From: les@jmdl.com (JMDL Digest) To: joni-digest@smoe.org Subject: JMDL Digest V2000 #513 Reply-To: joni@smoe.org Sender: les@jmdl.com Errors-To: les@jmdl.com Precedence: bulk Archives: http://www.smoe.org/lists/joni Websites: http://www.jmdl.com http://www.jonimitchell.com Unsubscribe: mailto:joni-digest-request@smoe.org?body=unsubscribe JMDL Digest Monday, September 25 2000 Volume 2000 : Number 513 The 'Official' Joni Mitchell Homepage, created by Wally Breese, can be found at http://www.jonimitchell.com. It contains the latest news, a detailed bio, Original Interviews, essays, lyrics and much much more. --- The JMDL website can be found at http://www.jmdl.com and contains interviews, articles, the member gallery, archives, and much more. --- Ashara has set up a "Wally Breese Memorial Fund" with all donations going directly towards the upkeep of the website. Wally kept the website going with his own funds. it is now up to US to help Jim continue. If you would like to donate to this fund, please make all checks payable to: Jim Johanson and send them to: Ashara Stansfield P.O. Box 215 Topsfield, MA. 01983 USA ========== TOPICS and authors in this Digest: -------- Clamoring For A Tape Tree! ["Jim L'Hommedieu" ] Uh Oh... (long) [JRMCo1@aol.com] What song, please? [JRMCo1@aol.com] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2000 01:58:42 -0400 From: "Jim L'Hommedieu" Subject: Clamoring For A Tape Tree! * Yes, yes! What Michael Paz said! Let's get a tree going right away- before the Holidays!! * I also want to say that I was also saddened by the Heche/DeGenerges split. I identified with Anne wandering around, dazed and confused. ANYWAY..... I am sorry when anyone breaks up. (although Meg Ryan is available again...... Hmmmmmmm.) All the best, Jim L'Hommedieu ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2000 02:16:36 EDT From: JRMCo1@aol.com Subject: Uh Oh... (long) The JC is near the end. Sorry for the length, but I didn't want to paraphrase this one. - -Julius ___ 'I'm lucky to be alive - I deserved to die' 09/25/2000 The Express Copyright (C) 2000 The Express; Source: World Reporter (TM) The man who 20 years ago pumped three bullets into the heart of John Lennon, murdering the Beatle in front of his wife Yoko Ono and the world's media, has spoken for the first time in eight years in a world exclusive interview for the Daily Express. Timed ahead of his parole-board hearing next week, the killer sensationally explains for the first time why he killed John Lennon and why he now believes he deserves his freedom. The words mark a complete change of heart for assassin Mark Chapman, 45, who up until now has always believed he would die in prison. However, inspired by hope that he may be released following his parole hearing, Chapman's talk is now of preparing for life beyond Attica prison in New York state, where he has spent the past 20 years for the killing which numbed the world. With the date of the hearing, October 3, circled on a calendar on his cell wall, Chapman opens his heart and mind in a frank and forthright account of his crime, his punishment and his changed expectations. A burly six footer, Chapman has become grossly overweight since his last media appearance and, self-conscious of his size he now refuses to be photographed. Under New York state law he automatically comes up for parole having served 20 years, and has the right to indicate before the board whether he wants to be freed. In a move that to some will seem grotesque, Chapman not only wants his freedom but has prepared a case to present to his parole board next week. The self-absorbed, immature nobody who came out of the shadows on December 8, 1980, wanting desperately to be a somebody, killed Lennon, he freely admits, as his passport to fame. Chapman was sentenced to life in prison but admits that even so he revelled in the notoriety, the TV interviews, newspaper articles and magazine profiles which followed from murdering one of the most famous men in the world. "Sure, I don't think gloat is the word. But my identity was such, so low that I had to kill somebody. So, naturally, I'm going to, you know, proclaim some of that and try to feel good about myself." Now, however, Chapman dreams of being "Mr Nobody" again. "I don't know how easy that would be but I'd try just to lead an ordinary life again. Stay out of the papers. There's not many places to go once you've killed someone like John Lennon." Keen to paint himself as a changed, adjusted, deeply religious and remorseful man, a "liberal" who recognises what he did as "an awesome thing", Chapman believes he can now spread the word of Christianity if he were allowed his freedom. He plans to tell the parole board that he would dedicate himself to touring as a Christian revivalist. "I could have an impact, a positive impact," he insists. "I could travel to different places and tell people what happened and how their answer, as well as mine, is in Jesus." There are even friends, he claims, who would look after him. "There's people here who like me," he says. Incredibly, Chapman also believes that John Lennon would forgive him and support his request for parole. "I think he would be liberal, I think he would care. I think he would probably want to see me released. That's my opinion." Chapman today prefers not to revel in the infamy he once so desperately craved for his dreadful crime. "I don't like to be reminded of it at all." Struggling to explain the senselessness of his attack, Chapman told the Daily Express that he never saw his victim as human. Lennon was just "a picture on an album cover", as far as Chapman was concerned at the time. "When I met him and when I shot him, when I saw him on the album cover, it just wasn't real." Chapman remembers clearly the morning he knew he was going to kill Lennon. He put on a black felt cap and scarf, collected his copy of The Catcher In The Rye, JD Salinger's famous novel about alienated adolescence, and walked from a nearby YMCA to the Dakota building on the west side of Central Park. He joined the throng of Lennon groupies who lived in almost perpetual encampment, hoping for a glimpse of their idol and his autograph. Lennon often obliged and that brisk, winter morning he stared into the eyes of his killer. "I had a piece of cardboard and I used it to camouflage the shape of the gun in my pocket," Chapman recalled. "I had the album with me, too, the John Lennon album. I brought that with me as a reason for standing out there. It was a ruse. I didn't want his signature, I wanted his life. And I ended up getting both." Lennon had just finished recording Double Fantasy and it was being well received by critics. Life, by a tragic irony, was better than it had ever been since the heady days of the Beatles. And Lennon was loving New York, telling the Radio One DJ Andy Peebles in what turned out to be his last interview, that: "People come up and ask me for autographs or say 'hi', but they won't bug you." Chapman had been there so often, playing the role of besotted fan, that Lennon felt comfortable walking over earlier in the day he was to die. Chapman recalls their conversation. "I said: 'John, would you sign my album?' He said: 'Sure' and wrote his name and he handed it back to me. "He looked at me and said: 'Is that all you want?' Just like that. And I said 'Yeah, thanks John.' And he again said: 'Is that all you want?' And there was Yoko, she was already in the car, the door was open, it was running. And he asked me twice and I said: 'Yeah, thanks, that's all,' or something like that and then he got into the car to drive away." All the time, Chapman says, his hand held the gun in his pocket, wet with sweat. Lennon sensed something was up, repeatedly asking him if he wanted anything else, but this time Chapman held back. The murder came later. Chapman spent the day milling around the Dakota building, pleading with inner demons. "Help me devil, give me the power and the strength to do this," was the mantra he muttered. His head, he said, was torn between "the phoney adult" and the "evil child" within. Eventually, at around 11pm, the limousine carrying the Lennons appeared outside the block. Yoko came out first. Chapman recalled a "dead silence in his brain" as he nodded to Lennon, who was clutching cassettes. "A voice in my head said: 'Do it, do it, do it, do it.' I aimed at his back and pulled the trigger five times and all hell broke loose in my mind." Chapman made no attempt to leave the scene as the ecstasy of recognition began. Lennon sang of imagining a world with no religion, something which Chapman's warped mind clung to as justification for the killing. Chapman is now and was then immersed in a world filled with nothing but religion, a zealous Bible reader weaving a selective path through memorised passages of scripture to find what he calls peace. The former security guard has developed a trick of dividing himself into two, barely related individuals. "There really is no Mark Chapman," he says. "That's the person that killed John Lennon and that's in the newspaper. I don't live that life." The first Chapman, he believes, ought to have received the death penalty. "I should have been executed, you know. Well, if you commit murder, maybe that's what's due?" he said. "I'm lucky to be alive. You know, I deserve to die." Chapman claims that the image of Lennon remained in his mind as just that - just an image on an album cover - until three years ago when he claims Lennon suddenly became mortal to him, a father and husband of flesh and blood. "It all became real three years ago, where this isn't an image I blew away. This was a beating heart. I guess it was just the right time for me to be able to see that kind of thing - hiding from my responsibilities. I don't think most murderers realise what they've done. But I did. He became real for me, he stepped from the album cover." As for remorse, it appears to be grudging: "When I think about it I get very serious and sometimes I have to tell people. I say: 'I did this crime and this was a real person and if you call that remorse, fine.'" Prison psychiatrists have been evaluating Chapman's sanity in preparation for the parole hearing. "I'm talking now with a fellow from mental health, just on a friendly basis. I don't receive any kind of treatment ! and I'm not on any medication. I've been mentally well for 12, 13 years. No problems. I'm on their highest grade of mental wellness." The cell he inhabits these days has views to distant hills, a special privilege that reflects his years of good behaviour. Chapman's bed is on the right and there are sparse furnishings, all prison issue: a locker, desk and set of drawers. The only photograph is of his dead grandmother. There are pictures of Jesus. Lots of them. He is a voracious reader and has more than the permitted 25 books in his cell, including several Bibles. "Underneath my table, I have a box of media interview requests that I've never answered, hundreds. And on top of that is another box of personal correspondence. Letters are hard for me. I hardly ever write." Chapman now speaks to only one person, a local newspaper reporter called Jack Jones, who is also the author of the biography Let Me Take You Down: Inside The Mind of Mark Chapman, The Man Who Killed John Lennon. The recent Jones interviews, more than three hours long, took place in July. They are for a Court TV documentary to be broadcast next week, Death Of A Beatle. Jones believes that the seeds of the killing were sown in Chapman as a 10-year-old playing nothing but Beatles music, emerging as a Jesus-obsessed adolescent with a precarious grip on reality. He sees Chapman regularly, and is clear about one thing. "This is a person who just made a choice to do evil at a great level. Then John Lennon, his hero, talks of being bigger than Jesus and imagining no heaven. Chapman simply wanted to hurt as many people as possible and by killing John Lennon he knew he could cause the maximum pain to a world he hated." Music was at the rotten core of Mark Chapman as he grew up a troubled loner and he has now reassessed the music of the man he killed. "He truly cared about people. he was a human being. He wasn't perfect, just like all of us," says Chapman. "I don't think he thought of himself as a Messiah. But here was a man who had power and money and I think he, you know, kind of blew all that off there, especially towards the end, and said: 'It's about people.' His songs, they're not phoney." Chapman also plays guitar. "I'm working on some Joni Mitchell stuff," he says. I like what you call folk rock now: Joni Mitchell, America, Don McLean. I've mellowed. The music soothes me." Music is still the way he tries to understand what he did. "I often sit, particularly lately, I think: 'Gee, I'm here, 45 years old, and I'm a living human being. I'm in jail for murder, who knows when I'll get out. But I'm alive, you know. Where's this other fellow at? He's not here any more, he's gone. That bothers me a great deal."And the Beatles? "I don't have any Beatles tapes," he says. And the new Mark Chapman who will sit before the parole board has no problems when he hears their songs on the radio. "Doesn't bother me at all. I mean, it's good music." ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2000 02:28:36 EDT From: JRMCo1@aol.com Subject: What song, please? - -Julius ------------------------------ End of JMDL Digest V2000 #513 ***************************** ------- Post messages to the list at Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe joni-digest" to ------- Siquomb, isn't she?