Stalkers. Jean Ritchie

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СКАЧАТЬ 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. СКАЧАТЬ