Dr. Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter

Lecter appears in Red Dragon (published in 1981, filmed in 1986 as Manhunter and in 2002 under its original title), The Silence of the Lambs (published in 1988, filmed in 1991), Hannibal (published in 1999, filmed in 2001) and Behind the Mask (to be published in 2006, and filmed as Young Hannibal).

In Harris' novels and their film adaptations, Lecter is an ingenious, cultured psychiatrist and resourceful serial killer, who practices cannibalism upon his victims. He has often been put in the company of the greatest villains in literature and film, along with Satan from John Milton's Paradise Lost, Darth Vader from the Star Wars films, and Professor Moriarty from Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories.

Brian Cox was the first actor to play the character, taking the role in Manhunter, but most moviegoers recognize Anthony Hopkins as Lecter. Hopkins first appeared in the role in The Silence of the Lambs, winning the Academy Award for his highly praised performance. He also appeared as Lecter in Hannibal and Red Dragon.

Harris, who rarely gives interviews, has never definitively explained his influences for creating Lecter, but real-life cannibalistic murderers such as Albert Fish and Issei Sagawa have been mentioned by fans as possible influences. In a commentary on the Criterion Collection DVD version of The Silence of the Lambs, Hopkins claims the villainous computer HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's 2001 – A Space Odyssey as one inspiration for his interpretation of the character. Cox stated on the Manhunter DVD interview that his main inspiration for playing Lecter was Scottish serial killer Peter Manuel, who, according to Cox, "didn't have a sense of right or wrong."

Early life and murder spree

Hannibal Lecter was born in Lithuania in 1938 to a wealthy, aristocratic family; His father was a count, his mother a descendant of the famous Visconti family of Milan. In Hannibal he is said to be a cousin of the artist Balthus. He had a younger sister named Mischa.

When Lecter was six, a group of German deserters retreating from Russia shelled his family's estate, killing his parents and most of the servants. Lecter, his sister, and other local children were rounded up by the group of deserters to be used as sustenance during the cold Baltic winter. Mischa was killed and cannibalized, but young Lecter managed to escape. It is believed that this event would shape the rest of Lecter's life; Harris writes that it destroyed his faith in God, and he believed from then on that there was no real justice in the world. Years later, he would encounter the FBI agent Clarice Starling, with whom he developed a complex relationship, as a surrogate for his sister.

In Red Dragon, Harris wrote that, as a child, Lecter showed the first and earliest sign of sociopathic behaviour – sadism towards animals. As this doesn't appear to fit completely seamlessly with his later characterization, some fans are troubled by the inconsistency. It should also be pointed out that to be diagnosed as a true sociopath, Lecter must fulfill at least one other requirement from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual's checklist; he shows only two, a lack of remorse and habitual deceitfulness (though this is a point of debate, as he can be perfectly honest when he feels it personally important). It should be noted, however, that Harris also wrote in Red Dragon that Lecter did not really fit any existing psychological profile, so psychiatrists called him a sociopath for lack of another appropriate label.

Lecter established a psychiatric practice in Baltimore, Maryland in the 1970s. He became a leading figure in Baltimore society and indulged his extravagant tastes, which he financed by influencing some of his patients to bequeath him large sums of money in their wills. He became world-renowned as a brilliant psychiatrist, even as he himself apparently had nothing but disdain for the field; he would later criticize it as "puerile" and "on level with phrenology," and other psychiatrists as "ham radio enthusiasts and other personality-deficient buffs."

Lecter killed at least nine people before his capture, becoming known in the Baltimore area as "The Chesapeake Ripper." Only three of his victims survived, including Will Graham, an FBI profiler who was Lecter's captor and who figures largely in the plot of Red Dragon. Another one of these, Mason Verger, figures largely in the plot of Hannibal.

Only two of his 12 victims are known by name in the books – Benjamin Raspail and Verger. Verger was the scion of a very wealthy and influential family who controlled a meat-packing empire. Verger went through psychiatric counseling with Lecter after being convicted of child molestation. Lecter drugged Verger and suggested he try cutting off his face. Verger complied and, again at Lecter's suggestion, ate his own nose, feeding the rest of his face to two dogs. Lecter then broke Verger's neck and left him to die. Verger survived, but was left hideously deformed and forever confined to a life support machine.

Raspail was Lecter's ninth and final (known) victim before his incarceration. Raspail was a not-so-talented flautist with the Baltimore Philharmonic Orchestra, and it is believed that Lecter killed Raspail because his musicianship, or lack thereof, spoiled his enjoyment of the orchestra's concerts. Raspail's body would be discovered sitting in a church pew with his thymus and pancreas missing, and his heart pierced. It is believed Lecter served these organs at a dinner party he held for the orchestra's board of directors. Raspail claimed to have killed a man whose head was found years later in Raspail's rented storage garage in Baltimore, but Lecter suspected him of covering up for his former lover, Jame Gumb, who would later be involved in Lecter's life as the serial killer dubbed "Buffalo Bill."

Raspail's role is inconsistent in the Hannibal films. In Silence of the Lambs, Clarice Starling finds the head in the storage shed much like the events in the novel describe. Perhaps in an effort to condense the number of characters, the film actually labels this as Raspail's head (referring to a moth as "just like the one that was found in Raspail's head an hour ago"). Hannibal tells Clarice that Benjamin Raspail was a former patient of his, and began to fear his lover (who would later become Buffalo Bill). He tells her "I did not kill him, I assure you" and goes on to describe it as a "fledgling killer's" first attempt at transformation. Later, this description would indicate that he was killed by Buffalo Bill, as would the moth found in his mouth. However, in Red Dragon, it is made clear that Lecter did indeed kill the musician named Benjamin Raspail, and this is also mentioned in Hannibal.

The novels also mention a few details about Lecter's other victims. One, who initially survived, was taken to a private mental hospital in Denver, Colorado. Others include a bow hunter, a census taker he famously ate with "fava beans and a big Amarone" (in the movie, the wine he had for this particular meal was "a nice Chianti"), and a Princeton student whom he buried. Lecter was given sodium amytal by the FBI in the hopes of learning where he buried the student; he gave them a recipe for potato chip dip. He committed his last three known murders within nine days.

Lecter was caught in March or April of 1975 by FBI Special Investigator Will Graham. Graham was investigating a series of murders in the Baltimore area committed by a serial killer, and had turned to Lecter for professional advice. When Graham questioned Lecter at his psychiatric practice, he noticed some antique medical books in his office. Upon seeing these, Graham knew Lecter was the killer he sought; the sixth victim had been killed in his workshop and laced to a pegboard in a manner reminiscent of the Wound Man – an illustration used in many early medical books. Graham left to call the police, but while he was on the phone Lecter attacked him with a linoleum knife.

The courts found Lecter insane. Thus, he was spared prison and sent to the Baltimore State Forensic Hospital (later the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.) Many of the families of his victims pursued lawsuits against Lecter to have their files destroyed. The FBI investigated four more patients who had died under Lecter's care. He was nicknamed "Hannibal the Cannibal" in the National Tattler, a tabloid that also published unauthorized photos of Graham in the hospital after being attacked by Lecter. Another officer retired from the FBI after being the first to discover Lecter's basement. Lecter's electroencephalogram (EEG) showed a bizarre pattern and, given his history, was ultimately branded "a pure sociopath" by the hospital's administrator, Frederick Chilton (who was not a certified doctor). Ultimately, Lecter remained an enigma; he was far "too sophisticated" for most forms of psychological evaluation, especially considering the fact that he enjoyed staying abreast of all of the latest developments in his field. Since he knew how the tests worked, no one could use them on him.

Lecter was a model patient until the afternoon of July 8, 1976. Upon complaining of chest pains, he was taken to the infirmary where his restraints were removed. He attacked a nurse who was then placing leads for an electrocardiogram (ECG) onto his chest, tore out her eye, dislocated her jaw and ate her tongue. His pulse never went above 85 beats per minute. During the struggle with the orderlies, his shoulder was dislocated. Following the incident, Lecter was treated very carefully by the hospital staff. He was often confined to heavy restraints, a straitjacket and muzzle, and he was only transported when strapped to a hand-truck.

Chilton and Lecter's relationship was marked by mutual hatred; Chilton's mediocrity and inflated self-importance offended Lecter, who often humiliated his keeper, while Lecter's constant mind games and slipperiness infuriated Chilton, who punished him by removing his books and toilet seat. (Chilton once claimed Lecter saw him as his nemesis; this was clearly a case of projection.) At the end of Red Dragon, Lecter diagnosed this form of punishment as indicative of the damnation of society by half-measures – "Any rational society would kill me, or give me my books." By contrast, Lecter reached a mutual respect with his primary caregiver and warden, Barney Matthews, and the two often shared thoughts over Barney's correspondence courses. During the investigation of Buffalo Bill, the two would also discuss Clarice Starling.

Helping the FBI

During his stay in the hospital, Lecter would help with two FBI cases. Graham came out of retirement in 1978 to help out with the "Tooth Fairy" case and, while at a dead end, he went to Lecter for help. Lecter "helped" by sending a coded message to the killer, Francis Dolarhyde, to kill Graham and his family, resulting in Graham being permanently disfigured. Five years later, Jack Crawford sent FBI trainee Clarice Starling to Lecter. Starling thought she was there for a class assignment, hoping to get Lecter to take a questionnaire, but she ended up getting him to help her in the Buffalo Bill case. In both of these cases, Lecter used word play and subtle clues to help Graham and Starling figure it out themselves. It is his relationship with Starling, equal parts antagonism and seduction, around which The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal revolve. Harris based the Lecter-Starling relationship on the "consultations" between profiler Robert Keppel and serial killer Ted Bundy, in which Bundy offered to help Keppel track down the Green River serial killer. Interestingly enough, Bundy is known to have owned a copy of Red Dragon while on death row in Starke, Florida; John Douglas in the book Obsession suggests that Bundy's contacting Keppel was inspired by the Lecter-Graham relationship described in Red Dragon.

Gumb's latest kidnappee was Catherine Martin, daughter of Sen. Ruth Martin. Lecter told Chilton he would reveal Buffalo Bill's real name to Martin and was promptly flown to Memphis and held at the Shelby County Courthouse. During his stay in Memphis, Lecter lied to Martin, giving her the fake name "William Rubin." (Bilirubin is a pigment found in feces, the same colour as Chilton's hair, Lecter's hint that the name was fake; the movie changed the name to "Louis Friend," an anagram for "iron sulfide" – fool's gold.) Starling then visited Lecter at his makeshift cell, and he gave her some final clues before making a bloody escape, killing two police officers during the ordeal. He escaped by making a "mask" from parts of the faces of the officers.

After plastic surgery and the removal of a distinctive sixth finger, Lecter relocated in Florence, Italy. Lecter avoided reconstruction of his nose to protect his unctuous enjoyment of fragrances. In Florence, he took the pseudonym "Dr. Fell," a reference to the Tom Brown translation of Martial's epigram "Non amo te, Sabidi" ("I do not love thee, Doctor Fell / The reason why, I cannot tell.") As Dr. Fell, Lecter's dazzling charm won him the recently vacated position of museum curator. Lecter murdered the previous curator.

Winning Clarice

Lecter's identity would be discovered by Florence detective Rinaldo Pazzi seven years after his escape from Memphis. Pazzi, who had been disgraced when he bungled the "Il Mostro" case, saw a chance for redemption when he realized the identity of Dr. Fell. Pazzi struck a deal with Verger to get Lecter alive so that Verger could feed Lecter to wild boars. In his efforts to capture Lecter, Pazzi inadvertently informed Lecter of his insight. After disemboweling and hanging Pazzi, Lecter went back to the United States. Both Verger and Starling would hunt him, hoping to get to him before the other. Lecter ended up being captured by Verger's men, but escaped once again, taking the wounded Starling with him and convincing Margot Verger (Mason's sister and a former patient, whom Mason had raped when they were teenagers) to kill her brother. Lecter left a voice message claiming responsibility for Verger's death. Although, in the movie Hannibal, it was Mason's butler/caretaker who eventually kills Verger as Lecter offers to take the blame.

Lecter kept Starling in total isolation during the next few months, subjecting her to various brainwashing and conditioning techniques. His main goal was to systematically replace Starling's memories and personality and make her believe she was Lecter's deceased sister Mischa. After breaking Starling down, Lecter kidnapped her nemesis, Paul Krendler, who was trying to discredit her, as a final test. At the rented home that Lecter was living in, Lecter performed a craniotomy on Krendler and tastefully prepared and shared his brains with Starling while Krendler was still alive.

However, Lecter's plan to brainwash Starling ultimately failed, as he utterly underestimated her strong will; Starling refused to have her own personality sublimated, mocking his efforts to turn her into his sister. Then, in the novel's most controversial moment, she seduced Lecter, and the two became lovers.

The couple then vanished. Lecter's former caretaker, Barney Matthews, spotted the two in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2000. It is stated that Starling was able to use sex to tame Lecter's darker impulses and literally domesticate the serial killer, with the two living an affluent lifestyle.

The ending of Hannibal sparked much controversy. Harris wrote an alternate ending for the film adaptation – in the new ending, Lecter didn't try to brainwash Starling, and the infamous dinner party where Krendler's brain was served took place days, not months, after the death of Mason Verger. The police tracked Lecter down, and, in order to buy time, Starling handcuffed herself to Lecter. In the film's climax, Lecter grabbed a meat cleaver and prepared to chop off Starling's hand to escape. She was defiant, so Lecter tested her – he asked her to beg him to turn himself in to the police and renounce his murderous ways. Starling refused, and Lecter thanked her for not disappointing him; he then chopped off his own hand so he could escape. Because of a large amount of bandages covering his arm in the preceding scene, it is not known whether or not the hand was later re-attached. The film ended with a scene from the middle part of the novel, where Lecter was on a plane and gave some food from his personal lunchbox to a child sitting next to him. While the novel made it clear that Lecter gave the child liverwurst, the film heavily implied it was left-overs from Krendler's brain. At the end of the film, Hannibal Lecter is still alive and at large.

Appearance

In the books, Lecter has been described as short, but with noticeable wiry strength and dignity of bearing that makes him seem taller. He had maroon coloured eyes that reflected light and even rows of small white teeth. His "most ardent fan," Francis Dolarhyde, remarks that he is "the dark portrait of a Renaissance prince," possibly a nod to Machiavelli. In The Silence of the Lambs, he is mentioned to have a widow's peak, and dark hair. He had six fingers on his left hand, the middle finger perfectly replicated, until he underwent a surgery to better mask his identity. He tends to be very still, yet very quick when required, and tilts his head to one side when listening. He has excellent hearing and smell. His voice is described as having a metallic ring to it, as though he spoke with a perpetual tension. After plastic surgery, he looks little different, but is said to have different hair and a minor alteration to his nose and cheeks. At the end of Hannibal, when he is spotted with Starling by his former orderely Barney, he has had his face altered again. His body count totals 21, 14 confirmed by the FBI, and 4 attempted murders. It is unknown whether he killed Chilton, although he went missing soon after Lecter's escape. An Italian musician also vanished not long before Pazzi's murder.

Lecter as a cultural figure

While Harris' novels Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs were critically and commercially successful, it was not until the film adaptation of the latter was released in 1991 that Lecter, as played by Anthony Hopkins, became a cultural icon. In many ways, the character became the template for cinematic portrayals of serial killers from that point on as cold, calculating master criminals who live to play "cat and mouse" with the police, manipulating both their victims and the detectives who "hunt" them like pawns in a game of chess. Many real-life serial killers, such as Andrei Chikatilo, BTK, and Jeffrey Dahmer, have been compared to Lecter. His relationship with Starling set a precedent for the relationships between fictional murderers and police officers; it has by now become almost cliché for onscreen detectives to have "special relationships" with serial killers based on grudging respect and mutual obsession, and for police to consult with them in their cases in order to "think like their prey." Many law enforcement officers who have investigated serial killers have complained that Lecter is an inaccurate, romanticized caricature of an especially brutal kind of criminal, and that the "genius" with which he is portrayed committing sadistic, coldblooded murder, often getting away with it, glorifies and trivializes violence and the pain it causes.

He has been the inspiration behind many subsequent villainous characters, primarily because he represents an unusually horrific brand of serial killer; while most real-life serial killers suffer from severe psychological difficulties which often impede their sociability and their capability to relate to other people (as exemplified by Francis Dolarhyde from Red Dragon), Lecter fits in among an extremely limited range of sociopaths, one who appears on the surface to be completely normal, or perhaps even brilliant; and who just happens to have a penchant for gruesome murder.

Indeed, Lecter's refined, aristocratic charm has made him something of a romantic figure, and his relationship with Starling has drawn many comparisons with the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast. While portrayed as a sociopath, Lecter is not without compassion; he feels genuine concern and affection for Starling, respects his caretaker, Barney Matthews, and truly wants to help Margot Verger overcome her brother's abuse. In this sense, he has evolved from a villain into an antihero whom audiences cheer for. Red Dragon director Brett Ratner called him "the huggy bear of serial killers."

His line "I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti" from Silence of the Lambs was voted as the 21st most famous movie quote of all time by the American Film Institute. The slurping sound he makes right after this line has also become a widely recognized, imitated, and parodied staple of pop culture.

Will Graham

Will Graham was originally a homicide detective in New Orleans who had grown up poor in Southern Louisiana. He left to attend graduate school in forensic science at George Washington University. After attaining his degree, Graham went to work for the FBI's crime lab. Following exceptional work both in the crime lab the field, Graham was given a post as teacher at the FBI Academy. During both his field work while at the crime lab and the Academy, Graham was never made a Special Agent, but is given the title of "Special Investigator" while he was in the field.

In one of Graham's field cases during the 1970s, he was tracking a serial killer, who had been stabbing young women, many of them college coeds, for eight months. He eventually caught the killer, Garrett Jacob Hobbs, known as the Minnesota Shrike, and killed him. When Graham found Hobbs at Hobbs' home, Hobbs was repeatedly slashing his own daughter's throat. When Graham appeared, Hobbs' wife was on the apartment landing, bleeding from multiple stab wounds, and clutched at Graham before he kicked in the door. He then shot Hobbs to death (Hobbs' daughter survived and eventually returned to normal life following intensive therapy). Graham was profoundly disturbed by the incident, and was referred to the psychiatric ward of an unnamed major hospital. He eventually returned to the FBI. In 1975, he began to track down another serial killer, known as the "Chesapeake Ripper", who was removing organs from the victims. He turned to world famous psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter for help. After looking around Lecter's office, he saw the antique medical diagram Wound Man, whose wounds matched exactly those of one of the Ripper's victims, and realized that Lecter was the killer he sought. Graham made a phone call and was nearly disemboweled by Lecter. Lecter was arrested and Graham spent months recovering in hospital. A tabloid reporter, Freddy Lounds, snuck into the hospital where Graham was recuperating and photographed Graham's wounds and humiliated him in the National Tattler.

Three years later, Graham, now living with his wife Molly and her son Willy in Marathon, Florida, is approached by his former boss, Jack Crawford, who had come to persuade Graham to come out of retirement and help the FBI again. Graham did so and began to work on the Tooth Fairy case. The Tooth Fairy, actually a man named Francis Dolarhyde, had killed two families on a lunar cycle, the first in Birmingham and the second in Atlanta. After studying the crime scenes, Graham consulted Lecter on the case, but Lecter gave him only vague brainteasers as clues, and sent Dolarhyde Graham's address in code, threatening the safety of his wife and son. Following moving his family to a farm belonging to Jack Crawford's brother, Graham resumed tracking Dolarhyde, eventually linking Dolarhyde to a video production company. When Graham, Crawford and FBI agents arrived at Dolarhyde's home to arrest him, it exploded, leaving Graham to believe Dolarhyde's reign of terror was over. However, at the end of the book, Dolarhyde attacks Graham and his family at their Florida home. He stabbed Graham in the face before being killed by Graham's wife. Graham and his family survived, but he was left disfigured. A brief reference in Silence of the Lambs, the sequel to Red Dragon, implies that his wife had left him soon after that, and was now "a drunk with a face that's hard to look at."

Notes

In Michael Mann's film version of the book, Manhunter, Graham is played by William Petersen. In Brett Ratner's 2002 remake, Red Dragon, he is played by Edward Norton. Neither film adaptation has Graham as seriously injured by Dolarhyde as the book's climax suggests.

In the novel, Graham's wife, Molly, has a son, Willy, from a previous marriage. In both films, Willy is Graham's child. In the novel, Molly's son is named Willy; in Manhunter, Willy becomes Kevin; in the film Red Dragon, Willy becomes Josh. The reasons for these name changes has never been explained.

In the film Manhunter, Graham's "gift" is never explained (an extra scene in the Director's Cut shows a conversation between Graham and Dr. Chilton, in which Chilton inquires Graham about his abilities). In both the film and novel Red Dragon, Graham's gift is classifed as making him an 'eideteker', a person with eidetic memory.

In the novel Red Dragon, Graham carries a heavily modified Charter Arms Bulldog .44 Special.

Dr. Frederick Chilton

He is the director of the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where he treats his most infamous patient, Hannibal Lecter. In Manhunter, Chilton is played by Banjamin Hendrickson. In both The Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon, he is played by Anthony Heald.

His role in the novel Red Dragon is a minor one. The book's villain, Francis Dolarhyde, finds out from a tabloid article written by Freddy Lounds that Will Graham is seeking advice from Lecter, who replies by sending him a coded message in the personal ads section of Lounds' paper, The Tattler. Before Lecter's reply goes to press, however, a cleaning crew finds Dolarhyde's letter, written on toilet paper, hidden within Lecter's personal toilet paper spool. Chilton springs into action, calling the FBI to inform Graham and Jack Crawford.

Part of the note, which instructed Lecter to reply via The Tattler, has been excised. The letter was written to be easily ingested, should the need arise, and apparently Lecter did just that. However, an analysis of the ink used allows their forensic scientists to see top of certain letters from the missing section, and Graham correctly guesses that it is The Tattler. They intercept Lecter's reply, but are unable to decipher it in time. So, they let it run in order to maintain and exploit the contact between Dolarhyde and Lecter. A codebreaker later figures out that the coded message is Graham's home address, which, in the book and the second film, Dolarhyde uses to track Graham down.

Chilton continues to allow Graham and Lecter to communicate, and Lecter alerts Graham to the key evidence – home videos of the two slain families, both of which were produced by the photo developing store where Dolarhyde works.

In The Silence of the Lambs, Chilton is once again called upon to allow an FBI agent to interview Lecter about an at-large serial killer, "Buffalo Bill." This time it is Clarice Starling, at whom he makes a clumsy pass, which is quickly rejected. Starling piques Lecter's interest at first by admitting her disdain for his hated keeper, and her visits with Lecter become much more frequent. Chilton grows jealous and resentful of Lecter's willingness to cooperate and share information with her, but not with him.

He places recording devices in Lecter's cell to listen in on his conversations with Starling, and stumbles onto a goldmine – Starling, under Crawford's orders, made an offer to Lecter, that he would receive a transfer to a minimal security prison if information he provided led to the arrest of Buffalo Bill. Chilton investigates this claim, and quickly finds that this bargain is false, and that Senator Ruth Martin, the mother of Buffalo Bill's captive, had not agreed to such a transfer. Chilton sets it up anyway, and quickly hogs the spotlight as the architect.

Lecter agrees and is transferred, but gives false information to Senator Martin and Paul Krendler from the Justice Department; he tells them the killer's name is "Billy Rubin," a reference to bilirubin, a pigment found in feces — and the exact shade of Chilton's hair. This effectively shuts out the FBI. However, he reserves the best information for Starling, and using that, she tracks Gumb down to Belvedere, Ohio. Lecter himself escapes custody, however, and Chilton becomes involved in the manhunt to recapture him. At the end of the book, Lecter sends a letter to Starling, indicating that he intends to get revenge on Chilton, and that when he is done, he will need to be fed through a tube, and that instructions should be "tattooed on his forehead." In the film, he calls Starling on the phone, and, while watching Chilton debark a plane, tells her that he is "having an old friend for dinner." Lecter appears to have gotten his revenge, whatever that may be, as Chilton does not appear in Hannibal, and the hospital has been shut down.

His role is expanded in the film Red Dragon, and his greed and ambitions are incorporated into this new, younger interpretation of the character.

Francis Dolarhyde

He is a serial killer nicknamed "The Tooth Fairy" due to his tendency to masticate his victims' bodies, the uncommon size and sharpness of his teeth and other apparent oral fixations.

Born in 1936 with a bilateral cleft lip and palate, Dolarhyde suffered severe emotional and physical abuse in a series of orphanages and from his sadistic grandmother. After her death, he was turned over to the care of his estranged mother and her husband; he was also abused by this family. He began displaying violence at an early age by torturing animals; after being caught breaking into a house at age 17, he was enlisted in the army. He developed dissociative identity disorder, his other, violent personality manifesting itself as a monstrous being who Dolarhyde ultimately came to call the "Great Red Dragon", from a painting by William Blake entitled The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun.

Dolarhyde began his killing spree in 1980 by murdering two families within a month, both crimes being committed on or near a full moon, but it is hinted in the book that he had killed before that. He chose his victims through the home movies he edited as a film processing technician. He believed that by killing people (or "transforming" them, as he called it) he could fully become the Dragon. He had a large tattoo of a dragon emblazened on his back, and two sets of false teeth; one of them normal for his personal life, the other distorted and sharp for his killings. (There was also a sexual component to his crimes; he molested the corpse of one female victim and he would often masturbate to the films he himself made while committing murder.)

FBI profiler Will Graham came out of early retirement to aid in his capture. Graham had previously captured Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a cannibalistic psychiatrist and serial killer, whom Dolarhyde idolized. Graham visited Lecter in the Chesapeake Mental Institute, hoping that the doctor would be able to help identify the Dragon, or at least assist in creating a psychological profile. Following this meeting, Lecter "helped" by sending Dolarhyde Graham's address in code. Dolarhyde was only foiled when FBI director Jack Crawford intercepted the message in time to warn off Graham's family.

Dolarhyde was an avid reader of The National Tattler, a tabloid which ran sensationalistic stories about serial killers, and he obsessively collected clippings about Lecter and Graham, as well as his own murders. To provoke Dolarhyde out of hiding, Graham gave an interview to Tattler reporter Freddy Lounds in which he said the "Tooth Fairy" was an impotent homosexual, and that Lecter considered him a "bottom-feeder." This enraged Dolarhyde, who kidnapped Lounds, forced him to recant his article on tape while glued into Dolarhyde's grandmother's wheelchair, and then bit his lips off, set him on fire and rolled him down an incline into the front door of the Tattler's office.

Over the course of the novel, Dolarhyde fell in love with a blind woman named Reba McClane. Though at first her intimacy with Dolarhyde quelled his murderous impulses, her presence only infuriated the other part of Dolarhyde's psyche. Desperate now to retain control of himself and deny his violent urges, Dolarhyde flew to New York, where he devoured the original Blake watercolor, believing it would destroy The Dragon.

The plan failed, however; if anything, Dolarhyde's ingestion of the painting only made "the Dragon" angrier. Dolarhyde killed McClane's former lover after seeing them together at her house, and apparently had planned to kill her and himself by setting his house on fire after kidnapping and depositing her at that place. Dolarhyde relented at the last minute, however, and apparently shot himself. Fans have debated why Dolarhyde did this; some think this was the only way he could save McClane from his sinister alter ego, while others believe that it was all part of "the Dragon's" plan to escape the FBI, which is never revealed to the reader.

In a later conversation with McClane, Graham told her, "There was plenty wrong with Dolarhyde, but there's nothing wrong with you. You said he was kind and thoughtful to you. I believe it. That's what you brought out in him. At the end, he couldn't kill you and he couldn't watch you die. People who study this kind of thing say he was trying to stop. Why? Because you helped him. That probably saved some lives. You didn't draw a freak. You drew a man with a freak on his back."

It turned out, however, that Dolarhyde was alive, having merely shot the corpse of one of his previous victims. Being blind, McClane was fooled. Dolarhyde later attacked Graham and stabbed him in the face, only for Graham's wife Molly to attack him with an aluminium fishing rod, precipitating a struggle which ultimately resulted in Dolarhyde's death.

As well as his poorly reconstructed hare lip, Dolarhyde is recognizable by several features. He is very muscular, and bears a massive tattoo of the Red Dragon on his back, continuing down so its tail wraps around one leg (this was not present in Manhunter, although scenes with the tattoo were filmed but never used). Finally, he wears false teeth, alternating between two different sets; he wears standard prosthetics at work, and his "Dragon teeth," created in imitation of his grandmother's sharp, snaggle-toothed grin, when committing murder. With these teeth and his powerful jaw muscles, he can bite through fingers easily.

Dolarhyde lives in his grandmother's old home, where he spent part of his childhood. It includes his work out room, containing his giant portrait of the dragon, as well as a televison room, where he views his home videos of his victims (as well as his tapes of their murders). In his home, Dolarhyde maitains a massive ledger in which he keeps newspaper clippings describing his murders; besides the killings of Lounds, the Leedses, and the Jacobis, Harris implies that Dolarhyde was responsible for the murders of several elderly women (the ledger contains articles about the mysterious disappearances of these women). Lounds's lips, which Dolarhyde ripped off with his teeth, are also kept in a baggie in the ledger.

The character may have been based in part on Australian serial killer Eric Edgar Cooke. Both had cleft palates and suffered traumatic childhoods. The character may also have been partially based on BTK, described (under a pseudonym because the case was under investigation) by FBI profiler John Douglas in the first chapter of his book Obsession, who attacked whole families in their homes and took photographs of the murder scenes.

Film Adaptations

Dolarhyde has been twice portrayed in movie adaptations of Harris' novel – By Tom Noonan in 1986's Manhunter, and by Ralph Fiennes in 2002's Red Dragon. Noonan's depiction (whose character is called Dollarhyde instead of Dolarhyde as in the novel) was critically acclaimed, and is often cited as more effective, believable and disturbing, though not as detailed, complex and as accurate to the novel as Fiennes'.

In the first movie, Graham kills Dolarhyde, while in the second, both he and his wife have a hand in Dolarhyde's death, with Graham firing the majority of the shots in a crossfire with Dolarhyde, and his wife finishing him off as Dolarhyde rises back up, even with the bullet wounds.

Jack Crawford

He is in charge of the Behavioral Science Unit of the FBI in Quantico, Virginia. Though a fictional character, he is modeled after John E. Douglas, who holds the same position.

In the books, Crawford is a friend and mentor to the two heroes, Will Graham and Clarice Starling.

His first appearance is in the book Red Dragon, where he calls upon Graham, his former protegé, to ask for his assistance in solving the murders being committed by the "Tooth Fairy." As a profiler, Graham had a reputation for being able to think like the criminals he hunted, thus making it possible for the FBI to apprehend them. He had retired after being attacked and nearly killed by Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a Baltimore psychiatrist who had helped the FBI on several occasions, after Graham intuited that he was the serial killer he sought. Crawford convinced Graham to come out of retirement to help solve the "Tooth Fairy" murders, and soon they both realized that they would need Lecter's help again. Crawford helped shelter Graham and his family after Lecter sent the killer, Francis Dolarhyde, his old nemesis' address. They eventually solved the case, but Dolarhyde permanently disfigured Graham before he was finally killed. Crawford was haunted with guilt and resented Lecter for the rest of his life.

Red Dragon was filmed first in 1986 as Manhunter, in which Crawford is played by Dennis Farina. In the remake, Red Dragon (2002), he is played by Harvey Keitel.

Crawford appears again in The Silence of the Lambs, once again investigating a serial killer, this one known as "Buffalo Bill," and once again needing to call upon the services of Dr. Lecter. This time, he sent a trainee, Clarice Starling, to interview him. By way of information obtained from Lecter, Crawford and the FBI attempted to track down the killer, Jame Gumb. However, the address they obtained for him was out of date. Gumb had killed the employer of one of his former victims and moved into her house to use its large basement as a torture chamber. Realizing that Buffalo Bill probably knew his first victim, Frederica Bimmel, Starling set about interviewing everyone close to her, and ended up stumbling upon Gumb's house. All of Gumb's victims had been large women, so her suspicions were aroused when Gumb asked if Bimmel was "a great big fat person." Upon stepping inside, she saw a Death's Head moth like the ones that Buffalo Bill stuffed into his victims' throats, and realized she had found the killer. She pursued him into his basement, where she fatally shot him and rescued his last victim, whom Gumb was about to kill when she knocked on his door. Crawford did not arrive until afterwards.

During the novel, Crawford's wife, Bella, dies of cancer. Lecter somehow finds out and sends him a note expressing his condolences. Crawford was offended by the gesture and momentarily lost his trust in Starling, thinking, incorrectly, she had told Lecter about his personal life.

In the film version of The Silence of the Lambs , Crawford is played by Scott Glenn.

Crawford appears as a relatively minor character in the book Hannibal, and dies close to the end. He does not appear in the film. A deleted line of dialogue refers to him having died between films.

Reba McClane

Reba is a blind woman who attracts the attention of serial killer Francis Dolarhyde, her co-worker at Chromalux Film & Videotape Services, where Dolarhyde's work gives him access to the home movies which the company transfers to video cassette. She and Dolarhyde begin a romantic relationship. Dolarhyde's newfound love conflicts with his homicidal urges, which manifest themselves in his mind as a separate personality he calls "The Great Red Dragon," after the William Blake painting. Posing as a researcher, Dolarhyde enters the Brooklyn Museum, beats a museum secretary unconscious, and eats the original Blake watercolour of The Red Dragon which is kept there, believing that if he consumes the Dragon, he can stop killing and pursue a normal relationship with the kind, soft-spoken Reba. Unfortunately, this only makes matters worse; the Red Dragon personality tries to kill Reba, with Dolarhyde resisting, but he is thwarted by FBI agent Will Graham.

In the end, Graham tries to reassure a traumatized and heart-broken Reba that she was not at fault – "There was plenty wrong with Dolarhyde, but there's nothing wrong with you. You said he was kind and thoughtful to you. I believe it. That's what you brought out in him. At the end, he couldn't kill you and he couldn't watch you die. People who study this kind of thing say he was trying to stop. Why? Because you helped him. That probably saved some lives. You didn't draw a freak. You drew a man with a freak on his back."

Freddy Lounds

A reporter for the tabloid The National Tattler, Lounds wrote a gossip column focusing largely on serial killers and the police officers who pursued them. Shortly after FBI profiler Will Graham apprehended Dr. Hannibal Lecter, he was hospitalized for injuries inflicted by Lecter. Lounds sneaked into his hospital room and took pictures of the unconscious Graham, and also documented Graham's extensive psychiatric therapy afterwards. Graham retired from the FBI soon after that but held a lasting resentment against Lounds.

Years later, when Jack Crawford called Graham out of retirement, Lounds started tracking him, and discovered that Graham had gone to Lecter for help in his search for the "Tooth Fairy" killer, aka Francis Dolarhyde. Lounds reported this, and Dolarhyde himself bought a copy of his paper. This in turn inspired him to write to Lecter, sending coded messages by way of The Tattler's personal ads. Lecter replied by sending Dolarhyde a coded message for Graham's home address in Florida.

Once Graham and Crawford were informed of the message, they went into action to protect Graham's family. Graham's wife and stepson were taken the home of Crawford's brother, while Graham himself was taken to an apartment in Washington, D.C. They then turned to Lounds, tricking him into thinking he was being given "exclusive information" about the case. Lounds took photographs of Graham in his D.C. apartment, making sure to include notable landmarks in the background, to send the message that Graham wasn't home, and to encourage Dolarhyde to strike at him there instead of at home. Graham also gave Lounds false information about the clues Lecter has given him, saying Dolarhyde may be a homosexual or impotent. By attributing these insults to Lecter, they hoped to trick Dolarhyde into breaking the contact.

Instead, Dolarhyde kidnapped Lounds himself, stripped him naked, and superglued him to a wheelchair in his home. While there, he explained his "transformation" into the "Red Dragon," which he believed was brought closer to fruition with every murder. He made Lounds record a confession in which he admitted that he lied in his article, blamed Graham and Crawford for making him do it, and professed his gratitude at being witness to part of Dolarhyde's "transformation." Once he had completed the recording, Dolarhyde bit out Lounds's tongue, doused him in gasoline, and set him on fire. Dolarhyde then dropped him off in the parking garage of the Tattler. Lounds later died from the injuries in the hospital. Before dying, he blamed Graham for what happened to him.

In the book, and in the film Red Dragon, Dolarhyde uses the address given to him in The Tattler to find Graham's home. In Manhunter, he is killed before he can do that. Also, in both films, he is killed by Dolarhyde before going to the hospital.

Clarice Starling

In the movie adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs she is played by Jodie Foster, while in the movie adaptation of Hannibal she is played by Julianne Moore. (Foster turned down the role in the sequel.)

In The Silence of the Lambs, Starling is in her mid-twenties and a student at the FBI training school. She hopes to work at the Behavioural Science Unit, tracking down serial killers. As a chore, she is asked to interview Hannibal Lecter, a cannibalistic serial killer and psychiatrist who is held in an insane asylum. After a shaky start, Lecter forms a bond with Starling and eventually offers help in catching Buffalo Bill, a serial killer who is currently on the loose.

We also learn some of Starling's history. She was raised in a small town in West Virginia. When she was about nine years old, her father—a night watchman—was shot dead by robbers. She went to live on a farm with a foster family, from which she briefly ran away in horror when she witnessed lambs being slaughtered (hence the title of the book.) The incident haunted her for years afterward.

She spent the rest of her childhood in a Lutheran orphanage. She graduated from the University of Virginia at the top of her class and became a star student of the training school, attracting the attention of FBI Chief of Behavioural Science Jack Crawford, who selected her to interview Lecter.

Upon arriving at the asylum for her first interview with Lecter, Starling is the subject of the crude and lewd attentions of Lecter's captor, the asylum manager Frederick Chilton. She rebuffs him, much to his annoyance, which probably helps her bond with Lecter, who also despises Chilton.

During the investigation, Starling and Lecter form a strange relationship in which Lecter demands personal details about her life in return for his consultation (in the form of cryptic, riddling information designed to help Starling figure it out for herself.) The two grow to respect each other, so when Lecter escapes, Starling feels sure that he won't come after her.

Acting on a hunch that one of Buffalo Bill's victims had a personal relationship with him, Starling goes to the victim's home in Belvedere, Ohio to interview people who knew her, and unknowingly stumbles onto the killer himself, a man named Jame Gumb. When she sees a Death's Head moth (the same kind that Bill stuffs in his victims' throats) flutter through Gumb's house, she knows she has her man and tries to arrest him. Gumb flees and Starling follows him into his basement, where his latest victim is alive and screaming for help. Gumb stalks Starling wearing night vision goggles and is about to kill her when she hears him from behind and opens fire, killing him. The victim is rescued. Lecter writes Starling a letter from a hotel room somewhere in Detroit wishing her good luck in silencing the screaming of the lambs.

In Hannibal, Starling is aged 32 and a full-fledged FBI agent. A bungled drug raid leaves Starling suspended from duty, at which point she receives a letter from Lecter, who is in Florence, Italy, soaking up the cultural delights of the old city. One of Lecter's surviving victims, the billionaire Mason Verger, is after Lecter and has offered a huge reward, which an Italian detective named Pazzi tries to claim by hunting Lecter. Lecter finds out about the plan, kills Pazzi, and flees back to the US. He stalks Starling, although without homicidal intentions, whilst Starling is being harassed and chased out of the FBI by various antagonistic agents (including Paul Krendler, who hates Starling after she turned down his attempt at seduction.) Starling tries to hunt down Lecter herself, partly to capture him but mainly to save him from Verger's sadistic grasp.

When Starling is wounded in a gunfight at Verger's farm (in which Verger is killed), Lecter nurses her back to health and attempts to transform her into a surrogate for his sister, Mischa, through a regimen of mind-altering drugs, brainwashing and psychological conditioning. Lecter utterly underestimates her strong independent streak, however; she mocks Lecter's devotion to his sister and tells him that he should brainwash himself into becoming Mischa if he truly wanted her back. Then, in the novel's most controversial sequence, Clarice takes off her shirt and offers her breast to Lecter. Lecter accepts Clarice's offer and the two become lovers. Starling domesticates her old foe, quieting his violent impulses with sex.

Lecter kidnaps and lobotomizes Krendler, and he and Starling feast on his brain. They run off together and disappear, although Lecter's former guard Barney reported seeing them together in Buenos Aires in 2000.

In the movie version of Hannibal, screenwriters Steve Zaillian and David Mamet changed the ending (which was controversial among both critics and fans) to portray Starling as trying to apprehend Lecter rather than giving in to him; she handcuffs herself to him and calls the police. Lecter threatens her with a meat cleaver, with which he then chops off his own hand so he can escape.

Buffalo Bill

Bill's real name was Jame Gumb ("James" was misspelled on his birth certificate, and he insisted that it be pronounced as such, as stated in the novel). He murdered overweight women so he could remove their skin and fashion a "woman suit" for himself because he believed himself to be transsexual but was too disturbed to qualify for sex reassignment surgery. He became known as "Buffalo Bill" during his murder spree because of an off-color joke by Kansas City homicide detectives; upon discovering his first victim, the detectives said "This one likes to skin his humps".

Abandoned by his prostitute mother, Gumb was raised by his grandparents, who became his first victims when he killed them impulsively as a child. After being released from a juvenile facility, he went on to serve in the Navy. A bisexual, Gumb had transitory relationships with both men and women, most notably with Benjamin Raspail, one of Dr. Hannibal Lecter's future victims. Raspail left him when he murdered a transient and 'did things' with the skin.

He began the "Buffalo Bill" murders in 1983 by killing a girlfriend named Frederica Bimmel in a fit of rage. Bimmel's was the third body found and the only one Gumb attempted to hide, by weighting it down in a riverbed.

Gumb's modus operandi was to kidnap a woman by approaching her pretending to be injured, asking for help loading something heavy into his van, and then knocking her out in a surprise attack from behind. Once he had a woman in his house, he would keep her alive for three weeks, starving her so her skin would be loose enough to easily remove, and then kill her with a revolver, or by hanging, and strip her skin off. He would then place a Death's Head moth in her throat — he was fascinated by their metamorphosis, a process he wanted to undergo by becoming a woman — and dump the body.

The FBI intensified the manhunt for Gumb when he kidnapped Catherine Martin, the daughter of a US senator. Then-FBI trainee Clarice Starling enlisted Lecter's help in tracking him down, as Lecter had met him while treating Raspail. Lecter gave Starling a series of cryptic clues to Gumb's identity, but never revealed his name in hopes that Starling would figure it out for herself. She eventually deciphered one of the doctor's riddles — "This man covets, and how do we begin to covet? We covet what we see every day" — and realized that Gumb knew his first victim, Bimmel.

Starling's mentor, FBI Director Jack Crawford, told her that they already knew Gumb was the killer, and sent her to Bimmel's hometown of Belvedere, Ohio to investigate the tie between Gumb and his victim. Crawford would find out, too late, that the address supplied in Gumb's file was merely a business office.

Starling, meanwhile, went to the house of a Mrs. Lippman, Bimmel's elderly employer, only to find Gumb himself, calling himself "Jack Gordon." (Gumb had killed the old woman, and was living in her house and using it as a torture chamber for his victims.) Starling realized who he really was when she saw a Death's Head Moth flutter by and ordered him to surrender. Gumb fled into the basement and stalked her with night vision goggles as she stumbled around in the dark, but she heard him behind her just in time to open fire and kill him. Martin was rescued, and Starling became a hero, as well as a full-fledged agent.

Gumb thought of his victims more as things rather than people, referring to them as "it" ("It rubs the lotion on its skin, or else it gets the hose again!")

The one thing in Gumb's life that he genuinely cared for was his pet toy poodle "Precious," which he would often talk to like one would to a baby, even while torturing his victims. Starling may have been too late to save Martin if she had not lead the dog into the cellar/old well in which Gumb was holding her prisoner, letting Martin stall for time by threatening to kill it.

Although neither Harris nor Silence of the Lambs screenwriter Ted Tally delved too deeply into Gumb's past, in the movie Lecter summarized his life thus – "Billy was not born a monster, but made one by years of systematic abuse." The same thing was said about Francis Dolarhyde in Red Dragon.

The movie adaptation of Silence of the Lambs was criticized by some gay rights groups for its portrayal of the sociopathic Gumb as bisexual and transsexual, even though he is never explicitly identified as either.

Harris may have based Gumb on four real-life serial killers:

Ed Gein, who murdered two women and dug up several graves to make a "woman suit" for himself.

Ed Kemper, who, like Gumb, killed his grandparents as a teenager "just to see what it felt like".

Ted Bundy, who pretended to be injured and asked his victims for help, and then incapacitated and killed them.

Gary Heidnik, who kidnapped five women and held them hostage as sex slaves.

Paul Krendler

Krendler is an agent of the U.S. Department of Justice. In The Silence of the Lambs the FBI is attempting to track down serial killer Jame Gumb, also known as "Buffalo Bill." Jack Crawford has sent trainee Clarice Starling to interview Hannibal Lecter to gain a psychological profile of the killer. The case gains new urgency when Gumb kidnaps Catherine Martin, the daughter of a Republican senator. Crawford figures the best way to secure Lecter's cooperation is to offer him a transfer to another mental hospital, away from the ambitious and self-serving Dr. Chilton. Lecter accepts, but the offer turns out to be fake. Although Starling's meetings were supposed to be confidential, he has been taping her conversations with Lecter, and he engineers his own transfer plan with Senator Martin, promising Lecter a transfer in exchange for Buffalo Bill's identity. Lecter accepts, and the case is taken out of the FBI's hands and placed under the jurisdiction of the Justice Department, led by Krendler. Gumb had been the lover of one of Lecter's former patients, so he provides truthful information about him, except for his name. The crucial evidence, however, he reserves for Starling, and it is she who tracks Gumb down, not Krendler.

Krendler is both impressed with and jealous of Starling's ingenuity. In the intervening years, she gains a reputation as a crack shot, with most of her arrest attempts ending in her killing the suspects instead of apprehending them. She also consistently refuses Krendler's sexual advances, feeding his resentment.

Hannibal picks up after one of Starling's arrests, which results not only in the death of the suspect, Evelda Drumgo, but also a fellow field officer. Krendler is called in to investigate any reckless or negligent behavior on Starling's part, and sees this as an opportunity to destroy her career. The publicity that Starling receives attracts the attention of one of Lecter's former victims, Mason Verger, and he recruits Krendler in his scheme to incriminate Starling in a bid to lure Lecter out of hiding so that Verger can exact his revenge. To this end, Krendler plants incriminating (and forged) letters from Lecter, indicating an intimate relationship between him and Starling, and creating the appearance that she is withholding evidence from the FBI.

As planned, this scheme does attract Lecter's attention. In an attempt to contact Starling, Lecter is captured by Verger. Starling rescues him but is wounded in the attempt. Verger is killed by his sister, Margot, while Lecter takes Starling back to his rented home. Having figured out Krendler's role in the conspiracy, Lecter recruits Starling in avenging themselves on him. He kidnaps Krendler, drugs him, and performs a lobotomy upon him. Lecter and a drugged Starling then feast upon the brains of the alive-but-delirious Krendler. Krendler is eventually shot with a crossbow and killed.

For the film, this scene was slightly changed, with the feast happening after Lecter caught Krendler at his own vacation home. Also, Starling is not made to partake in eating his brain. Instead, Lecter feeds Krendler his own brain until he bleeds to death.

Mason Verger

Mason Verger was the son of a wealthy meat packer. While claiming to have accepted Jesus into his life, this was clearly self-serving, as he used his faith to gain access to a Christian summer camp so that he could molest children. He had a younger sister named Margot, whom he regularly abused when they were children and brutally raped when they were teenagers, dislocating her arm and biting a chunk out of her buttock in the process. Margot went into therapy and met Dr. Hannibal Lecter, who counseled her, advising her not to fall into self-loathing and that it would be cathartic to kill her brother. Years later, she worked as Verger's bodyguard and tried to get into his good graces so he would donate his sperm to her lesbian partner, in order to take advantage of a stipulation in their father's will that denied her any inheritance but left in a provision stating that his estate would go to any children that Mason might have.

Lecter was introduced to Mason in the 1970s when a court recommended therapy after he was found guilty of child molestation. During his sessions with Dr. Lecter, Verger claimed to have worked with several of the world's worst war criminals, including Pol Pot and Idi Amin. At one point he was a participant on Easter of a re-enactment of the crucifixion. Verger and Lecter seemed to get on well until Verger invited Lecter to his pied a terre. After Verger showed him the noose he used to perform autoerotic asphyxiation, Lecter asked him to demonstrate the procedure; while Verger was dangling from the noose and masturbating, Lecter fed him Angel Dust and several other mind altering drugs, and convinced Verger to tear his face off with a shard of mirror and feed it to his pet dogs. Verger did so, and also gouged out one of his eyes and ate his own nose. Lecter finished him off by manipulating the noose to break his neck. Amazingly, Verger survived this, but was left a hideously disfigured quadriplegic dependent on a life support machine.

According to the police, Verger was one of three victims to survive Lecter's attacks. When Lecter was captured, Verger never issued a statement in Lecter's trial. It has not yet been explained why Verger did not alert the authorities to Lecter's identity, or if he was capable of doing so in the period immediately following the attack.

In 1989, Lecter escaped from prison. Verger, furious that he didn't have him killed, contacted a group of Sardinians to breed several large, man eating boars to eat Lecter.

In 1996, the boars were ready. Verger had planned to use Clarice Starling as bait by discrediting her. A crooked Justice Department employee, Paul Krendler, also helped in the frame up. A tip off from a detective called Pazzi located Lecter in Florence under the name "Dr. Fell." Pazzi tried to kidnap Lecter but ended up murdered along with a Sardinian and a pickpocket. Lecter then fled to the United States.

Lecter's murder of a deer hunter alerted the FBI to his return to the US. Lecter was eventually kidnapped by Verger's men and was about to be eaten by the boars when Starling rescued him. She was wounded and Lecter took her to safety. Verger was murdered by his sister, who forced his pet electric eel down his throat while stimulating him with the Sardinians' cattle prod, causing him to ejaculate in his death throes, providing Margot with the needed sperm. Lecter claimed responsibility for the death.

In the movie version of Hannibal, in which the character of Margot doesn't appear, Verger dies at the hands of his long-suffering personal physician, Cordell Doemling (played by Zeljko Ivanek), who throws him to the boars.