John Lennon was brutally assassinated in the archway of the apartment building where he resided with his wife Yoko Ono and their son on December 8, 1980.
Dr. Shervert Frazier, one of the nation’s finest psychiatric authorities on aggressive conduct, arrived at Bridgewater State Hospital in Massachusetts the next week. He knew that forensic psychologist Robert Fein, a young protégé of his, and the rest of the expanding team that Frazier had assembled at the maximum-security mental institute would be particularly affected by the death of the music star.
Mark Chapman, a twenty-five-year-old attacker who had lingered outside the Dakota building on the intersection of 72nd Street and Central Park West for many days, was the subject of several media inquiries. Chapman ultimately obtained Lennon’s signature his newly-released album Double Fantasy late in the day on Monday, December 8, after Lennon had left a beautiful residential complex and stopped to meet some admirers in front. Chapman then proceeded to linger.
Lennon and his wife and co-artist, Yoko Ono, arrived from a recording session just before 11 p.m., exiting a limousine in front of the building. Chapman allegedly cried out “Mr. Lennon” as he emerged from the shadows while wearing a black trench coat and a fur hat as the pair entered the majestic entrance.
As stated by the New York City head of detectives, he then assumed a “fighting posture” and fired four hollow-point bullets from a.38 caliber pistol into Lennon’s back. Lennon was transported to Roosevelt Hospital in a police vehicle, but doctors were unable to revive him. Amid the shock and worldwide outpouring of sorrow, Chapman was branded as “an infatuated fan,” “deranged,” “a lunatic,” and “a wacko” by different news organizations and public leaders.
Frazier had recently returned from a trip to Washington, D.C., where he served on a committee for the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences. He requested that Fein assemble the sixteen-member Bridgewater team of psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers. The timing of the news Frazier gave with them was serendipitous: His IOM committee had been in discussions with the US Secret Service over the last several months about enhancing assassination-prevention skills via behavioral science research.
Since the nation’s foundation, one out of every four presidents has been the subject of an assassination attempt, and the current age is even more perilous for senior political officials. After the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., and Senator Robert Kennedy in the 1960s, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter were also targeted. There were two near-misses involving President Ford, and the same assailant who attempted to murder Nixon severely injured Alabama governor and presidential contender George Wallace.
Leaders of the Secret Service were committed to enhancing the agency’s expertise and methods. Frazier informed the gathering audience that he had made a bold promise to a group of mental health professionals and law enforcement officials: The Bridgewater team will create the definitive research on mentally ill assassins.
Fein and the crew were surprised by the unanticipated task, but the topic swiftly turned to the recent tragedy in New York City, especially Chapman’s peculiar conduct after pulling the trigger. Moments after the gunshot, he told a lady who approached him to inquire what happened, “I’d go if I were you.” Chapman had no intention of fleeing. He had dropped his firearm and remained close on the sidewalk, where he quickly flipped through The Catcher in the Rye until police arrived.
He reportedly intended to indicate that he represented Holden Caulfield, the jaded protagonist of the seminal book. During a period of his youth in Georgia, Chapman was devoutly religious, and he considered John Lennon to be among the “phonies” of the world. He may have rationalized this resentment in part due to Lennon’s famous assertion in a 1966 interview that Christianity would decline and the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.”
Chapman’s behavior at the murder site, however, was more than a startling illustration of a serial killer’s obsessive attachment with a fictitious character. Unbeknownst to Chapman, he had just constructed a new form of a “culture script” – a kind of narrative blueprint for future murders.
Assassins and mass killers sometimes drew inspiration from their predecessors, adopting their looks and deeds in what has been known as copycat or contagious behavior. Behavioral science specialists were already aware with an analogous historical phenomena known as the “Werther effect,” which refers to a suicide epidemic in eighteenth-century Europe after the publication of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Some readers donned costumes like the novel’s romantically distraught protagonist and committed themselves, often while carrying a copy of the book. Chapman would garner some disgruntled fans, a precursor to the mimicking behavior that would inspire mass shooters in the decades to come and attract the attention of threat assessment specialists.
The Bridgewater team was aware that the potentially threatening animosity directed towards celebrities and politicians extended beyond the horrific incidents that the general public was aware of. Lennon’s assassination has brought to light the fact that the institution harbored persons who had threatened to assassinate the U.S. president or other prominent people.
Frazier urged to Fein and his colleagues, asking them to investigate this conduct by speaking with the Secret Service. Frazier was assisting in the planning of an exclusive conference of mental health and law enforcement professionals that would take place in Washington, D.C., three months after the completion of this study endeavor.
In the next weeks, Fein and several coworkers combed over Bridgewater case files, examined their experiences with dangerous criminals, and spoke with Boston and Washington Secret Service officials. By the beginning of March, they had completed the report.
At that time, Frazier, Fein, and their research colleague Sara Eddy headed to the nation’s capital for a closed-door meeting with Secret Service officials and a handful of research institution luminaries. The gathering’s major objective was to build active working relationships between special agents and leading specialists in behavioral science, mental health, and the law.
Law enforcement was responsible for investigating crimes, not preventing them. Even with the Secret Service’s unique protection role, which depended on detaining criminals under the federal “threat law,” such an occurrence seemed unthinkable.
The boring title of the latest study by the Bridgewater team, “Problems in Assessing and Managing Dangerous Behavior,” hardly suggests an aspiration for cooperation. However, the introduction provided the outlines of a new discipline. It outlined how specialists may collaborate to “detect, appraise, and manage” the extremely small number of individuals who may plan or act to murder prominent public figures.
The physicians recognized that there was no scientifically reliable approach for measuring a person’s “dangerousness” and that attempting to forecast whether a person would conduct an act of violence in the future was likely pointless. However, it may be able to foresee such behavior in certain instances. “Rather than consider hazardous individuals,” they stated, “we prefer to consider dangerous scenarios including a particular topic, a victim, and an act under precise conditions.”
This was a significant improvement over the old method of assessing violence risk, which required time-consuming clinical observation and examination of a person. In contrast, the team of doctors proposed that the Secret Service use psychiatric skills in a far more direct and pragmatic manner.
They outlined procedures for rapidly assessing individuals of concern. This included examining their mental health and connections with others, evaluating any severe complaints they may have, and deciding whether they seemed capable of committing a violent act. The team also proposed establishing a nationwide network of mental health professionals with expertise working with violent criminals, recommending that these specialists be accessible “around the clock” to confer with agents on threat assessments and management strategies.
The fact that the opaque and close-knit Secret Service still used antiquated methods created a problem. In an unsettling historical twist, the organization was established under the Treasury Department in 1865 to fight widespread counterfeiting, after being approved by President Abraham Lincoln on the day he would be murdered. After the killings of James A. Garfield in 1881 and William McKinley in 1901, its role evolved to encompass the security of the president. Now, more than a century later, a reevaluation of the agency’s embedded culture and procedures, prompted by the March 1981 conference of specialists in Washington, would prove significant for the development of behavioral threat assessment. Secret Service commanders were enthused in pursuing the novel study and cooperation, but obtaining the required buy-in and money from within the federal bureaucracy was anticipated to be difficult.
Three weeks later, though, the task took on a heightened sense of urgency as a new tragedy unfurled in the nation’s capital. On the afternoon of March 30, 1981, as President Ronald Reagan left the Washington Hilton Hotel after delivering a speech to labor leaders, a 25-year-old man wearing a trench coat and standing among the press corps in a light drizzle opened fire with a handgun. John Hinckley Jr. fired a bullet that ricocheted into Ronald Reagan’s body, penetrating the president’s left lung and stopped an inch from his heart. Other shootings left Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady, disabled, as well as a police officer and a Secret Service agent critically wounded.
Hinckley was obsessed with the young actress Jodie Foster for years, seeing her in Taxi Driver several times, mailing her notes, and following her at Yale University. He evidently grew to assume that fame would help him earn Foster’s affection. He would try a high-profile political murder, much like the paranoid and alienated teenage protagonist in Taxi Driver.
In Hinckley’s rendition of the cultural script, several strands were interwoven. The script for Taxi Driver drew inspiration from the diaries of Arthur Bremer, the young man who sought recognition by attacking Richard Nixon and then killing Governor George Wallace. A copy of Bremer’s journal was among the items recovered in Hinckley’s hotel room in Washington, D.C.
The agents also discovered a second book, The Catcher in the Rye. Hinckley had given Chapman his whole attention. On audio records taken immediately after John Lennon’s death, Hinckley described how Lennon and Foster were “bound” in his mind: “John and Jodie, and now one of them is dead.” Hinckley played a version of Lennon’s love ballad “Oh Yoko!” on a guitar, substituting “Oh Jodie!” for “Oh Yoko!” while he sang.
As a result of the assassinations of Lennon and Reagan, important study has been conducted on a variety of murderers. Later, Fein would join with Secret Service officers to enter jails and mental facilities around the nation. They invested many hours over the course of several years to interviewing and establishing relationships with infamous criminals, including Chapman, Hinckley, and almost two dozen others. These specialists’ unique insights into “pre-attack thought” and conduct have been essential to a procedure that has become a norm.