Assassin says Lennon was ‘a complete phony’

Press, 5 March 1988, Page 33

Assassin says Lennon was ‘a complete phony’

NZPA-AP i London Mark Chapman said he murdered John Lennon because he believed the former Beatle had become “a complete phony,” according to previously undisclosed tape recprdings aired in a British: TV documentary.

Chapmari also said he was playing out the role of (Holden Caulfield, hero of “The Catcher in the Rye," the classic 1951 novel about adolescence by) the American author, J. D. Salinger.

■ ‘‘l’m indeed the Catcher in the Rye of this generation,” he told investigators in' the tape-recorded interviews soon after the shooting on December 8, 1980.

(Yorkshire Television, which made the documentary, said the tapes had never been heard in public. They did not emerge in court because Chapman cut short the

trial by pleading guilty. Now ( 31'; he is serving a life sentence at 'Attica State Penitentiary. I I The tapes record. Chapman’s calm account to New York City police of what led him to fire five shots into Lennon outside the musician's Manhattan apartment. ( The! chubby, bespectacled young man described an ordinary childhood in Georgia;,that degenerated with drugs in his teens, followed by a spiritual encounter with I Jesus Christ, after which he discovered happiness working with children.!

Like Holden Caulfield, his role model, Chapman believed children were mankind’s only innocents. The fictional character fantasised himself: protecting children who were playing near a cliff from falling over the edge. That became in Chapman’s (mind a metaphor

for the transition to adulthood and (“phoniness.” Lennon,! he said, “sang about peace, he sang about giving things to charity, he protested, he whined, he screamed ... it’s all self-centred baloney. (The man was just a complete phony.” In fact, Lennon had at that time withdrawn from the public eye, abandoned drugs and devoted himself for five years to his wife, Yoko Ono, and to raising their son, Sean. But Chapman became obsessed with the notion that wealth had made Lennon forsake the ideals of love i and peace that inspired much of the 1960 s generation. "I , was probably angered at his phoniness

. . . and then I thought to myself ttmk I was going to kill John pennon." “The(reason ... was to gain prominence to promote the reading of J. D.

Salinger’s ‘The Catcher in the Rye’.” I ( At another point in the tape, Chapman said: “Lennon was an extraordinary person, the Beatles were an extraordinary cultural movement ... they changed the world as we know it, and I changed them.”

Chapman (moved to New York and spent the week-end before : the assassination retracing the wanderings of the fictional Holden Caulfield.

He bought (a .38-calibre pistol with hollow-tipped bullets and; waited for Lennon outside the apartment building. "He walked past me and then I heard my head saying “Dp it, do it, do it,’ over and over again. I pulled the gun out of my pocket in my left hand, i don’t remember aiming ... I just pulled the trigger steadily five times,” he said. i (