MARK’S CASE

I am mad north by northwest. When the wind is from the south, I know a hawk from a handsaw.

—SHAKESPEARE, HAMLET

Immersed in a blizzard of medical paperwork, Dr. Naomi Goldstein was looking forward to the end of her shift on December 9 at Bellevue Hospital. As she reviewed the unending stream of afflicted humanity in her care on the hospital’s infamous psychiatric wing, Dr. Goldstein was startled when a security officer rapped sharply on her office door and stepped inside. The officer entered hastily, without waiting for her to reply.

She, like everyone else at the hospital, had heard radio and television reports throughout the day about New York City’s most recent murder. She had been surprised to learn from the news reports that the slain man, international folk hero and rock superstar John Lennon, had lived on West 72nd Street, not far from her apartment on West 81st. When the hospital security officer asked if she’d heard about the shooting, the doctor realized she wouldn’t be going home for a while.

Five hours later, Dr. Goldstein found herself still on the wards at Bellevue, awaiting the arrival of an armed convoy of police and the man who killed John Lennon. Darkness had fallen across the city and a wintry, wind-driven rain was lashing the barred windows of the second-floor psychiatric ward when the security officer stepped back into her office.

The security officer advised the doctor that maintenance crews were preparing to put a coat of black paint on the windows looking from the secure ward where Chapman would be held several days for psychiatric observation.

“Cops say we’ve got to take precautions against snipers,” the officer explained. “Cops say a lot of people out there don’t want this particular patient to leave the hospital—unless he’s in a body bag.”

Dr. Goldstein threaded her way among a loose phalanx of nervous, heavily armed police officers in bulletproof vests who had taken over the hospital corridors. She had never seen so many men with guns in one place.

At the small interview room near the hospital’s maximum security ward, she showed her identification to an officer with a shotgun. The officer nodded curtly and let her into the room. With some trepidation, Dr. Goldstein turned the doorknob and approached an overweight young man with dark circles under his eyes. The man sat stiffly in a wooden chair, leaning his elbows on the scarred surface of a wooden table. She avoided looking directly at the patient, focusing her attention instead on a small stack of printed forms she placed on the table before her. The man on the other side of the table observed her quietly. Looking up from the papers, the psychiatrist withdrew a pencil from the pocket of her starched white linen jacket and introduced herself. She managed a brief, professional smile as the man introduced himself by his full name of Mark David Chapman. He said he was from Hawaii and he began to rock nervously back and forth in the chair. She observed that his fingernails were gnawed to the quick.

As she talked with the patient, she made notes on a hospital admission chart:

“Speech coherent, relevant and logical. No evidence hallucination or delusions. Clinical evaluation reveals a pleasant, generally cooperative young man, of medium stature with a somewhat puffy face … very anxious, hyperventilating, and exhausted, but cooperative, appropriate and in good contact.”

After he had answered a series of routine questions, Goldstein probed Chapman on the events that had led police to bring him to Bellevue.

“I wanted to kill somebody to stop my mind,” he told her, matter of factly. “I thought it would stop my life.

“I remember that I thought if I killed him, I wouldn’t have to worry anymore.”

He apologized to the psychiatrist for being unable to talk about details of the shooting. “Not now,” he explained. “I’ve been blocking out what I’ve done. I’ve been blocking out what I’ve done to my family.”

In one of several recurring literary and Hollywood fantasies from which he had sought to extract meaning for his life before killing John Lennon, Chapman talked to Dr. Goldstein metaphorically of himself after the shooting. He said he saw himself as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz “where she is in a weird place and wants to go back home. Like Dorothy, I just want to click my heels together and go back home. But I know it’s not done in real life.”

During the summer and fall of 1980, Chapman had turned with increasing frequency to the familiar memories and objects of his childhood. In the months before his spinning mind became obsessed with thoughts of murder, he began revisiting some old friends in the fairy-tale land of Oz.

Long before Chapman came to believe that he had found himself in The Catcher in the Rye, he had discovered that his interior struggle between the good and evil spirits of the world was being dramatized once a year when the movie classic The Wizard of Oz was rebroadcast on TV.

“It was a great event in our home when The Wizard of Oz was on,” he recalled. “It had a great impact on me the first time I saw it and every time I saw it.”

Chapman described his favorite scenes from Oz and talked of the warring good and evil forces within that had ripped from him the pieces of a life he was unable to understand.

“The movie was ahead of its time,” he said. “It earmarks a sensitivity. It’s a great mystery. It’s flawless. It’s close to me.”

He explained that, although he was a twenty-five-year-old man, he still had the sensitivities of a child. He spoke of the various elements of his mind, his emotions, memories, thoughts, dreams, and intellect, as virtually separate entities within himself. He said he identified simultaneously with all four of the characters from Oz—Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion.

“They’re all sensitive,” he said, explaining that, even as an adult, he always would cry whenever he watched the sad and frightening parts of the movie.

“If I did not cry when I saw it, I would have become a hardened adult,” he said. “I’m not ashamed of this, seeing all the evil in the world. I was always thinking about the bad in the world, because I was too sensitive.”

Naomi Goldstein was the first mental-health professional to speak with John Lennon’s killer. She would be followed in the next six months by an array of some of the most famous and respected forensic psychiatrists and psychologists in the country. Written less than twenty-four hours after the killing, her notes offer the killer’s freshest and clearest memories of the events and feelings immediately before and after a murder that shocked the world.

Of the dozen or so experts who attempted to probe the mind of Mark David Chapman after Lennon’s murder, Goldstein was the only psychiatrist who had no personal or legal attachments to the patient; she wasn’t writing a book, nor was she engaged in a research project. Of greatest significance, unlike the high-profile psychiatrists who would follow her, Dr. Goldstein wasn’t being paid to render an opinion favorable to either prosecution or defense lawyers laying the groundwork for “the trial of the decade.” She was simply doing her job and Mark David Chapman was just another patient to be diagnosed and understood.

Dr. Goldstein had conducted interviews with scores of murderers before she met Chapman. She has conducted interviews with hundreds of other violent felons since. Almost a dozen years later, she said that she never had a more elusive case than the one that sat before her on the evening of December 9, 1980.

“Totally unique,” she recalled. At the end of the interview she noted on the admission chart that her tentative diagnosis of Chapman would be “deferred.”

Chapman was eager to divulge every detail of his life, no matter how embarrassing or insignificant, to Dr. Goldstein and the psychiatrists who would later visit him in his caged room at Bellevue and his cell at Rikers Island. He hoped that they could tell him something he had never been able to figure out on his own: who he was. He described details of the events leading up to the murder of Lennon, hoping the psychiatrists would help him understand why he had grown up to murder a man that he had idolized in childhood.

He said he had thought of taking his own life instead, after climbing to the head of the Statue of Liberty, “because nobody had done it there before.”

He told Dr. Goldstein that he “chickened out” after envisioning a possibly painful and crippling aftermath. “I imagined my brains hanging out and me being alive,” he said.

In the weeks that followed her first interview, Dr. Goldstein found that Chapman seemed to be possessed at once by the symptoms of virtually every malady in the psychiatric literature. Yet, to her continuing bewilderment and frustration, she found that he remained lucid, articulate, and keenly aware of the daily realities by which mental health is commonly gauged. Chapman spoke clearly of the grim truth of the murder he had committed. Although curiously detached from the suffering and pain he had caused John Lennon, he clearly apprehended the worldwide dimensions of the grief he had inflicted upon humanity.

Chapman also appeared to Goldstein and other psychiatrists to have an even higher sensitivity than most people to moral issues and social concerns in general. He had a clear understanding of the relationship between past actions and their future consequences. He demonstrated that he understood very well the connection between murder and imprisonment—or even execution. He said he didn’t know, when he murdered Lennon, whether he might face the electric chair or gas chamber. He said he didn’t care.

In the end, Dr. Goldstein determined only that the enigmatic murderer was capable of understanding the consequences of his actions. She recommended that he stand trial for the crime of second-degree murder.

When she concluded her court-ordered examination, Dr. Goldstein reported that Chapman “had an insatiable need for attention and recognition … grandiose visions of himself.” She also observed depression, “mood fluctuations … anger … paranoid tendencies … suicidal thinking, rage, confusion and agitation about himself.”

Whatever Chapman’s reasons for killing the rock superstar, the psychiatrist came to the conclusion that those reasons were part of a complicated riddle that lay beyond the realm of modern psychiatry as she knew it. Concluding that Lennon’s killer was “fit to understand the charges and cooperate in his own defense,” Dr. Goldstein recommended that the judicial system, not the medical system, determine his fate.

For more than a decade after the killing, Dr. Goldstein continued to think about Chapman’s case, reviewing other cases that could perhaps shed light on a patient whose diagnosis she still considered “deferred.” Although she continued to suspect that he suffered from one or more psychiatric abnormalities, she remained uneasy with the various labels that other experts attached to the crime and to the criminal, often for the sake of simplifying or winning legal and psychiatric arguments.

Nearly a dozen years after the first interview, Dr. Goldstein remained unsure whether she or anyone else could attach a meaningful psychiatric tag to Chapman. Likewise, other psychiatrists who met with Lennon’s killer remember him among their most difficult cases to diagnose. All have struggled to penetrate and describe the medical symptoms of a spiritual battle that Mark Chapman says has raged within him for his entire life.

At least as early as June of 1976, when he was twenty-one years old, Chapman told therapists who counseled him after his suicide attempt in Hawaii that he was caught in the middle of a struggle between “good and evil spirits.” He said that he believed the spirits to live independently inside him.

“There’s a big part of me that’s mostly good,” he said. “But there also is a very small part of me that is very powerful and very evil.”

On the eve of Chapman’s scheduled murder trial, during the summer of 1981, Dr. Daniel Schwartz had been prepared to argue in court that Lennon’s killer was mentally ill when he shot Lennon. More than a decade after the killing, Dr. Schwartz said he agreed with Dr. Goldstein’s conclusion that the killer should face the criminal consequences of having silenced one of his generation’s most creative artists.

“I personally believe that, in the average person’s mind, the so-called insanity defense is a way of forgiving somebody. The jury might not have felt like forgiving this … evil act,” said Schwartz.

“Was he responsible for his actions? He did something terrible. He did something terrible! Who knows what more John Lennon would have contributed to the world? Who believes that somebody as wonderful as he was should die this way?”

Schwartz, whose interviews led Chapman to start talking to psychiatrists about a world of Little People who had lived within his mind since childhood and who had returned in the months before the killing, concluded after his interviews that the killer was schizophrenic. Schwartz said Chapman also suffered from a narcissistic personality disorder that caused him to crave attention and fame.

Chapman’s apparent confusion between Lennon and himself caused Schwartz to theorize that the murder was a surrogate suicide.

“I might argue that, from the psychiatric point of view, Chapman was not responsible.… But then the jury might decide ‘The hell with you,’ ”Schwartz said. “There’s no doubt Mr. Chapman knew and appreciated the nature and consequence of his conduct. He understood the nature and consequences of shooting John Lennon.”

In addition to exhaustive interviews with psychiatrists, Chapman underwent rigorous psychological and neurological testing at Bellevue and Rikers Island.

Although neurological tests were inconclusive, a bizarre profile of murder emerged from a series of verbal and perception tests, including the Rorschach, which Chapman agreed to undergo.

Among the Rorschach inkblots, he described scenes of bleeding female pelvic areas “which had been shot.” Overall, psychologists wrote that his Rorschach results betrayed “a perception of woman as seductive and dangerous. Oral aggression appeared to be associated with sex, and sex appeared to be perceived as of a conflictual nature. The patient impresses as fearful of sex, but as capable of being reassured temporarily by phantasies of sexual violence.…

“He spoke about his sensitivity and intelligence, which he got from his mother, who ‘is female’ as making him more a man than other men.”

Responding to a series of vaguely suggestive photographs and drawings, Chapman detailed revealing fantasies in which death and evil were recurring themes, such as the following interpretation:

In another picture he saw the image of another famous assassination victim, “JFK. Very pensive look that he has. He knows that he’s going to die. It’s in his eyes. But if you look closely his mouth denies what his eyes know. His mother stands there accepting her son but it’s unquestionably true that his eyes know he’s gonna die but his mouth denies it.”

Dr. Richard Bloom, like Dr. Daniel Schwartz, concluded after extensive interviews that Chapman was schizophrenic and that he suffered from delusions of grandiosity. Bloom, a psychologist called by the defense to evaluate Chapman and testify on his behalf at his scheduled trial, has maintained that the killer was psychologically unable to control his actions on the night he shot Lennon. Bloom traces the tragedy to a psychosis that began, he says, when the killer was a child. Bloom also theorizes that the seeds of violence were further nourished by Chapman’s indiscriminate use of psychedelics and other drugs that may have caused organic brain damage during early adolescence.

“From my point of view, all this stuff that took on such a worldly manifestation really was an expression of his own family life,” Bloom said. “All this stuff, as grandiose as it all sounds, filters down to his own relationship with his own family.”

Chapman told Bloom that he grew up hating his father “because of what he did to my mother.”

All the hate that the world’s John Lennon fans felt toward him, Chapman said, was “just a small fraction” of the hatred he felt toward his own father. Chapman talked in detail to Bloom and other psychologists and psychiatrists of the times his mother had cried out to him for help when she was being abused by her husband. He told Bloom he would wake up many mornings to find his battered mother in his bed.

Chapman’s creation of a world of Little People and his continuing fascination as an adult with The Wizard of Oz and other childhood fantasies indicate that “his intellect and emotions were operating totally separate from each other,” Bloom said. Chapman was unable ever to unify the various elements of his personality into a cohesive and recognizable self. Mirroring the dilemma of his alter ego Holden Caulfield, he was unable to see that the things he believed he needed “from his environment” were there all along, inside him. He identified with Holden Caulfield “as somebody that would rescue the children, which is something that nobody would do for him,” Bloom said.

Although Chapman’s later adolescence and young adult years were marked by success and civic achievements, Bloom says that success came too late to undo “permanent, lasting damage … probably during the first six or eight years of his life.” Bloom is confident that it was the childhood trauma that laid the groundwork for Chapman’s later obsessive and compulsive behavior patterns. The psychic scars of childhood, perhaps exacerbated by drugs, impaired “his ability to control his impulses … so what would have normally been something controllable becomes involuntary,” the psychologist said.

“He was operating beyond free will,” Bloom said. “The murder of John Lennon had the appearance of a premeditated act. But I saw this elaborate planning as part of the involuntary compulsions.

“He was on a track where he was unable to get off it. There were moments when he wished he could get off it, but while he was on it, he lost control.”

Bloom explains Chapman’s early worship of the Beatles, his religious fanaticism, his spur-of-the-moment obsessions with art, personal finances, The Catcher in the Rye, and other spontaneous compulsions as telltale indicators of the thought process that led to the death of John Lennon. Obsessive and compulsive behavior arises from “an inability to control things once the ball gets rolling,” Bloom said. “When Mark saw the John Lennon book, the ball was rolling and it was out of control and he couldn’t stop it.”

In the months, weeks, and hours before the killing, Chapman was able to appear normal and lucid because “He’s not psychotic or abnormal all the time. But when he’s in that obsessive mode of operation, that’s where he’s lost control. That could easily have been what was at work. There’s enough evidence to indicate that this is the way he operates. This is the way his mind works—on these obsessive tracks. I speculate that this is probably what was happening at the time he killed John Lennon.”

• • •

The only decision Chapman made, he says, was a choice to give up control over his future actions by allowing the “ball” to start rolling in the first place:

“After I got the autograph on the album, I should have got in a cab and gotten the hell out of there. I was oscillating back and forth between staying and killing him or leaving. There was part of me, the good part, that said, ‘Quickly, do it now before the bad part gets hold of you again. Get the doorman to hail you a cab. Go to the airport, get a plane and go back to Hawaii as fast as you can. Nobody will ever believe this is John Lennon’s real signature, but you know it’s real.

“Just do it! Just get away from here. Go home and hang the album on the wall and remember it. Remember you did get something. You came after something and you got something.’

“Then I would just collapse into the other mode, like switching modes. I envisioned the Double Fantasy album on the wall and me sitting on the sofa, looking up at it knowing what almost happened. Knowing that I went back home and got therapy so I was able to enjoy a ‘normal’ life. But I needed therapy right then. I needed someone to see these things and help me right then. I was out of control.… Inside my heart I know I’m guilty because I had the chance to turn around three months prior and I didn’t do it. I made that decision, a cognizant, rational, intelligent decision, to murder a man. Once I made it, there was no stopping. It was all downhill from there. God brought me to a crossroads and said, ‘I want you to go this way, not that way.’ God didn’t create robots. But once I made the decision, I was programmed by my own self-destruction. After that, something had to occur. The dénouement had to be written. It became so paradoxically a search for identity yet a search for destruction at the same time. I just felt like a big nobody and that was so attractive to me, to go out and do this horrible act that would make me become somebody. I couldn’t control it. There was something in me that desperately wanted to be filled. I was stretched to the limit and I had no personality and everything was going so wrong there was no way to avoid going down that hole once I made that decision. The forces were too great to withstand.

“It was like a runaway train. There was no stopping it. Nothing could have stopped me from doing what I did. Not prayer, not my will, not the devil, not any man, not any bodyguard. Not anything could have stopped me.”

CHAPTER NINE

MARK’S CASE