WHEN Mark Chapman fired four shots into John Lennon four decades ago there seemed little doubt who was responsible for the cold-blooded murder.
Immediately after the shooting outside the former Beatle’s New York home on December 8, 1980, the killer dropped his gun and waited for the police to arrive.
But a new documentary series raises questions about whether Chapman could have been hypnotised or controlled by shadowy forces.
In the three-part Apple TV+ series a pal of John’s reveals for the first time that the singer’s widow Yoko Ono asked him to look into a possible conspiracy.
And he discovered that the US secret services had followed and bugged the peace-campaigning couple because of their radical ideas.
Confidential documents reveal that the FBI considered them “dangerous” and that President Richard Nixon wanted their activities stopped.
If jobless oddball Chapman seems an unlikely assassin, the fact that the CIA had carried out experiments to see if mind control was possible only adds to the murder’s mystique.
Elliot Mintz, who used to be a spokesman for John and Yoko, says: “I’ve never expressed this before.
“One of the things Yoko asked me was to look into the various conspiracy theories after John’s murder.
“The two of them were convinced that the Dakota building, their apartment area, was being bugged.”
John and Yoko were arguably the world’s best-known peace campaigners during the Vietnam War.
In 1969 they held “bed-ins for peace” and John released the anti-war anthem Give Peace A Chance.
That year Republican Nixon became US President and approved the secret carpet-bombing of Vietnam’s neighbour Cambodia.
John believed his phone was being tapped and saw men loitering outside his door.
He once said: “I realised this was serious. They were coming for me, one way or another.”
While that might sound paranoid, the FBI really were on his tail. Confidential files revealed that agents had been ordered to follow and wire-tap the couple.
At the end of one document, a note in capital letters says: “All extremists should be considered dangerous.”
Elliot, 78, who was also a DJ on underground radio, says: “There were hundreds and hundreds of pages written to the director of the FBI from Richard Nixon, where it was determined that John and Yoko were to be followed, monitored and steps were taken on the highest level of government to do something about the Lennon problem.”
Following the Watergate scandal Nixon was forced to resign in shame in 1974 and a year later US forces exited Vietnam for good.
But John remained a thorn in the side of the US government.
He expressed a distrust for the police, took illegal substances and his 1971 single Imagine asked people to think of a world with no possessions or national borders.
In his final interview, recorded just hours before his death aged 40 and aired in the documentary, John said: “People have the power to make the society they want.”
Repeated attempts by British-born John to obtain US citizenship had failed. But he had largely kept a low profile for five years before his murder and didn’t appear to be a critic of President Jimmy Carter.
However, Chapman did not have an obvious motive either. Various bizarre explanations have been given, with the killer once saying he did it to promote the reading of JD Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher In The Rye.
He had modelled himself on its main character Holden Caulfield, a symbol of teenage rebellion.
But the prosecution claimed Chap-man simply wished to be famous.
In one confession, he said: “I thought I would turn into somebody if I killed somebody.”
Witnesses to the murder certainly found his behaviour odd for a killer.
Taxi driver Richard Peterson says in the show: “After he shot him, Chapman was still standing there with the gun, took off his overcoat and pulled out that book and held it up — Catcher In The Rye.”
The police officers were equally puzzled by Chapman. One, Tony Palma, asked him: “Do you realise what you’ve done?” and the accused replied: “Yes, I just killed myself, I’m John Lennon.”
A police lieutenant who questioned Chapman reportedly told British barrister and writer Fenton Bresler: “He looked as if he could have been programmed.”
Chapman, a married man who lived in Hawaii, admitted to the killing, but Detective Ron Hoffman, who was in charge of the investigation, speculated that there could be more to the case.
He says: “We had the killer, we were positive about that, we wanted to close every possibility that he had no help.
“Was he alone, was there somebody behind the lines, was it a conspiracy — all these questions started running through my mind.” In Chapman’s room Hoffman found his personal effects carefully laid out on a desk, including his passport and a Bible open at the Gospel of John.
This pointed to a premeditated act and there was no evidence he corresponded with a co-conspirator, though that still leaves the hypnosis theory.
From the 1950s, the CIA ran a 20-year top-secret project, codenamed MKUltra, that used drug addicts and mental health patients in mind-control experiments.
Chapman fits that profile because he had both a history of suicidal feelings and drug abuse.
His former girlfriend Jessica Blank-enship, who met him at a church retreat aged 16, remembered him having a nervous breakdown and trying to kill himself.
She adds: “He particularly liked The Beatles until John Lennon said they were more popular than Jesus Christ.”
Childhood friend Vance Hunter recalled Chapman taking “eight hits of LSD 25, which was very powerful” over one weekend, and trying opium.
After the killing Chapman was repeatedly interviewed by the police and his own legal team.
On one tape he described the seconds before firing the gun, saying: “All I remember is I had a voice in my head saying, ‘Do it, do it, do it, do it’.”
Over the years since the killing, conspiracy theorists have been out in force.
Fenton Bresler believed Chapman was a victim of a mind control programme and put the blame on the CIA in his 1989 book The Murder Of John Lennon.
In 2018 documentary Drugs As Weapons Against Us, John Potash suggested the same agency played some part in John’s death.
But Potash has also claimed the CIA had a hand in the murder of rapper Tupac Shakur and the suicide of rocker Kurt Cobain.
One other mysterious detail is that President Ronald Reagan’s would-be assassin John Hinckley Jr also had a copy of Catcher In The Rye.
Reagan survived being shot at close range by Hinckley in 1981, just three months after John’s murder.
But the idea that the former Beatle was killed by the State has gathered few supporters. Even Chapman’s own lawyers did not put forward that defence.
Instead his legal team maintains that the miscarriage of justice in this case was allowing a psychologically disturbed man to enter a guilty plea.
But the court decided Chapman was of sound mind and in August 1981 he was sentenced to 20 years to life. He remains in prison today, after 12 parole hearings.
David Suggs, who helped to put Chapman’s defence together, says: “This isn’t a whodunnit. Our intention was to prove this man was insane.”
Indeed, insanity remains a credible reason for the murder, and Suggs adds: “He thought he was going to turn literally into Holden Caulfield in The Catcher In The Rye.”
