The scene outside New York's spooky old Dakota apartment building on the evening of December 8, 1980, was as surreal as it was horrifying. John Lennon, probably the world's most famous rock star, lay semiconscious, hemorrhaging from four flat-tipped bullets blasted into his back. His wife Yoko O-No held his head in her arms and screamed (just like on her early albums).
A few yards away a pudgy young man stood eerily still, peering down into a paperback book. Moments earlier he had dropped into a military firing stance - legs spread for maximum balance, two hands gripping his .38 revolver to steady his aim - and blown away the very best Beatle. Now he leafed lazily through the pages of the one novel even the most chronically stoned and voided-out ninth grader will actually read, J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.
The Dakota doorman shouted at the shooter, Mark David Chapman, "Do you know what you've done?"
"I just shot John Lennon," Chapman replied, accurately enough.
It was a tragedy of Kerkegaardian pointlessness. There was only one apparent way to squeeze any sense from it; write it off as random violence by a "wacko."
"He walked past me and then I heard in my head, 'Do it, do it, do it,' over and over again, saying 'Do it, do it, do it,' like that," Chapman, preternaturally serene, recalled in a BBC documentary several years after going to prison. "I don't remember aiming. I must have done, but I don't remember drawing a bead or whatever you call it. And I just pulled the trigger steady five times."
Chapman described his feeling at the time of the shooting as "no emotion, no anger…dead silence in the brain."
His unnatural tone sounded all-too-familiar. British lawyer/journalist Fenton Bresler took it as a tip-off. Chapman was a brainwashed hit man carrying out someone else's contract.
"Mark David Chapman," writes Bresler, "is in many ways as much the victim of those who wanted to kill John Lennon as Lennon himself."
Prosecutors, as a loss for motive, opted for the cliché: Chapman did it for the attention- the troublesome American preoccupation with grabbing that elusive fifteen minutes of propels many a daily-newspaper-journalist-cum-pop-sociologist into raptures of sanctimony. But Arthur O'Connor, the detective who spent more time with Chapman immediately following the murder than anyone else, saw it another way.
"It is definitely illogical to say that Mark Committed the murder to make himself famous. He did not want to talk to the press from the very start….It's possible Mark could have been used by somebody. I saw him the night of the murder. I studied him intensely. He looked as if he could have been programmed."
O'Connor was speaking to Bresler, and publicly for the first time. Bresler's book Who Killed John Lennon? Offers the most cogent argument that Lennon's murder was not the work of yet another "lone nut."
Conspiracy theories abounded after the Lennon assassination, many rather cruelly fingering Yoko as the mastermind. Another focused on Paul who, by this line of reasoning, blamed Yoko for engineering his arrest in Japan on reefer charges. The Lennon conspiracy turns up on radio talk shows with some frequency, where hosts fend off callers with the "Why bother to kill that guy?" defense.
Only Bresler's thesis, that Chapman was a mind-controlled assassin manipulated by some right-wing element possibly connected to the newly elected (and not even inaugurated) Reagan apparatus of reaction, transcends the confines of pure speculation, extending into the realm of actual investigation.
Even so, Bresler's book a little too often substitutes rhetorical questions ("What does that steady repetition of a voice saying 'Do it, do it, do it,' over and over again in Mark's head sound like to you?") for evidentiary argument. We can forgive him for that failing. Bresler tracked the case for eight years, conducted unprecedented interviews, and extracted a ream of previously unreleased government documents. But unlike researchers into the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, he did not have volumes of evidence gathered by any official investigation, even a flawed one, to fall back on. The New York police had their man, the case was closed the very night of the murder - and, anyway, what political reason could possibly exist for gunning down the composer of "I Am the Walrus"?
In building his case, Bresler established some key points that put the lie to any "Who would want to kill an aging rock star?" brush-off.
Richard Nixon, his administration and other right-wing politicians (including ultraconservative ancient Senator Strom Thurmond, who personally memoed Attorney Gerneral John Mitcell on the matter) were fixated on what they saw as the Lennon problem. To them, the politically outspoken singer-songwriter was an insidious subversive of the worst kind, the famous and beloved kind.
J. Edgar Hoover shared their concerns. One page of Lennon's FBI file bears the handwritten, block-lettered, under lined words, ALL EXTREMISTS SHOULD BE CONSIDERED DANGEROUS.The government went all-out to deny Lennon his longed-for permanent U.S. residency, and more than that, to deport him altogether (that was the subject of Thurmond's memo).
Lennon's FBI file - at nearly three hundred pages as chubby as Hoover himself - reveals that he was under "constant surveillance." Nor did the G-men keep a particularly low profile around the ex-Beatle, apparently attempting to harass him into silence or at least drive him nuts, similar to the tactic they had used on Martin Luther King, Jr., a few short but eventful years earlier.
In late 1972, when the "surveillance" was at its peak, Lennon told humorist Paul Krassner, "Listen, if anything happens to Yoko and me, it was not an accident."
The FBI and the CIA tracked Lennon at least from his "Free John Sinclair" concert in 1969 until 1976 - even though by then Lennon had won his immigration battle and dropped out of not only political activism but public life altogether into what turned out to be a five-year period of seclusion. His apartment was watched, he was followed, his phone was tapped.
Placing a person under "constant surveillance" and ordering that person executed are admittedly two different things. Nevertheless, Bresler's point is that the government did not consider John Lennon a harmless rock 'n' roller whose awkward entrance into the world of political activism often carried a high cringe factor (as in his Montreal "bed-in").
He was viewed as a dangerous radical who needed to be stopped.
And in a way that official paranoia might have been justified, because as embarrassing as Lennon and Ono's political publicity stunts occasionally became, John Lennon was always capable of seizing the spotlight and speaking directly to millions of young people who venerated him.
With unfettered access to the media, his power was immense, at least potentially so, and recognized by more experienced radicals like Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, who linked themselves to Lennon, clinging to close that they made the rock star uncomfortable.
Lennon was killed just four years after the intense FBI/CIA surveillance ceased. In those intermittent years, Jimmy Carter was president - a Democrat who kept the two gestapo-ish agencies more or less in check.
But in December 1980, when John Lennon's first album in half a decade was high on the charts, Carter was a lame duck chief executive, having lost his reelection bid to Ronald Reagan. Reagan's campaign was managed by career secret agent William Casey, who under President Reagan became the CIA's most freewheeling chief since Allen Dulles. The new far-right administration would reassemble the intelligence services and grant them a cheerful carte blanche.
The forces that tried desperately to neutralize Lennon for at least seven years lost power in 1976. Lennon's government dossier ends in that year. In 1980, as those forces were preparing to retake control of the government, "dangerous extremist" John Lennon emerged from retirement. Within a few months he was murdered.
The paper trail that might support the conspiracy theory is a little thin, however. It doesn't extend much beyond the airline ticket found in Chapman's hotel room; a Hawaii-New York connection departing December 5. But Chapman had actually purchased a Hawaii-Chicago ticket to depart December 2, with no connecting flight. The ticket found after his arrest had apparently been altered. None of his friends knew that he traveled on to New York. They thought he went to Chicago for a three-day stay.
Bresler concludes that the Lennon assassination, which, as Chapman himself noted in a rare interview, "ended an era," bears similarities to another assassination that took place twelve years earlier: the murder of Robert F. Kennedy.
RFK's apparent lone killer, Sirhan Sirhan, and Chapman (coincidentally?) shared a defense psychiatrist. But while Dr. Bernard Diamond couldn't skirt the obvious fact that Sirhan was under hypnosis (Diamond wrote it off as self-hypnosis), he labeled Chapman a "paranoid schizophrenic."
The court disagreed. Chapman even now has never had more than routine psychiatric care since entering his guilty plea. He was not sent to a mental hospital, but to Attica State Prison. He was judged legally "rational."
Bresler clears up a few widely disseminated misconceptions about Mark David Chapman:
While any mention of his name is now accompanied by the phrase "deranged fan," Chapman was anything but. He was no more or less ardent a Beatles/Lennon fan than anyone of his generation. His real rock hero was Todd Rundgren, a cynical studio craftsman who could not be further from Lennon in artistic sensibility.Notwithstanding Chapman's announcement months after the murder that he "killed Lennon to gain prominence to promote the reading of The Catcher in the Rye," Chapman never exhibited strong feelings about the novel until shortly before the shooting. (Catcher, Bresler muses, may have been used as a device to trigger Chapman's "programming.")
After the murder, major media ran bizarre stories of Chapman's supposed growing identification with John Lennon - at one point he even "re-baptized" himself as Lennon, according to Newsweek. These stories were all quite fascinating, but there was no evidence to back any of them up. (It is true that when Chapman quit his last job he signed out as "John Lennon," then crossed the name out, but Bresler interprets this, reasonably, as Chapman saying, "John Lennon, I am going to kill you," rather than "John Lennon, I am you."
Chapman was not a "loner." He was for most of his life a normally social individual and a camp counselor who had a special rapport with kids.
Bresler also notes that when Chapman signed up for a YMCA overseas program, he selected an odd destination: Beirut - a perfect place, says Bresler, for Chapman, a once gentle soul, to be "blooded," that is, desensitized to violence.
A final note to the mystery of Mark David Chapman: As he was ready to go to trial and his diligent public defender was winding up six months spent assembling Chapman's defense, the accused killer suddenly decided to change his plea to guilty. His lawyer was perplexed and more than a little perturbed. But Chapman was determined. He said he was acting on instructions from a "small male voice" that spoke to him in his cell.
Chapman interpreted it as the voice of God.
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Jim Morrison's Death
In all likelihood, rock and roll legend Jim Morrison is buried in Paris's Pere-Lachaise cemetery. That fact, of course, hasn't inhibited numerous "sightings" of the Doors' lead singer since his would-be death in 1971. Chalk it up, if you will, to the rock icon's prodigious mythology - like Dead Elvis's perpetual loitering or the Virgin Mary's fondness for making cameo appearances on tortillas.
Still, the circumstances of Morrison's death were quite mysterious and confusing. It's not surprising that a crop of postmortem rumors sprang up insinuating that by the good graces of assorted conspiracies - from the political to the supernatural - the Lizard King lives. Indeed, the official version of Morrison's death is in some respects even less believable than the surreal myths.
Officially, Morrison died at about 5 a.m. on July 3, 1971, of a heart attacks, a rather improbable fate for a twenty-seven-year-old man - although somewhat less so for a rock star prematurely weathered by a decade of gut-flushing bacchanalia. As his longtime girlfriend, Pamela Courson, told the story, Morrison decided to take a bath in the Parisian flat one evening. Courson went to bed and the next morning discovered Morrison's corpse in the tub.
Bizarre rumors began to surface almost immediately, undoubtedly nursed along by Courson's puzzling attempts to screw a lid on the news. Courson initially told reporters that Morrison was "not dead but very tired and resting in a hospital." Nonetheless, word began to wend through Paris that Morrison had died of a heroin overdose in the sleazy underground nightclub, Rock 'n' Roll Circus. (Another popular rumor had it that Morrison OD'd on cocaine, a drug that he was known to binge on.) Rumor had it that Morrison was hustled home and deposited in the bathtub in an attempted revival. Of course, there were no witnesses.
Although Courson was claiming that Morrison was still alive days after his demise, in fact, a Parisian doctor had already signed the death certificate, listing the deceased as "James Morrison, Poet." The coffin was sealed before either the American Embassy or Morrison's family had been notified. No autopsy was performed. Only a full six days later, after Morrison's quiet burial at Pere-Lachaise, did Doors manager Bill Siddons hold a press conference announcing the news that the "Young Lion" had died of a heart attack brought on by a blood clot and possible a lung infection.
The Los Angeles Times stirred doubts when it headlined a story, WHY MORRISON DEATH NEWS DELAY? Inevitably, there was talk of a cover up. After all, only Courson, a couple of French medical examiners, and unknown police officers had actually seen Morrison's corpse. Not even Siddons (who jetted to Paris after Courson denied Morrison's death over the phone and then broke down crying) thought to open the casket when he arrived at the flat.
There were other improbable details in the official scenario, which subsequently fueled bizarre lore: How had an American rock star like Morrison finagled his way into Pere-Lachaise, the historic French cemetery were luminaries like Balzac, Chopin, Moliere, and Oscar Wilde are entombed? For some unexplained - ergo, suspicious - reason, the headstone didn't appear for several months, and the grave remained unmarked. When Doors drummer John Densmore later visited the cemetery, he announced, "…the grave is too short!"
In addition to the unsubstantiated theory of the nightclub heroin OD, which was favored by Parisians, an assortment of alternate scenarios began to circulate.
One political conspiracy theory had it that Morrison was assassinated in a plot masterminded by those crew-cut reactionaries at the FBI. In a scheme to snuff the radical New Left and hippie movements, J. Edgar Hoover's boys had iced not only Morrison, whose popularity, antiauthoritarian bent, and native smarts made him a threat to the American Way, but Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, who had "allegedly" died of drug ODs earlier. (The theory was docu-dramatized in the low-rent film, Down on Us, later retitled Beyond the Doors.)
It wasn't as farfetched a scenario as it now seems, given the government's very real plots to undermine the New Left and the FBI's attempts to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr. (not to mention troubling government links to King's assassination). And after Morrison's infamous Miami arrest (for allegedly waving his wand onstage) the FBI did launch an investigation into his past. Of course, aside from a total lack of evidence, the theory just doesn't gel because Morrison refused to rent himself to any political causes. So why would "the man" hassle with a political hit?
The occult theories about Morrison's death sprout from his well-known dabbling in the esoteric arts (he was "married" in a Wiccan ceremony and believed that an Indian spirit inhabited his body). One had it that he died when someone plucked his eyes out with a knife to "free his soul." Another supernatural theory proposed that a jilted mistress in New York killed Morrison via transatlantic witchcraft. Some chose to think that Jim's spirit had sloughed off its mortal coil (as Courson claimed he had often done during trances), but his time canceled the return trip.
The most popular theories have it that Morrison, the martyred artist in a Jesus Christ, Superstar sense, somehow defied death, either metaphysically or literally. Morrison gets out alive!
As James Riordan and Jerry Prochnicky wrote in their Morrison biography, Break On Through, his "bizarre lifestyle inspired such thinking." Morrison's notorious disappearances had sparked death rumors before, and the confusion surrounding his apparently authentic death only egged on speculation. He had often talked about scrapping the burdens of super-celebrity by faking his own death and vanishing into the heart of Africa or some other suitably mysterious place. He told intimates that he would use the nom de guerre Mr. Mojo Risin' (the famous anagram of Jim Morrison in the song, "L.A. Woman") to contact them after he had "split to Africa." And Morrison was fascinated with conspiratorial scenarios that had the Disciples stealing the body of Christ from the crypt in what he jokingly called "the Easter Heist."
Not surprisingly, then, the sightings began soon after his "death," at first in Paris, and then in Los Angeles, where a black-leather-bedecked Morrison reportedly hung out in underground gay nightclubs. A Bank of America employee in San Francisco claimed to be handling the account of someone calling himself and resembling Jim Morrison, although the clerk, later contacted by journalists, admitted he wasn't certain it was the Doors singer. In 1974, the rumor mill shifted into overdrive when Capitol Records released an album called Phantom's Divine Comedy, with a band identified as drummer X, Bassist Y, and keyboardist Z - and with a lead singer who sounded eerily like Morrison. (A recent account has it that the Morrison sound-alike was actually proto-punk rocker Iggy Pop.)
One legend, described in Break on Through, had it that "at an obscure radio station in the Midwest Jim supposedly showed up in the dead of the night and did a lengthy interview that explained it all." Of course, after the interview the mystery dude vanished again, and "no recordings of the interview exist."
Other rumors placed Morrison in Louisiana, where he was said to be living a secret life. In what looks like a connection to the Bank of America sightings, the incognito Morrison purportedly wrote and published a 1975 book called The Bank of America of Louisiana, under the auspices of the Zeppelin Publishing Company. The Book's disclaimer, which states that names in this fiction "based on fact" had to be changed or "I would find myself back in the courts," is signed "Jim Morrison." The final line in the book is cryptically hoaky, just as we'd expect from an immortal sixties rocker: "B of A & Company, USA…where monkey business is big business."
But these sorts of rumors were inspiring, at least to a group of fans who, armed with Morrison's dental records, attempted to exhume the peregrinating corpse's casket - without success. Eventually, though, even Doors keyboardist May Manzarek was moved to remark, "If there's one guy who would have been capable of staging his own death - getting a phony death certificate or paying off some French doctor… and putting a hundred and fifty pounds of sand into a coffin and splitting to some point on this planet - Africa, who knows where - Jim Morrison would have been the guy to pull it off."
The speculation only gets funkier and, or course, foggier.
Thanks to the fact that Morrison's father, Steven Morrison, had been an admiral in the U.S. Navy, and was therefore "privy to intelligence and counterintelligence information," theories of an espionage role in Jim's death inevitably sprouted. According to conspiratologist Thomas Lyttle, a Scandinavian magazine published an article "detailing French intelligence efforts to assassinate Jim Morrison in Paris."
In his mondo Morrison essay in the anthology, Secret and Suppressed, not only does Lyttle fuse the espionage and spooky mystical theories, he mounts that double-header to the Louisiana Doppelganger, breeding a full-tilt conspiracy Cerberus.
Lyttle begins with the theory that crass commercial interests intervened in Morrison's spiritual transmigration (just as record execs compromised his earthly artistry). How Lyttle gets from A to B to C is a bit confusing, but boiled down to basics: he contends that Morrison dabbled in voodoo/voudon mysticism, which holds that the soul or aura needs a few months' quality time in which to successfully split to the beyond. Voodoo high priests, according to this tradition, have been known to intercept astral-bound souls, collecting their prize in a clay jar called a canari. This raises the question: Was Morrison's aura "bought and sold and then collected on that fateful day in Paris when he 'died"?"
According to Lyttle, the canari that captured Morrison's elemental identity was none other than Zeppelin Publishing Company, the same Louisiana outfit behind the aforementioned Jim Morrison/B or A book. (Lyttle states, but doesn't exactly prove, that the original Jim Morrison founded the Zpeelein organization himself, which seems to suggest that Morrison 1 approved the sale of his soul.) and the "high priest"? again, according to Lyttle it was the mysterious proprietor of "B of A Company," who "owns an active passport and Ids under the name of James Douglas Morrison and claims to actually be the not-so-dead rock star!"
What this means is that the should of Morrison 1 possesses the physical body of the mysterious Morrison 2, to whom Lyttle assigns the shorthand, JM2. And apparently JM2 was into more than just sex, drugs, and morose poetry. According to Lyttle, JM2 "Claimed to be operating as an intelligence agent for a number of domestic and international groups including the CIA, NSA, Interpol, Swedish Intelligence, and others." Lyttle reports that he has seen documents, presumably provided by JM2, purporting to chronicle JM2's CIA work and "rogue financial activities with the Bank of America" on behalf of intelligence agencies, including "experiments to destabilize foreign currencies." Lyttle warns that he can't authenticate these papers, "but everything looked extremely official and very elaborte," he reassures.
Appropriately so, for JM2's plot is wonderfully elaborate. As Lyttle reports, JM2 has claimed publicly that there are "numerous" Morrison doubles doing yeoman's work in an obscure espionage cabal involving CIA sociological experiments. What's more, all the James Douglas Morrisons "knew one another and met from time to time to work it all out."
Whew. It makes you wonder whether that "Paul McCartney is Dead" hoax was in fact orchestrated by James Bond's archnemesis, Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
JM2's astral projections notwithstanding, a more mundane explanation for the suspicious secrecy surrounding the original Morrison's death emerged in the 1991 biography Break on Through. Although Pamela Courson took her secret to the grave in 1974 after overdosing on heroin, authors Riordan nd Prochnicky interviewed close friends to whom she had confided.
They reported that a despondent Morrison found Courson's heroin stash and overdosed - perhaps snorting it, for he was afraid of needles - in the Parisian flat. The next morning Courson discovered the corpse, and with the help of a close friend, attempted to prevent the sort of media circus that paraded around the drug-related deaths of Hendrix and Joplin. Somehow, Courson and company managed to persuade a French doctor to certify the death as a heart attack, thereby precluding an official autopsy. Meanwhile, they inveigled permission to lay Morrison to rest quietly in Pere-Lachaise, days before informing the world, hardly knowing that they'd also laid the foundation for Morrison's mythological resurrection.
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The True Death of Jimi Henrix
Hippie, a word that strikes fear in the hearts of those whose hearts are black, namely every American politician. In the 1960s it seemed that every young person was for love and peace, and against violence, war and the government. With all the LSD and marijuana no one had a care in the world. it was a time when everyone was free, and many people were doing something no one thought was possible; escaping the system.
It was at this point that the government knew it was time to step it. Time to end all this 'insanity.' America was losing it's slaves fast and so the best thing to do was get to the source. Who was the source? Anyone preaching love and peace who had a lot of followers. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and eventually John Lennon.
Considering that next month is the 40th year anniversary of the Woodstock festival, I decided to post a few articles about the death of the greatest hippies who ever lived... and then died, and how they really died.
Starting off with Jimi Hendrix, a man who supposedly died of LSD O.D.
The Real Death of Jimi HendrixHendrix’s death was most likely the result of an FBI-sponsored conspiracy which involved groupie-girlfriend Monika Dannemann, manager Michael Jeffrey, and record producer Alan Douglas.... Michael Jeffrey reportedly died in a plane crash on his way to Spain in 1973, about three years after Hendrix’s death. Monika Dannemann reportedly committed suicide on April 5, 1996, about a year after Phillip Harvey’s damning affidavit surfaced showing her as a prime suspect in Hendrix’s murder; Chas Chandler also died in 1996. Devon Wilson reportedly died under mysterious circumstances at the Chelsea Hotel in New York in 1971.51 Contrary to popular belief, Hendrix’s death was not heroin-related at all. He did not die from "inhalation of vomit due to barbiturate intoxication" as London coroner Gavin Thurston (deceased) wrote on the inquest report. Jimi Hendrix drowned in red wine. This is not wild speculation, it was disclosed by Dr. John Bannister—the physician who worked on Hendrix at the St Mary Abbot's Hospital—in an interview on December 18, 1993; later on September 10, 1995. If Hendrix was drowned in red wine, he must have been murdered. This leaves two possible scenarios. He was either strapped down, and red wine was poured down his throat until he drowned, or he was given a barbiturate which put him in a drug-induced coma, and wine was poured down his throat until he strangled, because he was unable to cough. In either scenario, he drowned from red wine and merely regurgitated as a final stage of drowning. Whether Jimi Hendrix was murdered or not is no longer a topic of serious debate. The question to ask about his death should be the same one asked by the Warren Commission regarding President Kennedy’s assassination. Was he killed by a lone nut or was it a governmental conspiracy? In both cases, the alleged lone nuts (Oswald and Dannemann) ended up dying unnatural deaths.
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