A book and planned documentary that’s claimed will challenge the official narrative surrounding John Lennon’s killing has been announced. It will look into the strong possibility that the man jailed for the shooting, Mark David Chapman, was “groomed” to take part in the event in December 1980 through “hypnosis” and, as well as that, wasn’t even the man who fired the fatal shots into the former Beatle, that there was “a second shooter” who was the actual person who killed the music-star.
For me personally, I find this proposed project looking into the assassination somewhat newsworthy, not necessarily because it appears to be delivering a lot of information that flies in the face of the official version of events – after all, authors, researchers, radio-hosts and podcasters have been reporting on and investigating the holes in the officially agreed narrative for decades including the possibilities that there was a mysterious second shooter and that Chapman was mind-controlled, so, not much new there. And indeed, myself and Mark Devlin and Desiree Hall, my co-hosts on our podcast series ‘Magical Mystery Talk,’ explored and talked about very much the same with regards to the Lennon killing in a two-parter in 2020. No, whatstands out at me as worthy of some highlight about this touted project is that, to my knowledge,there has never been a documentary produced on the alternative version of events surrounding John’s assassination before, and also because it’s being advertised with the help of one of the giants of the British mainstream media, quite an unprecedented step given that most of the challenges to the official narrative that have come by way of radio-shows, podcasts and interviews, articles and other authored works in the past have come through the so-called ‘alt. media.’ The aforementioned giant that’s announced – in what it’s describing as an “exclusive” – the proposed arrival of this documentary – that’s credited to “British author and TV-producer David Whelan,” who’s “examined Lennon’s fatal shooting” in “a three-year investigation,” – is the ‘MailOnline’ which is the internet arm of the British newspaper the ‘Daily Mail’ which, as I compose this article, is reported to be the UK’s best-selling daily paper, founded back in the 1800s, so, yes, it’s mainstream.
Having taken a little bit of a closer look at David, via his page at the careers-based social-media platform ‘LinkedIn,’ it’s there that I see it stated that “a book” has also been “written,” with the title ‘Gimme Some Truth – The Assassination of John Lennon,’ and that it’s “finally coming out in the sunlight.” There’s also mention that “a documentary series is planned.” So, if I’m not wrong, this is the one and the same documentary that the MailOnline mentions although it makes no reference in that article to it being a series, instead giving me the impression that it’s going to be released as one-episode, whereas Whelan’s LinkedIn page leaves me thinking that, actually, it’s going to be a bit more expansive than that.
Now, you might be reading this thinking that it’s great that a mainstream source such as the MailOnline is shining a spotlight on a researcher who’s poised to issue information about the inconsistencies, anomalies, and other lesser-known aspects of John Lennon’s killing that have almost never been reported on before by a news-provider with an audience-reach of, literally, millions. You might be feeling a sense of relief and/or satisfaction that, at long last, after 43 years of suppression, info on the murder of the former Beatle linking it to mind-control, “second shooters,” and more of the same type of mostly stifled information (including MK ULTRA), will be allowed to breathe in the mainstream arena. However, on the contrary, you might actually be a little concerned that a source such as the MailOnline might be flying in the face of the universally-trumpeted narrative, you know, that states that Mark David Chapman was nothing more than a ‘crazed lone Beatles nut’ who shot Lennon outside his apartment at the ‘Dakota’ building in New York because he deemed the music-star to be a “phony.” I ask myself, how often, when I look back and reflect, has the mainstream media lent its valuable airtime and page-space to – for example – the suspicious and downright incoherent officially-sanctioned version of events surrounding 9/11, or the ‘rona, to name but two? Well, of course, not often, and when such conspiracies are reported on outside of the alt. media arena it’s been done with a varying degree of derision or some other potentially damaging form of reporting. But, hey, maybe I’m being too suspicious here, too cynical? Well, while I’m at it, I’ll mention here that there’s another aspect to the publicity surrounding this project that I find quite jarring, although, I’ll note once again, that my cynicism might be running away with me. The MailOnline article (which you can read excerpts of below) claims that, in “a three-year investigation” Whelan “has spoken to key figures involved in the aftermath of the shooting” and “has unearthed a trove of documents relating to the killing.” Whilst I am in no position to challenge this or to doubt it, what does irritate me slightly is that mainstream audiences who have very little to no knowledge of the decades-old research that’s already been available in the public domain into the holes and inconsistencies surrounding the official narrative, including evidence of a “second shooter” and Chapman being under “hypnosis,” will read this MailOnline article, see this information for the first time, and assume that what’s to come in this proposed documentary, whether it’s released as a series or one-off episode or whatever, is all exclusively down to this “trove of documents” that Whelan “unearthed” during his “three-year investigation.”
If you’ve ever listened to the two-part special of Magical Mystery Talk from 2020 into the murder of John Lennon, you will have heard me talk in it at some great length about what is, to my knowledge, the first ever book published that challenged the official narrative surrounding his shooting, released back as early as 1989, and titled ‘The Murder of John Lennon’ by Fenton Bresler, a British barrister who conducted a first-hand investigation into the killing lasting almost eight years and who spoke with many of the principle protagonists including Chapman’s defence lawyer, his prosecutor, Yoko Ono, the police officers on duty on the night of the killing, as well as the-then Lieutenant of Detectives Arthur O’Connor who questioned Mark following his arrest and is quoted in the book as saying that “he looked as if he could have been programmed.”
This is mentioned briefly in the MailOnline article as is Dr Milton Kline, a New York psychologist who, according to Bresler, “served as an unpaid consultant on CIA hypnosis research” and was called on by a judge to examine the jailed Chapman who, as has been known about in the public domain for decades, heard a voice in his head that compelled him to shoot Lennon, that kept saying to him, “do it, do it” on the night of the killing, and that also told him to change his ‘not guilty’ plea to ‘guilty’ thus denying himself a trial, these are mentioned below in the MailOnline article excerpts, as is the first-hand accounts of Dr David Halleran, the surgeon who desperately tried to save John’s life and who for some considerable time has stated that the singer was shot in the front of his body, not the back as Chapman himself has claimed.
The individual in charge of the autopsy was then-New York City Chief Medical Officer Elliot Gross, a controversial figure who is talked about in some length in my previously-mentioned Magical Mystery Talk two-part special from 2020, and who gets mentioned in the MailOnline article, below:
A three-year investigation into the murder of John Lennon has unearthed a series of extraordinary inconsistencies – including the suggestion that detectives may have fundamentally misunderstood how the shooting happened.
British author and TV producer David Whelan has exhaustively examined Lennon’s fatal shooting on December 8, 1980, as he and his wife Yoko Ono returned to their home in the Dakota Building overlooking New York’s Central Park.
Whelan has unearthed a trove of documents relating to the killing, including gunman Mark Chapman’s ‘hit list’ – published for the first time here – which as well as the former Beatle also featured Marlon Brando and former First Lady Jackie Kennedy Onassis.
And intriguingly Whelan’s research for a forthcoming book into the former Beatle’s death has raised a series of troubling questions about exactly how the killing was carried out – and why.
Mr Whelan, 56, has spoken to key figures involved in the aftermath of the shooting. These include: the surgeon who treated Lennon and two nurses who assisted – as well as uncovering other witness testimonies which don’t appear to correspond with the official narrative.
The prosecution’s version of events, accepted by the courts, was that disturbed loner Chapman lay in wait for Lennon and shot five times, four of the bullets hitting his victim in the back. But this now appears to be riddled with contradictions.
Instead, Whelan’s witnesses suggest that the way the shooting was officially recorded may have been completely wrong – with the fatal shots fired into Lennon’s chest rather than back.
The surgeon who treated Lennon and the two nurses who assisted are all adamant that Lennon was shot in the front, with the four bullets grouped closely together, suggesting a high degree of marksmanship, and three passing straight through his body and out of his rear shoulder.
Other evidence gleaned by Whelan about those who may have influenced Chapman has led him to question whether the young man might even have been ‘groomed’ for the assassination through manipulation or even hypnosis by powerful backers with links to right-wing Southern Christians, the US military or the CIA.
Whelan points to first-hand witness statements by that surgeon, Dr David Halleran, and the two nurses, Barbara Kammerer and Dea Sato, all of whom state unequivocally that Lennon was shot four times in his upper chest area from the front, with three of the bullets exiting from his left back. One round remained in his left chest or lower shoulder area.
Whelan said: “Between the two of them, nurses Kammerer and Sato saw Lennon’s wounds up close, three times. Twice when he was washed and shrouded.
“Nobody was better placed to say where and how John Lennon was shot.”
Yet retired NYPD lead detective Ron Hoffman, in a recorded interview with Whelan, claimed Lennon must have been shot in the back and not in the front, stating: “It’s impossible because he (Lennon) was walking up the stairs in front of Yoko.”
But that in itself raises another question, says Whelan.
Eyewitnesses do agree on where Chapman was standing: just at the entrance to the Dakota’s portico, several yards from those steps and if Lennon was climbing the steps he would have been out of Chapman’s view.
Said Mr Whelan: “As in the case of John F Kennedy, you simply cannot get shot in the front from the back.”
He continued: “The hollow-point bullets Chapman supposedly used do not usually pass through a victim, as they are designed to spread out on impact, causing maximum damage to the body.”
Yet three bullets did pass through Lennon, leaving holes in the glass panels of a vestibule door attached to the security entrance of the building. Whelan claimed that the slugs’ marks in the door were too low to have come from shots to Lennon’s shoulder.
Whelan also questioned Chapman’s own recollection of the night’s events.
“He could not coherently understand why he felt compelled to shoot John Lennon – Chapman did not remember pulling the hammer or aiming,” said Whelan.
“All he could remember was a voice in his head saying, ‘do it do it.’ NYPD Lieutenant Arthur O’Connor, stated that Chapman appeared ‘programmed’ on the night he shot Lennon.”
Chapman, even now, is adamant that he shot John Lennon four times in his back from five attempts. But Mr Whelan said: “It’s something I suggest, from first-hand medical testimony, he could not have credibly done.
“Therefore, we can assume that Chapman was possibly having some kind of psychotic episode, which enabled him to think he was doing something he couldn’t have done.”
Although a post-mortem examination was carried out on Lennon’s body, the autopsy was performed by the controversial New York City Chief Medical Officer, Elliot Gross, and his report has never been released to the public.
Gross had a reputation for running a chaotic office and was later investigated over allegations of misconduct, misleading causes of deaths, and covering up evidence of police brutality. He was dismissed in 1987, though later cleared of 11 charges of negligence, misconduct, and incompetence.
Mr Whelan alleges that key information surrounding the murder was ‘hushed up’ by the NYPD and the District Attorney’s office, including 122 unidentified pills found in Chapman’s hotel room, which were supposedly sent off to a lab for drugs analysis. The results have never been revealed.
The various items found by the police which were made public are listed on a typed docket, including an expired passport, a pocket bible and a Wizard of Oz placemat. Whether Chapman’s death list was found in the hotel room isn’t clear, but it is not listed on the docket.
Having obtained Detective Hoffman’s original notebook and other documents associated with the case, Mr Whelan pointed out that no single eyewitness, including Yoko Ono, saw Lennon being shot by Chapman.
Ono’s exact location when John was shot, has changed several times, via various witness statements she gave around the time of her husband’s murder, understandably, no doubt, given her emotional turmoil.
Much more information surrounding Chapman and the murder would no doubt have emerged – and the evidence tested – in court, but no trial ever took place – and that in itself is suspicious, according to Mr Whelan.
“Chapman’s lawyers were aiming for a trial and an insanity plea, but out of the blue, Chapman decided he wanted to forgo a trial and plead guilty, claiming that ‘a little voice inside his head’ told him to do this,” said Whelan.
Crucially, says Whelan, that volte-face only came after Chapman was visited in his cell by various psychiatrists employed by his defence lawyers.
Three of those doctors had been involved in hypnosis, and one of them, Dr Milton Kline, worked with the CIA on its notorious MK ULTRA mind-control programme, which the Hollywood movie the ‘Manchurian Candidate’ was loosely based on.
In 1979, Kline boasted in a TV documentary that a man could be programmed to murder via hypnosis, via the MK ULTRA programme.
Why Kline, along with two other experts in hypnosis, was asked by the lawyers to meet Chapman, is not clear, though it is not impossible that the defence was already considering putting forward the notion that their client was hypnotised into carrying out his crime.
Another defence psychiatrist (and law professor) Bernard Diamond, who also examined Chapman, gave expert testimony along similar lines in the case of Sirhan Sirhan, who gunned down Senator Robert Kennedy in 1969. ( – Note from Matt @’The Occult Beatles’: Actually, it was 1968, not ’69)
But if Chapman were, as Whelan suggests, a patsy – or not even the shooter at all – who else would wish Lennon dead?
That, according to Whelan, can be traced right back to Lennon’s infamous 1966 quote in an interview that the Beatles were ‘more popular than Jesus’. The reaction in the Southern Bible Belt was literally incendiary, with records publicly burned and radio stations banning The Beatles songs during their US tour, despite apologies from Lennon.
Neither he nor The Beatles ever toured again.
US Intelligence agencies secretly monitored John Lennon for many years and are still concealing hundreds of pages of secret documents on him, says Whelan.
In November 1980, the newly-elected US President Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy facilitators would have known that John Lennon was a potential strong and influential future voice against any future militaristic foreign ambitions.
Added Whelan: “John Lennon’s murder meant that no celebrity voices with any weight, would be heard against Reagan’s ambitions and used as a potential opposition rallying cry.
“Could Lennon’s famous criticism of Christianity and Richard Nixon have possibly played a part in his murder, and could Christian groups associated with Chapman have deliberately, or perhaps inadvertently, programmed and groomed him to be an assassin?”
Chapman, now aged 67, first became eligible for parole in 2000 after serving twenty years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement, for his own protection, though his wife Gloria, who lives in Hawaii, is allowed regular conjugal visits to his New York prison.
Since 2000, the Parole board has denied Chapman parole every two years, a total of twelve times. Before his first parole hearing, Yoko Ono wrote to the board requesting that Chapman should remain behind bars for the rest of his life.
Whelan concluded: “I think Mark Chapman was potentially shooting a gun or thinking he was shooting a gun possibly blanks.
“He thinks he’s done something he couldn’t have possibly done – therefore, the only conclusion I can come to is there might have been a second shooter or it was highly likely there was a second shooter in the vestibule area on the stairs, shooting John in a close group pattern in his upper left chest area.
“When I spoke to the doctors and nurses at the time who treated John – and they saw his wounds many times – they all agree that whoever shot John was very close to him and standing in front one or two feet away.
“And they managed to achieve a very professional grouping around John’s left chest area above his heart.
“It’s almost impossible for Mark Chapman to do that from where he was and it was dark. He was 20 to 25 feet away from John.
“It’s a disturbing, troubling assessment, I’m well aware of that, but I can see no other explanation for John’s wounds.”
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You can read the article in its entirety here:
If you click the link and explore further, you’ll notice an accompanying video that features Whelan himself talking about his research. You can see it here as well (thanks to ‘YouTube’):
Whelan has launched a YouTube page, ‘The Assassination of John Lennon’:
https://www.youtube.com/@AssassinationOfLennon/videos
There you’ll find the video that’s featured above as well as clips of, amongst others, Mark David Chapman, Dr David Halleran, and the notorious Dr Milton Kline. There’s also an interview with Whelan himself on the UK’s ‘Talk TV’ from April 30th. As you might already be aware, it’s a television-channel that, very similar to the MailOnline, is a mainstream outlet. Having viewed his appearance on it, the majority of what he’s sharing in terms of information regarding the Lennon murder and the events surrounding it have been investigated, unearthed and reported on by others before him. Other than that, he also says the planned book and documentary is set to be released at the end of the year and that he aims to use his YouTube channel as a base where morsels of information from the as-yet-to-be-issued project can be regularly ‘drip-fed’ for public consumption in the meantime. He’s also launched a ‘Substack’ page with the same intention. Actually, at the time of publishing this article, what he’s so far posted there in terms of information regarding John Lennon’s murder is, in places, rather enlightening (there’s even mention of Fenton Bresler). Check it out here:
https://davidwhelan.substack.com/
And while I’m at it – in case you haven’t yet heard the Magical Mystery Talk two-parter with myself and my co-hosts Desiree Hall and Mark Devlin, and would like to, check them out below. An invitation has been sent out to Whelan asking him if he’d be at all interested in appearing as a guest in a future episode…
theoccultbeatles.wordpress.com 
Daily Mail? Mail Online….hmmm. Smells funny…
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What about the fact that certain corners want to “blame” christianity for a lot things. . . and maybe John wasn’t even shot. Have you looked at Miles Mathis’ assertion that’s death was faked? There might be so much more going on: a “martyr” perhaps; furthering the occult agenda of the Beatles?
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Yes, hi, I’ve looked at the Miles Mathis angle and I do like your idea that the death was faked in order to foster a martyr. Perhaps the so-called ‘powers that be’ needed to present a martyr for the ageing Sixties generation that Lennon represented. As even mainstream commentators have voiced, with his death came the death of the Sixties once and for all (although, in terms of nefarious agendas, I’d argue that the Sixties lives on in the realms of seeds that were watered in that time, such as in today’s ‘climate change’ agenda, the LGBTQ agenda, AI, the internet, and the ‘New Age’ pursuits of TM, yoga and dodgy gurus). To add on to that, I was talking about some of this with someone just a couple of days ago actually. He reckons that Lennon’s death was a mass (mind-control) trauma – not only spelling an end to the hippies’ dreams born from a decade long gone – but the marking open of its opposite: the war-mongering, flashy, consumerist, and Gordon Gecko era.
My only question would be though, why would John need to fake his death in order to bring about a martyr? Why not just actually kill the guy for real? Unless of course he was open to the idea and was happy enough to fade away into the background.
I should really go take a look at Miles’s theory again. Myself and fellow ‘Magical Mystery Talk’ hosts Desiree and Mark Devlin did bring up the subject of Lennon having faked his death in our two-part Lennon Assassination special, although briefly. Medical staff at the hospital shortly after the shooting didn’t recognise that it was John lying on the gurney. Then there’s that photo of ‘John’ after his death. To me, that looks fake in some way. Whoever it is on that slab, his head seems to have melted like wax. It’s odd-looking, really.
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