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

by Jack Jones

“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 that they portend to offer up secrets. He showed us everything; he had nothing to hide. He lived his life on as public a stage as anyone I can recall. The Associated Press says that John and Yoko are the most photographed couple of the twentieth century, and that includes President and Jackie Kenned...