Buffalo Bill is Jame Gumb, the serial killer Clarice Starling hunts in Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, played by Ted Levine.
Quick Specs
| Real name | Jame Gumb (“Jame,” not James) |
| Created by | Thomas Harris, in The Silence of the Lambs (novel, 1988) |
| Played by | Ted Levine (film, 1991); Simon Northwood, in flashback only (Clarice, 2021) |
| Codename origin | A grim joke by Kansas City homicide officers |
| Aliases | “Jack Gordon”; John Grant (novel) |
| Trade | Tailor, dressmaker and leatherworker |
| Victims | Five women murdered before the story opens; Catherine Martin abducted and rescued alive |
| Signature | A death’s-head hawkmoth pupa left in each victim’s throat |
| Dog | A toy poodle named Precious |
| Fate | Shot dead by Clarice Starling in his basement, in novel and film |
| Birth date | None settled; reference dating varies |
Who He Is in Canon
Buffalo Bill is the active killer of The Silence of the Lambs, as distinct from the imprisoned Hannibal Lecter, who is consulted about him. He is Jame Gumb, known to the FBI and the public only as Buffalo Bill until Starling and Jack Crawford identify him late in the story. This page labels what comes from Harris’s novel (1988), what comes from Jonathan Demme’s film (1991), and what is in both. The novel gives him a full life story; the film cuts nearly all of it.
The name Jame is not a typo. In the novel’s backstory, “Jame” on his birth certificate was a clerical error “that no one bothered to correct.” The codename is a grim joke inside the fiction: Kansas City homicide officers called him Buffalo Bill because he “skins his humps.” Starling relays the origin early in the film. It was not coined by the press.
His trade is the plot, in both versions. Gumb is a tailor, dressmaker and leatherworker, and Starling’s breakthrough is seeing, from his first victim’s dress patterns, that the pieces of skin taken from the bodies are cut like a tailor’s pattern pieces, with darts. In the novel he learned tailoring while institutionalised.
The works frame his motive carefully, and so does this page. Lecter states in the film, and the novel’s clinic material states at length, that Gumb is not a transsexual. He hates his own identity and wants, or believes he wants, to become a woman; in Lecter’s film line he is “not really transsexual.” In the novel Gumb applied for surgery at Johns Hopkins and other major centres and was rejected, because he concealed a violent past and did not fit the clinics’ profile, and a Johns Hopkins doctor in the book objects to Buffalo Bill even being mentioned alongside the clinic’s patients. Refused surgery, he is sewing a “woman suit” from his victims’ skin instead. That is the works’ own framing, and it is not the end of the argument, which is covered below.
The novel only gives his past. He was born in California. His mother was an aspiring actress who fell into alcoholism when her career failed. He went into foster care at two and lived in foster homes until 10, when his grandparents took him in; two years later, at about 12, he killed them on impulse. He was committed to Tulare Vocational Rehabilitation, a psychiatric hospital, where he learned to sew. As an adult he had a relationship with Benjamin Raspail, Lecter’s former patient, and after Raspail left him he killed Raspail’s new lover, Klaus, and flayed him. The film keeps none of this beyond Lecter’s summary: “Our Billy wasn’t born a criminal, Clarice. He was made one through years of systematic abuse.”
The house, in both versions, belonged to Mrs Lippman, the employer of his first victim, Fredrica Bimmel, in Belvedere, Ohio. Gumb murdered Mrs Lippman earlier and took it over. Its basement is a warren holding a dry well where he keeps his captives, his sewing room and his moths.
The moths. He raises death’s-head hawkmoths and places a pupa, not an adult moth, in each victim’s throat, because the insect’s change from caterpillar to pupa to moth mirrors the transformation he wants. The novel names the species Acherontia styx; the moth used on screen in the film is Acherontia atropos.
Precious. His toy poodle is, with the moths, the only living thing he shows real affection for, and the works use that as a plot device rather than a soft spot.
How he works, in both versions. He picks larger women, because he needs enough skin for a suit to fit his own frame. His lure is borrowed from a real case: he fakes an injury, with his arm in a cast, asks a woman to help him load furniture into his van, and knocks her out once she is committed to helping. He keeps each captive in the well for days, starving her to loosen her skin and ordering her to put lotion on it, then kills her. The first two were hanged; later victims he shot. He takes a different section of skin from each body, inserts the pupa, and dumps the body, weighted, in a river. Bimmel, though killed first, was weighted so that she was found third, which misled the investigation’s ordering.
The victims. Five women are dead when the story opens. Fredrica Bimmel, the first, knew Gumb in daily life, the key to Lecter’s clue, “we covet what we see every day,” and was a skilled seamstress herself. The other four are not named here. The sixth woman he takes, Catherine Martin, daughter of U.S. Senator Ruth Martin, is abducted outside her apartment building while helping a man with an injured arm load a sofa into a van, and she survives. The novel’s backstory killings, his grandparents, Klaus and Mrs Lippman, are a separate set and are not part of the five.
He thinks of his captives as things, not people, and calls Catherine “it.” Her mother’s televised pleas repeat Catherine’s name precisely to make him see a person.
Work by Work
The Silence of the Lambs, novel (Thomas Harris, 1988). Harris writes chapters from Gumb’s point of view, the only version of the character with an inner life and a full biography. Five women are already dead with pupae in their throats when Crawford sends the trainee Starling to consult Lecter, who met Gumb through Raspail and feeds her riddles rather than a name. Gumb abducts Catherine. The gender-clinic trail turns up his real name and an old address too late. While Crawford’s team raids what turns out to be only Gumb’s business address, Starling, working the Bimmel connection in Belvedere, reaches the Lippman house alone. She hears the name “Jack Gordon” at the door and knows who he is when a death’s-head moth flutters loose in the room. She follows him into the basement, and after a long chase in the dark she kills him. Catherine is rescued.
- Status at the end, novel: Dead, shot by Starling. As he dies he asks her, “How does it feel to be so beautiful?” That line is in the novel only.
The Silence of the Lambs, film (Jonathan Demme, 1991). Ted Tally’s screenplay compresses the same story: the backstory cut to Lecter’s line about systematic abuse, the clinic material reduced to Lecter explaining that Gumb applied for a sex change, was refused, and is “not really transsexual.” The film adds the beats that became the iconography: the lotion and the basket at the well, the dance to “Goodbye Horses,” Catherine capturing Precious, the cross-cut raid on an empty house in Calumet City, Illinois while Starling stands alone at the real door, and the basement climax. Gumb cuts the lights and stalks her wearing night-vision goggles, his hand reaching toward her face. When he cocks his revolver the sound gives him away, and she turns and fires.
- Status at the end, film: Dead, shot by Starling in the dark. Catherine is rescued alive.
Red Dragon, Hannibal and Hannibal Rising. Harris’s earlier novel Red Dragon (1981), filmed as Manhunter (1986) and Red Dragon (2002), was written before Gumb existed, and its killer is Francis Dolarhyde. Gumb does not appear in Hannibal (1999 novel, 2001 film) or Hannibal Rising.
Clarice (CBS, 2021). The series is set in 1993, a year after the film, and Gumb is dead throughout its present action. Simon Northwood plays him in flashback only, in a recurring credit; reviewers singled out the flashback images, with Slant describing Clarice’s jittery memories of “the late Buffalo Bill sewing his skin suit in the nude.” The series is built on the idea that killing Gumb, not only meeting Lecter, is Starling’s defining wound, and she is in mandated therapy for it.
- Catherine Martin (Marnee Carpenter) is a series regular, reclusive and traumatised, living with her mother, Ruth Martin (Jayne Atkinson), now U.S. Attorney General. The two women’s stories meet in the episode “How Does It Feel to Be So Beautiful,” titled after the novel’s dying line.
- In “Motherless Child” (June 3, 2021), Catherine goes to confront Gumb’s mother, whom the series names Lila Gumb (Maria Ricossa). The name is the series’ invention; the novel gives his mother no name and no presence in the story’s present.
- The series brought the representation debate into its fiction through Julia Lawson, a trans character played by the trans actor and activist Jen Richards, who has to reckon with Buffalo Bill’s fame.
- Clarice ran one season. Talks about a second season on Paramount+ came to nothing, so Gumb’s afterlife on screen ends with these flashbacks.
The Real-world Layer
Thomas Harris created Gumb for the 1988 novel. Gumb is a composite, and there are two layers to it. Harris drew on cases he heard presented in an FBI lecture by the profiler John Douglas, who was also the model for Jack Crawford: Ed Gein, for the skin; Ted Bundy, for the faked injury; and Gary M. Heidnik, for women held in a pit in a basement. Separately, Ted Levine based part of his performance on Jerry Brudos. That is an acting influence, not one of Harris’s sources, and Gumb is not “based on” any single man.
Levine was a largely untested actor, with mostly bit parts, when he was cast. He worked from the novel as well as the script, and told the Chicago Reader in 1991 that the two together were useful and a burden: “there are so many images in the book that aren’t in the film… I drove myself nuts with this character.” He prepared with FBI material, taped interviews with a killer who held women in a basement hole, possibly Heidnik, as one account has it. He is also reported to have visited gay and trans bars and talked to patrons as research.
The dance was his idea. In the novel Gumb only stands at the mirror admiring himself; Levine turned it into a dance, and said he took a couple of shots of tequila before filming it. Brooke Smith, who played Catherine, has recalled that it “blew everyone away,” and that the strangled, mimicking voice he used in the well scenes was his own invention: “I don’t think that was in script. He just came up with it.” She gained weight for the role, and has said fans still heckle her with the lotion line.
“Goodbye Horses” is by Q Lazzarus, the musical project of Diane Luckey, and was written by William Garvey, who has said the horses are the five senses and the song is about rising above the earthly. Demme discovered Luckey when she was driving a cab and played him her demo in the car. He used her “The Candle Goes Away” in Something Wild (1986) and “Goodbye Horses” first in Married to the Mob (1988), before giving it to the mirror scene, where it plays as Gumb puts on make-up and dances while Catherine, below, tries to lure Precious. It was Luckey’s only officially released song in her lifetime, and became a cult standard on the strength of the scene, later covered by MGMT and Crosses. Her identity was a long-running mystery until her death on July 19, 2022; her obituary gave her age as 59. Gumb does not sing it. He dances to it.
The film’s honours frame everything else. At the 64th Academy Awards on March 30, 1992, The Silence of the Lambs won the “Big Five”: Best Picture, Best Director for Jonathan Demme, Best Actor for Anthony Hopkins, Best Actress for Jodie Foster and Best Adapted Screenplay for Ted Tally. It was only the third film to do so, after It Happened One Night (1934) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), and it remains the only horror film to win Best Picture. It grossed about $272 million worldwide on a $19 million budget.
The house used for the exterior of Gumb’s home stands near Perryopolis, Pennsylvania. It was sold in 2020 to 2021 and now operates as a fan rental and tour property, where Smith has appeared for photo events in the well. It is a filming location, not Gumb’s address in the story.
Signatures and Iconography
The lotion. His best-known words are spoken down into the well at Catherine: “It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again,” and “It puts the lotion in the basket,” and, when she defies him, “Put the f---ing lotion in the basket!” The horror is grammatical. He calls a woman “it.” The scene has since been parodied endlessly and turned into a meme.
The night-vision reach. In the dark basement he stalks Starling through night-vision goggles and reaches out toward her face, almost touching her, unseen. It is the most imitated image of the character and the inverse of the Lecter scenes: Lecter is watched through glass in bright light, and Gumb watches, unwatched, in the dark.
The mirror dance. To “Goodbye Horses,” putting on lipstick and wearing a victim’s scalp, he poses and dances before the mirror and says to himself, “Would you f--- me? I’d f--- me. I’d f--- me so hard.” It is a rare case of a signature image belonging to the actor rather than the author or the screenwriter.
The moth. The death’s-head hawkmoth, with its skull-patterned thorax, is his sigil and the film’s. In the story the pupa in the throat is the mark he leaves; outside it, the poster covers Starling’s mouth with the moth, and its skull, seen close, is made from Salvador Dalí’s In Voluptas Mors arrangement of nude figures. One is a clue and the other is how the film was sold.
Precious in his arms. The small poodle carried and talked to in baby talk while he gives orders from the rim of the well. The incongruity is the image.
“Was she a great big fat person?” Playing innocent as “Jack Gordon,” he fishes for what Starling knows about Bimmel: the killer interrogating the investigator in his own doorway, seconds before the moth gives him away.
Why He Matters
He is the working killer to Lecter’s imprisoned theorist, and one of the most studied screen villains in the scholarship. Barbara Creed, in Screening the Male (1993), reads woman as his “totem animal”: he wants to take on the transforming, birth-giving power he associates with women. Jack Halberstam, in Skin Shows (1995), argues the violence lies “not in his gender confusion or his sexual orientation” but in the assumption that sex, gender and orientation “must all match up to a mythic norm,” and reads him as a Frankenstein figure, creator and monster at once. Marjorie Garber, in Vested Interests (1997), notes that the book and film say he only believes himself transsexual but argues they still carry negative connotations about trans identity, calling the novel “a fable of gender dysphoria gone spectacularly awry.” John Douglas’s point is that a Buffalo Bill is more plausible, not less, for being a composite.
He is also the central case in a long argument about how horror uses gender, and the record of that argument runs in both directions.
- The protests: When the film came out and through the 1992 Oscars, gay and trans rights activists protested the portrayal. Several hundred demonstrators organised by Queer Nation gathered outside the ceremony, with ACT UP and others. A GLAAD leader quoted at the time listed the traits, “He has a poodle named Precious, he sews, he wears a nipple ring, he has an affected feminine voice, and he cross-dresses,” and concluded, “He completely promotes homophobia.”
- The critics: Julia Serano criticised the novel for presenting transsexuality as psychosis despite its insistence that Gumb is not a true transsexual. Lilly Wachowski, coming out in 2016, singled the film out for “demonizing and vilifying” trans people, said Bill had been used in anti-trans attack ads, and wrote: “We are not predators, we are prey.” In a 2021 Vox essay, Aja Romano recorded the lived-experience side: Emily VanDerWerff’s point that audiences never kept the dialogue’s disclaimer, because “they saw a weirdo serial killer dancing around in women’s clothes,” and the writer Harmony Colangelo, compared to Buffalo Bill by strangers: “There is no film that leaves me feeling worse than Silence of the Lambs.”
- The makers: Demme told HuffPost in 2014 that he regretted the film was not clearer; Gumb “didn’t wish to be another gender,” he said, but “loathed himself,” and becoming a woman was his method of escaping himself. Ted Tally defended the script in 2026: “I don’t think of trans people as being violent, homicidal, and we tried to get that into the dialogue, that he doesn’t fit the profile. He’s just bats--- crazy,” adding that Gumb “is no more representative of every trans person than Hannibal Lecter is representative of every psychiatrist.”
- The reassessment: For the film’s 35th anniversary in February 2026, Levine spoke about the controversy for the first time, to The Hollywood Reporter: “There are certain aspects of the movie that don’t hold up too well. We all know more, and I’m a lot wiser about transgender issues. There are some lines in that script and movie that are unfortunate.” The vilification, he said, was “f---ing wrong,” and of his own approach: “I didn’t play him as being gay or trans. I think he was just a f---ed-up heterosexual man.” The producer Edward Saxon said in the same piece that the team “weren’t sensitive enough to the legacy of a lot of stereotypes and their ability to harm,” adding, “There’s regret, but it didn’t come from any place of malice.”
- The corrective: Jen Richards explained Clarice’s approach in 2021: in the early 1990s “the transgender community was largely invisible,” so “any portrayal of people who were trans had a weight to it,” and Bill could reinforce “a stereotype that already existed that transgender women were people who coveted and wanted to harm women.”
Those later statements concern how the film handled him and what it did; they do not rewrite what the novel and film say. Gumb endures as both things at once, a landmark screen killer and the defining case in the argument over his portrayal, and a page that carries only one of them is incomplete.