“Maybe he is watching me from above,” Julian reflects. “It would be nice if he was. I guess I’ll find out someday.”

Before dawn on Sunday, December 14, the first mourners begin to gather in Central Park for the silent vigil scheduled for 2:00 p.m. At that hour, one hundred thousand people stand with their heads bowed. The only sounds are the buzzing of news helicopters and the flapping of American flags lowered to half-staff.

On a white poster board, one man has sandwiched a youthful photo of Lennon between two peace signs. The hand-lettered sign pleads, WHY?

Mourners begin to disperse, spreading a trail of flowers in their wake. “The dream is over,” they sing, repeating the chorus from “God,” the song that climaxes John’s emotionally raw first solo album.

“Now Daddy is part of God,” Sean tells his mother. “I guess when you die you become much bigger because you’re part of everything.”

—

August 24, 1981

Life has been good to him these past eight months.

Wonderful, in fact. He has never slept better in his entire life.

The psychiatrists retained by both sides can’t figure him out. They give conflicting reports, with defense experts declaring him to be mentally unfit and government experts rejecting his insanity claims. He is diagnosed by one defense doctor as a paranoid schizophrenic.

It’s all quite entertaining.

Prosecuting attorneys Kim Hogrefe and Allen Sullivan believe he is a coldhearted, calculated killer. Key to their case is the fact that he bought the gun in Hawaii, made multiple trips to New York, had the presence of mind to fly to Atlanta to buy bullets, and knew to smuggle the gun in his luggage so it would not be found.

“If he was obsessed with anything, it was bringing attention to himself,” Hogrefe has said. “He was narcissistic, he was grandiose. He wanted to bring attention to himself. The fact that John Lennon was the victim here was simply because John Lennon was available, publicly available, and others were not.”

Mark has an epiphany one night while sitting in a lounge at Rikers Island, watching a movie called The Bunker. It’s about the last days of Hitler. He talks about the movie with his defense attorney’s cocounselor, David Suggs.

“It’s quite amazing, when you think about it,” Mark says.

“I’m not following.”

“Hitler. Look at what he was facing, and yet he did not give up his principles and his ideas.” Mark smiles. “And then it hit me, like a joyful thing, that I was called out for a special purpose, to promote the reading of the book.”

Mark pens a letter to the New York Times. “It is my sincere belief that this written statement will not only stimulate the reading of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, but will also help many to understand what has happened.”

*  *  *