That’s how the celebrity game is played.
Soon, everyone in this city will be battling one another to get a glimpse of him, the man who killed John Lennon. His name will be all over the papers, all over the news—all over the world—in just a few hours.
Mark takes in a deep breath.
Smiles.
From the corner of his eye he catches movement outside his window. He turns his head slightly to his right, hears some commotion, and then he sees someone crouching, looking at him.
It’s Yoko.
She stares at him through the glass.
Mark stares back.
Chapter 63
You stole my heart, and that’s what really hurts.
—“Maggie May”
Officer Frauenberger lays John Lennon across the back seat of the patrol car, manned by officers Jim Moran and Bill Gamble.
“Are you John Lennon?” Moran asks him.
Lennon nods, his chest soaked with blood.
They pull off the curb and speed the mile between the Dakota and Roosevelt Hospital.
Officer Tony Palma follows close behind. His back-seat passenger is a stunned and silent Yoko.
In the lead car, Moran radios ahead that police are bringing in a gunshot victim.
* * *
Third-year general surgery resident Dr. David Halleran is making his rounds when his emergency pager goes off. He runs to trauma room 115.
“I waited for the next few minutes, expecting to see an ambulance pulling in,” he recalls in 2019. “Instead, I see a cop car.”
Nurse Deartra Sato is part of the team that puts the victim “on a stretcher, pulled him into our minor OR, which was room 115. Then we cut the clothes off and opened his chest.”
Halleran tells his team, “Four entry wounds over his left chest, three exit wounds. Either you do nothing or you crack his chest and find something that might be salvageable.”
With no blood pressure and no pulse, every moment is critical.
“The patient didn’t come in dead; he came in mortally wounded,” he explains. “And I had nothing to lose. I was hoping that we could find something that we could repair, fix, or patch until we got him up to the operating room. For me, there was very little downside.”
He makes an incision in the left side of the victim’s chest and works to separate the ribs to expose the heart. With one hand flat underneath and the other hand over the vital organ, the surgeon squeezes the heart gently and rhythmically at one hundred beats per minute, trying desperately to increase blood flow to the coronary arteries.
It’s not working.
A nurse leans over the operating table and is startled to recognize the victim, calling him by name.
“No, it’s not,” Halleran says while continuing to hold the victim’s heart in his hands. “It can’t be.”
Nurse Sato checks his wallet and finds an ID that verifies his identity.
Chapter 64
Tomorrow I’ll miss you.
—“All My Loving”
TV producer Alan Weiss is lying on a gurney in the hallway of the Roosevelt Hospital ER. He’s awaiting X-rays following a motorcycle accident he suffered an hour before in Central Park.
“My ears are still ringing from the impact of the road,” Weiss later recalls, “and two police officers come out and they are literally standing over my head. I got my eyes closed, and I hear one officer say to the other one, ‘Can you believe it? John Lennon.’”
Weiss’s mind begins to race. Did he say John Lennon, my favorite Beatle?
“At first, I didn’t believe it,” Weiss explains in a 2019 interview. “I banged my head. My ears were ringing. I wasn’t sure I heard it correctly.”
Weiss, a recent graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, works in the fast-paced television newsroom at WABC, located in the nearby Lincoln Square neighborhood. He begins peppering passersby with questions, trying to investigate this developing story from the confines of his gurney.
Finally, he slips a janitor some cash, saying, “Here’s my press card; here’s twenty bucks. Call this number, ask for [assignment editor] Neil [Goldstein], tell him Alan’s in the hospital and I believe John Lennon’s been shot.”
The worker never makes the call, but within minutes Weiss gets powerful confirmation when he sees “Yoko Ono in a full-length fur coat on the arm of a police officer, and she’s sobbing.”
* * *
In trauma room 115, Dr. David Halleran is working steadily to keep John Lennon alive. Though Halleran’s hands are steady, with every pump of the ex-Beatle’s heart, his faint vital signs diminish.
Cardiovascular surgeon Dr. Richard Marks steps in to assist. A resident of the Upper West Side, he had returned to the hospital after seeing the commotion at the Dakota. Attending physician Dr. Stephan Lynn, who had left the hospital at 10:30 that night, remembers that he was called to return just before the eleven o’clock news.
* * *
With the assistance of a police officer, Weiss gets through to his editor on a hospital telephone. “Neil, I think John Lennon’s been shot.”
* * *
As the doctors work to save John Lennon’s life, John’s voice can be heard harmonizing around them as the Beatles’ “All My Loving” plays over the hospital sound system.
Twenty minutes pass. With every medical intervention “totally ineffective,” they have no choice but to declare him dead. “I stepped away from the table at that moment,” Halleran remembers. “I felt exhausted and defeated. It was a Hail Mary pass, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we had failed this great man.”
It falls to Dr. Lynn, as the director of the Roosevelt Hospital emergency room, to tell Yoko Ono what transpired in the last minutes of her husband’s life.
In the emergency thoracotomy, he tells her, “all of the major blood vessels leaving the heart were simply destroyed. There was no way that we could repair them.”
“He can’t be dead, he was just alive,” she says.
At that moment, Dr. Lynn begins to learn “more and more about how much John Lennon affected the rest of the world.”
Chapter 65
I know a man ain’t supposed to cry…
—“I Heard It Through the Grapevine”
Live from South Florida, ABC is broadcasting the final minutes of a matchup between the New England Patriots and the Miami Dolphins. The game is tied 13–13 in the fourth quarter when the phone rings in the production truck parked outside Miami’s Orange Bowl stadium.
“John Lennon has been shot in front of his apartment building and died on the way to the hospital,” Monday Night Football producer Bob Goodrich is told over the phone by WABC-TV’s Neil Goldstein.
Is this the truth? Is this some kind of hoax? Goodrich thinks.
With less than a minute to go on the game clock, the tragedy is communicated to the broadcast booth. It’s manned by NFL greats Fran Tarkenton and Frank Gifford—and legendary announcer Howard Cosell.
Before Cosell breaks into the game with the tragic announcement, the announcer’s mind flashes to his 1974 Monday Night Football interview with John, when the singer said the rowdiness of an NFL crowd “makes rock concerts look like tea parties.”
With three seconds remaining and the Patriots’ kicker, an Englishman named John Smith, warming up to attempt a field goal, Cosell begins speaking.
“Remember this is just a football game, no matter who wins or loses,” Cosell announces. “An unspeakable tragedy, confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City: John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City, the most famous, perhaps, of all of the Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, dead…on…arrival.”
John Smith’s kick is blocked.
* * *
Geraldo Rivera sits in the living room of his apartment, overlooking Central Park West. From his location on 64th Street, he hears gunshots in the vicinity of the Dakota but is unfazed by the sound.
His phone rings. Rivera’s assignment editor is calling him in to the television studio on West 66th Street. He’s to report live, via satellite, on the murder of John Lennon, joining British-born anchor Ted Koppel, who is broadcasting live from Washington.
Geraldo hangs up the phone, fighting off shock as he makes the connection between the shots he heard earlier and the breaking tragedy.
“The most tragic aspect of this terrible thing is the ironic thing about the fact that John Lennon was back; John Lennon, after a five-year absence, was finally back in the studios, had finally released a record album,” he tells Koppel on the air. “[He was] one of the cornerstones of one of the most incredible musical units in the history of the planet. Changed the course of rock ’n’ roll, changed the course of many of our lives…I’m trying to put my thoughts in order and give them to you in a logical way, but the painful aspect of what’s happened has really skewed my reasoning on this.”
Decades later, when Rivera recalls that moment with Koppel, he says, “Attempting to put John’s life into context in real time was very challenging and extremely emotional. I tried to prevent myself from breaking down and crying, but it was very difficult.”
* * *
As John Lennon lies wounded and bleeding inside the Dakota, Philip Michael, a maintenance man for the building, stands outside, watching in horror and trying to piece together everything that has happened.
Suddenly, he sees an object in motion. He approaches a decorative stone flower urn sculpted into the building entryway.
What’s fallen out is a record—John Lennon’s Double Fantasy album.
And it’s signed.
This belongs to someone, Michael thinks, putting the album back inside the urn.
The damn thing keeps falling out, no matter how many times he replaces it. He decides to take it home with him for safekeeping.
On the way, he hears someone mention that the police are looking for a signed album. It’s a piece of evidence from the crime scene. Michael contacts the police and gives them the album.
The following year, after Chapman’s trial, Michael fills out paperwork in an effort to have the album returned to him. His request is granted. The district attorney thanks him in writing for turning in this crucial piece of evidence.
The album he gets back is a bit worse for wear. It’s been handled throughout the police investigation. The killer’s forensically enhanced fingerprints are visible, as are notations from the crime lab.
He now has in his possession the last autograph John Lennon ever signed.
Michael puts the album away.
“It’s the most valuable artifact in rock and roll history,” a gallerist later tells the New York Daily News.
* * *
Jay Dubin, the videographer who filmed the Double Fantasy sessions, is with his fiancée. They are waiting for a table at a restaurant when the news of John’s murder breaks.
“I was just with him,” Dubin says to her, stunned.
Later, Dubin realizes there was a cassette player recording the whole session. He puts the audiotape in his closet, eventually digitizing it for safekeeping, but otherwise leaving it be.
If ever he wants to hear John’s voice, it will always be near.
* * *
Jack Douglas is at the Hit Factory continuing work on Yoko’s “Walking on Thin Ice.” At 11:35 p.m., his wife gets through to him. Though the news she shares plunges Douglas into shock, the producer’s sharp mind jumps back to the moment when Yoko, toward the end of the session, asked John what was wrong. Douglas recalls that John was acting strangely, and the producer feels compelled to act. He wipes clean the session tapes dated December 8.
* * *
It’s after midnight when the chief of Manhattan detectives, Richard Nicastro, sits down with Yoko at the Dakota. With producer David Geffen nearby, the detective tries to question Yoko about the events of the day.
“The shock is too great!” is all she can say. “I can’t, I can’t do this right now.”
Chapter 66
All I want is the truth.
—“Gimme Some Truth”
Officer Tony Palma returns to the Twentieth Precinct.
John Lennon’s killer sits in his tiny cell, sweating and clutching his book.
Palma still cannot comprehend what has happened. Can’t get the image out of his head from back at the hospital—Yoko, after learning her husband was dead, collapsing and then banging her head repeatedly on the floor.
“Do you realize what you just did?” he asks, shaking his head in disbelief.
“Yeah,” Chapman replies with a vacant stare. “I just killed myself. I am John Lennon.”
I am John Lennon. The chilling words hit Palma right in the gut.
* * *
Lead homicide detective Ron Hoffman heads back to the Twentieth, where the alleged assassin will be charged with violation of New York penal law 125.10—criminally negligent homicide.
Hoffman looks into the interrogation room where Chapman is seated, wearing a white thermal undershirt. The suspect is refusing a formal interview.
The detective is working from the premise that “Chapman shot John Lennon because he wanted his moment of glory in the sun.”
In a city filled with grief-stricken fans, Hoffman has to deal with the reality that his prisoner may himself become a target, “another Jack Ruby.”
* * *
Assistant district attorney Kim Hogrefe is assigned the case, which is being treated as a “premeditated execution.” Hogrefe must immediately contend with the press. “We felt he was criminally responsible,” he says, explaining that Chapman “borrowed a substantial sum of money—of which $2,000 was found on him—for the purpose of coming to New York City to do what he has done.”
* * *
At 6:00 a.m., a caller from California gets through to Yoko’s office in the Dakota, saying, “I am flying to New York to finish the job Chapman started. I’m going to get Yoko Ono.”
Chapter 67
The love you take
Is equal to the love you make.
—“The End”
At his country estate in the small village of Peasmarsh, East Sussex, Paul receives a phone call. The words he’s hearing make no sense. How can his lifelong friend be gone?
A few minutes later, Linda finds him standing in their driveway. Paul breaks down in her arms.
“I can’t take it in,” he says.
The lifelong peacemaker takes on the pain the world is feeling. “That was like a really big shock in most people’s lives, a bit like Kennedy…For me, it was just so sad that I wasn’t going to see him again.”
* * *
George gives a brief statement saying that he’s “shattered and stunned” and that “to rob life is the ultimate robbery.” He retreats into his grief.
* * *
“Something’s happened to John.” Ringo and his fiancée, Barbara Bach, are in the Bahamas when Barbara’s daughter calls them. Ringo is on hiatus from recording a new album, Stop and Smell the Roses. John had offered Ringo two songs for the album, and was scheduled to join Ringo in the studio in January to record “Nobody Told Me.” (Neither this nor the other John Lennon song, “Life Begins at 40,” winds up on the album.)
* * *
“Cyn, I’m so sorry. John’s dead.” Cynthia Lennon happens to be in London, visiting Ringo’s ex-wife, Maureen, when Ringo calls with the awful news.
Cyn immediately thinks of her and John’s seventeen-year-old son, Julian, back home in North Wales. Everyone says he’s the spitting image of his father. And Cyn knows firsthand what it’s like to lose a parent at that age.
It’s barely 6 a.m., so Cyn calls her third husband and asks him to keep the news from Julian until she can make the four-hour drive home.
As soon as Julian wakes, though, and sees all the reporters outside the house, he know
s that something terrible has happened to his father.
* * *
Ringo charters a private plane and flies with Barbara to New York.
“Don’t run from them, it will just make it more difficult,” advises friend Elliot Mintz as he helps Ringo and Barbara navigate the media swarming the Dakota. But the celebrity photographers don’t miss a face as famous as Ringo’s.
“I want to do what I can to help,” Ringo tells Yoko when they’re inside, away from the glare of the cameras.
“Well, you just play with Sean,” she tells him. “Keep him busy.”
Ringo and Barbara follow the child into his play area, equipped with a trampoline, and spend hours trying to make the little boy smile.
* * *
Elton John’s plane touches down in Melbourne, Australia, but he and his entourage are ordered to stay on board. An eerie feeling comes over him immediately.
Someone’s dead.
Elton’s manager climbs out of his seat and heads straight to the cockpit to demand answers. Moments later, he returns crying and relays the tragedy.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Elton John says. “It wasn’t just the fact of this death, it was the brutality of how it happened.”
* * *
Hours after learning of his father’s murder, Julian Lennon boards a passenger jet bound for New York.
The press are respectful of the teenager’s grief as he departs, but he is unprepared for the mob scene that greets him at the Dakota, where hundreds of mourners have already started to gather to sing his father’s songs.
December 9, 1980
Inside the Twentieth Precinct, Mark reads his copy of The Catcher in the Rye. He is dressed in the same clothes he wore last night, and he still smells pleasantly of gunpowder.
The Last Days of John Lennon Page 26
