Who Killed John Lennon?

John Lennon was assassinated 27 years ago, one month before Ronald Reagan assumed office. That was a long time ago, but it should be a reminder to all people who work for change and promote peace that there are people out there who are willing to do anything to extinguish the flame of hope and turn this country in the direction of division and violence.

John Lennon was gunned down by a klansmen and religious evangelical who became increasingly radical and turned to the neo-Nazi movement. This isn’t the story you’ve been told, but it is the truth. The media will tell you how crazy Mark Chapman was, how he was a loner with no friends who hated his father, and they’ll describe how he was a disenchanted fan of John Lennon who had grown to despise the hypocrisy of his former idol. All wrong.

Mark Champman was born in Ft. Worth, Texas, the son of an Air Force officer. At seven he moved to Decatur, Georgia where his father worked for the American Oil Company. You’ll have to take the assassin’s word that Chapman had a bad realtionship with his father because everybody else claims that they were very close.

Mark Chapman was never a fan of John Lennon. Ever since Lennon said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, the Ku Klux Klan and the religious right were out to get him. They burned the band members in effigy throughout the South and staged protest rallies where Beatle albums were burned in bonfires. Chapman lived a stone’s throw from Stone Mountain, the infamous Klan stronghold.

Chapman had plenty of friends, contrary to what you hear about his angst and alienation. His friend David Moore helped facilitate his travels, Dana Reeves supplied him with the hollow-point bullets used in the assassination, his best friend, Michael McFarland, gave him the infamous book, Catcher in the Rye. They were all part of the conservative evangelical Christian movement sweeping the Bible Belt.

When Lennon came out with his song Imagine, Chapman and his friends joyfully sang it with new lyrics; “Imagine John Lennon is dead!” The idea that Chapman was ever a Beatle’s fan is an out and out fabrication. Chapman was a right wing extremist who traveled constantly. After a stint in Lebanon, Chapman’s hatred of communism was cemented working with South Vietnamese refugees in Ft. Chaffee, Arkansas. From there he followed his girlfriend to Covenant College, a strict Presbyterian college founded in Pasadena, California. Chapman went to Hawaii for a while and then traveled the world. He went to Japan, Korea, China, Thailand, India, Iran, Israel and Switzerland. Then he got married to Gloria Abe, a travel agent from Hawaii.

Despite being only a hotel armed security guard, Chapman was able to live it up, buying expensive artwork by the likes of Salvador Dali and Norman Rockwell. Then he went to New York and, after an expensive dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria, he went out to case his target at the Dakota apartment building. He couldn’t make himself do it the first time and went back to Hawaii where he became increasingly radical. He started carrying out neo-Nazi activities, making threatening phone calls and calling in bomb threats. He got a kick out of harassing the Hare Krishna’s in Honolulu.

On his last trip to New York, he summoned up the will to kill Lennon by repeating, “Do it, do it, do it” over and over again. After the assassination, Chapman sat down on the sidewalk, took out his copy of
Catcher in the Rye and waited to be arrested. Ironically, the book Chapman claims to be his salvation, blasphemes God over two hundred times.

What ever happened to Mark Chapman? He shaved his head and became a skinhead in prison.

Aaron Dahl

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