There’s more to know about Hannibal Lecter’s creepy origin story
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Book Review
Hannibal Lecter: A Life
By Brian Raftery
Simon & Schuster: 336 pages, $30
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Of all President Trump’s rather peculiar hyper-fixations — rigged elections, left-wing fake news and Rosie O’Donnell — there is one that particularly stands out, and his name is Hannibal Lecter. At times the president either compliments the serial killer or compares Lecter’s time in an asylum to that of immigrants seeking asylum — though the constant references to Hannibal the Cannibal might fall into comparison given the president’s own rather carnivorous-leaning diet.
Brian Raftery cleverly opens his new biography, “Hannibal Lecter: A Life,” with this heightened focus on how the once side character became such a household name. In introducing Lecter to this culturally embalmed state only offered to a select golden group of characters, the Los Angeles-based author sets the stage to unravel the mysterious character’s origins through his elusive creator, Thomas Harris, and the real-life crimes and surprising interviews with the FBI that shaped the mythologized antihero.
But how does one set out to write a biography about the creation of an author who not only can’t be reached, but actively evades the spotlight? It’s this automatic built-in tension between the researcher and Harris, and ultimately Harris and the general public for decades, that excels within this story.
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Thomas Harris grew up in the South as a bookish outcast, reading the works of Ernest Hemingway and Jonathan Swift. It wasn’t until Harris moved to Texas and worked as a reporter at the Waco Tribune-Herald that his most iconic character began to take form.
During his time on the police beat and as a freelancer, Harris developed a fascination with crime and close proximity to its cast of characters from suspected murderers to homicide detectives. But as Raftery recalls from his research, it was serial killers that became a major focus of his attention and work.
There was a particularly chilling sex-trafficking-turned-murder case involving three sisters that Harris followed in which he came face to face with one of the sisters and wrote, “When she looks at you, you feel that something terrible is watching you out of the darkness.”
But it was his next case that seemed to follow Harris onto the page. He was preparing to interview an American crane operator and former mental patient, Dykes Askew Simmons Jr., who had been arrested for the murder of three siblings in the late ‘50s. There in prison, he met a captivating man he called Dr. Salazar, who possessed a sophistication that caught Harris’ attention.
The doctor had watched over Simmons, and recommended Harris refrain from wearing sunglasses while speaking with the prisoner, as he believed if he were to see his reflection, it would bring back childhood memories of being bullied for his appearance. After finishing the conversation, Harris, still struck by the insight of the prison doctor, asked a warden how long the man had worked in the prison. The doctor, later identified by Vice as Alfredo Balli Treviño, was not an employee, but an inmate. After a fight with his partner, he had used his background as a surgeon to slit the man’s throat before cutting his body into pieces on an operating table, and stuffed the pieces into a carton. Police would later suspect it had not been the doctor’s only crime.
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For fans of “The Silence of the Lambs,” the connection between the so-called Dr. Salazar and Hannibal Lecter is uncannily similar. It was these investigations that created the structural world that Harris’s work stemmed from. And as Raftery shared from a former university classmate from Baylor and fellow reporter, Dallas Lee, the younger Harris had an “appetite to examine the horrors of existence” as well as a “curiosity to know about these things without any moralizing about it.”
But of Harris’ liaisons with criminals and detectives, the anchor in his work — and in Raftery’s biography — would be his proximity to the FBI. Specifically, his proximity to Robert Ressler, a special agent said to have come up with the term “serial killers,” and who spent much of his career speaking with them.
Ressler joined the FBI’s newly launched Behavioral Science Unit in the mid-1970s. He and special agent John Douglas were paired up to visit police stations across the country to “talk shop” with the various officers and gather files about local crimes to better profile violent criminals.
But the duo realized they were missing a crucial source: the criminals. The agents decided to forgo asking their supervisors for permission and flashed their badges to access some of the country’s most notorious criminals, including California’s “Coed Killer,” Edmund Kemper.
The Burbank-born killer was a particularly challenging case to understand. He had killed his grandparents as a teenager and baffled psychiatrists and social workers trying to diagnose him. He had been placed in Atascadero State Hospital, a maximum-security prison for mentally ill convicts located between Los Angeles and San Francisco. After his release, he went on a brutal killing rampage that targeted female hitchhikers. After killing his mother, he was sentenced to life in prison. His story would later become a core element of the first season of Netflix’s “Mindhunter” series based on the book co-written by Douglas.
Ressler and Douglas repeatedly met with Kemper at his Vacaville prison. The conversations surprised them. As Raftery writes, television and films had, at the time, generated the notion that serial killers were “unhinged lunatics,” but the agents discovered a different side. Douglas found the conversation dynamic and funny at times, and even noted he and his partner worried Kemper could have been smarter than them. But these surprising finds showed a different side to serial killers, and would forever shape understanding of their psyches. After finally confessing to their bosses about these secret missions, they were allowed to continue. The agents spent countless hours with some of the country’s most feared killers, including Charles Manson, described as a “manipulative genius.”
The questions the agents were asking started to parallel the questions Americans were asking in the late ’70s, from the “Hillside Strangler” of L.A. to the “Son of Sam” in New York. More attention was falling on the FBI to combat what seemed to be a sensationalist epidemic of serial killers, and though the exact year was unclear, somewhere around that time Ressler was notified that there was a novelist, Thomas Harris, who wanted to speak with him.
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Harris would soon have access to Ressler along with other special agents, and even the FBI’s monthly journal for his research. He would fire away a variety of questions, but one subject he kept returning to was profiles, which had only started in early 1980 to gain acceptance within the agency. He was fascinated not only by the science behind them, but by the profilers themselves, and the effects their proximity to evil had on their well-being. As Raftery writes, “Harris was fascinated by the idea of turning over one’s life and one’s mind to some of the most terrifying humans imaginable.”
This passion for understanding the dimensions of profiling would forever shape Harris’ storytelling.
Raftery’s biography exceeds tiny Easter eggs, but writes about the monumental structures and lived discoveries of Harris’ that shaped Lecter. In doing so, he traces society’s perception of killers — fictional, real and those somewhere in between. For fans of true crime, Raftery has written a fascinating biography and origin story about one of pop culture’s most emblematic serial killers, and his lasting bite on society.
Beavin Pappas is an arts and culture writer. Raised in Orange County, he now splits his time between New York and Cairo, where he is at work on his debut book.
