ANSWERS: 4
  • Not on any one specific person. He is a compilation, if you will, of several famous and infamous killers. An excerpt from The Crime Library article on Dr. Lecter The FULL article which is much more detailed is here: http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/weird/lecter/1.html?sect=3 Hannibal the Cannibal In creating Hannibal Lecter, Harris might have looked to real-life practitioners of anthropophagy (i.e. cannibalism). David Sexton, author of The Strange World of Thomas Harris: Inside the Mind of the Creator of Hannibal Lecter, writes that Harris once told a librarian in his home town, Cleveland, Mississippi, that Lecter was inspired by a murderer named William Coyne, who had escaped from prison in 1934 and gone on a rampage in Cleveland that included acts of murder and cannibalism. Coyne’s exploits were the stuff of local legend when Harris was growing up and might have planted the seed for Lecter in the author’s mind. Sexton also suggests Welsh killer Jason Ricketts “who murdered and eviscerated a cellmate in Cardiff prison, mistaking his spleen for his heart,” as another possible model for Lecter. In March 1990, the city of Tokyo breathed a sigh of relief when Tsutomu Miyazaki confessed to kidnapping, murdering, and dismembering four preschool-age girls in 1988 and 1989. Miyazaki, who was twenty-six at the time, came from a respectable middle-class Japanese family, which made his crimes all the more shocking to a country unused to serial violence. Generally unassuming in appearance, Miyazaki was a loner who worked in a print shop. He was born with deformed hands and couldn’t turn his palms upward or grasp objects easily. He confessed to cooking the hands of one of his victims and eating them. As described by Robert Ressler and Tom Shachtman in their book I Have Lived in the Monster, Miyazaki taunted the families of his victims during his active killing period by writing letters to them and signing them with a female name “Yuko Imada,” which literally means “Now I have courage” but is also a pun on the Japanese words for “Now I will tell you.” Red Dragon book cover. Harris might have drawn some inspiration from this Japanese dabbler in cannibalism but probably not much. Of all the killings mentioned in the novels, none of Lecter’s victims were children. Lecter’s polydactyly (extra finger) could relate in some way to Miyazaki’s deformity, but Lecter’s condition is never described as a handicap while Miyazaki’s hands sometimes made him the object of ridicule and could have hastened his descent into madness. The full extent of Miyazaki’s crimes came to light in 1990; Lecter made his first appearance in Red Dragon two years earlier, so it’s unlikely that Miyazaki was a direct source for the creation of Hannibal Lecter. If anything, Miyazaki is more typical of the type of victim Lecter targeted. Jeffrey Dahmer: Milwaukee serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer has been suggested as another possible model for Lecter. Dahmer, who targeted young homosexual men, murdered, dismembered, and ate his victims, claiming at one point that consuming young flesh gave him an erection and kept him vital with their spirits. He kept strips of flesh in his refrigerator like beef jerky. Dahmer, like Ed Gein, was fascinated with the body parts of his victims and experimented with ways of preserving them. He kept their genitalia in formaldehyde and boiled the flesh off their skulls, then painted them gray to resemble the plastic skulls used by medical students in order to avoid detection. But like Miyazaki, Dahmer entered the headlines after Hannibal Lecter’s first public appearance, so it’s very unlikely that Harris knew about him when he first created Lecter. Dahmer was a more dedicated cannibal than the Japanese killer, so he could have provided some inspiration for the Lecter who appears in the later books, but Dahmer’s typical victim of choice does not exactly match Lecter’s. Dahmer killed boys or men who looked like boys; Lecter prefers mature men. In all likelihood, Lecter would have preferred to have Dahmer on the menu than share notes with him. Another possible source for Lecter is the Russian serial killer and cannibal Nikolai Dzhurmongaliev who made it his mission to rid the world of prostitutes and managed to eliminate 47 women before he was caught. Though the gender of his preferred victims does not match Lecter’s, Dzhurmongaliev did share Lecter’s appreciation for a well-prepared meal. The Russian made a habit of preparing ethnic dishes out of his victims and serving them to his friends. Dzhurmongaliev shared other characteristics with Dr. Lecter. As Carrie Comeaux, Elizabeth Eads, Sheila Dickerson, and Van Tran write on their website “Real vs. Fiction: The Minds of Serial Killers,” Dzhurmongaliev “was always seen as an unusually calm man with an air of stillness about him, but when provoked, would strike out with alarming force and injure those trying to restrain him.” Thomas Harris, however, has never indicated that he knew of this Russian gourmand when he was writing his books. Andrei Chikatilo Another Russian, Andrei Chikatilo, was dubbed the “Russian Hannibal Lecter” by virtue of the incredible number of murders he committed. Fifty-three young women and children of both sexes died at his hands, and cannibalism was part of his signature. Described as mild-mannered and effeminate, Chikatilo was active from the late seventies to the early nineties. He was convicted in 1992 and put to death with a single bullet to the back of the head. Killing was the only way Chikatilo could achieve sexual gratification. When he was active, he was known as the “Forest Strip” Killer because of his preferred location for committing his crimes. Harris might have been aware of this killer when he was writing Red Dragon, the first book in the series, but again the victimology (check Douglas) does not match Lecter’s. Harris could certainly have had Albert Fish (a.k.a. the Gray Man) in mind when he was putting together Lecter. Fish was an old man when he was caught in 1934, and his penchant for writing letters about his crimes gives a unique insight into his mania. Unlike the other serial killer/cannibals mentioned so far, Fish, who targeted children, did not kill for sexual gratification. He killed for the indescribably sweet taste of a rump roast butchered from a child. Lecter brings all the skills of a trained French chef to his cannibalism, and Fish also relished the preparation of freshly slaughtered young humans. He described in one of his letters the joys of eating one little boy’s “pee wee” and the succulent stew he prepared from the ears, nose, face, and belly. The roasted gluteus maximus was the piece de resistance, of course. “I never ate any roast turkey,” Fish wrote, “that tasted half as good as his sweet fat little behind did.” Albert Fish Fish, who frequently beat himself with a homemade cat-o'-nine-tails, was convicted of killing ten-year-old Gracie Budd in 1934 and sentenced to death by electrocution, a punishment that apparently appealed to him. A Daily News reporter who covered the trial wrote that Fish’s “watery eyes gleamed at the thought of being burned by a heat more intense than the flames with which he often seared his flesh to gratify his lust.” But Fish was more pathetic than demonic, a broken-down old man who had spent a lifetime nurturing his unhealthy predilection in secrecy. None of the cannibals mentioned here comes close to the sweep and panache of Hannibal Lecter whose literary antecedents certainly include Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, and Milton’s Satan. The real-life cannibals do not share Lecter’s victimology or his MO. Perhaps to get to the root of Dr. Lecter’s origins, it would be helpful to profile him as the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit would.
  • I believe Hannibal Lecter is a composite of at least four other serial killers. (As was Norman Bates).
  • Why did you put this question under movies l-z? it would be under h for hannibal.
  • Donald Gaskins: 'I have walked the same path as God, by taking lives and making others afraid, I became God's equal.' Was a cannibal and once murdered a fellow inmate from his own cell. More rude and primitive than Lecter, but might have been some source of inspiration.

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