In Mark David Chapman's sights

John Lennon was not the only name in the sights of Mark David Chapman, the man who on December 8, 1980 killed the former Beatle with five gunshots at the entrance of New York's Dakota Building. The next name on the killer's list was David Bowie. British and American press sources have been revealing this for several years now, although the story has never come out clearly and definitively.

“During my interviews I've been shaken more than once by sudden revelations, never previously reported, but none was more shocking than the one the late David Bowie gave me in 1999 after I switched off the tape recorder – recounted Redbeard, the award-winning host of In The Studio, the series of rockstar interviews broadcast on 180 of the leading rock stations across North America from 1988 to 2018 (now available worldwide on inthestudio.net and as a podcast on Spotify) – According to Bowie, the New York police had discovered that his name was next on Chapman's list of targets”, Redbeard continued.

At the time of Lennon's murder, Bowie was just a few blocks away, starring on Broadway in the play “The Elephant Man”. “I was second on his list, the detectives told me”, Bowie told Redbeard in a New York studio near Madison Square Garden. “Chapman had a front-row ticket for 'The Elephant Man' the following night. John and Yoko were also supposed to sit in the front row at that show. So, the night after John's murder, there were three empty seats in the front row. You can't imagine how hard it was to go on stage. I nearly broke down during the performance”, Bowie revealed to the host.

The tragic paradox is that Bowie had co-written "Fame" with none other than Lennon himself (his first US No.1 hit, taken from the album “Young Americans”), and it was precisely their fame as rock stars that drew Mark David Chapman in, first leading him to stalk them and then to kill Lennon. Yet both Lennon and Bowie believed they had managed to live relatively normal lives in New York. Two weeks earlier, Lennon had confided to Andy Peebles: “I can walk out of this door right now and go into a restaurant. Do you want to know how great that is?”

On December 9, 1980, Bowie discovered with horror that Chapman had attended one of the performances at the Booth Theatre and had photographed him as he left the theatre. When police searched his hotel room, they found a theatre programme with the Thin White Duke's name circled in black.

“We asked David if he wanted to skip a few performances, but he refused, because it was very important to him to keep playing that role and to keep showing up on stage. It must have been terrifying for him,” revealed director Jack Hofsiss. Bowie nonetheless scrapped plans for a “Scary Monsters” tour and informed the producers of “The Elephant Man” that he would leave the show after the season's final performance on January 3.

John Lennon was murdered on the evening of December 8, 1980. Chapman had arrived in New York intent on committing the crime, and spent the day watching the Dakota Apartments. At 5pm he saw Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, leave the building and got him to sign his copy of “Double Fantasy”. The couple returned around 10:50pm. As Lennon was getting out of the limousine, Chapman knelt down and fired five shots at point-blank range, puncturing a lung and severing his left subclavian artery. The former Beatle was rushed to Roosevelt Hospital – now Mount Sinai West – where he was pronounced dead shortly after 11pm.

When police arrested Chapman, they found him leaning against the outer wall of the Dakota, reading “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger. The killer confessed to the murder immediately, and later revealed that he was a former Beatles fan, disillusioned by the image Lennon was projecting of himself. “He told us to imagine a world with no possessions, and meanwhile he had millions of dollars, yachts, farms, country estates... and he laughed at people like me who had believed him, buying his records and building an important part of their lives around his music,” he would later state. Chapman was sentenced to life in prison for second-degree murder. Since 2000 he has had numerous parole hearings, all of them denied.

David Bowie and John Lennon were close friends; they had met in late 1974, during the “lost weekend” of the “Imagine” songwriter, the period of his separation from Yoko Ono. They played together, and in January 1975 they decided to devote a day to a recording session at Electric Lady Studios, out of which “Fame” was born.

Bowie later said that Lennon was the song's “energy and inspiration,” and for that reason credited him as co-writer.

On the third anniversary of Lennon's death, Bowie paid tribute to him by performing “Imagine” at the Hong Kong Colosseum.

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05/03/2026