The last man to shoot an American president now spends most of the year in a house overlooking the 13th hole of a golf course in a gated community.
He likes taking walks, plays guitar and paints, eats at Wendy’s and drives a Toyota. Often, as if to avoid detection, he puts on a hat or visor before going out.
John Hinckley Jr. lives much of the year like any average Joe: shopping, eating out, watching movies.
Hinckley was 25 when he shot President Ronald Reagan and three others in 1981. When jurors found him not guilty by reason of insanity, they said he needed treatment, not a lifetime in confinement. The verdict left open the possibility that he would one day live outside a mental hospital.
For the past year, under a judge’s order, Hinckley has spent 17 days a month at his mother’s home in Williamsburg, a small southeastern Virginia city. Freedom has come in stages and with strict requirements: meeting regularly in Williamsburg with a psychiatrist and a therapist, volunteering. It has all been part of a lengthy process meant to reintegrate Hinckley, now nearing 60, back into society.
Court hearings are set to begin Wednesday on whether to expand Hinckley’s time in Williamsburg further — possibly permanently.
That leaves some in the place he would call home wondering: Is he ready for life on the outside? And are they ready for him?
Hinckley’s time in Williamsburg is highly scripted. He lives with his mother, Jo Ann, in the community of Kingsmill. He volunteers and drives alone, but only to places where “people will be expecting him.” He must avoid “areas where the president or members of Congress may be visiting.”
The aim is to help him rebuild some semblance of a normal life: to hold a job, make friends. But his progress has been halting, hampered by his notoriety.
Several organizations turned him down for volunteer positions before the librarian at Eastern State Hospital, a facility for the mentally ill, agreed to take him. “Not everyone was real happy about it,” Sandra Kochersperger said.
Hinckley was “very quiet” and “very sweet,” she said. He made copies and shelved books.
“I think John’s paid for what he did. He was in a totally different mind at that time. He was psychotic,” said Kochersperger, who retired in 2013. “I think he needs to be given the opportunity at this stage to try to have some kind of a life.”
Some other residents are also accepting, but others are unwilling to forgive. Kingsmill resident Joe Mann, 73, said Hinckley should remain confined.
“All it takes is one slip, one flip of whatever in the brain caused him to do what he did before,” he said.
Hinckley’s longtime attorney Barry Levine has called those concerns unfounded, and notes that Hinckley’s elderly mother helps supervise him. Lawyers have discussed the inevitable: She will die.
“Time is not our friend. This thing has a growing urgency to it,” Levine told the judge in November 2011.
“The time,” he said, “is now.”
