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

by Jack Jones

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Chapman flew from Bangkok to India, where the gestating Holden Caulfield witnessed appalling contrasts between the rich and poor of the earth. More than ever before, he became aware of the gulf of pain and desperation that separate the wealthy “phonies” from the “real people” who struggle daily to survive.

“Around the Taj Mahal were these tremendous green grounds and trees and ponds. It was one of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen. But I learned that this beautiful temple had been built for a khan’s wife and after it was built, they had the hands cut off of every artisan who had worked on it so they could never build another building like it. “Later the son of the khan betrayed him and locked him in the Red Fort a few miles from the Taj Mahal. He confined his father in a cell with a tiny peephole where the only thing he could see was the beautiful temple.”

“The only thing that’s important,” Moore told Chapman, “is that you are happy.” After attending a United Nations session with Moore in Geneva, Chapman left for England where he spent several days visiting ornate parks and photographing famous statues and buildings. In London, he recalls that he approached an elderly man on a bench. He asked the man to tell him the meaning of life. The man had no answer for him.

He left England a few days later, never thinking, he said, about John Lennon or about the English city of Liverpool where the Beatles had been born.

Chapman told the psychiatrists he was especially disturbed by his mother’s liaisons with “beach bums,” boyfriends who were about his own age. “I would get mad with her, and say, you know, ‘What are you going around with this bum for?’ ’Cause she has big breasts, you know, and that’s all they want.” Diane Chapman confided in her son that she didn’t want his seventeen-year-old sister to come to Hawaii. Just as she had turned to him when he was a child to protect her from her husband, Chapman told the psychiatrists that his mother again thrust him into a role reversal as her confidant and adviser. “She’d say, ‘Well, I’m worried about Susan, and Susan wants to come out, but I can’t have her out because I’m starting my own life.’ “I said, ‘Don’t worry about any of that stuff,’ you know. I was the one who got her a lawyer for her divorce. She didn’t know what to do. I had to take care of her. I found her a job at Sears. “You know, I had to take care of her.” After her son was imprisoned for the murder of John Lennon, Diane Chapman told a reporter of her first concern: “I loved my life and I wanted my life back,” Diane Chapman said in a People magazine interview. “My first thought when this thing happened was ‘My God, I’ll never be happy again.’ ” Nearly twelve years after John Lennon was killed, the killer’s mother had visited her son twice at Attica prison.

“When I was a housekeeper, I was happy,” he explained. “It was a busy day and it would go quickly. Then I was stuck, all alone, in this printing room, smelling chemicals, going crazy with the noise, the boredom. I was taken away from my element of being happy and being sociable because of my own strict ‘should do’s’—should do this and should be that—because I was married.

“I don’t even think George Kaliope, the therapist at Castle who became my closest friend, I don’t even think he could have reached me. Maybe if some stranger could have sensed something was wrong, maybe the right stranger could have reached me through some act of kindness or understanding. I just don’t know. I just ran so much, I didn’t want to even know if anything was wrong at all. I was driving toward self-destruction and nothing could stand in my way. I just had no self-worth.

“That was a fantasy I had. I was a very lonely man. I was walking around, lonely and hurting, in a fantasy world. And I finally just got to the point of absurdity—and where I am today.”

“The library for me was a refuge from pain and confusion and the feeling of not knowing what was going on, not understanding the pain and confusion of the world around me, which it seems has always been the case.

“Listen to some of Lennon’s records. Listen to the background of some of the Beatles songs. That screaming in the background, that’s John Lennon. Listen to him scream when he’s singing about not having his mother, about being abandoned by his mother and his father. The poor guy, his father left the family, then his mother left him to be raised by his aunt and uncle. Then his mother got killed after she came back to him years later. “Just to think after a person had been through all that he had been through as a child, then to get murdered by somebody like me.…”

“What had happened to me was that I couldn’t work. I couldn’t mentally work because of the pressures that were building inside my mind, the fear of being around other people. Not necessarily paranoia, though I did have fits of intense suspicion. I thought other people were talking about me or making fun of me, and maybe they were. I guess what bothered me most was just people. The only public place where I felt comfortable around people was the library.

“Perhaps people in the library were of a different nature. They were intellectual, more so than others. They were quiet people. I remember sitting in the open-air courtyard of the library, in the middle in these wooden chairs, deep-set chairs that you can just kind of sink into that have a little desk attached, a little wooden palette you can lay a book on or where you rest your arms. I remember getting the paper and reading the news and maybe Time magazine. It was just a very calm, soothing place for me. It was a place of searching and of hope.

“That was what I was feeling at that time, when I came across the book that ironically, paradoxically, said, ‘One Day at a Time.’ John Lennon: One Day at a Time. And shortly thereafter I began to think about killing John Lennon.

“I started

“But it was like a badge, it was like a pledge, like a statement of ‘What if?’ A statement of ‘Here is my identity, here is what my pain is if it can be reduced to ink and paper. Here is what my pain is! Please help me.’ That’s what that was. ‘Please help me.’ I am deeply in trouble if I’m identifying with a sixteen-year-old boy in New York City and here I am a twenty-five-year-old man in Hawaii who is married. And inside this man, the tornado is ripping up everything around him right out of the ground, flinging bits and pieces of himself into his face. Silent cries and screams getting sucked up and going unspoken, unheard.

“And I began to think about what would happen if I did open it. And I thought about jail, about spending the rest of my life in prison. And it was an actual comfort to me, as odd as that sounds.

“That was my shelter, my handle on things. That was how I would cope. And every day that went by, my thought about killing Lennon became stronger and stronger until at some point that I don’t remember I decided to actually do it. I actually did open that pit door on the bottom of the ground—open it, go down into it, and shut out the tornado. I entered a whole new realm then of living. It was just as desperate, but the winds stopped howling. It didn’t hurt anymore. There was a goal, a substance to be grabbed onto then. “I was to find that there was actually no way out of that iron pit door ever again. I had to go deeper, I had to go through chamber after chamber that finally ended up here at Attica. “But the moment that I made that decision and climbed down into that pit and closed the door over me—the tornado stopped. “I had found my identity. But I had lost my life.”

“She didn’t tell me at first that her son had been murdered. For some reason, though, I deduced that he had been murdered. She said he had been killed. I asked her if he had been murdered and she nodded her head and said yes. “This woman had come to Hawaii to forget probably the greatest pain that any mother could ever feel. But at that time, inside myself, within the blackness of my cold and shut-off heart, I just wanted to take advantage of her grief and vulnerability to satisfy my desires.

“But she said no, she wouldn’t do it. She said she just felt so bad, she didn’t want to have any joy in her life. But I wasn’t thinking of her. I didn’t care if she had any joy in her life or not. There I was, just thinking totally of myself. And I began to feel angry at her for rejecting me. “This whole episode came back to me about four years ago. I was out of my cell because I was working at the time and I was in an area of the prison where a television was tuned in to one of the talk shows. “I looked up at the TV and I saw a woman on the show who seemed vaguely familiar. I would have sworn that I knew her from somewhere. The program was about the murdering of a child. Not a baby, but a teenage or young adult child. I remember this program was about parents who had been forced to come to grips with their children being murdered. The lady, the one who looked so familiar to me, said she had gone to Hawaii to recover and deal with her grief after her son had been killed. Then I knew. “It sent a shiver through me. It shocked me, like some of the things that shock me about John Lennon when I hear them on the radio or see them on TV or in the newspapers and magazines. It was a memory I had tried to wipe out, a memory that I was ashamed of and there it was, on TV. I had forgotten about that woman until then. But when I saw her again on TV, it made me remember the kind of person I had allowed myself to become. “Society meant nothing to me, except a tool to be used. People had b...

people around me that I believed to be phonies. “But I had no feelings. I had to bypass them all. What happens to a person when he has to bypass all his feelings? What happens to a person, a person who still has a brain and a heart and still has to function? How can a person function if he cannot feel?”

“After I had that revelation, my trial, my guilt or innocence, my life or death no longer meant anything. I honestly did not care about what would happen to me. Guilty? Not guilty? It did not matter one iota. All that mattered was that I do everything I possibly could to promote the reading of that book by people all over the world.

“That’s when I realized, in that instant, that John Lennon had been killed to promote the reading of The Catcher in the Rye. And it was like an electric current had passed through my body and lit up all the cells in my brain.

“Even now, after all these years, I feel my blood stir just thinking about Holden Caulfield. I guess it’s like a drug addict. To me, slipping into the mind of Holden Caulfield was as comforting as a needle full of heroin to an addict. You can’t imagine what it was like.”

The second possession and demonic outburst occurred after Chapman was taken from the city jail at Rikers Island. On June 22, 1981, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced on August 24, 1981, to serve a minimum of twenty years and a maximum of life in prison. Shortly after sentencing, he was taken from Rikers Island and committed to the state prison system at Downstate Correctional Facility. When he found that he was being sent to Attica—where forty-three men had died during September 1971 in the bloodiest prison revolt in U.S. history—the killer panicked. Chapman also feared Attica for another reason: John Lennon’s first public performance after immigrating to the United States in 1971 had been a benefit for the survivors and families of prisoners killed by state police at Attica. The song he wrote and sang for the benefit at the Apollo Theater and later recorded on the Plastic Ono Band album Sometime in New York City, was titled “Attica State.”

“But we’re talking about a very scrambled mind in a person and that’s the way I was in the final months before I became a murderer. No person who is healthy summons demons wanting to kill somebody.”

He routinely receives letters from high school students whose teachers have assigned projects requiring them to write Chapman, often in connection with the reading of The Catcher in the Rye. Many organizations write to request autographs or photographs to be auctioned off to raise money for various charities. Chapman says that he was particularly upset by a letter he received “from the Red Cross, of all organizations,” asking him to donate autographed material for a celebrity auction. “I’m a man who brutally murdered another human being,” Chapman said, tossing the letter abruptly across a table in the interview room at Attica prison. “That human being bled to death. His blood was all over the place. And I get a letter from the Red Cross, of all organizations, saying they want a signed photograph of me to auction off so they can raise money. “Anybody in jail for murder should not be treated this way, given celebrity status. They shouldn’t be able to take a signed letter or photograph from somebody like me and auction it off to raise money. “That tells you that something is truly sick in our society.”

Before he wounded former president Ronald Reagan and crippled White House aide James Brady in a 1981 assassination attempt, John Hinckley wrote a letter to actress Jodie Foster. He told her he was distraught over Chapman’s killing of Lennon. Somehow, Hinckley reasoned, the assassination of a president was supposed to avenge the rock star’s death and win the affections of the actress with whose celebrity persona Hinckley had become obsessed. The list of ingredients on Hinckley’s murder recipe, like Chapman’s and Bardo’s, included a .38 caliber Charter Arms Special and a copy of The Catcher in the Rye.

Chapman put on and discarded the personalities of friends with whom he sought to identify. In some cases, he says he virtually became the people that he admired. Until he became Holden Caulfield, the killer denies that he ever had a personality apart from “the alter ego of whoever I was closest to at a given point in my life, usually a friend a few years older than myself. I was always somebody’s sidekick. Anybody I was with, I became them. I had no personality of my own. Why didn’t I have any substance to myself? What happened? Why was my personality always so fragmented?”

During the summer of 1992, King himself was being stalked by a John Lennon fan who, noting the look-alike appearance of the murderer and the writer, accused King of being Lennon’s killer. The obsessed fan, barred by a court order from approaching the writer’s home or office, drove his van for several days through King’s hometown of Bangor, Maine, with a poster saying: “Photos prove it’s Stephen King, not Mark David Chapman, getting John Lennon’s autograph. No joke, folks.”

I was struck, for example, about what people were saying about the kind of people who do well in the modern corporation, in an atmosphere where manipulation of personal relations counts for more than doing a good job, essentially, or working with materials.

“The corporate master of interpersonal relations was also a pretty good description of a narcissistic personality. They had the same traits: the charm, the ability to inspire enormous loyalty and affection in people, but at the same time the incredible distance from themselves and others. The way these people tended to burn out at a certain point in midcareer when the youthful charm begins to fade and they find they can no longer manipulate people in this way. An inner emptiness floods to the surface and a lot of these people become suicidal. It sounds very much in some ways like Chapman’s description of himself.”

The

“Is there any way to identify such people? It’s always so much easier after the fact. Then everybody can look back and say, ‘It was so obvious, how could anyone have missed it?’ But Chapman, on the surface at least, was a person that everybody loved, a person who had these enormous personal successes everywhere. A person with people loving him and he’s doing a great job. That’s the last person you’d single out as somebody who was dangerous. That leads me to the rather pessimistic conclusion that there probably isn’t any way to identify such people ahead of time.

The thing that has changed most dramatically has been the saturation of public space by these images of high-flying celebrities.

“So many pop culture celebrities themselves are so flagrantly narcissistic that it makes identification with them easy. That’s the kind of response they invite.”

“The John Lennon experience did not turn into the Elvis Presley exploitation experience,” Mintz said. “This is not an attack on Priscilla Presley or any member of the Presley estate. It’s just that Yoko did it differently. At the very first moment, she decided there would be no funeral. The absence of a funeral set the tone for this not to be like what occurred in Memphis with forty white Cadillacs going down Elvis Presley Boulevard and the attendant mourners.

“Instead of a eulogy or statements, Yoko asked for a few moments of silence for people to reflect, and John was cremated. There is no place where people can go to visit John’s remains.”

Lennon was cremated rather than buried “so it wouldn’t become a situa tion like what we’ve seen in Paris, around Jim Morrison’s grave or people going off...

The day after he was murdered, the ashes of John Lennon’s body were brought back to Yoko Ono at the Dakota an...