Stalkers

If the problem continues to grow at its present rate (it’s increasing in America, and most British crime patterns follow America with a lag of about ten years), then it would be sensible for the big show business agents and television stations to start thinking about it more constructively. Out there, at any moment, someone, somewhere, is picking up a pen to write what Dr Park Dietz calls, with academic restraint, ‘an inappropriate communication’. And if they are writing it on a page of paper torn from an exercise book, and they have been writing to ‘their’ star for more than a year, and they are posting the letters from different areas of the country, then their ‘victim’ could be in for a very bumpy time.

‘It will only be a matter of time before we have a stalker here in Britain who tips over into extreme violence,’ predicts Dr David Nias.

‘BANG, BANG, YOU’RE DEAD’

THE EIGHTH OF DECEMBER 1980 was the day that stalking was blasted into public awareness by a snub-nosed five-shot revolver. As John Lennon followed his wife back into the Dakota Building, the famous New York apartment block where they lived, a fat bespectacled youth called Mark Chapman approached him. Chapman had for a few days been one of the regular fans who hung around hoping to glimpse the ex-Beatle, but by 8.30 p.m. on a cold dark night the others had all drifted away. The doorman of the exclusive apartment block had been chatting normally to the young man only minutes before, and said afterwards that Chapman was calm and rational.

As Yoko Ono swept passed him Chapman said ‘Hello’. Lennon, who was behind her, stared for a few seconds at his nemesis. Earlier that day he had signed his autograph on an album sleeve for Chapman, but he showed no sign of recognition. As Lennon started to enter the building Chapman stepped sideways, pulled the pistol from his pocket, held it straight in front of him with both arms outstretched, and fired all five bullets at his hero. The two bullets that hit Lennon in the back caused him to spin round, and two more ripped into his chest. One went wide of the target.

The most famous pop star in the world staggered up five steps to the Dakota office, where he collapsed in front of the night-duty man. The man who was about to become one of the most famous assassins in the world dropped his gun and stepped back into the shadows. He did not try to run away, but calmly pulled out his well-thumbed copy of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and started to read it while he waited for the police to arrive and arrest him.

The news of John Lennon’s death flew electronically around the world, and everywhere there was a reaction of shock. The Dakota was besieged by fans and inundated with flowers, radio stations played Lennon music for twenty-four hours a day and a worldwide ten-minute silent vigil was held six days later.

But while Lennon fans were stupefied by the death of the man they regarded as the next thing to God, others around the world were shocked by something else: the man who had murdered Lennon was one of his fans. The killer was a devotee of his, one of those who claimed to worship him. To those outside the closed world of megastardom, it seemed preposterous. Kennedy and Martin Luther King had both been assassinated, but there was some perverted political sense to their killings. It would have been easier to comprehend if Lennon’s killer had been bent on attracting international attention to some cause or other, if the murder had been a kamikaze publicity stunt. But the only thing that Chapman wanted to draw attention to was himself.

The risk from deranged fans had been known for years to those in the public eye. They received nutty mail in with the thousands of genuine, innocent adoring fan letters; they received death threats, they felt uneasy about certain persistent hangers-on at their gates. But it was Lennon’s death that publicly marked the extent of the risk, and brought celebrity stalking into the open. It was Lennon’s death that floodlit the dark, strange, obsessional world of the fanatical fan.

Mark Chapman’s decision to kill his hero John Lennon may have been triggered by a perceptive article in Esquire magazine, published in October 1980. The piece examined Lennon’s life, which was that of an eccentric semi-recluse, dominated by his Japanese wife Yoko. Their married life was bizarre, their relationship with their son Sean (born by Caesarean operation so that his birth date was the same as his father’s) was unconventional. The magazine article examined how Lennon’s life measured up to the peace and love philosophy that he had expounded for so long, and found it wanting. He did not emerge as an idealist who put his money where his mouth was, but as an extremely rich 40-year-old who watched daytime television and amused himself speculating in property.

Many devoted fans must have read the article and rejected it, others will have felt betrayed by Lennon. Critics of John and Yoko will have felt vindicated. But Chapman went further. He felt so deeply upset by his icon that he decided to kill him. It took a few weeks, but he managed it – one of the few times that Mark Chapman lived up to his own expectations.

Chapman was twenty-five at the time he killed Lennon. He was an unremarkable-looking young man who had managed to conceal the full extent of his mental disturbance from a lot of people for a long time. The son of a nurse and an ex-army sergeant, who divorced when he was still a child, he was born in Texas and brought up in Atlanta, Georgia, alienating his family in his early teens when he adopted a hippie lifestyle and experimented with marijuana, LSD, amphetamines and barbiturates. He acquired a criminal record for minor offences, most of them connected with drugs. During these years he idolized Lennon. At seventeen he cleaned up his act after he claimed to have met Jesus Christ, who came into his room and stood by his left knee, starting a tingling which spread ‘from the tip of my toe to the top of my head’. Chapman became a smartly dressed, clean-shaven, short-haired Bible freak, conventionally dressed apart from the large cross he always hung around his neck. He dropped out of school – where his record had not been good – to follow Christ. He joined a Pentecostal church, and walked the streets accosting passers-by and trying to convert them. His Christianity was fundamental: God represented the forces of good and the devil represented the forces of evil, and the world was a battleground in which the two sides fought each other. His feelings about Lennon became ambivalent; on one hand he still listened to and enjoyed the music, but on the other he suspected Lennon of being the anti-Christ because he had said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus.

Chapman became involved with the YMCA, and attended their summer camps, acting as a counsellor to young children. He felt a great rapport with children, and was popular with them. When he felt his Christian calling was bigger and that he should be doing something more dramatic for his faith, in 1976 he went to Beirut with a group of other volunteers from the YMCA, but was rapidly recalled back to the States because of the war in the Lebanon.

At this stage Chapman was, by his own lights, doing well. He had an attractive, bright girlfriend who shared his evangelical Christianity. He was very well thought of by the YMCA bosses, and it was at their suggestion that he went, with his girlfriend, to college in Tennessee in the hope of getting some qualifications so that he could take up a full-time post with the organization. But he hated academic work, and before the first term was over he had had a breakdown, walking out on the course and his girlfriend. He blamed the staff and the other pupils, describing them as ‘phoneys’ – the favourite description used by Holden Caulfield, the main character in The Catcher in the Rye, for his enemies. The book, a seminal work about teenage alienation from the adult world, spoke to Chapman at a deep level, and he identified with the hero who believed that childish innocence was more precious than maturity.

His family were not sympathetic after he dropped out and Chapman, twenty-one years old at the time, found a job as a security guard to support himself. He was given some rudimentary training in the use of a pistol; Chapman proved to be a good marksman. But being a security guard was, he felt, only a stop gap, and in a desperate bid to get some better qualifications he enrolled once more in college. When he failed to keep up with the academic work once again he felt a complete failure, and decided that he would end his own life. But he wanted to do it in style and in his own time; he had read somewhere that the Hawaiian islands were as close to paradise as you can get on earth, so he decided to commit suicide only after he had visited them.

Six months later, having travelled all around the islands, he decided that the appointed time had come, and fixed a hosepipe from the exhaust of his car. But he was no more competent at suicide than he was at college work; he was found and taken to hospital. After his physical problems were sorted out he was transferred to a psychiatric ward where he was treated for severe neurotic depression, a diagnosis which shows how clever he was at masking the extent of his symptoms, because by this time Chapman was certainly psychotic. He was preoccupied by the fight between God and the devil, which he hallucinated about constantly. He believed his brain could pick up the commands of the opposing armies, so that he refused a confusion of signals urging him to do good and then to do evil.

Perhaps he recognized his own need for help and treatment: when he was discharged he took an undemanding clerical job in the hospital and worked as a volunteer in the psychiatric unit. He saved his earnings assiduously, and started to plan a six-week holiday, in which he intended to see as much as possible of the world. The travel agent who helped him plan his holiday, which started in Tokyo, was a Japanese girl working in a Honolulu agency. She was the daughter of a prosperous baker. While he was away Chapman sent her postcards, and when he returned they started going out together. Gloria was a Buddhist who believed in fortune-telling and astrology, a combination at odds with Chapman’s born-again evangelical Christian faith, but theirs was a genuine romance and in June 1979 they were married.

Gloria had a comfortable life; her father was wealthy and she had her own salary. Chapman, who was still working at the hospital, began to enjoy a lifestyle he had never previously aspired to. He harboured dreams of grandeur, seeing himself as an art connoisseur. But his taste in pictures was esoteric and no doubt governed by the religious battleground his brain had become; he coveted a Salvador Dali representation of the crucifixion of Christ overlaid with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Death was becoming a fixation of his.

By the time he had been married for six months, Chapman had walked out on his job at the hospital in a fit of pique because he did not get a promotion he wanted. He became a security guard again: it was a job which gave him less responsibility and paid him less money, and he recognized it as a downward step. Money was no problem, though, because he had access to a shared account with Gloria.

For the whole of 1980 Chapman’s behaviour was odd, although obviously not odd enough to alert anybody. He bullied Gloria, was inordinately possessive about her, and was extravagant with their money, spending far more than he contributed to the household. Opposite the apartment where he and Gloria lived was an office of the Church of Scientology, a cult which recruits with promises of self-improvement. Chapman disapproved of the organization, and could be seen marching up and down repeatedly outside their offices, muttering to himself. The office began to receive threatening phone calls, sometimes as many as forty in a day. The phone would ring, the receiver be picked up, and a male voice would whisper ‘Bang, bang, you’re dead.’ Chapman later admitted he was the caller.

At home Gloria was becoming increasingly worried about him. He had always played lots of Lennon music, but the signs were there that he was developing into more than a fan. In August he wrote to a friend, said he was going to New York on a mission, and gave his address as the Dakota. His beloved Bible had an addition that he had scrawled in himself: ‘The Gospel According to John’ became ‘The Gospel According to John Lennon’. He read everything he could get his hands on about the star. After reading the Esquire article in October, his attitudes to Lennon hardened. He would sit in a darkened room, naked, in the lotus position, listening to speeded-up Beatles and Lennon tapes, and chanting ‘John Lennon, I’m going to kill you.’

‘It was hideous,’ he said later from his prison cell at Attica, ‘I would strip naked, gritting my teeth and summoning the devil and wild things into my mind. I was sending out telegrams to Satan, “Give me the opportunity to kill John Lennon.”’

He had, he would reveal later in prison, already thought about and discounted killing Jackie Onassis, Ronald Reagan, David Bowie and Elizabeth Taylor, among others. But once he hit on Lennon, everything he read and heard about the man whose music he revered confirmed that Lennon was ‘a phoney’. There was a time when Chapman’s delusions made him believe he was Lennon: when he gave up his job on 23 October he signed off as John Lennon, then scored the name out. But more telling, and more fundamental, was the belief that he was Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye.

Four days after finishing at work, Chapman bought a gun. It was not hard. He walked into a shop in Honolulu where the slogan above the door said ‘Buy a gun and get a bang out of life’ He paid $169.00 for .38 calibre pistol, which he chose because it was small enough to conceal in a pocket. He flew to New York on a one-way ticket, telling his wife Gloria that he was going ‘to make things different’. Arriving on 30 October, he became Holden Caulfield, retracing his fictional hero’s steps through the city with his well-thumbed copy of The Catcher in the Rye in his pocket. He went to the spots in Central Park that Salinger mentioned in the book and he went to the Museum of Natural History, another place Caulfield visited.

In between his pilgrimages, he joined the small knot of fans who hung around the Dakota building, hoping for a glimpse of their idol. He moved hotels, to be nearer to his stakeout, never giving any clue to the others that he was any different from them in his devotion to the star. He was even ‘normal’ enough to go out on a date with a girl he met in Central Park, where she worked in a café. The only clue she had about his state of mind came when he angrily lashed out at New York gun laws: he had discovered he could not buy bullets in the city. He contacted an old schoolfriend, a policeman back in his home state, Georgia, who agreed to supply him with ammunition. He flew to Atlanta to collect five hollow-nosed dumdum bullets.

Back in New York, Chapman was listening hard to the warring factions in his head. One side told him to kill Lennon, the other told him not to. The first victory went to the goodies: he phoned Gloria in Honolulu and told her that coming to New York had been a mistake. He revealed to her that he had been on a mission to kill Lennon – it was the first she had heard of his plans – but that he had won ‘a great victory’ and was on his way home. For three weeks he sat around the Honolulu apartment watching television. On the wall of the apartment was a plaque inscribed with the Ten Commandments, and as he walked past it Chapman saw ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ leap out at him; a sign, he believed.

But the battle was still raging and he needed to get back to New York, to be near Lennon. He told Gloria that he had thrown the gun and the bullets into the sea, and that she was not to worry that he would do anything silly. He even made an appointment with a psychotherapist who had treated him before for depression, but he never turned up. When he should have been getting professional help coping with his delusions, he was on a plane to New York.

He stayed at the YMCA for the first night, staking out the Dakota during the days. His second day in New York was, probably more by coincidence than planning, Pearl Harbor day, the anniversary of the Japanese attack on the American fleet which led to the US entering the Second World War. Both Lennon and Chapman had Japanese wives. That night, the eve of Lennon’s assassination, he went into his Holden Caulfield role-playing mode again. He moved from the YMCA to a hotel, booking a room for seven nights on his Visa card. On a table he laid out his must valued possessions: tapes by the Beatles and by guitarist Todd Rundgren, his New Testament in which he had written ‘Holden Caulfield’, a picture of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and some photos of himself when he worked at YMCA summer camps with young children. Then, like Caulfield, he hired a prostitute and re-enacted a scene from the book: talking to the girl, massaging her and being given a massage, but not having sex.

The next day, on his way to the Dakota, he bought a new copy of the book. On the title page he wrote ‘This is my statement.’ He took a copy of Lennon’s new album, Double Fantasy, and was mingling with the other fans by lunchtime. He had dressed carefully for the cold New York winter, wearing long thermal underwear, a coat buttoned up to the neck and a Russian fur hat. With his chubby cheeks he looked as though he might be a refugee from behind the Iron Curtain. The first member of the Lennon clan who he saw was Sean, John’s 5-year-old son, who came out of the Dakota with his nanny. Holden Caulfield liked kids, so did Mark Chapman. It was another fan, one of the regulars, who introduced Sean to Chapman, who knelt on one knee before the little boy and put his hand in the child’s. He told Sean he had come all the way from Hawaii, and that he was honoured to meet him. Then he added that Sean should take care of his runny nose. ‘You wouldn’t want to get sick and miss Christmas,’ said the man who was planning to make sure there would be no happy family gathering in the Lennon apartment on Christmas Day that year. Afterwards Chapman described Sean as ‘the cutest little boy I have ever seen’. It was 5.00 in the afternoon when Lennon first appeared, and all Chapman did was thrust his copy of Double Fantasy in front of the star for an autograph. ‘John Lennon, December 1980’ was scrawled across the cover. An amateur photographer, Paul Goresh, who was hanging around hoping to get some good pictures, took one of Lennon with Chapman in the background; it would later appear all around the world.

The other fans got tired and drifted away. At 8.00 p.m. Goresh, who had been chatting with Chapman, said he was calling it a day. Chapman tried to persuade him to stay: ‘You never know, something might happen. He might go to Spain or something tonight – and you will never see him again.’

It was as near as he could get to inviting Goresh to record on film the murder of John Lennon. The photographer did not pick up on it, and missed the scoop of a lifetime. For a couple of hours Chapman chatted with the Cuban doorman at the building. He seemed, the doorman said later, sane and normal. It was ten minutes to eleven when the Lennons returned. A few seconds later mayhem broke loose. Lennon, blood pouring from his mouth and chest, staggered into the building. Yoko screamed and screamed. The night-duty man hit a panic button, and within minutes two police cars, sirens screeching, were at the scene. John was taken to hospital, barely alive. He died shortly after, despite the desperate efforts of a seven-strong medical team.

Chapman, while all this was going on, had taken off his coat and hat to show the police officers that he was no longer armed. He waited quietly for them to arrive, exchanging a few words with the devastated doorman, the Cuban to whom he had been talking earlier, who shook the gun from his hand and kicked it into the street. Chapman even apologized for what he had done, and when a woman who had heard the shots came running up, he told her to get out of there for her own sake. Then he took out his copy of Catcher and started to read. Not surprisingly, when the police arrived they went to arrest the wrong man, turning towards the young night-duty man, not fifteen-stone Chapman who was hanging back in the shadows.

Chapman’s original intention was to say nothing and hand over the book, with the inscription ‘This is my Statement’ to the police, but his resolution failed him when the police grabbed him.

‘Please don’t hurt me,’ he pleaded, reassuring them that ‘I acted alone.’

In the police car being taken into custody one of the cops asked him if he knew what he had just done. He replied: ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know that he was a friend of yours.’ He was just as polite and restrained when he phoned his wife Gloria in Honolulu. He gave her concise and clear instructions about getting the police to protect her from the journalists who were already gathering outside the apartment. She said she loved him and he said he loved her.

He later explained the conflict that went on in his mind at the time of the killing, by seeing himself as two people, a child and an adult. He said the child and the adult went together to the Dakota that day, and the adult wanted to get in a cab and go home.

‘Then the child screams “No! No! No! Devil! Help me, Devil! Give me the power and strength to do this. I want this. I want to be somebody.”’

He placed great emphasis on the fact that neither Yoko nor John spoke to him, as if a smile and a ‘hello’ might have saved John’s life. In his disturbed state he did not see Lennon stagger into the building, and when he realized there was no body in front of him he was not sure that he had actually done it.

‘I was kind of glad that he wasn’t there because I thought I had missed him or didn’t kill him or something. I just wanted the police to hurry up and come.’

The death of the pop icon caused such an uproar that police insisted Chapman wore a bullet proof vest before his trial, and they painted the windows of his cell black so that he would not be shot by snipers. He refused to plead an insanity defence at the trial, instead admitting his guilt. The trial was therefore over quickly, with Chapman sentenced to between twenty years and life, with an order that he should receive psychiatric treatment. Because of the crime and the emotions it stirred up, it is likely that life will mean life. His own lawyer asked the judge not to impose a minimum sentence (after which Chapman could have been released) because, he said, ‘All reports come to the conclusion that he is not a sane man. It was not a sane crime. It was … a monstrously irrational killing.’ When Chapman was asked if he wished to say anything in his own defence he read out a passage from The Catcher in the Rye.

Chapman lives in Attica Prison, New York, segregated from the other inmates. Attica is notoriously violent, and amid its shifting population there are always some who would relish the fame of being the man who killed the man who killed John Lennon.

Gloria, Chapman’s wife, has not divorced him. For three years she lived near the prison, visiting him regularly. But she then moved back to their Honolulu home; he has said he no longer wants her to visit. She sends him money regularly.

In a television documentary, shown in Britain in 1988, Chapman showed no remorse for killing Lennon, only regret that the star did not die immediately and that Sean was left without a father. In a television interview in 1992 he said that when he shot Lennon he did not believe he was killing a real person, he was killing an image, a record cover. He said he had undergone an exorcism performed by a priest in his prison cell, and that his demons had left him. He said he did not expect to ever be forgiven for ‘taking away a genius’.

A psychiatrist involved in his care diagnosed Chapman as exhibiting ‘the symptoms of virtually every malady in psychiatric literature’.

Astonishingly, Mark Chapman, who stalked and murdered John Lennon, now has his own collection of would-be stalkers, weird letter writers who mail him their assorted fantasies. He gets plenty of straightforward hate mail from Lennon fans, but he also gets love letters from women he has never met, and letters applauding what he did.