by Ray Black
Chapman had been loaned $5,000 by his father-in-law and decided to live it up a little before carrying out his plan. He decided to check into the Waldorf Hotel and treated himself to a slap up meal. He was well aware that John lived in the Dakota apartment building across from Central Park, and Chapman spent much of the day walking round it and finding out from the doorman exactly which floor the Lennons lived on.
Chapman had forgotten to buy bullets in Honolulu and, not aware that New York’s laws forbade the sale of them, he had to think of an alternative plan. He called a man called Dana Reeves, who was a sheriff’s deputy in Georgia and told him that he wanted to visit some old friends. Reeves invited Chapman to stay in his apartment and he caught the first available flight to Atlanta. His story to Reeves was that he had bought the gun for personal protection while he was staying in New York, but he needed some bullets. Reeves was only too pleased to help and gave him five hollow-point cartridges. Despite the ban on military use, hollow-point bullets were one of the most common types of civilian and police ammunition, due largely to the reduced risk of bystanders being hit as they are the kind that expand as they pass through their target.
By November 10, Chapman was back in New York. That night he decided to go and see a movie called Ordinary People, in which Timothy Hutton played a suicidal youth trying to come to terms with his dysfunctional family. When he left the cinema, Chapman made a phone call to his wife in which he said, ‘I’m coming home, I won a great victory. Your love has saved me.’ Apparently, all of a sudden his demons were gone – but not for long. Back home he started behaving strangely and his wife, Gloria, was alarmed when he told her he was going back to New York. When she tried to stop him he told her that everything was fine and that he was going to find a job.
Chapman arrived in New York on Saturday, December 6 and immediately started to get into his character – the man chosen to assassinate John Lennon. He told a taxi driver that he was a recording engineer who had just come from a secret session with John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The taxi driver listened intently, not aware that it was all a pack of lies.
The following day Chapman spent many hours waiting outside the Dakota apartment building, then realising he was hungry, took a taxi back to the Sheraton Hotel, where he had booked in the previous day. Then he remembered he had forgotten to bring his copy of The Catcher in the Rye to New York and went off to a local bookshop to purchase the book.
On Monday, December 8, when Chapman woke he knew that this was to be the day. He dressed, picked up his copy of the Double Fantasy album, his copy of The Catcher in the Rye and one other item, the pistol with a piece of cardboard over it to conceal the outline of it in his pocket.
Outside the Dakota building, Chapman leaned against the railings and started to read his book. He was so engrossed that he didn’t notice John Lennon getting out of a taxi and walk into the building. In the afternoon, Chapman returned to the Dakota having had lunch with a woman called Jude Stein, who told him that she was a huge fan of John Lennon and that she had even managed to talk to him and his family on several occasions.
Back outside the Dakota, Jude and Chapman stood watching the front door when John’s five-year-old son, Sean, came out with his nanny. Jude introduced Chapman to Sean and Chapman shook hands with the young boy.
Later the same afternoon John came out of the building and Chapman, dumbstruck, held out his copy of Double Fantasy and a pen. John smiled and wrote ‘John Lennon, 1980’ on the cover.
Just a few hours later Chapman killed the man with whom he was obsessed. When the doorman pointed Chapman out to the police, he didn’t attempt to run away. He put his hands in the air and said, ‘Don’t hurt me’. The police put him in handcuffs and bundled him into the back of the squad car. ‘I’m sorry I gave you guys all this trouble,’ he said time and time again.
During his trial, the forty-five-year-old Chapman gave details of his mental state leading up to the shooting of John Lennon. He told the court that he had an overwhelming desire to kill Lennon after seeing photos of the pop icon standing in front his apartment buidling in a book called One Day at a Time. He also said that he had a list of other celebrities as a backup list in case he wasn’t able to get to the legendary former Beatle. He spoke of an obsession, claiming that he had heard voices telling him to ‘just do it’.
Chapman was sentenced to life in Attica prison, and the first few years behind bars were hard. Threats to his life were such a problem that the windows to his room at Bellevue Hospital had to be painted black in case snipers were waiting outside. He underwent dozens of tests and for many years experienced fits of rage which carried on into the 1990s.
The parole hearing in 2004, his third, brought a flood of protests. Yoko Ono said Chapman still posed a threat to her and her family, and a petition calling for him to live out his life in prison had 2,000 signatures.
In October 2006, the parole board held a sixteen-minute hearing and concluded that they remained ‘concerned about the bizarre nature of his premeditated and violent crime . . . While the panel notes your satisfactory institutional adjustment, due to the extremely violent nature of the offence your release would not be in the best interest of the community’ or his own personal safety.
On December 8, 2006, the twenty-sixth anniversary of Lennon’s death, Yoko Ono published a one-page advertisement in several newspapers, saying that, while December 8 should be a ‘day of forgiveness’, she had not yet forgiven Chapman and wasn’t sure if she was ready to yet.
Mark David Chapman is still a model prisoner in Attica Correctional Institution, seemingly free of his previous demons. For his own safety he has to remain in solitary confinement and as a New Yorker wrote, ‘If he is set free, something will happen to him’.
Chapman’s next parole hearing is scheduled for October 2008, but having killed one of the most popular singer/songwriters of our time, prison is most definitely the safest place for this assassin.
Jill Dando
Jill Dando was a much loved and admired household name at the time of her murder in April 1999. The thirty-seven-year-old was at the pinnacle of her broadcasting career. An attractive and popular TV presenter for the BBC, she had worked in television for fifteen years, fronting prime-time programmes such as Holiday. Most prominently, she presented BBC1’s Crimewatch with Nick Ross: a monthly magazine show that explores the nation’s unsolved crimes and appeals for witnesses and information, often leading to the conviction of dangerous criminals. In the period immediately following her death it was generally supposed that Jill had been targeted by one of these violent criminals, perhaps somebody connected with organised crime, who was hell-bent on killing her as revenge for their conviction. It is true that Jill took none of the precautions one might expect of someone working in such a field, especially a high-profile television personality who had received threatening letters and phone calls in the year leading up to her death. She very publicly opposed the criminal underworld, had no minders of any kind, and made no special secret of her home address.
At first the murder seemed to carry the hallmarks of an assassination by a hitman. Indeed, the murder site showed none of the mess you might expect to find at the scene of a crazed-stalker attack. It was a fairly clean kill – if such a thing really exists – in that there were no eyewitnesses to the crime, even though it happened in broad daylight, no gunshot was heard by people in the vicinity, and there was no ‘funny business’ involved – that is to say no obvious sexual motive, or lust for violence evident at the crime scene.
On the morning of Monday, April 26, 1999, Jill left the house of her fiancé, gynaecologist Alan Farthing, where she had stayed the night and climbed into her blue BMW convertible. She drove towards her own home in Gowan Avenue, Fulham, stopping briefly at a couple of electrical stores and a fish market to pick up supplies. At approximately 11.30 that morning, a neighbour of Jill’s, Mr Hughes, was alerted to the sound of a woman’s screams coming from outside, and he ran to investigate. He found
Jill slumped and bleeding in her doorway, as if crouched looking for keys. She had been shot once in the head at close range. The bullet had entered behind her left ear and exited behind her right, damaging the bottom of the front door to the right of the body. Hughes maintains he saw a well-dressed man standing outside another neighbour’s house as he went to investigate, but this man disappeared during the panic that ensued. Jill was rushed by ambulance to Charing Cross hospital, but was declared dead later that day. Jill’s friend and colleague, Jenny Bond, announced the news of Jill’s death live on air a few minutes later and the nation went into a state of shock.
The investigation, named ‘Operation Oxborough’, began without delay. The crime scene was quickly cordoned off for forensic examination, and a team of forensic experts descended on Gowan Avenue. Jill’s front garden yielded one single Remington brand cartridge from a short version 9 mm semi-automatic Browning pistol – a rare gun, and one similar to those used by drug dealers and professional killers. It was fired by someone with a knowledge of firearms, since the cartridge had been tampered with to remove some of the powder, thus deadening the sound of the shot. This was not the action of an opportunist, nor that of an unskilled amateur.
It was thought possible at the time that Jill’s killing was meant as retribution for a UK/US-led air attack on a Serbian TV station that had, according to members of the Serbian military, killed a number of Serbian journalists and staff. Dando had just made a campaign film to raise money for Kosovar refugees, so this theory made sense. She had apparently reported receiving a threatening letter from a Serb source, criticising her appearance in the film a mere fortnight before the shooting. The police investigated the lead, but the trail led nowhere. It is, however, interesting to note that, in the weeks immediately following Jill’s murder, Channel 4 stepped up security for their broadcast journalists, and other TV personalities John Humphreys and Alan Yentob also received Serbian threats.
Police soon ruled out the likelihood of a contract killing. It may have been a clean kill, but its neatness was really down to chance rather than meticulous planning. The killer came to Dando’s own home, one she rarely visited because she spent most of her time at her fiancé’s house in another part of London. This means the killer had either followed her there or come across her by chance. He had not allowed for a place to hide in the minutes immediately following the murder, there was no getaway vehicle and he had let the muzzle of the gun make contact with the victim’s head, leaving a distinct imprint of the gun on her skin near to the entrance wound. This was not considered by police to be the actions of a hitman, and on May 25, a senior Scotland Yard source declared that an obsessive fan or a figure from Jill’s private life was most likely responsible for her murder. The investigation changed direction.
Jill called herself ‘Blando’ Dando – because she was basically an attractive but uninteresting, conventional, girl-next-door type. Her televisual persona was not an elaborate creation, but a reflection of the safe, ‘average’ and homely person she really was. Perhaps it was these very qualities that attracted the sinister attentions of an obsessive killer. Her appearance also made her a target for unhinged elements of society. She bore a striking resemblance to the late Princess Diana, something which was often commented on in the media. Was it possible that a Diana fanatic had transferred his obsession to Jill following the princesses’s own premature death? Some thought this was a distinct possibility. Having taken over 1,000 statements without anything concrete coming to light the police retraced their enquiries until one person emerged as their prime suspect.
Barry George lived half a mile away from the scene of the murder and was undoubtedly an oddball. George grew up in an unhappy home on a deprived London housing estate. His childhood was a difficult one, he was always restless, always striving for a more glamorous life which was completely out of reach – an existence similar to those he saw on television. As an adult he renamed himself Barry Bulsara after the Queen frontman Freddy Mercury’s birth name, and sometimes claimed to be the singer’s cousin. He also occasionally posed as Gary Glitter, and called himself Paul Gadd – the singer’s real name. He was an obsessive compulsive who had developed fixations on the military, the world of celebrity and guns. He was also known to have followed countless women, sometimes as far as their front doors, and was once caught by police outside Kensington Palace wearing a balaclava and carrying a length of rope and a knife, along with a self-written poem to Prince Charles. In short, Barry George was most certainly a couple of b-sides short of a full back-catalogue, and he had made it known to police on a number of occasions. This was enough to put him squarely in the frame for murder.
George had been reported as behaving strangely in the crowd behind the police cordon immediately following the discovery of Dando’s body. Witnesses had said that, in hindsight, George had mentioned details about the murder that hadn’t yet been divulged by police to the public in their campaign to unravel the case. When the police investigated George in more depth they discovered a person whose profile made him a very likely candidate for the crime. The only employment he had ever had was as a messenger for the BBC for four months in 1977 and he had nurtured a particular interest in the corporation and its employees for many years. George’s enduring obsession with celebrities of all kinds, meant he had compiled dossiers on the individuals who aroused his interest – details of their appearance, addresses, employment, etc. were all listed. Princess Diana’s name was among these, but Jill Dando’s was not. Although George was a hoarder and collected newspapers for a number of years, only eight articles bearing any relation to Jill Dando were found in his flat. Jill had appeared on the cover of the Radio Times shortly before the killing, and she had recently become engaged. There were no copies of the Radio Times or articles pertaining to her engagement found at Barry George’s flat. Regardless of these facts and, despite having been placed on a low priority list of suspects during the initial investigation, Barry George was eventually arrested and charged with Jill Dando’s murder.
George was known to have been involved with gun clubs and the Territorial Army, he also owned a couple of air rifles and a number of gun magazines – but all this dated back to the 1980s. There was no evidence found in Barry’s flat that his obsession with firearms had developed, or even continued into the 1990s. He was dismissed from the TA after failing basic training, and rejected by the gun club because he was unable to provide a suitable character reference. These are not the actions of a ballistics expert. The only forensic evidence presented at George’s trial was that of firearms discharge residue found in the pocket of one of George’s jackets. These were proven to contain the same elements as those found at the murder scene. What this means is that both compounds contained the same ingredients, but firework residue could also produce the same result.
In addition to this, it has been argued that Barry George’s obsessions were exclusive. He could only be interested in one thing at a time, and when something, or someone, aroused his interest he was demonstrative and vocal about it – as with his interest in Freddy Mercury. Of George’s few friends, those interviewed could not name a single incident whereby George had mentioned, or made particular reference to, Jill Dando – the woman whose life he is supposed to have been so obsessed with, that he went out and shot her dead in broad daylight. There are many who believe Barry George’s conviction for the murder represents a huge travesty of justice, and it is not difficult to see why. But if Barry George didn’t do it – who did?
The Assassination of Olof Palme
The murder of the Swedish prime minister in 1986 was one of the strangest murder cases of modern times. Often in such cases a prime suspect is selected from a short list of suspects, and put on trial and convicted. It may later emerge that the wrong person was put on trial, or that more than one person was involved and the accomplices got away; often there is a sense that justice was not entirely done, and questions remain, as they still do over both of the Kennedy assassinations. W
hat is extraordinary about this case is that there was never at any point a clear and obvious suspect, and that nobody was ever tried and convicted. It is a totally unsolved crime.
Sven Olof Palme was born in 1927 and served as prime minister of Sweden from 1969 to 1976 and again from 1982 until his assassination in 1986. The murder of Olof Palme was the first of its kind in modern Swedish history and had an impact in Scandinavia similar to that of JFK in the United States. Politically he was a Social Democrat. During his time at university, Palme became involved in student politics, working with the Swedish National Union of Students. Palme attributed his becoming a socialist to three experiences: a debate on taxes which he attended in 1947, observation of the wide division between the social classes in America in the 1940s, and seeing for himself in 1953 the consequences of colonialism and imperialism in Asia.
He was elected as an MP in 1958 and he held several cabinet posts from 1963 onwards. In 1967 he became Minister of Education, and the following year he was the target of fierce criticism from left-wing students protesting against the government’s plans for university reform. When the party leader Tage Erlander stepped down in 1969, Palme was elected as his successor by the Social Democratic party congress; he also succeeded Erlander as prime minister.
Olof Palme’s ten years as Prime Minister and his untimely death made him one of the best known Swedish politicians of the twentieth century. His protégé and political ally, Bernt Carlsson, was the UN Commissioner for Namibia in July 1987, and he also suffered an untimely death. Carlsson died in the Pan Am air crash on December 21, 1988, on his way to the signing ceremony in New York, in which South Africa finally granted independence to Namibia.
Palme led a generation of Swedish Social Democrats who stood much further to the left than their predecessors. Because of this he became a controversial political figure on the international scene. He was brave enough to condemn the United States for its participation in the Vietnam War. He campaigned against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. He criticised the Franco regime in Spain. He condemned apartheid and supported economic sanctions against South Africa. He supported the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Olof Palme therefore made many enemies abroad as well as friends. It may be that making these powerful enemies sowed the seeds of his assassination.