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 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, “after 41 years, 2 months and 15 days, FINALLY FREEDOM,” the 67-year-old man tweeted, freed from all judicial control.
“huge disappointment”
Now free, John Hinckley, who always wanted to be a musician, is now a guitarist and songwriter who has another dream: to play in concert, in front of an audience.
Because on June 15, his recovery from freedom was accompanied by “tremendous disappointment,” the sixty-year-old who received him at his home in Williamsburg, with the dry guitar slung over his shoulder, told AFP.
A New York concert hall 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, Hinckley insists, after 41 years of imprisonment and psychiatric treatment, “he is a different person now” willing to share his music in a world that knew him as a “violent and deranged” young man.
On March 30, 1981, he shocked the United States and the world by shooting Republican President Ronald Reagan (who died in 2004 after serving two terms from 1981 to 1988) outside a hotel in Washington.
One of his bullets ricocheted off the armored presidential limousine 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 premiere in 1976 of the legendary Martin Scorsese film Taxi driverHe 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 John Hinckley did not disappear from public space during the 1980s and 1990s.
Famed Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021) made him one of the characters in his musical comedy in 1990 killers and the American rock band Devo turned one of his poems into a song.
Dylan and the Beatles
Living in seclusion with his cat in the historic tourist town of Williamsburg, Mr. Hinckley spends his days painting, writing songs, and posting his music on YouTube.
He boasts of having 50,000 followers on Twitter and about 5,000 listeners per month on Spotify.
The amateur musician says he has written thousands of titles, a mix of folk and acoustic rock repertoire, inspired by global icons Bob Dylan, Neil Young and the Beatles, with unequivocal lyrics about their extraordinary destiny.
He sings about his thirst for freedom, his remorse and his search for redemption.
And while he’s waiting for a concert hall to want him, John Hinckley has a vinyl record due out later this year on independent label Asbestos Records.
But his relative notoriety is not to the liking of the Reagan Foundation, which defends the memory of the former president. She accuses him of trying to “profit from his act of infamy” of him.
He replies that he has repeatedly tried to apologize.
“I’m sorry for what I did” but “I’m not who I was at the time,” he says, describing himself as “completely alienated, depressed and unbalanced” in his 40s.
Source: BFM TV
