Society. There are at least ten pictures of her in the yearbook, which cited her as one of the class’s eight “favorites.” She was a formidable sibling presence for Sophomore John.

During his junior year John was a member of the civic affairs club, and as a senior he was in the Rodeo Club, which organized barbecues, square dances and junkets to rodeos. In his yearbook John’s roster of activities was scanty but unembarrassing, just as his senior-picture hair length seemed perfectly median, neither long nor short. Bill Lierman, the Rodeo Club’s sponsor, recalled nothing untoward. Says Lierman: “He wasn’t a rowdy. He got along fine with all the kids.” And a sampling of schoolmates’ reminiscences shows a consensus. David Wildman, the basketball captain, calls him “a middle-of-the-roader.”

Only Sally Bentley, 26, disputes the hazy image of genial blandness. “He was well known because his sister was well known,” says the woman. “John was mousy. His sister was friendly and cute and alive. I thought he was sour about that. John never did anything outstanding or memorable.”

Lubbock, dry and bleak, is 318 miles from Dallas on the flat cap rock of west Texas. The population is 180,000, and 22,000 are Texas Tech students. John Hinckley Jr. was one of them, a business major, as of September 1973. He never finished, but over the next seven years Hinckley attended classes more than half the time. By 1977 he had dropped business in favor of liberal arts and earned at least a B average—good enough to be on the dean’s list. But once away from home, he made not even a token effort to fashion a social life. Says a Texas Tech spokesman:-“We can’t find a single university-recognized activity he participated in.”

In 1975, John’s parents moved to Evergreen, Colo., a Ponderosa town some 25 miles outside Denver. It is that city’s choicest mountain suburb: a place of steep, piney cul-de-sacs and well-to-do placidity. On some of his periodic sabbaticals from Texas Tech, John Jr. alighted at the new family home, and while there he often loitered at the local high school, presumably seeking companionship.

Not a single pal or girlfriend has turned up from those seven sketchy years at Texas Tech. His few acquaintances recall Hinckley as an expressionless blank.

Still he caused no alarm. Says German History Professor Otto Nelson: “I never picked up anything unusual or bizarre about him. He never asked a thing in class.” (Hinckley did, however, choose to specialize: one paper focused on Hitler’s Mein Kampf, his other on Auschwitz.) Says Mark Swafford, one of his Lubbock landlords: “I only saw him with another human being one time.” Hinckley’s student life was a sad, remote vigil. “Everywhere there were empty bags from hamburger joints and cartons of ice cream,” says Swafford. “He just sat there the whole time, staring at the TV.”

In late 1976 Hinckley went to California. He intended, John Sr. told a friend, to “crash Hollywood.” He ended up at Howard’s Weekly Apartments, in the seamy Selma Avenue district of Los Angeles—a street market for whores, drugs and every kind of sleaze. Perhaps during this period Hinckley developed his obsession with Actress Jodie Foster. Consider the plot parallels of the movie Taxi Driver, starring Foster as a prostitute and released just before Hinckley left for Los Angeles.

The film, according to a synopsis, concerns “a loner incapable of communicating,” who “usually spends his off hours…

eating junk food or sitting alone in a dingy room.” When the protagonist is scorned by Foster’s character, he mails her a letter and sets out to kill a presidential candidate. The coincidences are powerful and given credence by a letter that Scriptwriter Paul Schrader got last fall—from J.W. Hinckley. Schrader told TIME he thought the letter was from a smitten groupie who wanted to meet Foster, and he had his secretary throw it away.

Hinckley returned to Texas Tech during 1977, but his enrollment lapsed again during 1978. It was then that he began his flirtation with Nazism. According to Michael Allen, president of the National Socialist Party of America, Hinckley was a member of the sect for more than a year, and in March 1978 marched in a Nazi parade in St. Louis. Allen claims they kicked Hinckley out in 1979. Allen’s explanation:

“When somebody comes to us and starts advocating shooting people, it’s a natural reaction: the guy’s either a nut or a federal agent.” Hinckley was a voracious reader of newspapers, so it is logical that his affiliation with the Nazis began in early 1978: it was then that a spate of national news stories appeared about the National Socialists, mostly involving their planned marches through the heavily Jewish community of Skokie, Ill..

After more than a year’s hiatus from Texas Tech—a period of deepening disturbance for Hinckley—he registered for classes in September 1979. He also began his acquisition of firearms with a .38-cal. pistol, purchased in Lubbock, where a year later he bought two new .22 pistols at a pawnshop. When the 1980 summer session ended, Hinckley left Texas Tech for good to begin his last addled ramble around the country. His path seems one of accelerating aimlessness and fragmentation.

Hinckley found himself in New Haven, Conn., in September—within days after Foster’s matriculation at Yale—and boasted to strangers that they were lovers.

In October he returned to New Haven and left several notes for Foster at her dormitory.

A few days later, Hinckley was arrested—and promptly released on $50 bond—at Nashville Airport as he attempted to board a flight for New York City: in his carry-on luggage were three handguns and 50 rounds of ammunition.

Although President Carter was making a campaign appearance in Nashville the same day, the Secret Service was never told of Hinckley’s airport arrest. This may be the first clear, though unheeded, signal of Hinckley as stalker.

Four days later in Dallas he bought a pair of .22-cal. revolvers at a pawnshop.

Within a week Hinckley had surfaced in Denver, where he applied for jobs at two newspapers, claiming to one that he had just finished a month of classes at Yale. A few weeks later, in a Denver suburb, he at tended two meetings of the right-wing National Association for Constitutional Government. In December, the FBI suspects, Hinckley visited Washington, but in January he was back in the Denver area, where, on Reagan’s first full day in office, Hinckley bought a .38-cal. revolv -er. In February he returned to New Haven a third time, and then perhaps to Washington.

By the first of March, Hinckley was again in New Haven; he delivered more missives to Foster. Back in Denver a week later, he checked into a shabby motel.

Says one of the motel’s maids: “He didn’t say much, but he was nice to everyone — just a clean-cut, good-living kid.” In his first days in Denver he applied for a job at a record shop and pawned his type writer and electric guitar.

On March 25, Hinckley flew to Los Angeles via Salt Lake City, and the next day boarded a bus headed back to Salt Lake City — and on to Washington, D.C.

For perhaps the past six months, John Hinckley was under sporadic treat ment by Evergreen Psychiatrist John Hopper. No one but Dr. Hopper may be equipped to sketch a psychiatric profile of Reagan’s attacker. But particularly after the release of the final letter that Hinckley wrote to Foster, many psychiatrists have been willing to conjecture. Dr.

Thomas Gutheil, of the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, says that Hinck ley may be a victim of erotomania in one of its forms: obsession with a celebrity.

Harvard Psychiatry Professor Donald Russell believes that Reagan, not Foster, was central to Hinckley’s psychology, and several colleagues also doubt the impor tance of the movie-star crush. Says Rus sell: “He was obviously out to get these father figures.” Hinckley’s eclipse by an elder sibling was critical, says Chicago Psychiatrist Irving Harris. “The young brother tends to be overshadowed. If the man can’t find a socially accepted chan nel, he can become an assassin.” Dr.

James Gilligan, another Harvard professor, finds Hinckley’s insanity improbable.

Says he: “Most violence is not done by truly psychotic people. They are not completely normal, but that doesn’t mean they are crazy.” Dr. Gutheil cautions that no accurate explanation is apt to be simple:

more likely in Hinckley’s mind was a dis sonant snarl of emotions and delusions, which in concert led him to Washington.

Indeed, any explanation at all can smack of the pat. The consequence of lives like John Hinckley Jr.’s may be to amend a patriotic platitude. Perhaps not every little boy can grow up to be President, but he can, for the price of a pistol, grow up to be a presidential assassin.

— By Kurt Andersen. Reported by Richard C. Woodbury /Evergreen and Robert C Wurmstedt/Lubbock