Stalkers. Jean Ritchie

and drifted away. At 8.00 p.m. Goresh, who had been chatting with Chapman, said he was calling it a day. Chapman tried to persuade him to stay: ‘You never know, something might happen. He might go to Spain or something tonight – and you will never see him again.’

      It was as near as he could get to inviting Goresh to record on film the murder of John Lennon. The photographer did not pick up on it, and missed the scoop of a lifetime. For a couple of hours Chapman chatted with the Cuban doorman at the building. He seemed, the doorman said later, sane and normal. It was ten minutes to eleven when the Lennons returned. A few seconds later mayhem broke loose. Lennon, blood pouring from his mouth and chest, staggered into the building. Yoko screamed and screamed. The night-duty man hit a panic button, and within minutes two police cars, sirens screeching, were at the scene. John was taken to hospital, barely alive. He died shortly after, despite the desperate efforts of a seven-strong medical team.

      Chapman, while all this was going on, had taken off his coat and hat to show the police officers that he was no longer armed. He waited quietly for them to arrive, exchanging a few words with the devastated doorman, the Cuban to whom he had been talking earlier, who shook the gun from his hand and kicked it into the street. Chapman even apologized for what he had done, and when a woman who had heard the shots came running up, he told her to get out of there for her own sake. Then he took out his copy of Catcher and started to read. Not surprisingly, when the police arrived they went to arrest the wrong man, turning towards the young night-duty man, not fifteen-stone Chapman who was hanging back in the shadows.

      Chapman’s original intention was to say nothing and hand over the book, with the inscription ‘This is my Statement’ to the police, but his resolution failed him when the police grabbed him.

      ‘Please don’t hurt me,’ he pleaded, reassuring them that ‘I acted alone.’

      In the police car being taken into custody one of the cops asked him if he knew what he had just done. He replied: ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know that he was a friend of yours.’ He was just as polite and restrained when he phoned his wife Gloria in Honolulu. He gave her concise and clear instructions about getting the police to protect her from the journalists who were already gathering outside the apartment. She said she loved him and he said he loved her.

      He later explained the conflict that went on in his mind at the time of the killing, by seeing himself as two people, a child and an adult. He said the child and the adult went together to the Dakota that day, and the adult wanted to get in a cab and go home.

      ‘Then the child screams “No! No! No! Devil! Help me, Devil! Give me the power and strength to do this. I want this. I want to be somebody.”’

      He placed great emphasis on the fact that neither Yoko nor John spoke to him, as if a smile and a ‘hello’ might have saved John’s life. In his disturbed state he did not see Lennon stagger into the building, and when he realized there was no body in front of him he was not sure that he had actually done it.

      ‘I was kind of glad that he wasn’t there because I thought I had missed him or didn’t kill him or something. I just wanted the police to hurry up and come.’

      The death of the pop icon caused such an uproar that police insisted Chapman wore a bullet proof vest before his trial, and they painted the windows of his cell black so that he would not be shot by snipers. He refused to plead an insanity defence at the trial, instead admitting his guilt. The trial was therefore over quickly, with Chapman sentenced to between twenty years and life, with an order that he should receive psychiatric treatment. Because of the crime and the emotions it stirred up, it is likely that life will mean life. His own lawyer asked the judge not to impose a minimum sentence (after which Chapman could have been released) because, he said, ‘All reports come to the conclusion that he is not a sane man. It was not a sane crime. It was … a monstrously irrational killing.’ When Chapman was asked if he wished to say anything in his own defence he read out a passage from The Catcher in the Rye.

      Chapman lives in Attica Prison, New York, segregated from the other inmates. Attica is notoriously violent, and amid its shifting population there are always some who would relish the fame of being the man who killed the man who killed John Lennon.

      Gloria, Chapman’s wife, has not divorced him. For three years she lived near the prison, visiting him regularly. But she then moved back to their Honolulu home; he has said he no longer wants her to visit. She sends him money regularly.

      In a television documentary, shown in Britain in 1988, Chapman showed no remorse for killing Lennon, only regret that the star did not die immediately and that Sean was left without a father. In a television interview in 1992 he said that when he shot Lennon he did not believe he was killing a real person, he was killing an image, a record cover. He said he had undergone an exorcism performed by a priest in his prison cell, and that his demons had left him. He said he did not expect to ever be forgiven for ‘taking away a genius’.

      A psychiatrist involved in his care diagnosed Chapman as exhibiting ‘the symptoms of virtually every malady in psychiatric literature’.

      Astonishingly, Mark Chapman, who stalked and murdered John Lennon, now has his own collection of would-be stalkers, weird letter writers who mail him their assorted fantasies. He gets plenty of straightforward hate mail from Lennon fans, but he also gets love letters from women he has never met, and letters applauding what he did.

      He spends a lot of time answering them. He also spends a lot of time reading The Catcher in the Rye.

      If the death of Lennon put stalking into the public eye for the first time, it was the shooting of President Reagan by a Jodie Foster fan four months later that proved to the world that Lennon’s murder was not an isolated tragedy. The cliché ‘the price of fame’ began to have real meaning to a public which had smiled cynically every time a celebrity complained about invasion of privacy or harassment by fans. To those on modest incomes who helped their idols amass million-dollar bank balances by buying their records, watching their films or getting hooked on their TV soap characters, the stars’ whinges had always been a bit hard to take. Now, within four months, the real fear that stalked the stars had been brought out into the open. When celebrities complained about fans it was not, as their public had imagined, out of frustration at autograph hunters disturbing them in the middle of restaurant meals, or because they were unable to walk down a shopping mall without being mobbed; it was an ever-present knowledge that somewhere out there was a mentally deranged fan who had them in their sights. All they could hope was that the sights were not attached to a rifle.

      John Hinckley, who shot Reagan in the chest and seriously injured his press secretary James Brady, as well as wounding a policeman and a secret service agent, did it, he claimed, for Jodie. In his shabby motel room in Washington police found a letter to the star:

      Dear Jodie

      There is a definite possibility that I will be killed in my attempt to get Reagan. This letter is being written an hour before I leave for the Hilton Hotel [where Reagan had been lunching]. Jodie, I’m asking you to please look into your heart and at least give me the chance with this historical deed to gain your respect and love. I love you forever,

      John Hinckley

      At the time Jodie Foster was eighteen, in her first year at Yale University. She was a well-established actress, having shot to fame as a child in films like Bugsy Malone. Hinckley’s attempt on Reagan’s life largely mirrored the plot of one of her films, Taxi Driver, in which she played a teenage prostitute. The other star, Robert de Niro, played a character described in the publicity material for the film as ‘a loner incapable of communicating’ who spent ‘his off-duty hours eating junk food or sitting alone in a dingy room’. When the taxi driver is rejected by the prostitute, he sends her a letter before setting out to assassinate the President. There’s no doubt that Hinckley had seen – and been influenced by – the film, because about six months before he shot Reagan he wrote to the film’s scriptwriter, asking for an introduction to Jodie Foster. The actress also knew his name well before she heard it on the news bulletins about the shooting; he had been pushing letters under the door of her room at Yale.

      Hinckley, who was