Yesterday marked a sad milestone, the twenty fifth anniversary of the murder of John Lennon outside his Dakota apartment, which he shared with wife Yoko Ono in New York City, at the hands of crazed gunman Mark David Chapman. I would prefer actually to focus on Lennons legacy of music and activism. However, something needs to be addressed concerning the murder, which a good many have termed an assassination.
It was almost a sure thing that some would be shouting conspiracy, and sure enough, this happenned, with a variety of suspects being named. Sadly, but obviously, and sickeningly, Yoko was one of these named. Others included the Secret Service and/orFBI and/or CIA or some other branch of governemnt operating on behalf of the newly elected (though it must be pointed out, not then yet inaugurated) Reagan administration. Lennon it was suggested was jump starting his career, after a five year hiatus, and would have plenty to say about the direction his adopted country was beginning to take. Some even pointed the finger at the YMCA, a group with which Chapman had been affiliated.
Still, since Chapman is alive, and presumably still wants and hopes to be released one day on parole, one would imagine he would be more than conducive to offerring any information that might, along with a respectable show of remorse, grant him the parole he would naturally desire after twenty five years. Discounting the notion of brainwashing, I would suggest that this information would have been offerred up long ago or, dpending on the nature and identities of the conspirators, he would have been silenced long before given this opportunity.
No, Mark David Chapman is, in this case, I believe, the penultimate "lone gunman". Certainly he may have been inadverdantly influenced by certain factors that lead him on his trek to murder his one time idol, whom he now felt to have all along been a phoney, out for nothing more important, after all, than the money and fame so improtant to all artists.
The YMCA and his sudden attachment to them may have indeed been a factor, though an unwilling and unwitting one, as innocent perhaps of involvement as was Todd Rundgren, who had become Chapmans newest idol, and who in fact had been engaged in a running feud with Lennon, penning open letters which were read with bemused interest by a few, and seemingly ignored by Lennon himself.
It has been said that the reason the JFK assassination so readily and stubbornly lends itself to such a vast array of conspiracy theories is that the average person just can not bring themselves to accept that a person so important, so beloved by so many, so powerul on such a level, could find his life suddenly and senselessly ended by violence at the hands of a person who was, in the grand scheme of things, an insignificant gnat barely worthy of the name "man", if at all. There has to be another reason, a more complex explanation, they insist on some deep subconscous level. Life cannot be that random, that haphazard. Also, everybody loves a great mystery, to put it bluntly. The lone gunman theory is, in the final analysis, unsatisfactory on a variety of levels.
I disagree with this theory as it applies to the Kennedy assassination. There are too many mysterious circumstances, too many situations, which have not only never been answered, they have never when you get right down to it even been addressed.
However, as it pertains to the Lennon murder, this might well apply to those who still hold forth to the theory of some vast conspiracy to silence the former Beatle. In fact, I am sure of it. Barring some startling revelation or confession, therefore, I would hold firm to the belief in Mark David Chapman as the lone gunman. The only conspiracy he was involved in was the one he plotted with the voices in his head.
