"Loser of a One-Man Race"

By Anastasia Toufexis

How John Hinckley, on trial for shooting Reagan, saw himself

I remain the far side of crazy

I remain the mortal enemy of man

The poetic self-indictment was among the assorted scribblings that FBI agents found in a hotel room rented by John W. Hinckley Jr., 26, the day before his attempted assassination of President Reagan on March 30, 1981. The agents also seized a paperback book called The Fox Is Crazy Too, about a master criminal who used an insanity defense to escape conviction. "Was he crazy or just pretending?" asked a blurb on the book's cover. "Was he sane or just pretending?" That is the central issue in Hinckley's trial, which got under way in a federal district court in Washington last week.

The prosecution contends that Hinckley, who is charged with trying to kill the President and three others, was sane and responsible for his act. The crime, declared Chief Prosecutor Roger Adelman in his opening statement to the jury of seven women and five men, was "a deliberate, planned, premeditated, indeed a calculated attack." In his presentation, Defense Attorney Vincent Fuller told the jury that "the basic underlying facts of the tragic events are not in dispute." The case for the defense: Hinckley was legally insane at the time of the shootings and could not understand or control his actions. Said Fuller: "The mentally ill, the insane, can calculate, can plan, can indeed premeditate some of the most bizarre kinds of activities."

Hinckley sat, pale and hunched, displaying no emotion, as the prosecution showed an NBC videotape of the shootings outside the Washington Hilton Hotel and questioned witnesses of the attack, including two of the victims, Secret Service Agent Timothy McCarthy and District of Columbia Police Officer Thomas Delahanty. The prosecution also showed a startling ABC videotape of President Jimmy Carter campaigning in Dayton, Ohio, on Oct. 2,1980. While Carter shook hands in a crowd, Hinckley's face appeared, bobbing up and down, in and out of focus, only six feet away from the President. A week later Hinckley was arrested at the Nashville airport for carrying three handguns; Carter was then in town campaigning.

It remains to be seen whether evidence collected after the shooting by FBI agents from Hinckley's room at Washington's Park Central Hotel and at his parents' home in Evergreen, Colo., will prove more of a boon to the prosecution or the defense. Among the items agents found were a black plastic toy pistol and a Band-Aid box with a note inside reading "This plane has been hijacked!" There were also magazine and newspaper clips on the deaths of John Lennon and Elvis Presley and the shooting of former Alabama Governor George Wallace. Among Hinckley's books was The Fan, the story of a deranged youth who stalks an actress. Inside was an unmailed postcard with portraits of Ronald and Nancy Reagan on one side. On the reverse was a bizarre message to Actress Jodie Foster, 19, with whom Hinckley was infatuated: "Dear Jodie, Don't they make a darling couple? Nancy is downright sexy. One day you and I will occupy the White House and the peasants will drool with envy. Until then, please do your best to remain a virgin. You are a virgin, aren't you? Love, John."

The defense will undoubtedly use a number of Hinckley's rambling verses to buttress its portrayal of the would-be killer as a tortured psychotic who cannot be held accountable for his actions. "[Pretend] you are Satan's long-lost illegitimate son/ a solitary weed among the carnations," Hinckley wrote in one poem, "a child without a home/ the loser of a one-man race." Another verse notes: "I have become what I wanted to be all along, a psychopathic poet."

According to his attorney, Hinckley was a lonely, timid child who became increasingly withdrawn as he grew up and finally retreated into a world of fantasies. Hinckley dropped in and out of college, went to Hollywood seeking instant success as a songwriter, created a mythical group called the American Front Organization. He became obsessed with the film Taxi Driver, the story of a loner who stalks a presidential candidate; Foster was featured as a child prostitute. After the murder of Lennon, Hinckley visited the Dakota apartment building in New York City and stood with a pistol in his pocket in the place where the former Beatle was killed.

Hinckley's well-to-do family in Colorado tried to help him but without success. His mother Jo Ann testified to years of anguish, noting that her son's depressed condition had worsened dramatically in the fall of 1980. In October the family considered placing him in a mental hospital; a psychiatrist said no, urging the Hinckleys to persuade their son to accept responsibility for himself. John's parents gave him an ultimatum: by March 1, 1981, he was to have a job. Instead, he left home; a week later he called from New York, incoherent. The family sent him money to fly back to Denver. After he returned, Mrs. Hinckley testified, the psychiatrist advised his parents: "Give him $100 and tell him goodbye!"

A week before the assassination attempt, Mrs. Hinckley drove her son to the Denver airport to catch a flight to California. Getting out of the car, he told her: "Well, Mom, I want to thank you for everything you've done for me." Mrs. Hinckley told the court: "He looked so bad and so sad and so absolutely in despair, and I was frightened and I didn't know what to do. I said, 'You're very welcome,' and I said it so coldly." That was the last she heard of John, she said, until a Washington reporter called to ask if she knew that her son had just shot the President. She wept at the memory. The judge called a recess as John Hinckley was led from the courtroom, shaken by his mother's appearance. --By Anastasia Toufexis. Reported by David S.Jackson/Washington

With reporting by David S.Jackson/Washington

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