Stuff You Should KnowOn December 8th, 1980, John Lennon was shot and killed outside his apartment building in New York City, by Mark David Chapman. Music history was altered forever. Listen in to this tragic story.
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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, And this is Stuff you should Know. Solemn edition.
Yeah, pretty solemn.
Yeah, it's a solemn occasion to this episode is coming out on the anniversary of John Lennon's death, and not coincidentally, because we're actually doing an episode on the death of John Lennon, so it's appropriate.
It's actually the day before his death. If we're being nippicking close enough.
I was very close to Chuck.
Yeah, and I'm not one to commemorate death dates, especially murder dates. But I did want to do this episode, and since I saw it alined, I thought, you know, if we can get this out quicker than maybe it's timely.
I don't know.
Yeah, had you decided you wanted to do this before we did JD. Salinger or did it all just kind of work out like that.
I think it just worked out like that, Like the two were completely unrelated in my mind, such that when you suggested we put them both out on the same week, I was like, why.
Oh, they're related. The two are related for sure.
Yeah, absolutely, so let's.
Talk about this. I knew about the death of John Lennon some, but certainly not to the degree I do now. I like, for example, I knew he was forty, I knew he was shot I knew he died in front of his apartment building the Dakota, which we've talked about before. I knew a few other things, but certainly not the details. And I didn't know much about the guy who killed them that either.
Yeah.
Well, let's tell everybody what we've learned. Huh.
Yeah, I remember this happening, believe it or not. Wow, because I was, But I guess. And I would have been.
Nine. When's my birthday? March?
Yes, so yeah, you would have been nine.
Yeah, I would have been nine years old. And I remember just like you know, I didn't. I grew up in a house that didn't have a lot of music in it except for my room and my brother's room, So it wasn't like the Beatles were a household name or anything like most kids of my age who had parents who may or may not have been into the Beatles. My parents didn't tell me anything about the Beatles, right, But I knew they were a thing, and I knew like John Lennon is the guy with the round glasses because I was just a kid, and I remember it being like a big news and I was like, oh, that that singer guy, that one of those round Glasses was killed.
That's sad.
Yeah, it was really big news, as we'll see. I mean, it's still big news today, but at the time it was just earth shattering for sure.
Thanks to Olivia for the help with this one. And I guess we should start with talking a little bit about John Lennon and his love affair with New York City.
Yeah, I'm not sure when he moved to New York City. I just know that they moved to the Dakota he and Yoko in nineteen seventy three. When did they move to New.
York, you know, I don't know if the Bank Street apartment was the first one, but they moved to Bank Street in seventy one, so that may have been their first New York place. I know they lived a sort of partially lived in one of the hotels there for a while, but they lived at this very nondescript house at one oh five Bank Street in the West Village and for a couple of years. But one of the reasons they moved is because they were robbed in the apartment and people busted in former tenants apparently and stole some artwork and the TV and Lennon's wallet and his address book and supposedly he put the word out on the street that Bobby Seal's people are going to exact revenge if I don't get that address book back.
Oh yeah, like the Black Panthers.
Yeah. I don't know if he had a legit connection.
I mean, he seems like the kind of guy that would have known the Black Panthers and Bobby Seal. But it was enough to where that address book was in fact returned, and I guess that was enough to where they were like, hey, Yoko, I'm one of the most famous people in the world. Maybe we should move to a building that's a little more secure.
I mean, that's why they moved to the Dakota Is that had a security guard, that had a doorman. There was a driveway that was gated, so you could drive in through the gate and they'd close the gate behind you, and then you got out of your car in the courtyard so you didn't have to get out on the street. It was much much safer. But saying that, I've read interviews with John Lennon where he talks about his life in Manhattan, and like he would walk around Central Park, he would go get breakfast, like down the street, he was just like living like a normal New Yorker. And he said that people would like say hi or whatever, but rarely would anybody ever bug him. So he was living he was super super famous, but at the same time he was just living like a normal person by this time.
Yeah, I think that's one of the allures of New York is you can be one of the most famous people in the world and generally, like New Yorkers themselves aren't the ones that are gonna bug you anyway.
It's any tourists probably.
You know.
Yeah, But otherwise you can kind of live in New York and walk around and just do your thing. And that's what they did when they bought five apartments at the Dakota. They lived in a couple of them. They had a studio one which was Yoko's work studio, and they had a guest apartment, very nice thing to have, and then a storage apartment.
Yeah, and they also had Sean Lennon in nineteen seventy five, and this whole era from about that time until his death has a couple of different portrayals depending on who you ask. Yeah, a lot of times is portrayed is John Lennon's house husband era. He reputedly would bake bread and he would take Sean to go walk in Central Park and just being like a stay at home dad. He turned his business affairs over to Yoko and just basically was like, I'm just here to live. Yeah, And another set of reporting, including from people who were like there part of his life, like at least one personal assistant who was there. Toward the end, he said, that's kind of a charade, that he was actually really depressed. He would lock himself in his room and just watch TV for days on end. He was into the occult may or may not have been doing drugs, but he wasn't like baking bread and just been paying attention to Sean. He was he was depressed. But even if that holds true, by the time his death rolled around, he had turned some sort of corner because he was on a schooner somewhere on the way to Bermuda and ended up being the only person on the ship that wasn't seasick and was asked to like steer the boat through a storm, and apparently going through that gauntlet made him like just it just gave him some confidence or produce a spark in him that had been missing. So even if the people who said that his last years were pretty depressing, the last year of his life was different than that. It was renewed.
Yeah, I mean it was probably a little bit of both. John Lennon struggled his entire life with you know, with just issues. He had issues from the moment he was raised until the day he died, generally speaking in and out of drugs, stuff like that. So it was probably both, would be my guess as far as the work goes. That fall of nineteen eighty is when the album Double Fantasy came out. Great record released on November seventeen, the first one since Sean was born, and it was you know, things were looking I think more positive. You know, he regretted how he fathered Julian. I think he felt like he had a second chance here with Sean. He was madly in love with Yoko Ono, just like partners and everything, and things were looking pretty good. I think he had largely sort of let the Beatles thing. That was a tough breakup, you know, so he had to get through.
That, Yeah, But it sounds like he kind of had by the time Double Fantasy came out because it was a fairly upbeat album about like family life and stuff, right, Yeah, a lot of it was Yeah, so that's John Lennon. Kareening toreed him on a separate but soon to intersect path. Was another person who was not in any way famous, and depending on what interview you read of his, who you talk to, what psychiatrist notes you read, was very disappointed that he was not famous or that he was a nobody. His name was Mark David Chapman, and I should say, right out of the gate truck, there's a lot of people who are like, don't even mention that guy's name. Yeah, because he said multiple times that the reason that he killed John Lennon spoiler alert, Mark David Chapman was the person who killed John Lennon to gain fame, to like basically basque in the reflective glow that he would gain from taking John Lennon's life. So people are like, don't give that guy any publicity. You can't talk about the death of John Lennon unless you talk about Mark David Chapman. And from interviews that I've wrote with him, there's a lot more to the story than him just killing John Lennon because he wanted to be famous.
Yeah, although I mean, like you said, he has literally said I thought I could acquire his fame by killing him. So he was born in nineteen fifty five in Fort Worth, Texas, to an Air Force father and a nurse mother, and he grew up four miles from my house. Wowee, Yeah, I had looked it up before years ago, and I did it again today because I couldn't remember. He had a Decatur address, but it wasn't like a Decatur Decatur like we think of it. He went to Columbia High School, which was a rival high school to my high school that I went to. Obviously older than me, but yeah, he grew up right down the road. And his dad was a pretty tough guy. Apparently there were stories that he told about physical abuse against his mother in which he would step in to defend her. The mother did say that there were there was some abuse, but she, you know, I think, like a lot of women of the time, down played that. But he didn't seem like a very good guy, as evidenced by the fact that at one point, as we'll see, Chapman thought about killing his father, like he wanted to kill somebody, right, And we'll get into all that, But as a kid, there were you know, he was sort of a go get her in some ways. He started a newspaper for the neighborhood, he was a coin collector. He was kind of a normal kid in some ways. But then he also, you know, Olivia found this one thing, and I've seen this elsewhere that he would create these fantasies about people who lived in the walls and that he was their king. And you know, initially, I'm like, that's that's kids stuff, Like kids do all kinds of things like that. But the more and more I read, it seemed like it was it bordered on like like a godlike complex rather than just sort of you know, make belief friends.
Yeah, they considered him important, and they were the only ones who considered him important supposedly. Yeah, but I think like that's a good illustration that he was showing signs that could be taken a mental illness, like as early as childhood. Yeah, there's a lot of debate on the internet whether he's mentally ill at all. It seems like the growing consensus is, especially as we understand mental illness more and more, that yeah, he's probably very mentally ill, which makes the fact that he's not being treated for mental illness in prison like that much worse, you know. Yeah, of course, So he came of age in like the sixties and really kind of bought into the whole hippie thing for a little while. When he was in high school, started doing drugs. I think he started huffing in Halen's which is that's what you do when you start trying drugs in Georgia. And then he just moved on and eventually came to acid. I think he tried heroin a few times. Like he definitely tried all the drugs. And he also was into the Beatles. His favorite album was Sergeant Pepper's. He also kind of got into conspiracy theories in UFOs. Who's just kind of like into all the stuff you get into when you start doing lots of drugs, right, And then he had a turning point, Chuck, He like completely didn't about face during high school.
Yeah, it was only he only had did drugs for a couple of years, and you know, from fourteen to sixteen at Columbia High School he became a born again Presbyterian Christian quit drugging and during his drug years, like, you know, I saw those just weed and LSDVE, but I guess some other things were sprinkled in there. But he was actually ran away from home and was living on the streets of Atlanta for a couple of weeks as like a fifteen year old.
Wow.
But when he straightened himself out, he got a job at the YMCA after he graduated and was a counselor. He worked with Vietnamese refugees in Arkansas, and by all accounts, was really good at it. He was popular with the kids, he was popular with the campers. This is sort of I guess where we can start talking about the Catcher and the Rye. Yeah, because the one thing that he sort of identified with was well Holden call Field as a whole, but Holden call Field and his liking kids more than he liked adults, and that was certainly seen to be true with Chapman.
Yeah, he definitely came to identify with Holden call Field for sure. I read a people Like People magazine interview with him from nineteen eighty seven. It's really long piece by a guy named James R. Gaines, and in it you get the impression that Mark David Chapman during this time is struggling with trying to be sane, trying to be good, try not to be bad, trying not to feel like he's going crazy. Yeah, and at one point he finally got to the point where he's like he was apparently tired of struggling. He started he basically turns his back on God and started praying to Satan and was just like, just turn me crazy. I'm basically I'm sick of trying not to be crazy. From that point on his words, yeah, Yeah, from that point on, he just kept really going downhill from there essentially.
Yeah, And I think that can be the case, as you you know, depending on what sort of mental illness you have, as you get up in your upper teenage years, things can really sort of settle in.
Yeah.
And I saw a lot of interviews. He talked a lot about the two sides of himself. As we'll see later, there were certain psychiatrists after, like during the trial, that diagnosed him as having paranoid schizophrenia. He heard voices in his head like things like that were starting to happen with more regularity. So in nineteen seventy seven he kind of dropped out and moved to Hawaii. I think thinking it would be good for him. He did have a suicide attempt there, but he also got treatment for depression and started traveling and stuff.
Like that he did. This is really strange. He at this time managed to travel the world. I could not find how he paid for it, but I know that he paid for a later trip by selling an original Norman Rockwell that he had acquired. So this guy who is like basically living on the beach in Waikiki with no money, suddenly goes on a trip around the world to Asia to the Middle East during this several month period between oh, I think it's sometime in nineteen seventy eight. It's a really bizarre little footnote that there's not a lot of information on. But that's one thing he did. And the reason that we bring this up is because his travel agent, a woman named Gloria Abbe, ended up marrying him and they're still married.
Actually, yeah, they were. I mean that may be one of the facts of the podcast. They were married for eighteen months before he murdered John Lennon, and she has subsequently stayed married to him. And the interviews that I read, she's like, you know, I took an oath of marriage in front of God and everybody, and I'm gonna honor that. So that's basically the end of the story. I mean, there's really not more to it than that she has stayed by his side. You know, does regular conjugal visits with him in prison, and they're you know, they're still going strong, I guess. But in Hawaii is when although he was getting depression treatment, he really went downhill with his mental health there and that's where he started obsessing about killing somebody famous in order to gain fame. And Lennon was on a list as well as Johnny Carson and Elizabeth Taylor, Paul McCartney, George C. Scott, the governor of Hawaii, Ronald Reagan, apparently David Bowie was on the list.
It was a big list.
Of people that, you know, the police found this upon their investigations of people that he wanted to murder.
Yes, alarmingly, he was hired as a security guard and outfitted with a gun during this period, and in nineteen eighty he quit his job and he bought his own gun. He flew from Hawaii to New York with a gun in November of nineteen eighty and by this time, like you said he'd come up with a list of famous people who he might kill. And during this trip, he later said that he visited both Reagan's and Carter's election night parties, probably with a gun, kind of like a Travis Beck yeah, bikel kind of thing.
Yeah, but he.
Didn't do anything, obviously, And he actually went back to Hawaii afterward.
Yeah, And before he did that, he went to Georgia to get bullets because at the time, you know, the good old days, you could not even buy bullets in New York City. So he went back to Georgia to get bullets. And I don't know if he couldn't buy them there or what, but his plan was to get them from a cop friend of his and said that he was thinking about killing his dad. And then, you know, went back to Hawaii at that point, then went back to New York on December sixth, which was a Saturday. And maybe that's a good time to take a break, what do you think? Yeah, all right, we'll be right.
Back, all right.
So Mark David Chapman is in New York on December eighth. John Lennon and Yoko Ono are promoting the album they had just released, Double Fantasy, they went to breakfast. John Lennon went got a haircut. He had that awesome hair at the time. It's when he was sort of in his.
Kind of like grease or stray cats look.
Yeah, yeah, you're right.
That was kind of kind of a cool.
Look because he always had this long hair usually, and all of a sudden he had sort of this greaser look, which is which is super cool. Yeah, And he had a very very famous photo shoot done at his apartment that day with Annie Leibovitz for Rolling Stone. What a Day, the iconic cover that was released much later in January of nineteen eighty one, where John Lennon is curled up naked beside Yoko Ono and the picture's kind of taken from above, very very famous photograph.
And that photograph was, you said, taken on the day he died.
That's right.
Isn't that nuts?
Yeah, not as nuts as one of the other photographs taken.
That No, that is it's great foreshadowing. So after the Annie Leebowitz photo shoot, they went downstairs to Yoko's studio and they were interviewed by RKO Radio and then after that was time to go to work. It's like five PM and Yoko and John leave the Dakota to go to the Record Plant, a recording studio, to work on a new single called Walking on Thin Ice. This is around five o'clock and they leave the Dakota and as they're leaving, they met a fan who was standing out on the sidewalk, and it turns out had been standing out on the sidewalk essentially for the last few days to waiting to run into John Lennon. And that fan was in fact, Mark David Chapman.
Yeah.
As an odd side note, and I think this just came out in sort of semi recent years. He was not the only person to meet Mark David Chapman as a musician there. Yeah, But James Taylor said that he bumped into him. He lived, i think a couple of buildings up from the Dakota, and he met Mark David Chapman on the subway and he told the story, you know, in the past few years. He said that he had button holed me in the tube station right in front of seventy second Street the day before the murder, and he had sort of pinned me to the wall, not physically, but you know, just sort of metaphorically. I guess he was glistening with my niacal sweat and talking some freak speak about what he was going to do with this stuff, and how John Lennon was interested, because I don't think we mentioned he wanted to be a he wanted to be famous, but he supposedly tried to play guitar. I'm not sure how much he fancied himself a musician, but I don't think it's like he was delivering demo tapes or anything unless I had never caught that. But freak speak about what he was going to do, how Lennon was interested in how he's going to get in touch with John Lennon. He said he seemed either drugged or in a manic break of some sort. His eyes were darting all over the place, dilated like crazy. And then he closed by saying he was just someone who knew me and who I didn't know, and he had an agenda that I couldn't deal with, and I knew that I needed to get away from him.
Isn't that crazy? He met James Taylor the day before he killed John Lennon.
And Taylor heard the shots from his apartment. Yeah, when it happened.
So all but before that, after he met James Taylor, but before he shot John Lennon. This is still where around five o'clock, when Yoko and John are leaving the Dakota for the record plant, Mark Chapman walks up and asks him to sign his copy of Double Fantasy, that record that had just come out the month before. And that photo that you referenced, Chuck, that even weirder photo. There's a picture of this happening of John Lennon signing Mark David Chapman's copy of Double Fantasy. Just so happened that there was somebody with the camera standing on the sidewalk that decided to snap a picture of John Lennon signing an album for the man who would take his life a few hours later.
Yeah, it's one of the creepier photos that exists, especially if you're a Beatles fan. It was a photographer named Paul Garesh, and.
He didn't quite happen to be there.
He was someone who hung out there all the time, okay, to get pictures of Lenin and they were in fact friendly because he was always around and you know, obviously a huge Beatles fan and John Lennon like he would chat him up, and he was he was really he was a generous human as a super famous musician, right, and so he would spend time talking with Gorsh and stuff like that when they were he was waiting on a car or something like that. And that's why he was out there for a few minutes this time, as they were kind of just waiting on their car. And yeah, he signed it in pen. That record was auctioned off a couple of years ago for nine hundred thousand dollars and was signed in pen. But it also has you know, like police sharpie markings, like evidence markings on it and stuff like that.
It also has Chapman's enhanced thumbprint, like from police forensics testing it.
Yeah, it's I mean, I don't know one other.
I'm not going to cast his persions on who would buy something like that for almost a million dollars. Yeah, but you know, ten people been on it, so I guess I'm not sure if it was a Beatles fan looking to show it off or destroy it or what.
I didn't get any information about who bought it.
There's one other creepy footnote of this initial meeting too. Apparently somebody reported who was there when all this happened that John Lennon asked Mark David Chapman, is that all you want? And Mark David Chapman apparently just stood there and stunned silence, and John Lennon asked him again, is that all you want? And I guess Mark David Chapman said yeah or something like that, And so John Lennon said, okay, see you later and turned around and got in the car and left.
For the record, planted yeah, and that was enough.
That interaction was so amicable and friendly as a super famous guy talking with someone, you know, stalking outside of his apartment that Mark David Chapman reconsidered in that moment and was like, geez, you know, maybe I should go home and show my wife this autograph that I got. He was really kind to me, but that didn't happen because he has mental illness. He heard in his head. When he came back Lennon and Yoko Ono got back just before eleven, he was still there. That limousine, like you said, could pulled in that courtyard area where they would have had a gate behind them, but they dropped them off on the sidewalk, and in his brain he said he heard a voice saying do it, do it?
Do it?
With his external human voice, he just said, mister Lennon, and John Lennon turned around, and he fired his thirty eight pistol five times and hit him four times.
Yeah. So John Lennon stumbles forward, and I believe it was either the doormant or the security guard is standing there and John Lennon says to him, I've been shot. And there's a three part documentary series coming out on Apple Plus called John Lennon Colon Murder without a Trial. And I guess some publicists didn't do their research or whatever, because all of the stuff that all of like the ink that's being written about that documentary in the last week is about how it reveals John Lennon's last words, which turned out to be I've been shot. But anybody who cared to even go read even the first couple articles that covered this at the time, we'll see that his last words were I've been shot.
But they made it sound like it was breaking news.
Yes, they made it sound like at long last, this documentary, forty three years later is revealed his last words, but his last words were I've been shot. Technically, his last word was yes, because when he was laying there on the sidewalk, the police got there within two minutes and one of the cops that, are you John Lennon? And he said yes, and that was the last thing he ever said. The cops got there really quickly. But the thing that they found that was extraordinarily creepy was what Mark David Chapman did after he shot John Lennon.
Right yeah.
The security guard yelled out, do you know what you just did? And Chapman said, I just shot John Lennon, which would become a Cranberrys song in nineteen ninety six, that was about the murder of John Lennon. And he picked up his copy of Ketchri and the Rye and he leaned against the building and started thumbing through it. I think it was a he had bought a new copy that day of his favorite book. And he you know, didn't try and get away, didn't try and do anything, went very peacefully. The police when they got there, knew how dire this was. You know, four bullets at close range like that was, you know, basically a death sentence, and they knew they certainly couldn't wait for an ambulance, so they put him in the squad car, drove him to what was the time Roosevelt Hospital now Mount Sinai West, and supposedly, I mean I saw that he was listed as dead on arrival. They tried to resuscitate him, I think for about twenty minutes. Yeah, and they finally pronounced him dead at eleven fifteen. But I've heard different accounts that he died in the police car too. He died, you know, upon arrival at the hospital, And I'm not really sure anyone knows the exact moment.
No. I read a interview with the emergency room doctor that tried to save him, Stephan Glynn, and he said, like the bullets were so incredibly well placed that he actually had Lennon's heart in his hand trying to pump the blood to keep the blood flow going, and he said there was nothing to pump. He'd lost so much blood, there was no blood to pump in at any rate. All the arteries around the heart were so torn up they couldn't move any blood anyway. So it's probably likely he was dead in just that short car trip to the hospital.
Yeah, the official autopsy found two bullets went into his back and went through his left lung, another went through his left shoulder, also through his left lung and then lodged in his neck, and the other one hit his left armbone. And in a very sort of strange turn of events, this news got out very quickly because there was a producer for WABCTV there in the emergency room named Alan j Weiss who was being treated after a motorcycle crash, and all of a sudden, you know, it's not like a just a regular person being wheeled into an er. It was people were sort of losing their minds and it was really chaotic. He knew that something was going on, and he just gathered from sort of hearing things that it was in fact John Lennon. And as he says, and this sounds I'm not sure why, I don't want to believe it, but he says that the musaic playing in the room while they were trying to revive him was all my Loving.
Yeah Beatles song. Yeah for those of us who aren't really into the Beatles enough to know that that's a Beatles song.
Sure, because he would not mention all my Lovin by the Everly Brothers.
You never know, He's like, that's just weird. He also said that he heard Yoko and no scream, and he talked to one of the doctors attending to him and they agreed that John Lennon probably was and he was convinced enough that he called the station WABC and told them the news. And so the news broke on ABC, which just so happened to be airing Monday night football, and it was Howard Cosell that broke the news to the world essentially of John Lennon's death.
Yeah.
It was a Patriots Dolphins game, tied up in the fourth quarter, and Frank Gifford, you know, while they were in commercial, they discussed, like what should we do here?
This is too big to kind of sit on.
Apparently coselle did not really want to do it, but Frank Gifford was like, we kind of have to. And so as the quote goes, Gifford said, you know, three seconds remaining, John Smith is on the line, and I don't care what's on the line, Howard, you've got to say what we know. In the booth, and Howard Cosell talked about, you know, this is just a football game. He said, Lennon was shot twice, so the you know, the news wasn't even accurate that quickly off the you know, off the wire, or I guess it wouldn't even a wire at that point. But he said that he was dead on arrival and that it's hard to go back to the game at that point.
Yeah. So I also read Stevie Wonder stopped his concert in Oakland when he heard the news and broke it to his fans too. It was a huge, huge deal. I mean, like you said, you were even aware of it, and you weren't even like a Beatles fan or very aware of the Beatles if you were a Beatles fan at the time. Yeah, right, yeah, if you were a Beatles fan at the time, it was the most devastating news you've heard since the Beatles were breaking up. Maybe even more devastating than.
That, I would say, so, probably because that ruined any chance of it ever being reunited.
Yeah, fair point. I saw that somebody was like, what would have happened if John Lennon hadn't been killed. Somebody was like, they probably would have played together here or there, you know once in a while. So yeah, yeah, I'm sure it was much worse.
But well, he and Paul had had repaired their relationship by that point, and the whole you know, the Beatles breakup was it was acrimonious in that they were all sort of not tired of each other, but just tired of being in that band together. But it wasn't you know, they never hated each other. It was like any long term creative partnership. They had a strain, but they had worked it out, and they were hanging out together in New York some when Paul was in town, and you know, it wasn't like, you know, they weren't talking anymore or anything like that. Things were headed toward reconciliation, if not professionally, certainly personally.
Yeah, they did work it out. Please, I think with that, Chuck, we should probably take a break.
Huh, let's do it.
Okay. So we're back and the world is now just learning that John Lennon has been killed. Yoko No, I'm not sure exactly when she did it, but she released a statement saying like there's not going to be a funeral, which is probably a wise move because I can't imagine what John Lennon's funeral would have looked like. It would have just been chaos. But instead she said, I think it would be more appropriate to have like a ten minute silent vigil. And around the world people observe this ten minute silent vigil, and apparently in Central Park there was upwards of fifty thousand people standing there silently for ten minutes. And I heard a report that the only thing you could hear in Central Park in Manhattan at the time where the helicopters s whirling overhead who were covering this for the news, Like no one talked to car horns. There was nothing for that ten minute vigil, which must have just really kind of driven home like the significance of that moment, you.
Know, Yeah, I mean it was before that though the Dakota, like there are pictures of I mean, it looked like a you know, a festival, a concert, festival of people just outside the Dakota. I mean, it's not a stretch to say it was like on the manner of like the Queen dying or something like that. I mean, people all over the world, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands gathering together to mourn his death, and even very sadly, a couple of people in the following days took their life by suicide. Mentioning Lenin's death and depression kind of pushing them over the edge and their suicide notes.
Yes, Paul McCartney when he heard the news and was, I guess asked by a reporter Tom on it, he said something like drag, isn't it okay? Cheers and was very widely criticized for it, and he, in his defense said like, I couldn't bring to words like what I was feeling at the moment. I was in shock. Apparently he went off and wrote a a song about the whole thing called Here Today. Have you heard that song?
Oh? Yeah, it's on the Tug of War record, the Good One. It's okay, I mean, it's not my favorite from that record, But that that interview that always has bothered me. If you see the interview, it's just like he's jammed in the middle of throngs of people on a sidewalk and someone you know, sticks a camera and microphone in his face, and when you watch it, it's clear he's not being flip.
He's he's a guy who's who.
Probably doesn't want a camera and microphone shoved in his face at that very moment and is just trying to get out of there. Paul McCartney was obviously crushed, as were all the Beatles. Ringo Star was in the Bahamas, immediately came to New York and acted as you know, sort of temporary dad to Sean, because Yoka was like, I need I need help with my son. You know, you don't think about like the nuts and bolts of going through something like that, one of which is I have a five year old that needs to be looked after. And Ringo stepped in there, which is amazing that it.
Seems like a pretty Ringo Star thing to do too.
Yeah, I agree.
George Harrison, he was off on his kind of like Eastern philosophy trip and had been devoting his life to preparing for a peaceful death. So when he got the news, he apparently thought he got the call in the middle of the night and his wife Olivia took the call, and he thought he just guessed at first that Ringo Starr was dead for some reason. I never saw what his reasoning was. He just said that he thought that in an interview. But then when he found out what had happened, he apparently was really angry that that John had been like robbed of a chance of having like a peaceful, like calm death, that he died in such a violent manner, and it took him a while to get over that and just kind of accept that that happened. But on that note too, about the fact that John Lennon died in a violent manner, he supposedly had kind of postulated that something like that might happen to him someday, and he chalked it up to his violent pass that he was a violent person and that he expected he might die violently when he went. I thought was very bizarre.
Yeah, very much. Julian was seventeen. He was in North Wales, and he said he woke up with a gut feeling that something terrible had happened, and he, as the story goes, went downstairs and opened the curtains of his mother and stepfather's house and it was just mobbed with press. So that's how he finds out terrible. Lenin was cremated at Ferncliff Cemetery outside New York City, in Hartsdale. But there was somebody who took another photograph, an unfortunate one of his body in the morgue, and the New York Posts published it, which is terrible.
Yeah, on the front page, I think. And if it wasn't the New York Post that put it on the front page, the Inquirer definitely did. So, Yeah, there's some really significant photographs just that circle this event. So Mark David Chapman shows up in court two days later, he's taken to jail of obviously by the police, placed under suicide watch. And also I think he was wearing a bulletproof vest in court because there was just such a chance that somebody would kill him for killing John Lennon. Still today, I think if he left prison, somebody might kill him for killing John Lennon forty three years later, you know. And I suspect he might be aware of that. But he underwent a battery of psychiatric tests with I believe a dozen psychiatrists over two hundred hours between over about the six months between the first time he was arraigned and when he ended up pleading guilty in court, and every single one of these psychiatrists, prosecution and defense said this guy has some sort of mental illness. The degree of it was disagreed upon by the prosecution and the defense. The defense a psychiatrist real like he has schizophrenia, he has psychosis. He's not aware of what he did. The prosecution said, he's very aware of what he did. He has mental illness, probably some sort of personality disorder, but definitely not anything that's made him so detached from reality. He's not culpable for this crime.
Yeah, for sure. Finally, on June twenty second, he changed his plea himself. His attorney. It was actually a second attorney because the first one withdrew very quickly because there were death threats, like you're, you know, defending Mark David Chapman. But Jonathan Marx was the second US attorney appointed, and he was like, don't change your plea to guilty, because you know, we could probably get you, you know, at least insane at the time of the shooting, like temporary insanity.
Which did they still even use that as a plea?
I don't know, man. I know we've done an episode on it, but I don't remember where it landed these days.
Yeah, I'm not sure. But he changes guilty plea to guilty of second degree murder. On August twenty fourth, the judge sentence send to twenty years to life at green Haven Correctional Facility and said you should get psychiatric treatment and Mark David Chapman read from The Catcher in the Rye the part where I was just going to read it but it's a little long, but the part where holding call Field is basically talking about saving the kids, yeah, that are in danger of wandering off the cliff. And you know that's when he calls himself the Catcher and the Rye and that's you know, he was still so attached to that book at that point that that was sort of his final statement. And I think he even had a copy of the book that he had inscribed and said this is my statement.
Yeah. Apparently the book, the copy that he was reading after he shot John Lennon had that written in it. And if you read that James R. Gaines interview with him and people from nineteen eighty seven, this period of time, that six months are when he really seems the most mentally ill, when it really shines through, because he's vacillating between a complete and total immersion in The Catcher in the Rye and rejecting the Catcher in the Rye and going to the Bible and then vice versa. And there's a point where he has this awareness that the whole reason he shot John Lennon is to let everyone know that he's this generation's catcher in the rye, and every generation has a catcher in the rye, and he's the one now. And it's really unsettling and disturbing. And it would be really difficult to say the things that are coming out of this guy's mouth documented and be just making it up to make yourself seem mentally ill. It's just it's too off, unhinged essentially.
Well, and there was a history of this in his life, you know. It wasn't like all of a sudden after the murder he just started saying these things.
You know. Yeah. And also, I mean, even if if you exclude all that, don't you have to be mentally ill to kill somebody to become famous. Doesn't that require a certain level of at least like a fundamental personality disorder that would qualify as a genuine mental illness?
I think so I do too.
Yeah, I'm no psychiatrist, but if you believe that you can acquire someone's fame by murdering it, then essentially, yeah, there were a couple of the other motives. I mean, you know, the motive is what it is, which is a disturbed person wanting to kill a famous person to gain fame. But he also was a very devout Christian after this, and at one point, you know, the Beatles talked about being more popular than Jesus. He offended his Christianity with stuff like that and the song Imagine. But you know, I don't think those were like the big reasons. He has expressed more and more remorse and shame over the years as time went by, because in twenty I'm sorry. In two thousand he became eligible for parole, and every two years he goes up before the board and he expresses shame. Now, he said in twenty twenty, what I did was despicable. I assassinated him because he was very, very very famous, and that's the only reason. And I was very very much seeking self glory, very selfish. For her part, Yoko Ono always writes a letter saying, please don't let him out. I don't feel like it's a punitive plea. From hearing interviews, she genuinely thinks that herself or Sean or Julian would be in danger if he was let out, And who can blame her?
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I don't know what else to say after that.
And one more thing I want to mention is, of course Strawberry Fields, the place in October of nineteen eighty five, on what would have been Lennon's forty fifth birthday, Central Park dedicated dedicated an area near the Dakota where he used to go and walks with Sean as Strawberry Fields. And it's a wonderful place to visit. It's got this beautiful mosaic on a walking path and if you go there are always you can't go there without seeing still just scores of Beatles fans paying their respects. Nice. Yeah, and Yoko ninety years old, still going strong and lived in that same apartment until just a few years ago.
Yeah, I know. And there's a lot of people who love to hate on Yoko. If you want to get into John Lennon conspiracy theories, she's frequently the person who's blamed as like hiring in it indirectly mark David Chapman as the hit man to kill her, right exactly at the same time. That kind of that, that's the kind of thing that gives people who despise her fodder for being like sea. She just she'd walk past the place where her husband died every day and it didn't you know, she didn't move or something like that. So she's a very misunderstood person. I think in a lot of ways. She finally did move during the COVID pandemic up to upstate New York.
I think with Sean, yeah, people need to stop all the Yoko stuff for God's sake.
Yeah. I mean it's still going strong if you read the Internet, but it does feel like it's gone. There's been a sea change. I think it used to be way more acceptable to just hate on her, and just in general, I think it's gotten a little more conspiracy oriented rather than just mainstream these days.
Yeah, Yoko Ono did not break up the Beatles full stop stop saying that. If you watch that the great Peter Jackson documentary that was out recently, it was it was definitely an odd thing for all of a sudden to have her in the recording studio with them. It's different. But Paul was like, it was an adjustment, and Paul was like, hey, listen, I it's a little weird, but like he needs her, he loves her. She's great for him, and she's not It's not like she's much of a disruption or anything like even when you watch the footage, she's she's just there and other family members are popping in here, here and there all the time. She was there the whole time, and he really needed her at that point, like she was his life. And Paul McCartney understood that, and he knew that like that was going to be part of the working arrangement moving forward, and they were getting okay with that, you know.
Nice. Well, I'm glad you finally settled it once and for all.
Yeah, I'm sure not everyone will be like well Chuck said, it goes great.
So if you got anything else.
No, I don't love her singing, but that's a different story we've talked about.
I think we have. But I'm sure I've mentioned before. I have you ever seen her cover of Fireworks?
Uh huh? I love that, man.
I just think she's a true original artist. So even if I don't love the singing, like, she's always done interesting things.
Yeah, okay, Well, if you want to know more about the death of John Lennon, there is no shortage of articles and documents and stuff that you can read on the Internet. And since I said that, of course it's time for listener mail, I'm.
Gonna call us just a recent email from a young listener. Hey, I'm sorry, not even hey, Yo, Josh and Chuck. My name is Ben S and I'm a thirteen year old from Eagle Mountain, Utah. Love your podcast. I have been listening to it for years and it makes me feel very smart around my friends. My dad introduced us to it by having us listen to it on all of our road trips because we really like to go camp. I come from a family of six kids, and four of us have a rare skin condition called epidermalysis epidermalysis belosa Simplex'd be super cool if you guys did a podcast about our skin condition and also this. We have a contest in our family to see who can get on listener mail first, and I'm really hoping it can be me. So if you do read this on the podcast, can you shout out my family, Mom, Dad, Ricky, Lily, Me, Olivia, Sam and Grace.
Thanks again for the show.
Hopefully I can listen to it all through high school and college and Ben, sometimes we like to make dreams come true, so that's why I picked this one. So take that to Mom, Dad, Ricky, Lily, Olivia, Sam and Grace.
Ben one everybody contest is over.
First one to email as far as I know, but that's all goes well.
That's awesome. Thanks a lot, Ben. We appreciate him. We're glad we could help you out a little bit. Thank you very much for listening, and we hope you do continue to listen throughout the rest of your life and to be like Ben and send an email and let us know you're super cool. We love that kind of thing. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
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