Last Updated on April 10, 2022
Would-be Reagan assassin John Hinckley has rebranded himself as a songwriter and recently announced that will be performing at a concert in NYC this summer. Hinckley shot then-President Reagan, White House Press Secretary James Brady and a D.C. Metro police officer in 1981.
“Big news!! I will be performing on July 8 at the Market Hotel in Brooklyn, NY,” Hinckley wrote in a tweet promoting the concert. The failed assassin noted that “special guests” would be in attendance at the July 8 event, though he did not give specifics. “Get your tickets while you can.”
The Hinckley concert was confirmed in a post on the hotel’s Instagram Story, with tickets going for $20.
“In December 2020, Hinckley, now 66, created a YouTube account in an attempt to jump-start a long-simmering dream of working in the music industry,” the New York Post said in a report. Since then, he has uploaded more than three dozen videos to the account, which has more than 26,000 subscribers. Hinckley has written songs titled “May Your Dreams Come True,” “Can’t We Get Along” and “You and I Are Free” and has done covers of songs from the likes of Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Elvis Presley.
Last December, Hinckley announced plans to start his own record label. The would-be assassin plans to name the label “Emporia Records”, which will premiere with a 14-song CD of his music. He also said that interested musicians could submit their own CD or cassette demos to him via a Post Office box in Williamsburg, Virginia.
According to the New York Post, Hinckley currently has 29 tracks available on iTunes and Spotify. His latest single, “Dark is the Night”, was released on April 1.
Hinckley shot Reagan as part of a deranged fantasy that doing so would gain him favor with then 18-year-old movie star Jodie Foster. he became obsessed with Jodie after watching the 1976 movie, The Taxi Driver, in which she played the role of a prostitute named Iris Steensma. Hinckley wrote a letter to Foster a day before he shot Reagan and multiple others with his revolver outside a Washington Hotel. “Jodie, I’m asking you to please look into your heart and at least give me the chance with this historical deed to gain your respect and love,” reads a section of the letter.
Just a month prior to his NYC concert, Hinckley will be granted an “unconditional release” this upcoming June. “I am going to, after all these years, grant unconditional release to Mr. Hinckley,” U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman said during a court hearing in the District of Columbia last June. In 2016, Friedman allowed Hinckley to move out of a Washington psychiatric hospital, where he had lived for three decades, in order to live with his mother.
