10 Mind-Blowing Facts You Never Knew About Hannibal Lecter

In 2013, author Thomas Harris finally revealed that there was indeed a real life inspiration behind the character of the infamous Hannibal Lecter. In an interview with the Times newspaper, Harris revealed that while working as a journalist in 1963, he had been given an assignment to interview an inmate, Dykes Askew Simmons, a mental patient who was incarcerated for the murder of three people.

While in the Nuevo Leon State Prison in Monterrey, Mexico, Harris recounts meeting a man whom he believed to be the prison doctor, going by the name of 'Dr. Salazar'. Salazar had supposedly saved the life of Simmons after he had been shot in an escape attempt a year prior.

After speaking with the prison warden, Harris learned that 'Dr. Salazar' was in fact Alfredo Balli Trevino, an inmate in his own right who had been convicted of murdering his former lover, Jesus Castillo Rangel, by slitting his throat in a crime of passion.The body was dismembered and buried in a garden.

Upon interviewing Trevino, a "small lithe man with dark hair," Harris regarded the man, noting "he stood very still and there was a certain elegance about him." After Trevino began to ask Harris peculiar questions on the nature of Simmons' crimes, Harris began to imagine a fictional doctor who was in fact a secret serial killer and thus, Lecter was born.