The CIA Doctors

by Colin A. Ross, M. D.

  Many of the expert witnesses in the Sirhan case, including Dr. Diamond and the prosecution psychiatrists, concluded that Sirhan’s thought processes were always organized and coherent outside the dissociated trance state. In the 1960’s, the term schizophrenia was overused and used loosely by American psychiatrists. There is no reason to think that Sirhan Sirhan would receive a diagnosis of schizophrenia if interviewed with the more scientific and reliable diagnostic procedures of the early twenty-first century.

  The prosecution expert witnesses included Dr. Seymour Pollack. He did his psychiatry training at the New York Psychiatric Institute, where Harold Blauer was killed with an injection of U.S. Army mescaline in 1953. Dr. Pollack recommended at trial that Sirhan be sent to the medical facility at Vacaville State Prison, where drug research was conducted under MKSEARCH Subproject 3, and where Donald DeFreeze was contacted by Colston Westbrook. MKSEARCH ran from 1964 to 1972, the time period of the Sirhan trial and DeFreeze’s imprisonment at Vacaville.

  Sirhan Sirhan was a self-created Manchurian Candidate. He carried out an actual assassination. He illustrates the point that the term Manchurian Candidate could be expanded to include self-created variants. The self-created assassins help us to understand the mind of the Manchurian Candidate; one might think of them as naturally-occurring analogs.

  22

  MARK DAVID CHAPMAN

  Mark David Chapman, the man who shot John Lennon, was born at Harris Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas on May 10, 1955. His father, David Curtis Chapman, was a staff sergeant in the Air Force. His mother, Diane, was a homemaker. Shortly after Mark’s birth, his father left the Air Force and moved the family to Indiana. There he worked for American Oil Company and took a degree in engineering at Purdue. From Indiana, the family moved to Decatur, Georgia where Mark’s father worked in the credit department at American Oil. After two years, the family was transferred to Roanoke, Virginia where Mark’s sister, Susan Jill, was born. She is seven years younger than Mark.

  Like Sirhan Sirhan, for the purposes of this book Mark David Chapman is assumed to be a self-created Manchurian Candidate level assassin.

  From Virginia, the Chapman family moved back to Georgia. It was there that Mark first became aware of the Little People inside his mind. Chapman’s biographer, Jack Jones142 (p. 115) quotes Mark describing his father as living “by very rigid patterns, doing the same things day after day. He was very meticulous, very unemotional…. I don’t recall that my father ever hugged me or told me he loved me…. He was just a shell who swallowed everything. And then, when it finally came out, God help you.”

  According to Mark, his father beat his mother regularly. Mark also recalls his mother coming into his bed at night to escape her husband. He recalls physically interfering when his father was beating his mother. When his parents separated, Mark believes, his father cut his mother out of much of their joint marital property.

  While Mark was in prison for the murder of John Lennon, from 1981 to 1992, his father never visited him once. During that period David Chapman was married twice, and suffered a series of heart attacks and a stroke, from which he recovered.

  There is no evidence that Mark was ever sexually abused. In a 1987 interview in People magazine, his mother minimized the amount of conflict and spousal abuse in her home. It does seem that Mark’s childhood was traumatic. His early years were filled with loneliness, emotional neglect by his father, a rigid unemotional home atmosphere, and hypersensitivity to taunting and rejection by other children. Mark felt like an empty nobody, except that he was full of anger.

  To fill up the emptiness, to create a sense of power and control in his life, to escape from the outside world, and to create secure attachment figures for himself, Mark created an inner world in which he was the boss. He followed primarily the neglect pathway to a dissociative disorder not otherwise specified I describe in my textbook258. His biographer quotes him as saying142 (pp. 122):

  The Little People adored me. I got my respect and adulation from an imaginary source, rather than confronting the kids and the things that hurt me and earning it on my own. When I got really angry about something, I would take it out on the Little People. Sometimes if somebody had hurt me at school or I was angry with my father, I would get revenge by killing some of the Little People. I had a button on the arm of the couch in the den. When I pushed it, it would blow up the houses where the Little People lived. Sometimes I would kill hundreds or thousands of them. Then, after I calmed down later, I would apologize. They would always forgive me.

  Mark Chapman sang Beatles songs to the Little People. His problem was that his surface self had no real identity, despite his interactions with the Little People. It was a shell. The first transformation in surface identity occurred after Mark started taking LSD at age fourteen. He also smoked marijuana and sniffed glue. Over the summer between eighth and ninth grades he changed from being “aloof, solicitous, and clean-cut,” a student government representative and YMCA counselor, to being a drug head. This was a sudden religious conversion. The “religion” was psychedelia.

  In March, 1970, Mark ran away from home to join the circus. His brief stay on the beach in Florida with hippies and drug abusers did not bring happiness. He returned home to high school, and on October 25, 1970 attended a religious retreat with other teenagers. This sowed the seeds of his next transformation.

  In the summer of 1971, while on vacation at his grandmother’s home in Ormand Beach, Florida, Mark’s wallet was ransacked by a group of hippie friends. Chapman described his reaction to this event as follows (pp. 149):

  And I remember, when I realized that my buddies had gone through my wallet, feeling the lowest I had ever felt. I felt like nobody. Like nothing. Nothing at all … at some point I lifted my hands and I said, ‘Jesus, come to me. Help me.’ And that was my time of true spiritual rebirth.

  It was not a true rebirth. It was just another change in persona. There was no depth to the rebirth. Mark David Chapman’s spiritual problem, his emptiness and rage, was not solved. It was merely glossed over temporarily. On return to high school for his junior year, Mark was completely disconnected from his druggie identity of the previous two years. His longtime friend, Miles McManus, said of Chapman’s transformation to born-again Christian, “It was a true personality split.”

  Shortly after his religious conversion to Christianity, Chapman began to think of his idol John Lennon as a Communist and a blasphemer. He would sing out loud to his friends, to the tune of John Lennon’s song, Imagine, “Imagine John Lennon is dead.”

  After transforming John Lennon into the enemy, Chapman began to worship the pop singer Todd Rundgren. Prior to killing John Lennon on December 8, 1980, Chapman left a copy of The Ballad of Todd Rundgren in his hotel room. Lennon and Rundgren feuded in public while Chapman was in high school - at one point, John Lennon called Rundgren “Todd Runtgreen.” Lennon was already being transformed from beloved idol into murder victim in Chapman’s mind while he was in high school. This transformation parallels the devaluation of Robert Kennedy in the mind of Sirhan Sirhan.

  Chapman’s Christian fundamentalism was fleeting, like his other identities and enthusiasms. Soon it was replaced by an obsession with Todd Rundgren. The next shift in identity was triggered by work Mark did as a counselor and assistant program director at the South De Kalb County YMCA from 1970 to 1975. The children called him “Captain Nemo.”

  This became his new identity. Everyone in the YMCA thought Chapman was an excellent counselor.

  In 1975 Mark went to Beirut, Lebanon with the YMCA’s international program. He was evacuated after several weeks due to the war conditions there. He got a job instead at the YMCA resettlement camp for Vietnam refugees at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. It was in 1975, after his first experience with sexual intercourse, that he began masturbating up to seven times per day.

  For his first twenty years, Chapman was aware of a dissociated internal child who was not one of the Little People. While the fake adult persona e
xperimented with drugs, Christianity, masturbation and being Captain Nemo, the little child became the inner container for all Chapman’s anger and resentment. He, the child, eventually became the killer of John Lennon. Chapman’s account of the process is as follows (pp. 57):

  My child was always conflicting with my fake adult, my phony adult that I had erected around it.

  All that rage came spilling out and I killed the hero of my childhood. All the rage at the world and in my myself and in my disappointments and disillusions. All those feelings I kept pent up, feelings that the child couldn’t handle … but I didn’t, like a child, know how to kill anybody. So I summoned the forces of evil to do it, to help me do it. I did what I thought you could do to get the evil forces. You chant and you take your clothes off. You get angry and you say horrible things. I had to pump up to do it …

  The adult was just a front for an act of evil that was carried out by a child. It was a child’s anger, a child’s jealousy, a child’s rage. But the adult was so undeveloped, he didn’t know what to do with it.

  The adult was all surface, anyway. It was a front. It couldn’t handle anything. It diverted everything to the child, and the child put it in his black toy box, because he couldn’t handle adult feelings either.

  He would, the adult would take each feeling and say some words and then give it to the child. The child would put it in the toy box he never opened, except to put something new in it.

  The child would play with his new toys. But one day he opened the box to put something new inside, he came across a toy that he had played with years ago. It had once been his hero, but it wasn’t the same. He showed it to the fake adult, the phony adult…. Then the adult knew what to do. And they conspired together, the child and the child’s fake adult, to kill a hero. To kill the phony. To kill phoniness. To take some kind of a stand for the first time in our lives. To do something. To do something real. I was going to stamp out phoniness….

  Then John Lennon got out of the limousine. He had something in his hands. Some cassette tapes. The child looked at his hero - his broken toy - and his hero looked back at him. It was a hard look. The child was sure that his hero recognized him from earlier in the day, when he signed the album. Neither one smiled. Nobody said a word. There was dead silence in my brain and John Lennon walked past me…. His back was to the child and the voice said: Do it! Do it! Do it! Do it! Do it!

  I aimed at his back. I pulled the trigger five times. And all hell broke loose in my mind.

  It was like everything had been stripped away then. It wasn’t a make-believe world anymore. The movie strip broke.

  Mark David Chapman was diagnosed by the psychiatrist who examined him in jail as schizophrenic. He was actually suffering from dissociative disorder not otherwise specified, and was a self-created Manchurian Candidate assassin. Chapman’s inner word became real when he pulled the trigger five times, because then it had a real effect in the outside word.

  In the spring of 1976, Chapman went to a fundamentalist college in Lookout Mountain, Tennessee called Covenent College. He dropped out in the spring semester and returned to De Kalb County YMCA, like he returned home after failing to create a new circus identity as a teenager.

  Shortly after returning home, Chapman suffered another identity collapse (pp. 168): “And then, when my YMCA identity fell apart, when I was stripped of that is when the clouds really started getting dark and I slipped into an abyss that ended in murder, of someone I didn’t even know.”

  Despondent, Chapman went to Hawaii to kill himself in 1977, but his spirits lifted so he returned home to pursue his relationship with his girlfriend, Jessica Blankenship. When this relationship failed, he returned to Hawaii in May. Soon he tried to kill himself by carbon monoxide poisoning, using his car. The attempt was foiled because the hose he had connected to his exhaust pipe melted.

  Chapman was admitted to Castle Memorial Hospital, a Seventh Day Adventist facility, on June 21, 1977 where he received a diagnosis of depression. During that admission the psychiatrist discovered nothing about the Little People, the inner child, or the dissociated phony adult. In 1977, virtually all psychiatrists would have missed all of that, or misinterpreted it as schizophrenia.

  After discharge on July 5, 1997 Chapman moved in with the Reverend Peter Anderson and his wife, to whom he had been introduced by Dennis Mee-Lee from Castle Memorial Hospital.

  On July 6, 1978 Chapman took a hastily planned trip to Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, India, Iran, Israel, Switzerland, England, Georgia and then back to Hawaii. He was met at the airport on August 20, 1978 by his girlfriend, Gloria Abe. They became engaged in early 1979 and married on June 2, 1979. Mark worked at the hospital again but was fired in late 1979 due to hostility towards co-workers and excessive perfectionism. At this point, he started talking to the Little People again, for the first time since his adolescence.

  Early in 1980, Chapman began to think more intently about killing John Lennon. He also explained the Little People to his wife, Gloria. One night Gloria awoke to hear what seemed like two voices shouting and arguing about killing John Lennon, but Mark was the only other person in the house.

  During 1980, Chapman put himself in trance while sitting naked listening to Beatles songs on headphones. He did this in a ritualistic manner and called upon Satan to give him power to kill John Lennon. This is very similar to the trance exercises Sirhan Sirhan performed with mirrors and candles, in order to create a dissociated assassin state within himself. It is curious that Dr. Bernard Diamond diagnosed Sirhan Sirhan as a self created multiple personality, but considered Mark David Chapman to be schizophrenic, when the mental processes of the two are so similar.

  During 1980 Chapman called on the Little People to help him plan and carry out the murder. The killing of John Lennon was carefully premeditated by the phony adult. Mark David Chapman’s inner world was not chaotic, disorganized or psychotic; it was controlled at a high level of precision. Chapman rightly refused to mount an insanity defense even when encouraged to do so by defense psychiatrists who considered him schizophrenic.

  Chapman described his Little People this way (pp. 289):

  But anyway, that’s what it was: a board and people were formed into committees. It’s exactly like I had when the Little People returned before I killed John Lennon. One committee worked on my finances. And every night or once a week they would give me these reports on how we were doing. And these were all highly trained, efficient people. I even sensed their personalities. One of them even had a name. He was like the chief of staff. He was very aloof and efficient. I would often see him sitting by the window alone in the boardroom, just looking out the window and thinking. We had on the board the equivalent of like a military general, who was head of the defense department, a defense committee and the financial committee, the relationship committee. Just maybe five or six committees that worked there to help me and I would turn to them and they would tell me what to do. Of course they were answerable to me, but they would often give me advice.

  The Little People did not participate in the murder of John Lennon. In fact they actively tried to talk the phony adult out of it, without success. When the phony adult talked to the Little People, including Robert, his most trusted advisor, the phony adult’s face would be displayed on a video screen in the inner boardroom. This is typical of the inner worlds of people with dissociative identity disorder or dissociative disorder not otherwise specified255, 256, 258. So is referring to oneself as “we” or “us,” which schizophrenics do not usually do.

  After discussion with “Mr. President,” the phony adult, about the plan to kill John Lennon, the Little People maintained their integrity by departing (pp. 237):

  One by one, beginning with his defense minister, the Little People rose from their seats and walked from the secret chamber inside the mysterious mind of Mark David Chapman. Alone in his dangerous world at last, abandoned even by the endlessly forgiving Little People whom he had created within himself, the face of Mark
David Chapman faded from the screen.

  The Little People and the murderous inner child had evolved into much more than inner fantasies. They had their own separate, dissociated feelings, motives and points of view. They monitored and interacted with the outside world, took executive control of the body, made decisions and carried out internal actions independently of the control of the phony adult. They feared his retaliation, but they did not bend to his will.

  Chapman went to New York twice in late 1980, the first time for reconnaissance, the second to carry out the murder in front of the Dakota apartments late on the evening of December 8. Afterwards, in jail, in 1981, Robert returned to the phony adult when he was awaiting trial (pp. 279):