If the fundamental measure of a documentary series is how many first-hand witnesses it can recruit, John Lennon: Murder Without a Trial is unimpeachable. This three-parter has almost everyone you could ask for, apart from Yoko Ono, as it reviews the day Lennon was shot dead by Mark Chapman, in New York on 8 December 1980, and the legal investigation that followed. What it can’t control is how much of interest those people have to say – because, however much we might expect the killing of a Beatle to be a fascinating story with a hive of secrets beneath the surface, this is a sad but simple tale.
By far the strongest episode of the three is the first, concerning the killing itself. Chapman shot Lennon after watching him leave the apartment block where he lived, the Dakota building overlooking Central Park, then waiting for him to return after a trip to the recording studio. Murder Without a Trial talks to the Dakota’s security guard, who speaks for the first time, and the building’s porter. It also talks to a taxi driver who witnessed the attack, the radio journalist who conducted Lennon’s last interview earlier in the day, the producer who had overseen Lennon’s last work, the NYPD’s first and second responders and to two nurses and a doctor who failed to revive Lennon in hospital.
Between them they offer a vivid picture of events, from the blood and discarded glasses and Ono wailing with her husband’s head in her lap, to the extremely suspicious behaviour of Chapman hours before the shooting and his bewilderingly placid reaction immediately after it. There are thrillingly odd archive nuggets, too: a newscaster gathering her composure before going live to tell the US that Lennon is dead, reading a hastily written script wrongly saying he’d been murdered in his apartment; Paul McCartney, ambushed by reporters on the street and appearing strangely offhand, presumably as a result of shock; two sports commentators debating off-air whether or not to include the breaking news in their description of a Monday-night football game, before doing so as the New England Patriots line up a field goal.
A profoundly strange cultural moment is well captured. With Lennon gone, however, the onus is on Chapman to maintain the narrative and he just isn’t a terribly interesting murderer. The series flirts briefly with conspiracy theory, setting us up to think there will be an element of state skulduggery by mentioning the FBI’s surveillance of Lennon at the height of his political activism. But Lennon’s anti-war campaigning had peaked years earlier; at the time of his death, he’d only just emerged from a self-imposed hiatus after the birth of his son, Sean.
After a mention of the CIA brainwashing programme MKUltra and the odd behaviour of Robert F Kennedy assassin Sirhan Sirhan, the series takes off its tinfoil hat and focuses on the process by which lone gunman Chapman’s sanity, and thus his suitability for trial, was assessed. A psychiatrist who interviewed him speaks here for the first time, but says nothing of note. Even Chapman is an underwhelming interviewee: Murder Without a Trial has previously unheard tapes of him talking to his lawyers, but his statements are self-contradictory babble.
“I thought I would turn into somebody if I killed somebody,” Chapman says. “I thought I would turn into the character of the book.” Chapman had been found at the scene of the shooting, calmly reading JD Salinger. “I killed John Lennon to get as many people as possible to read The Catcher in the Rye.” But then later, he says: “All You Need Is Love – and $250m! [Lennon] was the biggest phoniest bastard who ever lived.”
Was Chapman insane in the legal sense, or a man with significant mental health issues who was nevertheless capable of executing a cold-blooded killing? More than 40 years on, the distinction just doesn’t seem all that important, and Chapman ended the debate himself anyway: the Lennon case is a murder without a trial because at the last moment, the defendant changed his plea to guilty, claiming that was what God had told him to do.
A segment on Chapman’s upbringing and youth in Georgia turns up a dispiriting melange of drugs, violence, depression and half-hearted religion, with the programme having impressively tracked down his pastor and an early girlfriend. She says his Beatles fandom ended abruptly when he took offence at Lennon’s infamous “more popular than Jesus” remark in 1966.
Until December 1980, Chapman remained an angry ex-fan, confused and disturbed and, above all, desperate for attention. Even a perfectly well-made documentary such as this one risks giving him more of that attention than he merits.
• John Lennon: Murder Without a Trial is on Apple TV+.
