A Drifter Who Stalked Success

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Still he caused no alarm. Says German History Professor Otto Nelson: "I never picked up anything unusual or bizarre about him. He never asked a thing in class." (Hinckley did, however, choose to specialize: one paper focused on Hitler's Mein Kampf, his other on Auschwitz.) Says Mark Swafford, one of his Lubbock landlords: "I only saw him with another human being one time." Hinckley's student life was a sad, remote vigil. "Everywhere there were empty bags from hamburger joints and cartons of ice cream," says Swafford. "He just sat there the whole time, staring at the TV."

In late 1976 Hinckley went to California. He intended, John Sr. told a friend, to "crash Hollywood." He ended up at Howard's Weekly Apartments, in the seamy Selma Avenue district of Los Angeles—a street market for whores, drugs and every kind of sleaze. Perhaps during this period Hinckley developed his obsession with Actress Jodie Foster. Consider the plot parallels of the movie Taxi Driver, starring Foster as a prostitute and released just before Hinckley left for Los Angeles.

The film, according to a synopsis, concerns "a loner incapable of communicating," who "usually spends his off hours...

eating junk food or sitting alone in a dingy room." When the protagonist is scorned by Foster's character, he mails her a letter and sets out to kill a presidential candidate. The coincidences are powerful and given credence by a letter that Scriptwriter Paul Schrader got last fall—from J.W. Hinckley. Schrader told TIME he thought the letter was from a smitten groupie who wanted to meet Foster, and he had his secretary throw it away.

Hinckley returned to Texas Tech during 1977, but his enrollment lapsed again during 1978. It was then that he began his flirtation with Nazism. According to Michael Allen, president of the National Socialist Party of America, Hinckley was a member of the sect for more than a year, and in March 1978 marched in a Nazi parade in St. Louis. Allen claims they kicked Hinckley out in 1979. Allen's explanation:

"When somebody comes to us and starts advocating shooting people, it's a natural reaction: the guy's either a nut or a federal agent." Hinckley was a voracious reader of newspapers, so it is logical that his affiliation with the Nazis began in early 1978: it was then that a spate of national news stories appeared about the National Socialists, mostly involving their planned marches through the heavily Jewish community of Skokie, Ill..

After more than a year's hiatus from Texas Tech—a period of deepening disturbance for Hinckley—he registered for classes in September 1979. He also began his acquisition of firearms with a .38-cal. pistol, purchased in Lubbock, where a year later he bought two new .22 pistols at a pawnshop. When the 1980 summer session ended, Hinckley left Texas Tech for good to begin his last addled ramble around the country. His path seems one of accelerating aimlessness and fragmentation.

Hinckley found himself in New Haven, Conn., in September—within days after Foster's matriculation at Yale—and boasted to strangers that they were lovers.

In October he returned to New Haven and left several notes for Foster at her dormitory.