When the music died

John Lennon, a co-founder of the Beatles pop group and one of the world’s most famous musicians, was shot dead by Mark David Chapman

By Shevlin Sebastian

It had been a long day for musician John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono. They had spent many hours at a record studio at New York where John was working on a song by Yoko called ‘Walking on Thin Ice’, in which he played the lead guitar.

It was almost 11 p.m. when they returned to the Dakota building where they lived. A young man Mark David Chapman was standing silently in the archway. John nodded as he seemed to recognise Mark. A few hours earlier, John had signed the jacket leaf of his record, ‘Double Fantasy’, for Mark.   

When the couple had walked a few steps ahead, Mark pulled out a .38 special revolver and aimed shot five times at John’s back. The singer staggered and fell into the reception area where he said, “I am shot, I am shot.”

The doorman at the Dakota Jose Perdomo as well as the concierge Jay Hastings immediately informed the police.

Mark threw the revolver to the ground and stood calmly at one side. He had also taken off his coat to show that he had no concealed weapon. Perdomo shouted at Chapman, “Do you know what you've done?". Mark said calmly, "Yes, I just shot John Lennon.”

When the police arrived they saw that Mark was holding a paperback of JD Salinger’s

classic novel, ‘The Catcher In The Rye’. Mark was handcuffed and placed in the back seat of the police car. Another pair of policemen, officers Herb Frauenberger and Tony Palma saw John lying face down on the floor. Blood was gushing out of his mouth. Instead of waiting for an ambulance, with the help of first responders, they placed John in the back seat of the police car and took him to the St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital Centre.  

By this time, John had no pulse. Several doctors and nurses tried to revive him but to no avail. Finally, in an act of desperation, surgeon David Halleran cut open Lennon's chest and did a manual heart massage but he soon gave up because there was far too much damage done by the bullets.

Finally, at 11 p.m., on December 8, 1980, John Lennon, who was only 40, was declared brought dead on arrival.

When the news spread, there was a sense of shock and outrage. As Jay Cocks wrote in Time Magazine: ‘The outpouring of grief, wonder and shared devastation that followed John's death had the same breadth and intensity as the reaction to the killing of a world figure: some bold and popular politician, like John F Kennedy or a spiritual leader like Martin Luther King Jr.’

John was the co-founder of the Beatles, one of the most successful pop groups of all time. He and fellow founder Paul McCartney had a successful songwriting partnership, which was one of the reasons why so many of their songs, like ‘Hey Jude’, ‘Penny Lane’, and ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ became superhits. The other members included George Harrison and Ringo Starr. However, the group disbanded in 1970 and both John and Paul went on to have highly successful solo careers.

In 2002, Lennon was in the Top Ten of the 100 Greatest Britons in a BBC poll and in Rolling Stone magazine’s greatest singers of all time, he came in at No 5. In 1987, he was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame as well as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Background

So who is Mark David Chapman? And why did he want to kill John?

Mark belonged to a middle-class family in Fort Worth, Texas. His father was a staff sergeant in the US Air Force while his mother was a nurse. As a boy, he watched his father being violent with his mother and that frightened him. When David was 14, he began taking drugs and missed classes at the Columbia High School in Georgia.

When a friend presented him with the book, ‘The Catcher In The Rye’, he was profoundly affected by it. He modelled himself on the teenage hero, Holden Caulfield. But at the age of 16, he became a born-again Christian.

A few years later, he joined the Covenant College, a liberal arts college in Georgia. But he did not do well. He had an affair which broke up. David felt suicidal. Soon, he dropped out of college. Then he went to Hawaii. One day, he attached a hose to his car’s exhaust pipe and led it inside the car. He wanted to kill himself by carbon monoxide asphyxiation. But the hose melted. Mark was then admitted to Castle Memorial Hospital because he was suffering from depression. When he was released, he got a job in the same hospital. At this time, his parents divorced and his mother joined him.

In 1978, Mark decided to go on a trip around the world. Soon, he fell in love with a Japanese American Gloria Abe and married her on June 2, 1979. They remain married to this day.  

Meanwhile, Mark was a Beatles fan who idolised John. But he became angry when he read that John had said that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ. Some members of a  prayer group, of which Mark was a member, joked, paraphrasing John’s famous song, ‘Imagine’, by saying, “Imagine if John Lennon was dead.” And that was when Mark decided he would kill John.

Following his trial, Mark was sentenced from 20 years to life. Thus far, he has spent 38 years behind bars. His parole has been rejected 10 times since 2000. The latest was in August, this year. His next hearing will be in 2020. And in the past few years Mark has repeatedly said that he regretting killing John especially when he gets letters from the musician’s fans who ask him the reasons behind his dastardly act. 

(The Martyrs' Supplement, The New Indian Express, South India)