What were the events and traumas that shaped Hannibal Lecter into the weirdly beloved serial
killer he became?
The fava beans are stewing and the Chianti is decanting we're having lots of old friends
for dinner to explore Hannibal Lecter's story.
Hannibal Lecter was born on January 20, 1933 in the southeastern region of Lithuania to
a family of great wealth and noble bloodline.
His Lithuanian father, Count Lecter, was a direct descendent of warlord Hannibal the
Grim, while his Italian mother's ancestors ruled Milan for over two centuries.
"They lived like they had money."
Hannibal's education began early, and his teachers quickly discovered his extraordinary
intellect, along with a gift for learning languages.
By the time he was 10 years old, Hannibal could speak Lithuanian, German, English, and
Italian, and he was on the road to being fluent in Latin.
In 1939 his sister Mischa was born.
Hannibal was extremely protective of her and cared for her more than anyone.
It wasn't long after her birth, however, that tragedy befell the Lecter family.
In 1941, they were forced to flee their castle when Nazi troops invaded.
A small group of Nazis, lead by a brutish sadist named Vladis Grutas, found the Lecters
and killed the parents in front of Hannibal and Mischa.
The children were kidnapped and held prisoner until food ran out.
It was then that Grutas cooked Mischa in a stew in front of Hannibal and forced him to
eat it.
Still in shackles, eight-year-old Hannibal escaped into the woods.
By the grace of wartime alliances, young Hannibal was found wandering in the woods by Soviet
soldiers.
The trauma he'd survived turned him mute, although he'd fully repressed the memory of
what happened with his sister.
By this time, the Russians occupied Castle Lecter and turned it into an orphanage for
children like Hannibal.
"It's not healing to see your childhood home.
But it helps you measure whether you are broken, how and why, assuming you want to know."
His fellow orphans considered Hannibal's muteness a sign of weakness, and he was bullied mercilessly
for it.
Hannibal took the abuse, but when he saw other younger children being bullied, he began to
lash out violently.
Hannibal Lecter's particular code for choosing his victims began here.
But, though he was involved in many physical altercations, he had yet to kill.
After Hannibal's 13th birthday, his uncle, Count Robert Lecter, arrived at the castle
turned orphanage to adopt his nephew.
Hannibal went to live with Uncle Robert and his wife, Lady Murasakiin their country home
in France.
Hannibal was still mute, but he and Lady Murasaki had an instant connection.
Using martial arts, cooking, and meditation, she helped Hannibal begin to heal, and he
developed a taste for the finer things in life.
When he started to speak again, Hannibal added Japanese to his list of fluent languages.
But tragedy would befall young Hannibal once more.
When a local butcher hurled insults at Lady Murasaki, Hannibal attacked the man.
Later, when his Uncle Robert heard about the altercation, he confronted the butcher and,
in the resulting fray, had a heart attack and died.
In a haze of rage and grief, Lecter stalked and killed the butcher using one of Lady Murasaki's
samurai swords.
He cut out the man's cheeks and ate them, marking both his first kill, and his first
act of cannibalism by choice.
"I would have used the butcher's knife, but the sword seems so appropriate."
Local law enforcement knew that Hannibal had killed the butcher, but since he passed a
lie detector test with a convincing story, they were forced to let him go.
In the wake of Robert Lecter's tragic and untimely death, Hannibal and Lady Murasaki
moved to Paris.
Hannibal's exceptional intelligence landed him a spot in a highly esteemed boarding school,
where he focused on medicine.
He completed his diploma in record time, graduating with honors as the youngest person in the
school's history.
At 18, Hannibal returned to the cabin in Lithuania where his family was murdered.
After he gave his sister's bones a proper burial, Hannibal found the dog tags belonging
to the brutes who killed her, and something snapped.
He went after each of the men with cold precision, removing their cheeks to eat them.
Hannibal was now on police radar, and they were convinced he was a serial killer.
"He was killed in the woods where your family died.
His face had been eaten."
In retaliation for the killings, Vladis Grutas kidnapped Lady Murasaki, and she was nearly
killed.
When Grutas reminded Hannibal of his own part in his sister's cannibalism, the repressed
memory pushed Hannibal from methodical to crazed killer.
This monster frightened Lady Murasaki so deeply that she fled France and went into hiding.
Hannibal never sought her out again.
While Hannibal was in jail awaiting trial for Grutas' killing, he began to do work sketching
post-autopsy bodies for the medical examiner.
When public outcry led to a full acquittal, Hannibal took an internship at Johns Hopkins
in Baltimore, which turned into university and postgraduate studies.
"Well, now I understand why your drawings earned you an internship at Johns Hopkins."
Hannibal became a highly regarded psychiatrist with a reputation for throwing exquisite dinner
parties, during which he would often feed choice morsels of his victims to his unsuspecting
guests.
One of his patients, the millionaire Mason Verger, was a sadistic sexual assailant who
had attacked his younger sister so badly, she would never be able to have children.
When he discovered Mason's crime, Hannibal drugged him with hallucinogens and suggested
Mason cut up his own face.
He did, and came out of the ordeal as a paraplegic with a lifelong grudge.
Around this time, Hannibal began to consult with Detective Will Graham on a serial killer
case, which he happened to be behind.
When Will discovered Hannibal's true identity, they nearly killed each other in a violent
showdown.
In 2013, showrunner Bryan Fuller created an arthouse version of Hannibal Lecter's story
that drew heavily from previous books and movies while it simultaneously created a new
narrative.
Fuller's Hannibal was in his 40s, with a backstory that saw him go to Florence as a young man
and start his killing there.
Inspired by The Monster of Florence serial killer, Fuller drew from the real-life set
of 16 ritualized killings that took place between 1968 and1985.
"I met him, 20 years ago.
Il Mostro, the Monster of Florence."
Fuller's Hannibal was also the Baltimore PD's on-call psychiatrist for profiling purposes.
He didn't just work sporadically with the department.
He acted as therapist to many of his colleagues, including Will Graham, with whom he had a
deeply intense and complicated relationship.
This version of Hannibal wasn't just the Chesapeake Ripper.
He often mimicked the killings of those he'd been tasked to help catch, adding to their
body counts.
"Is the organ harvester disguising his work as the crimes of a serial killer, or is a
serial killer disguising his crimes as the work of an organ harvester?"
The show's three-season run offered a textbook manual on how to identify Hannibal's gaslighting
practices, which he used to frame Graham for a series of killings he himself committed,
all the while convincing Graham that he actually was responsible.
Bryan Fuller's Hannibal didn't just deepen the relationship between Will and Hannibal.
A number of key characters were added, who helped make this new iteration of Hannibal
Lecter profoundly three-dimensional.
Many of them appeared marginally in Thomas Harris' books, but Fuller gave them new life.
In this version, Lady Murasaki's maid Chiyoh helped Hannibal find, torture, and imprison
the men who killed his sister.
A gender-flipped Dr. Alana Bloom, first mentioned in Red Dragon as Alan, became a pivotal figure
torn between helping a troubled Will Graham and actively being gaslighted by her serial
killer boyfriend, Hannibal.
Red Dragon's relentless tabloid journalist Freddie Lounds was also gender-flipped.
New characters included FBI Agent Miriam Lass, who discovered Hannibal's identity but disappeared
before she could tell anyone.
Lass was presumed dead when her severed arm was identified, but it was later discovered
that Hannibal had kept her alive for years in an underground bunker.
And Fuller's Hannibal introduced the killer's own therapist, Bedelia Du Maurier, who provided
incredible insight into Hannibal's mind, as well as a sense of fear about who, or what,
she suspected him to be.
"What Hannibal does is not coercion.
It is persuasion."
Hannibal Lecter was convicted of multiple homicides and remanded to Baltimore State
Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
Hospital staff soon learned Hannibal was unlike any of the other psychopaths housed in their
facility.
He was a master of self-control, able to manipulate his body and vital functions with such precision
as to fool machines.
He actively cultivated his so-called "Memory Palace," detailed rooms in his mind filled
with art, books, and places he hoped to see again in person.
"My palace is vast, even by medieval standards."
One day, Hannibal faked a seizure and proceeded to kill a nurse, just because he could.
The incident forced hospital administrator Fredrick Chilton to create entirely new protocols
on how to handle Hannibal, which included absolutely no physical contact.
Hannibal's only ally was Barney, a compassionate orderly who became as friendly with him as
anyone could.
While Hannibal might have been one of the most disturbing serial killers ever caught,
he was also still one of the psychiatric community's greatest minds, especially when it came to
people like himself.
In 1978, Will Graham came out of retirement to help Baltimore PD with a series of brutal
family murders that were taking place on a lunar cycle.
"It won't stop."
"Why not?"
"Cause it makes him God.
Would you give that up?"
Will approached Hannibal once more for help, and together they identified the "Tooth Fairy"
killer as Francis Dolarhyde, a film tech who was choosing targets through their home videos.
The case ended with Dolarhyde's death, but Hannibal continued to write Will letters,
claiming that Will was the only person in the world who truly knew him.
Hannibal Lecter would have no contact with anyone other than Fredrick Chilton, Barney,
and other orderlies for the next five years.
That's when the FBI sent in Special Agent Clarice Starling to get Hannibal to talk about
a former patient who was suspected of being a serial killer known as "Buffalo Bill."
Hannibal saw right through Clarice, but he also found himself drawn to her.
"Now this ham-handed segway into your questionnaire.
It won't do."
In a cruel game of quid pro quo, he got her to reveal personal details about her life
in exchange for information about Buffalo Bill, although only some of what Hannibal
told her turned out to be true.
While Clarice earned her FBI badge, Hannibal staged an elaborate escape that involved wearing
the face of a police officer monitoring him.
He wound up in the Bahamas, where Fredrick Chilton happened to be vacationing.
Hannibal called Clarice to tell her he wouldn't be seeking her out, and said:
"I have no plans to call on you, Clarice.
The world's more interesting with you in it."
He then implied he'd be seeing Chilton soon, and said:
"I'm having an old friend for dinner."
Chilton was never seen or heard from again.
Following his escape, Hannibal Lecter went through extensive plastic surgery on his face,
sparing only his nose for fear he'd lose his extra-sensitive sense of smell.
He started going by Dr. Fell and set up shop in Florence, where he rebranded himself as
an art expert and museum curator.
"They are letting me look after the library, for a stipend."
Hannibal was of Italian heritage on his mother's side, so he began to investigate his bloodline
alongside his curatorial duties.
But despite his efforts, he wasn't as incognito as he thought.
Mason Verger had been stewing in his rage for years, and he'd put a multi-million dollar
price tag on Hannibal's whereabouts.
He planned to enact his revenge by feeding his old nemesis alive to wild boars.
In the meantime, a disgraced Clarice Starling, who had been demoted following a botched heist,
figured out what Mason Verger had planned and attempted to find Lecter first in an effort
to save her career.
Hannibal kidnapped Clarice, and Mason's younger sister killed her brother, a crime that Hannibal
took the fall for.
Hannibal slowly came to accept how the horrific trauma of being forced to eat his own sister
had shaped his subsequent crimes and desires.
While he was attracted to Clarice, he also saw his sister in her.
"Will you stay with me in my prison cell and hold my hand, Clarice?
We could have some fun."
Her anecdotes from their quid pro quo game all those years ago created a soft spot in
Hannibal, leaving him oddly protective of her.
"And he was fond of her?"
"Yes."
Even so, this didn't stop Hannibal from hurting Clarice.
He attempted to brainwash her into believing she really was Mischa in order to have a proxy
of his sister back, but Clarice was too strong mentally, and she overpowered Hannibal's attempts.
During that process of hypnosis, though, Clarice was altered mentally, and she became a different
kind of student of Hannibal's singular psychopathy.
The two became romantically involved and were last spotted in Buenos Aires.
It remains unclear whether Clarice was with him because of his hold over her, or if she'd
actually chosen to align herself with the serial killer she once hunted.
"Would you ever say to me, stop?
If you loved me you'd stop."
"Not in a thousand years."
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