On December 8, 1980, at approximately 10:45 p.m., Beatles legend John Lennon was gunned down by Mark David Chapman, a fame-seeking, one-time fan. Lennon, one of the pioneers of the “British Invasion” of American airwaves during the early 1960s, the brooding genius of transformational pop-rock super-band the Beatles, and a legendary superstar in his own right, was dead at only forty years of age. Already an international pop icon like Elvis before him and Michael Jackson in the years to follow, Lennon’s assassination-style murder propelled him into the upper reaches of the American mythic imagination. Every aspect of Lennon’s life was to be reinterpreted through hindsight, not just through the lens of celebrity, but as a step on a tragic hero’s doomed journey to a rendezvous with destiny.
John Lennon (1940–1980) of the Beatles fame is seen here in December 1980. This image was taken just a few days before his assassination by Mark David Chapman outside of the Dakota Hotel where Lennon lived. Although Lennon was a rock icon long before his untimely death, his murder at the hands of an unhinged fan has in and of itself become an event of legendary importance in American popular culture. (AP Photo)
By 1980 John Lennon was a transplanted New Yorker, living in the famous and grandiose Dakota Building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Having left the turmoil of his hippie days and with the chaotic final days and artistic differences of the Beatles well behind him, Lennon was purported to be happily married to Yoko Ono, his soul mate and muse, and the couple were rearing their young son, Sean. John had spent Sean’s first years more or less as a stay-at-home dad, but by 1980 his album Double Fantasy, recorded with Ono, had gone gold, and during Sean’s eighth year Lennon and Ono were working on the recording of a new single, “Walking on Thin Ice.” By all appearances, John Lennon had entered a new, stable, and productive stage of his life.
On the morning of his murder, Lennon went out to get a haircut in preparation for a Rolling Stone photo shoot with acclaimed celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. Among the images captured by Leibovitz that day was an artistic and atmospheric shot of a nude Lennon coiled around a black-garbed Yoko Ono; this picture, one of the last ever taken of the former Beatle, was destined to represent in the minds of many fans Lennon’s relationship with his wife. Meanwhile, outside the Dakota, Mark David Chapman was already waiting for the chance to meet Lennon and was holding an album for the superstar to sign. Chapman engaged in a brief and awkward conversation with another fan, David Goresh, who would later in the day snap a picture of Lennon signing Chapman’s album.
After the Rolling Stone shoot, a radio team from the West Coast interviewed Lennon; when the interview was concluded, around 4:00 p.m., Lennon and Ono went downstairs with the journalists, who were expecting a limo to take them to the airport. When Lennon went outside to look for the car, which was to transport him to the recording studio, he signed the album Chapman mutely waved under his nose while Goresh photographed the encounter. Because their car never showed, Lennon and Ono caught a ride to the studio with the radio team, who dropped them on their way to the airport. Lennon and Ono spent the evening working in the studio and then returned to the Dakota around 10:45 p.m. Mark David Chapman was awaiting them, and as John left the car Chapman fired five shots, four of which found their marks. The police were on the scene within minutes, and Chapman was under arrest and Lennon on his way to the hospital in the back of a patrol car before 11:00 p.m. The assassin’s bullets had done too much damage, however, and Lennon was pronounced dead shortly after arrival.
Due to Lennon’s own iconic status, not to mention the odd motives and behavior of his murderer, it is perhaps no surprise that the shooting of John Lennon gave birth to numerous conspiracy theories. The most popular of these is that Lennon was assassinated by the CIA because of his immense popularity and radical politics, which according to these theories could have made him a destabilizing force that conservative elements of the United States government and intelligence community sought to eradicate. Other theorists suggest that John Lennon was executed on the orders of the shadowy multinational “New World Order.”
John Lennon was a vibrant topic of folklore, myth, and legend in his adopted country long before an assassin propelled him to the upper reaches of the stratosphere of the American popular imagination, where he continues to abide with such figures as Elvis, the King himself. That the cult of John Lennon is alive and well decades after the man’s death is evident by the many pop culture references to John and Yoko, not to mention the seeming ubiquity of Lennon’s music and that of the band that launched him to fame. In addition, there are myriad websites dedicated to all things Lennon, including an official Web page, a Facebook page with millions of “likes,” and an open Facebook group with tens of thousands of actively posting members. In addition, Yoko Ono has seen to it that her martyred husband’s memory and legacy have remained in the limelight, perhaps most literally and evocatively through her “Imagine Peace Tower,” an art installation that illuminates the sky from Viðey Island, just off the coast of Reykjavík, Iceland. Dedicated on John’s birthday in 2007, when he would have been 67, this tower is illuminated during the bleakest, blackest nights of the Icelandic year and is designed to offer a promise of warmth and light and hope in the midst of cold and darkness and despair, conceived of by Yoko as a fitting monument to John, his life’s work, and all he represented.
Chapman, Mark David (1955–)
Seldom has a celebrity murderer more openly embraced the pathetic sense of self-loathing and worthlessness that spurred him to his crime than Mark David Chapman. Born in Texas in 1955, Chapman self-consciously and publicly acknowledged that his motivation to kill John Lennon was an attempt to write himself into the history books, and in so doing he became a forlorn fixture of American folklore. Chapman pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to prison for twenty years to life in August 1981. Having applied for parole every two years since 2000, Chapman was denied parole for the eighth time in August 2014.
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The killing of the former Beatle is perhaps the most famous assassination of a public figure that can be clearly linked to the desire to write oneself into American myth, legend, and folklore. John Lennon was one of the most influential pop icons of the twentieth century, a legendary figure wreathed in the mythic trappings of a secular god or superman, even in life. Cut down in his prime, Lennon underwent an apotheosis in the popular American imagination, taking on the trappings of Christ-like sacrifice. His killer, meanwhile, fulfilled the pathetic intention of crowning himself—however briefly—with the wreath of celebrity bought at the cost of Lennon’s blood. Moreover, this ambition was self-conscious and speaks to the contemporary American Faustian fixation with fame, which is believed by many to be worth almost any cost. Lennon’s murderer famously evoked the cult of celebrity directly when he recounted that he killed John Lennon precisely because he wanted what Andy Warhol is popularly thought to have called his “fifteen minutes of fame”; as Mark David Chapman put it, “I was ‘Mr. Nobody’ until I killed the biggest Somebody on earth” (Carpenter 1993).
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See also Kennedy, John F., Assassination of; Lincoln, Abraham, Assassination of; McCartney, Paul, Alleged Death of; Monroe, Marilyn, Death of
Further Reading
Carpenter, Teresa. 1993. “Nobody with a Gun.” New York Times, January 31. http://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/31/books/nobody-with-a-gun.html. Accessed July 21, 2015.
Jones, Jack. 1993. Let Me Take You Down: Inside the Mind of Mark David Chapman, the Man Who Killed John Lennon. New York: Villard Books.
Lightfoot, Steve. 2001. LennonMurderTruth website. http://www.lennonmurdertruth.com/. Accessed July 18, 2015.
Wampler, Scott. 2010. “The Top 3: Conspiracy Theories Revolving Around the Death of John Lennon.” Examiner website. December 8. http://www.examiner.com/article/the-top-3-conspiracy-theories-revolving-around-the-death-of-john-lennon. Accessed July 18, 2015.