Within six hours, her blouse is found on the roadside, slit up the back: Buffalo Bill's calling card. In Tennessee, Catherine Baker Martin, daughter of Senator Ruth Martin, is kidnaped. Starling takes the pupa to the Smithsonian, where it is eventually identified as the Black Witch Moth, which would not naturally occur where the victim was found. She also asks why she was sent to fish for information on Buffalo Bill without being told she was doing so Crawford explains that if she had had an agenda, Lecter would never have spoken up. On the basis of Lecter's prediction, Starling believes that he knows who Buffalo Bill really is. Furthermore, autopsy reports indicate that Bill killed her within four days of her capture, much faster than his earlier victims. Triangular patches of skin have also been taken from her shoulders. Starling finds a moth pupa in the throat of the victim, and just as Lecter predicted, she has been scalped.

When Bill's sixth victim is found in West Virginia, Starling helps Crawford perform the autopsy.

The nickname was started by Kansas City Homicide, as a joke that 'he likes to skin his humps.' Throughout the investigation, Starling periodically returns to Lecter in search of information, and the two form a strange relationship in which he offers her cryptic clues in return for information about her troubled and bleak childhood as an orphan. Lecter is serving nine consecutive life sentences in a Maryland mental institution for a brutal series of murders, which involved cannibalism.Ĭrawford's real intention, however, is to try and solicit Lecter's assistance in the hunt for a serial killer dubbed 'Buffalo Bill', whose modus operandi involves kidnapping overweight women, starving them for about three or four days, and then killing and skinning sections of their bodies, before dumping the bodies in nearby rivers. Starling is to present a questionnaire to brilliant forensic psychiatrist and cannibalistic sociopath, Hannibal Lecter. In 1983, Clarice Starling, a young FBI trainee, is asked to carry out an errand by Jack Crawford, the head of the FBI division that draws up psychological profiles of serial killers. The novel was adapted into a film in 1991, which won 5 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The protagonist is FBI Special Agent named Clarice Starling.

Both novels feature the cannibalistic serial killer Dr. First published in 1988, it is the sequel to Harris' 1981 novel Red Dragon. Hannibal The Silence of the Lambs is a novel by Thomas Harris.

Hannibal novel series