The Last Day in the Life: The Assassination of John Lennon

Article by Eddie Watson. Edited and researched by Rob Russell.

‘John Lennon was not just a celebrity, he was something more important than that’ – CBS Evening Special (09/12/1980) 

At around 10:50 pm on 8 December 1980, John Lennon was shot just outside his apartment at the Dakota in New York City. The gunman shouted his name, Lennon turned, and as he tried to flee he was shot twice in the back and twice in the left shoulder. As he stumbled up the steps towards the reception area, bleeding profusely, he stammered “I’m shot, I’m shot”. The cultural icon that was larger than life was pronounced dead on arrival by the time he reached Roosevelt hospital.

The untimely death of one of the most influential people in the twentieth century resonated around the world, as millions held a ten minute silence on 14 December, including every radio station in New York City. Crowds chanted Lennon’s songs outside the Dakota in tribute, before over 225,000 people reconvened in Central Park. In his home town of Liverpool, around thirty thousand gathered, and three Beatles fans even committed suicide as a result of their grief. A memorial entitled ‘Strawberry Fields’ was established in 1985 in Central Park and Liverpool airport was renamed in honour of John Lennon, with the tagline ‘above us only sky’. The mourning of Lennon was on a scale comparable to a world leader, as the former Beatle encompassed the vast social and cultural change of the 1960s, both in his music and as a public figure. Amidst the grief, people rediscovered what John Lennon and the Beatles meant to them on a personal level. The shock demonstrated the importance of popular music to people’s lives in the twentieth century. 

There is a tragic irony entwined with his murder. After the Beatles split in 1970, Lennon moved with his wife Yoko Ono to New York City to escape the ubiquitous fanaticism he faced in Britain, claiming he could walk down the street and go into a restaurant without being constantly hassled. With his political activism – most notably his criticism of the Vietnam War – he became a figure of peaceful rebellion, prompting the Nixon administration into several failed attempts at deporting him. Having taken a break from the music industry after the birth of his son Sean in 1975, Lennon re-emerged on the music scene with a new album ‘Double Fantasy’ in 1980. It was this album that Lennon famously signed for his killer, Mark David Chapman, merely hours before his death. Lennon had immigrated to the US to find and spread peace, but was killed by the violence he protested against and the obsessive fanaticism he had tried to escape. 

Chapman claimed he had planned to kill John Lennon months beforehand. Inspired by the protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye, he was angered by Lennon’s hypocrisy, labelling him a ‘phoney’. Lennon’s ‘imagine no possessions’ lyric and the ‘bigger than Jesus’ comment in 1966 particularly angered him, after initially being a fan of the Beatles. In his own words, Chapman believed, “the child and the adult conspired together to kill the phoney…the child was praying to the devil and the adult was praying to the lord”. Chapman underwent dozens of psychiatric assessments after the murder, speaking of his anger towards his father, who he said used to hit his mother, and reaffirming how he identified with Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. 

As with other unexpected violent deaths, the murder evoked a profound examination of the broader social and cultural context of the incident and society itself. Lennon was idolised by millions and the twisted nature of his killer’s obsession highlighted the sinister side of celebrity culture. Indeed, Mark David Chapman was envious of Lennon’s fame, and by assassinating him the killer went from being a nobody to a somebody, much to the despair of Beatles fans worldwide. As the news coverage plastered his face over television screens, and persistent interviews and documentaries focused on his dark nature, they in turn perpetuated the idea that one way to become a renowned celebrity, albeit infamous, was by murdering a cultural icon. Keeping murderers as anonymous as possible in the media would be a step towards removing the symbolic heroism these unstable people aspire to – although casting them off as anonymous lunatics would make Foucault have a field day. If the media had not have put so much emphasis on Mark David Chapman’s back story, trying to get interviews with him at every opportunity, he may not have even been mentioned in this article.

Gun crime was also discussed in popular discourse, as the British press were keen to emphasise the ease at which guns could be bought and transported via air travel. In the US, CBS reported that Yoko Ono’s brother had urged her to move back to Japan, where the gun rate was two-hundred times less. CBS went on to report an astonishing piece of political point scoring, where President Carter was ‘saddened’ and ‘distressed by the senseless manner’ of the murder, while President-elect Reagan called it ‘a great tragedy’ but reaffirmed his opposition to gun control legislation. Even though it was discussed, the murder did not bring about any real change regarding the accessibility of guns in the US. 

Rarely does one artist have such an influence over the society they live in. Although the Beatles were not wholly responsible for the vast social and cultural change of the period, they epitomised the mythical ethos of the time. As the Daily Mirror described in a commemorative issue on the 10 December 1980, they were renowned as ‘the most astonishing force ever unleashed on an unsuspecting generation’. John Lennon was a key part of ‘Beatle mania’ and his political activism combined with the influence he had on popular culture meant that millions worldwide were stricken with grief after his sudden death. In their mourning, people explored what John Lennon and the Beatles meant to them personally. The shock reverberated worldwide, yet it was his music that he was and still is most famous for, not the fact that he was assassinated. 

• Since the completion of his twenty year prison sentence, Mark David Chapman has been denied parole on seven occasions. 

• Part of central park near where Lennon was assassinated has since been renamed Strawberry Fields in honour of the former Beatle. 

• The Beatles, the band from which Lennon drew his fame had a record fifteen number one albums in the United Kingdom.

← Back to Volume 4

← Back to Issue 2