Nation: A Lethal Delusion

• Share

The twisted man who wanted to be Lennon

"The presidential assassin establishes with his victim a deadly intimacy, follows his movements, attaches himself to his rising star." Historian Christopher Lasch was writing about political assassins, but he might have been describing Mark David Chapman, 25, the accused murderer of John Lennon. Since he was a child, Chapman had attached himself to his hero's star, first as fan, then as imitator, finally as killer. Indeed, it is possible that in some distorted, Dostoyevskian mirror within his mind, he saw himself as Lennon—and the real Lennon as a threatening impostor.

In Atlanta, where Chapman spent most of his childhood, he joined a high school rock band and, like millions of others, worshiped the Beatles. He wore his hair long, in the distinctive Beatles cut, with strands flopping like a sheepdog's over his forehead. He experimented with drugs, which his idols condoned, and dropped acid when he was only 15. His parents strongly disapproved of the drugs, as well as of the Beatles, and would not let him play their records in the house. They searched his room, and once, when his mother warned him not to lock his bedroom door, he pried it off its hinges, took it downstairs and leaned it against the kitchen wall. He resisted authority, fought with his younger sister, and ran away from home several times. All the while he identified closely with Lennon, the most rebellious of the Beatles.

Still, he was not a delinquent. Most people appeared to like him, and he became a counselor at an Atlanta Y.M.C.A. "He seemed to really want to find a way to serve," says Tony Adams, who was the Y's executive director. "If ever there was a person who had the potential for doing good, it was Mark."

After he shot Lennon, Chapman said, "I've got a good side and a bad side. The bad side is very small, but sometimes it takes over the good side and I do bad things." For most of the '70s, the good side seemed to be in control. After graduating from high school in 1973, he got a full-time job at the Y, going so far as to sign up in 1975 as a missionary in Lebanon. The trip was his dream, but civil war broke out shortly after he arrived in Beirut, and he was forced to return home. Aware of his dedication as well as his disappointment, the organization sent him to help Vietnamese refugees who were awaiting resettlement at Fort Chaffee, Ark. "He was especially drawn to small children," says Gregg Lyman, one of his coworkers. Adds Y.M.C.A. Executive David Moore: "The problems of the people really got into his gut. He cared."

Chapman's other side appears to have begun its ascendancy a year later, after a college romance fizzled. He dropped out of Covenant College, a small Presbyterian school in Tennessee, after one semester, worked as a security guard in Atlanta, then moved to Hawaii. Depressed, however, by the unhappy love affair and the impending divorce of his parents, he tried to kill himself with a car exhaust. Treated at Castle Memorial Hospital outside Honolulu, he stayed on to do odd jobs.