DATE: 1980.
WHAT IT IS: A .38-caliber special Charter Arms Undercover revolver used in pop music’s most famous assassination.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The Lennon murder weapon has a 2-inch barrel and a 5-chambered cylinder. It is a “blued” gun—bluing is a process in which a preservative coating is put over the metal to keep it from rusting—that appears to have a black finish. The serial number inscribed on the gun is 577570.
The 8th of December 1980 was a mild winter day in New York City, the temperature dropping into the fifties as darkness descended. Midtown Manhattan was alive and vibrant, as it typically is on a weekday night, with traffic navigating the crowded thoroughfares and pedestrians briskly negotiating the sidewalks. Neon lights flickered over Broadway, skyscrapers stretched to the heavens along the Avenue of the Americas, stately apartment buildings presided over Park Avenue, and trendy restaurants and boutiques graced the fashionable West Side. Below ground, long subway trains clattered through the dark serpentine tunnels, their passengers perhaps a little wary of the dangers of night travel in the city’s subterranean trenches.
On West Forty-fourth Street, in the heart of the theater district, a couple left the Record Plant recording studio and climbed into a limousine. A glut of long black cars routinely clogged the streets in Gotham, ferrying the wealthy, the famous, and those who wanted to impart these images, but this particular limo harbored two world-renowned passengers. He was a rock star, one of the most idolized persons in the world, the erstwhile co-creative force of what many considered the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band of all time. A towering figure, the man was a widely acclaimed musical genius, an artist with sublime musical and lyrical gifts, a poet, a peace activist, and a thinking person’s renegade—not to mention the world’s most famous former full-time househusband. Although personal and professional rifts were given as the underlying reasons, his wife had been vilified as the dragon lady who had catalyzed the sundering of the iconographic Sixties music group, which had bestowed on the world a catalog of tunes that not only changed the face of the popular music scene, but which ushered in a whole cultural shift. The Beatles were not only the most inventive, most celebrated, and most successful pop musical group in the history of the music industry, but they spawned a revolution that reverberated for decades, perhaps permanently changing the sociological and cultural tapestry of civilized society.
Together the two limo passengers, husband and wife John Lennon and Yoko Ono, were a pop-music duo in their own right, having released several recordings since their controversial 1968 album Two Virgins, whose front and back covers were graced by photographs of their fully naked bodies.
The husband-and-wife music team had been working at the Record Plant on a song for a planned new album. This project was part of Lennon’s musical rebirth since the birth of his and Ono’s son, Sean, in 1975, after which the ex-Beatle Lennon decided to take the radical step of becoming a full-time father and nurturer to his newborn child. With his substantial earnings from his days as a Beatle, as well as the vast self-perpetuating royalties earned daily for radio airplay of the songs he wrote and of repackaged Beatles records, money would not be a problem for the wealthy Lennons in their New York City digs.
An English expatriate, John Lennon had had to fight to make America his home, after initially being denied permanent residence because of an earlier drug conviction in England, but finally he became a legal resident of New York City.
From the late 1950s, Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison had been members of a musical group, eventually known as the Beatles. The band built up local followings in Hamburg, Germany, where they played on several visits, and in their hometown of Liverpool, England. In 1961, a record-store proprietor named Brian Epstein heard the band play and got them a contract with the Parlophone label of EMI. There were a couple of early personnel changes, and the band soon became famous as the foursome of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Ringo Starr (born Richard Star key, Jr.).
In October 1962 the Beatles hit the English charts with “Love Me Do,” followed a few months later by “Please Please Me.” But the Beatles hadn’t caught on yet in the United States, the world’s largest record market, because EMI’s American subsidiary, Capitol Records, had no faith in the combo’s commercial potential in America.
Despite Capitol’s refusal to release the Beatles’ records, Epstein himself traveled to America to play for an East Coast Capitol chief a dub of the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which generated a lot of excitement. On February 1, 1964, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” reached the top position on the U.S. singles chart, followed in the next few months by “She Loves You,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Love Me Do,” and “A Hard Day’s Night.” (Not only were all these songs written by Lennon and McCartney, but the pair even had another number-one tune as writers during this time with Peter and Gordon’s “A World Without Love.”) By now, Beatlemania had grabbed the world and was changing the face of the music scene.
Lennon and McCartney wrote the Beatles tunes and sang the lead vocals on most of them as well. They created infectious melodies and married lyrics to them that could be fun, ponderous, silly, provocative, romantic, cryptic, optimistic, pessimistic.
As the Sixties wound through their critical social upheavals with the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Vietnam War, the Beatles not only supplied the musical sound track, but led the revolution with their faddish hairstyles and attire and their maverick attitudes on everything from religion and philosophy to sex and politics. The Sixties were a time of psychedelic drugs, sexual liberation, mysticism, antiwar demonstrations, and rabid environmentalism. John Lennon was perhaps the most progressive Beatle, the experimenter, the articulate spokesperson, the elder statesman of the Fab Four. Even though they had stopped touring in 1966 and produced music only on vinyl from that point on, millions of Beatles fans worldwide received the news of their breakup, announced by Paul McCartney in April 1970, with immense disappointment, and the Japanese artist Yoko Ono was fingered by some as the culprit. But Lennon had found his soul mate in Ono, his second wife.
As Lennon and Ono cruised uptown in their limo, a deranged fan waited at their destination. The limousine pulled up to the Dakota at Central Park West and Seventy-second Street, the home of its passengers. The massive yellowish stone building with castle-like turrets was surrounded by a wrought-iron fence topped with a long row of truculent sculpted male heads. At the entrance was an imposing arched stone gate that opened into the building’s large interior courtyard. A small guardhouse stood in front of the gate on the right-hand side, from which security personnel could keep watch over the driveway into the courtyard and the twin walkways that bordered it.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono got out of their limousine and were about to step onto the right-hand walkway when the armed intruder emerged from the shadows of the arched entrance. Earlier in the day the stocky, bespectacled man had asked John Lennon for his autograph, which the rock star had willingly scribbled on the cover of his recently released album, Double Fantasy. Now the interloper called out.
“Mr. Lennon!”
Famous the world over, Lennon was recognized everywhere he went, and people were constantly beseeching him for autographs. It was well known that New York City was his adopted domicile and that he had taken up residence at the Dakota, a building known for its famous show-biz inhabitants. Lennon was probably not surprised to hear the voice of a stranger call to him, but this time he was met not with gushing admiration but with lethal action.
At about 10:50 P.M., the sound of a flurry of shots echoed from the face of the massive stone building across the intersection and into the park across the avenue, followed by a woman’s scream. Four bullets struck John Lennon—two in the back, two in the left shoulder. As Yoko Ono, who was not hit, cried out for help, the wounded Beatle staggered up the walkway past the guardhouse, collapsing as he emerged into the Dakota’s courtyard.
The gunman did not bother to run or toss away his gun, but rather just paced about under the archway holding his weapon, getting into a verbal altercation with the frantic doorman, then quietly waiting for the police.
By the time police arrived minutes later, scores of people had gathered around the entrance to the Dakota. Word of Lennon’s shooting spread with amazing rapidity. Tears streamed down the shocked faces of many of the onlookers. Television crews pulled up shortly afterward. Soon the world would receive the news that John Lennon had been shot and possibly killed.
New York City police officers lifted the mortally wounded victim and placed him into the back of a police car, where he sprawled across the seat. An officer asked him if he was John Lennon, and the dying man, barely conscious, muttered, “Yeah.” During the ride to the emergency room Lennon moaned. The police sped to nearby Roosevelt Hospital, but by the time they arrived the life had already trickled from the once-vibrant musician. In the emergency room doctors pronounced John Lennon, forty years old, dead at 11:15 P.M.
Yoko Ono, driven to the hospital in a police car, became hysterical, begging, “Tell me it isn’t true.” A crowd was building outside the hospital now, and by one in the morning about a thousand people stood outside the Dakota, some mute and numb, others softly chanting one of Lennon’s musical mantras about giving peace a chance.
The gunman was identified as twenty-five-year-old Mark David Chapman. He had traveled to New York City from his home in Hawaii, making a stop in Georgia where he had lived as a teenager. He brought with him a gun that he had purchased for a reported $169 in Hawaii to carry out the execution. Chapman did not have a criminal record, but he had tried to commit suicide twice—once in 1977, the second time a couple weeks earlier while he was in New York City stalking Lennon.
Until recently Chapman, who had previously done social work for the YMCA, had worked as a security guard at a condominium in Hawaii. After the first of his suicide attempts, he had been temporarily confined to an institution. A high school rock-band guitarist who was obsessed with the Beatles, Chapman, like Lennon, was married to a Japanese woman. Although a fan of the former Beatle, some dark impulse in Chapman had driven him to destroy his idol.
The news of the death of John Lennon stunned the world. Society had become inured to the premature death of its cultural icons; many popular entertainers had died prematurely due to fatal accidents, drug overdoses, or other calamities. Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, Mama Cass, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison had all succumbed at relatively young ages. But the killing of John Lennon was different, a new phenomenon: the murderer committed the deed merely to have his name linked with a famous person.
In the last months of his life, John Lennon had become musically active once again. The preceding summer he had begun recording with Yoko Ono the album Double Fantasy. Shortly before he was fatally shot, a single, “(Just Like) Starting Over,” was released and became a hit. With the song an overture to his musical resurrection, it was one of life’s cruel jokes that Lennon was cut down just as he was returning to music after a period of quiet domesticity.
One man, one gun, one psychotic impulse, and the world was deprived of one of its great musical geniuses. With the voice silenced, people everywhere mourned the man who had brought pleasure to their lives and in his songs pled for peace.
Meanwhile, on December 9, the day after the murder, the New York City Police Department’s Ballistics Squad received from the morgue three bullets in association with complaint number 14854, the designation given to the John Lennon murder case, which was caught by (that is, assigned to) the 20th Precinct Detective Unit. One piece of lead bullet found at the crime scene was so deformed that ballistics examiners could not match it with the gun. The other two bullets delivered to the squad were taken from John Lennon’s body by the medical examiner. Both were .38-caliber lead hollow-point bullets. Of these two, one bullet was in good condition, the other in fair condition. The alleged murder weapon, a .38-caliber Charter Arms Undercover revolver that was vouchered by the arresting officer, was received by the Ballistics Squad around the same time the spent bullets came in.
On the eighth floor of the NYPD Police Academy on East Twentieth Street in Manhattan, a ballistics test was performed to determine if the weapon seized from Chapman had fired the two bullets found in Lennon’s body. After a ballistics examiner made an identification study of the gun and recorded its serial number, caliber, barrel size, number of chambers, and manufacturer, he fired it to make sure that it was in fact an operable firearm. Then he placed a couple of .38-caliber cartridges into chambers of the Charter Arms revolver and shot into a large water tank. The water absorbed the kinetic energy of the bullets, slowing them down so that they wouldn’t cause damage. But now the bullets bore the unique markings of the imperfections in the barrel of the gun.
The two test bullets retrieved from the water tank were placed in small envelopes and forwarded to the squad’s Microscopic Section. Here a microscopic comparison was performed in which the markings of the test bullets were compared to the markings of the two bullets recovered from John Lennon’s body. As a result of the test, the Ballistics Squad matched the two bullets from the body with the Charter Arms firearm, the weapon recovered from Mark David Chapman at the Dakota on the night John Lennon was shot.
A New York City Police Department Crime Scene Unit photograph of the gun used to kill John Lennon.
On December 10, two days after the fatal shooting, John Lennon’s remains were reportedly cremated at a Hartsdale, New York, crematorium. The body that once was a familiar sight on millions of album covers was now a pile of ashes. But although his life was terminated, his songs endure as a testament to the indomitable spirit and creative genius of one of the twentieth century’s great musical talents. The gun that discharged the fatal bullets survives as well and will continue to be a grim reminder of the day John Lennon became a martyred icon for the ages.
LOCATION: Firearms Analysis Section, New York City Police Lab, Jamaica, Queens, New York.