A Lethal Delusion

By Gerald Clarke

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.

For a time he seemed more stable. His father, a loan collector in an Atlanta bank, gave him money for a round-the-world trip. In June 1979, the stocky (5 ft. 11 in., 195 Ibs.) Chapman married Gloria Abe, the attractive Japanese American who planned the itinerary. Though Chapman earned only $4 an hour as a security guard, money seems not to have been a problem: the couple lived in a $400-a-month apartment in a downtown Honolulu highrise, and Chapman was able to indulge his newest passion, art. He bought expensive works and last year purchased a $7,500 lithograph by Norman Rockwell. Like his earlier love of music, art became an obsession, and he would spend hours in Honolulu galleries and contact dealers all over the country for information on works in which he was interested.

Some time in October, Chapman's bad side took over completely. On Oct. 23 he quit his job, signing out in the logbook, John Lennon. Four days later he walked into J and S Sales, a gun shop just a block from the main Honolulu police station. Because he had no arrest record, a salesman sold him a Charter Arms .38-cal. revolver (price: $169). "It's the type used by detectives and plainclothes police because it is easy to conceal," explains Steve Grahovac, the store's owner.

It is also the type Arthur Bremer used to gun down George Wallace in 1972--a grotesque coincidence that prompted Chicago Sun-Times Columnist Mike Royko to write, with biting effect: "Now that Charter Arms Corp. has the unique distinction of having two famous people shot by one of their products, I wonder if they have considered using it in their advertising. Something simple and tasteful like: 'The .38 that got George Wallace and John Lennon. See it at your gun dealer now.'

Chapman flew to the mainland in November and spent two days in Atlanta before returning to Honolulu. Earlier this month he came back to Manhattan with at least 2,000 borrowed dollars for his fateful rendezvous outside the Dakota.

Psychiatrists believe that the best clue to what went wrong in Chapman's head is his signing of Lennon's name in the logbook last October. That act, they say, may indicate that he was losing what little remained of an obviously fragile sense of identity. "He had a superidentification with Lennon, but he was also in competition with him," says Manhattan Psychiatrist David Abrahamsen, who examined David Berkowitz, the "Son of Sam" killer. "His murder of Lennon was a substitution for his own suicide."

To be sure, the parallels that Chapman established between his own life and Lennon's were startling: both loved music as adolescents, both were in rock groups, both loved children, both were devoted to helping others, and both married Asian women who were older than themselves (Lennon's wife by seven years, Chapman's by four). "There's very strong evidence that Chapman very much wanted to be Lennon," says Stuart Berger, a New York forensic psychiatrist. "He slowly became delusional and incorporated Lennon into his sense of self. The only obstacle that stood in the way of his becoming Lennon was Lennon." Now, as he sits in detention at Rikers Island prison complex in the East River, he must face the awful reality of being Mark David Chapman.

--By Gerald Clarke

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