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''This is about the character from Red Dragon. To read about the evangelist, go to Will Graham, evangelist Will Graham is one of the main characters of the novel Red Dragon. He is an FBI profiler who has the ability to emphathise with psychopaths. In the book, as well as the two film versions of it, Graham is portrayed as being disturbed, even disgusted, with his ability.
This history is based on the novel by Thomas Harris, not the any of the screenplays in which Will Graham appears:
Will Graham was originally a homicide detective in New Orleans who had grown up poor in Southern Louisiana. He left to attend graduate school in forensic science at George Washington University. After attaining his degree, Graham went to work for the FBI's crime lab. Following exceptional work both in the crime lab and in the field, Graham was given a post as teacher at the FBI Academy. During both his field work while at the crime lab and the Academy, Graham was given the title of "Special Investigator" while he was in the field.
In one of Graham's field cases during the 1970s, he was tracking a serial killer, who had been stabbing young women, many of them college coeds, for eight months. He eventually caught the killer, Garrett Jacob Hobbs, known as the Minnesota Shrike, and killed him. When Graham found Hobbs at Hobbs' home, Hobbs was repeatedly slashing his own daughter's throat. When Graham appeared, Hobbs' wife was on the apartment landing, bleeding from multiple stab wounds, and clutched at Graham before he kicked in the door. He then shot Hobbs to death (Hobbs' daughter survived and eventually returned to normal life following intensive therapy.) Graham was profoundly disturbed by the incident, and was referred to the psychiatric ward of an unnamed major hospital. He eventually returned to the FBI.
In 1975, he began to track down another serial killer, known as the "Chesapeake Ripper", who was removing organs from the victims. He turned to world famous psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter for help. After looking around Lecter's office during a consultation, he saw the antique medical diagram Wound Man, whose wounds matched exactly those of one of the Ripper's victims, and realized that Lecter was the killer he sought. Graham made a phone call and was nearly disemboweled by Lecter. Lecter was arrested and Graham spent months recovering in hospital. A tabloid reporter, Freddy Lounds, snuck into the hospital where Graham was recuperating, photographed Graham's wounds and humiliated him in the National Tattler. Three years later, Graham, now living with his wife Molly and her son Willy in Marathon, Florida, is persuaded by his former boss, Jack Crawford, to come out of retirement and help the FBI again in the "Tooth Fairy" case. 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 consulted Lecter on the case, but Lecter gave him only vague brainteasers as clues, and sent Dolarhyde Graham's address in code, threatening the safety of his wife and son. Following moving his family to a farm belonging to Crawford's brother, Graham resumed tracking Dolarhyde, eventually linking him to a video production company. When Graham, Crawford and FBI agents arrived at Dolarhyde's home to arrest him, they found that the killer had set it on fire while his erstwhile girlfriend, Reba McClane, was inside. Graham rescued and consoled McClane, and returned home, believing Dolarhyde's reign of terror was over.
However, at the end of the book, 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 survived, but he was left disfigured. A brief reference in Silence of the Lambs, the sequel to Red Dragon, implies that his wife had left him soon after that, and he was now "a drunk with a face that's hard to look at."
Notes
In Michael Mann's film version of the book, Manhunter, Graham is played by William Petersen. In Brett Ratner's 2002 remake, Red Dragon, he is played by Edward Norton. Neither film adaptation has Graham as seriously injured by Dolarhyde as the book's climax suggests.
In the novel, Graham's wife, Molly, has a son, Willy, from a previous marriage. In both films, Willy is Graham's child. In the novel, Molly's son is named Willy; in Manhunter, Willy becomes Kevin; in the film Red Dragon, Willy becomes Josh. The reasons for these name changes has never been explained.
In the film Manhunter, Graham's "gift" is never explained (an extra scene in the Director's Cut shows a conversation between Graham and Dr. Chilton, in which Chilton inquires Graham about his abilities).
In both the film and novel Red Dragon, Graham's gift is classifed as making him an 'eideteker', a person with eidetic memory.
In the novel Red Dragon, Graham carries a heavily modified Charter Arms Bulldog .44 Special.
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"Will Graham"