Second gunman not Mark David Chapman may have shot John Lennon: author
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Imagine that.
Mark David Chapman might be innocent in the murder of John Lennon, according to a British author and TV producer who said his upcoming documentary and book outline how a second shooter might have killed the iconic singer.
Chapman may have been brainwashed by the CIA to serve as a patsy, according to David Whelan, who spent three years investigating what he called astonishing inconsistencies in the official narrative of Lennon’s 1980 slaying as well as weird coincidences.
Whelan, whose book “Gimme Some Truth – The Assassination of John Lennon” and a documentary will be released later this year, told The Post he believes the official narrative that Lennon was shot from behind by Chapman is untrue, and that a more professionally trained gunman shot him from the front, into his chest.
As part of his research, Whelan spoke to the surgeon, Dr. David Halleran, and two nurses, Barbara Kammerer and Dea Sato, who tried to save the dying Lennon at the former Roosevelt Hospital and to the lead detective who handled the case.
He also pored through reams of police and medical records, he said in an interview from his London home Saturday.
Lennon was fatally shot on Dec. 8, 1980, as he and his wife, Yoko Ono, were returning to their apartment at the Dakota on Central Park West.
Chapman, now 67, described as an obsessed fan with mental problems, shot the former Beatle with a .38 revolver. He pleaded guilty to the murder after his lawyers briefly considered an insanity defense and is serving a 20-years-to-life sentence at Green Haven Correctional Facility in upstate New York. He’s been denied parole at least 12 times.
Whelan said the “official narrative” says Lennon was shot from behind, but his interviews and research with the surgeon and nurses, among others, indicated that Lennon was shot by someone in front of him.
In addition, Whelan said, it was dark that night and Chapman was reportedly about 25 feet from Lennon when he fired, a vast distance for an untrained marksman. Yet the bullets entered Lennon in a close grouping that looked professional, Whelan said.
“Dr. Halleran said that not even a Navy Seal could pull it off from that distance,” Whelan said.
Whelan said he discovered that Chapman had a long history of associating with charismatic Southern Christian preachers who had ties to former President Richard Nixon, as well as to psychiatrists with links to military intelligence.
It’s on record that four psychiatrists known for their forensic psychiatry and skill in hypnosis, including one expert in the CIA’s notorious mind-control program MK-ULTRA, visited Chapman’s prison cell within a month of his arrest for Lennon’s murder.
Among them was the former CIA consultant Milton Kline, a New York psychologist and expert hypnotist who once said he could “create a patsy in three months” but it would take six months to make someone an assassin.
Bernard Diamond, a renowned forensic psychiatrist and expert hypnotist who was a witness for the defense at the trial of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. assassin Sirhan Sirhan and who hypnotized Sirhan while in his cell, successfully instructing him to “climb like a monkey,” also visited Chapman in jail.
Whelan said he believes Chapman may have been groomed and mind-controlled to be the frontman, so that Lennon could be taken out by a professional assassin.
Dave Wedge, who co-authored 2020’s “The Last Days of John Lennon” with James Patterson and Casey Sherman, told The Post Saturday that Whelan’s thesis was “a crock.”
“It’s a fantasy,” Wedge said. “We went through all the case files that hadn’t been looked at in 30 years. No one disputes that Chapman was the gunman. He’s confessed repeatedly and apologized.”
Whelan still can’t explain exactly what happened.
“The motive isn’t totally clear, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a CIA/Deep State operation,” he said. “There are links between fundamentalist Christians and these hypnotist doctors and Nixon as well. Nixon and Lennon were arch enemies, and Nixon was close to [Ronald] Reagan,” who was president-elect when the former Beatle was shot.
“Lennon was just coming out of his shell and getting back to political activity and Reagan was coming into office,” Whelan observed.
Whelan alleges that key information surrounding the assassination was “hushed up” by the NYPD and the District Attorney’s office and said the autopsy report was never released by then-Medical Examiner Elliot Gross.
But Wedge said he and his co-authors saw the autopsy report during their research and didn’t find any major discrepancies.
Whelan uncovered numerous documents in the case. The Daily Mail was the first to publish Chapman’s “hit list,” courtesy of Whelan, which included newsman Walter Cronkite, late-night host Johnny Carson, actors George C. Scott and Marlon Brando and Jackie Kennedy Onassis.
Additional reporting by Michael Kaplan
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