But about God himself he was at ease; his act was doubtless exceptional, but so were his excuses, which God knew; it was there, and not among men, that he felt sure of justice.
—ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, MARKHEIM
The first baby born on this planet was a murderer.
—MARK DAVID CHAPMAN
Less than two hours after John Lennon was pronounced dead on arrival of gunshot wounds at Roosevelt General Hospital, Mark David Chapman signed a handwritten confession at the Twentieth Precinct Detective Unit Office in Manhattan.
I never wanted to hurt anybody my friends will tell you that. I have two parts in me. The big part is very kind. The children I work with will tell you that. I have a small part in me that cannot understand the world and what goes on in it. I did not want to kill anybody and I really don’t know why I did it. I fought against the small part for a long time. But for a few seconds the small part won. I asked God to help me but we are responsible for our own actions. I have nothing against John Lennon or anything he has done in the way of music or personal beliefs. I came to New York about five weeks ago from Hawaii and the big part of me did not want to shoot John. I went back to Hawaii and tried to get rid of my small part but I couldn’t. I then returned to New York [on December 6, 1980, after leaving Honolulu] on Friday December 5, 1980. I checked into the YMCA on 62nd Street. I stayed one night. Then I went to the Sheraton Centre 7th Ave. Then this morning I went to the bookstore and bought The Catcher in the Rye.
I’m sure the large part of me is Holden Caulfield who is the main person in the book. The small part of me must be the Devil.
I went to the building it’s called the Dakota. I stayed there until he came out and asked him to sign my album. At that point my big part won and I wanted to go back to my hotel, but I couldn’t. I waited until he came back. He came in a car. Yoko walked past first and I said hello. I didn’t want to hurt her. Then John came, looked at me and printed me. I took the gun from my coat pocket and fired at him. I can’t believe I could do that. I just stood there clutching the book. I didn’t want to run away. I don’t know what happened to the gun, I just remember Jose kicking it away. Jose was crying and telling me to please leave. I felt so sorry for Jose. Then the police came and told me to put my hands on the wall and cuffed me.
End of statement
0105 Hrs. Dec. 9, 1980
Mark D. Chapman
“I remember a lot of pain and a lot of confusion at what I had done when I dictated the statement.
“I remember thinking I was frightened—in one way comforted, and in another way frightened by the police. I didn’t want to say to the police that John Lennon was a phony. I didn’t say that in my statement because I was frightened of what they would have thought of me. I was afraid that they would have been angry with me.
“I remembered the look of one of the officers as he was dragging John Lennon’s body to the back of his patrol car. How there was blood all over the place and the officer looked at me and cursed me. I never heard the curse words, but I could see them on his lips. He was very, very angry and upset.
“So when I got to the police I said that I liked John Lennon, and it wasn’t exactly a lie. There was still a part of me that appreciated and enjoyed his music and still liked the Beatles and, remember, John Lennon had been cordial to me earlier in the day. I had been genuinely excited about having his signature on my Double Fantasy album.
“So when I told the officers that I liked John Lennon, it really wasn’t exactly a lie. I just didn’t want to say he was a phony, and I was angry at him.
“I was in a very unreal, a very surreal world then. I was in utter panic of sheer terror and wanting things to go back to the way they were before I had pulled the trigger that night.
“But I felt anger spreading over my mind as I was dictating the statement and talking about The Catcher in the Rye.
“There was nothing that felt like I was in a womb; nothing that felt like I was Holden Caulfield. I felt more of a panic, more of being sucked into a giant wave that I couldn’t swim out of or even come up for air.
“I dictated the statement and a detective wrote it. But the anguish is all mine.
“Then, after I signed the statement, one officer asked me about the Beatles. He said he liked the Beatles. I said I like them, too. The officer just shook his head and walked away from me.”
On Friday, December 5, after her husband left for New York, Gloria Chapman returned to her apartment where she spent the weekend reading and visiting with friends. She finished reading The Catcher in the Rye and she turned again to her readings in the Bible. She didn’t turn on the tape recorder that her paranoid husband had attached to the telephone to record incoming calls. If she had, she would have perhaps heard a cryptic clue to the tragedy he was about to stage.
At the beginning of an otherwise blank tape, Chapman had recorded “A Little Bitty Tear,” a popular ballad by Burl Ives with the words: “Everything went like I planned it, I really put on quite a show.”
Gloria Chapman, unlike her husband, didn’t routinely record her phone conversations, but less than an hour after the John Lennon murder, when a reporter called and told her that her husband had carried out the threat he had made to her a month before to kill John Lennon, she switched on the tape.
Chapman has never heard the tape his wife made of their phone conversation, nor has he read a transcript of the call. He says he was troubled by news reports and police accounts of the conversation in which he sounds calm and eerily rational. Chapman says the phone call provides a stark example of the psychopathic mind-set into which he had fallen in the months before the killing, a time when he says his only feelings were for himself:
“The tone of the call sounds, I’ve read that the tone of the call is calm, that it doesn’t sound like I’m insane at all. Remember, on that very day, I had lunch with a woman in the Dakota café and she had no idea that, a few hours later, I would do something totally bizarre and uncharacteristic in my life.
“I was a master at keeping my feelings in and I was able, on the surface, to carry on a very poignant, emotional conversation with a minimum of emotions expressed. This comes from years of this kind of behavior, years of repressive behavior.
“What you’re listening to when you listen to this call is not a sane man who is only concerned about his wife. It almost sounds like a hit man pulled this off. But what you’re listening to is a man who, inside of him, is a boiling cauldron; a boiling cauldron who had learned to repress all his feelings and emotions and sound very lucid and very clear to get a point across.
“This is the voice of a man who, within two hours or so, had killed a man and then had begged God to turn back time. Yet on the phone I sounded very composed. My lips and tongue were composed, but my stomach and heart were disintegrating.
“Somebody listening to that tape for the first time might make a quick judgment about what was going on. That is me being upset, being paranoid about the media, telling my wife to get the police over there. But someone who doesn’t know me, or understand how someone who has repressed their emotions all their life can behave in the most incredible situations, the most bizarre circumstance, would read into it that the person just didn’t care what he had just done.”
NEW YORK CITY: Yes, Twentieth Detective Squad, Detective Hoffmann speaking. Who am I speaking to, please?
GLORIA: Mrs. Chapman. [Choking, she clears her throat.] Excuse me.
NEW YORK CITY: Mrs. Chapman?
GLORIA: Yes. I’m his wife.
NEW YORK CITY: You’re whose wife?
GLORIA: Mark Chapman’s wife.
NEW YORK CITY: Mark Chapman’s wife? Yeah, may I ask you how you found out about this, Ma’am?
GLORIA: A reporter from the Advertiser here called me.
NEW YORK CITY: From the advertiser?
GLORIA: Yes, I don’t know how he found out but he found out way ahead of everybody.
NEW YORK CITY: What’s the advertiser?
GLORIA: Uh, it’s one of the two major newspapers here in Honolulu.
NEW YORK CITY: Okay, a reporter called you and told you.
GLORIA: Yeah.
NEW YORK CITY: Okay, What could I do for you, Ma’am?
GLORIA: Well, is there any way I could speak to my husband?
NEW YORK CITY: Okay, we’ll see if we can find out. Okay.
NEW YORK CITY: Okay, hold on a second please.
GLORIA: Thank you.
NEW YORK CITY: Okay, we’ll, uh, one second, Ma’am.
GLORIA: Thank you. [Long pause and click.]
NEW YORK CITY: Hello, Gloria?
GLORIA: [Breathlessly] Yes!
NEW YORK CITY: Yeah, this is Police Officer Spiro in New York. I’m here with your husband.
GLORIA: Yes! Is he all right?
NEW YORK CITY: He just wanted me to get you on the phone first and tell you that he’s all right. And that he’s, uh, that I’m here with him, and that I’m, uh, I’m more or less taking care of him, making sure that everything’s all right. He’s gonna talk to you now, okay?
GLORIA: Okay, umm, please.
NEW YORK CITY: You want to ask me anything?
GLORIA: Well, I just don’t want somebody to, to hurt him.
NEW YORK CITY: NO, nobody’s going to hurt him. I told him that. I will be with him, and there’ll be nothing the matter with him. Okay? I promise you that.
GLORIA: Thank you.
NEW YORK CITY: All right. You’re quite welcome.
MARK CHAPMAN: Hi.
GLORIA: Hi, Mark. I love you.
MARK: I know. I love you too.
GLORIA: Oh. [She starts to cry.]
MARK CHAPMAN: Are the police with you?
GLORIA: NO! The first call I got was a reporter. Well, he didn’t call me directly. But the phone company called me.
MARK CHAPMAN: Oh no! Are the police with you now?
GLORIA: NO, the police don’t care.
MARK CHAPMAN: Are you at home?
GLORIA: Yeah. Your mom and Greta [Mom’s friend] are here and Jean [wife’s sister] is gonna stay with me tonight.
MARK CHAPMAN: Okay. Well, I don’t want to talk to anybody else.
GLORIA: I know.
MARK CHAPMAN: But I don’t want you crying ’cause they can hear me.
GLORIA: Okay.
MARK CHAPMAN: Why aren’t the police there?
GLORIA: I don’t know. UPI’s been trying to get me.
MARK CHAPMAN: Don’t answer the phone.
GLORIA: The operator called back. She says, “You don’t want any more calls.” She says, “I just feel like these are all newspapers.”
MARK CHAPMAN: Yeah, please. You didn’t say anything did you?
GLORIA: Well, I might have said too much to the first guy since you weren’t here. But, you know, Mark.
MARK CHAPMAN: Call. Get the police over there.
GLORIA: Why?
MARK CHAPMAN: Please.
GLORIA: What can, uh.
MARK CHAPMAN: Call them.
GLORIA: Just what would—would I tell them?
MARK CHAPMAN: Just that you want them to come over. To keep the press off of you.
GLORIA: Oh, they’re not harming me. They’re not it, you know.
MARK CHAPMAN: Are they knocking on the door?
GLORIA: No. No one is.
MARK CHAPMAN: Well, they’re gonna do that and I want to protect you from that.
GLORIA: Yeah, but you don’t want me to go there then?
MARK CHAPMAN: Go where?
GLORIA: To New York.
MARK CHAPMAN: NO, no, no. You just stay where you are.
GLORIA: Okay.
MARK CHAPMAN: I love you and just call the police. I mean the police know, right? And they won’t come over to your place?
GLORIA: No, I don’t think they know.
MARK CHAPMAN: Well, they told me here that they called you. They called you?
GLORIA: No, they didn’t. No one did.
MARK CHAPMAN: IS everybody else all right?
GLORIA: Well, no, I don’t think your grandmother knows or anybody like that on the mainland knows.
MARK CHAPMAN: I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about my mom.
GLORIA: NO, she’s worse off than me, I think.
MARK CHAPMAN: Well, you need to call her a doctor and call the police. You should call a lawyer or somebody.
GLORIA: [Starting to cry] Well, I don’t know. You know, I can’t afford anybody. I can’t afford a lawyer. Has it hit you yet—what you’ve really done?
MARK CHAPMAN: I’m gonna have to go.
GLORIA: I love you.
MARK CHAPMAN: I know and I love you too. And.
GLORIA: I always will love you.
MARK CHAPMAN: I know and I love you too and I need your love, and I, everything will be all right. You’ll see.
GLORIA: What do I tell people?
MARK CHAPMAN: You don’t talk at all.
GLORIA: Okay.
MARK CHAPMAN: You don’t tell nobody nothin’. It’s not your position to do that. You just trust me. Don’t talk. Especially the press. Don’t let them bug you. That’s why I say call the police. Tell them to keep the press away from you. Okay?
GLORIA: I don’t think they can.
MARK CHAPMAN: Well just call them to come over, okay?
GLORIA: Mark, that’s worse when they’re not even calling, you know. No one knows yet.
MARK CHAPMAN: Well, they will. They’ll bother you.
GLORIA: I won’t talk. I won’t go out at all.
MARK CHAPMAN: Okay, just stay in. Call your dad. Is your dad there?
GLORIA: Well, Jean’s going to go over and take the kids and talk to them personally. Carol [wife’s sister] called and she didn’t know when she called. And I should tell her.
MARK CHAPMAN: Did they give my name out and everything?
GLORIA: No, it’s not on the news. All they’re saying is it’s someone crazy in New York. They don’t even say.
MARK CHAPMAN: All right, don’t talk about it.
GLORIA: Okay.
MARK CHAPMAN: I love you and I’ll talk to you again and don’t worry about anything, okay?
GLORIA: Okay.
MARK CHAPMAN: You were my, you were my first concern.
GLORIA: I know.
MARK CHAPMAN: I’m just worried. You ought to call the police. You know, you know, you’d like to know what to do. And that you want somebody to come over, you know, a doctor and lawyer and whatever. Don’t worry about the money. You know that lawyer that we used, what’s his name?
GLORIA: Um, I don’t know, but I’ll figure it out.
MARK CHAPMAN: Okay, I love you.
GLORIA: I love you, darling. I really do.
MARK CHAPMAN: See you. Love you.
GLORIA: Okay. Bye.
MARK CHAPMAN: Bye.
After speaking with his wife, the murderer was taken into another small room at the police station where he was fingerprinted, photographed, and assigned a number.
Several minutes later, “another detective told me to take my sweater off and, as I was removing it, he just ripped it off my shoulders and strapped a bulletproof vest around me. Then I was taken downstairs and paraded before the media. The area around the police station was besieged. You could feel it in the air and all the officers were tense and edgy. I was told we were going to be walking by the media, but that nothing was going to happen to me. Officer Spiro, the officer who had arrested me, was on my right, another officer was on my left, and other officers were in front and behind me.
“When we got to the door, I looked outside at all the lights and cameras and I said, ‘I want a coat. Can I put a coat over my face?’ One of the officers threw me an old green coat and I drew it over my face and crouched down.
“I remember, from the darkness inside the coat, tremendous tumult occurring as we walked from one door to another door. I looked down and the ground was lit up by white light from all the strobe flashes and video lamps. It was almost like I was walking on just one giant, pulsating beam of light under my feet. I could hear people scurrying. One woman said to me, ‘Why’d you do this, Mark?’ and ‘Mark! Is that you under there?’
“I didn’t say anything.
“Then began an odyssey, like something out of a Robert Ludlum novel. We went through a dark building into a barred holding cell, me and two uniformed officers and three or four detectives. It was pitch dark and we were sitting in this holding cell. They explained to me they were going to try to throw off the press by pretending to put me in a van and whisking me out to the courthouse at One Center Street in Manhattan. It was a ruse to get the press out of the way. So we waited there in the dark for two or three hours.
“But the media wasn’t fooled. Occasionally I’d hear a woman’s voice call from outside, ‘Mark, are you in there? Are you there?’ It was pitch dark and scary. The officers, after a while, were joking about it, how it seemed so ridiculous, but soon it became something very horrible, something out of Kafka.
“We were in pitch darkness with nothing but the sound of the officers breathing. Then one of them asked me, ‘Mark, why’d you do it?’
“I remember what I said to him. I said, without hesitation, ‘I can’t understand what’s going on in the world and what it’s become.’ I was just so in pain and hurting and so disappointed and crushed at what the world had become, or what I perceived at that time that the world had become. I remember that the officer didn’t have a reply.
“We waited and waited in silence and then another officer signaled and I was led through the door and down an elevator to a basement parking lot. There was a van and an unmarked brown police car with the doors open. A door swung open at the top of a ramp and I could see it was breaking daylight.
“A detective who seemed very frightened motioned us out of the elevator, forward, and pushed me into the unmarked car. The officers got into the van. We flew up the ramp and into the street going at least sixty miles an hour. They pushed my head down between my knees. They said all they cared about was getting me to court before someone could kill me.”