The Real Killers Who Inspired 'The Silence of the Lambs'

When the movie The Silence of the Lambs debuted in 1991, audiences were transfixed by one its villains, Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb, a character so disturbing that he felt eerily real. That uneasy familiarity was no accident. In his 1988 novel of the same name, author Thomas Harris crafted Buffalo Bill as a composite figure, drawing on traits, methods and psychological patterns from several of America’s most notorious killers.

According to criminologist John Douglas, Harris found inspiration from a lecture Douglas once gave on killers, including Ted Bundy, Ed Gein and Gary Heidnik. Their murderous crimes had shocked the public and became key to Harris’s work. 

Gein’s crimes formed the brutal foundation for Buffalo Bill’s signature behavior. When police entered Gein’s isolated Wisconsin farmhouse in 1957, they found one of the most grotesque crime scenes in American history: chairs upholstered with human skin, bowls made from skulls, masks fashioned from faces and clothing. Their most shocking discovery was a “woman suit” constructed from preserved body parts. Gein confessed to exhuming recently buried women whose bodies he believed resembled his deceased mother, then using their remains in his macabre craftwork. He also admitted to killing two women, though most of his “material” came from grave sites.

Buffalo Bill’s actions in The Silence of the Lambs closely parallel these details but are even more depraved. Rather than rob graves like Gein did, Buffalo Bill carefully chooses live victims, selecting them for specific physical characteristics. He then starves and skins them before using their hides to construct his own suit. Like Gein, it’s his attempt to transform himself through the literal use of another person’s flesh. The idea of wearing another’s skin as a means of identity alteration is directly connected to Gein’s crimes.

Bundy’s influence on Buffalo Bill comes primarily through the killer’s manipulative strategy for approaching victims. Bundy, one of America’s most notorious serial killers, sometimes feigned vulnerability—wearing a fake cast, using crutches or pretending to struggle with heavy objects—to gain the trust of the young women he murdered. Once they offered assistance, he incapacitated and abducted them. This tactic is directly recreated in The Silence of the Lambs in one of the film’s most memorable scenes: Buffalo Bill asking a woman to help him load a sofa into a van and then overpowering her once she is within reach.

Bundy’s ability to appear harmless also helped shape Buffalo Bill’s outward persona. Bundy was widely described as charming, intelligent and clean-cut. These traits allowed him to move easily through society without raising suspicion. Buffalo Bill, though more socially isolated, uses a similar facade. He presents himself as nonthreatening, in need of help and even awkward, masking the violence he is preparing to unleash on his victims. 

Heidnik’s crimes provided the template for Buffalo Bill’s imprisonment of his victims. In 1987, Philadelphia police discovered that Heidnik had kidnapped several women and held them captive in a makeshift dungeon in the basement of his home. He kept the women restrained for extended periods, subjecting them to severe physical and psychological abuse before murdering them. The horror of discovering such crimes in a seemingly ordinary home captured national attention and remains one of the most disturbing cases in U.S. history.

Actor Ted Levine, who portrayed Buffalo Bill in the film, prepared by watching taped interviews of a killer, possibly Heidnick, who discussed how he’d kidnapped and held women in a basement lair, giving him key insights into the role. Like Heidnik, Buffalo Bill also creates a basement pit of horrors where he can exert complete control over his prey. It’s where he keeps Catherine Martin captive, lowering food, water and instructions to her from above as she frantically searches for a way out. 

This aspect of Silence of the Lambs closely mirrors Heidnik’s terrifying tactics. While the fictional Buffalo Bill’s motive is tied to his desire to create a skin suit, the mechanics of captivity, isolation and the transformation of a suburban home into hidden site of torture is reminiscent of Heidnik’s case.

Rather than replicate a single criminal, Harris blended elements from multiple cases, creating a villain whose crimes echoed real-world horrors while forming something uniquely unsettling. As Harris said in a rare interview about his work and its true-crime inspiration, “Everything has happened. Nothing’s made up. You don’t have to make anything up in this world.”