by Milly W
*Warning: this article includes reference to film and real-world violence*
Whilst Dr. Lecter is a fictional character created by Thomas Harris, he was based on the former surgeon turned killer, Dr Alfredo Balli Trevino. In 1963 Harris went to visit Dykes Askew Simmons, an American who was sentenced to death for triple murder. Whilst Harris was visiting the Nuevo León state prison in Trevino in Monterey, Mexico he came across Dr Trevino who had treated Simmons after suffering a gunshot wound during an escape attempt, during this Dr Trevino was serving the death penalty for murder. When Harris and Trevino met, Harris originally believed that Trevino was the prison doctor due to the way that Simmons was describing the treatment that he received. Even though Harris was there to be interviewing Simmons, he was drawn to Trevino and his interesting psyche. After interviewing the doctor and finding out his real occupation, former surgeon turned killer, Harris began to be questioned himself by Trevino, later commenting on the insightful and astute nature of the questions and says he was struck by his poised manner and stillness of his body.
Most aspects of the character Dr. Lecter are fictional, firstly his name, rhyming with cannibal, revealing his tendency to eat his victims. The aggressive nature of Dr. Lecter is brilliantly portrayed in The Silence of the Lambs, being shown by the iconic ‘Hannibal mask’ and him frequently being restrained, this is due to the nature of a crime in prison, he attacked and ‘deformed’ a nurse who got ‘too close’.
The violent nature of Dr. Lecter though, isn’t very fictional, after growing up as a gay man in Mexico in times where the LGBTQ were hugely oppressed Trevino began a relationship with Jesus Castillo Rangel.
Following an argument about money or Trevino’s intention to marry a woman (no one is really sure) Rangel attacked Trevino with a screwdriver, intentionally aiming to harm him. In response to the attack, Trevino swiftly disarmed Rangel and administered anaesthetic to him. Then dragged the unconscious Rangel to a bathtub, where he stabbed and then dismembered the victim, packaging the remains in a very small.
Afterwards, Trevino drove to a relative’s farm and asked to bury ‘medical waste’ in a field, a worker on the farm, after seeing the mound, reported it to the police, who further concluded what had happened. Harris remembers Trevino having ‘a certain elegance about him’ even though he was describing such horrific events. On top of all of this horror, Trevino was also suspected to have perpetrated similar crimes with regard to hitchhikers in the 1950s and 60s, though his guilt was never proven.
Harris used all of these points, many of which he embellished, to create the character of killer and psychopath, Dr Hannibal Lecter or ‘Hannibal the cannibal’, which had its first debut in the New York Times best seller, Red Dragon, released in 1991. The character of Dr Lecter has taken many forms over the years, from Dr Trevino all the way to Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal and is regarded as one of the most interesting book/tv/film characters ever created, in my opinion anyways.
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