“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all,” Mark says, his heart swelling. “Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.”

Mark knows they don’t understand the passage, don’t understand him—how, like John Lennon, he has become this generation’s voice, the one to speak out about phoniness and corruption. They lack the ability to understand, and he can’t be angry at them. They lack his superior intelligence.

Judge Edwards says he must serve a minimum of twenty years. After that, he is eligible for parole.

What follows next is testimony regarding his mental state. He tunes it out, has nothing more to say.

He has promised never to speak again.

He is taken to a maximum-security cell.

He sits on his new bed. Closing his eyes, he takes in a deep breath.

Here, he will be protected from the ugliness of the outside world. People will bring him food. Books. He’ll have all the time he could ever want to read, watch TV. To think.

It’s wonderful.

The cell door slides shut and locks.

Mark David Chapman smiles.

I’m home.

Notes

Prologue

vii Well, if you get a .22: Jack Jones, Let Me Take You Down: Inside the Mind of Mark David Chapman, the Man Who Killed John Lennon (New York: Villard Books, 1992), 192.

vii The safest way to transport: Associated Press, “How John Lennon’s Killer Mark David Chapman Brought Legal Gun to NY 35 Years Ago,” Syracuse.com, December 8, 2015.

viii his thoughts turning to the five bullets: In this scene and others without available firsthand accounts, the reflections or words of Mark David Chapman and the people he interacts with have been reconstructed based on available third-party sources and interviews.

viii changes in air pressure: E. R. Shipp, “Chapman Given 20 Years in Lennon Slaying,” New York Times, August 25, 1981.

ix “I’m a recording engineer”: James R. Gaines, “Descent into Madness,” People, June 22, 1981.

ix “I’m working with John Lennon and Paul McCartney”: Gaines, “Descent into Madness.”

ix bag of coke: Gaines, “Descent into Madness.”

ix “But I’d plug him anyway”: Gaines, “Descent into Madness.”

x “I’m Mark Chapman”: Gaines, “Descent into Madness.”

Chapter 1

1 “a great fellow”: Philip Norman, John Lennon: The Life (New York: Ecco, 2008), 103.

2 “You lose a mother—and you find a guitar?”: Hunter Davies, The Beatles: The Authorized Biography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 28.