Aaron Stampler

Villain in William Diehl's 1993 novel Primal Fear and its two sequels, Show of Evil (1995) and Reign in Hell (1997). He was portrayed by Edward Norton in the 1996 movie adaptation of Primal Fear in an Academy Award-nominated performance.</p>

Born and raised in the tiny (fictional) Appalachian mining town of Crikside, Kentucky, Stampler was subjected to systematic physical, emotional and sexual abuse from a young age, molding him into a sociopath. A brilliant student noted for his talents in acting and psychology, he resented the stupidity of the townspeople, adults and his peers alike; he saw them as nothing more than fodder for the mines that slowly killed them for the mining company's profit. He went down into the mine as a child with his father, and was so terrified by the cramped, dark space that he vowed to never go down there again. From then on, he would have a lifelong fear of being trapped in the dark.

He committed his first murder at the age of five, pushing the town preacher, whom he hated, over a cliff. He also murdered his brother and his girlfriend at the age of 10, and an attendant at the morgue he worked at as a teenager. An adept con artist with angelic good looks, he was never even suspected for any of these crimes.

He lost his virginity at age 14 to Rebecca Nolan, one of his (much older) teachers, who in later years would become his criminal accomplice.

At 16, Stampler ran away to Boston, where he was homeless until he was taken in by Richard Rushman, the city's Archbishop, who made him an alter boy. A pedophile, Rushman forced Stampler, his fellow alter boys, and his girlfriend, Linda, to perform in videotaped child pornography. This went on for three years until Stampler finally snapped and brutally murdered Rushman, dismembering him and carving a library reference number to a quotation from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter into his chest: "A man who wears one face to himself and one face to the multitude may become confused as to which one is the true." This was Stampler's statement that Rushman, a beloved clergyman who molested children behind closed doors, was a hypocrite.

Arrested immediately after the murder covered in Rushman's blood, Stampler was dubbed "the Butcher Boy" in the media and became the most hated man in Boston—attracting him to Martin Vail, a hotshot defense attorney who wanted to defend him for the publicity. Affecting a meek, frightened persona, complete with an endearing stutter, Stampler swore to Vail he didn't kill Rushman, claiming that he had been with the archbishop but had blacked out, awakening to find him dead. Feigning multiple personality disorder, Stampler invented a violent, coldblooded alter ego named "Roy" (who was closer to his true self than the shy, stuttering "Aaron") who claimed responsibility for Rushman's murder. He completely fooled Vail and court psychiatrist Molly Arrington, as well as a jury when he assumed the "Roy" persona in the middle of the trial, attacking prosecutor Jane Venable in the middle of her cross-examination.

Stampler was found insane by the court and sentenced to a mental institution. Resenting Vail for not introducing Rushman's child porn tapes into evidence, which he felt would have gotten him an acquittal, he revealed to Vail that he had faked his disorder—"Suppose there never was an 'Aaron', counselor!"—which he knew would haunt Vail forever.

Stampler was released from the institution ten years later and persuaded Nolan to kill the other alter boys and Linda, to get revenge on people he thought betrayed him without casting suspicion on himself. Vail found him out and foiled his plan, though he paid a price for it when Stampler killed Arrington, who had also been Vail's lover, and beat Venable (who was now in a relationship with Vail) so badly that she lost an eye. Nolan was killed in a shootout with police and Vail chased Stampler to the feared coal mine of his childhood, which he fell into to his (apparent) death.

He reappeared in rural Texas a few years later, disguised as a blind Baptist preacher, part of a scam to bilk people out of money and get access to their teenage daughters. He aligned himself with a survivalist militia, which attracted the attention of his archenemy Vail, who now worked for the U.S Attorney's office. As the militia surrendered to federal agents in what turned into a Waco-like shootout, Stampler tried to escape in the clothes of a soldier he'd killed, but finally met his end when he was shot and killed by an agent after Vail, who had accompanied the feds to see that his case didn't end in violence, recognized him.

In both the book Primal Fear and its movie adaptation, it's only revealed at the very end that Stampler was faking multiple personality disorder.