The Evolving Motives of Mark Chapman

A timeline of Mark Chapman’s multiple motives for wanting to murder John Lennon

If you asked an AI engine today what was Mark Chapman’s motive for shooting John Lennon, a common answer would be ‘complex’. Perhaps confusing would be a more appropriate answer. In recent times Chapman has helpfully tried to clarify the situation. In his 2020 parole hearing, Chapman declared that he shot John Lennon for “self-glory”. He then went on to say that he was “angry and jealous” at the way John was living:

"At the time my thinking was he has all of this money, lives in this beautiful apartment and he is into music representing a more cautious lifestyle, a more giving lifestyle. It made me angry and jealous compared to the way I was living at the time. There was jealousy in there."

"It was just self-glory, period. It was nothing more than that. It boiled down to that. There's no excuses."

Jealousy and glory were new motive words in the ever-expanding Mark Chapman motive lexicon. I have been told by people who have visited Chapman in recent years, that he is desperate to be released and will say anything at his parole hearings to try and achieve this. The two people who are probably advising Chapman today are his old Pastor, Charles McGowan and his wife Gloria. With friends like those..

Glory is an interesting word for Chapman to now use. It ties in nicely with Chapman’s long and torturous religious journey in prison. A journey Chapman travelled alongside religious snake oil salesmen like Don Dickerman and Ken Babbington. Babbington used to be a used-car salesman. When he isn’t selling his own unique brand of Jesus, you can find him online exposing the greatness of the confederate flag. Dickerman runs a ghostbusting service who prescribe that a liking of Harry Potter, could mean you are possessed by a demon. With friends like those..

Jealous doesn’t make much sense as a motive, as most of the planet in December 1980 was better off than jobless Mark Chapman. Why just be jealous of Lennon? Still, it’s another juicy media-attractive motive to throw on top of the enormous and ever-expanding motive pile.

In 2022, Chapman played along with the DA’s consistent assessment that he ‘did it for fame’ by declaring:

“I wanted to be somebody. I wasn’t going to be a nobody anymore”.

It’s pointless to dwell too long on Chapman’s parole hearing babblings. Ultimately, they are meaningless at this point. Chapman has endured decades of being ‘got at’ in prison. We know all about the hypnotists and psychiatrists who had him all to themselves in the early years. We know about the two ‘journalists’ who had years of access and were respectively also members of the Council of Foreign Relations and the Office of Navy Intelligence. We also know about the aforementioned religious hellfire guys. Chapman has even admitted that secret service personnel visited him ‘for advice’. Gloria Chapman and Charles McGowan now exclusively manage the Mark Chapman prison experience. That said, Chaman’s last parole hearing in March 2024 was strangely ignored by the world’s media. Perhaps Mark is now going off script?

A breakdown and timeline analysis of the dozens of motives that have been attributed to Chapman, by Chapman himself and other Chapman cohorts and interested parties, is useful and often revealing. The ever-shifting sands of Chapman’s motives are important because they tell us how this story was carefully crafted and, in some cases, painfully concocted by people who sometimes revealed hidden agendas about themselves by hitching their wagon to a particular motive.

There are five main motives commonly cited.

The Lennon one. This rotates between Chapman wanting to be Lennon or he was obsessed/jealous/angry with Lennon.

The Religious one. Chapman, (despite being only 11 when it happened), was enraged with Lennon’s ‘more popular than Jesus’ quote. Or, the Imagine song was blasphemous.

The Fame and Glory one. As rabidly sold by the prosecution. Despite all the evidence to the contrary over the past 45 years, Asst. DA Kim Hogrefe still clings to this motive like his life depends on it.

The Catcher one. Chapman thought he was Holden Caulfield. Or, Chapman wanted to promote ‘Catcher in the Rye’. Or, Chapman wanted to escape into the book.

The Phony and Hypocrisy one – Like Holden Caulfield, Chapman apparently hated phonies. Chapman saw Lennon as a phony because of his 1980 lavish lifestyle, after Lennon previously sung about having ‘no possessions’ – in 1971!

So, let’s explore the history and validity of these evolving claims through a timeline of when they surfaced and who was behind them. Starting with the first and only motive Chapman ever gave before being submitted to the hypnotists.

‘I’m Holden Caulfield and the Devil made me do it’

Speaking to Officer Cullen in his patrol car after being arrested, Chapman allegedly said:

‘The big man inside of me is Holden Caulfield. The small part is the Devil. And tonight, the small part won’.

A big and small part battling it out in Chapman’s mind would often be rolled out by Mark in the following months to come.

At 12.20am on 9^th December 1980, Chapman gave a statement to the NYPD. Below are the motive extracts:

‘I fought against the small part for a long time, but for a few seconds the small part won’.

‘I have nothing against John Lennon or anything he has done in the way of music or personal beliefs’

‘I’m sure the large part of me is Holden Caulfield. The small part of me must be the Devil’

This was the first and last statement Chapman ever gave before being subjected to CIA hypnotists. There is no indication he was jealous or obsessed with Lennon, or that he thought Lennon was a phony. There is no indication he did it for fame or glory. Religion is not mentioned.

One of Chapman’s ‘defence’ lawyers was David Suggs. Suggs worked for the CIA law firm, Donovan, Leisure, Newton and Irving. Suggs also appeared in Apple TV’s 2023 disappointing official narrative documentary, ‘Murder Without a Trial’. The series didn’t feel it was worth telling its viewers the CIA intelligence background of the law firm where Suggs used to work. To be fair though, they did reveal that Milton Kline used to worked for the CIA, but connecting dots was not something this series was prepared to do. Suggs provided the series producers with audio tapes of his conversations with Chapman after his arrest. It is not clear whether these recordings were made after Milton Kline and his evil ilk visited Chapman in his cell, but considering Suggs’s colleague Jonathan Marks placed Kline in Chapman’s cell just 48 hours after he got the gig, it is highly likely that Kline had already got to Chapman before Suggs and Marks started recording conversations with their client.

On the tape we first hear Chapman make some claims as if he is reading from a script. Chapman also appears to be speaking as if he is in some kind of trance:

“I’m under complete understanding now of what happened. And it is very clear and it is very rational. It is my sincere belief that I killed John Lennon to get as many people as possible to read the Catcher in the Rye. All of my efforts would now be devoted towards this goal”.

The shift from thinking he was a book character to promoting the said books content, was already complete.

We then hear a new aggressive sounding Chapman claim:

“All you need is love and 250 million dollars. He was the biggest phoniest bastard that ever lived. I wasn’t about to let the world endure ten more years of his menagerie of bullshit”.

Think about what Chapman was actually saying in the days after the murder. He initially claimed that he thought he was Holden Caulfield and an internal devil was trying to lead his Holden persona astray. But, in the Suggs audio tape clip that was featured on the Apple TV series, Chapman appears to now be a combination of an avenging Holden Caulfield and a devil-like entity. Evil Holden if you will. Chapman also contradicts himself claiming that he wanted to kill John Lennon to promote a book but he also wanted to kill John Lennon because he was a bullshitting phony. Was it both or were contradictory motives being programmed into Chapman’s brain by Kline and his cohorts?

These are either the contradictory claims of someone who is clearly mentally ill or, the assertion of someone who has been programmed to think he is someone else committing an evil act for reasons he cannot comprehend or understand. There were unsubstantiated reports that while in Hawaii in the final months before the murder, Chapman wanted to change his name to Holden Caulfield. There was also a January 1981 report from a woman called Lynda Irish, claiming that Chapman wrote Irish a letter on September 10^th 1980, with Chapman allegedly signing off as 'Catcher in the Rye, Mark.' Lynda never produced the letter because she apparently burnt it, claiming she didn’t want to see it end up in a ‘sensation-oriented publication’.

We have also been told that Chapman called for the services of a prostitute on the evening of 7^th December 1980. Like the fictional prostitute who met Holden Caulfield, the woman who met Chapman was wearing a green dress. Was this a coincidence, or were nefarious forces trying to re-enforce Chapman’s Holden Caulfield fantasy 24 hours before Lennon’s murder?

Inside Chapman’s ‘Catcher’ book that he had on him when he was arrested, he had signed his name above the line ‘THE CATCHER IN THE RYE’. Below that was – THIS IS MY STATEMENT.

Chapman thinking he was someone else was a problem for many. None of his early ‘Catcher’ themed claims would work for the prosecution. If Chapman was convicted as a mentally ill man who was not responsible for his actions, he would have gone to a psychiatric hospital where he would have been treated accordingly. Deeply embedded secrets and programming may have then possibly risen to the surface. If however, Chapman was convicted as a sane man, he would rot away in a prison cell and would not be examined or treated by prying doctors.

CIA consultant Milton Kline was very happy to talk to Chapman about his obsession with the ‘Catcher’ book but not seemingly about thinking he was the main character. By using the book as a manifesto, Chapman was being portrayed as a sane man looking for a prop. I always thought it was strange that Kline told Chapman he was going to make ‘Catcher’ globally popular by promoting it through Lennon’s murder. But I believe Kline was deliberately moving Chapman away from his belief that he was a character in the book, to promoting the book and its content. It aided the ‘he was not insane’ camp and that aided the possibility of sending Chapman to prison as a sane man.

All of these conflicting ‘Catcher’ themed narratives were going on behind closed legal doors. The world and its shoddy mainstream media were desperate for a credible motive. Their pleas were answered in Hawaii.

He thought he was John Lennon – He was obsessed with John Lennon

To fill the motive void, an enduring ‘Lennon obsessive’ motive would come from Hawaii. But before we get to that, let’s just go back a couple of years to the Summer of 1978, where John Lennon was on holiday at Mount Fuji in Japan with his wife & 3-year-old old son.

In Hawaii’s Castle Memorial hospital at the exact same time (and after being subjected to months of hypnotic drugs and brainwashing) Mark Chapman was given substantial funds by Castle Memorial to fly out to Mount Fuji & then onwards for a World trip. These funds were allegedly in the shape of a loan. At the time of his trip, Chapman was a lowly janitor.

A legend was carefully being set of Chapman being a Lennon obsessive stalker. The 1978 Japan trip was ultimately not required as the world’s media completely bought the lie that Chapman was always a Lennon obsessive. All it took to convince the media of this fact was a crossed-out Lennon signature on a work ledger. A ledger that swiftly disappeared when Hawaiian authorities tried to recover and analyse it.

There were early reports that the man was had discovered the ledger, building manager Joseph Bustamante, had forged the Lennon signature and then sold it quickly for profit after the murder. It was also claimed that Bustamante was planning to forge another signature and bring it out to New York. Bustamante claimed that Mark and Gloria’s lawyers, Jonathan Marks and Brook Hart, had asked him to do this. Marks and Hart denied this. More on this here and here.

Castle Memorial then served up one of its psychiatrists, Dr Robert Marvit, to talk to the media after Lennon’s murder. Marvit ludicrously claimed that Chapman wanted to become Lennon by killing him. Marvit also forgot to mention that he worked at the same hospital that treated Chapman.

Dr Marvit and Castle Memorial head Dennis Mee Lee were involved in a legal dispute with a Hawaiian Scientology centre throughout 1980. An aggressive Mark Chapman carried out a campaign of intimidation against the Scientology centre throughout most of 1980. While doing this, Chapman often played loud Beatles music out of a nearby building.

To finish off the Lennon/Beatles angle, a bogus story started to circulate in the days after the murder that Chapman had 14 hours of Beatles music on him when he was arrested.

Imagine if you will, Chapman obeyed the orders of Dakota doorman Jose Perdomo and ran away from the Dakota after John Lennon was murdered. A brave local cop or an upstanding New York citizen then managed to apprehend and kill Chapman as he ran through Central Park. Or alternatively, imagine if you will Chapman was programmed to kill himself after Lennon’s murder. With Chapman dead and silent, what Chapman info could then have emanated out of Hawaii regarding this strange character? Could a person like Dr. Marvit reveal that an aggressive Chapman was so obsessed with Lennon, he even managed to stalk him halfway across the world in the summer of 1978. Could it also have been revealed that Chapman always played loud Beatles music and his demeanour was aggressive and hostile throughout 1980. A two-year legend was carefully constructed and was waiting on the shelf if needed.

Chapman not killing himself or fleeing the scene meant that his 1978 trip to Japan and his love of loud Beatles music and aggressive local interactions, were ultimately not needed. The Bustamante signature and a Dr Marvit media interview were enough to placate (and befuddle) the world and its sleepwalking media.

In his police statement given to the NYPD just two hours after Lennon’s murder, a confused Chapman had no clear idea about what he allegedly just did. He remembered firing a gun, but details regarding where he shot Lennon and what Lennon allegedly did after being shot, were filled in much later in Chapman’s mind, no doubt with the assistance of a whole army of hypnotists. Incoherent motives were being wildly speculated in the media but the Lennon obsessive legend was the most powerful. Perhaps the most telling (and truthful) early media reports were the ones revealing that Chapman kept on giving different motives for the alleged murder. Like an actor performing on a stage without a script, Chapman stumbled around looking for guidance to get him through the show.

Once the hypnotists internally got hold of Chapman in the early months of 1981, promoting Catcher once again became a predominant and useful reason for the murder. Lynda Irish and her burnt letter helped with this. But after John Hinckley was found with a copy of Catcher in his hotel room at the end of March 1981, demons and the devil were employed as the dark undercover mechanics of Chapmans ‘possessed’ mind. For the next three years, ‘exorcisms’ were conducted on Chapman to gaslight him into believing he was possessed by demons. At the end of this process, Chapman never spoke again about Catcher or Holden.

The Religion angle was mostly sold by ONI agent Charles McGowan with additional support from Gloria, Dickerman and Babbington. McGowan predictably led the way. In an 8^th January 1981 interview McGowan gave to the ‘Atlanta Constitution’, McGowan sowed the seeds for supernatural elements being involved in the events of 8^th December 1980.

McGowan:

“it’s a struggle between good and evil and right and wrong”

“He didn’t talk as one who had the three faces of Eve type of personality. Or any kind of dual personality”

“He told the police that inside of me there’s a whole lot of good and a little bit of evil and every once in a while, the evil tends to dominate and control me”

No Catcher, no Lennon fixation and no fame seeking. Just a simple parable of good versus evil and a declaration that Chapman was not a schizophrenic and therefore was not insane.

The Fame and Glory one

The prosecution stuck to the only motive that would help them in gaining a conviction for Chapman as a sane man. A loser did it for fame. The fact that Chapman forwent the trial of the century was conveniently ignored. Talk of an unverified ‘hit list’ was all the prosecution needed to seal their case – after Chapman pled guilty. A point in time when the prosecution knew they wouldn’t be asked to produce a hit list in court. To ensure the hit list narrative didn’t get too complicated, speaking to the media on 6^th June 1981, DA Sullivan declared Chapman’s hit list was a ‘mental’ one.

The Manhattan DA’s office never had to officially name a witness who saw Chapman do it. They never had to discuss forensics or any other evidence that they had in hand that might have stuck in court. They bluffed it right up until the proposed day of the trial. A trial that didn’t happen because ‘God’ visited Chapman’s cell. How convenient.

Chapman’s 1978 trip to Japan and his hostile Scientology campaign were buried deep down the memory hole. A memory hole Chapman himself has never managed to recover. Chapman has spoken about his global trip but he has never spoken about the strange Lennon Mount Fuji location coincidence. Chapman has mentioned harassing people in 1980, but in Chapman’s post Milton Kline brain, the people he was harassing are now ‘Krishna’s’ and not Scientologists.

in 1987, journalist Jim Gaines, published three People magazine articles based on his discussions with Chapman in prison.

Chapman insisted to Gaines that he did not kill John Lennon to be famous. There was clear evidence to back this up. In the previous six years, Chapman had refused all media interviews and he had foregone the trial of the century in the summer of 1981.

After reporting on Mark’s ‘little people kingdom’ concept, Gaines, with the help of Gloria, then started promoting the religious/demon angle via an unsubstantiated story that Mark prayed to the devil and demons to give him the strength to kill Lennon.

Tying the religious bow up neatly with its originator, Charles McGowan, Gaines then revealed that McGowan contacted Gloria Chapman after the murder and told her that in his opinion:

‘There is a dimension to this case that the secular psychiatric world would never understand. I believe there was a demonic power at work’.

No Catcher, no Lennon fixation and no fame seeking. Just an identical prognosis to Charles McGowan and his 8^th January 1981 assertions. Were Charles McGowan and Jim Gaines comparing notes?

By 1987, the demon gas-lighters had done their despicable work on Chapman in prison. They had managed to convince Mark that demons made him kill John Lennon. This in turn pushed Catcher and Mark’s initial belief that he was Holden Caulfield, deep down the memory hole, never allowed to return. Always a team player, Gloria was consistently on-message in this regard. In a 2014 Daily Mail article, Gloria refused to discuss Catcher and its impact on Mark throughout her interview.

At some point between Gaines and his demon assertions and Chapman’s two 1992 TV appearances, a decision must have been made to move on from those pesky demons and shift Chapman over to the prosecution claims that Chapman ‘did it for fame’. To help facilitate this, Nixon insider Chuck Colson helped parachute ONI officer Jack Jones into Mark Chapman’s cell. Jones recorded five years’ worth of interviews with Chapman. Jones also released a rambling and incoherent book about Mark in 1993, called ‘Let me take you down’. I’ve often considered reviewing this awful book, but there are so many factual errors and unsubstantiated claims contained within it, it would take up far too much of my valuable time.

Before the books release, Jones persuaded Mark to give two highly staged and carefully scripted TV interviews to Larry King and Barbara Walters. The question of motive obviously came up. Right off the bat on question one, Mark wanted to erase the demons:

‘It was me, Larry, and I accept full responsibility for what I did. I’ve seen places where I’m blaming the devil, and I hope that that isn’t kept going after this interview. I’m not blaming the devil, I’m blaming myself. But in the major sense, it wasn’t me, because I’m better now.’

The demons had done their job in erasing the Catcher motives. Now the demons were no longer required. Mark was now happy to play along with the simplistic fame motive with a little bit of nostalgic Catcher ‘phony’ thrown into the mix. Bizarrely Mark also started talking about himself in the third person to help him with his new motive story:

‘Mark David Chapman at that point was a walking shell who didn’t ever learn how to let out his feelings of anger, of rage, of disappointment. Mark David Chapman was a failure in his own mind. He wanted to become somebody important, Larry. He didn’t know how to handle being a nobody. He tried to be a somebody through his years, but as he progressively got worse – and I believe I was schizophrenic. at the time. Nobody can tell me I wasn’t – although I was responsible, Mark David Chapman struck out at something he perceived to be phoney, something he was angry at, to become something he wasn’t, to become somebody.’

Mark kept on referring back to previous motive theories, declaring that he was ‘rooted’ in Lennon who was no longer a ‘phony’:

‘My past was very rooted in Lennon. I believed in the things he was saying, and I believe he did too, by the way. I don’t think he’s phoney anymore.’

When you consider the ever-shifting and evolving Mark Chapman motive story laid out in this article, it is hardly surprising that Chapman came across in 1992 as confused and incoherent, even when he is obviously trying so hard to sell the ‘he did it for fame’ motive.

After spending five years in Mark Chapman’s cell, Jones probably anticipated all of this and as a man with a huge ego, he decided to talk to Larry King himself. Jones started big, upping the ante via equating Chapman’s motive to hurting the whole planet.

‘Some psychologists say he was killing his father but, I think, on a much more relevant level he was killing a part of all of us. He wanted to hurt the world.’

Incredibly, Jones decided to go yet one further, evoking the dread of a nuclear war:

‘Chapman told me at one point that he fantasised about getting his hands on nuclear devices and maybe blowing up a small city, injuring or killing thousands, if not millions, of people – and reasoned that, by killing someone that most of the people in the world identified with or had been touched by in one way or the other he could hurt us all, and he did.’

Chapman, the fame hungry killer according to DA Kim Hogrefe, never gave another media interview after 1992. Despite countless media requests, Chapman kept his silence for another 28 years. This silence was briefly broken in 2020, when Jones scored a very brief conversation with Mark for a Sky TV documentary. Sky were no doubt keen to get some new access beyond the old familiar recorded prison audio interviews. As usual, Chapman sounded rehearsed as he briefly told Jones on a mobile phone call that he killed John “for glory”, with Chapman then tellingly saying he must get off the call to check in with Gloria.

Despite all of the efforts by a multitude of people to evolve and morph Chapman’s motives over many decades, today, most people have settled on the ‘obsessive fan’ theory as a motive they are most comfortable with. It’s the simplest one to get a hold on, as celebrities being stalked by obsessed fans has definitely become a thing since December 1980. Chapman was a Todd Rundgren fan who knew next to nothing about the Beatles, so ‘obsessive fan’ doesn’t really cut it as a credible motive for Lennon’s assassination by Mark Chapman.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, some people still go with the ‘he wanted fame’ motive, virtuously declaring they will never say Chapman’s name because of this. I’m sure Kim Hogrefe would be proud of them. Catcher, Religion and Demons have all been put away in the memory hole box. They sometimes surface to confuse, but that probably suits the original instigators of these motives.

Interestingly, nobody ever mentions the incoherent motive Chapman actually gave on the night of the murder. He thought he was Holden Caulfield and a devil-like small part made him do it. That motive, like all the others on offer, simply doesn’t make any sense. What does make sense is that Chapman was programmed to think he was doing something he wasn’t actually doing. With Chapman’s problematic survival at the crime scene, all of the above motive carousel bullshit had to be concocted and managed.

Today most people sadly need a comfortable and simple motive in these kinds of shocking cases. Nothing too taxing on the brain.

He was a mad fan who wanted fame.

We won’t say his name.

Poor John.

Case closed.