A Penguin in the Orchard

Chapman’s “Compulsion”

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Tapes of Lennon’s killer to air

Newly released audio tapes of interviews with John Lennon’s assassin reveal Mark Chapman’s self-confessed “compulsion” to kill the former Beatle.

“It was like a train, a runaway train, there was no stopping it,” Chapman told interviewers in a New York prison more than a decade ago.

This event was probably my generation’s first Kennedy assassination moment. There have been several since then (the Challenger accident, 9/11, etc.), but this was the first time I could legitimately say, “I remember right where I was when I heard … ”

That place was the USS Forrestal, on a workup cruise in the Carribbean, preparing for a summer deployment to the Mediterranean. I was the ship’s TV anchorman for the nightly closed-circuit news broadcast. I also wrote for the shipboard newspaper and did a three-hour radio show (also on closed-circuit) each night. I literally tore the story off the wire in the ship’s Public Affairs Office and, stunned, wondered if I’d ever be able to deliver the story in the night’s news without breaking down. I did, but at the time, it was the most horrible, inexplicable news I’d ever had to deliver. So much has happened in the 25 years since Lennon’s death that the horror of the story almost seems naieve today. But, I’ll always remember right where I was when I heard that John Lennon had been murdered.