Hinckley Hearing Stalls on Mass Slayer, Manson Links

A federal judge abruptly recessed a hearing today on John Hinckley Jr.’s bid to make an unescorted Easter trip when a psychiatrist revealed Hinckley recently wrote a sympathetic letter to mass murderer Theodore Bundy and received mail from another would-be assassin suggesting he write to Charles Manson.

The revelations from Dr. Glen Miller, a psychiatrist and consultant to St. Elizabeths Hospital where Hinckley has been confined for five years since shooting President Reagan in 1981, prompted U.S. District Judge Barrington Parker to recess the hearing until Wednesday morning and issue a court subpoena for all information relating to the correspondence.

Parker delayed the hearing on the request by Hinckley for a one-day visit with his parents to allow prosecutors time to prepare for cross-examination.

Miller said Hinckley had received a letter from Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme, a former Charles Manson follower who tried to shoot President Gerald R. Ford in 1975, and had asked for Manson’s address so that he could correspond with him.

But, Miller, said, “So far as I know he has never written a letter to Charles Manson.”

At the same time, Miller said, Hinckley declined to respond to Fromme.

Miller said Hinckley had “written recently to Bundy . . . expressing his sorrow” at his “awful position.”

Bundy is on Death Row at the Florida State Prison in Starke, Fla., convicted and sentenced to die for three murders--including two Florida State University sorority sisters and a 12-year-old schoolgirl.

He is suspected of killing more than two dozen other women across the country and savagely mutilating their bodies.

The psychiatrist, who examined Hinckley in 1982 when he entered the mental hospital and earlier this year, said Hinckley’s psychotic disorders were “in remission” but questioned his judgment at times, including his decisions about “responding to some of the characters who wrote him.”

Miller said the presidential assailant now is “a much different person” and can look his doctors in the eyes and feel remorse for his deeds.

He also told the court Hinckley now feels he committed a “horrendous” act in shooting Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady.