John and Yoko gain another fighter in their corner in their simultaneous ongoing search for Kyoko. Outside their Immigration and Naturalization Service hearing on April 18, John elaborates on what he told reporters in March. “We want to stay permanently because New York is the center of the earth and also because we want to find Yoko’s daughter, Kyoko.” John gives an interview to Geraldo Rivera, a twenty-nine-year-old reporter for ABC-TV Eyewitness News, explaining that it’s because Yoko “is married to an English citizen”—referring to himself, of course—“and that’s caused all the trouble” before reiterating, “But we love to be here.”

Rivera has earned praise and notoriety (and a Peabody Award) for his March 1972 investigative exposé, Willowbrook: The Last Disgrace, detailing the inhumane treatment of residents at a Staten Island school for the mentally disabled. That same month, Willowbrook parents filed a class-action lawsuit against the facility (though it would be another fifteen years before the state ultimately shut it down, in 1987).

John and Yoko, Rivera says in 2019, “appreciated the work I was doing on behalf of the developmentally disabled and vowed to help.”

But first it would be Rivera who, they hoped, could help them.

JOHN & YOKO WAIT & WAIT is the New York Daily News headline on July 14. The paper reports that after months of immigration hearings, a decision on the couple’s status will be postponed until September.

The delay allows them more time to search for the missing Kyoko. From August 3 to 6, accompanied by Rivera and his Eyewitness News camera crew, John and Yoko fruitlessly scour San Francisco, unknowingly following the trail of the FBI (who in late May had responded to an informant’s claim that Kyoko was in the vicinity of Monterey—“I know the whereabouts of Kyoko Cox”—only to dismiss the assertion as the “vision” of a “flower child”).

Unfortunately, they are no more successful than the FBI had been. “I could tell they were very distressed by what was happening to them,” Rivera says, “but also [by] what was happening around the country because of Nixon’s endless war.”

John and Yoko seek treatment from a Chinese acupuncturist introduced to them by the editor and publisher of SunDance magazine. Visits to the healer’s family home in San Mateo, are kept secret by referring to John “as J. L. so people wouldn’t know who we were talking about.”