On Friday afternoon, I found myself Ubering through Colonial Williamsburg—past wood-barrel trash cans and spilt-rail pens of dirty sheep—en route to an address that had been tweeted by John Hinckley, Jr., the man who shot Ronald Reagan in 1981. Outside the town center, I cruised a forlorn strip of auto-related establishments, then disembarked at a low-slung building of whitewashed brick. I was looking for Hinckley’s new record store, whose “grand opening,” he’d said online, would occur in one or two weeks.
At first glance, I saw no sign of him. The address was a desolate strip mall: a tax preparator, a Domino’s, a Spanish-language storefront church. As I took it in, a skinny white guy hopped into a pizza delivery car with a Jesus bumper sticker. A couple of vehicles queued at the Hardee’s by the road. It felt a little surreal. This was where I might locate the man who shot the president? Between a vacant party store and a darkened Jazzercise studio? History had spat him out here?
I wasn’t frightened, exactly, at the prospect of encountering one of the 20th century’s most fearsome lone gunmen. In 2016, after a 30-plus-year, court-mandated psychiatric hospitalization, a federal judge declared Hinckley rehabilitated and placed him into the care of his mother. For a half-dozen years, he lived under various legal restrictions, which were all unconditionally lifted in 2022. At that point, for the first time in 41 years, Hinckley was a totally free man. With that liberty, he chose to pursue a creative life.
These days, one typically encounters Hinckley through his YouTube songs, his eBay store where he sells paintings of his cat, and his social media posts. (“Violence is not the way to go. Give peace a chance,” he notably tweeted after Donald Trump was shot in July.) Hinckley has also been sporadically in the news, mostly for his 2022 attempt at a “Redemption Tour,” in which he booked a series of shows at music venues across the nation, all of which were scrapped due to public backlash. Hinckley declared himself a “victim of cancel culture,” which got a lot of pickup online.
What made folks queasy about the Redemption Tour seemed to be the attention-seeking, the fact that nobody would have cared about the YouTube croonings of a random 67-year-old in Virginia, but since he’d put a bullet in the lung of an American president, he could trade on his notoriety to sell out shows. There was also the eerie resonance with his crime. Hinckley had no political goal when he shot Reagan; he simply wanted to be in the newspaper—to become equivalently famous to Jodie Foster, whom he hoped (due to his acute psychiatric delusions) that his act of violence would impress. In booking the Redemption Tour, Hinckley seemed to want people to look at him, to hear his music, to know his name. The continuity of impulse scared folks, I think. Last time, it didn’t lead anywhere good.
Opening a record shop, though, struck me as a significant humbling. Hinckley would not grow his infamy as a downmarket entrepreneur, the proprietor of a tiny retail store a couple miles from Colonial Williamsburg. If he had his own space, he could—at worst—regale his audiences without fear that his gigs would be shut down. At best, he’d create a little haven where he could sling records and live a life centered on music, which even before the shooting he’d aspired to do.
I guess that’s why I went down there. This version of Hinckley’s redemption seemed more plausible to me—his oddball passion project a modest gesture of hope, a stab at a third act from the kind of person who usually wouldn’t get a second. It also seemed a little doomed. Most small businesses fail.
The address Hinckley tweeted didn’t specify the record store’s suite, so I began searching for him at one end of the strip mall—peering into a darkened boxing gym, the hardwood expanse of the Jazzercise studio, a cramped church with a fake-floral altar. Then I saw a sizable red for-rent sign hanging on a grimy storefront window. This must be it, I thought—the future record store. I knocked to no avail.
At the next shop over, an unmarked business with a kitchen of gleaming stainless steel, a man answered the door. I introduced myself as a reporter. “Oh, are you here about Hinckley?” he asked.
This was Chris Waller, a burly food-truck owner in the process of opening a smashburger spot. “Never met him, never seen him,” Waller said of his rumored new neighbor—but he knew about the record store from an article his dad had sent, which he figured a lot of other people must have read, too. “Traffic has increased crazily lately,” he told me. “I’ve seen a lot more cars through here in the last few days.”
“How do you feel about him moving in?” I asked.
“Rather not say.”
“Would you buy records from him?”
“No, but I also don’t have a record player. I think most music stores are going out of business with streaming and everything.”
Waller sent me off with a tip: The “space available” sign had recently come down from the old party store a few doors down, so he figured that’s what Hinckley had leased. But to confirm, he said, I could ask the landlords; the Extra Space Storage at the building’s very end apparently owned the whole strip.
Searching “John Hinckley” on YouTube returns a mix of results: news segments, documentary clips, and a video of Hinckley’s own—entitled “John Hinckley Speaks About Peace and Harmony”—which he recorded after the attempted assassination of former president Trump. “I know I’m known for an act of violence,” Hinckley says, “but I live a peaceful life now.” With a flat and expressionless drawl, he urges listeners to “try and reject violence in all its forms.” The video is stripped-down and unpolished; the camera peers up at him, computer screen glinting against his dark aviators. “This is the strangest fucking timeline the world could’ve possibly ever gotten,” the top comment reads.
Mostly, Hinckley’s YouTube is music. There he is—portly and wan, a splash of thinning white hair—singing dozens of mournful songs into his computer while strumming an acoustic guitar. That guitar is the color of caramel and adorned with white block letters that spell out Hinckley’s own name. His songs are classic Americana, coffeeshop fare. They’re earnest. Traditional. His voice is largely in tune.
In Hinckley’s lyrics—which are blunt and rudimentary, self-reflective and searching—one often hears a kind of plea: “I got through the darkest night / Now I hope to make things right.” Or, “You never thought I’d be free / You don’t know a different side of me.” Sometimes, when he records a song with his sunglasses off, you can glimpse the man from the mugshot—25 years old, light eyes, arched eyebrows, a snub nose. In one video, the ghost of that young man sings, “Tomorrow is another day / The best is yet to come / I have found a different way / It’s baffling to some.”
“Redemption” is a key word in the John Hinckley universe—the name of his thwarted tour and his debut album. On his website, he refers to the “National Redemption Party” as the “political wing” of the John Hinckley fan community. Redemption can mean a lot of things: In religion, it’s to be cleansed of sin. In the sense of redeeming a token, it’s to collect something that you’re owed. “My definition of redemption is to make amends for all the negativity that I created in 1981,” Hinckley told the New York Times Magazine in July. “I’m trying to redeem myself through positive music, through a thing that people really like—as opposed to the things they really hated about me in 1981.”
Hinckley’s post-release behavior has seemed, in some ways, perfectly calibrated to strain the public’s moral intuitions about justice. He shot perhaps the highest profile target on earth—plus a cop, a Secret Service officer, and a presidential aide—and lived to walk free. Maybe that’s the law working as intended: rehabilitating a man then returning him to his life. And maybe it’s a failure of the system. Reagan’s daughter, Patti Davis, has said as much, writing that she and the other victims’ families still feel the day of the shooting “like a shredded nerve that will never heal.” Davis opposed Hinckley’s release, but even if you support it, there’s still the question of his music career. What to do with a man who is legally free but behaving—at least to a large swath of the public—in such poor taste? Is it intellectually coherent to believe that Hinckley is entitled to his freedom, but not to use that freedom to seek fame?
In 2022, when Hinckley first announced his Redemption Tour, I reported a short piece where I called around to various DC music venues and asked the owners if they’d hypothetically book him. Bill Spieler of DC9 said absolutely not; he lived in DC in 1981 and remembered the city’s terror. But Sandra Basanti of Pie Shop wouldn’t rule it out. She said she was “very against demonizing people who have a history” and that “if they’ve successfully served their time, they should be allowed to come out and live a life.” Dante Ferrando from the Black Cat told me it would largely depend on Hinckley’s music. While he’d “only listened to, like, a couple seconds of it,” the song he heard “sounded like music. I mean, it sounded like something that would be a legitimate submission.”
All of these answers, disparate as they are, seem like defensible responses to Hinckley’s bid for a public platform. I think that’s part of what’s compelling about him, what so rankles the American psyche: He’s an unsolvable moral riddle, a persistent and unbanishable ghost. Is his music an attempt to honor the gift of his freedom, or a betrayal of it? Does he owe it to the public he terrorized to make himself scarce? Or as someone who’s served his time, is he entitled to try to make amends?
And is it possible that what he owes society is no longer the question? That maybe, having done his time, he deserves to be taken on his own terms, as himself?
En route to the Extra Space Storage, I indulged in a minor detour, popping into Domino’s to ask what its employees might have seen. A graying woman rolling out dough knew nothing of any record store, but she seemed less ruffled by the prospect of John Hinckley than by the audacity of his plan.
“People still buy records?” she said. “Good for them.”
“I really don’t care if he has a past,” this woman continued. “If we don’t let them work, how are they truly going to be rehabilitated?” But she wasn’t confident Hinckley would be working at all, since he didn’t seem to have much business sense: “There are not any workmen coming and going, and it would seem dumb to open after Christmas, because I would think your sales would not be that great.”
“Wait,” she said before I left, “so he assassinated JFK?”
Around the corner, I found the airy front office of Extra Space Storage. At the desk, the youngish, hoodied employee initially gave me his full name, then later texted to request I not use it. This was apparently due to his wife’s squeamishness that he’d talked to me on the subject of John Hinckley at all—particularly, I assume, because he likened Hinckley opening a record store to “the Green River Killer setting up a daycare” and said that he would not become a customer.
This man knew nothing of the rental transactions occurring in the storefronts to his left, but he gave me the phone number of someone who would—the facility’s commercial leasing manager, who could tell me if Hinckley was the party store’s new tenant. But before I called, I decided to see if Hinckley was there; it seemed possible that I might find him inside, industriously setting up shop.
Next to the Domino’s, the colorful “Parties Galore, Cakes & More” sign still hung. Through the door, I saw a small front room painted sage, festive stripes of blue and pink ringing the walls at waist height. Behind it were some architecturally odd details: a back-room flanked by saloon doors, cabinetry glimpsed through a cut-out in the wall. Right out front, maybe 20 feet from the door, flew a faded and tattered American flag.
In his tweet—which is now deleted—Hinckley had claimed that the grand opening was imminent. But this storefront was deserted, lacking any evidence at all of human life: no albums, no decorations, not even a desk or a chair. Standing in the cold, I felt queasy. How did I not take more seriously that the record store might have been a delusion, that perhaps it was never actually meant to exist?
For years, per the courts, Hinckley was not allowed to speak to the press—in part to curb his grandiosity, but also to protect him. An onslaught of attention, it was thought, might derail his delicate transition back to everyday life. That restriction has been lifted, which still doesn’t make it defensible for a reporter to hunt him down, to scrutinize the erratic business practices of a mentally ill sexagenarian who spent his adult life sequestered from the world. I knew that when I got on the train to Williamsburg. I went anyway. I told myself it was fine to entertain the possibility that this record store might give him a new life. Undeniably, though, I was also there to wring content from a clinically disturbed man whose future could never outrun his past.
Since Hinckley wasn’t there, I needed to email him for comment, although I had no expectation that he would reply. But that evening, as I rode the Amtrak back to DC, he popped up in my inbox. The record store, he told me, was “on hold.” His vision had apparently been to sell his collection of about 1,000 rock albums, plus some guitars—but he got blowback over the announcement and “didn’t feel comfortable opening a store when there was such a negative reaction.” The landlord from Extra Space Storage never returned my calls, but after publication, a company spokesperson emailed a statement: “I can confirm John Hinckley expressed an interest in renting the property, but that’s where his interaction with us ended. There was no lease agreement finalized.”
Contemplating the death—or at least the deferral—of Hinckley’s dream, I thought back to a moment at the strip mall, when I waited for an Uber inside a nearby Family Dollar. There, I spoke with a manager, Shemica Parker, a slender woman in gold necklaces and a bright red “Merry Christmas” shirt. I asked how she felt about John Hinckley moving in a few doors down, and she said, “To be honest, I’m a people’s person, I love everybody.” But would she buy one of his records? “If his music is good, I would,” she said, then pulled up his YouTube on her phone.
Over a speaker by the register, Hinckley’s song “Lonely Dreamer” began to play. We listened for a moment in silence, surrounded by bottles of DayQuil and Roblox gift cards and plastic candy canes filled with Skittles. As Hinckley sang about dreaming his life away and prevailing through troubles, Parker nodded and smiled. “I like this type of music,” she said. “A couple of months ago, I was going through something—a terrible, terrible situation. I was alone and daydreaming and sitting there just thinking and thinking and thinking. And once you listen to music like this, it relaxes you.”
Parker told me that she wouldn’t have expected that a man like Hinckley would sing, and we discussed, for a moment, his arc: the shooting, the insanity defense, the hospitalization, his faltering quest for redemption. “People go through things,” Parker said. “Some things happen when you go through life. He did the crime, and he did the time, so now just give the man a second chance.”
