That was the day that the unimaginable occurred: a crazy fan named Mark Chapman killed John Lennon in cold blood.
Just as people were getting ready for Christmas, Lennon had just wrapped up a recording session and was returning to his New York apartment at The Dakota.
John had signed an autograph for Chapman earlier that day, and the former Beatle legend was waiting for him when Chapman shot him in the back.
John Lennon: Murder Without a Trial, a new documentary series, will revisit the catastrophe that caused everyone to rethink how we relate to celebrity and the famous.
He was 40 years old when he was brutally assassinated. His wife Yoko Ono and son Sean Lennon lost a father and a husband, and he lost his life just as he was about to resume his career after a five-year hiatus with Double Fantasy.
The documentary John Lennon: Murder Without A Trial will disclose the last words of the ‘Imagine’ legend in addition to previously unreleased crime scene images, eyewitness accounts, and interviews with Lennon’s friends and Chapman’s attorneys.
John yelled out, “I’m shot,” as he entered the building and fell on the ground, bleeding from his mouth, according to Jay Hastings, who worked at the front desk of the Lennon apartment building.
The whole music industry was rocked by this incident. However, how did the remaining members of The Beatles respond to their former bandmate’s murder?
When John was killed, George Harrison was in bed when he received the news, and he was working on his own record.
Talking about Lennon’s passing with Ringo Starr and Michael Aspel in 1988, George revealed that when he first heard of the news, he went back to sleep.
“I was in bed in England at the time. Sometime between four and five in the morning, the call was received. I declined the call. When Olivia answered the phone, she announced, “John has been shot.”
“Oh, how horrible is it, I thought to myself. I assumed he might have had a flesh wound or something similar, but she informed me that he had passed away.
“I actually just went back to sleep,” he said. Perhaps it was
Ringo Starr was in the Bahamas when he was first notified of John Lennon’s murder on 8th December 1980.
In the same interview with Michael Aspel in 1988, he revealed: “I still miss the man, I love the man, I was close to the man.”
“He went out in such a stupid way and the guy is famous now for God’s sake. We were in the Bahamas at the time and my stepdaughter Francesca, Barbara’s daughter, called and she said ‘there is some kind of news about John. A shooting and things like that’.”
“Then they called back and they said he [had actually died]. So we sat around and were just devastated. I was just down,” he admitted.
“So five o’clock in the morning I ordered the plane and flew to New York. Just to see if there was anything you can do, but you can’t. You know, when you get to that position or situation, you just do something and that’s what Barbara and I did. Because you couldn’t have a holiday after that.”
Ringo told Barbara Walters that he was the last member of The Beatles to see John alive in 1981, just a year after John was killed.
Remembering their get-together, he said, “I was lodging at the Plaza. We spent some time in New York. Since we meet each other everywhere we go, I hadn’t seen him in a while.
“And he spent an hour visiting Yoko. And because they stayed for five hours, we had a terrific time. The fact that we hadn’t seen one another for a year didn’t matter. When we did, everything was always OK.”
“But it was a particularly great time that we, that I had, anyway,” said Ringo. “Then the asshole showed up. It is not understandable. You consider it. However, you’ll never understand it, I assure you. A wonderful man has left the world.”
