Assassination!: The Brick Chronicle of Attempts on the Lives of Twelve US Presidents (31 page)

Moore was sentenced to life in prison. In 1979, she and a fellow inmate climbed a barbed wire fence and briefly escaped. After running through the snowy Appalachian foothills and hitchhiking twenty miles, they were caught a few hours later.

Released from prison in 2008 at age seventy-seven, Moore appeared as a guest on NBC’s The Today Show, saying, “We were saying the country needed to change. The only way it was going to change was a violent revolution. I genuinely thought that this might trigger that new revolution in this country.”

Dropping out of Texas Tech University after one year, Hinckley moved to Los Angeles in 1976, hoping to find success as a singer-songwriter, but quickly became disillusioned. Over the next several months he went to see the film Taxi Driver many times and became obsessed with actress Jodie Foster. In the movie, she was an underage prostitute rescued by a social outcast who attempted to assassinate a presidential candidate.

Hinckley returned to Texas Tech, and over the next couple of years took classes on and off. During this time he bought his first handgun from a pawnshop and practiced target shooting. He also collected and read books about Nazis, assassins, mass murderers, and serial killers.

In 1980, Hinckley convinced his parents to give him $3,600 to attend a writer’s workshop at Yale University where Jodie Foster had just enrolled. Once there, Hinckley left the celebrity freshman love notes under her door, followed her from a distance around campus, and twice managed to speak to her on the phone but was politely told to leave her alone.

Hinckley then decided he would have to do something dramatic to get Foster to take his love for her seriously. For two weeks in October, Hinckley stalked President Jimmy Carter across the United States, flying from city to city. At the Nashville Airport, police arrested Hinckley and confiscated three handguns he was carrying in his suitcase, just hours before the president landed.

After paying a fine, Hinckley was released. He then flew to Dallas and purchased two new handguns while visiting his sister. Then he flew to Washington, DC, still looking for an opportunity to assassinate Carter. As the election approached, however, polls showed that Carter would soon be defeated, and Hinckley lost interest.

As he usually did when he ran out of money, Hinckley returned to his parents’ house in Colorado. At their insistence, he began to see a psychiatrist. In his many therapy sessions over the coming months, Hinckley never mentioned his obsession with Jodie Foster or the violent crimes he was considering carrying out.

In December of 1980, Hinckley began stalking President-elect Reagan, but was interrupted on the 8th, when his hero John Lennon was assassinated in New York City. Immediately getting on a plane, Hinckley joined the great mass of mourners gathered in Central Park.

While in New York, Hinckley sought out the services of underage prostitutes. He soon became fascinated by Lennon’s assassin, the similarly chubby social outcast Mark David Chapman. Returning to Colorado in January, he went to a sporting goods store and purchased the same model handgun that was used to kill Lennon.