‘What drives a man to do this?’: re-examining the murder of John Lennon
The production company 72 Films specializes in what the executive producer Rob Coldstream calls “box set” documentaries, “archive deepdives into compelling figures, events or moments in history that also say something about the world”. They have tackled such enigmas as Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Bashar al-Assad, but their latest project – John Lennon:
Murder Without a Trial, a three-part miniseries streaming on Apple TV – presented an unfamiliar challenge in its seeming straightforwardness.
There are no big question marks hanging over the assassination of the former Beatle and counterculture icon by Mark David Chapman: plenty of eyewitnesses watched it play out in front of the Dakota apartments, Chapman was immediately apprehended, and his guilty plea stuck him with a 20-to-life sentence at the Green Haven correctional facility, where he remains today. The co-directors Coldstream and Nick Holt reasoned that they would break new ground on the subject by privileging depth over breadth, inspecting the known components of an infamous case more closely than anyone had before with help from those embedded in the situation.
“It seemed to us that lots of people had made shows about aspects of John’s death and Mark David Chapman,” Coldstream says from his London offices. “But nobody had really put it all together in a way that felt definitive and comprehensive, walking you through the whole thing without having an agenda. We didn’t want to do the sensational true-crime approach or make it into entertainment. We just wanted to lay it out. Then, once we started looking at the gaps between what has and hasn’t been told, it was obvious that there was a lot of evidence and discussion and argument around Chapman and his mental state that was never really heard. So we started to research this, and found a few people out there who hadn’t previously spoken about it.”
Rather than pondering one of the most heavily analyzed public figures of the 20th century, the three installments shift focus from Lennon to construct an exhaustively detailed profile of Chapman, whose inscrutable motivations confounded and fascinated Coldstream. Over several years