0:01

Why media productions.

0:05

Remember this is just a football

0:07

game. Come out of who wins, aw loses?

0:10

An unspeakable tragedy. John

0:12

Lennon, shot twice in the back,

0:15

rushed the Roseveld hospital, dead

0:18

on arrival. The

0:21

death of a man who sang and played

0:23

the guitar overshadows the news from

0:25

Poland around in Washington tonight. John

0:28

Lennon is dead.

0:30

Don't let it kept mark.

0:36

David Chapman was a nobody

0:38

until he was on every channel. It

0:40

was December eight, a

0:43

chilly winter evening on Manhattan's Upper

0:45

west Side. Chapman wore a

0:47

fur hat, a silk scarf, and a

0:49

black three quarter lights coat. He

0:52

stood on the sidewalk, arms extended

0:54

holding a Charter Arms thirty eight caliber

0:57

handgun. He squeezed the

0:59

trigger again and again.

1:02

He fired five hollow point bullets,

1:04

and his childhood hero, John

1:06

Lennon. The

1:08

Assistant District Attorney said, Chapman committed

1:10

a deliberate, premeditated execution

1:13

of John Lennon in a cool, calm,

1:15

calculated manner. His attacker

1:17

made no attempt to flee. He was arrested

1:20

at the Dakota Police say he is marked. David

1:22

Chapman The reports are that he starts

1:25

reading this novel as

1:27

the chaos erupts around him. So the

1:29

police cars arrived, people

1:31

point out, this is the gunman right here. He's

1:34

standing there reading this novel. It's bizarre.

1:37

The strangeness of the acts stood out to everyone

1:40

at the time, from the police, to the

1:42

media, to even Chapman himself. Years

1:45

later, he described the scene in

1:47

an interview with Larry King and then

1:49

afterwards, it was like the

1:51

film strip broke. Took the Catch

1:53

in the Ryo out of my pocket. I

1:57

paced, I tried to read it. I

2:00

I just couldn't wait, Larry, until

2:02

those police got there. I was just devastated.

2:06

The police put Chapman in the backseat of a patrol

2:08

car. He gazed out the window and saw

2:10

officers place a blood soaked body into

2:13

another car. There wasn't time

2:15

to call an ambulance. John Lennon

2:17

was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.

2:20

The two police officers who drove Chapman from

2:22

the scene turned to look back at the killer.

2:24

Chapman smiled and said, I

2:27

am the catcher and the rye.

2:41

I'm Sean Braswell, and this is

2:43

the thread. A podcast from AZSI media

2:46

where we examine the interlocking lives and

2:48

events of history. We turned

2:50

back the clock, one story at a time to

2:52

reveal how various strands are woven together

2:55

to create a historic figure, big

2:57

idea, or an unthinkable

2:59

tread j D. This

3:02

season, we start with the death of rock star

3:05

John Lennon and over the course of five

3:07

episodes, actually connected back

3:09

to communist leader Vladimir Lenin.

3:12

Along the way, we meet some of the twentieth centuries

3:14

greatest artists and writers. We

3:16

explore how each of their stories hinge

3:18

on the past and influence the

3:20

future. People

3:25

are trapped in history, and history is

3:27

trapped in them. That's what the writer

3:29

James Baldwin once said. Mark

3:31

David Chapman may have pulled the trigger, but

3:34

trapped in history. Lenin and his death

3:36

are forever linked with the classic American

3:38

novel and Chapman's possession that

3:40

December Day, The Catcher and the

3:42

Rye. What on earth would

3:44

make someone kill their own hero in cold

3:47

blood? Why did Chapman pull

3:49

the trigger? Trying to understand what motivated

3:51

the guy, what took him there? Why he spent three

3:53

days in New York. Tim Riley is

3:55

a professor of journalism at Emerson College,

3:58

a music historian and the author or

4:00

of Lenin The Man, The Myth, the

4:02

Music. And I've meditated on this for

4:04

years. I don't feel like I've ever gotten

4:06

a good understanding of what's going on there. Let's

4:09

pick up the thread at the beginning. Is

4:12

a turbulent year for the United States. Fifty

4:15

two American citizens are held hostage in

4:17

Iran for over a year. The

4:19

US boycott's the Summer Olympic Games in Moscow.

4:22

Back home, Ronald Reagan, a former actor

4:24

and California governor, is elected President

4:27

of the United States. The year's

4:29

top film is The Empire Strikes Back, and

4:31

a former Beatle living in New York records

4:34

his first album in five years. Saturday,

4:38

December six, two days

4:40

before the death of John Lennon, a heavy

4:42

set man from Honolulu named Mark David

4:44

Chapman arrives at LaGuardia Airport

4:47

in New York. Chapman brings

4:49

with him over two thousand dollars in cash, a

4:51

handgun, and five hollow point bullets.

4:54

He takes a cab to the Dakota, a

4:56

famous Gothic style apartment building

4:58

overlooking Central Park. Some

5:00

of the world's most famous people called this home,

5:03

including Gilda Radner, Leonard Bernstein,

5:05

Lauren Bacall, and of course John

5:08

Lennon. Sunday,

5:13

December seven, Mark David Chapman

5:15

spends all day outside the Dakota. Wasn't

5:18

uncommon for people to wait at the entrance to the Dakota

5:20

because many of celebrities lived there. Lennon

5:23

typically would sign a few autographs

5:25

friends knew where he lived. The

5:28

Chapman sees no sign of the rock star that day.

5:30

In the evening, Chapman treats himself to an expensive

5:33

dinner and an escort at his hotel. The

5:36

escort happens to wear a green dress, just like

5:38

the prostitute who visits Holden Caulfield,

5:40

the main character in The Catcher in the Rye synchronicity,

5:44

Chapman observes to himself. Monday

5:48

December eight, Mark David Chapman

5:51

wakes up at nine a m. Before

5:53

leaving his hotel room, he sets out a strange

5:55

assortment of personal items, a bible,

5:58

his passport, phoe does of himself,

6:01

and a small Wizard of Oz poster. Chapman

6:04

then turns to look into the mirror, brandishes

6:06

his firearm and proclaims, the

6:09

Catcher in the Rye of my generation.

6:12

I left the hotel room, bought

6:14

a copy of The Catcher in the Rye, signed it

6:17

to Holding Caufield from Holding Caufield,

6:20

and wrote underneath that this is my

6:22

statement. Chapman stands

6:25

once more by the door of the Dakota with the

6:27

other regulars, hoping to catch a glimpse

6:29

of celebrity. He peruses his

6:31

copy of Catcher as he waits. On

6:33

page he

6:35

finds the line it was a Monday

6:38

in all and pretty near Christmas, and all

6:40

the stores were open a

6:42

Monday near Christmas. Synchronicity

6:44

again. Today is

6:47

the day. Chapman

6:50

gets so engrossed in his book that he fails

6:52

to notice a taxi pull up. A thin

6:54

man in a tan jacket gets out and bounds

6:56

through the Dakota gate. It's Lenin.

6:59

Did you see him, the dorman says to Chapman,

7:02

stun Chapman responds, guess

7:05

I missed my chance. He checks out

7:07

Lennon's daily habits.

7:09

It's clear by now, because he's there when

7:11

Lennon leaves in the morning of December eighth, and he's

7:13

there when Lennon returns. Chapman

7:16

sees John Lennon and Yoko Ono emerged

7:18

from the Dakota en route to the recording studio.

7:21

Chapman walks up to Lennon, his gun in his

7:23

coat pocket, and he

7:26

asked Lenon for his autograph. A nearby

7:28

photographer snaps a photo of the moment.

7:31

Then Lennon gets into his limo and leaves, and

7:33

we have a picture of him signing this kid's

7:36

album cover of Double Fantasy. And

7:38

he signs this album cover, and when he gets home

7:40

that night, that same kid is waiting for him.

7:46

Around PM, Lennon

7:48

returns to the Dakota, and this time

7:51

Chapman does what he came to do. Chapman

7:54

shoots Lennon from behind, and the bullets

7:56

explode in his chest. The

7:59

voice that touched millions is silenced in an

8:01

instant. Chapman

8:03

and Lennon are taken from the Dakota in their separate

8:06

patrol cars. Can you imagine how Lennon

8:08

feels dying in the back of his cop car. I just

8:10

I have a hit album, I've just figured

8:12

out how to do this life. I'm

8:14

finally doing it on my own terms, and

8:17

somebody guns me down. So

8:22

what brought Lennon to his death the doorstep

8:24

of the Dakota that night. Let's rewind

8:27

Lennon was one of the most famous people on the planet

8:30

back in that fame

8:32

was taking a hard toll, especially on his

8:35

first marriage to Cynthia and their young

8:37

son Julian. There are periods

8:39

where the only thing that is going

8:41

well in Lennon's life are the the

8:44

kinds of songs that are tumbling out of him.

8:47

It's kind of unbelievable

8:49

to see what's going on in his life, failing

8:51

marriage, failing as a father, feeling

8:54

guilty, having lots of affairs,

8:56

taking lots of drugs, really not a

8:58

happy person. Then yet turning out

9:00

some incredible songs. But then

9:02

it got to be format. This is Lennon

9:05

reflecting on this period in his life in

9:07

an interview with Archao Radio only

9:09

hours before his death. It would

9:11

be his last and sort

9:14

of not the pleasure that it was. And that's

9:16

when I felt that I had lost myself, not

9:18

that I was on purpose purposely

9:21

being a hypocrite or phony phony.

9:25

It's a word strewn throughout The Catcher in the

9:27

Rye. The main character hates phonies,

9:30

the hypocrites and fakes. That he sees everywhere.

9:33

Little did Lennon know that being labeled a phony

9:35

would get him killed. But more on

9:38

that later. John

9:43

and Yoko get married and moved to New York.

9:45

In the first

9:48

few years of their marriage were rough. Lennon

9:50

battled depression, drug addiction, and

9:52

other demons. In Lennon

9:55

decided to take a break from music to focus

9:57

on raising his new son, Sean. Lennon

10:00

forged a life for himself outside of

10:02

celebrity, and he felt free in

10:04

the streets of New York. He feels like

10:06

New York has a different attitude towards celebrities.

10:09

He feels as though he's able to walk the streets

10:12

without being accosted and without drawing a crowd.

10:14

New Yorkers always considered themselves way

10:16

too cool to be star struck. You

10:18

don't want to know how great that is. I mean,

10:21

people come up to the aft board to grab or

10:23

say hi, but they won't bug you. By

10:27

nineteen eighty, after five years as a

10:29

stay at home dad, Lennon was ready for

10:31

his comeback. The world closely

10:33

followed his return to the recording studio.

10:35

It was a very fruitful period. Songs

10:38

poured out of lenin about fatherhood,

10:40

redemption, and his new stage of life.

10:43

He released the album Double Fantasy with Yoko

10:45

in November. The album had just reached

10:48

number one in the UK the week he died up

10:52

next Why Catcher? Why did

10:54

a book like that speaks so much to someone like

10:56

Chapman. We'll be back in a moment.

11:04

While Lennon's life was coming together, Mark

11:06

David Chapman's life was falling apart. As

11:09

a teenager in Georgia, he went from being a burned

11:11

out druggie to an obsessively devout Christian.

11:14

He often heard voices, and he was a

11:16

loan or a quiet type person. Maybe a little bit

11:18

of instability there, so I could I could deceive

11:20

how it could happen, you know. Chapman

11:23

moved to Hawaii in nineteen seventy six,

11:25

where he planned to end his life with what he called

11:27

a last fling in Paradise. He

11:29

attempted suicide and failed. Chapman

11:32

was later diagnosed with a variety of psychological

11:35

disorders, from schizophrenia to

11:37

narcissistic personality disorder. There

11:39

was never any consensus. Chapman

11:43

rediscovered a book from his childhood, The Catcher

11:46

in the Rye at a local library in Hawaii.

11:49

Month after month he poured through its pages.

11:51

Chapman would explain later, I actually

11:54

became holding Caulfield in my own mind

11:56

as a way of coping. By

11:59

the way, case you haven't read it, The Catcher

12:01

in the Rye is about a teenager Holden

12:03

Caulfield, coping with the death of his brother

12:06

and the few days he spends in New York before

12:08

checking himself into a sanitarium.

12:11

Holden fantasizes about catching children

12:13

who are running through a field of rye before

12:15

they fall off a cliff, saving their

12:18

lives. Mark David Chapman's

12:20

fantasy was much different. On

12:23

one fateful day in early nine, Chapman

12:26

picked up another book at the library, a

12:28

recent Linen biography called One Day

12:31

at a Time by Andrew Fawcett. Inside

12:33

there was a photo of the rock star on the roof

12:36

of the Dakota. Chapman, again,

12:38

in his interview with Larry King, remember,

12:40

I'm in a different state of mind, and I'm and

12:42

I'm falling in on myself. I'm angry

12:45

at seeing him on the Dakota,

12:48

and I

12:50

say to myself, that phony that bastard

12:54

Chapman heard the hypocrisy and his heroes

12:56

singing Imagine No Possessions.

12:59

While he lived a charmed life on New York's

13:01

Upper West Side, he got angrier

13:03

and even more delusional. One

13:06

day, as he was sitting cross legged on the carpet

13:08

of his Honolulu apartment listening

13:10

to the Beatles, he had a disturbing

13:12

epiphany. Holden

13:15

Caulfield fantasized about killing a phony

13:17

and The Catcher in the Rye, but Chapman

13:19

was determined to do better. He

13:21

bought a gun and after that.

13:24

Chapman later explained there was

13:26

no power on earth that would have saved

13:28

John Lennon's life.

13:37

Holding Caulfield, the main character in

13:39

The Catcher in the Rye, has violent fantasies

13:41

of killing phonies, like this one

13:44

passage where Holding wanders through the

13:46

halls of his Little Sisters Elementary school

13:48

and he sees a graffiti view scrolled

13:51

across the wall. I kept

13:53

wanting to kill whoever written it. I

13:55

figured it was some perverty bum that sneaked into the school

13:57

late at night to take a leak or something and then wrote

13:59

it on the all. I kept picturing

14:01

myself catching him at it, and how I'd smashed his

14:03

head on the stone steps till he was good and goddamn dead

14:06

and bloody. After Lennon's

14:08

murder, Catcher in the Rye kept turning up at crime

14:10

scenes. A copy was found

14:12

in John Hinckley Jr. Hotel room after

14:14

he attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan,

14:17

and in nine Robert John

14:19

Bardo had a copy of it on him when he murdered

14:21

the actress Rebecca Schaefer. This

14:24

is Ken Slowinski, author of J. D. Salinger

14:26

Alife. So the country I did

14:29

throughout the eighties become the

14:31

symbol of not just only disuspected

14:34

youth, which is what it had been for

14:36

years before that, but it's crazy disuffected

14:39

youth. Lennon himself

14:41

would have been perplexed by the connection between

14:43

his death and The Catcher and the Rye, says

14:45

Tim Riley. He was a big reader

14:48

of Sallenger Catching the Rye. He loved that book.

14:50

We have it on record that he gobbled it down and that

14:52

he really loved it. And Riley

14:54

claims it helped ignite the era of Beatlemania.

14:57

John Lennon and his crowd they

14:59

were avid rock and roll fans, but they also

15:02

saw these other sparks of subversive energy

15:04

and other areas of pop culture. And

15:07

you know it can't be any accident that Salinger

15:09

is writing that in his

15:11

character for Capturing the Rye

15:14

at the same time that rock and roll begins to explode,

15:17

and you can see why, Oh yeah, Lennon would

15:19

definitely respond to that book in that character

15:22

holding Caufield is in

15:24

a lot of ways, he's like a mentor to John

15:27

Lennon. Our

15:32

series begins at the end of a long timeline

15:35

at the gates of the Dakota

15:37

for death because I don't believe in it. I think it's

15:40

just getting out of wrong call and

15:42

get into another. Lennon

15:44

famously said this in a nineteen interview,

15:47

And in a way, this is how our thread works.

15:50

People get in and out of cars, travel

15:52

briefly in each other's lives, and the consequences

15:55

echo throughout history.

16:00

We trace our thread backwards through the blood

16:02

soaked beaches in Normandy and the streets

16:04

of revolution in Russia, through

16:06

grimy back room bars and glamorous

16:09

nightclubs. Join us as we traveled

16:11

through nearly a century of history and find

16:13

out how it all connects. Next

16:18

episode, we pick up the thread with J. D.

16:20

Salinger. If The Catcher in the Rye

16:22

resonates with people in dark psychological

16:24

places, it's probably because

16:27

the novel and its author passed

16:29

through Hell itself on the way to publication.

16:37

The Threat is produced by Meredith hot Nutt, Libby

16:39

Coleman, and me Sean braswell. Our

16:41

editors are Carlos Watson and Samir Rao.

16:44

Meredith hot Knot engineered our show with mixing

16:46

and sound design from James Rowland's

16:48

and Chris Hoff Special

16:50

thanks to Cindy carpi In, David Boyer, Tracy

16:53

Moran, Seawan Culligan, Daisy Carrington,

16:56

Sun, Jeeve Tandon, Jeremy Williams, Cameo,

16:58

George tim Olsa, Ethan Lindsay

17:01

and k A. L. W. Check

17:03

us out at AUSI dot com, That's

17:05

o z y dot com or on Twitter

17:08

and Facebook. To learn more about

17:10

the thread, visit ausy dot com, slash

17:12

the thread all one word, and

17:14

make sure to subscribe to the thread on Apple

17:16

Podcasts. If you love surprising,

17:19

engaging stories from history like this

17:21

one, look no further than the flashback

17:23

section of AZZI. Thanks for listening,