Last Update on the Left - Episode 5 - Mark David Chapman Returns

49m
What do J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and the Holy Bible have in common? They both contain explicit instructions to kill John Lennon—or at least, according to Mark David Chapman, they do. And guess what? Chapman’s been up to some stuff since that fateful day in 1980 when he snuffed out the life of the quote-unquote “Smart” Beatle. In this episode, the boys find out exactly what the fame-hungry murderer has been up to since our original coverage of him in Episode 315 on the Last Podcast on the Left—which includes being denied parole a grand total of THIRTEEN TIMES. Maybe he should’ve given peace a chance, huh?

Listen and follow along

Transcript

This episode is brought to you by FX's Alien Earth, the official podcast.

Each week, host Adam Rogers is joined by guests, including the show's creator, cast, and crew, in this exclusive companion podcast.

They will explore the story elements, deep dive into character motivations, and offer an episode-by-episode behind-the-scenes breakdown of each terrifying chapter in this new series.

Search FX's Alien Earth wherever you listen to podcasts.

The thought of getting a degree can be straight up terrifying.

We get it.

But Southern New Hampshire University makes it easier than you'd think.

They have over 200 degrees you can earn online.

No set class times, so your social life stays alive and well.

And low online tuition that won't scare your bank account.

College doesn't have to be a horror story.

Visit snhu.edu/slash last podcast to get started.

That's snhu.edu slash last podcast.

That's when the cannibalism started.

Last update on the left.

Speaking of my mother, we can start like that.

Speaking of my mother,

my mom always says she remembers the day.

That John Lennon got murdered.

Yeah.

Yes, but she said she didn't want to go on the train to go down there there to Dakota.

To Strawberry Fields.

Yeah, because she said if she went to Dakota, that's where she went to go get stabbed by a hooker.

So she didn't want to go to the absolutely incredible moment in history to be a part of the group of people singing Imagine in front of the Dakota.

Yeah.

Because give peace a chance.

No, no, no, no.

She wouldn't.

Give peace a chance.

She decided that it was too difficult.

She decided she was going to be physically assaulted outside of Central Park because it used to be violent.

Well, yeah, of course it used to be violent, but at that moment, I mean, I've seen the pictures of the assassination of John Lennon, like right afterwards.

Like there were so many people there, and, you know, it was like, you know, people were sad and dangerous.

All they do was grab at me, Henry Thomas.

Everywhere I go.

There's no way I could go.

All the way to the city?

I'm not going to the city.

From Queens?

From Forest Hills?

From the Queen, from Queens.

I'm not going to go to the city.

She might have been in the city by that point.

I actually don't know.

Either way, John Lennon's fucking dead.

Yep.

Welcome to Last Update on the Left, ladies and gentlemen.

I'm Marcus Parks here with Henry Zabrowski going deep into the Queen's lore.

Wait a second, let me practice my yoko.

It's more of a...

Yeah, you're both.

It's more like a...

See, I've actually listened to the music.

I would spend a lot of time.

I've never listened to the season of class.

I listened to the Leno LenoNo, man.

I listened to all that, but guess what, man?

Either way, she also

didn't stop jack shit.

She should have been there because guess what?

She was obviously told by the CIA that Mark David Chapman was an assassin that it was also being protected by the doorman

who is also who apparently shot John Lennon in the front.

That's what we've been told.

We're here on our Mark David Chapman update.

Now, our Mark David Chapman series, this is one of those that me and Henry both feel is an underappreciated series.

I will never not die on that line in the sand because

I love those episodes.

I thought that Mark David Chapman's inner life is truly, truly mysterious.

So, obviously, most of this episode is just straight up a commercial for our old episode that you should go listen to because we are definitely going to go into.

Is that what the whole show is.

Mark David Chapman, there are updates because, like, we really are, for a lot of our

topics in this series, we are fully updating them.

And in this one, like, we did a pretty thorough job in our original series going deep into the life of Mark David Chapman.

But the one thing that we don't do a lot on Last Podcast on the Left as much anymore is give like a lot of credence to the various conspiracy theories that are wrapped up.

We believe kind kind of in the Occam's razor of most situations, especially when it comes to humans killing humans.

Yeah.

And this, we, at the time, I think we did.

We even really cover the MK Ultra angle because we were Mark David Chapman.

I don't think we did not mention it at all.

Because we were more so interested in his inner life, which was so fascinating.

Far more fascinating.

Because you have no idea that you know that you can be sad in Hawaii.

Lots of people are.

There's a whole movie called Descendants about it.

I did not know.

I literally didn't know until we did that series.

I was like, it's Hawaii.

Yeah, they have a very intense depression rate and suicide rate.

Yeah.

Well, Mark David Chapman's inner world, it was one of those things that started when he was a small, small child that he imagined that he was surrounded and commanded

these little people, as he called them.

And he would play Beatle songs for them.

And he would crush them and kill them when they displeased him.

And when he did things good for them, they would say, All Mark, King of the

Lord, Mr.

Mark, we love you.

Which is fun.

You know, I honestly, I wish I had the same.

A lot of my little guys argue.

Yeah.

And most of them, honestly, are pretty anti-the content.

Yeah.

Just keep talking about it when we get ready for your insanity, please.

Yeah, that's how you build up.

It didn't work for Mark David Chapman.

But so, do we have to tell people that Mark David Chapman killed John Lennon on December 8th, 1980?

For those of you that don't remember, and the reason why he is fascinating and the reason why we all, the whole world, became interested in Mark David Chapman was because, number one, he let himself very easily be arrested by the police.

He did not try to escape.

There was the weird stuff that was found in his hotel room.

Like the picture of the Wizard of Oz cast.

It was a picture of Dorothy and the cowardly lion.

Yeah, which I get.

I know it was all four of them.

I thought it was just Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion.

There's a picture in that new documentary series that we're not necessarily plugging.

If it was all four of them, then the book that we used got it wrong.

Yeah, it's very, very possible.

But this, we watched the new documentary on Apple Plus that's called John Lennon, Murder Without a Trial, which is kind of

trying to wrap up.

This is kind of where the update idea even came from.

And so also Mark Java Chapman.

He shot John Lennon from the back, three different shots, tight grouping, which is a big people.

This is one of those weird red flags for some people about the type, tight grouping.

And then also he stood with the book, Catcher in the Rye, in his hands.

And he was reading chapter seven, which is then becoming like, I guess that is his important one.

I believe that is the chapter where Catcher in the Rye, where he said it.

He said it like in the book.

Said,

said what?

Like catchers, with the one thing where it's like, and then they caught the kids like a catcher in the rye.

Like, I want to say it's in that

title line.

Yes.

Yeah, the titular line.

You know, I, for one, think, you know, it's not all bad that this happened because that was the day I was conceived.

No shit.

Oh, do you think that loosened your mother up?

Do you think that when John Lennon was shot, it made her wet enough to have sex with your father?

Do they embrace each other and try to while away?

Ow!

Isn't your dad Morty?

Morty?

What was your dad's name?

Jerome.

Oh, Jerry.

Oh, Jerry.

Make a big one.

Do you think that you have the soul of John Lennon within you?

See.

Oh, Spanish.

Really, with the update, I mean, my biggest update is I know a lot more about Todd Rundgren now than I did then.

We all do.

Because Todd Rundgren, that was actually, like, that was the big misconception, was that the Beatles were Mark David Chapman's favorite band.

His favorite artist was Todd Rundgren.

He He was a massive Todd Rundgren fan.

He left an eight track next to the Wizard of Oz picture.

That was part of his shrine.

But, I mean, Ed, are you a Todd Rundgren fan?

He's great.

Yeah.

I like Todd Rundgren.

Yeah.

But I mean, do you know some of the albums that he's produced?

It's fucking.

I don't know his production.

I know he's like a big producer, and I haven't gone down that rabbit hole yet.

He was the sound engineer for Stage Fright.

Fuck, that's one of my favorite songs.

Yeah.

No, the whole album.

Oh, wow.

The entire, yeah, that was one of his first gigs in 1970.

That must have been hard because they were all fucked up.

Barely showing up to work.

Yeah, man.

No, he spent like a whole, he had like, they call it his Bearsville period where he was just up there fucking producing songs.

He looks like an

he looks like if Brian Warner grew up and never became Marilyn Manson.

I didn't realize that's what Todd Rundgren looks like.

Yeah, he did two Butterfield Blues Band albums.

He has the longest head.

Look at his head.

He looks like Bert.

It's an extraordinarily long head.

Whoa.

Gives Joe Walsh a run for his money.

Joe Walsh

unexpectedly wise.

But Joe Walsh's face, it's starting to get much more squat.

He's starting to get that face where his chin and his nose are trying to say hello.

His face is getting longer.

Do you remember in Drop Dead Fred when the guy gets squashed

and his head's real long and flat?

That's what Joe Walsh is beginning to look like.

Todd Rundard's like, one of his biggest ones is New York.

He did the New York Dolls debut album.

Oh, my God.

He did We're an American Band by Grand Funk.

He did a lot of stuff.

All of that shit.

But this is not a fully Todd Rundgren-based episode.

But the last thing, yeah.

What else are we going to talk about?

There's a lot of stuff here.

John Lynn's still in.

I want to.

But the last thing that, but the reason why Todd Rundgren is now, he actually does own a massive estate in Hawaii.

Todd Rundgren is incredibly, incredibly wealthy because he was the guy who produced Bad Out of Hell.

Oh.

And he got points on Bad Out of Hell, which is one of the best-selling albums of all time.

So, yeah, so Todd Rundgren is like incredibly, incredibly wealthy.

Still alive, not assassinated by a psychotic assassin, though.

No.

In fact, in a weird little coincidence, he is part of Ringo's band.

Oh, whoa, weird.

And Ringo was John Lennon's favorite Beatle.

And the first Beatle to show up.

Yeah, well, it's because he was the only one that liked him.

Because he was just happy being there.

He was just happy having a bit of a good old time.

Yeah,

what did McCartney say?

He was like, ah, bit of a bummer.

He was very upset.

They had gotten into a fight.

It was a long thing.

But so, more with Mark David Chapman was that after the trial.

So, like, let's cut after.

He shot John Lennon.

Everybody is torn asunder, obviously.

The whole thing.

But he's gone.

Everyone's freaking out.

They figured that Mark David Chapman was going to immediately get assassinated in New York.

That's like one of the weird things that adds to the conspiracy theory fuel.

One, was that there were a double, a double was set up that would walk in and out of the hospital that wasn't Mark David Chapman that they did to protect Mark David Chapman so they could get him to trial.

So there was like a weird double, and there was a lot of being like, there's multiple Mark David Chapmans.

That's like one fun theory.

Well, I mean, there's also, I mean, it could have been very likely that someone could have killed Mark David Chapman, like Jack Ruby stuff.

Very much so.

At At the time, like John Lennon was like a new, he was a love, he was a very loved New York character at that point.

Like, everyone would, like, they'd say, like, yo, John, hey, like, and he'd like, hello.

People are just always waiting for him outside of his apartment.

Yeah, they'd be waiting.

I know he's the one that's down there.

He's Joe Lennon, who's the deep one.

No, he's down here.

Who's down there?

Down there.

But Bull, Bull McCotney's up here.

Joe Lennon's down there.

And where's Ringo?

Oh,

it's me.

Octopus's garden.

And finally, give me your best Harrison.

George Harrison.

Well, he had the fin recently said, well, Moe Tall John Flight Wipes.

That's not bad.

Yeah, that's actually, the whole thing was very impressive.

Hey, thank you.

Yeah, the non-information.

But yeah, John Lennon was very well loved because that's why he loved New York City because he could just kind of hang out and no one would really fuck with him.

And what I actually learned recently is that John Lennon was at this time really starting to turn shit around because he very much had the reputation.

And I kind of bought into this as well, like as he was a bad dude for a long time.

He was an asshole.

He was a huge asshole.

But at this time, he was starting to make amends for a lot of the bad behavior.

He was starting to become un-assholes during this time period.

His son, Sean, helped a lot.

Yeah.

According to him.

But also, he didn't get to the end of the process, so we did, which is sad because he didn't get to fully absolve himself and change.

He had walked away from show business for like five years.

Yeah.

So he was, he was basically in total isolation.

The story was that John Lennon was trying to sort of become a person again, which it sounds like he was getting towards.

He had this beautiful relationship with his new producer.

Him and Yoko were banging on pots and pans together.

You've got his new son who he was desperately in love with, even though he kind of like left the other one.

The other other one's fine.

The other one's working.

He was starting to bring

it out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He was trying to work it out.

He was trying to say I'm sorry.

And then when he got shot, so obviously he died very quickly, but this is also where it gets weird.

Is that, so Mark David Chapman allowed himself to be immediately arrested.

The whole city

is torn apart.

The thing is that the first words out of Mark David Chapman was, I can't believe that it wasn't real because he had this concept in his head, according to the first people speaking to him.

Mark David Chapman said that I was convinced that when I shot John Lennon, I would magically transform into Colden Holden Caulfield, who is the lead, who's the protagonist of Catcher in the Rye, who's the child who says that everybody's phonies.

And it's also, it's the book, too, that which is also cool because it changes as you get older.

The more you read that book, the more it goes from when you're a kid, you read it, you think that Holden Caulfield's a hero.

And then when you read it later on, you kind of realize Holden Caulfield's a young shithead.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But that's what's you were, you're supposed to start a young shithead.

That's where you're supposed to, that's where you're supposed to come from.

I missed the window.

Like, I didn't, I didn't read Catcher in the Rye when I was in high school.

I missed the window to read it back then.

I read it in college.

By then, I was already, it was all Huntress Thompson.

Yeah.

I read it in college as well, and I was like, I hate this kid.

Well, I got to love the rest of the books.

The rest of the family that is, that's not in the, like, so J.D.

Salger.

I love Zoe and all that.

Yeah, I loved Franny and Zoe.

That is one of my favorite books ever.

The other series about the family is good.

Like, they're all great, but, you know, and then J.D.

Salger is a weird guy.

Yeah, JD, and also,

I think like a year later, maybe it was less than a year later, Catcher in the Rye was also found with John Hinkley Jr.

Yeah, who was at the

vigil for John Lennon.

And he is still obviously one of the more famous victims of cancel culture.

Yeah.

Because they won't allow him to do shows.

I don't know why.

Everlasting Quest, I think, is a good song.

And John Hinkley got, he got the full, they allowed him out, which is a part of the reason why they think that Mark David Chapin's shit is a little fishy.

So they were trying to make him be crazy.

Everyone was trying to say Mark David Chapin is crazy.

Why?

Because he was crazy.

Yeah.

Very, very much so.

Completely batching and saying.

He also said he thought he was going to turn into John Lennon after he killed all the people.

I'm going to go kill yourself.

That was the second round.

I said, I went to go kill myself.

I'm going to go kill this version of John Lennon, this thing that is me, right?

He was projecting himself onto John Lennon.

And then he also said that

he expected himself to disappear into the ink of the book he said he changed the story so many fucking times well he was in well no and so for a while he was trying to i think they were and his defense were like this guy's crazy so they were trying to get a lot of people coming in one of them again now this is the next thing that brings in the conspiracy theory edge that we didn't talk about in the first series was during this time period when they were trying to figure out whether or not he was insane or trying to basically prove that he was insane, there was a man by the name of Dr.

Milton Klein that got involved during this process.

His shit's bizarre as hell.

Dr.

Milton Klein, which there is almost no internet footprint for because he doesn't have a Wikipedia page, he doesn't have any stuff.

He is not famous, but he is this considered to be this hypnosis expert.

For a long time, he was arguing against hypnosis

about how powerful it was.

He said that he worked as a consultant with, which was, we now know, the real

program, MKUltra.

He also believed that he said that he said he hypnotized Sirhan Sirhan, that he would climb around the room like a monkey.

That's what he said.

And he went in to go talk to Mark David Chapman.

Now, all this happens, they're prepping for this big trial.

Dr.

fucking Milton Klein comes in,

yada, yada, yada.

They show up expecting for this trial to fucking be the trial of the century.

Mark David Chapman pleads guilty.

We hear nothing.

We hear nothing ever again.

To a closed courtroom.

Yes.

Yeah.

Well, he was originally going to plead not guilty by reason of insanity, but had said that God told him in his jail cell to plead guilty.

Which means he's crazy.

Well,

that's the actual catch-22.

Yes.

Yes.

Because also, what we hear a lot is that, yeah, sure, you might not go to prison, but you then will go to a mental institution for the, like on the other end like a a jail mental institution which is apparently not cool yeah apparently is not nice in there where would you rather be oh definitely mental asylum yeah only just because then i can get but you can do you think you get more stuff in a mental asylum or in prison do you think in prison you get stuff to write with and stuff like more you mean something that like a prison for the criminally insane yeah i think you get far far less right like i think you get a lot of like everything is a blunted object yeah You're not going to be interacting.

The people you're going to be interacting with are going to be very dangerous and very

unpredictable.

Unpredictable.

All the time.

It's going to be hard to make friends in that environment.

The cartoons are better.

The cartoons.

Yeah, plenty of bullwinkle.

The criminally insane, but no football.

No football.

But sometimes basketball.

But Mark David, I was trying to think, what else really points towards it?

So that was like one of the big things where they were like, so this is where we're bringing some of the conspiracy and stuff.

Because I received back in the day, I have a fun wall printout that is all of the various things talking about why Mark David Chapman was a remote-controlled assassin trained by MKUltra, but he wasn't trained to be the assassin.

He was trained to be the Patsy.

Yes.

Yeah.

Like that's that's the idea is that somehow, somewhere, Mark David Chapman ran afoul of the CIA and that the CIA had programmed him to just go to this.

He had to go to this spot and to pull the trigger or to, I get a little fuzzy on the details because he had the gun and he pulled the trigger.

A lot of it's made up.

A lot of it's made up.

They say that apparently it was that he never fired the gun at all.

So the full conspiracy theory view is that John Lennon, which is the fun little thing that makes conspiracy theories hold together, was that John Lennon did have a file on him.

No, he had none.

Not just a file.

I mean, people followed him and Yoko constantly.

Was it COINTELPRO?

Isn't that what that was called?

Yeah.

And so, like, again, another real thing, or another real thing that was

during this time period, Nixon was extremely paranoid about the cultural, quote-unquote, war that was going on.

He felt that John Lennon was destabilizing the United States of America.

They went and looked at, they basically just tracked him.

They were just like, and so they had a big, thick fucking file on him.

So there was like, much like with JFK, people point towards, well, that's like the first step that shows they had a motive.

They got a file on anyone who makes statements that we should have peace.

They were afraid.

Exactly like it.

They were afraid that John Lennon, that was coming back after a five-year absence, was about to change everything because Ronald Reagan was running for president.

This is another thing that kind of chimes all this stuff together.

Well, he had already won by this point.

Didn't he already?

He'd won.

It's 1981.

He'd won two years before.

No, this is 80.

80, but it's won the year before.

But yes, he's the incumbent.

He just won.

Yeah.

But still, he's the guy that would be the most quote-unquote detrimental to a Reagan presidency.

That's like what the theory was that they were using.

I can agree with that.

That he was going to fuck the presidency.

And so, what they did was they had a trained assassin that was

more likely than not.

And this is proof.

And not just because it comes through wikispooks.com.

It's that it is a man by by the name of Jose Podermo.

Now, Jose Perdomo,

he was one of the doormen at the Dakota who was in front of John Lennon, Standard and Y.

He was one of the big eyewitnesses of the murder.

And he, and this is not just people saying this on the internet because we can't know for certain, but we know for certain because it's said on the internet that he was a member of Operation 40, which was the secret CIA Cuban assassination team that was going to be used to kill Fidel Castro.

And so this is a trained, not fake, this is a trained MKUltra assassin that is now a doorman at a very fancy New York apartment complex.

So Mark David Chapman is the hypnotized Patsy.

He has received all of these various things.

He has been hypnotized to leave these super suspicious, these things behind.

I guess there are some people also within the MK Ultra, I guess, did not like Todd Rundgren.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, Todd Rundgren, that's the weird thing about it: there's so many of these weird things that don't make any sense, like how he went to New York once, but then, like, it's proven that he went.

Scouting trip sent by MK Ultra.

But why does he need to scout if he's programmed?

Scouting for to see

if the

thoughts in his brain work

that were made up.

So you got to go and put him in the New York one time.

You're like, well, let's just see if he runs into traffic.

And then if he does it, like, you know, because you train him, and then we're like, oh, this will be Mark David's day out.

He'll go and have fun in New York and the big city and we'll lightly see what he does.

And so he does a bunch of weird stuff in New York for a while.

Yeah, he goes and sees, like, he has a fucking fantastic weekend.

He goes and sees David Bowie perform The Elephant Man.

That's incredible.

Yeah,

he goes and sees another show the next night.

He goes and sees George C.

Scott perform.

If none of this

makes you understand that New York's beautiful and you shouldn't just, you shouldn't kill, you should act, nothing will.

Or just, you should just go.

Just a magical place.

You know, maybe not anymore, but back then, absolute fucking stardust everywhere.

Yeah, you know, they're barely murdering people like they were back then.

Yeah, it's Jay.

They just don't do it quite as much.

Yeah, it's, I mean, it's definitely down from, you know, the 2,000 that it was around this this time 2000 per year yeah i think they're back down to like one a day maybe two a day yeah i don't know i mean it's it's a different city definitely yeah back then yeah mark david chapman went a couple times like and then he decided i think it was after he went have you ever seen ordinary people yes yeah he went and saw ordinary people that's sad

i get it now the whole thing is that whole line of like I looked into the abyss

and I saw him staring back.

No, that's Nietzsche.

Yeah, that's Nietzsche.

What did the guy say?

Too sad.

What did Timothy Hutton say?

Because he was so moved by Timothy Hutton's performance that he decided I shouldn't kill John Lennon.

Really?

Yeah.

But he still did it.

Yeah.

That was the first trip.

He went for the first trip, and yeah, he went and saw Bowie.

And he said, that's the fucking thing: he's sitting there watching Bowie play the Elephant Man, and all he can think of is like, man, I could really pull out my gun and kill David Bowie right now.

No one can do anything about it.

Because he had a fucking 38 special on him.

And so he goes and sees this, and then he goes to a screening of ordinary people.

And he comes out and he decides, like, I love my wife.

I don't want to kill John Lennon.

I shouldn't kill John Lennon.

I should go home to my wife.

So he calls up his wife and says, hey, honey, I was going to kill John Lennon.

I'm not.

You know, I decided I'm not going to do it.

I'm coming home.

It's so crazy.

Because the woman is like, the mom is like the villain of that movie.

No, he calls up.

Yeah, he calls up his wife.

Like, I'm going to go.

And then he goes, but he says that there was a voice voice that he called the child that told him that he had to go do it.

Because it's not uncommon for killers to blame their crimes on some other worldly presence.

Ted Bunny had the same thing.

He called it the entity.

The entity made him do it.

It wasn't him that actually killed and raped and murdered these, you know, it was the entity.

And Mark David Chapman said the same thing.

The child told me to do it, that John Lennon was a toy that he once had that was broken, and now he was angry and he needed to destroy his toy because John Lennon had become a phony because he read this book.

It was all sorts of like convoluted mess.

But then, you know, long story short, he goes back.

And do you know the fucking Rosemary's baby story?

No.

This one's incredible.

Yeah.

Like, this is the most incredible coincidence, I think, in all of true crime.

This is fucking nuts.

So it's the day before the assassination.

And you know, the Dakota is where they film Rosemary's Baby Story.

Yes, very much so.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So Mark David Chapman is sitting like across the street from Dakota, you know, on one of those benches bordering Central Park, and he's looking at it and he's thinking about, you know, Roman Polanski directed Rosemary's Baby, and, you know, Roman Polanski is married to Sharon Tate.

And Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson family.

And as far as Mark David Chapman knew, the Manson family murdered Sharon Tate because of Helter Skelter, which is, of course, done by the Beatles.

And as he's thinking about all this and thinking about all the connections, fucking Mia Pharaoh walks right on by.

Yeah, it doesn't help.

And you're in where all the stars are.

Yeah, Mia Pharaoh walks by, and he says, At that moment, he saw it.

He said it was a sign.

He said, that was the sign that I was doing the right thing, that I was on the right track.

She probably lived two doors down.

Yeah, that's a problem.

Yeah, or it was just a woman with a pixie cut.

Yes.

You know, like it really, very

well could have been a woman with just a short haircut.

I saw Yoko Odo in the street before, and she was very unmistakably Yoko Odo.

Oh, yes.

yes,

you know, it's it's interesting because now, so after all of these years, because like they're they've really been trying to figure out like why everyone wants to know why.

Well, he changes the story over and over and over and over again.

Yes, like it's, I think he's he's almost to the point where he's saying, like, I did it for attention.

He finally, that was the big breakthrough, apparently, is that that was in 2022, yes, which is apparently when he got his, that was like the last time um

so i guess yeah he wouldn't it was in 2024 of this year he was already uh he had one last brawl where they denied but the closest he got to being let go was in 2022 where they basically said i wanted the fame i wanted fame i wanted somebody and i want and he wanted to be a somebody and nothing was going to stop that i actually also wonder if he just is trying to tell them whatever the fuck it is they want to hear at any point yeah try a new tactic at some point well he's hungry with the lord and then it turned into, then he tried to admit that it was premeditated.

And then it's like each time it's getting a little bit more detailed.

And Yoko goes each time to make sure that he doesn't, it doesn't have an opportunity to be paroled.

But it's weird because in the Patsy idea, it said, yes, he goes, he does like he goes and changes all his other stuff.

I'll never quite understand the idea of a Patsy, only just because the idea of like, like,

I feel like a Patsy

is like easy

versus an assassin.

A Patsy is easy.

What's like finding a Patsy?

I feel like he doesn't need to be hypnotized to be a Patsy.

You can't exactly ask around.

We're looking for someone to take the rap for John Lennon's murder.

What do you think?

You start with interns.

You call it interns.

But I wonder, like, you know, I feel like you could kind of...

If you wanted to actually put, like, if you were shooting from the government, you want to kill somebody, and you wanted to then frame it on somebody else, you could elaborately set up their home.

Sure, you literally could take the gun that the guy you trained to kill the guy, he could take that gun and just you, you he hands it to his connect who gives it to the guy who breaks into the Patsy's apartment, who puts all the weapons there.

You know, like you, you put the guy there where he needs to be, and then you basically blame it all on him.

Yeah, I don't think it's that difficult, but the idea is that Mark David Chapman was hypnotized to be arrested.

That's the the idea is that he was to take it and then go and act super crazy, essentially.

And that he was, his brain was specifically scrambled by MK Ultra training, which is what made him crazy.

But now, as we're seeing, I feel like as the years go by,

my contingents, my feelings will always be,

these guys all talk on their deathbed.

Why in the living fuck will we not have the guy that trained Mark David Chapman come forward?

Well, why wouldn't Mark David Chapman at this point just come out?

Blame the government.

He does all of this stuff to blame the government that this happened to me, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah, well, unless he's being threatened, like, we'll kill your wife.

Because his wife is still with him.

Oh, really?

After he was sentenced, like, she moved from Hawaii to upstate New York.

He's in Attica.

Oh, my God.

God.

And so she lives there.

They actually get to spend 44 hours a year together.

Oh.

Yeah.

She's leaving it an hour and a a week.

I know.

No, it's not, it's not a lot of people.

You could just fly in for that.

Live in Hawaii.

It's upstate New York.

It's freezing.

I guess the problem is, is there ain't no fucking dick like that Mark David Chapman dick.

And she's straight up addicted to it, and she missed getting fucking full-on gaped by that guy.

Now, you remember he doesn't like having sex because he says vaginas scare him because he says that he's scared that he will be enveloped by their warm wetness.

That he's just going to fall into it.

You don't think that that don't make a Gloria happy?

Warm wetness is like why I do it.

Yeah.

Most people do it.

But I think he's afraid it's going to go

and then you go, oh,

and then all of a sudden you're in Barbie.

You're like in that world and you don't know how you got there.

Or does if you get sucked through the portal inside of a vagina, do you think it's more you go to like a Ruth Bader Ginsburg world where it's just like women voting and writing books?

I don't think every vagina goes to the same place.

I don't know.

I I think there are many portals through many vaginas to many places.

Where do you think Carolina's vagina portal takes you?

Oh, wow.

Sleeter Kinney concert.

Oh, that's nice.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's really fun.

Or maybe a bikini kill concert.

A concert of some sort.

Okay, wow.

Involving women.

Okay, yeah.

Probably bikini kill, yeah.

Yeah, wow.

Yeah.

Bratwurst festival for me.

Julie's going to be mad.

Julie's going to be extremely mad saying, like, oh, my vagina portal brings you to a sausage festival.

We are not getting serious.

I don't have to worry about it.

It is serious.

This is the show.

I get to say all the things.

This is dead serious.

This is dead fucking serious.

Mine is a twisted carnival.

There'll be kisses there.

Well, him and his wife, Mark David Chammy, they like making homemade pizzas together.

They watch Wheel of Fortune

Pizza.

And they're watching Prison Wheel of Fortune.

What's Prison Wheel of Fortune?

Oh, man.

It just

always like, don't buy a vowel.

Because it's always an A.

You don't want to know what you own when you buy that vowel.

That was the weirdest thing about Gloria is like when she was interviewed, which I still have no idea why she did this, but when she was interviewed, she's like, I'm sad that he had to die.

Yeah.

And it was just like.

Well, that's people point that towards being super mysterious, too.

I just think she just didn't understand how to talk properly.

No, I don't think that she was used to television.

Her lawyer was a moron.

That whole concept of like, we'll get all the press in one room and then they can ask every question if they thought of you.

And then just like this woman who's never had any sort of media trading, whose husband's a total psychopath who killed one of the most famous people on the face of the planet, she wasn't ready.

No.

No, no, no.

They said that they speak about John Lennon together.

They pray for Yoko that Yoko finds Jesus.

Yeah.

Whatever.

Also, I find it, there was one other weird connection that I could not find any actual exact information on.

Okay.

Because no one would tell me.

And I looked it up on the internet.

I couldn't find the exact thing.

Talking about connecting Mark David Chapman back to MKUltra, which is this idea that he had a pastor.

I want someone to reach out to me.

Side stories, L-P-O-T L at gmail.com.

I tried to look for the name of this pastor that said that he worked, he was when he was in Georgia, that Mark David Chapman was in this with a pastor that was connected to Nixon.

And all of this puts him back into why he was even chosen, that he was groomed as a little boy, that they saw that he had, because one of the big indicators that they use for MK Ultra, apparently, which again is all, I don't know what's real and what's the conspiracy end, which is the idea of using kids with schizophrenia as a great way to train them.

That's a good one to train to be an assassin.

Well, Mark David Chapman, if you follow the MKUltra storyline, I mean, he would have have actually been a very good agent because Mark David Chapman, when he was a kid, he was what they called a garbage head back then, where he loved doing like he would sniff glue

and then he would do a bunch of acids, like do like eight hits of acid at a at a time, you know.

And then eventually, like, after he had, like, after a guy, like a hippie stole his wallet at the beach, he became disillusioned in the hippie movement.

And so he turned into like a Jesus freak, as they called it back then.

And so if that pastor did find him, I mean, Mark David Chapman showed signs of schizophrenia.

If he's that's the thing, but you're also always going back towards like, what is Mark David Chapman telling me?

You know, what is Mark David Chapman saying?

At what point in his life is he saying all this shit?

And what does he want out of it?

Because it very well could be that Mark David Chapman is just a murderous, narcissistic shithead.

He very well could, I mean, at the end of the day, it could just be a narcissist with a fantastic imagination.

Yeah, and trying to desperately get off on what he thought was going to be easier.

I think at some point he thought that the

going to jail, going to the mental asylum and being guilty by reason of insanity was going to be easier.

So he thought, oh, okay, I'll just act crazy.

I'll build a case for acting crazy after just really just wanting to be famous for killing John Lennon.

And then essentially you hear like

what we were talking about, where it's like, no, you're going to go into a mental asylum for the criminally insane, in which you are going to be slobbering on thorazine for the rest of your life.

You're tied to a bed forever.

You're not going anywhere.

And so, even in, I think, prison got to look good.

I think he was like, all right, yeah, all right, I can get my dick sucked and stuff.

Like, I can get in there and do a lot of stuff.

I can make wine.

And then he continued the act for many years.

Like, you remember the episode where he was acting up, and the, what is it, the orderly came in the room with the needle.

He's like, yeah, break the needle off in my ass.

Break the needle off.

Yeah.

I love that guy.

Let him out.

But he kept it up for years and years.

And then he just eventually,

I think its usefulness, I think it kind of got old.

And I think he just, I think he might have done it just to amuse himself.

Just to kind of keep the story going and to keep like the Mark David Chapman, like to keep himself relevant.

Because if he just goes into prison and it's just quiet, then you know, nobody's talking about Mark David Chapman anymore.

But if he's crazy and he acts crazy, then

people will, you know, keep the legend of Mark David Chapman going.

I'm surprised he didn't try to put out an album like

Manson did.

Well, he wasn't a musician.

My first girlfriend said he was a very talented guitar player.

Well, he never wrote songs of his own, as far as I know.

Yeah, he played Beatles songs.

Yeah,

he would charge little kids in his neighborhood money to watch him lip-sync to Beatles songs.

Whoa!

Like Jinx Malone.

That That would be incredible.

But this is.

I would love to see Mark David Chapman lip-sync for his life.

Oh,

can you imagine a lip-sync battle between Mark David Chapman and John Hinkley?

Oh, come on.

Let's do it.

Oh, but they have to do Imagine.

Which is going to be very, very difficult for people watching.

I also, you know, he could also,

you look at all of it, and then

the simplest explanation too is that he was just absolutely batshit insane.

That could be.

be.

He could very well be entirely insane and then just don't you have to be a little bit insane to do it?

You know, I don't know.

No, that's the old, I mean, that's the old argument.

You got to be kind of crazy to do it.

But really, it's the whole thing is whether you know the difference between right and wrong.

And he knew that killing John Lennon was wrong.

Yeah.

And it was definitely premeditated.

Yes.

He had to go down to Georgia to get the bullets.

He had the whole shrine and shit.

Yeah, no, no.

He made two trips to do it.

You know, he, you're like, yeah, he had the whole thing of like, wouldn't it be something if I killed John Lennon?

The thing about crazy is that a lot of times it becomes criminality comes around when it's also paired with being kind of stupid, unfortunately.

Is that I feel like crime is

more about impulse control and how you react to your own emotions.

And a lot of times, unfortunately, in people that kind of have lower intellectual abilities, they have less less impulse control most of the time i think that the intelligence is what kind of what like yeah obviously there's both but it's more like understanding what you're doing when you're doing it yeah it's the the theory going around that you know the reason why the world has gotten like just progressively weirder and worse since 2020 is because so many people came out of covid with permanent brain fog and since they have permanent brain fog people have a lot less impulse control so it's just people are just generally like worse.

I also think that we're a little bit in a, this obviously it's completely off the topic of the episode, but

I think we're a little bit in a

caught in a fake virtual matrix where people also sort of believe that the internet is real.

And so they are

driven insane by that.

Yeah.

Yeah, they're not.

Can you imagine if he had an I feel like we're lucky that this is back in the day when he had to go shoot

Sadly, he had to go shoot an icon to get famous.

Where, like, I feel like in this modern time period, Mark David Chapman would have just shot up a school, shot up a public space.

That's, you know, that shows the difference.

Back then, you had to read a full book to get crazy.

That was just a meme.

And that's another thing that makes the Zoomers fucking lazy is that they're not putting the work into their assassinations.

I want to see a reading list.

I want to see actions taken.

Oh, you're going to kill me over Zoom?

I don't think so.

You're going to want to get out there and put your feet to the goddamn cement.

All right?

Paper resumes.

Here's an interesting new wrinkle to the story.

It's like new, it's not new, but it's something that I discovered since we recorded the episode.

Apparently, I don't know if James Taylor's just trying to get in on the story, but in 2015, he went on Stern and said that he encountered Mark David Chapman the day before the murder.

What?

Yeah, he said Chapman pinned me to the wall, glistening with maniacal sweat, and tried to talk in some freak speech about what he was going to do and stuff about how John was interested and how he was going to get in touch with John Lennon.

And it was surreal to have contact with the guy 24 hours before he shot John.

Why didn't he do anything?

Because he was on a lot of methadone at this point in the early 80s.

Yeah, he's trying to get off heroin.

He was a big motherfucker, though.

James Taylor.

He's like, he seems like he's kind of jacked.

I always find it strange when those guys that play like light acoustic guitar are like super deep into heroin.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, because it's always like, I've seen fire,

but I know that song's about like finding a man, a woman with like a blood coming out of her nose and like shit her pussy and she was fucking dead and shit.

But it's like this like night, it's like a song you hear at like Joann's.

Yeah.

Is that what it's about?

It's so, yeah.

I thought it was about his like girlfriend that died in a plane crash.

Yeah, it was about his girlfriend that died in a plane crash.

It's not about a woman being found with feces and her pussy and she's dead.

Yeah, flying machines and pieces on the ground.

That's what that song's about.

Fire and raid!

Oh, what are you thinking of?

Oh, I was thinking of the other movie.

Oh, he's like a great song called, Oh, that's what it is.

I mix it up with She Shit Her Pussy, I found her there.

Yes!

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that is one of my favorite James Taylor songs.

She shit her pussy, I found her there.

Cheryl King actually wrote it.

Oh, that makes sense.

That makes sense because of its understanding of women.

Yes, I love that song.

Well, why did he do anything to stop him, dog?

Well, this is one last interesting factoid about Mark David Chapman: when he returned to New York for the second time, he got into a cab with this guy named Mark Snyder, and he told Snyder,

I'm a producer from the Rolling Stones.

I just got back from a recording session with the Beatles.

They just got back together.

And then when Snyder asked, hey, do you remember any of the new songs?

Just Mark David Chapman just got angry and said, forget it.

It's all scat.

It's a scat album.

And I saw her standing with

him.

Pull off.

Oh, my God.

Oh my God.

You want Aaron?

You olden?

And then when the cab driver dropped him off, he said, My name is Mark David Chapman.

You will remember my name.

Hey, that sounds like most of the people I imagine who have to drive Uber in L.A.

and have to deal with Los Angeles in general.

Yeah, yeah, you will remember my name.

My name's Trayton Montgomery VII.

You will remember my name.

Now, I'm sure you guys have covered this on the show in the past, but I just got to know, for my own personal knowledge, why do we always get the middle name of the assassin?

You know what?

No one's ever been able to figure that one out.

It's one of those.

I mean, you don't get, well, they say it's always the assassins that aren't pinkly didn't finish the job.

Yeah.

But you get John Wilkes Booth.

You know what?

I found out a really interesting factoid about John Wilkes Booth the other day is that John Wilkes Booth and his brother, you know, they were both like really famous actors.

Yeah.

And they raised money for a statue of Shakespeare that is still in Central Park to this day.

You know what play they performed?

Julius Caesar.

Whoa,

wild stuff.

Lincoln's secretary.

His name is Kennedy.

Did you see this?

Kennedy's secretary.

His name is Lincoln.

Lincoln.

And do you know that Kennedy was killed from a warehouse and

the man went to the theater and Lincoln was killed in a theater, and the man went to a hidden warehouse.

I'm going to come.

Oh, fuck, I'm going to come.

Just fucking thinking about it.

So, in the end,

we were going to update Mark David Chapman.

And we went, we had our intrepid researchers research, and we went and re-researched, and we found out a lot of the stuff that we were going to update you on is fake.

Yeah.

so but we're just sort of on a track right now oh yeah and we just kind of have to keep going on this train but i do no matter what towns it stops in i know for i knew that we weren't going to find definitive

evidence what is some of the fake

all of the things most of the things that we've said except

except for the fact

yeah and the todd rundgren stuff that's all real he definitely was a sound engineer for stage fright he knows that for certain

and the stuff about operation 40 i don't know and the stuff about the the the hypnotist we don't know we stuff about the the patsy stuff we don't know we don't know if the doorman was trained by cia

i'm not sure from the from the documentary first of all it said murder without a trial the third episode is called the trial so i don't know what the fuck they're doing and i'm gonna just say again we're not paid by these people it was a lot of padding Yeah, right?

I got a little upset for a second.

Am I not right?

Am I not correct?

A lot of these documentaries, like it was a lot of padding.

I mean, maybe we'll talk about this further in another episode, but a lot of these true crime documentaries these days, the three, four-part, motherfuckers, cut it down to two.

Cut it down to two.

Most of us now in the year 2024, just imagine Netflix, when you're making a documentary, imagine 75% of your audience has a podcast that has done an episode on this serial killer.

So just know that before you make another documentary, because we know the story, like we didn't need an hour, like maybe this is just straight bitching, but I don't know if we needed the hour explaining who John Lennon was, who Mark David Chapman was.

What was that?

Because it's like, would I be here?

Would I be at this juncture

watching a new show about Mark David Chapman, trying to learn new information about Mark David Chapman if I didn't know who the fucking Beatles were.

Because that would be really fucking stupid.

What am I doing?

I mean, just living my life going on Wikipedia on the letter M to seeing what comes up.

So, yeah.

So, check us out

at patreon.com slash lastpodcast on the left.

That's where you see us do fucking shit.

Yeah.

Check us out on Instagram and TikTok.

Go to twitch.tv slash LPNTV to see our Twitch content.

And check us out at LastPodcastOntheleft.com to go see us live all over North America.

And I believe by this point, we'll have announced our UK and Iceland shows.

We better have.

And all of our shows in Australia in August.

Yes, go to lastpodcastontheft.com.

If you live in any of those places,

go check it out.

I love that about us.

I love that about all of us.

And every single one, are we and that.

Hail Saint.

Hail Rundgren.

Yeah, Hail Rund.

Hail Todd.

Go home and listen to Fearless.

That all looks great.

Don't go to Central Park.

You'll get stabbed by a hooker.

It's a lot nicer these days.

Yeah, I know.

The lie.

Actually, it's going back.

It's kind of nice.

We've been alive so long, we're watching New York get bad again.

That's nice.

Nothing.

God is a concept in which we measure our pain.

Whoa.

Fuck you.

John Lemon.

Wow.

Yoko Omo.

Thank you for enjoying the last update on the left.

You can find other shows that you'll enjoy from the Last Podcast Network on LastPodcastontheleft.com.

See you there.

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Commercial Insurance.

Business owners meet Progressive Insurance.

They make it easy to get discounts on commercial auto insurance and find coverages to grow with your business.

Quote in as little as seven minutes at progressivecommercial.com.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company.

Coverage provided and serviced by affiliated and third-party insurers.

Discounts and coverage selections not available in all states or situations.

Filtreat brand air filters help capture unwanted particles in your indoor air, like dust, pet dander, bacteria, and viruses, and have similar airflow across all MERV and MPR levels, now available in more dimensions and sizes.