Jack Jones - Let Me Take You Down (Lennon Special Part 2)
London: Virgin Publishing Ltd, 2001
About the Author: Jack Jones is an investigative journalist who has written about the American penal system for a number of years, which included a spell working undercover at Attica maximum-security prison. This led to an exclusive, conducting the first personal interviews with David Berkowitz, the notorious 'Son of Sam'.
Plot: The murder of John Lennon, through the eyes of the murderer. Jones conducted over 200 hours worth of interviews with Mark David Chapman, and this is the result, helping us to understand the why, the how and the aftermath of an event we are still yet to make sense of.
Review: On a cold winter’s day just before Christmas, an angry, depressed young man arrives in New York City. It’s not the first time he’s been, but this time he’s come with a specific purpose: to connect with somebody.
On his arrival, his thoughts turn to Central Park. There are ducks on the lake there, and the young man wants to know if the ducks migrate during the winter months. Winters on the East Coast can be harsh, and our protagonist isn’t used to these temperatures. As he walks the nine blocks from his hotel to his spot on one particular bench, the towering buildings and structures of one of the world’s most unforgiving cities tower over him. This man, this arrested little boy, looks up at the Gothic pile and tries to imagine what life would be like if he was allowed inside of those walls, protected from harm between those forbidding bricks.
But being an outsider isn’t the thing which makes him angriest. His ire is trained on the phonies he sees all around him; the wicked, licentious rich with their wealth and their habits of sneering at the regular guys. The world he knows is not one of privilege, it’s one of reality: worlds below worlds, full of sin and corruption. Fakes who pretend to live above this just can’t understand where he’s coming from, what he’s seen. How he understands.
Only that’s not going to get him anywhere right now. To connect, he’s going to have to fake it himself. Pretend to be somebody else. Somebody who doesn’t mind all the phoniness, somebody who will take it. Firstly, he makes a transient connection, talking to a few tourists. They’re excited to be here. Later on, he buys a record; a special record for a special person. Finally, he sheepishly books a hooker to come to his room. But they don’t sleep together. Real men don’t pay for sex.
On his rootless voyage around the city, our protagonist keeps gravitating to one location: Central Park and those ducks. It’s as if that childlike concern for creatures in the winter cold gives him a sense of humanity; proof that he’s not a monster. Or maybe that’s fake, too. He’s been holding how he feels back for so long now that it’s impossible to tell. Sometimes he feels so little. So much like a child. He knows how good it feels to protect children. Keep them safe, encourage them. He’s seen them play, seen the smiles on their faces. He was good at that. He will be good at that. When this is all over, he’ll do that for the rest of his life.
But first, there’s the thing. The final act. He has to face it. And that’s why he’s come to New York. He’s gotten sick and he needs this one thing to get well. To connect. It’s a hastily conceived plan but he’s able to roll with the changes. And now here, standing on the pavement in the dead of night, he’s about to become everything he ever dreamed of. He is Holden Caulfield, and in the space of a few seconds, he will be absorbed into the print of the book he is holding. He will be nothing no longer. For he will become the Catcher in the Rye, and a man simultaneously composed of nothing and everything.
In August 2020, Mark David Chapman was denied parole for the eleventh time. The reason given was that his release “would be incompatible with the wellbeing of society”, which tells us less about the danger he poses and more about what he represents. For in those three words the world has a shorthand for the very worst aspects of our relationship with fame: delusion; obsession; stalking; jealousy; entitlement; selfishness. On a chilly December night exactly forty years ago, somebody met a nobody, and it reminded us that sometimes, for no particular reason, hatred wins out.
While much has been written about John Lennon, his life and legacy, it’s felt to be largely pointless to explore the life of his murderer. With understandable reason, too: names such as James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan or Ramon Mercader are footnotes in a larger history, dismissed as either deluded or agents of vengeance. Perhaps only Lee Harvey Oswald has a story, but even then it’s largely because of the conspiracy industry, who ignore the small, petty man with the marksmanship training because it’s much easier to understand how somebody as mighty as a President can be murdered by committee than by a loser with a grudge.
In the lineup of famous assassins, Mark David Chapman is rarely seen as anything other than a sick individual, who cut short the life of a musical genius because his own desperate life had nothing to show for it. This is something alien to the vast majority of us, who may be angry, depressed or disappointed in how our lives have turned out but would never dream of such a cowardly solution to our lack of enterprise.
It’s easy to forget how much John Lennon had accomplished in such a short time, and indeed how young he was when he was killed. Lennon was approaching his second life, a forty year old who had spent at least a decade searching for a purpose and finding a new energy in fatherhood and creativity. Lennon’s seventies were confusing and directionless but at the dawn of a new decade, a healthier man seemed to have emerged from his internal exile in the Dakota Building: free of heroin, with a record deal and a softer front. Indeed, on the night of his murder, he insisted on returning home at a reasonable hour so he could see his young son.
But it’s also key to the tragedy to realise how much fame had almost destroyed John Lennon. Here was a man who had created a New World and conquered it too, and all by the time he was in his mid-twenties. Those turbulent seventies full of hate, spite and lust were a product of his attempt to come to terms with what he’d achieved, and most importantly, why it had happened to him. From an emotionally stunted childhood, he had squeezed a career’s worth of unimaginable creativity into a few breakneck years, and along the way alienated the only people who could really understand the way he felt. Important people had left his life, he had suffered a near-total mental collapse at the hands of LSD, and the sureties he craved were often as meaningless as he feared. Even his relationship with Yoko was almost destroyed. Small wonder, then, that it took him most of his thirties to regain his equilibrium.
The Dakota Building at West 72nd Street was one of New York’s most identifiable buildings before the night of December 8th, 1980. Its spandrels and soot-coated gargoyles give it less the appearance of a sought-after locale and more of a Gothic prison. The Lennons reportedly owned five apartments, but John reportedly holed up in one bedroom for much of the 1970’s, smoking Gauloises after Gauloises, skimming through his nudie mags and watching endless hours of cable television. In his gilded cell, Lennon craved mental escape from his listless days, and it wasn’t until he started writing his own music again that he found it. Having recently dropped his first album in five years, Double Fantasy, to muted critical applause, Lennon had found a true release.
Every two years Mark David Chapman applies for his own physical release, probably knowing in his soul that it’s unlikely to happen. This will not be because of his history of schizophrenia or his crime, but because he is a symbol. A symbol of what, though? Defiance? Madness? The Importance of Fame? In his own way, Chapman has understood for the last forty years how Lennon felt between the final sessions for Abbey Road and that last night at the Record Plant: confusion, regret, isolation. He sits in solitary confinement in the Wende Correctional Facility in Buffalo; trapped behind the bricks of his infamy, regularly receiving mail from fans and haters alike, perhaps wondering if a life which peaked at age 25 will ever make sense.
However, while it’s been our job to remember John Lennon for the last four decades, it’s beholden on those of the correctional and medical profession to understand what could have driven Mark David Chapman to such an horrific act. It won’t bring Lennon back, or diminish the depth of feeling aimed at Chapman, but it may help highlight the warning signs in a mind rapidly unravelling. In these times of heightened celebrity, recognising the psychology and processes behind obsessive behaviours may in certain circumstances save a life. Let’s not forget there were weeks between John Lennon’s murder and the attempt on President Ronald Reagan’s life, itself a product of warped, impossible demands on an unwitting victim of attraction.
Let Me Take You Down, Jack Jones’ study of Mark David Chapman’s journey from madness to murder and the years beyond, is a pop cultural attempt to tell the killer’s version of events, its stated purpose to take us inside the mind of the man. Written in 1992, by which time Chapman had been incarcerated for nearly twelve years, Jones’ selling point is the wealth of material obtained from Chapman himself, from visits and correspondence to Attica prison. In this way, we take on the role of a proxy parole board, hearing the well-versed testimony of a man far beyond that which he had been.
Mark David Chapman was born in 1955, the son of an Air Force sergeant and a nurse. According to Chapman, he was far closer to his mother than his father, who he characterised as workaholic and distant. By contrast, his mother was a livewire, incredibly supportive, but flawed in the way she viewed him as an ersatz husband, craving emotional support from her marital unhappiness. This gave him the impression he held adult power, which would end up having a terrible, negative effect on his later psychology.
Moving to Georgia, the Chapmans seemed like any other hardworking, God-fearing family, but Chapman recognised later on what he saw as the obvious signs of mental imbalance: pockets of anger; fear of sin; passive suppression of needs. Instead, Chapman turned within to fulfil the need to exercise his power, creating what came to be known as the Little People. The Little People were mental creations who ran Chapman’s motivations and emotions, subjugating themselves to his wise, kind actions. They would sit inside him as he obsessively played the only proper album he owned, Meet The Beatles. One night, without warning, he brought horror to the Little People, by imagining exploding large numbers of them with mental bombs. This was because something had made him angry.
At age fourteen, Chapman discovered drugs, specifically LSD, which turned him from a nerd to a hippie. Chapman became evangelical about the drug, losing his mind in the vivid colours and spending most of his time at school tripping. Soon, he was finding himself in trouble with the law, lurching from one reality to the next, until 1970, when he secretly planned and executed a plan to run away from home and join up with ‘the freaks’ who would appreciate him for himself. Making his way to Florida, the young, naive Chapman was divested of his money by smarter, more streetwise panhandlers, eventually admitting he needed to return home.
No sooner was Chapman back in Georgia than he became a born-again Christian, renouncing his hallucinogenic ways and joining a church group, where he would help worship by playing gentle, acoustic Christian songs on his guitar. He became a shining light for the YMCA, becoming a firm favourite in youth groups, who nicknamed him Captain Nemo. He even got engaged, to an equally committed Christian girl, but underlying all of this was a lie - Chapman had aggressive sexual fantasies and had slept with another volunteer.
This, in hindsight, is when Chapman felt his life started to unravel. Quitting the YMCA in a fit of depression, he found himself without an anchor again, and eventually decided to kill himself, taking all of his savings and intending a blow-out in Hawaii before gassing himself in his car. He got to his final moments before the hose melted, and Chapman decided he needed help, checking himself into a hospital to deal with his suicidal tendencies.
It’s here where the story takes a bizarre twist: Chapman’s treatment had barely begun before he started to blur the lines between patient and colleague, forming personal relationships with hospital staff and becoming a janitor in the institution. He was discharged as a patient and instead became an employee, rising from lowly caretaker to an important role in its PR department. This startling journey is where the story ought to end, but in typical Chapman style this opportunity to stay in the normal world was spurned. His depression returned, and yet he managed to function on the paradise island of Honolulu, getting married to his travel agent. It was through her that Chapman booked a round the world trip in the style of a former hero, Phileas Fogg.
But Chapman’s mind began to fragment into sharp shards, forming impossible plans to solve his debt issues or read every book in the Honolulu Public Library. It was here he discovered a picture book about John Lennon’s New York apartment, showing the singer stood in luxury far above the dirty streets. Chapman always maintained that Lennon had been supplanted as his musical hero by super-producer Todd Rundgren, but this light, frothy glimpse into a world of wealth and privilege which would always be denied to him angered him to such a degree that another plan instantly formed in his head: to kill John Lennon. On his last night before putting the plan into action, Mark David Chapman signed out of his security job with the name of his target.
So Chapman pooled money he didn’t have, bought a gun and a one-way ticket to New York City, and started to edge closer to Lennon. Over the course of his time there, he discovered that he couldn’t get hold of the right ammunition for his gun, and so diverted to Georgia, where an old friend unwittingly supplied him with the hollow-point bullets which ended up in the body of John Lennon. In a last-ditch attempt to delay the inevitable, Chapman returned to Hawaii, but his course was set. He couldn’t rest until John Lennon was dead.
According to Chapman, when he killed Lennon, he expected that he would be atomised at a physical level into the pages of the book which would become inextricably linked with this terrible act, JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Chapman had become obsessed with this too, rediscovering it as an adult and identifying strongly with main character Holden Caulfield’s weary anger. Encouraging his wife Gloria to study the book, Chapman intended it as his defining statement, leaving a note on its frontispiece for the police at his arrest. His initial hours in the city followed his teenage hero's footsteps, right down to the ducks.
Needless to say, Chapman’s silence didn’t last, as he pleaded with them not to hurt him as the aftermath of Lennon’s murder played out. Babbling that he hadn’t intended to cause anybody any trouble, Chapman’s gun was kicked away from him by the Dakota’s security staff, and while the clearly stricken Lennon was rushed to the Roosevelt Hospital, Chapman was rushed to the Bellevue psychiatric wing to answer for his crimes. Unfortunately, the book wasn’t as clear in its explanation that Chapman believed it would be, and so he was committed to trial, where Chapman eschewed the insanity defence and instead chose to take on the role as the novel’s unofficial promoter, insisting as the titular Catcher that everybody read it to understand. Chapman was convicted of second-degree murder, and for the first six years of his sentence refused all interview requests.
So, Let Me Take You Down is probably the most comprehensive investigation into the how and the why of Mark David Chapman as a result, and in the years since its publication has stood as Chapman’s statement in a more understandable way than Catcher ever did. So what remains is only one question: was it worth it?
Well, no. Being the murderer of John Lennon was undoubtedly the biggest mistake of Chapman’s life, one which it’s clear from the book he was yet to come to terms with. As for his stated goal to become The Catcher in the Rye, the only way in which Chapman could possibly save children from falling from the edge of a cliff would be to become the prime example of what happens when one lets obsession and jealousy to get the better of oneself, but sitting in a small cell pondering on life’s twists would not be the way to do it. In 1992 Chapman had still to decide how he felt about himself, but it’s doubtful the population at large sees him as anything other than the heavyset killer he was on that night in 1980.
It may be because I was reading it at a temporal remove of nearly thirty years, but I wasn’t sure myself whether Mark David Chapman was in any way regretful of the things he had done. What comes across very strongly from Let Me Take You Down is how Chapman almost divorces himself from the events leading up to the killing, like there is a person to be punished who no longer inhabits his skin. Being no expert in mental health, maybe it’s necessary for the criminally insane to remove themselves as a person in this way, but this would have been a far stronger statement in his defence if Jones hadn’t detailed all the ways in which Chapman had played the delightful Southern gent with the Dakota’s security staff, or calculated the best way of getting hold of the type of ammunition which would put Lennon down for good - taking his police officer friend out for some target practice, Chapman asked for the hollow-points because he claimed to be scared of a possible mugging while staying in the Big Apple.
Chapman does go on to say that this is how things progress in the minds of the mad - they make allowances, they draw on resources that people just cannot understand. Maybe so, but what’s most obvious about Chapman to me is not how desperate he was, but how pathetic. There were plenty of stopping-off points between the decision to kill Lennon and the act itself, including an explicit one where he admitted his intention to his wife, who believed it to be nothing more than a cry for help.
But I wasn’t reading Let Me Take You Down to debate the wrongs and rights of what Chapman did, since there is no contest about that. So what’s the point of the book at all? To be honest, that’s what I struggled with. The way in which the book is structured - crime first, explanation later - seems to me to be a mistake. We are all largely aware of the details of the murder, in which case we’ve already made up our minds, so to give the latter two-thirds over to Chapman’s feeble explanations of his mental state at the time finds itself redundant. By the time we get to Chapman’s childhood, with his Little People and his body issues, there would need to be something spectacularly wrong in his life to even touch a justification for murder, let alone one of such obvious jealous rage.
So when we start to delve, will we find anything which might explain the why or protect another person from harm? No, of course we won’t. Chapman’s life, while not one coated in stardust, is a perfectly reasonable journey of a frustrated childhood and awkward teenage misadventure before finding a real purpose in the protection of vulnerable children. But somehow, that wasn’t enough. Chapman had to be famous, and he trained his sights on the biggest symbol of ‘easy’ fame he could see, a John Lennon who was enjoying the material comforts of a crazy handful of years.
The real tragedy in Chapman’s life is that he had a lot more going for it than he had a right to spurn. Jack Jones makes it clear how popular he was with children, and how good he was at his involvement with them. He already was The Catcher in the Rye. He found a wife, who loved him and indulged his fantasies of greatness much like his mother had done. He had people who gave him jobs and socialised with him. He had a life in Hawaii, yet none of it mattered. I think this is what made this book such a struggle to finish: Chapman’s empty justifications for the many things he spat back in people’s faces. Even John Lennon, hours before his brutal slaying, signed an autograph for a tongue-tied Chapman, and then sweetly asked, “is that all you want?”. Chapman always wanted more, even when he didn’t need it.
I don’t doubt Chapman had, or still has, a mentally disturbed state of mind. This won’t be apparent from Let Me Take You Down, other than from Chapman’s own lips. On several occasions, Jones quotes from professionals who have interacted with Chapman, but by that time you strongly feel a sense of time wasted in tedious company. There’s a laughable sequence in which Chapman claims to have performed his own exorcism, allowing the devil who encouraged his act to leave his lips, and of course, now he finds himself able to view his crimes objectively. All he talks of is crumbling minds and deathly spirals, as if we understand the logical progression. Well, the Mark David Chapman in these pages is trapped in its print, and unlike that of The Catcher in the Rye, I’m glad nobody needs to study it unless they’re forced to. His is a useless life, a pathetic one, and even if there’s a streak of punishment in my response to his justifications, he deserves to enjoy nothing but his own company forevermore.
Will this book stay on the bedroom floor?: No. Chapman said all he had to say forty years ago and nothing since is worth hearing.
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