Jay Hastings was working as a janitor at the front desk of the Dakota Building on Manhattan's Upper West Side on December 8, 1980; the night John Lennon was murdered. He heard the musician say his last words before he died. “‘They shot me,’ he said as blood fell from his mouth. He collapsed to the floor and I went over to put him on his back. I took his glasses and placed them on the desk. Yoko screamed.” Hastings' unpublished testimony is part of the new docuseries John Lennon: Murder Without Trial, available on Apple TV starting today, Wednesday. For the first time, witnesses to the event reveal in detail what happened the day the former Beatle was shot five times. The reporter who did his last interview with him that morning, the doctors who tried to revive him for 45 minutes and even a taxi driver who was passing through and believed that what he had seen was part of a movie shoot.
“I reckon my job won't be done until I'm dead and buried, and I hope that's a long, long time from now,” John Lennon told reporter Laurie Kaye in his final interview. Yoko Ono was next to him. No one imagined that Lennon had nine hours to live and that outside the radio studio was the man who planned to kill him. The former Beatle had just returned to the music scene with the album Double fantasy, after five years in which he dedicated himself exclusively to raising his son Sean. “He was completely back,” remembers Jack Douglas, his friend and his last music producer. “That night we finished the mix in the studio and before leaving he said to me smiling from the elevator, 'I'll see you tomorrow at nine.'”
That night taxi driver Richard Peterson was passing by the Dakota building. He had just dropped off some passengers and saw Lennon's limousine approaching. “He had never seen it in person.” Then the driver decided to stay and wait for Lennon to get out of the car. "He was entering when a boy shouted 'John Lennon' from behind him." The next thing Peterson heard were five gunshots. “I thought they were making a movie, but there were no lights or cameras.”
The first thing police officer Peter Cullen remembers about the moment he arrived at the crime scene is that “it looked like a photograph.” Everyone was petrified, except for a young man who was reading a copy of The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger. In that moment, that harmless-looking individual had stopped being Mark David Chapman, a stranger, and had become the man who killed John Lennon. When Cullen placed the handcuffs on him, Chapman did not resist. “I'm sorry I ruined your night,” he told the police officer. "It's a joke? Do you know what you've done? “You have ruined your life,” the officer responded in disbelief. It would have taken just a few minutes for Chapman to flee through Central Park and disappear. The 25-year-old's behavior made no sense at all.
The mental health of Mark David Chapman and the motives that led him to commit the crime remain a mystery to this day. “I thought if he killed him he would turn me into someone else,” Chapman privately told his attorney. That “someone else” was Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of the novel he seemed to be obsessed with, The Catcher in the Rye. The murderer also told his defender that he had killed Lennon so that as many people as possible would read Salinger's book. He later declared that Lennon was “the biggest lying bastard ever” for promoting in his lyrics that “it only takes love” and was not going to let the world endure another ten years of his music. Chapman was taken to Bellevue Hospital to undergo a psychiatric examination. Dr. Naomi Goldstein, the specialist who evaluated him, admits for the first time in the series that Chapman's mind was a real “puzzle,” but that despite his complexity, he was a person capable of facing a judgment.
“Mark David Chapman, you'll remember my name,” the 25-year-old told a New York City taxi driver. At his 68th, Chapman remains under arrest after repeated failed attempts to obtain his parole. John Lennon: Murder Without Trial is an exclusive Apple TV production that reopens one of the deepest wounds in the history of music. It is narrated by actor Kiefer Sutherland, winner of the Emmy Award for his role in the fictional series 24, and directed by Nick Holt and Rob Coldstream.
