Mark Chapman: The Man Who Killed John Lennon (Daily Mail, 2004)

What turns a fan into a deranged killer? For just how long should a murderer be incarcerated? Can we believe an unprovoked killer when he says he's now sane and truly repentant? And can such a person ever be trusted with his or her freedom ever again?
Next month for the third time in four years a New York parole board will wrestle with these and other questions as the case of Mark David Chapman, the murderer of John Lennon, comes up once more for consideration.
          Already Chapman has served nearly twenty four years in Attica prison in upstate New York, for the killing of the ex-Beatle on December 8, 1980. He pleaded guilty at his trial, refusing to let his lawyer use grounds of diminished responsibility due to insanity to get him an easier sentence in a mental hospital, and was duly sent down for "from twenty years to life" for second degree murder.
At the time of the killing, in which he shot Lennon four times in the back, causing Lennon to bleed to death from massive internal injuries, there was no death penalty in the state of New York. Had there been it's very possible that Chapman wouldn't be alive now to be once more asking for his freedom, which would have been ironic as Lennon was deeply opposed to the death penalty.
But then the story of how Mark Chapman became, at 25, one of the 20th Century's most famous killers is littered with ironies.
          For almost five years until just before being murdered Lennon had lived almost as a recluse, seeking a normal, private life. But one of Mark Chapman's motives for the murder was to do the exact opposite. He said later he thought he could take some of Lennon's fame, the fame Lennon had tried to shrug off, and have it for himself, by killing him. There’s irony.
Chapman had been a Beatle fan as a teenager but then, after becoming a born-again Christian, he took exception to Lennon's song Imagine and the lines "Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try".
          The song was intended, and interpreted by most people, as being about peace and against violence, about a world without hate caused by religion or politics. But Chapman misunderstood the message. So he performed an act of total violence on a man who had become famously non-violent. There's more irony.
          Then there was the matter of Lennon living in New York. He preferred it, he said, because people didn't bother him there! But perhaps most ironic was the name of the sales attendant who sold Mark Chapman the gun with which to commit the murder. It was Ono.
The killing of John Lennon shocked the world with its senselessness. There had been other assassinations in the decades before, Ghandi, the two Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X. Quite a list. But they had mostly been political murders, no matter how skewed the politics of some of the killers might have been.
          Lennon's killing was different. It was a celebrity assassination, presaging the cult of celebrity which has snowballed since his death. He was killed not because of what he might do but because of how famous he was.
For many it drew the line under an entire generation. But for me, personally, who had had a very friendly relationship with the Lennon since the Sixties the shock was compounded by the fact that I was looking forward to seeing him the very next day.
          So you could day that both Mark Chapman and I had John Lennon on our minds on December 8, 1980. I received a call from Yoko Ono that day asking why I wasn't in New York doing the interview with John that we'd talked about for some weeks. I said I would go to New York the following morning.
          If she'd looked out of her window then at 1 West 72nd St, New York, she would have seen Chapman, plump and bespectacled, already waiting to kill, just another goofy fan, but one with a gun in his pocket and a copy of J.D. Salinger's novel The Catcher In The Rye in his hand.
Two men, two different agendas. Later I would discover that during all the weeks I'd been trying to arrange the interview, Mark Chapman had been making his plans, too.
Today Mark Chapman is institutionalised, apparently a model prisoner, working as a janitor in a protected, safe part of Attica prison. From the beginning the prison authorities realised that there would be many other prisoners who might wish to do him harm and they've had to keep a careful eye on him.
          But what sort of man was Mark Chapman before his terrible crime? In a word, fairly bright but soon to be troubled. Born in Texas, where his father was in the US Air Force in 1955, but brought up in Georgia, he was just nine when Beatlemania hit America. He loved the Beatles and he loved the Wizard of Oz on TV, but at 14 he began taking drugs---everything apart from heroin, he would admit later.
          Then at sixteen he suddenly changed and became a born-again Christian, angry now that John Lennon could ever have said, in a much misunderstood interview, that the Beatles are "bigger than Jesus now".
          By the time he was twenty he was working for the YMCA, and spent some time in Beirut before being repatriated to the US when civil war broke out there. But for a time he was a success. Working with Vietnamese refugees, he was caring and popular.
          However as that job finished, and a girl friend left him, he felt useless. Depression overcame him. He stopped studying and took a job as an armed security guard. He was a very good shot. But, as American crime reporter Fred McGunable uncovered, thoughts of suicide played on his mind
Again he changed his life. In 1977 he used all his savings on a one-way ticket to Hawaii, where he spent hours on the phone to the equivalent there of the Samaritans who talked him out of suicide. On one occasion he actually tried to take his own life, but on failing he went on a world trip to the Far East, then India, Iran and Switzerland.
          When he got back he married his travel agent, Gloria Abe. In yet another irony she's Japanese American. They're still married. Loyally she flies from Hawaii twice a year to visit him in prison.
They should have been happy together, but by the summer of 1980 he was becoming increasingly disturbed. He wanted to change his name to Holden Caulfield, the fictional character from The Catcher In The Rye. On at least one other occasion he signed himself "John Lennon".
By now he was sometimes praying to Satan, sitting naked at his tape recorder and mixing together his reasons for killing John Lennon from Beatle lyrics, The Wizard of Oz and lines from The Catcher In The Rye. He wanted, he would say, to rid the world of what Holden Caulfield, the boy in The Catcher In The Rye, called "phoney people".
          With a five thousand dollars loan from his father-in-law it was a short step to the gunshop in Honolulu where he legally bought a .38 revolver. Then he took a plane to New York where he did a thorough recce of the Dakota apartment building where the Lennons lived and of the streets around that part of Central Park.
At that point he hit a snag. He had no bullets for his gun, and couldn't buy them in New York. Flying down to Georgia he got hold of five hollowed-point cartridges, the kind which expand as they pass through the target, and thus cause maximum damage.
          Back in New York he still hadn't determined completely that Lennon would be his victim. He might, he thought, be too difficult a target, he told his first parole hearing in 2000. But if that turned out to be the case he had a list of other targets, too, Jackie Kennedy and the actor George C. Scott among them.
Then for some reason he changed his mind again. God, he said, spoke to him. John Lennon had been granted a reprieve. Chapman went back to Honolulu, told his wife what his intentions had been and said he'd thrown the gun into a river.
          That was a lie. By December 6 he was back in New York outside the Lennon's apartment again. Staying that night at the YMCA he left the next morning, sickened, he would say later, by the sound of gay sex in the next room. Checking into the nearby Sheraton Hotel he bought a copy of Double Fantasy, Lennon's latest album.
          Then because that was what Holden Caulfield had done in The Catcher In The Rye, he called an escort service and invited a prostitute to his hotel room, just to talk. When she left at 3 a.m. , a hundred and ninety dollars better off, she hadn't even taken off her clothes.
Before he left his room the following morning he laid out an old letter from a superior with the YMCA praising his work in the refugee camp, together with photographs of himself with Vietnamese children, placing behind them a poster of Judy Garland as Dorothy with the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz. They were obviously meant to be found.
          Then he set up watch outside the Lennon's apartment, his loaded gun in his pocket, the album and The Catcher In the Rye in his hands.
          In mid-afternoon he met Lennon for the first time as John and Yoko left the apartment building to go downtown to a recording studio to mix one of Yoko's new recordings. Chapman pushed his new record into John's hand, which the star duly signed. "Is that all you want?" Lennon asked him twice. Chapman, thrilled to meet him, said it was.
          "I was on Cloud Nine," he would say later in his prison cell. "There was a little bit of me going 'why don’t you shoot him ?'. But I couldn't shoot him like that…I wanted to get his autograph."
John and Yoko returned from the studio at around ten to eleven. Chapman had been waiting there for over twelve hours by then. Yoko got out of the white limousine first and walked up the covered archway towards the entrance to the building. John followed.
          Suddenly Chapman stepped out about ten to fifteen feet behind them and shouted: "Mr Lennon."
John half-turned to see Chapman crouching, with both hands on his gun. As he turned to flee Chapman shot him four times in the back. The fifth and last bullet missed. In a last effort John ran up a short flight of steps to the porter's lodge and collapsed on the floor.
Chapman made no attempt to escape. Alerted by the porter a cruising police car was at the scene within two minutes, but John Lennon was already bleeding to death. As they carried him to their car one police officer heard his shattered bones crunch.
          As the ex-Beatle was raced away to nearby Roosevelt Hospital, Chapman waited to be arrested, reading his copy of The Catcher In The Rye. "I'm sorry I gave all you guys this trouble," he said when he was handcuffed.
Back in England when the telephone woke me up just forty minutes later I assumed it was the taxi coming to take me to the airport to catch the plane to New York. I was wrong it was a friend on this newspaper telling me of the shooting.
          A few minutes later the BBC World Service confirmed that John Lennon was dead and that a man was being held. Paul McCartney didn't hear the news until his wife Linda returned from the school run several hours later. But by then the rest of the world knew.
In fact by the time Yoko returned from the hospital fans had already begun to congregate below the Lennons' apartment singing Beatle songs. They sang all night, and the next night and the one after that.
          At his trial the following summer Mark Chapman made no attempt to defend himself. His lawyer said he heard voices, but later Chapman admitted that that was not strictly true. The verdict was a foregone conclusion. And from the night of the murder until today Chapman has been incarcerated.
          His first few years in jail were difficult. He destroyed his television, became suicidal, ripped off his clothes, and then fought the guards when they came to restrain him. But by the late eighties, he would say later, after refusing therapy and medication, his Christian beliefs led him to undergo an exorcism and the evil spirits, which had led him to commit the murder, left him.
Since then he's been a model prisoner, though he's locked up for 23 hours of the day in a six by ten foot cell, only coming out to clean the floor, collect laundry and serve food. The only time he leaves his safe little section of the prison is under armed guard.
          He very, very rarely makes any trouble. "He's a hard worker and he's respectful," a spokesman for the prison says. "I know a lot of people hate him, but I wish I had twenty two hundred Mark Chapmans."
          There are fears, of course, that if he ever were to be released from prison he might very well not survive. Though he and his wife Gloria have plans for a quiet life doing church work, in a population of three hundred million Americans, it doesn't seem unlikely that an old Beatles' fan, as disturbed as he once was, will want to do to him what Jack Ruby did to Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who assassinated President Kennedy.
          Whether they will ever get the opportunity is difficult to say. When Chapman first came eligible for parole in 2000 Yoko Ono wrote
to the parole board saying that she feared for the safety of her children if Chapman were freed. This time she has decided to wait until after the board have made their decision before issuing any statement.
          As he's already served twenty four years, four years more than the minimum he was sentenced to, the parole board may well decide, if the psychiatric reports deem him to be no longer a threat to anyone, to release him.
          But if they don't, it won't be difficult to see why. At his parole hearing in 2000 he was just so terribly reasonable and penitent, so plausible and condemnatory of himself and of what he had done that he came across, to me at least, as though he'd brainwashed himself with little bits of psycho-babble and religion.
          Having refused to let his mother and his wife write to the parole board on his behalf, he then told the board he felt lucky to be alive. Then he made a point of saying that as a conservative, he believed that once you take a life there was no way you could make up for it.
          The question is, was he playing a clever game with the parole board, pretending to expect nothing in the hope that he would get everything. I don't know any more than you do. But he didn't get parole.
          My bet, and his, too, I believe, is that John Lennon would have felt that he'd served his time and that, if he's thought to be safe, he should be released. I would go along with that.
But it’s the parole board's call. Next month, close to what would have been John Lennon's sixty fourth birthday, they will have to decide.

back to the top of the page