So who do you think shot John Lennon
Let's compare notes here
David Whelan's timeline of the week before Lennon's death got me thinking about my own timeline in late November 1980.
I was traveling solo through Egypt and Israel from November 1 until I met up with Leonard Cohen and his band at the Tel Aviv airport in late afternoon of November 23 1980. I joined them on the bus to their hotel by the sea and spent the night (platonically) with my old friend guitarist Mitch Watkins.
November 24 was the sound check and the concert - I was standing near the front in my Bedouin dress bought in Cairo and later I was backstage. Then back to the hotel where Leonard had interviews with journalists the following day, at least one of whom worked for Mossad.
I had been keeping a diary of my travels which is now stored in a carton at McGill University Library's special collections. In it I recorded adventures and also some dreams. One dream involved riding a bus with a mysterious assassin… but let's stick to our timeline for now.
On November 26 the band including Jennifer Warnes and Sharon Robinson flew back to America. Leonard boarded a flight to Athens where I was also headed on another plane later that day or the next. At border control Israeli security tore my bags apart- as I vividly recall.
The following day the 27th, a Thursday, I landed in Athens and caught a boat to Hydra, where I took a room in the port in a small hotel, and spent my first night (after going out for a bite to eat and meeting a very talkative young American man who traded stocks for a living.)
Author David Whelan thinks the plan to assassinate Lennon went into effect on November 28.
The following afternoon, Friday the 28th, I went to see if Leonard was in his house, and yes, he was there. We went out to dinner in the port and ran into a friend, Jean- Marc, and the brash young American who said something insulting to Leonard causing him to leave the taverna in a huff. But after I chased after him and explained that I didn't know the American kid from Adam and he was just some loudmouth, Leonard seemed placated.
Over the weekend I visited once again at his house and helped him repair an upstairs floor in preparation for his kids spending Christmas and New Years. Then I cooked a simple supper. All seemed well except he told me I couldn't spend the night because “I'm expecting a phone call and no one else can be here when it comes.”
I said “Who are you - James Bond?” He laughed. I returned to my room in the port which I had to check out of the next day due to the bedbugs: “Greek mosquitoes” the owner called them. I found a permanent room for the winter at Zoe's pension in Kamini.
In a cafe I met a young French painter and we struck up a friendship - on Hydra there was a looming sense of impending doom, cold and isolation that often drove strangers together. The house where the painter was living, overlooking the port, had been struck by lightning so there was no electricity - I spent one romantic, candlelit night and Guy made crepes on the gas fire the next morning, which dawned windy and grey. Was this what my winter in Greece would be like?
On the night of Thursday December 4, I was in my damp bed in Kamini, shivering under piles of blankets and having what seemed like a major anxiety attack. Near midnight I got dressed and ran over to Leonard's thinking, as he was a night owl, he would still be up and would make me a nice hot cup of Ovomaltine before sending me on my way. His house was unusually dark but I called up to his bedroom window. After a few moments a strangely deep, groggy voice shouted down at me.
“Go away!” it groaned. “Leave me alone! I need my sleep!”
Shocked and ashamed, I ran back to my room where I shivered through the night and resolved I would not visit him again til I bumped into him by accident, which happened on the early afternoon of December 14, a Sunday. By then Lennon had been dead for almost a week and I could have no notion Leonard had been to New York in the 9 days since he had shouted down at me from the upstairs window.
In that interval he had grown a beard and visibly lost weight. He looked haggard and exhausted and he also seemed nervous when he tiptoed over to talk to me in the port where his kids and their nanny were standing, having just disembarked from the boat. Our conversation was odd to say the least... and for that reason it remains etched in my memory.
I have written this all out elsewhere. It took me years and two full biographies to make me realize and accept the fact that Leonard was in Manhattan during the week when John Lennon died, and never mentioned it. To anyone.
He came back to Hydra that day, as I happened to be crossing the port, and pretended he hadn't been anywhere.
But now what I find most interesting is how neatly those dates and Leonard's itinerary coincide with the movements of Marc David Chapman, the purported assassin at the Dakota who has been in jail ever since for the murder of John Lennon.
Let's review:
On the 28th the plan to kill Lennon got underway. Leonard had already left Israel for Greece on the 27th and moved into his house on Hydra. I saw him November 28.
Over the weekend of November 29 -December 1, he said he was waiting for a phone call and “no one else can be here when it comes.”
On December 2, Chapman's ticket from Honolulu to Chicago got issued. On December 5 he flew to NYC. There are questions about the tickets being tampered with or the date changed but I will let you read Whelan's comments on that at his Substack.
Leonard's phone call must have come sometime after I left his house, on the Sunday or Monday. Over the next few days while I was having my little fling with the French painter, Leonardwould have been preparing to fly to NYC.
The likely reason for him to be in bed asleep before midnight on December 4, was to catch the early hydrofoil into Athens at 7 am - and then the 9-hour flight to New York on the 5th. Which would have him arriving in NY the same day as Chapman.
What a coincidence!
But wait, there's more.
Chapman first checked into the Manhattan Y, but moved to the Sheraton on Times Square the following night.
By then Leonard would have been checked into his room at the Algonquin.
It's a nice straight walk along 7th Avenue from the Algonquin to the Sheraton, and on to the Dakota across Central Park.
Leonard could start out from his hotel, pick up Chapman at the Sheraton, and the two of them on foot could be at Lennon's front entrance 1.1 mi away in 25 minutes.
Neat, eh? If you were planning an operation on the night of December 8 you couldn't have coordinated it any better.
I never wanted this to be true for two main reasons : I was the only witness to Leonard leaving Hydra on December 5 and returning 9 days later physically and mentally changed. I just happened to witness both ends of his secret trip to New York - but it would be another 15 years before I realized he really was there the week Lennon died. The biographies are right about that- but wrong about where he went afterwards and what he did in 1981.
It took me decades to wrap my mind around what I had witnessed and figure out what really happened: as opposed to the official alibi. It's strange that neither biographer thought to wonder what Leonard thought about Lennon and the assassination since he was just across the park and it must have affected him. It's never mentioned.
Even though I saw the gun at his house on Hydra and witnessed the change in Leonard over that winter- sullen, reclusive, paranoid - spouting strange right-wing rhetoric- it never once occurred to me that he could be the assassin.
But if you put the timelines side by side- from Tel Aviv to Athens to New York and back to Athens and his winter cooling off on Hydra, everything coincides perfectly.
Over that winter Leonard told me in so many ways that I ignored or failed to understand at the time -- he was a mess and I thought it was all about money. He claimed to be broke and washed up after the 1980 tour. He drank heavily with his intelligence cronies - mercenaries, gamblers, prostitutes -- and surrounded himself with women who took care of his children. In private he was anxious and volatile - no fun to be around.
I had given him the idea of spending the winter on Hydra. In Tel Aviv after the concert I told him I was planning to rent a room and write my novel there. He warned me winters in Greece are tough - and then he said "Maybe I'll go there too." I think he perceived it as a perfect alibi -
I was happy at the thought of having company but it didn't turn out as expected.
I'm just a witness and storyteller who lived nearby, saw him come and go, watched him deteriorate afterwards, and saw the gun - thousands of miles from the scene of the crime.
Miles Mathis' theory is irrelevant to what I witnessed - but several others independently have claimed Lennon faked his death. If so, the joke is on Leonard who told his lover Elizabeth Buchanan "I shot John Lennon because of what he did to you" -- she knew John in his May Pang period. Leonard thought Lennon was a feminist and a degenerate who misled women like poor Liz who was mind controlled from childhood- her mother was the red haired maid that Leonard raped as a teenager at the Cohen's home in Westmount
The only way to "prove" Leonard killed Lennon forensically would be with photos or other physical evidence like an audio confession- so forget about that kind of proof.
The forensics show that Chapman couldn't have killed Lennon -- the official story was fabricated afterwards.
But i know who the shooter was because he told me, in so many ways, in the year we spent on Hydra. And by framing an alibi that was obviously false, which ended up in the biographies: a hotel receipt from the Algonquin and a poem he wrote on the stationery - proves he was in NY that week. But he never mentioned that 9-day trip to anyone - and no one noticed he had been away, except me.
Ironically, crooked Michael Posner interviewed people on Hydra who confirm Leonard was on Hydra after December 14 - including published photos -- so while claiming I "stalked" Leonard Posner backs up my story.
There is proof he lied about his whereabouts and hid on Hydra through 1981 until late September when I visited him at his house in Montreal. He was very paranoid even then.
I'm a witness to the fact that he talked about shooting people, trained his kids to shoot, "hated the Beatles" etc etc and loved Ronald Reagan.
It's not forensics- it's personal experience living next door.