Buffalo Bill (character)

Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumb
Hannibal Lecter character
Created by	Thomas Harris
Portrayed by	Ted Levine, William Wubbolt
Information
Aliases	John Grant Jack Gordon
Gender	Male

Jame Gumb (known by the nickname Buffalo Bill) is a character and the primary antagonist of Thomas Harris's 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs and its 1991 film adaptation, in which he is played by Ted Levine. In the film and the novel, he is a serial killer who murders overweight women and skins them so he can make a "woman suit" for himself.

According to the novel, Gumb was born in California on October 25, 1949, and abandoned by his mother – an alcoholic prostitute who misspelled "James" on his birth certificate – and taken into foster care at age two. The screenplay omits Gumb's backstory, but does imply that he had a traumatic childhood. Lecter summarizes Gumb's life thus: "Billy was not born a criminal, but made one by years of systematic abuse."

The novel goes on to tell of Gumb living in foster homes until the age of 10 before being adopted by his grandparents, who became his first victims. The story then puts him in Tulare Vocational Rehabilitation, a psychiatric hospital where he learns to be a tailor. Later, Gumb has a relationship with Benjamin Raspail. After Raspail leaves him, he kills Raspail's new lover, Klaus, and flays him.

Both the novel and film depict Gumb as a tortured and self-hating individual. Believing himself to be transgender, he wants to become a woman but is too psychologically disturbed to qualify for gender reassignment surgery. He kills women so he can skin them and create a "woman suit" for himself.

Gumb's modus operandi is to approach a woman, pretending to be injured and asking for help, then knocking her out in a surprise attack and kidnapping her. He takes her to his house and leaves her in a well in his basement, where he starves her until her skin is loose enough to easily remove. In the first three cases, he leads the victims upstairs, slips nooses around their necks and pushes them from the stairs, strangling them. He then skins parts of their body (a different section on each victim), and then dumps each body into a different river, destroying any trace evidence. This MO caused the homicide squad to nickname him Buffalo Bill (Buffalo Bill's Wild West show typically claimed that Buffalo Bill Cody had scalped a Cheyenne warrior). One officer quipped it was because he "skins his humps." In the case of Gumb's first victim, Fredrica Bimmel, he weighed down her body, so she ends up being the third victim found. In the case of the fourth victim, he shoots her instead of strangling her, then inserts a moth into her throat and dumps the body.

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