After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The Real Hannibal Lecter

Episode Date: February 18, 2024

At the tender age of 23, Thomas Harris, author of The Silence of the Lambs, was sent to interview a convicted murderer inside a Mexican prison. What happened that day lived rent free in his mind for the rest of his life.Anthony tells Maddy this story of murder and of love that blurs the lines between truth and fiction.Written by Anthony Delaney. Produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code AFTERDARK sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here.

Wendy's has a new breakfast deal. Mix and match two items of your choice for only $4. Breakfast wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small seasoned potatoes or small hot coffee. Choose two for $4 at Wendy's. Available for a limited time at participating Wendy's in Canada. Taxes extra. The heat in Nuevo Leon, Mexico, was so stifling it coated the inside of the young journalist's mouth,

forcing him to concentrate on his breathing through closed eyes in order to stay focused. At times, it appeared that the ground before him shuddered, as if it were about to explode in flames. But he went on. At 23, Thomas Harris, who would go on to write Silence of the Lambs, had been sent to Mexico to interview Dykes Askew Simmons. Simmons was an American citizen who had been hastily charged

and detained at Topo Chico Penitentiary for the murder of three siblings, two sisters and their brother in Mexico. Now, while Simmons had a history of petty theft and psychiatric instability, Manny thought him incapable of murder. And so his story prompted intrigue and mystery in Mexico. Harris had come to clear all this mystery up once and for all and to get an exclusive from or about Simmons himself. Once he'd cleared security and stood within the high walls and wire fences of the penitentiary, Harris spent most of his visits simply observing Simmons, taking notes and making connections with other inmates and staff who might shine a light on this convicted killer.

Just before he left, however, the prison doctor, Dr Salazar, approached him to find out a little bit more about his assignment. Harris asked if he could interview him for the piece, but it became instantly clear that the doctor would be conducting this interview. Mr Harris, how did you feel when you looked at Simmons? Salazar probed. Harris noted the doctor was a small, lithe man with dark red hair. He stood very still and there was a certain elegance about him. Would you say the sunglasses add an element of symmetry to his face? Salazar went on.

His unusual line of questioning settled on Harris in the uncanniest manner. Salazar wished to know if Harris thought that Simmons was tormented on the school playground because he was disfigured, if he'd seen and studied the pictures of the bodies and what he made of them, and if he thought the three young victims were attractive youngsters. Harris was still unsettled, but now intrigued. He asked Dr Salazar to look him up if ever he found himself in Texas. He was sure his insights would prove invaluable to this and future work. Thank you, Mr Harris, Salazar beamed.

Certainly I will when next I travel. The heat of the day now somewhat vanished, Harris made to leave Simmons, Salazar and the other inmates behind him. As he passed once more through security, the prison guard inquired after the progress of his observations. Harris replied that the prison doctor had been most helpful and asked how long he'd worked there, mentioning they'd made loose plans to meet in Texas. The guard casually passed Harris his things and smirked. Salazar did not work at the penitentiary, he informed the young journalist. He was an inmate, a vicious murderer

who would never leave the confines of the prison. Harris had been duped by a monster. I've got the shivers. Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Maddie. And I'm Anthony. And this week we are exploring the true history of the fictional character Hannibal Lecter, who was created by a young journalist that you've just encountered at the opening of this episode. One, Thomas Harris. I have to say, Anthony, that opening has made my skin crawl. It's creepy in its nothingness, right? It's the casualness of the conversation, who you're face to face to. There's something very unnerving about not knowing fully who you're face to face to there's something very unnerving about not knowing fully who you're

talking to right i think so and i think as well thinking about silence of the lambs i'm thinking of the the famous film with jodie foster and um anthony what's he called oh my god anthony hopkins thank you oscar winner sir anthony hopkins maddie pelling sir anthony hopkins and jodie foster and what i think is so aside from the obvious in that film what's so unsettling about it is that he is on the surface a sophisticated trustworthy figure of authority and yet he has this dark side and i think that's what we're seeing in this opening here and that presumably that's what inspired harris to come face to face with someone who the way that you initially read them is actually completely badly informed and yeah they're not who they say they are. Yeah, and we'll totally get into that.

One of the things that this, one of the many places that this story is going to take us, we are going to go from the penitentiary and then we're going to explore some of that fictional inspiration from real life. Then we'll go back and look at what the actual crimes that Salazar is supposed to have committed and how that may have informed Silence of the Lambs. But just to give you a little bit

of context, so this is 1963. So what's happening in America in 1963 as Thomas Harris is going to visit Simmons in the prison? And we have Vietnam War. The Americans have joined on the side of South Vietnam against the communist ally group. Martin Luther King Jr. has delivered his I Have a Dream speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to an audience of at least a quarter of a million people. This is a really iconic stuff that's unfolding. This is a big year for America. Yeah, it really, really is. In less maybe momentous things, the Coca-Cola company introduced its first diet drink, which is called Tab Cola, which I've heard this thing about Tab Cola.

I didn't realise it was a diet drink. I didn't know much about it. Is that like Diet Coke today? I think it's just Diet Coke now, yeah. Also, if I have an addiction, it's Coke Zero. Like I need to sort my Coke Zero consumption out. It is too much. You don't strike me as a Coke Zero person.

I'm not one for fizzy drinks. I like a cup of tea, but see, you don't like a tea or a coffee. I'm a cup of tea girl. Or an espresso. I do like an espresso in the afternoon, which isn't great by 5pm when I'm shaking after that six of them. Not ideal. The other thing that happened, of course,

again, this is a really iconic year, is that on November 22nd, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, President John F. Kennedy, took place in Dallas, Texas. So, you know, a lot of huge things. Also, my mum was born in 1963. I don't know how relevant that is to this story. I would have led with that. That's obviously the most important thing in this list.

But you know what? She doesn't know when she was born in that year because they don't know her actual date of birth oh yeah i mean it's one of a few which that's a podcast episode i don't think it is i think it's just forgetful administration but it's one of a few around a similar time which i won't divulge here my mum's like so paranoid about being um scammed so i think if i were to give out any more information including her name or even possible dates of birth she would lose the run of herself completely but that is what's going on that's going on in the world in america not so much the world but in america that's the

context within which thomas harris goes down to mexico so those those events including the birth of your mom are telling me yes that in america that's a year of great turbulence and great change we've got the civil rights movement we've got war and so there's a a sense of society changing not just the big institutions like the army or the government or whatever but like on a street level on an ordinary domestic level people's lives are changing the president's been assassinated in a really violent way the other thing maybe that's gonna creep in here and you can tell me if i'm wrong is thinking about criminality we think about lee harvey oswald who shot jfk and there's so much dialogue around who he was what his was, whether or not he really did

it, blah, blah, blah. But I wonder if some of that discourse is happening at the time of the assassination and in the days, weeks, months afterwards in 1963, that Thomas Harris as a journalist is maybe not tapping into, but he's aware of it, something that's happening within the culture around him. I think it's definitely, it was very quick after Oswald was captured and then shot that speculation around his involvement, for whatever reason, and however credible, started. So I'm sure these conversations were happening in the ether and actually not even in the ether, because think about where Harris is working at this point. He's a journalist. He is involved in these stories as they're unfolding. So I'm sure he will have come face to face

with a lot of these things in a very immediate way. But then obviously he's 23, he's starting out. So he's going to have to do other stories that are not necessarily the main headline news. That said, Simmons was headline headline news he was a big story there was this we you know we talk about um true crime podcasts a lot there was an element of true crime uh mystery around what he had supposedly done because people assumed he was innocent so just just to remind me because i'm already getting slightly confused all these names

simmons is the criminal that that Harris is going to interview or write about in prison. Yes. And he's murdered how many people? So he is, well, he has been convicted of murdering three people, siblings, three young siblings. And while he has a rap sheet, it is not particularly indicative of murder.

So people think, well, there's no way he could have done this. He was involved in theft and he had some mental health issues as well. But they thought that because of the way he'd been arrested in Mexico and the legal system that he had gone through, they weren't, American citizens weren't, and because he was an American citizen, other American citizens weren't confident

that he had been given due process and that he had received a fair trial. And some people thought that he was possibly legally convicted and detained. So this is what brings Harris down to Mexico to investigate this story that's bubbling under, okay, it doesn't have the same national consequence as some of those things that we discussed in terms of civil rights movement or the assassination of a president. But it's still headline news and it's still the topic of conversation across America at the time. So we've got Harris, he goes to the prison to meet Simmons, to write about him, but he encounters this other person who's called Salazar, Mr. Salazar? Who is he? Yes, well, OK, he does. He goes, he talks, he's there to find out about Simmons.

But it's Salazar, Dr. Salazar, who intrigues him the most after that visit. Now, Dr. Salazar is not his real name. Harris never actually, it's a name that Harris invented. And Harris thought that it was not right for him to disclose the person's real name because he felt it was somewhat exploitative. So therefore, there's this element of fiction within a fiction, because we know that this goes on to inform Silence of the Lambs, right? So I'd be interested to know how you feel about him

fictionalising a name in order to protect an identity regardless of what the person has done let's leave that aside for a second but i just want already this idea of fiction is injecting itself into the history i'm just wondering what your thoughts are on that well i think it's interesting that harris is a journalist but he obviously goes on to be to be aist. And there's that sense of the distance between fact and fiction. It's overlapping at times, creeping into the story here. I'm wondering how much we can trust Harris in terms of his description of this first meeting of Salazar.

If he's making up his name, and he's looking presumably back on this event after it's happened, when Silence of the Lambs is out as a book, as a film. Well, this event was described by Harris in 2013. Oh, wow. When a reissue of the book came out, an anniversary edition. And it was there that he disclosed Salazar. It was there that he said, actually, this was based on a real encounter. And'm thinking about how people like to play with those boundaries i'm thinking of the coen brothers doing their tv series fargo and they so famously write

you know this is based on true events and do that whole spiel at the beginning of every series but actually it's not at all they've completely fictionalized it and it's a kind of nod to that genre more generally and i think that's so interesting to me. And I think that's what's happening here with Harris. Maybe he's looking back from a perspective of 2013 when there's so much, not only in terms of like writing, journalistic writing, true crime,

but, you know, thinking about like film and TV and it's a whole genre across different media now and i i wonder if that's informing the way that he's remembering this interaction okay put a pin in that we are going to come back to that very idea what does come from it though what does come from this disclosure of a of a dr salazar who is not a real person is that journalists become intrigued obviously we have this huge movie, Silence of the Lambs, the book as well, of course, and it has shaped a generation of kind of psychodrama. It's won numerous Oscars.

And so the journalists, when this comes out in the anniversary edition of the Silence of the Lambs reissue, they go, we can figure this out. We have the name of the prison. We have the year. We have the fact that he's a doctor. Let's go and see what we can figure this out. We have the name of the prison. We have the year. We have the fact that he's a doctor. Let's go and see what we can uncover. So they worked with the details that Harris had disclosed.

And they were really quickly actually able to discover that Salazar's real name was, in fact, Alfredo Bali Trevino. And he, yeah, so this is a person that they were able to take the facts that Harris had given them to show that it really was a person and they were able to name that person. And this is who we think, based on Harris's written testimony, that inspired Hannibal Lecter. And in real life, he had a reputation for himself as a monster in his own time. And the press had named him various different names. He was known as the werewolf of Nueva Leon. He was known as the killer doctor. And he was also known as the vampire Bali, using his surname. So this is headline, he is making headline news at the time. So the journalists didn't have to dig too deeply, actually. So do we know, do we know

what he did? Obviously, we know in silence of the lambs hannibal lecter is famously a cannibal is this the same for alfredo so just cut that question because that's the entire second uh second narrative is that one cool cool cool i'm gonna leave you waiting for the details on that just a little bit longer because it's coming but before i tell you exactly what he did and it's quite gruesome i have a picture as we often do on after dark um of alfredo travinio and maddie i'm gonna i'm gonna throw to you to describe what you're seeing that this is a picture taken in prison and i'll let you tell the the listeners who so this is a black and white photo of Alfredo Balli and Simmons.

It's interesting to me that you say this is a photograph of the people that we now know, because it doesn't look particularly sinister. No, right. We already know that they're both in prison for murder. Also, the fact that it's taken in prison, you would not necessarily guess that from the photograph. Okay, so it's a black and white image. There are two men. One is slightly in the foreground, one slightly behind him. Neither of them are looking at the photographer.

They're looking away in opposite directions. The man in the foreground, who I think is Alfredo, he's got dark hair, a bit of an Elvis quiff going on potentially. He does, yeah. Sunglasses. He's got a short sleeved crisp white shirt on um but the most notable things about him he's holding a sun parasol over his left shoulder yes and over his sort of flopped folded over his right arm looks to be a fur coat maybe which is weird because the way this photograph is shot there's a lot of

exposure it looks like it's a sunny day it's a little bit odd yeah something's slung over his arm it's difficult to see something it looks like fur it's a strange texture uh simmons in the background is again looking away he's got blonde maybe gray silvery hair he's also got sunglasses on he has a cigarette sort of flopping from his mouth and he's rubbing his hands together. It looks like an action shot. It could be, I mean, they look kind of classically 1960s with the sunglasses.

It looks quite cool. Looks like it could be almost like a still from a film. So two murderers in prison looking cool on a sunny day with a sun parasol and a fur coat isn't the parasol interesting because it says something about masculinity and 1960s american masculinity and here's this parasol daintily it looks like a very dainty parasol doesn't it like it's not very big it's quite little it's got quite a short little sort of handle um and actually i'm remembering as we're talking harris described him as elegant

and there is a strange elegance about it right he's stylish he looks he looks chic and of that moment yeah it's an it's interesting thinking about that era of masculinity i mean he's got like his forearms exposed. There's almost something, I don't know if we can sort of code him as being queer, but the parasol, it feels like a little bit of an anomaly in the context of what we know about him. He's in prison, in a men's prison.

I don't know. It just, it's a strange picture. It's a strange picture. Well, Maddy, your gaydar is on form because we can code him as being queer. Would you like to hear the next part of the story? Yes, please. We'll be right back. small hot coffee. Choose two for $4 at Wendy's. Available for a limited time at participating Wendy's in Canada. Taxes extra. Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, Catherine Parr. Six wives, six lives. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, I'm joined by a host of experts

to tell the stories of the six queens of Henry VIII who shaped and changed England forever. Subscribe to and follow Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm going to go. 1959, Mexico. Alfredo Bali Trevino and Jesus Castillo Rangel were young doctors at the beginning of very promising careers. They were also in love. Their love, as in most other countries in the world at this time, was legally forbidden in Mexico,

but like their queer brothers and sisters across the world, Alfredo and Jesus had found a way. Little did Jesus know, however, that the biggest threat emerging from his relationship with Alfredo and Jesus had found a way. Little did Jesus know, however, that the biggest threat emerging from his relationship with Alfredo did not arise from the homophobia without it, but from the murderous violence within it. One evening, a heated argument took flame between Alfredo and Jesus. We cannot know the exact details of what was spoken that day, though some local newspapers

say money was at the root of the disagreement. What we do know, however, is that inconvenienced by Jesus' rebuttals, Alfredo knocked his sentimental partner, as the newspapers reported it at the time, unconscious, and injected him with a sodium pentothal anaesthetic. Once sedated, Alfredo took a scalpel and ran it across his lover's throat. Alfredo sat there then, watching the blood creep silently from Jesus as his breathing shallowed and all the colours of life drained from his body. Alfredo Balitrovino roused himself then, and calling on his medical training, hacked Jesus' body into multiple pieces. He boxed them neatly and planned to dispose of the dismembered corpse on an unused lot.

He could not achieve this on his own, however. So he turned to a former lover, Francesco Carrera Villarreal, to help. Apparently Villarreal was only too happy to oblige. Together Trevino and Villarreal went to Villarreal's uncle to borrow a shovel in order to dig the holes that would receive Jesus's dismembered body. We can't say for certain what aroused the uncle's suspicions, but aroused they were. And so contemporary news reports tell us he secretly followed his nephew and his murderous companion after they left with his shovel. I'm gonna say, if someone comes to you asking for a shovel. No, no.

You could ask why. Well, yeah. But no, like, you know, I'm from rural Ireland. People would borrow shovels from time to time. I mean, you would ask why, though. Often it'd be like, I don't really know why. Move cow shit. But this is not moving cow shit.

This is something far bleaker but he the uncle followed them right and he stayed kind of in the background to see what they were doing and then

when they left he went in to see what they had so he knew they'd buried something but he just didn't know what it was and then went in and discovered exactly what it was did he use his own shovel

was it returned to him so he could dig it back up he hadn't got the shovel back at this stage he He must have just, yeah, actually. Well, it's funny you say that because there is a little bit of a discrepancy in some of the accounts. The newspapers are reporting this, obviously, pretty quickly at the time, once Trevenio is arrested. And there's this idea that the uncle followed them straight away and watched them. There's then also this idea that he waited a few hours

and followed them later. Either way, he followed and he uncovered what they were doing. Trevino was arrested. And then he tried to, this is odd. And this, again, speaks to me of something of a fiction, even though it was reported as fact at the time, because this is not from Harris. This is from the newspapers.

He then tried to bribe the police, apparently. Okay, fine. Well, not fine, but I'm with you. I'm listening to the newspapers. He then tried to bribe the police, apparently. Okay, fine. Well, not fine, but I'm with you. I'm listening to the story. But then it says he confessed to the crime and proudly detailed his precision perfect method of dismemberment. Now, that's not impossible. But the man that we meet later on, it doesn't add up to this. So I'm just wondering if, again, if there's this fictionalization around the fact happening at the time as the crime's unfolding well i'm thinking the whole murder from the details that you're telling me just it doesn't really quite make

sense so we know he's a medical doctor right yes okay so he is in a homosexual relationship at a time when that's not allowed, so they are presumably conducting that in private. There's a violent moment where he knocks his partner unconscious. Again, that's the effect of explosive rage. It seems really sudden. It seems unplanned. But the next thing he does is inject

him with something that's going to make him unconscious and helpless then kills him with a scalpel that is the opposite of violent yeah and there's something there about the yes the precision of it but to me that that doesn't go with the violence and the shock of knocking him unconscious in the first place. There would be other ways to do that if you're a doctor interested in precision. did our episode on Palmer the Poisoner, there was so much fascination in the 19th century in Britain with, yes, the panic about the fact that doctors are meant to be reliable, good people who help you, but something about the way that he used the tools available to him. And that's what we're seeing here with Alfredo. And I just wonder if, I wonder if there's a similar press interest happening in the 1960s. I think in the 60s as well. This is an era of hippies, of free love, of experimentation with drugs.

And I wonder if that's creeping in here in terms of the coverage that this case gets and the way that it becomes sensationalized, fictionalized. I mean, the murder itself is horrendous but there are these the way that it's being told as you say there are sort of discrepancies and additions augmentations to the story yeah it i i think it's interesting that's that the context in which the story is emerging in the press, right, because we have the violence of war going on in the background, like we said, Vietnam War. We have the violence of the civil rights movement that's often perpetrated against a large portion of the black community in America at this time. We have the violence of the assassination of a president. So there is violence in this society.

It's quite present and it's quite masculine. It's quite male-driven. And so we have here then this example of men committing crimes against, violent, murderous crimes against one another in a really domestic way. violent, murderous crimes against one another in a really domestic way. And it seems that that kind of male violence and murderous intent is creeping across politics, across domestic settings, across the international stage. And it's really everywhere by the looks of it in 1963.

Tell me this. How do the press deal with the fact that Alfredo and Jesus are in a sexual relationship? We think about the understanding and portrayal of masculinity in America in this period. Is their relationship and the crime, are those both causes for concern in the press? Are they dealt with in different ways? You know what? You talk about the sexual relationship, which we know they did have.

But actually, one of the main things to come out of it is the sentimental relationship between them as opposed to the sexual relationship that they had, which is interesting. Mexico is also very well known for its pro-LGBTQ plus communities there. And it became, Mexico often became a haven

for a lot of queer people from America. They would often go to Mexico, despite some of the other problems socially and culturally that were happening. There was a queer element to Mexico a lot for a very long time. So in that sense, it wasn't the center of the reporting.

When it did become a little bit more contentious was with the release of the movie. This representation of LGBTQ plus people in... So I'm talking now about the character of Buffalo Bill in the movie Silence of the Lambs. So we're moving away slightly from Trevino himself and seeing how that linking of queer people represented in these scenarios is impacting later on in the movie. So Buffalo Bill is shown as what people have described as a bisexual trans murderer. So that's pretty intense. I don't know. Can you remember the movie? Is it a while since you've seen it? I mean, I'd say it's probably several years, but in terms of basic plot for anyone who hasn't seen it, Hannibal Lecter is already an infamous cannibal. He's

in prison, in a very high security prison. And Jodie Foster's character is, I think, like a trainee detective, and it's one of her first cases, and she has to prove herself. And she goes to interview him as part of her search to catch a different serial killer who's still at large, who seems to be abducting and murdering women and so the movie plays out with her going to the prison having these conversations with hannibal where he sort of tries to help her but famously they have this sort of mental wrestling going on and it's a whole thing and their relationship's really complicated and then outside the prison you have her trying to catch this other killer yes and it's that other

killer that is coded as queer or has been coded as queer in the movie. So we're talking about Buffalo Bill here for anybody who is familiar with the movie. And he has been described in very flattering terms as a deranged bisexual trans murderer. Now, caveat that the producers of the film have said since that actually Buffalo Bill is not really a trans character at all. But the film was controversial when it was released because the LGBTQ plus activist group Queer Nation protested at the 1992 Academy Awards ceremony because of the representation of queer people in cinema. I mean, think about it. This 1992. What's that?

Is that 30 years ago? God, that's depressing, is it? Is it it is it yes 30 years it is 32 years ago and don't ask me how i know that oh okay we're not asking at all no questions about age on this podcast thank you um but the but apparently that's likely not it's not probable that it's linked to the fact that Trevelyan was gay. I don't know how unlikely that is. I think there was a queer element. If this is the person who inspired the character of Hannibal Lecter and there was a queer element to that story. And then this queer element finds its own way into the movie in a different but related way.

Then I don't know. I think it might somewhat be related. If it is related, it's a pretty negative representation. But again, the context of 1992, there ain't much positive queer representation happening in cinema at that time. So we've talked about the fact that Harris in 2013 looks back over his life

and he credits Alfredo and his visit to the prison as this moment, this lightning strike of inspiration. But this isn't the only true life crime story that he has credited as being the foundation for Hannibal Lecter, is it? No. And this is where fact and fiction, history and story start to blur the lines, right? Because apparently a librarian came out after people had identified Treveño as Hannibal Lecter and said, well, Harris had told her that the inspiration was a William Coyne who was an escaped prisoner who went on a cannibalistic rampage in 1930s Mississippi.

So, and that would feed into what you've described already about Hannibal being a cannibal. But at the same time, fictionally, Hannibal didn't start life as a cannibal, that came in later. So this could be this librarian crossing ideas or misremembering something. So it's difficult because I think Trevino is obviously front and centre of the inspiration, but then there's obviously other things creeping in as well, which is fiction, right? That's what you would expect.

And I think it's interesting that the sort of mythology that grows up around this, that there is, yes, the blurring of these lines. In terms of Alfredo, though, he continues to work as a doctor in prison. Within the prison. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he did. And this is also where some of this is interesting.

Again, that history story thing. So he continues to work as a doctor informally in prison. I mean, the prison guards are using him to treat other prisoners. And he treated Simmons because Simmons famously tried to escape and was shot. And Trevino was his doctor when that happened. shot. And Trevino was his doctor when that happened. And one kind of strangely, one source told a Mexican newspaper that Trevino had helped many people in jail and he became so good, I'm quoting now, that with time he was even allowed to go out at nights to see patients. Like private patients? Go out where? Patients in the public? Patients in the public? I don't know.

This is the only piece of information that we get about that. And again, it's newspaper reporting. This isn't, you know, coming from the source himself or it's not coming from... But the story was going around at the time that he was allowed

to go and see patients. And a prison guard apparently told Thomas Harris that he was insane, but not insane with the poor, that he was very kind towards the poor. He was very helpful, very emotionally driven when it came to poor people. So it's an odd, odd juxtaposition based on what we hear at the end and what we heard that he did at the murder scene with Jesus. It's a central theme

of silence of the lambs as well as well one of the central themes this idea that doctors are inherently trustworthy and yeah that's why we fall down and it's just fascinating to me that in real life alfredo was given this freedom to a certain extent to practice on people even though it was his medical knowledge and the tools of his trade that he used to commit a really violent murder and not only to commit the murder but to dispose of the body of the man that he supposedly loved or was in a relationship with it's remarkable to me that anyone would trust him again whether or not this is true or whether this is just something that's being reported in the newspapers and if it is just being reported in the newspapers it says so much again about storytelling and how these these crimes true crime or generally

is mythologized how people build story around that and you know i think there might be truth to it and the reason i'm saying that is because originally he was sentenced to death, but that was later commuted to 20 years. And so he was released. We think, well, it's difficult to tell. Some reports say that he was released in 1978. Other reports leave it as late as the year 2000. So that's a huge discrepancy there.

But he was definitely released. We do know that because he went to work in a small clinic in Monterey and he gave an interview in 2008. Now, it was a doorstep interview, so I don't think he had, you know, it wasn't a sit down. He wasn't looking to share his story, as far as I'm aware. But this is what he said. And I know we're often wary of sharing the words of killers on this podcast'm aware. But this is what he said. And I know we're often wary of sharing the words of killers on this podcast, but I think this is interesting. He said, I don't want to relive my dark past. I don't want to wake up my ghosts. It's very hard. The past is heavy. And the truth is that this angst I have is unbearable. Isn't that kind of

haunting? It's very eloquent for someone doorstepped by a journalist as well. To me, that says he's at least thought what he would say if asked. Yeah, you're right. The fact that he's released from prison is so interesting and it makes me think, is it the end of Silence of the Lambs where Hannibal escapes from prison? And I think he calls Clarice Jodie Foster's character yeah there's a phone call isn't there yeah and he says something he sort of looks to the camera knowingly and says

something about he's going to have dinner now or something you know and this has that feeling about it a little bit of you know releasing someone who's committed such a okay he's not necessarily been a cannibal but he's he's committed such a brutal okay, he's not necessarily been a cannibal, but he's committed such a brutal crime. You know what, though? His reputation after he was released had a bit of a rehabilitation because he spent his final years helping the poor and the elderly, apparently.

And that gained him some respect in the community in which he was working. And he died then. Alfredo Treveño died in February 2009. He died in his sleep and people mourned his passing. I'm not just talking about family members, but people in the wider community. It was just a really interesting tension

between what he had done in 1963 and what happens then at the end of his life. This has made me want to revisit Silence of the Lambs now, I think. Do you think, now that you've researched this history for the episode, and we know a little bit about Alfredo's story, about Harris's story, his life as a journalist, and the people that you met, has it given you a different perspective on the film?

Will you watch it with different eyes now? I will, but not maybe in the way one might think. the reason i will watch it slightly differently is because i'll be asking myself a question and the question is why do we want to think that these stories are based on true events or true people what does it add to something that's so horrendous already that we're seeing unfold in front of our eyes in real time, i.e. movie time, that we need that extra layer of reality infused in it to really unsettle us, to go, actually, somebody didn't just dream this up. This happened and somebody thought like this and somebody did these things. So that's the question I'll ask myself. Why is it, like you talked about Fargo earlier,

why Fargo are clearly coming into something there where they're saying based on true events that captivates people's imagination. I don't know if you remember, oh gosh, what was it? Oh yeah, the Blair Witch Project. Like the campaign of that was that these were true events initially before it came out. So we want for some reason to believe that there is history in stories.

And that's fascinating. So yeah, the next time I'm watching Science of the Lambs, I'll be thinking about some of this real history that went to inform the fiction. But that seems like a good place to wrap it up. Thank you to everybody who's tuned in as ever. Please do follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Leave us a review.

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