John Lennon is the victim of a suspicious assassination on December 8, 1980


A decade of neon and pastel got off to a much darker start when America failed to get out of its first year without the shocking loss of John Lennon. The creative giant and political activist was gunned down outside his New York City apartment building on the evening of December 8, 1980, in an assassination that had all the hallmarks of a government conspiracy, complete with an unconvincing patsy pulling the trigger. Lennon had been hounded by the FBI, and illegally by the CIA, since moving to the United States. The powers-that-be feared his potential influence on elections, particularly among younger voters.

Gunman Mark David Chapman remains in prison, serving a 20-years-to-life sentence at Green Haven Correctional Facility in Beekman, New York. He has been denied parole all fourteen times he has been eligible for it. His explanation for killing Lennon, who was only 40 at the time, doesn't add up. He claimed on the one hand that he was obsessed with what he thought was Lennon's hypocrisy in promoting a life free of possessions, while living a lavish celebrity lifestyle in an exclusive, luxury apartment building. But he also stated that he considered other celebrity targets, seeking notoriety for killing a prominent person.

Yet, despite this discrepancy, no official law enforcement investigation into possible government involvement in the assassination was conducted. The efforts of a private citizen, historian Jon Wiener, were ultimately successful in forcing the release of a massive trove of documents revealing the incredible lengths the FBI, Immigration and Naturalization Services, and CIA went to in tracking and listening in on Lennon over a decade. The materials ranged from the illegally-serious (planting drugs on Lennon as a false pretext to deport him) to the comical (chronicling the utterings of a Communist parrot, who liked to interject "Right on!" when he heard human activists around him say something that met with his avian approval).

No one familiar with the assassinations of the Kennedys, the attempted assassinations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, and the assassination of Charlie Kirk will be surprised to learn that a full and exhaustive, transparent investigation that goes wherever the facts lead - including government conspiracy to remove Lennon from the political chessboard - was never undertaken by law enforcement or a compliant, quasi-state media consisting of three TV networks, and a handful of powerful, legacy newspapers.

There was, quite obviously, no internet in 1980.

Location: New York, NY, USA

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