First published in The Daily Mail, 10 March 2001
INSIDE THE MIND OF LENNON'S KILLER
On the surface MDC seemed talented, likable and hard working. Nothing hinted at his crazed obsession with John Lennon. But as our new series exploring the minds of celebrity stalkers reveals, he lived in a bizarre world of drugs, paranoia and imaginary 'little people' who revered him as God.
By Richard Gallagher
The scourge of stalking has become one of phenomena's of our age. Only last week, a crazed woman who threatened to kill pop singer Billie Piper received a suspended jail sentence. Other cases seem to occur almost daily. Now, in the first of two articles exploring the subject, concluding on Monday, the author of a new book offers a compelling analysis of on of the most famous stalkers of all...
Sean was the son of famous parents. He was used to seeing people grouped around the doorway to his home, hoping to catch a glimpse of his father. On that cold day in December 1980, as the five year old went out with his nanny, he recognized the regulars.
But there was also one he hadn't seen before: a plump, amiable-looking young man in a funny russian hat and a long coat.
The man came forward to say hello to Sean, gripping the little lads tiny fist with a hand that was warm and clammy from having been deep inside his coat pocket.
The stranger told Sean he had traveled a very long way to be here outside this sprawling New York mansion block overlooking Central Park - all the way from Hawaii.
Then, telling the child to look after himself, he put his hand back into his pocket, and wrapped his fingers once more round the unseen handle of a loaded .38 revolver.
Although Sean had no way of knowing it, the youth in the funny hat was called MDC, and he was that most dangerously unpredictable of human beings, a stalker.
He had come to New York with the sole intention of assassinating his own one-time hero, Sean's father John Lennon.
Having met the son, later that night MDC would confront the man himself on that same stretch of pavement outside the Dakota building on West 72nd Street. Forty year old Lennon had been in the recording studio all day and was coming home with his wife, Yoko Ono, beside him.
This time MDC took the gun from his pocket and fired five shots into Lennon's back as he walked into the building. Later he said that, seconds before he fired, a voice came into his head telling him: "Do it! Do it! Do it! Do it!"
As the former Beatle lay dying, MDC took off his coat and hat to show he had no more weapons hidden about him.
As blue lights flashed, sirens wailed and police and paramedics hurtled to the scene, he just paced up and down, trying to read from a book that had become his obsession - J. D. Salinger's novel of adolescent angst, The Catcher in The Rye.
The truth was that at 25, MDC was still a child in a man's body. His mild and inoffensive appearance concealed a screaming mess of grief and pain.
But in that moment, he had finally achieved what he had always wanted: an identity, a sense of himself that would never leave him. He was now a world famous assassin.
The killing of John Lennon that night was not just the murder of the decade (or the century as some would have it). This was also the moment when stalking first rose to public prominence.
Now, two decades on, it seems to be everywhere. Indeed, it has been called the fastest growing crime of our times. But just what is it that drives one human being to pursue another? What makes them decide that their life, perhaps their very survival, is bound up with that of their victim?
How do these obsessions arise, and why do they spin out of control? What is it that can turn a man like MDC seemingly no more than an amiable dreamer, into a single-minded murderer?
*
Had they met at some other point in their lives it is more than possible that John Lennon would have liked MDC. Most people did.
He was hard-working, intelligent, thoughtful and perceptive. He had a sincerity which, though often rather intense was also disarming. He often achieved success at his various jobs, and won the admiration of those around him.
MDC had the ability to be all things to all men - he would change himself to please whoever he was with at a particular time. This chameleon quality was reflected in the way he attacked each and every new experience in his life as though he totally believed in it.
By the time he became the world's most famous stalker, he had undergone several drastic character changes. He had began as a typical High School nerd and the metamorphised into a scary, drug crazed hippie. Then he changed again, into a feverant born-again Christian.
There was no logical progression from one role or to the next. They were snatched at, enthusiastically embraced to the exclusion of everything else and then, finally, bitterly discarded.
MDC borrowed these personas because he thought they might help him 'be somebody'. He donned them like costumes, approaching each new part he played with the skill of an actor.
But ultimately, he found no real satisfaction. For inside himself, when the play-acting was over, there was no firm identity of his own.
The clues were there in his outwardly conventional childhood in the suburbs of the American South. MDC was born in Fort Worth, Texas on May 10, 1955, but grew up in Dacatur, Georgia, where his father David worked as a debt collector for a bank after leaving the air force. It was an unhappy household in which his mother, Diane often looked to him for protection against her husband's rages.. MDC would sometimes interpose his body between his warring parents.
His mother would get into his bed at night, assuring him that she had only married his father so that he could be born. Perhaps more significantly, she told him over and over that he was destined to become a great and important person.
Understandably, MDC became confused between his apparent destiny as a superhero and the knowledge that inside he was just a frightened, insecure child. That split in his personality would never be healed and lay at the heart of all his troubles.
From an early age, he escaped into a fantasy world in which his bedroom became populated by a race of 'little people'. MDC was their ruler and their god. He would use these creatures of his imagination as badly as any tyrant.
When he was angry, he would blow the up by the thousand, imaging their screams of terror as the fantasy cities he had created for them crashed down.
His 'subjects' though, were always forgiving. Unlike real people who surrounded him, they understood and respected him. They were his entertainment, his escape and the tenuous rope by which he anchored his sanity.
MDC would sing to them, too, against the backing of his favorite Beatles albums. Hugging himself and rocking his body to the music, and the youngster would try and obliterate the frightening sounds of his parents arguments.
*
As he grew older, MDC found other answers to his problems. At the age of 14 he discovered the liberating power of psychedelic drugs.
The Beatles bore some of the responsibility for this. The pop group had come to play a central role in his psyche and he had papered the walls of his room with their posters.
"He was a John Lennon fanatic," recalled school friend, Garry Limuti. "He liked Lennon's wit and cynicism - he was our favorite Beatle."
But by the late sixties, the group had stopped being the clean and wholesome mop-tops of their early days and were now at the vanguard of hippie excess.
As MDC later explained: "They were no longer the Beatles whose music I had played for my Little People. They were into long hair, beards, meditation and drugs."
Like many of his contemporaries, MDC was happy to embrace this new world. But he did so with a special ardor - the desperation of someone with a gap where his personality should have been, desperately trying to find an identity though would make him feel part of life.
As a hippie , MDC felt involved with other people for the first time. He grew his hair, didn't wash, wore dirty jeans and took to glue sniffing, marijuana and LSD.
Soon the signs of drug dependency were showing. He would laugh hysterically at nothing and stare into space for long periods. In place of his 'little people', he weaved fantasies about imaginary computers that monitored his bodily needs and told him when to eat, drink or sleep.
For others this was the age of 'peace and love', but not for MDC. Under the influence of drugs, he became aware of a boiling anger inside him. He began having violent fantasies about killing people.
During one drug session, he recalled, he remained awake after his friends passed out. Suddenly, he noticed there was a knife in the room. "Something inside me - I recognize it now as a spiritual force, but I didn't know it at the time - was trying to urge me to pick up the knife and stab it into these guys. I didn't do it, but it was a compelling urge to pick up the knife and kill these people."
The void inside MDC was being fulfilled but powerful, negative forces. He enthusiastically followed wherever they took him.
Running away from home, he started living with some dropouts on a beach in Miami. They left him when his money ran out and for a short time he acted out the classic childhood fantasy of living with some fairground folk.
Eventually he returned home with a distraught mother and an angry father - only to astonish them with his latest change of direction. For it was now that MDC discovered God.
A classmate persuaded him to go to a Presbyterian retreat, though it wasn't the religion that attracted him but the large number of girls who were attending.
One girl, Jessica Blankenship, became a special friend. They had known each other as small children and had even stood side by side for a junior school photograph (although MDC hated the picture, because to his acute embarrassment, the elasticated waistband on his underpants was showing.)
Now Jessica and MDC grew close again. An affectionate, but entirely chaste, relationship began.
Among this gathering of young Christians, MDC found a ready-made family of warm, supportive and loving people. Their beliefs made them ready to welcome even the most inadequate stranger into their midst, and MDC's history of drugs and sin only served to make him more alluring as a convert.
Few sinners could have been more easily led. MDC renounced his long hair and scruffy clothes in favour of a respectable image and launched into his new faith with impressive fervor.
Weaning him off drugs was did present more of a challenge, and he even managed to persuade his fellow young Christians to try LSD. The result was the total disruption of an evangelical convention, with one youth stripping naked and running into a lake, shouting happy nonsense as he did so.
But in the end MDC turned completely to Christ. His new faith demanded total rejection of his previous role models - including his one time hero, Lennon.
The Beatle had always taken digs at religion. He had once famously said The Beatles were more popular than Jesus; his song Imagine rejected the idea of Heaven.
MDC the Christian could not countenance such provocative statements and radical thoughts. He denounced Lennon as a communist and blasphemer.
At his preyer meetings he would paraphrase Imagine by singing "Imagine John Lennon is dead." At this stage though there is no indication that the threat was real.
In any event, MDC's ferverent Christian phase did not last long. Once he was no longer the groups latest covert, and his friends' attention turned to more recent arrivals, he began to loose interest.
But one important introduction had been made during this period. A member of the group had recommended a book to MDC: J. G. Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye.
Catcher is a gentle, knowing story which describes the thoughts and frustrations of 16-year-old Holden Caulfield, who, expelled from school, wanders around New York, staying in hotels and trying to bridge the gap between adolescence and adulthood.
He smokes, drinks and attempts to have sex with a prostitute. He sees through the facade of people who attempt to give him advice, and scorns the clumsy attempts of his classmates to wrestle with their burgeoning adulthood. He describes them all with a word which MDC adopted as his all-encompassing pejorative; "Phonies".
The novel is burrowed into MDC's brain so deeply that he came to believe that it spoke directly to him and was offering him guidance.
Eventually it would urge him to murder. For MDC would become convinced that John Lennon was the greatest phoney of all, a middle aged sell-out who had betrayed the youthful idealism of his early career.
*
MDC's religious passion having abated, the 17-year-old now looked around for a new person to become. Discovering he had a genuine talent for taking care of children, he took a job as a youth worker with the YMCA.
Chapman was immensely popular with his young charges, who saw him as one of themselves. In fact, he was one of them - far happier among children than when tackling the adult world, with all its challenges and responsibilities.
Respected and admired, he was truly happy at last. He received glowing reports from his supervisor, who said he was destined for a wonderful career.
MDC was seconded to a camp in Arkansas, looking after Vietnamese Boat People. Again, he threw himself into his new role, sometimes working 16 hours a day. And again, he was a great success - although the strain of working with such desperate people soon grew too much for him.
It was during this period that MDC lost his virginity. He began sharing a room with a woman working at the camp, and they ended up sharing a bed.
Far from being pleased, MDC was consumed by guilt. He had already promised himself to Jessica, the girl at his first Christian retreat. He viewed her as his fiance, and yet he had not been strong enough to save himself for her.
When Jessica came to visit him, he did not own up to his affair. The couple talked about engagement plans and all seemed well.
He left the YMCA and enrolled as a student at the college Jessica was already attending. She would never know he had cheated on her, but it continued to trouble his conscience. He realized he had now joined the world of adults, the world where people indulge in sex and and deceit, the world where everything and everyone is phoney.
The realism dented his hopes and dreams and overwhelmed him. Everything he had done, he decided, was a mockery. Success and happiness were beyond his reach. He was a nobody and tired of fighting fate.
Soon he and Jessica had split up. He decided to kill himself, to wipe out his nothing of a life. Nobody would even notice he had gone.
At a last adventure, MDC decided to go to Hawaii. There, the charms of the islands took the edge off his depression and he rang Jessica to say he wanted her back.
She let him think there was still a chance for the two of them - faced with a man on the verge of suicide, there was little else she could do - and he came home.
He was, he later admitted, 'crushed' to find Jessica had no real interest in resuming their relationship. For a while he tried to settle down to life with his family again, but this was impossible.
There were too many rows and, needing to escape, he decided he would return to Hawaii, get a job in one of the luxury resorts there and live out his days, as he saw it, in a paradise of wealth and sunshine.
It was a childish fantasy, but MDC was impetuous and believed in following his instinct. He spent the last of his savings on a one-way ticket, which meant that when he got there he was forced to take a nasty, low paid job in the kitchens of a food factory.
Instead of a life of glamour, he could barely afford a room at the YMCA. Depression had followed him to paradise and he sank to the lowest ebb of his life.
He hated the world because it was cruel and unjust; he hated himself because he was not strong enough to cope. He was drinking heavily and talked for hours to a suicide helpline.
Finally, he hired a car and, after eating his 'last' meal (the food was included in the hire price of the vehicle) he drove to a quiet beach where he ran a hose from the exhaust in through the windows.
Feeling peaceful at last, he lay back, closed his eyes and waited for oblivion.
Instead, he was awoken by a fisherman. The heat of the engine had melted the rubber hose at the point where it connected to the exhaust. A fluke had saved his life.
To MDC, this could be no mere accident of fortune. He had been saved for a reason. He said a preyer, thanking God for his deliverance and promising always to listen to Him in the future.
From here on, his life was in the hands of something bigger than himself, something that would not let him down. There would, he knew, be signs to show him the path.
The next morning he admitted himself to hospital for treatment for depression. He allowed himself to cal lapse utterly for a few days before making a remarkable recovery.
Soon he was chatting amicably with other patients and even singing to them. Throughout his stay, he was co-operative and articulate. Two weeks later he was discharged.
He took a job at the hospital as a maintenance man and quickly made himself a popular figure around the place. Feeling immeasurably better, he decided on a holiday, a round-the-world tour, and went to see a travel agent.
There he was served by a Japanese-American woman called Gloria Abe. Over the next few days, as she helped org anise his trip, he flirted with her and bought her presents of flowers and soft toys.
Gloria felt drawn to MDC, too, and when he set out on his journey in July 1978, she was at the airport to see him off. They had grown close and she gave him a meaningful goodbye kiss. He promised to write to her everyday.
His holiday was a mixed experience. His depressions were with him much of the time, unassuaged by a night in Bangkok with a drunken prostitute. On his return to Hawaii, Gloria was waiting.
*
MDC did not hide his dark side from his new girlfriend. She seemed to be patient, and supplied with him a willing ear as he discussed his hopes and fears.
Gloria found his troubled soul attractive: it proved him to be sensitive and thoughtful. Soon they were married, with MDC adopting his new role as devoted husband with characteristic energy.
But wedded bliss was interrupted when his parents divorced and his mother announced she was going to live near her son in Hawaii. MDC hated the idea.
This was his special place, the haven where he had at last managed to find some semblance of being himself, independant of the cloying influences of his childhood. His mother's presence was intrusive and restrictive.
The couple now seemed to have little time alone together, and Gloria sensed her husband was torn between the two women in his life.
Knowing he would not be strong enough to cope, she adopted the role of the meek and submissive wife who allowed her husband to have his own way in all things.
Meanwhile, MDC worried that he wasn't living up to his own idea of what a married man should be. He needed to be more successful. Being a hospital maintenance man was no longer good enough, and he applied for a job as the clinic's public relations representative. He was quickly out of his depth, especially since his emotional equilibrium was now beginning to fall apart again. He was overeating, moody and often disagreeable.
He would lose his Gloria and when she was late leaving work one day, he made her hand in her notice.
This placed great strains on the couples resources, as he was also running up debts on his credits cards and had insisted on moving to a more expensive apartment.
Eventually, his increasingly erratic behavior at work became impossible to ignore and he was asked to resign.
Embracing the failure he thought he deserved, he took a menial job as a security guard. And so it came to 1980; the year when the dam of his psyche would finally burst.
*
MDC was talking to his imaginary 'little people' again, relying on them for advice on how to run his life and get out of debt.
His moods leapt manically from wild enthusiasm to total despair. Then one day he came across a book by his former hero, John Lennon. It was called One Day At A Time [?] As he read it, MDC became angry.
'Here was a successful man who had the world on a chain. And there I was, not even a link of that chain. Just a person who had no personality, a walking void. At that moment, something inside me just broke.'
Fueled by early-morning drinking, he slipped steadily deeper in to paranoia. He re-read The Catcher In The Rye and deduced that its hero was speaking directly to him alone. He was Holden Caulfield.
His tortured mind began to make connections between the various events and disappointments which had brought him to his present state. He described his emotions as being like a cyclone - sucking him into a spiral of chaos from which he knew he would never escape.
The idea of murder appeared in the middle of this storm, and it came to him as though it were a means of shelter. It would be the ultimate, cathartic action which would at last make sense of his life. MDC came to believe he had to assassinate his one time hero.
It was in September 1980 that he set out on his momentous journey. He had already brought a revolver, and obtained a permit for it, though as yet he had no ammunition.
Arriving in New York, he registered at the Waldorf Hotel. This was a big occasion for him - the biggest in his life - and he was not going to stint on the cost.
At first he behaved like any other tourist. He visited the sights, he went to see Broadway shows. He befriended several women whom he wined and dined and tried to impress. He kept hinting that he was up to something. "You're going to hear about me," he told them.
He became a regular visitor outside the Dakota Building and became friendly with the guards on the door, though he was disappointed when he couldn't get an answer to his questions about Lennon's movements. Ge was careful to come across as sane and decent.
He tried to buy bullets for his gun, but there was a snag ; he did not have a firearms lisenced for New York and was refused. He made a hurried trip to his home state of Georgia to buy the ammunition he needed.
The enormity of what he was planning now frightened him and he rang Gloria to tell her what he was up to, but that he had changed his mind and was coming home. His love for her, he said, had made him see sense.
The adult MDC had won a victory, but not for long; the vindictive child inside him was still screaming for revenge against the man he blamed for all his troubles.
No sooner had he returned home to Hawaii than the insist ant message was resounding in his head once more, "Kill John Lennon, kill John Lennon."
It was a road that he did not have to go down. He had a wife who loved him and stood by him; he had many talents; he had a home and, though there were financial problems, he could have dealt with them.
But he remained crippled inside. The demon child continued to shout for attention.
Back in Hawaii, he began to 'play' at being a stalker. He would ring the public phone across the road from his apartment and when some unsuspecting passer-by answered it, he would say he was going to kill them. He took a dislike to one of the doctors at the old hospital and he would ring and threaten him.
But Lennon was never far from his thoughts, and early in December he set off for New York once again. This time he would not return.
There are always fans outside the Dakota Building, some were regulars - like the two young women MDC befriended and who pointed out young Sean being taken out for a walk by his nanny.
For most of the day the unsuspecting fans chatted to the man who was about to murder their idol. They even suggested he bought a copy of Lennon's new album, Double Fantasy, and MDC had it with him when Lennon appeared at the door.
This was the first time MDC had actually ever seen Lennon and he was suddenly overawed. Instead of shooting him, he thrust the record at him and Lennon signed it without paying much attention to the wide-eyed young man.
MDC could have called the whole thing off there and then. Part of him appreciated that Lennon had never done him any harm and had even been pleasant to him just then, if only for a few seconds.
But if he had given up his quest, he would have forever buried the idea of being a 'somebody'. In his own mind, he would be the man who went to New York to murder John Lennon and then backed out. His life would amount to nothing more than a signature on an album and a memory of something he might have done.
Lennon would be returning home later that evening. MDC waited.
Later he would say, "All that rage came spilling out and I killed the hero of my childhood. All the rage at the world and in myself and in my disappointments and disillusions. All those feelings I kept pent up, feelings that the child couldn't handle. Feelings that the adult was supposed to handle but couldn't.
"I had to usurp someone else's importance, someone else's success. I was Mr Nobody until I killed the biggest somebody on Earth."
They were the words that would strike a chord with countless other celebrity stalkers.
On Monday, I will tell the story of one who was born within days of MDC, became besotted by a beautiful, Hollywood actress and attempt what is perhaps America's ultimate crime - the assassination of a President.
Extracted from 'I'll Be Watching You" by Richard Gallagher. © Richard Gallagher 2001
