– Mark Chapman
What kind of person could have committed so senseless a crime? Only a mad man. The story of how Mark Chapman became, at twenty-five, one of the twentieth century’s most infamous killers is impossible to be viewed in any other way. For almost five years, until just before his murder, John had lived a private life. But one of Mark Chapman’s motives was to achieve the exact opposite for himself. He would say later that he thought that by killing John he could take some of his fame and have it for himself – the fame that John had often found a burden.
Chapman had been a Beatles fan as a teenager, but then, after becoming a born-again Christian, he took exception to the song ‘Imagine’ and the line ‘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 famously preached non-violence.
But who was Mark Chapman before his crime? Apparently, he was fairly bright as a child, but soon became troubled. Born in 1955 in Texas, where his father was in the US Air Force, but brought up in Georgia, he was just nine when Beatlemania hit America. He loved the Beatles and he also loved watching The Wizard Of Oz on TV. But at fourteen 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 that much misunderstood interview, that the Beatles were ‘more popular 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 in Lebanon. For a time, he was a success. Working with Vietnamese refugees, he was caring and popular. However, as that job finished, and a girlfriend left him, depression overcame him. He stopped studying and took a job as an armed security guard. He was a very good shot. But thoughts of suicide preyed on his mind.
Then, once again, he changed his life. In 1977 he went 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 did attempt 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 to Hawaii he married his travel agent, Gloria Abe, a Japanese American. 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 occasion he signed himself ‘John Lennon’.
By now he was, it’s been reported, sometimes sitting naked at his tape recorder and mixing together his reasons for killing John Lennon from Beatles 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 called ‘phony people’.
With a five-thousand-dollar 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 outside of the Dakota and the streets around that part of Central Park. But 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 John would be his victim. John might, he thought, be too difficult a target. 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 he changed his mind again. God, he said, spoke to him. John had been granted a reprieve. Going back to Honolulu, Chapman told his wife what his intentions had been and said he’d thrown the gun into a river.
That was a lie. By 6 December he was back in New York outside the Dakota. Staying that night at the YMCA, he left the next morning, sickened, he would say later, by the sounds of gay sex in the next room. Checking into the nearby Sheraton Hotel, he bought a copy of Double Fantasy. 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 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 meant to be found.
Then he set up watch outside the Lennons’ apartment, his loaded gun in his pocket, the album and the copy of The Catcher In The Rye in his hands. In mid-afternoon he met John for the first time as he and Yoko left the apartment building, and pushed the record into his hand. John duly signed it.
‘I was on Cloud Nine,’ Chapman 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.’
By the time John and Yoko returned from the studio, Chapman had been waiting outside their apartment for over twelve hours. His moment had come. He took aim and fired at point-blank range.
As John was raced away to hospital, Chapman waited to be arrested. ‘I’m sorry I gave all you guys this trouble,’ he apologized to the police when he was handcuffed. ‘Don’t hurt me. Please don’t hurt me.’
At the time of writing he is still in Attica State Prison, thirty-eight years after his crime.