Six Shots at a Nation's Heart

April 13, 1981 TIME Cover: Moment of Madness
What Happened and Why Can It Never Be Stopped?

(9 of 10)

Within moments of Hinckley's arrest the FBI dispatched its agents to weave a net of evidence that would form the legal case against him. They found the unmailed letter to Jodie Foster in his Washington hotel room —a note that amounted to a highly explicit confession. The investigators also found a tape recording of telephone conversations between Hinckley and a woman who might have been Foster; it is possible that Hinckley made the calls anonymously.

Thrust innocently into a national spotlight she had not sought, the actress held a news conference at Yale to confirm that she had received many "unsolicited" love notes from Hinckley. None had mentioned the President, she said, and none had contained any hints of violence.

But the letters became so persistent that last month she gave the ones she had not earlier destroyed to her college dean. He turned them over to campus police, who found nothing in them that would warrant warning anyone else about Hinckley.

Demonstrating the importance of registering handgun sales, the Treasury Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms within minutes discovered where Hinckley had purchased the weapon: at Rocky's Pawn Shop in Dallas. If Hinckley had somehow eluded capture, tracing this sale would have given the FBI the gunman's identity.

FBI agents are convinced that there was no plot, no conspiracy and that Hinckley had acted on his own. Nonetheless, they were busy tracing his past connections with the Chicago-based National Socialist Party of America. A neo-Nazi group, it claims to have expelled him in 1979 for being "too militant." Agents were also puzzling over evidence suggesting that the suspect may have been stalking Reagan in Washington last December, and that someone was expecting him in the city just before the shooting. In Hinckley's hotel room, police and FBI agents found clippings from a Dec. 10 article in the Washington Post. The next day Reagan visited the Hilton to address a meeting convened by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. Reagan left the hotel through the same exit he used when Hinckley tried to kill him. Agents so far have been unable to trace the two calls Hinckley made after checking into the Park Central. Hotel employees said two calls were made to his room. One was a wrong number —a woman trying to reach a relative who was registered elsewhere in the hotel. The other was from an unidentified woman who asked for Hinckley by name.

The rapidity of the shots fired at the Hilton made it difficult for the FBI to pinpoint the sequence of the multiple wounding. Studying the video tapes and the ballistics evidence, the FBI tentatively concluded that Reagan was hit after he had been doubled over by Agent Parr and was being pushed into his car. In a freak bit of chance, the bullet apparently bounced off the car's window frame and through the narrow gap between the open door and the car body.

But had the Secret Service done all it could to protect the President? As congressional committees began a series of post-assault probes, there was lavish praise for Agent McCarthy, who had stepped into the line of fire at the risk of his own life. Agent Parr too was complimented for his fast reaction. Contended one veteran agent: "Everyone did exactly what he was