Real Encounters

*The Numbers*

Back in the ’60s, my dad worked as a guard at a prison near Miami. He described his most memorable experience to me recently. He says that there was one prisoner who was a lot like a younger Hannibal Lecter. Very calm but very menacing. He always kept his cool no matter what, but there was something threatening about him.

Well one day, Young Lecter was able to start a riot on his cell block, purely by motivating the other prisoners into a frenzy. He didn’t participate in the riot at all, but he got every other prisoner to start a fit in their cell.

My dad and a few other guards were called down to the cell block to quiet them all down. He says that when he got down there, every prisoner was screaming and throwing themselves against the walls of their cells, and shouting profanity and insults to the guards. That is, every prisoner except Lecter. He was the only quiet one on the whole block. My dad came up close to his cell, and this guy was standing near the back with his hands folded, staring my dad directly in the eye, and muttering a random sequence of numbers with a strange smile on his face. My dad stood there, trying to figure out what the numbers meant, and then it finally hit him. The prisoner was reciting my dad’s home phone number on repeat.

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Note: Dr. Hannibal Lecter is a fictional character in a series of suspense novels by Thomas Harris.

Lecter was introduced in the 1981 thriller novel Red Dragon as a forensic psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer. 

Thomas Harris has given few interviews, and did not explain where he got inspiration for Hannibal Lecter until mid 2013. Harris revealed that the character was inspired by a real-life Mexican doctor and murderer he met while visiting a prison in Monterrey city, in the state of Nuevo León, during a trip to México in the 1960s, when he was a 23-year-old reporter. The doctor was serving life after murdering a young man, supposedly a "close friend", mutilating his body into several body parts and putting them in a very small box. Harris, who would only refer to the surgeon by the fake name "Dr. Salazar", described him as a "small lithe pale man with dark red hair". He added: "There was certain intelligence and elegance about him."

Several reporters and investigators have traced the records and whereabouts of the Mexican prison doctor in later years and discovered that "Salazar" was in reality Alfredo Ballí Treviño, a physician from an upper-class Monterrey family who was found guilty of murdering a close friend (and lover) and mutilating his body; he was also suspected of killing and dismembering several hitchhikers in the city outskirts during the late 1950s and early 1960s.