John was a misfit in class too. He wanted to be a singer and writer, but was stuck in a business course. Whenever he thought he would fail a course, he would withdraw from it (after six years of failing to get a degree, he finally dropped out in 1979).
Needless to say, John was not able to make much progress at Texas Tech. He moved to Los Angeles for a while and while there he noticed that Taxi driver. He watched it over and over again, 16 times in all. By the time he came home to Evergreen, Colorado, for the holidays that year, he was John Hinckley Jr. in name only. Inside, he had changed into a man who was more of a man than a man. Travis BickleCharacter played by Robert De Niro Taxi driverJohn was madly, obsessively in love jodie fosterAnd his obsession triggered a series of actions that nearly resulted in the death of an American President.
Detached from reality
In his 1985 book Breaking PointJohn’s parents Jack and Joanne Hinckley have detailed how he lost touch with reality.
They were surprised and delighted when he told them he finally had a girlfriend, Lynn Collins, who wanted to be an actress. John was so shy that he ran to his room whenever the neighbors came over. He wouldn’t even play the guitar for his parents. And yet, he told them that he had seduced Lynn at the laundromat.
It was too good to be true, as the FBI found in their investigation. Lynn was John’s brainchild. She was the equivalent of Travis’ rich girlfriends Taxi driverThat was, quite possibly, the first of many stories he weaved over the next 5 years.
When John came home in the winter of 1976 he asked his mother if she had seen Taxi driver. She hadn’t done that, so she couldn’t have guessed that her new outfit was inspired by Travis. John was more influenced by Travis’ ideas than by style. One of them was to ‘save’ Jodie from a ‘degenerate’ society and the other was to try and assassinate the President.
The pair was great PassionIn the Washington hotel room where John stayed on the day of the assassination attempt, the FBI found a photograph of the President and Mrs. Reagan. On it John had written Jodie and that he would one day live in the White House. They also found a photograph of Napoleon, beneath which he had written, “Napoleon and Josephine. John and Jodie.”
Peach Brandy
On New Year’s Eve 1980, John sat alone in his room at his parents’ home and recorded this message on his cassette recorder: “Everything I do in 1981 will be for Jodie Foster. I want to somehow tell the world that I worship her and idolize her.”
He recorded it after turning down his father’s offer of champagne and asking for peach brandy instead. Yes, peach brandy – the drink Travis used to soak his bread in for breakfast.
But months before the announcement he had begun making secret trips to New Haven, Connecticut, where 18-year-old Jodie had just enrolled at Yale University in the fall of 1980. He called her at her dormitory and recorded two of their conversations. Unbeknownst to her, he had been following her around campus, and is believed to have followed her around with a gun, with the idea that her murder and then his suicide would link their deaths.
His second plan was to kidnap Jodi, then hijack a plane and demand that they both be “installed in the White House.” He also wrote a note to the FBI threatening to kidnap Jodi.
John was also slipping notes and letters under Jodie’s dorm door. The first set arrived in September. The second in October or November (Jodi wasn’t sure), and the last on March 6, 1981. One note read: “Jodie Foster, love, just wait. I’ll rescue you soon. Please cooperate.”
When she came to testify at John’s trial, Jodie said she immediately recognised that it was the same type of letter that Travis had sent to Iris in 1982. Taxi driver,
John Travis
By March 1981 John had fully transformed into Travis. When his parents refused to let him live at home – hoping he would take charge of his own life – he signed the register at a motel as “J. Travis.” John Travis.
The day he shot Reagan, John was scheduled to speak to his music industry contacts in Hollywood. His mother had put him on a plane to California herself. So, how did he get to Washington, DC?
It was his obsession with Jody again. He had boarded a coast-to-coast Greyhound bus from Hollywood to New Haven. After a journey of 4 days, he reached Washington, DC and stayed for the night. By chance he read Reagan’s itinerary in a newspaper and decided to kill him to impress Jody.
Yes, there was no political angle or animosity to it. John had actually been happy when Reagan won the presidential race a few months earlier. “Maybe there’s still hope for this country,” he had told his father.
He didn’t care which president he shot, as long as he could be famous. In October 1980 he was arrested with three guns at the Nashville airport on a day when then-President Jimmy Carter was in town. No one suspected what he was up to, so he was released with a mere $62.5 fine.
Unfortunately, Reagan became a victim of John’s obsession with Jodie. The FBI found a letter left by John for Jodie in his Washington hotel room on the afternoon of March 30, 1981:
“Jody, if I could win your heart and spend the rest of my life with you, whether it was in total anonymity or something, I would give up this idea of getting Reagan in an instant. I will admit to you that the reason I am going ahead with this effort now is because I can’t wait any longer to impress you.”
Although John shot and wounded the President and 3 others from a distance of 15 feet (6 bullets in 1.7 seconds according to the FBI), the jury found him not guilty on the grounds of insanity. He was sent to a psychiatric institution, but it took him some time to regain his sense of reality. In that time he managed to send a 4-page letter the new York Times which said, among other things:
“The shoot outside the Washington Hilton Hotel was the greatest love affair in the world… At one time Miss Foster was a star and I was a trivial admirer. Now everything is changed. I am Napoleon and she is Josephine. I am Romeo and she is Juliet… I may be in prison and she may be making a movie in Paris or Hollywood but Jodie and I will always be together, in life and in death.”
