I'm Mary Kay Mcbraer, host of the podcast The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever told, where I dig into crimes where a woman is not just a victim. She might be the detective, the lawyer, the witness, the coroner, the criminal, or some combination of those roles. These are the stories we need to know to understand the intersection of society, justice, and the fascinating workings of the human psyche. Listen to the greatest true crime stories ever told on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Join the Elvis Durant in the morning show for a special gathering at iHeartLand and State Farm Park. It's a holiday celebration with fun talks, plus a very special Elvis Durant in the morning show poem twice the night after Christmas. Don't miss this special event. Starting Monday, December 18th at 7:00 PM Eastern at State Farm Park and iHeartland in Fortnite, available for a limited time. Afterwards, stick around and check out all the exciting things State Farm has to offer. Say hi to Jake from State Farm on the big screen and try to beat Jake's score at the park or mini game. Visit iheartradio. Com/iheartland to start playing today.

Hey, everybody. We're coming to the Pacific Northwest. If you live in that area or can get on a plane to go to that area or a boat or snowshoot, whatever, we'll see you at the end of January.

That's right. Brand new show, brand new topic. We don't even know what it is yet, but we'll be in Seattle, Washington on January 24th, Portland on January 25th, and then our annual trip to San Francisco Sketchfest on January 26th. In Seattle, we're counting on you. We're at the paramount this year, and that's a lot of seats. We need a lot of your lovely faces in the audience.

Yes. Get the to stuffyoushouldknow. Com and click on the tour button to get all your facts, or you can go to linktree/sysk and get the same links and the same facts. We'll see you guys in January. We can't wait. Welcome to.

Stuff You Should Know, a.

Production.

Of.

Iheart Radio. Hey, and.

Welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too. This is Stuff You Should Know, a solemn edition.

Yeah, pretty solemn.

Yeah, it's a solemn occasion. This episode is coming out on the anniversary of John Lennon's death. And not coincidentally, because we're actually doing an episode on the death of John Lennon, so it's appropriate.

It's actually the day before his death, if we're being nitpicky.

Close enough. I was very close, Chuck.

Yeah, and I'm not one to commemorate death dates, especially murder dates. But I did want to do this episode, and since I saw it aligned, I thought if we can get this out quicker than maybe it's timely. I don't know.

Yeah. Had you decided you wanted to do this before we did JD Sallinger, or did it all just work out like that?

I think it just worked out like that. The two were completely unrelated in my mind, such that when you suggested we put them both out on the same week, I was like, Why? Nice.

Well, they're related. The two are related for sure.

Yeah, absolutely.

Let's talk about this. I knew about the death of John Lennon some, but certainly not to the degree I do now. For example, I knew he was 40. I knew he was shot. I knew he died in front of his apartment building, the Dakota, which we've talked about before. I knew a few other things, but certainly not the details. I didn't know much about the guy who killed him either.

Yeah.

Well, let's tell everybody what we've learned, huh?

Yeah, I remember this happening, believe it or not. Oh, wow. Because I was, but I guess I would have been nine. When's my birthday?

March? Yes. So, yeah, you would have been nine.

Yeah, I would have been nine years old. I remember just like, I didn't... Weirdly, I grew up in a house that didn't have a lot of music in it, except for my room and my brother's room. So it wasn't like The Beatles were a household name or anything. Like, most kids of my age who had parents who may or may not have been into The Beatles, my parents didn't tell me anything about The Beatles.

Right.

But I knew they were a thing. And I knew John Lennon is the guy with the round glasses because I was just a kid. And I remember it being big news. And I was like, Oh, that singer guy, that one of those round glasses was killed. That's sad.

Yeah, it was really big news, as we'll see. I mean, it's still big news today, but at the time, it was just earth-shattering for sure.

Thanks to Olivia for the help with this one. I guess we should start with talking a little bit about John Lennon and his love affair with New York City.

Yeah, I'm not sure when he moved to New York City. I just know that they moved to the Dakota, he and Yoko in 1973. When did they move to New York?

You know, I don't know if the Bank Street apartment was the first one, but they moved to Bank Street in '71. So that may have been their first New York place. I know they lived at, partially lived in one of the hotels there for a while, but they lived at this very nondescript house at 105 Bank Street in the West Village for a couple of years. But one of the reasons they moved is because they were robbed in the apartment and people busted in, former tenants, apparently, and stole some artwork and the TV and Lennon's wallet and his address book. Supposedly, he put the word out on the street that Bobby Sears' people are going to exact revenge if I don't get that address book back.

Oh, yeah, like the Black Panthers.

Yeah. I don't know if he had a legit connection. I mean, he seems like the guy that would have known the Black Panthers and Bobby Seale. But it was enough to where that address book was, in fact, returned. I guess that was enough to where they were like, Hey, Yoko, I'm one of the most famous people in the world. Maybe we should move to a building that's a little more secure.

That's why they moved to the Dakota, is that had a security guard, it had a doorkan. There was a driveway that was gated so you could drive in through the gate and they'd close the gate behind you. Then you got out of your car in the courtyard so you didn't have to get out on the street. It was much, much safer. But saying that, I've read interviews with John Lennon where he talks about his life in Manhattan. He would walk around Central Park, he would go get breakfast down the street. He was just living like a normal New Yorker. He said that people would say hi or whatever, but rarely would anybody ever bug him. He was super famous, but at the same time, he was just living like a normal person by this time.

Yeah, I think that's one of the allures of New York, is you can be one of the most famous people in the world. Generally, New Yorkers themselves aren't the ones that are going to bug you anyway. It's any tourist, probably. But otherwise, you can live in New York and walk around and just do your thing. That's what they did when they bought five apartments at the Dakota. They lived in a couple of them. They had a studio, one which was Yoko's work studio. They had a guest apartment, very nice thing to have, and then a storage apartment.

Yeah, and they also had Shawn Lennon in 1975. This whole era, from about that time until his death, has a couple of different portrayals, depending on who you ask. A lot of times it's portrayed as John Lennon's house husband era. He reputedly would bake bread, and he would take Sean to go walk in Central Park. And just being a stay-at-home dad, he turned his business affairs over to Yoko and just basically was like, I'm just here to live. Yeah.

Another.

Set of reporting, including from people who were there part of his life, like at least one personal assistant who was there toward the end, he said, That's a charade, that he was actually really depressed. He would lock himself in his room and just watch TV for days on end. He was into the occult, may or may not have been doing drugs. But he wasn't baking bread and just been paying attention to Sean. He was depressed. But even if that holds true, by the time his death rolled around, he had turned some corner because he was on a scooner somewhere on the way to Bermuda and ended up being the only person on the ship that wasn't seasick and was asked to steer the boat through a storm. Apparently, going through that gauntlet, it just gave him some confidence or produced a spark in him that had been missing. Even if the people who said that his last years were pretty depressing. The last year of his life was different than that. It was renewed.

Yeah. I mean, it was probably a little bit of both John Lennon struggled his entire life with just issues. He had issues from the moment he was raised until the day he died, generally speaking, in and out of drugs, stuff like that. So it was probably both would be my guess. As far as the work goes, that fall of 1980 is when the album Double fantasy came out. Great Record, released on November 17, the first one since Sean was born. And things were looking, I think, more positive. He regretted how he fathered Julian. I think he felt like he had a second chance here with Sean. He was madly in love with Yoko Ohno, just like partners and everything, and things were looking pretty good. I think he had largely let the Beatles thing. That was a tough breakup, so he had to get through that.

Yeah. But it sounds like he had by the time Double Fantas y came out because it was a fairly upbeat album about like, Family Life and stuff, right?

Yeah, a lot of it was. Yeah.

So that's John Lennon. Careening toward him on a separate but soon to intersect path was another person who is not in any way famous. And depending on what interview you read of his, who you talk to, what psychiatrist notes you read, I was very disappointed that he was not famous or that he was a nobody. His name was Mark David Chapman. And I should say right out of the gate, Chuck, there's a lot of people who are like, don't even mention that guy's name. Because he said multiple times that the reason that he killed John Lennon, spoiler alert, Mark David Chapman was the person who killed John Lennon to gain fame, to basically bask in the reflective glow that he would gain from taking John Lennon's life. People were like, don't give that guy any publicity. You can't talk about the death of John Lennon unless you talk about Mark David Chapman. From interviews that I've read with him, there's a lot more to the story than him just killing John Lennon because he wanted to be famous.

Yeah. Although, like you said, he has literally said, I thought I could acquire his fame by killing him. He was born in 1955 in Fort Worth, Texas, to an Air Force father and a nurse mother, and he grew up four miles from my house. Wow. Yeah, I had looked it up before years ago, and I did it again today because I couldn't remember. He had a Decatur address, but it wasn't like Decatur, Decatur like we think of it. Right. He went to Columbia High School, which was a rival high school to my high school that I went to, obviously older than me. But yeah, he grew up right down the road, and his dad was a pretty tough guy. Apparently, there were stories that he told about physical abuse against his mother, in which he would step in to defend her. The mother did say that there was some abuse, but she, I think like a lot of women of the time, downplayed that. But he didn't seem like a very good guy, as evidence by the fact that at one point, as we'll see, Chapman thought about killing his father. He wanted to kill somebody body.

Right. And we'll get into all that. But as a kid, he was a go-getter in some ways. He started a newspaper for the neighborhood. He was a coin collector. He was a normal kid in some ways. But then he... And also, Olivia found this one thing, and I've seen this elsewhere, that he would create these fantasies about people who lived in the walls and that he was their king. And initially, I'm like, That's kid stuff. Kids do all kinds of things like that. Right. But the more and more I read, it seemed like it was it boarded on like a godlike complex rather than just make-believe friends.

Yeah, they considered him important, and they were the only ones who considered him important, supposedly. Yeah. But I think that's a good illustration that he was showing signs that could be taken as mental illness as early as childhood.

Yeah.

There's a lot of debate on the internet whether he's mentally ill at all. It seems like the growing consensus is, especially as we understand mental illness more and more, that, yeah, he's probably very mentally ill, which makes the fact that he's not being treated for mental illness in prison that much worse.

Yeah, of course.

He came of age in the '60s and really bought into the whole hippie thing for a little while when he was in high school, started doing drugs. I think he started huffing in Halence, which is that's what you do when you start trying drugs in Georgia. Then he just moved on and eventually came to Acid. I think he tried heroin a few times. He definitely tried all the drugs. He also was into The Beatles. His favorite album was Sergeant Peppers. He also got into conspiracy theories and unicorns. He was just into all the stuff you get into when you start doing lots of drugs. Then he had a turning point, Chuck. He completely did an about-face during high school.

Yeah, he only did drugs for a couple of years. And from 14 to 16 at Columbia High School, he became a born-again Presbyterian Christian, quit drugging. And during his drug years, I saw those just weed and LSD, but I guess some other things were sprinkled in there. But he actually ran away from home and was living on the streets of Atlanta for a couple of weeks. He was like a 15-year-old. Oh, wow. But when he straightened himself out, he got a job at the YMCA after he graduated and was a counselor. He worked with Vietnamese refugees in Arkansas, and by all accounts was really good at it. He was popular with the kids. He was popular with the campers. This is, I guess, where we can start talking about the catcher and the rye because the one thing that he identified with was, well, Holden Caulfield as a whole, but Holden Caulfield and his liking kids more than he liked adults. And that was certainly seen to be true with Chapman.

Yeah, he definitely came to identify with Holden Caulfield, for sure. I read a People magazine interview with him from 1987. It's a really long piece by a guy named James R. Gains. And in it, you get the impression that Mark David Chapman, during this time, is struggling with trying to be sane, trying to be good, trying not to be bad, trying not to feel like he's going crazy. And at one point, he finally got to the point where he was apparently tired of struggling. He basically turned his back on God and started praying to Satan. It was just like, Just turn me crazy. Basically, I'm sick of trying not to be crazy. From that point on-.

His words.

Yeah. From that point on, he just kept really going downhill from there, essentially.

Yeah, and I think that can be the case depending on what mental illness you have as you get up in your upper teenage years, things can really settle in. I saw a lot of interviews. He talked a lot about the two sides of himself. As we'll see later, there were certain psychiatrists after during the trial that diagnosed him as having paranoid schizophrenia. He heard voices in his head, things like that were starting to happen with more regularity. So in 1977, he dropped out and moved to Hawaii, I think, thinking it would be good for him. He did have a suicide attempt there, but he also got treatment for depression and started traveling and stuff like that.

He did. This is really strange. He, at this time, managed to travel the world. I could not find how he paid for it, but I know that he paid for a later trip by selling an original Norman Rockwell that he had acquired. This guy who is basically living on the beach in Waikiki with no money suddenly goes on a trip around the world to Asia, to the Middle East during this several-month period between, I think, it's some time in 1978. It's a really bizarre little footnote that there's not a lot of information on. But that's one thing he did. The reason that we bring this up is because his travel agent, a woman named Gloria Abbey, ended up marrying him. They're still married, actually.

Yeah, they were... I mean, that may be one of the facts of the podcast. They were married for 18 months before he murdered John Lennon, and she has subsequently stayed married to him. And the interviews that I read, she's like, I took an Oath of marriage in front of God and everybody, and I'm going to honor that. So that's basically the end of the story. I mean, there's really not more to it than that. She has stayed by his side, does regular conjectural visits with him in prison, and they're still going strong, I guess. But in Hawaii is when, although he was getting depression treatment, he really went downhill with his mental health there. And that's where he started obsessing about killing somebody famous in order to gain fame. Lennon was on a list as well as Johnny Carson and Elizabeth Taylor, Paul McCartney, George T. Scott, the governor of Hawaii, Ronald Reagan, apparently David Bowie was on the list. It was a big list of people that the police found this upon their investigations of people that he wanted to murder.

Yes. Alarmingly, he was hired as a security guard and outfitted with a gun during this period. In 1980, he quit his job and he bought his own gun. He flew from Hawaii to New York with a gun in November of 1980. By this time, like you said, he come up with a list of famous people who he might kill. During this trip, he later said that he visited both Reagan's and Carter's election night parties, probably with a gun, like a Travis Bicle. Yeah, Bickle thing. But he didn't do anything obviously, and he actually went back to Hawaii afterward.

Yeah, and before he did that, he went to Georgia to get bullets because at the time, the good old days, you could not even buy bullets in New York City. So he went back to Georgia to get bullets. And I don't know if he couldn't buy them there or what, but his plan was to get them from a cop friend of his and said that he was thinking about killing his dad, and then went back to Hawaii at that point, then went back to New York on December 6, which was a Saturday. And maybe that's a good time to take a break. What do you think?

Yeah.

All right, we'll be right back.

I'm Mary Kay Mcbrare, host of the podcast The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever told. I write about true crime, which means I live inside the research wormhole, but I'm not necessarily interested in the headline grabbing elements, the blood and the gore, all of that. I'm more interested in the people behind these stories and what we can learn by looking at their experiences. You can meet me every week on The The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever told, where I dig into crimes where a woman is not just a victim. She might be the detective, the lawyer, the witness, the coroner, the criminal, or some combination of these roles. I delve into the good, the bad, the difficult, and all the nuance I can find, because these are the stories we need to know to understand the intersection of society, justice, and the fascinating workings of the human psyche. Listen to the greatest true crime stories ever told on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Join the Elvis Durant in the morning show for a special gathering at iHeartLand in State Farm Park. It's a holiday celebration with fun talks plus a very special Elvis Durant in the morning show poem twice the night after Christmas. Don't miss this special event starting Monday, December 18th at 7:00 p. M. Eastern at State Farm Park in iHeartland in Fortnite, available for a limited time. Afterwards, stick around and check out all the exciting things State Farm has to offer. Say hi to Jake from State Farm on the big screen and try to beat Jake's score at the park or mini game. Visit iheartradio. Com/iheartland to start playing today.

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All right, so Mark David Chapman is in New York on December eighth. John Lennon and Yelka Ohno are promoting the album they had just released, Double fantasy. They went to breakfast. John Lennon went and got a haircut. He had that awesome hair at the time. It's when he was in his greaser, straight cats look.

Yeah, you're right.

It was a cool look because he always had this long hair, usually. And all of a sudden, he had this greaser look, which was super cool. And he had a very famous photoshoot done at his apartment that day with Annie Leavivitz for Rolling Stone. Yeah, what a date. The iconic cover that was released much later in January of 1981, where John Lennon is curled up naked beside Yoko Ohno, and the picture is taken from above. Very, very famous photograph.

And that photograph was, you said, taken on the day he died. That's right. Isn't that nuts?

Yeah, not as nuts as one of the other photographs.

Taking that day. No, that's great foreshadowing. So after the Annie Leibovitz photoshoot, they went downstairs to Yoko Studio and they were interviewed by RKO Radio. And then after that, it was time to go to work. It's like 5:00 PM and Yoko and John leave the Dakota to go to the record plant, the recording studio to work on a new single called Walking on Thin Ice. This is around five o'clock and they leave the Dakota. As they're leaving, they met a fan who was standing out on the sidewalk and it turns out, had been standing on the sidewalk essentially for the last few days waiting to run into John Lennon. And that fan was, in fact, Mark David Chapman.

Yeah. As an odd side note, and I think this just came out in semi-recent years. He was not the only person to meet Mark David Chapman as a musician there. But James Taylor said that he bumped into him. He lived, I think, a couple of buildings up from the Dakota. And he met Mark David on the subway. And he told the story in the past few years. He said that he had button-hold me in the tube station right in front of 72nd Street the day before the murder. And he had pinned me to the wall, not physically, but just metaphorically, I guess. He was glistening with maniacal sweat and talking some freak-speak about what he was going to do with his stuff and how John Lennon was interested because I don't think we mentioned he wanted to be... He wanted to be famous, but he supposedly tried to play guitar. I'm not sure how much he fancied himself a musician, but I don't think it's like he was delivering demo tapes or anything unless I never caught that. But freak speak about what he was going to do, how Lennon was interested, and how he's going to get in touch with John Lennon.

He said he seemed either drugged or in a manic break of some sort. His eyes were darting all over the place, dilated like crazy. Then he closed by saying he was just someone who knew me and who I didn't know, and he had an agenda that I couldn't deal with, and I knew that I needed to get away from him.

Isn't that crazy? He met James Taylor the day before he killed John Lennon.

And Taylor heard the shots from his apartment when it happened.

But before that, after he met James Taylor, but before he shot John Lennon, this is still around five o'clock when Yoko and John are leaving the Dakota for the record plant. Mark Chapman walks up and asks him to sign his copy of Double fantasy, that record that had just come out the month before. And that photo that you referenced, Chuck, the even weirder photo, there's a picture of this happening, of John Lennon signing Mark David Chapman's copy of Double fantasy. Just so happened that there was somebody with the camera standing on the sidewalk that decided to snap a picture of John Lennon signing an album for the man who would take his life a few hours later.

Yeah, it's one of the creepier photos that exists, especially if you're a Beatles fan. It was a photographer named Paul Geresch. And he didn't quite happen to be there. He was someone who hung out there all the time to get pictures of Lennon. And they were, in fact, friendly because he was always around. And obviously a huge Beatles fan. And John Lennon, he would chat him up. And he was a generous human as a super famous musician. And so he would spend time talking with Gorish and stuff like that when he was waiting on a car or something like that. And that's why he was out there for a few minutes this time, as they were just waiting on their car. And yeah, he signed it in pen. That record was auctioned off a couple of years ago for $900,000. It was signed in pen, but it also has police, Sharpie markings, evidence markings on it and.

Stuff like that. It also has Chapman's enhanced thumbprint from police forensics dusting it.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I'm not going to cast dispersions on who would buy something like that for almost a million dollars. But 10 people bid on it, so I guess I'm not sure if it was a Beatles fan looking to show it off or destroy it or what. I didn't get any information about who bought it.

There's one other creepy footnote of this initial meeting, too. Apparently, somebody reported, who was there when all this happened, that John Lennon asked Mark David Chapman, Is that all you want? And Mark David Chapman apparently just stood there in stunned silence. John Lennon asked him again, Is that all you want? And I guess Mark David Chapman said, Yeah, or something like that. So John Lennon said, Okay, see you later. And turned around and got in the car and left for the record plant.

Yeah, and that was enough. That interaction was so amicable and friendly. As a super famous guy talking with someone, stalking outside of his apartment that Mark David Chapman reconsider in that moment and was like, Jeez, maybe I should go home and show my wife this autograph that I got. He was really kind to me. But that didn't happen because he has mental illness. He hurt in his head when he came back. Lennon and Yoko Ohno got back just before 11:00. He was still there. That limousine, like he said, could have pulled in that courtyard area where they would have had a gate behind them, but they dropped them off on the sidewalk. And in his brain, he said he heard a voice saying, Do it. Do it. Doit. With his external human voice, he just said, Mr. Lennon. And John Lennon turned around and he fired his 38 pistol five times and hit him four times.

Yeah. So John Lennon stumbles forward, and I believe it was either the doorman or the security guard is standing there. And John Lennon says to him, I've been shot. And there's a three-part documentary series coming out on Apple Plus called John Lennon: Murder Without a Trial. And I guess some publicists didn't do their research or whatever because all of the stuff that all of the ink that's being written about that documentary in the last week is about how it reveals John Lennon's last words, which turned out to be, I've been shot. But anybody who cared to even go read even the first couple of articles that covered this at the time will see that his last words were, I've been shot.

They had made it sound like it was.

Breaking news. Yes, they made it sound like at long last, this documentary 43 years later has revealed his last words. But his last words were, I've been shot. Technically, his last word was yes, because when he was laying there on the sidewalk, the police got there within two minutes. One of the cops said, Are you John Lennon? And he said, Yes. That was the last thing he ever said. The cops got there really quickly. But the thing that they found that was extraordinarily creepy was what Mark David Chapman did after he shot John Lennon, right?

Yeah, the security guard yelled out, Do you know what you just did? And Chapman said, I just shot John Lennon, which would become a Cranberry's song in 1996 that was about the murder of John Lennon. And he picked up his copy of Catcher in the Rye, and he leaned against the building and started thumbing through it. I think he had bought a new copy that day of his favorite book. And he didn't try and get away, didn't try and do anything, went very peacefully. The police, when they got there, knew how dire this was. Four bullets at close range like that was basically a death sentence. And they knew they certainly couldn't wait for an ambulance, so they put him in the squad car, drove him to what was at the time, Roosevelt hospital, now Mount Sinai West. Supposedly, I saw that he was listed as dead on arrival. They tried to resuscitate him, I think for about 20 minutes. They finally pronounced him dead at 11:15. But I've heard different accounts that he died in the police car, too. He died upon arrival at the hospital. I'm not really sure anyone knows the exact moment.

No, I read an interview with the emergency room doctor that tried to save him, Stephan G. Lynn, and he said the bullets were so incredibly well placed that he actually had Lenin's heart in his hand trying to pump the blood to keep the blood flow going. He said, There's nothing to pump. He'd lost so much blood. There was no blood to pump. At any rate, all the arteries around the heart were so torn up, they couldn't move any blood anyway. It's probably likely that he was dead in just that short car trip to the hospital.

Yeah, the official autopsy found two bullets, went into his back and went through his left lung. Another went through his left shoulder, also through his left lung, and then lodged in his neck, and the other one hit his left arm bone. And in a very strange turn of events, this news got out very quickly because there was a producer for W. A. B. C. T. V. There in the emergency room named Alan J. Weiss, who was being treated after a motorcycle crash. And all of a sudden, it's not like just a regular person being wheeled into an ER. People were losing their minds, and it was really chaotic. He knew that something was going on, and he just gathered from hearing things that it was, in fact, John Lennon. And as he says, and this sounds, I'm not sure why I don't believe it, but he says that the music playing in the room while they were trying to revive him was all-my-loving.

Yeah, Beatles' song. For those of us who aren't really into the Beatles enough to know that that's a Beatles song.

Sure. Because he would not mention All-my-lovin' by The Everly Brothers.

You never know. He's like, That's just weird. He also said that he heard Yoko Ono scream, and he talked to one of the doctors attending to him, and they agreed that John Lennon probably was dead. He was convinced enough that he called the station, W. A. B. C, and told them the news. The news broke on ABC, which just so happened to be airing Monday Night Football. It was Howard and Kosell that broke the news to the world, essentially, of John Lennon's death.

Yeah, it was a Patriots-Dolfins game tied up in the fourth quarter. Frank Gifford, while they were in commercial, they discussed like, What should we do here? This is too big. We need to sit on. Apparently, Kosell did not really want to do it, but Frank Gifford was like, We have to. And so as the quote goes, Gifford said, Three seconds remaining, John Smith is on the line, and I don't care what's on the line, Howard. You've got to save what we know in the booth. And Howard CoSell talked about, This is just a football game. He said Lennon was shot twice, so the news wasn't even accurate that quickly offthe off the wire, or I guess it wouldn't even a wire at that point. But he said that he was dead on arrival and that it's hard to go back to the game at that point. Yeah.

I also read Stevie Wonder stopped his concert in Oakland when he heard the news and broke it to his fans, too. It was a huge deal. I mean, like you said, you were even aware of it, and you weren't even a Beatles fan or very aware of The Beatles. If you were a Beatles fan at the time-Yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah. If you were a Beatles fan at the time, it was the most devastating news you've heard since the Beatles were breaking up. Maybe even more devastating than that.

I would say so, probably, because that ruined any chance of it ever being reunited.

Yeah, fair point. I saw that somebody was like, What would have happened if John Lennon hadn't been killed? Somebody was like, They probably would have played together here or there once in a while. So yeah, I'm sure it was much worse.

Well, he and Paul had repaired their relationship by that point. And the Beatles breakup, it was acrimonious in that they were all not tired of each other, but just tired of being in that band together. But they never hated each other. It was like any long-term creative partnership. They had a strain, but they had worked it out. And they were hanging out together in New York some when Paul was in town. And it wasn't like they weren't talking anymore or anything like that. Things were headed toward reconciliation, if not professionally, certainly personally.

Yeah, they did work it out.

Please.

I think with that, Chuck, we should probably take a break, huh?

Let's do it.

I'm Mary Kay Mcbrare, host of the podcast The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told. I write about true crime, which means I live inside the research wormhole, but I'm not necessarily interested in the headline grabbing elements, the blood and the gore, all of that. I'm more interested in the people behind these stories and what we can learn by looking at their experiences. You can meet me every week on The The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever told, where I dig into crimes where a woman is not just a victim. She might be the detective, the lawyer, the witness, the coroner, the criminal, or some combination of these roles. I delve into the good, the bad, the difficult, and all the nuance I can find because these are the stories we need to know to understand the intersection of society, justice, and the fascinating workings of the human psyche. Listen to the greatest true crime stories ever told on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Join the Elvis Durant in the morning show for a special gathering at iHeartLand and State Farm Park. It's a holiday celebration with fun talks plus a very special Elvis Durant in the morning show poem twice the night after Christmas. Don't miss this special event starting Monday, December 18th at 7:00 p. M. Eastern at State Farm Park in iHeartLand and Fortnite. Available for a limited time. Afterwards, stick around and check out all the exciting things State Farm has to offer. Say hi to Jake from State Farm on the big screen and try to beat Jake's score at the park or mini game. Visit iheartradio. Com/iheartland to start playing today.

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Okay.

So we're back and the world is now just learning that John Lennon has been killed. Yoko, oh, no. I'm not sure exactly when she did it, but she released a statement saying there's not going to be a funeral, which is probably a wise move because I can't imagine what John Lennon's funeral would have looked like. It would have just been chaos. But instead, she said, I think it would be more appropriate to have a 10-minute silent vigil. And around the world, people observed this 10-minute silent vigil. Apparently in Central Park, there was upwards of 50,000 people standing there silently for 10 minutes. I heard a report that the only thing you could hear in Central Park in Manhattan at the time were the helicopters whirling overhead who were covering this for the news. No one talked, there weren't car horns. There was nothing for that 10-minute vigil, which must have just really driven home the significance of that moment.

Yeah. Before that, though, the Dakota, there are pictures of... It looked like a festival, a concert festival of people just outside the Dakota. I mean, it's not a stretch to say it was like on the manner of the Queen dying or something like that. I mean, people all over the world, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands gathering together to mourn his death. And even very sadly, a couple of people in the following days took their life by suicide, mentioning Lennon's death and depression, pushing them over the edge in their suicide notes.

Paul McCartney, when he heard the news and was, I guess, asked by a reporter to comment on it. He said something like, Drag, isn't it? Okay, cheers. And was very widely criticized for it. And he, in his defense said, I couldn't bring the words like what I was feeling at the moment. I was in shock. Apparently, he went off and wrote a song about the whole thing called Here Today. Have you heard that song?

Oh, yeah. It's on the Tug of War record.

The good one?

It's okay. I mean, it's my favorite from that record, but that interview, that always has bothered me. If you see the interview, it's just like he's jammed in the middle of throngs of people on a sidewalk and someone sticks a camera and microphone in his face. When you watch it, it's clear he's not being flipped. He's a guy who probably doesn't want a camera and microphone shoved in his face at that very moment and is just trying to get out of there. Paul McCartney was obviously crushed, as were all the Beatles. Ringo Star was in the Bahamas, immediately came to New York and acted as temporary dad to Sean because Yoko was like, I need help with my son. You don't think about the nuts and bolts of going through something like that, one of which is I have a five-year-old that needs to be looked after, and Ringo stepped in there, which is amazing.

It seems like a pretty Ringo Star thing to do, too.

Yeah, I agree.

George Harrison, he was off on his Eastern philosophy trip and had been devoting his life to preparing for a peaceful death. When he got the news, he apparently thought he got the call in the middle of the night, and his wife, Olivia, took the call. He thought he just guessed at first that Ringo Star was dead for some reason. I never saw what his reasoning was. He just said that he thought that in an interview. But then when he found out what had happened, he apparently was really angry that John had been robbed of a chance of having a peaceful, calm death that he died in such a violent manner. It took him a while to get over that and just accept that that happened. But on that note, too, about the fact that John Lennon died in a violent manner, he supposedly had postulated that something like that might happen to him someday. He chalked it up to his violent past that he was a violent person and that he expected he might die violently when he went, which I thought was very bizarre.

Yeah, very much. Julian was 17. He was in North Wales. He said he woke up with a gut feeling that something terrible had happened. In as the story goes, he went downstairs and opened the curtains of his mother and stepmother's house, and it was just mobbed with press. That's how he finds out.

That's terrible.

Lennon was cremated at Fern Cliff Cemetery outside New York City in Hartstale. But there was somebody who took another photograph, an unfortunate one, of his body in the morgue. The New York Post published it, which is terrible.

Yeah, on the front page, I think. If it wasn't at The New York Post, they put it on the front page, the inquire definitely did. There's some really significant photographs just that circle this event. Mark David Chapman shows up in court two days later. He's taken to jail, obviously, by the police, placed under suicide watch. And also, I think he was wearing a bulletproof vest in court because there was just such a chance that somebody would kill him for killing John Lennon. Still today, I think if he left prison, somebody might kill him for killing John Lennon 43 years later. I suspect he might be aware of that. But he underwent a battery of psychiatric tests with, I believe, a dozen psychiatrists, over 200 hours, over about the six months between the first time he was arranged and when he ended up pleading guilty in court. Every single one of these psychiatrists, prosecution and defense, said this guy has some mental illness. The degree of it was disagreed upon by the prosecution and the defense. The defense psychiatrists were like, He has schizophrenia. He has psychosis. He's not aware of what he did. The prosecution said he's very aware of what he did.

He has mental illness, probably some personality disorder, but definitely not anything that's made him so detached from reality. He's not culpable for this crime.

Yeah, for sure. Finally, on June 22, he changed his plea himself. His attorney, it was actually his second attorney because the first one withdrew very quickly because there were death threats like you're defending Mark David Chapman. But Jonathan Marks was the second US attorney appointed, and he was like, Don't change your plea to guilty because we could probably get you at least insane at the time of the shooting, like temporary insanity. Which do they still even use that as a plea?

I don't know, man. I know we've done an episode on it, but I don't remember where it landed these days.

Yeah, I'm not sure. But he changed his plea to guilty of second-degree murder. On August 24th, the judge sentenced him to 20 years to life at Green Haven Correctional Facility and said you should get psychiatric treatment. Mark David Chapman read from The Catcher in the Rye, the part where... I'm just going to read it, but it's a little long, but the part where Holden Caulfield was basically talking about saving the kids that are in danger of wandering off the cliff. And that's when he calls himself The Catcher in the Rye. And he was still so attached to that book at that point that that was his final statement. I think he even had a copy of the book that he had inscribed and said, This is my statement.

Yeah, apparently the book, the copy that he was reading after he shot John Lennon had that written in it. And if you read that James R. Gains interview with him and people from 1987, this period of time, that six months, are when he really seems the most mentally ill, when it really shines through because he's vacillating between a complete and total immersion in the catcher in the rye and rejecting the catcher in the rye and going to the Bible and then vice versa. There's a point where he has this awareness that the whole reason he shot John Lennon is to let everyone know that he's this generation's catcher in the rye and every generation has a catcher in the rye, and he's the one now. It's really unsettling and disturbing, and it would be really difficult to say the things that are coming out of this guy's mouth that is documented and be just making it up to make yourself seem mentally ill. It's too unhinged, essentially.

Well, and there was a history of this in his life. It wasn't like all of a sudden after the murder, he just started saying these things.

Yeah. And also, I mean, even if you exclude all that, don't you have to be mentally ill to kill somebody to become famous? Doesn't that require a certain level of at least like a fundamental personality disorder that would qualify as a genuine mental illness?

I think so.

I do, too.

Yeah, I'm no psychiatrist. But if you believe that you can acquire someone's fame by murdering them.

Then yeah. Essentially, yeah.

There were a couple of the other motives. The motive is what it is, which is a disturbed person wanting to kill a famous person to gain fame. But he also was a very devout Christian after this. And at one point, the Beatles talked about being more popular than Jesus. He offended his Christianity with stuff like that and the song Imagine. But I don't think those were the big reasons. He has expressed more and more remorse and shame over the years as time went by, because in 2000, he became eligible for parole. And every two years, he goes up before the board and he expresses shame now. He said, In 2020, what I did was despicable. I assassinated him because he was very famous, and that's the only reason. I was very much seeking self-glory and very selfish. For her part, Yoko Ono always writes a letter saying, Please don't let him out. I don't feel like it's a punitive plea from hearing interviews. She genuinely thinks that herself, or Sean or Julian would be in danger if he was let out, and who can blame her?

Yeah. I don't know what else to say after that.

And one more thing I want to mention is, of course, strawberry Fields, the place in October of 1985, and what would have been Lennon's 45th birthday Central Park, dedicated an area near the Dakota where he used to go on walks with Sean at strawberry Fields in. It's a wonderful place to visit. It's got this beautiful mosaic on a walking path. And if you go there, you can't go there without seeing still just scores of Beatles fans paying their respects.

Nice.

Yeah. And Yoko, 90 years old, still going strong, and lived in that same apartment until just a few years ago.

Yeah, I know. And there's a lot of people who love to hate on Yoko if you want to get into John Lennon conspiracy theory, she's frequently the person who's blamed as hiring indirectly, Mark David Chapman is the hitman to kill John Lennon. Just stop. Right, exactly. Just stop. At the same time, that's the thing that gives people who despise her fodder for being like, See, she walked past the place where her husband died every day and she didn't move or something like that. She's a very misunderstood person, I think, in a lot of ways. She finally did move during the COVID pandemic up to upstate New York, I think, with Sean.

Yeah, people need to stop all the Yoko stuff for God's sake. Yeah.

I mean, it's still going strong if you read the internet, but it does feel like it's gone. There's been a sea change. I think it used to be way more acceptable to just hate on her just in general. I think it's gotten a little more conspiracy-oriented rather than just mainstream these days.

Yeah, Yoko Ohno did not break up The Beatles, full stop. Stop saying that. If you watched the great Peter Jackson documentary that was out recently, it was definitely an odd thing for all of a sudden to have her in the recording studio with them. It's different. But Paul was like, it was an adjustment. And Paul was like, Hey, listen, it's a little weird, but he needs her. He loves her. She's great for him. And it's not like she's much of a disruption or anything. Even when you watch the footage, she's just there. And other family members are popping in here and there all the time. She was there the whole time, and he really needed her at that point. She was his life. And Paul McCartney understood that, and he knew that that was going to be part of the working arrangement moving forward. And they were getting okay with that. Nice.

I just wanted to say that. I'm glad you finally settled it once and for all.

Yeah, I'm sure not everyone will be like, Well, Chuck said, Yoko, great.

You got anything else?

No, I don't love her singing, but that's a different story.

We've talked about that. I think we have. I'm sure I've mentioned before, have you ever seen her cover of Fireworks? . I love that man.

It's so great. I just think she's a true original artist. So even if I don't love the singing, she's always done interesting things.

Yeah. Okay, well, if you want to know more about The Death of John Lennon, there is no of articles and documents and stuff that you can read on the internet. Since I said that, of course, it's time for listener mail.

I'm going to call this just a recent email from a young listener. Hey, I'm sorry, not even hey, yo, Josh and Chuck. My name is Ben S, and I'm a 13-year-old from Eagle Mountain, Utah. Love your podcast. I've been listening to it for years, and it makes me feel very smart around my friends. My dad introduced us to it by having us listen to it on all of our road trips because we really like to go camping. I come from a family of six kids and four of us have a rare skin condition called epidermalysis. Epidermalysis? . Belosa simplex. It'd be super cool if you guys did a podcast about our skin condition. And also this, we have a contest in our family to see who can get on listener email first. I'm really hoping it can be me. If you do read this on the podcast, can you shout out my family? Mom, dad, Ricky, Lilly, me, Olivia, Sam, and Grace. Thanks again for the show. Hopefully, I can listen to it all through high school and college. And Ben, sometimes we like to make dreams come true. That's why I picked this one.

Take that, Mom, Dad, Ricky, Lilly, Olivia, Sam, and Grace.

Yeah, Ben won, everybody. Contest is over.

First one to email, as far as I know, but that's all good.

Well, that's awesome. Thanks a lot, Ben. We appreciate it. We're glad we could help you out a little bit. Thank you very much for listening. We hope you do continue to listen throughout the rest of your life. If you want to be like Ben and send an email and let us know you're super cool, we love that thing. You can wrap it up, spank it down the bottom, and send it off to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.

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I'm Mary Kay Mcbraer, host of the podcast The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever told, where I dig into crimes where a woman is not just a victim. She might be the detective, the lawyer, the witness, the coroner, the criminal, or some combination of those roles. These are the stories we need to know to understand the intersection of society, justice, and the fascinating workings of the human psyche. Listen to the greatest true crime stories ever told on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Join the Elvis Durant in the morning show for a special gathering at iHeartLand and State Farm Park. It's a holiday celebration with fun talks plus a very special Elvis Durant in the morning show poem twice the night after Christmas. Don't miss this special event starting Monday, December 18th at 7:00 p. M. Eastern at State Farm Park and iHeartLand and Fortnite. Available for a limited time. Afterwards, stick around and check out all the exciting things State Farm has to offer. Say hi to Jake from State Farm on the big screen and try to beat Jake's score at the park or mini game. Visit iheartradio. Com/iheartland to start playing today.

The free iHeart Radio app is your home for the holidays. Open the app and click on the holiday banner or search iHeartHoliday and start listening to your local holiday station. Plus stations playing all kinds of holiday music, Christmas classical, Christmas jazz, country R&B, tons of playlists, even podcasts. Our gift to you, the perfect holiday soundtrack. Join the millions of listeners on the iHeart Radio app. Free never sounded so good.

Iheart Radio.