Will Graham

Hannibal Tetralogy character
Will Graham
Gender	Male
Ethnicity	White American
Relationships	Molly Graham (wife, divorced)
Current status:	Alive
Portrayed by:	William Petersen (Manhunter) Edward Norton (Red Dragon)

Will Graham is a fictional character in Thomas Harris' 1981 novel Red Dragon.

Character overview

Will Graham is an FBI profiler with the ability to empathize with psychopaths. In the book, as well as the two film versions of it, Graham is portrayed as being disturbed, even disgusted, by his ability.

Profile

This history is based on the novel by Thomas Harris, not any of the screenplays in which Will Graham appears:

Red Dragon establishes Graham's backstory. He had been a homicide detective in New Orleans who had grown up poor in several places, including Biloxi and Lake Erie. He leaves New Orleans to attend graduate school in forensic science at George Washington University. After attaining his degree, Graham goes to work for the FBI's crime lab. Following exceptional work both in the crime lab and in the field, Graham is given a post as teacher at the FBI Academy. During both his field work while at the crime lab and the Academy, Graham is given the title of "Special Investigator" while he is in the field.

In one of Graham's field cases during the 1970s, he tracks a serial killer, who had been stabbing young women, many of them college coeds, in Minnesota for eight months. He eventually catches the killer, Garrett Jacob Hobbs, known as the Minnesota Shrike, and kills him. When a sliver of metal (like the kind found when cutting pipes) is discovered on one of the Shrike's victims, Graham begins to theorize that the killer could be a plumber, or perhaps a construction worker. While investigating different plumbing and building agencies, Graham runs across Hobbs' resignation letter, finding it "peculiar." When Graham finds Hobbs at the suspect's home, Hobbs is repeatedly slashing his own daughter's throat. As Graham appears, Hobbs' wife is on the apartment landing, bleeding from multiple stab wounds, and clutches at Graham before he breaks down the door. He then shoots Hobbs to death with a .38 (Hobbs' daughter survives and eventually returns to normal life following intensive psychotherapy). Graham is profoundly disturbed by the incident, and is referred to the psychiatric ward of Bethesda Naval hospital (in a later letter to Graham, Hannibal Lecter theorizes that what unhinged Graham was not so much the killing as the fact that, secretly, Graham enjoyed doing it). After a month in the hospital, he returns to the FBI.

In 1975, he begins to track down another serial killer known as the "Chesapeake Ripper", who is removing his victims' organs. He notices that a victim with multiple stab wounds has a healed stab wound; according to his medical records, from a hunting accident ten years previous. He tracks down the doctor who treated the victim in the emergency room, now renowned psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter, to see if he remembers any suspicious circumstances surrounding the patient. Lecter is polite and helpful, but claims not to remember very much. Graham, not satisfied, returns to see the doctor in his office (because there was no basis for a warrant), and seeing some antique medical books, realizes that Lecter is the killer he seeks. Graham goes to Lecter's outer office and makes a phone call to the FBI's Baltimore Field Office. Lecter, who has removed his shoes, sneaks up on Graham and slashes his abdomen with a linoleum knife, nearly disemboweling him (in the film he intended to eat Graham's heart as a sign of respect for his courage). FBI agents and Maryland State Troopers arrive and arrest Lecter and Graham spends months recovering in a hospital. It was only a while in the hospital that he realized what had tipped him off - the antique medical diagram Wound Man, whose wounds match exactly those of the Ripper's victim. Graham's capture of Lecter made him a media celebrity (newspapers referred to him as "Super Cop", "Top Cop", and "Hero Cop"), and he was revered as a legend at the F.B.I. A tabloid reporter, Freddy Lounds, sneaks into the hospital where Graham is recuperating, photographing Graham's wounds and humiliating him in the National Tattler. Graham retires after his recovery, and holds a grudge against Lounds.

Three years later, Graham, now living with his wife Molly and her son Willy near Marathon, Florida, is persuaded by his former boss, Jack Crawford, to come out of retirement and help the FBI again in catching a killer nicknamed "The Tooth Fairy". The Tooth Fairy, actually a man named Francis Dolarhyde, had killed two families on a lunar cycle, the first in Birmingham and the second in Atlanta. After studying the crime scenes, Graham consults Lecter on the case, but Lecter gives him only an explanation of why both houses had big enclosed backyards. Lecter later sends Graham's address to Dolarhyde in code, threatening the safety of his wife and stepson. The family are moved first to a cottage owned by Crawford's brother, but Molly later decides to take Willy to stay with her late husband's parents in Oregon. Graham resumes tracking Dolarhyde, and uses Lounds in an attempt to break the coded communication between Lecter and Dolarhyde by giving Lounds false information and also attributing fake insults against Dolarhyde to Lecter, which ultimately results in Dolarhyde kidnapping and brutally murdering Lounds. After linking him to a video production company, Graham, Crawford, and FBI agents arrive at Dolarhyde's home to arrest him, only to find that the killer had set it on fire while his blind girlfriend, Reba McClane, was inside; he then apparently committed suicide. Graham rescues and consoles McClane, and returns home, believing Dolarhyde's reign of terror is over.

However, Dolarhyde's apparent suicide is revealed to have been a ruse. Dolarhyde attacks Graham and his family at their Florida home, stabbing Graham in the face before being killed by Graham's wife. Graham and his family survive, but he is left disfigured. While it is strongly suggested that the ordeal puts a strain on Will and Molly's marriage, the family's eventual fate is unknown. Will Graham is briefly referred to in The Silence of the Lambs, the sequel to Red Dragon when Clarice Starling notes that “Will Graham, the keenest hound ever to run in Crawford’s pack, was a legend at the (FBI) Academy; he was also a drunk in Florida now with a face that’s hard to look at...” Crawford tells her that "his face looks like damned Picasso drew it."^[1]

Films

Graham has been portrayed twice on screen; in Manhunter by William Petersen and again in Red Dragon by Edward Norton.

In both adaptations, his eventual facial disfigurement is downplayed, and he appears to survive with a relatively happy ending, the last scene of Red Dragon showing him reading a letter from Lecter on a boat with his wife and son. Red Dragon also changes the nature of his connection to Lecter; while in the novel he merely met Lecter for the first time while questioning him about the patient, in the film he and Lecter apparently have an older friendship, with Will often consulting Hannibal on several of his cases until Hannibal's true nature is revealed, prompting him to return to Hannibal for information when hunting Dolarhyde.

References

External links

• William L Petersen as Will Graham in "Manhunter"