Mark, Jose, and John Lennon

It was 33 years ago this Sunday that John Lennon was gunned down outside the Dakota apartments in New York City. He was shot at 10:50 p.m., pronounced dead at 11:20, and by midnight the grim news was going forth to a shocked world. Most Americans heard the news that night from Howard Cosell who made the announcement during ABC’s Monday Night Football. I had spent most of that day in bed with the flu and had fallen asleep during a repeat of The Tonight Show. In one of those eerie moments when I was drifting between sleep and consciousness, I heard a bulletin from NBC News which said Lennon had been killed by “a local screwball.” In those pre-Internet days, my first instinct after digesting the news was to turn on the radio. A station that generally veered to the middle of the road was playing “God,” the rarely heard blasphemous centerpiece of the Plastic Ono Band album. It was then that I knew I wasn’t dreaming

The doctor on duty at Roosevelt Hospital Emergency Room that night said that though Lennon‘s killer claimed to have no previous experience with firearms, each of the bullets in his prey’s body were right on target and destroyed the arteries that carry blood to the heart. Of course, the alleged killer was easily apprehended since he made no attempt to flee, having decided to sit down and read The Catcher in the Rye while waiting for police to arrest him. Identified as Mark David Chapman, he fit the now familiar profile of the "lone assassin." That was the initial clue that he might have been a patsy, another of the CIA’s Manchurian Candidates, brainwashed into taking the fall for a killing that he may or may not have committed and which was planned by other parties.

In retrospect, it should have seemed obvious back in 1980. In Rolling Stone’s special issue memorializing Lennon, all but one player on the scene that night in December 1980 was identified.

It was Jay Hastings, an off-duty doorman, who futilely tried to fashion a tourniquet to prevent the massive bleeding after Lennon stumbled into a nearby office. Two police officers, Jim Moran and Bill Gamble, carried Lennon’s wounded body into the patrol car that took him to Roosevelt Hospital. The city’s medical examiner, Elliott Gross, was identified, as was Richard J. Nicastro, deputy chief of Manhattan detectives, Dr. Stephen Lynn, who made the official announcement that Lennon was dead, and even A. Burton, the hospital’s director of public relations.

Who was missing?

In Rolling Stone, he was identified only as “The doorman stationed outside” and “the other doorman.” He was the one who identified Chapman as the assailant. As Lennon, in his persona of Dr. Winston O’ Boogie, wrote on the back cover of his 1975 greatest hits collection, Shaved Fish, “A conspiracy of silence speaks louder than words.” The silence concerning “The doorman stationed outside” continued until 1987 when People magazine identified him as Jose Perdomo.

Who was Jose Perdomo?

In The Illuminati Zone, William Fevers reports that Jose Jacquin Sanjenis Perdomo “was a Cuban exile who participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, the failed CIA operation that much of the evidence suggests was led by George H. W. Bush, former CIA director and the vice-president elect at the time of Lennon’s murder.” In Let Me Take You Down, author Jack Jones writes that Chapman frequently discussed the Bay of Pigs with Perdomo while the alleged killer was stalking his prey at the Dakota. Before embarking on his doorman career, Perdomo was on the CIA’s payroll where he worked with Frank Sturgis, the convicted Watergate burglar employed by Richard Nixon, the president who wanted Lennon deported and encouraged the FBI to harass him in the early ‘70s. Sturgis is also believed to have had a hand in the Kennedy assassination.

If Chapman had no previous experience with firearms, Perdomo almost certainly did.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that Perdomo, the CIA agent and Dakota doorman, was the true assassin on the night of December 8, 1980. Perdomo said it was Chapman. The police said it was Chapman. The news media said it was Chapman. Hell, even Chapman said it was Chapman. The only ones who would say it might not have been Chapman are “conspiracy theorists,” and the same people who tell us it was Chapman would also say that “conspiracy theorists” are kooks and crazies. Let's get it straight: It was Chapman.

Say it with me:

It was Chapman.

It was Chapman.

It was Chapman.

Now go back to sleep.

Brian W. Fairbanks

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