Just a Jealous Guy

By the time John Lennon got to the emergency room at Roosevelt Hospital on December 8, 1980, he'd already lost 80 percent of his blood. Doctors pronounced him dead at 11:07 p.m., and in spite of how late it'd been, it wasn't long before fans began congregating at the Dakota, the apartment building on the southwest hinge of Central Park that'd been his home for the last seven years of his life. Those who came got there so quickly, in fact, that they could picture everything just by looking at the fresh blood on the pavement.

What they couldn't see, though, was how Yoko Ono was holding up after she came back to her apartment. She wouldn't linger on the subject very long in an interview she gave to Lennon biographer Geoffrey Giuliano two years later, but her memories carried a lot of weight. "I was still shaking in bed, so to speak, and the bedroom was the old one that John and I used to sleep in, which is on the 72nd Street side," she said. "All night these people were chanting or playing John's records, so that I heard John's voice, which at the time was a bit too much. What I learned was that I don't have much control over my own destiny or fate – anything."

What's strange about Ono's understanding of destiny is how it compares to the way Lennon's murderer understood his own. One of the things that led Mark David Chapman to shoot him was the idea of realizing Chapman's connection to Holden Caulfield, the hero of J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" whose trip to New York inspired him to go there himself. In fact, he came to pick up where Holden left off – killing Lennon would be the self-fulfilling prophecy that'd begin Chapman's literal transformation into Holden's successor, which would've allowed him to spend the rest of his life in Salinger's novel. Forget "Working Class Hero" – his fate was to become a kind of superhero.

Fate had something different in store for Chapman, though. After he pleaded guilty, the judge gave him 20 years to life in Attica, where Lennon's admirers sent hate mail in bunches.

In 2000, Ono composed a letter of her own – not to Chapman, but to the New York State Parole Board, urging its members to keep Lennon's killer behind bars. Altogether, he's been up for parole five times. The hearing he's getting this week will be his sixth.

Actually, the hearing was supposed to happen last month, but the board moved it to a time when it'd have more information to work with. Since none of the other hearings got postponed, does this suggest a different outcome?

"I certainly would not read anything into that – absolutely not," said Georges G. Lederman, whose work as a prosecutor for the Manhattan district attorney's office lasted nearly a decade. "The only thing, really, that the parole board really is considering is rehabilitation – whether this individual is or is not a threat to the community, and if the inmate has behaved well in the prison."

Good behavior isn't the only thing the board's interested in, of course. "There are a number of factors," Lederman said. "Another one is: What is the view of the community towards this individual? The parole board solicits and often receives letters as well as oral evidence from the people who are interested in the case. For example, most importantly, the [family members] of the deceased will always get an opportunity to voice their view."

Since one of those family members happens to be a major celebrity, her influence might mean more than anyone else's. A letter Ono sent to the board this year reflects the same sentiments as the one she composed in 2000, which UC Berkeley School of Law professor Jonathan Simon thinks is unfair.

"It's been almost 30 years, as I recall, since John's murder, and given that Chapman obviously suffered from severe mental illness, his culpability or responsibility for the crime ought to be considered on the more minimal side," Simon said. "There would be some irony, given Lennon's general philosophy of peace and reconciliation, if his family were to take a very harsh view."

Even if you take Ono out of the equation, Lennon's fame is enough to stack the odds heavily against Chapman. "The fact that Chapman's victim was a celebrity guarantees significant press attention to his parole hearing, and thus greater exposure of the board to public backlash," Simon said. "It is a good bet that the killer of a celebrity will serve more time."

This is particularly true when you're dealing with somebody who helped make some of the biggest music of the century as a Beatle and had an active solo career on top of that. Robert Rosen, author of "Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon," said the loss of an international icon justifies Chapman's sentence.

"He murdered a man who touched millions of people intimately with his music," Rosen said. "So yes, if Chapman had committed an ‘ordinary' murder, killing an ‘ordinary' person in a robbery or a crime of passion, perhaps after 30 or 40 years the parole board might let him out of prison. Such things do happen. But it's not going to happen to Chapman. He murdered John Lennon and he's going to die in prison, which I think is appropriate."

It's also appropriate that Chapman's something of a celebrity, considering how badly he wanted to be famous. "He wanted to murder Lennon to steal his fame," Rosen said. "He also wanted to murder Lennon because he believed that Lennon was a ‘phony' and a hypocrite who sang ‘Imagine no possessions,' but had more money and possessions than anybody else. He believed that through his music, Lennon had misled an entire generation."

That generation sees Lennon as one of its most inspiring figures, and even after dying all those years ago, every new generation hears his voice sooner or later. He would've turned 70 next month, and though it's hard to imagine what he'd have grown into, he intimated to Rolling Stone's Jann S. Wenner (10 years to the day before Chapman killed him, in fact) that he and Ono would probably settle down by then.

"I hope we're a nice old couple living off the coast of Ireland or something like that," he said, "looking at our scrapbook of madness."

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