Mark Chapman did indeed suffer from a mental illness that is well documented. Specifically, he suffered from depression and suicidal tendencies that became apparent shortly after his move from Georgia to Hawaii. While this does show some instability in his past, it isn’t that sensational, especially when you consider his circumstances. Of course, the defense experts for Chapman’s trial-that-never-came seized upon these traits to develop a motive for the killing.

As Rev. Newton Hendrix observed (see previous post), there was nothing inherently odd about Chapman during his teenage years. But after graduation from high school, his life began a slow downward spiral. Most of his peers and classmates went to college. Many of them became professional people. Chapman, however, didn’t go to college. Instead he went to work. While he would have other employers, the one for which he shined the brightest was the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). The YMCA had already played a large role in his life. His father taught young people how to play guitar in one of the local chapters, and that’s where a young Mark Chapman learned too.

Later on, Chapman took either temporary or part-time jobs at the Y of DeKalb, GA. He even participated in an international YMCA program that sent him to Beirut, of all places. As a temporary counselor helping young Vietnamese refugees acclimate to life in the US at Ft. Chaffee, he really seemed to have found his niche.

Chapman would probably have relished a career with the YMCA. And his supervisors welcomed the possibility that he would take a permanent job with them. But there was one small problem. In order to become a permanent full-time employee, he would need a college degree.

Chapman’s long-time sweetheart, Jessica Blankenship, encouraged him to finally get that degree. When she visited him at Ft. Chaffee, they discussed this as a possibility. They decided to go to college together, once the Y gig ended. They enrolled at Covenant College, a Presbyterian school located in Lookout Mountain, GA. Blankenship did okay. But Chapman couldn’t get his act together. He left after the first semester of a four-year program.

Blankenship had known Chapman for years, by that time. Many of their friends assumed they’d get hitched one day. Chapman assumed that too. But without direction, or purpose, or a steady job even, Blankenship could not wait for him to grow up and find himself. Judging from her actions (which I’ll mention later on), I would guess that she loved him dearly. But after Ft. Chaffee, she would love him only as a friend.

After the breakup with Blankenship, Chapman decided to get as far away from Georgia as he could, hence his move to Hawaii. He had saved up some money from his job as an armed security guard, a gig he got through his friend, DeKalb Co. Deputy Sheriff Dana Reeves, who, unsuccessfully, tried to get him to stay in his hometown.

Immediately upon landing on the sunny shores of Oahu, Chapman checked himself into an upscale hotel and lived large. Of course, his money didn’t last too long. The depression came shortly after, punctuated by a suicide attempt (carbon monoxide poisoning).

When one considers what Chapman lost in that brief period of time—his beau, his dream job, proximity to family and friends, etc.—then one could understand him being depressed. He went to the Waikiki Counseling Clinic for help. His therapist, Anne Jones, helped him through his crisis and suicide attempt. It wouldn’t take him long to recover. He wound up working there as a janitor. He would later get an office job at the clinic for Gloria.

Chapman’s defense psychiatrists combined this very real aspect of his mental health with something completely erroneous—his supposed obsession with John Lennon.

One could correctly identify Chapman—and millions of others—as a Beatlephile, if you’re talking about his childhood and early teenage years. His mother noted the times he would play their music on his guitar. Of course, as a young teenybopper, Chapman also indulged in booze and Mary Jane—as did his friends. His substance abuse ended, however, when he found religion. As Hendrix would note, his conversion was nearly instantaneous and permanent.

As a newbie conservative (Chapman’s characterization) Christian, he reassessed everything in his life, including his love for the Beatles. He didn’t suddenly hate them, or anything. Rather, he felt that they had become meaningless—Lennon, because of his flippant “We’re bigger than Jesus Christ” comment, especially so. Some of those in Chapman's church youth group had pretty virulent feelings about the former Beatle. Some even took to singing a song they called “Imagine John Lennon Dead,” a parody of “Imagine.” Chapman, however, wasn’t in for the vitriol. He simply didn’t think of Lennon, unless somebody else brought up the subject. David Moore, his supervisor at Ft. Chaffee, brought up the subject once, and Chapman’s response was more one of disappointment in the man rather than hatred of him, commenting, “He shouldn’t have said those things.”

On the other hand, Chapman did obsess over another rock star, Todd Rundgren, formerly of the Nazz. Rundgren had criticized Lennon in song and print.

Since his days as a kiddie stoner, Chapman didn’t obsess over Lennon. Instead, he was indifferent to him. He owned no Beatle albums, for example, although his wife owned several. He didn’t erect a shrine to his victim, as some stalkers do. There was a report early on that he had in his possession, at the time of his arrest, some fourteen hours of Beatles songs on cassette tape. But Fenton Bresler, who went to excruciating lengths to verify his information with the police and prosecutor, often getting them to speak on the record, said that Chapman only took one musical item with him, the copy of Double Fantasy (left) that Lennon would autograph shortly before his death. Fenton asserted that Chapman did this to deflect suspicion as he waited outside the Dakota. Instead of looking like a stalker (which, of course, he was) he would look like simply one more Beadle Peadle* looking for an autograph, and perhaps a picture.

At the time, the press made quite a fuss about something Chapman did prior to the shooting. When leaving his job at the building complex located at 444 Nahua Street in Honolulu, he usually signed out as “Chap.” But on the day he quit, he wrote the name John Lennon, crossed it out, and then wrote his own name underneath.** This led Chapman’s defense experts to the conclusion that Mark had come to believe he and Lennon were one and the same. As Dr. Daniel Schwarz said:

By the fall of 1980…he [Chapman] believed that he would retire. His wife’s income was adequate for both of them at that time, and she enjoyed her work, and he then tried to model himself after John Lennon, who you recall, like himself, was married to a Japanese woman who was the working member of the family.

However, in a way peculiar to schizophrenics, the closest he came to achieving this goal of identifying with Mr. Lennon, the more he came to believe he was John Lennon.

You and I try to model ourselves after somebody, we can try to identify with that person, but we will not run the risk of believing that we are that person. We will always know who we are and who that person is. But I believe that he became perilously close to losing his own identity, and actually, on the day that he retired, 23 October, he signed himself out from work as John Lennon.

Again, Dr. Schwartz is trying to do right by his client. Still, we have to wonder why Chapman would model himself after someone he cared nothing about. If anything, one would think that he would model himself after Todd Rundgren, whom he actually idolized. While Schwartz drew undeniable parallels between Lennon and Chapman, he didn’t mention numerous critical differences. For example, Yoko Ono is Japanese. Gloria Abe Chapman is an American of Japanese ancestry. Yoko Ono is a very strong-willed individual, creative and outspoken. Gloria is, by all accounts, modest, earthy, quiet, and somewhat passive. In short, they are about as different as two women could be, save their ethnicity. If Chapman were the Beatlephile everyone claimed him to be, he would have realized that Gloria was hardly a Yoko substitute. If he were truly modeling his life after Lennon, he would have picked another mate. After all, it’s not like Hawaii has a shortage on women of Japanese descent. Were he to marry a local, which he did, she would have a fair chance of having at least one Japanese ancestor.

Moreover, Chapman’s “retirement” in no way resembled Lennon’s five-year recording hiatus. Lennon stayed at home to keep a promise to Ono that he would raise their son. All the same, John didn’t need to live off of Yoko’s income. He had his own millions--although his wife’s shrewd investments greatly enhanced his portfolio. In short, Lennon might have been emotionally dependent on his wife, but not financially dependent, as Chapman was. And as the world knows by now, Chapman didn’t leave his job to sit around the house all day. He left his job for the sole purpose of going to New York and blowing away Lennon.

Furthermore, as Bresler noticed, the words ‘John Lennon,’ as they appear on the sign-out sheet of 444 Nahua, are crossed out with two very strong lines, followed by his usual ‘Chap.’ If he really thought he were Lennon, why make the correction? By that time, Chapman had already made up his mind to kill John. Moreover, he never intended to flee. And the money he got to go to New York didn’t come from his earnings. So it’s not as though he were running the risk of delaying the paycheck necessary for his date with destiny.

So, again, why make the correction?

Perhaps the scratched out name could be indicative of something else. For the moment, it might be helpful to view it as sort of an inside joke that Chapman had made to himself. You see, he is actually crossing off John Lennon.

Get it?

Then too, there was the identification with the fictional character, Holden Caulfield, who went on a mission to wipe out phonies. Combining the suicidal history with Chapman’s belief that he had become some amalgamation of himself, Lennon and Caulfield, the defense came up with a rather novel theory of the case. They averred that Chapman wanted to commit suicide, but didn’t want to die. So, he killed his other self—specifically, the phony self. As Dr. Schwartz explained:

I think that what finally happened was this: killing Mr. Lennon was, in his [Chapman’s] schizophrenic reasoning, a compromise, a way of handling these suicidal wishes, but in a sense, staying alive himself. He killed the person who, to him, now represented evil and hypocrisy. He killed him physically, and he killed himself psychologically.

For many, this would be the only explanation of the murder they would need. But considering that experts with an understandable (perhaps, in a strange way, noble) bias glossed over, distorted and omitted fairly strong evidence in order to form this opinion, we can thus see the problems inherent with it, even though some aspects of their characterization are probably accurate.

In some ways, it’s more frightening to think that a sane person would fly thousands of miles to murder someone whom he never met, and rarely thought of. So I, for one, can understand the public’s comfort with the official explanation, despite its problems.

The prosecution had its own theory regarding motive, and this too has received a lot of attention. At times, Chapman himself has stated this to be his reason, only to deny it later. Examining his actions, and the press surrounding them, we have questions to raise about this premise as well.


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*Beadle Peadle: what the Beatles called their fans; sometimes used derisively.

**Bresler notes that this list has only been exhibited as a photograph, and is no longer extant. This makes it difficult to determine who actually wrote the name. Although Bresler is right to point out that it’s not an ironclad fact that Chapman actually penned the name, I would say that it’s a very safe assumption that he did.

To read later posts in this series, click here.