Buffalo Bill (The Silence of the Lambs)
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Bill's real name was Jame Gumb ("James" was misspelled on his birth certificate, and he insisted that it be pronounced as such.) A serial killer, 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 teenager. After being released from a juvenile facility, he went on to serve in the Navy. After suffering abuse at the hands of his grandparents, he somehow twisted his logic around to believe himself to be a transsexual, 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 either 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. Gumb thought of his victims more as things than people, referring to them as "it" ("It rubs the lotion on its skin, or else it gets the hose again!")
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.
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 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. Equally controversial was the swastika flags Gumb had in his room, although it is never directly stated that he was anti-semitic. It is worth noting that morbid interest in Nazi paraphenalia and war atrocities are not uncommon among serial killers.
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.
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