Let Me Take You Down: Inside the Mind of Mark David Chapman, the Man Who Killed John Lennon

by Jack Jones

Overcoming abandonment and rejection by both his parents, Lennon etched his image in poetry and music upon the consciousness of an era.

Chapman

Maybe

Impressed by the doorman’s familiarity with Leonard Bernstein, Chapman informed him that Bernstein had been one of the first established and respected musical experts to appreciate Beatles music. While many critics and much of the public had dismissed the British rock group as another of many passing musical fads, Bernstein had predicted that the songs of Lennon and Paul McCartney would endure. “And Bernstein is right,” Chapman had told Perdomo. “The music of the Beatles will someday be known as classics. They’ll be ranked alongside the great musical geniuses like Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart. Mark my word.”

After several moments, Yoko disappeared. Other curious onlookers quickly began to take her place. They stared at him through the windows of the police car. He wanted it to be over. He wanted to be taken from the scene of his crime. He feared that, as word of what he had done spread through the city, an angry Lennon fan would appear and start firing bullets at him through the car windows. He prayed for God to turn back time. He promised God he wouldn’t do it again—if God would only turn back time.

As he waited for the police officer to return to the car, Chapman struggled against a growing realization of the enormity of his act. Time seemed to stand still. At last Spiro and Cullen got into the front seat of the car and drove away with their suspect. The officers chattered frantically with a dispatcher on the police radio. Red lights bathed the streets as the patrol car sped through traffic lights and swerved around corners and oncoming traffic. Chapman tried to press his large, handcuffed body onto the floor of the car, fearing that snipers already were searching for him.

“Please don’t let anybody hurt me,” he repeated to the patrolmen. “I’m sorry I caused you guys all this trouble.” Between radio calls, Officer Cullen advised Chapman of his right to remain silent and to contact a lawyer. The driver, the officer who had arrested Chapman, began rocking his body excitedly forward and backward, pounding the steering wheel of the police car with his fists. “I told you I felt it,” he said to his partner. “I told you that something big was going to happen tonight. Remember what I said?” Cullen nodded. “This is history, man!” Spiro was shouting. “This is history!” When he heard the officer’s remark about the historic dimensions of his act, Chapman snap...

Lennon’s breach of faith with his son “was the one thing he regretted most, primarily because he was acutely aware he was repeating the pattern of his own childhood,” according to Frederic Seaman. “It killed him,” said Seaman, who was employed as Lennon’s personal secretary, chauffeur, and all-around gofer during the last two years of the rock legend’s life. “He had suffered so much in his own childhood and I think at some point he had said to himself that, no matter what happened, he would not repeat that pattern with his own child. And yet he did. And he saw it. And it killed him. He felt overwhelmed by guilt and he felt a failure. It really tormented him.”

uxorious

Seaman suggests that Lennon’s troubled childhood and the realization that he had allowed the same fate to befall his son contributed to a “fatal flaw” that drove the musician subconsciously to plot his own death. Lennon, he says, had a compulsive fascination with mystical ideas of death and rebirth. Consciously or unconsciously, the expression of such ideas was bound to attract the attentions of someone like Mark David Chapman.

Seaman describes a tragic flaw in John Lennon “that was evident from the very beginning, but I didn’t want to deal with it for a long time. John was talking about it in March of ’79 in Palm Beach. He would go on about all this mystical stuff. He talked about his death early on from the context of books he’d been reading. He was always reading about the occult and about death. All this stuff was totally foreign to me. So I tended to just space out when he was talking about it because I didn’t want to deal with it. It wasn’t until later, after months and months of this, that I realized this was a big deal in his life and he really spent a lot of energy obsessing about this,” Seaman said.

“He said he dreamt of getting shot. He had nightmares of violent death—weird, recurring dreams, as he put it, about dying, about getting shot. He talked about getting shot as a modern form of crucifixion—the best way of moving on to the next life with a clean karmic slate.”

Seaman had just come from a movie theater with a date sometime between 11 P.M. and midnight on December 8 when he learned from a weeping hippie on a New York City sidewalk that his employer had been gunned down. At that moment, he said, the morbid conversations began to make a macabre sort of sense.

“After he died, I really started to reflect on a lot of it and wondered if he had some kind of premonition, or perhaps even desire to die a martyr’s death. I’m sure he’d fantas...

“The problem with John was, he had a lot of abstract knowledge, a lot of information. But he couldn’t apply it to his own self, his own family, or his own circumstances. And, you know, knowledge that can’t be applied to one’s being is essentially useless.”

Just as Lennon projected himself in his professional life—often with sexually explicit language and nude photographs that alienated fans and shocked public sensibilities—Mintz says the portrait of Lennon that emerges from the secret journals is “unfiltered, uncensored. Straight from the heart, or straight from the chip on the shoulder or wherever it’s coming from—but not internalizing the anger. And there was a great deal of anger inside John Lennon [from] wherever all that comes from.”

“As

privy as all of us are to people like John, there are countless areas of their lives that are known only to them. Their psychological makeup is known only to them. We have examined the John Lennon experience now for how many years? There is a presumption on the part of many that we know everything there is to know about John. But when we arrive at a question like ‘Where did all his anger come from?’—we don’t know. We can draw extrapolations, certain types of conclusions. It’s a question that’s still left hanging. We keep pointing to milestones: John’s mother being run over by an off-duty police officer who was drunk … when he was a teenager. Certainly, a psychologist could point to it as a basis for John’s antiauthority attitude. But it also, upon saying it, sounds like psychological mumbo jumbo. I don’t know. But there were times when the anger came through. You can hear it in his music. When he wrote that song, ‘How Do You Sleep?’ [a slashing musical attack on former Beatle Paul McCartney] you can feel the rage coming through. And when he would drink to excess, he was not the kind of person you would want to be around. When he would be arguing a point that he felt strongly about … he probably was not all that opposed to the use of fists. You wouldn’t want to be around John Lennon when he was angry.”

While never understanding the full range of Lennon’s complex emotions, Mintz says the star’s anger was inseparable from “brutal honesty.” Lennon, with the compulsive candor of a child, was unable, says Mintz, to look at any aspect of his life or the lives of others ...

“One thing he had, other people can have it too if they work on it, but he seemed to have it in a very spontaneous way. And that was that he was totally noncensorial in his behavior. He had the facility to be brutally honest, not just with people it was safe to be brutally honest with, but with anyone. I think one of the things that endeared him to so many people was that they recognized a quality that they would like to have in themselves and almost lived it vicariously through John. So when he got up there and sang ‘Help!’ and made that spirited call for help, it was striking and jarring. It had nothing to do with show business. When he wrote about kicking heroin in ‘Cold Turkey’ or when he wrote about being a ‘Jealous Guy’ or ‘I’m a Loser,’ or any of those things that were first-person autobiographical statements told without pretense or hype—that was an extraordinarily unique thing. And in the interviews, the body of interviews, he didn’t know how to give a jive answer. He wouldn’t have been good on Entertainment Tonight He was better off in psychodrama. “He kept no secrets. One of the things so perplexing about the books about his life that have come out after his death is ...

“John’s death was very much in keeping with John’s life,” Goldman says. “He saw himself as a martyr—a saint and a martyr.

“He saw himself as someone who was going to be assassinated and he was totally obsessed with assassination. The Kennedy assassination, he was always talking on that subject and relating it to himself. But he wouldn’t take the simplest precaution to prevent himself from being assassinated. He would walk in and out of the Dakota without a bodyguard in the middle of a publicity campaign. Then, on the other hand, he would sit at the kitchen table and get stoned and worry that he was going to be shot.”

“Particularly the sixties rock stars who grew up in this ambience of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the psychedelic drugs and avatars, believing that death was an extension of life. They began to believe, almost like old-time religious fanatics, that they could go around again.

Echoing a quote from John Lennon—“We are all Christ and we are all Hitler”—Goldman says that, virtually without exception, the superstars he has studied and written about are fixated on two characters in history: “Jesus and Adolph Hitler, and the common element there is simply megalomania,” he said. “There’s nothing more fundamental to the show-business personality than the feeling that you are good and you have this awesome power. And when you start to lose this power, that creates a real problem.

“Celebrities are very morbid figures, really, who imitate life. The closer you get to them, the more they tend to disappear.

“I don’t like to make John Lennon less singular than he was. He was a pretty unique person, but so many of these people are. Look at Jim Morrison. Everything that came out of that guy’s mouth from day one was about death, death, death. He wrote about death. He talked about...

Mintz agrees with Goldman that rock ’n’ rollers in person are pale images of their stage personae. “There’s not a great deal that’s remarkable about the rock ’n’ roll experience beyond the music,” Mintz said; although he believes the commitment of rock musicians to eradication of social evils such as world hunger, homelessness, poverty, and war is sincere.

“The personalities [of rock stars] are usually just a shadow of the impression that one would get of that person by listening to the music,” he said. “But the one thing that must be said about this particular idiom is that I don’t think there is any other group in the world that have given of themselves so selflessly in terms of social issues. I don’t know if the crooners ever did it, the jazz musicians, actors, dancers, or Comic Relief group.

“I did speak to John about the need for heightened protection. It seemed to him I might be a little paranoid because of my unfortunate experience. But I said to John, ‘You are speaking to so many people in the music and in the interviews, you just have to assume there will be a few, a handful, that will be very disturbed by what you say, and one or two might be motivated to react in a very negative way—to try and hurt you.’

“From the time he was a teenager, he had people around him insulating and isolating him from the world around him. So when he hit New York, he felt this tremendous sense of freedom, his first since the Beatles era. People always recognized him on every street corner. There would be no street corner that John could stand at waiting for a light to change without people coming up to him, but the vibe was not hysterical.… People wanted to shake hands, say ‘How are you doing? When are the Beatles getting together again?’ But for the most part, it was kind of a blasé, New York vibe. He liked that. He advertised it. In his last interview, the day of his death, he said he felt great that he could walk around New York; that he and Yoko could go anyplace they wanted to go.” If a man like Mark David Chapman was stalking John Lennon “he believed there was really no protection for that,” Mintz said. “When Sean was born, they hired a former FBI agent to provide some low-level security, primarily around Sean. But John and Yoko both loved the idea of walking around freely. “You’ve got to keep in mind that, before 1980, most public figures moved around without a lot of public guard.”

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.

“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.”

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.

“My father lived by very rigid patterns, doing the same things day after day. He was very meticulous, very unemotional. He was a ‘good’ man, as far as doing all the things a ‘good father’ is supposed to do,” Chapman struggled to explain. “He never drank and he was always home. But there was an iciness that I felt from him all my childhood. We went to the Boy Scouts together and the Indian Guides and all that father-son stuff that society says a good dad is supposed to do with his kids. But I don’t recall that I ever had a conversation with him about anything that was real. I don’t recall that my father ever hugged me or told me he loved me.

After

Sociologist Todd Gitlin of the University of California at Berkeley believes that the early and repeated use of psychedelic drugs by adolescents may lay the groundwork for a pattern of later sociopathic behavior. In Chapman’s case, it may have laid the groundwork for murder.

To

In the evenings, he taught guitar at the YMCA and Adams says that any time anyone needed a special favor, Mark Chapman would go out of his way. “If there was ever anybody that didn’t like Mark,” Adams said, “I don’t know who it was. The Mark Chapman I knew was just an outstanding person.”

The following fall, Chapman enrolled in part-time classes at South De Kalb Community College. He worked for a short time as an aide at an Atlanta-area hospital for autistic and mentally ill children. He was dismissed from the job when he was unable to subdue a child who became violent.

Interviewed shortly after Chapman was arrested for the murder of John Lennon, Moore said he would never forget what Captain Nemo had done for the refugees. Moore also said he worried about the toll that the job might have taken on a hypersensitive youth.

“Where was the beginning of this? This had to happen at Covenant. With total clarity, I saw that all this began with my breakdown at Covenant College and proceeded up to that night of December 8, 1980. I realized why I got depressed at Covenant College. I never had that answer before. I thought maybe the war problems I had seen at Fort Chaffee, the fact that … I had had sex and I had repressed the guilt from that and never told Jessica. I don’t ever remember dealing with guilt from that. Why was I a security guard? Because I thought I was a nothing, and that was the only thing I could handle.

“With the YMCA in Lebanon, even though it ended in disappointment, I had been a somebody. I had been chosen to go to Lebanon as the culmination of all my work with the YMCA and it was the most exciting thing in my life. Even when I had to leave, it turned out to be for something better. I rose to an even greater position of importance at Fort Chaffee. I was an area coordinator in charge of an important project. Then, when the job ended and I enrolled at Covenant, I became a nobody.

“The true reason was that I felt like a nobody. I felt like a nobody because I wasn’t a normal person.… When I went to college I was just like everybody else, and had to study like everybody else.… I wasn’t in charge of anything, I wasn’t in a foreign country taping bomb sounds down the avenue. I was a regular college student with regular responsibilities and studies and that was it. That was all. I was just like everybody else—a nobody.

He had been somebody. Suddenly, he was nobody. Mark David Chapman decided that being a nobody was worse than being dead. It was worse than spending the rest of his life in prison.

In several of his notes, however, Dr. Gursahani expressed concerns about sexual and other unspecified “fantasies” Chapman had reported. Before he was discharged, the patient was interviewed by an unidentified therapist who made a brief report on one of his more curious fantasies of “wanting to be in prison.” If he were in prison, Chapman told the therapist, “he could rest and read. Pointed out that his day was spent [at the hospital] in that exact way.”

Intelligent, sensitive, compassionate and solicitous of her feelings, Chapman approached Harvey as one of his peers. Harvey recalls that she had to remind herself on numerous occasions that he had been a patient—that he wasn’t a mental health professional like herself.

“He was so good with the patients that we began inviting him to join us for beer, dinner, or whatever after working hours at the hospital,” Harvey said. “That’s when he became one of our peers. Mark was a patient at the hospital and I was a nurse at the hospital. But Mark was never in therapy with me,” she said. “He was my friend.… Most of the time, I had to force myself to think, ‘Oh yeah, this guy was admitted.’ ”

“You know the song, ‘Starry, Starry Night’ [‘Vincent’]? It reminds me of Mark. The way he just, like, took everything in so much and maybe felt it all too much. If you don’t have a good way to let that out, that sensitivity, if you can’t deal with it yourself, it’s going to blow you up. “Mark was extremely sensitive.… He would get depressed and very moody and when he’d start talking that way, I’d say, ‘Go see your counselor. You know, I’m not your counselor. I’m your friend.’ ” Observing that he seemed always to prefer the companionship of older men and women like herself, Harvey, almost twenty years older than the young ex-patient, speculated that “maybe he was looking for his parents.”

Larrabee was executive director of the hospital in 1977 when Chapman was hired, about two months after the abortive suicide attempt. The hospital director later told police investigators that he had no qualms about hiring Chapman, even though he had been a patient a short time before. “Mark was like one of the family,” Larrabee said. “He was extremely competent, an outstanding employee and personal friend.” Like others who had known Mark David Chapman throughout his life, Larrabee described the bewildered young man as an object of pity. He was someone who had “no enemies,” Larrabee said.

On the first day of the world trip he met in Tokyo with an official of the Japanese YMCA who praised him for the work he had done with refugees. The conversation caused Chapman to realize, for the first time in his life, that he was beginning to lose touch with the sense of compassion he believed he had always felt for other people. He had never felt more compassion than he had for the war-torn Vietnamese. “But as I talked with this man, he turned to me with tears in his eyes and he asked what I thought about the refugees—the uprooting of so much humanity,” Chapman recalled. “I just sat there, kind of numb. I was kind of in shock because of his question and I was surprised at myself because I realized that I couldn’t feel anything. It was weird, like all that feeling I had before inside me had dried up. I felt guilty. I just couldn’t say anything. My tongue was tied, and I just kind of nodded my head as he talked.”