Word: chapman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Chapman arrived in New York three days before the killing, checked into a Y.M.C.A. nine blocks from Lennon's apartment, and started hanging out in front of the building, waiting for Lennon like any other fan. There were usually fans at the gates of the Dakota, a grand, gloomy, high-maintenance Gothic fortress overlooking the west side of Central Park, because the building houses several celebrities: Lauren Bacall, Roberta Flack, Leonard Bernstein. Fans of the Beatles and Lennon lovers accounted for conversation with
...Chapman outside the Dakota. Said one, "He just seemed like a really nice, genuine, honest person who was there because he admired John." Others, like WPLJ Disc Jockey Carol Miller, who lives near the Dakota, had noticed Chapman and thought "he looked strange. He was older than the kids who hung around there." When Miller first heard that Lennon had been shot, Chapman's face flashed in her mind...
...Saturday night, Chapman hailed a cab and told Driver Mark Snyder to take him to Greenwich Village. On the way he boasted that he had just dropped off the tapes of an album John Lennon and Paul McCartney made that day. He said that he was the recording engineer and that they had played for three hours...
...Monday afternoon Chapman spotted Lennon and asked him to autograph an album. Lennon hastily scribbled his name and climbed into a waiting car to take him to a recording studio. Did Chapman feel slighted by Lennon? Possibly. But the night before he had suddenly checked out of the Y and moved into the cushier Sheraton Center hotel and bought himself a big meal. It was as if he were rewarding himself in advance for some proud accomplishment. Now on Monday, only hours after getting Lennon's autograph, Chapman was waiting again, this time in the shadows of the entryway...
...presidential assassin establishes with his victim a deadly intimacy, follows his movements, attaches himself to his rising star." Historian Christopher Lasch was writing about political assassins, but he might have been describing Mark David Chapman, 25, the accused murderer of John Lennon. Since he was a child, Chapman had attached himself to his hero's star, first as fan, then as imitator, finally as killer. Indeed, it is possible that in some distorted, Dostoyevskian mirror within his mind, he saw himself as Lennon-and the real Lennon as a threatening impostor...