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United StatesThe man who wanted to kill Reagan seeks redemption in music
After 41 years of deprivation of freedom and psychiatric care, John Hinckley is free and dreams of concerts.
John Hinckley boasts of having 50,000 followers on Twitter and some 5,000 listens per month on Spotify.
AFP
American John Hinckley, who tried to kill President Ronald Reagan in 1981 to impress actress Jodie Foster, is a free man now seeking redemption through music.
Declared criminally irresponsible by the courts, John Warnock Hinckley spent 34 years confined in a psychiatric hospital, before being authorized in 2016 to go live with his mother, under judicial supervision in Williamsburg, Virginia, 250 kilometers south of the federal capital Washington. On June 15, “following 41 years, 2 months and 15 days, FINALLY FREEDOM”, had tweeted the 67-year-old man, released from all judicial control.
Now free, John Hinckley, who always wanted to be a musician, is now a guitarist-songwriter who has another dream: to play in concert, in front of an audience. Because on June 15, his regained freedom was accompanied by “tremendous disillusionment”, tells the sexagenarian to AFP who met him at his home in Williamsburg, his acoustic guitar slung over his shoulder.
A New York theater where he was to perform canceled everything, citing, according to him, “serious and serious threats” to security. Same cold showers repeated before live concerts in Chicago, Virginia and Connecticut.
“Violent and unbalanced”
But, insists Hinckley, following 41 years of deprivation of liberty and psychiatric treatment, he is “now a different person” willing to share his music in a world that knew him as a “violent and unbalanced” young man.
On March 30, 1981, he shocked America and the world by shooting Republican President Ronald Reagan (who died in 2004 following serving two terms from 1981 to 1988) outside a hotel in Washington. One of his bullets ricocheted off the armored presidential limo and hit Reagan in the chest. Three people were injured, including then-White House spokesman James Brady.
The young John Hinckley at the time, obsessed with Jodie Foster since the release in 1976 of the mythical film by Martin Scorsese “Taxi Driver”, had then declared that he wanted to impress the actress. He had been declared criminally irresponsible by the courts and interned for more than three decades at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington.
But Hinckley did not disappear from the public space during the 1980s and 1990s. The famous Broadway songwriter Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021) made him one of the characters in his musical “Assassins” in 1990 and the group of American rock band Devo had turned one of his poems into a song.
Dylan and the Beatles
Living recluse with her cat in the historic and tourist town of Williamsburg, Hinckley spends her days painting, composing songs and posting her music on YouTube. He boasts of having 50,000 followers on Twitter and some 5,000 listens per month on Spotify.
The amateur musician says he has written thousands of titles, a mix of folk and acoustic rock repertoire, inspired by world icons Bob Dylan, Neil Young and the Beatles, with unequivocal lyrics regarding his extraordinary destiny. He sings regarding his thirst for freedom, his remorse and his quest for redemption. And while waiting for a concert hall to want him, John Hinckley has a vinyl album that should be released by the end of the year on the independent label Asbestos Records.
But his relative notoriety is not at all to the liking of the Reagan Foundation, which defends the memory of the former president. She accuses him of seeking to “profit from his act of infamy”.
He replies that he has repeatedly tried to apologize. “I am sorry for what I did” but “I am no longer who I was at the time”, he assures, describing himself as “completely alienated, depressed and unbalanced” more 40 years old.
(AFP)
