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June 25, 2023 - Info Warrior - Jason Bermas
59:48
The Truth About The Assassination Of John Lennon?
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Hey everybody, Jason Burmus here and the next hour or so should really be a treat.
At least it will be for me because this is actually a subject that I am relatively ignorant of and really was brought to my attention kind of by chance.
Just a few weeks ago when I was on the Grand Theft World podcast and just briefly I discussed John Lennon.
All of a sudden Richard Andrew Grove was talking about chest wounds from the front and I just kind of was puzzled.
I said I hadn't heard of that.
Then, lo and behold, the Daily Mail does a story where they're showing what appears to be two different types of the same caliber of bullet being pulled from John Lennon.
And the guy that was talking about this is a gentleman named David Whelan.
And I did that broadcast.
He actually reached out to me.
So we're going to discuss this whole situation.
And I want to start, David, by saying thank you for coming on.
How did you get involved in this?
Well, thanks for having me on, Jason.
It came about in 2020.
Like most people for the last 42 years or for the last 40 years in 2020, I thought the John Lennon murder was a very basic open and shut case.
Mark Chapman, the lone nut, was there.
He did it. He admitted to doing it.
And that was the end of the case.
He's still in jail and he's kind of a bit like Voldemort.
We're not even allowed to say his name.
I was surprised in 2020 when I was just literally walking my dog like I know you do, just walking him in the fields, listening to a podcast.
And someone mentioned that the doorman at the Dakota might have been a CIA agent.
And I thought, hang on a minute, that sounds quite interesting.
I've always... I've always been a massive fan of the JFK assassination.
The Oliver Stone film was a big moment for me.
I suppose you'd call it my red pill moment.
So I know that case inside out.
So when I heard CIA agent and then I heard he was an ex-Cuban kind of guy who talked about the bear pigs, I just thought I need to really look into this.
So I just went home that day.
It was lockdown. I had lots of time on my hands.
I started to Google. I started to research.
I come from news research and TV originally, so I have those skills.
And the more I looked into it, Jason, the more I just thought, what is going on here?
None of this adds up.
This should be the most...
Open and shut case in history, but there's so much conflicting stuff here.
So I kept going deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole, and eventually I thought, I need to start talking to some people.
I got a little bit obsessed about it, to be honest with you.
And I started to ring up some of the people involved, some of the doctors and some of the cops and various people who worked at Dakota, and it was...
It was very hard to find some of these people, but eventually I found most of them, and that's when it really started to get serious, because then I realized there was pretty much a cover-up, really, and the murder, the way we've been told it, just didn't happen that way, and I've got lots of evidence now to prove it.
So we're going to talk about that evidence in a moment, but let's talk about the gathering techniques and your past.
So you come from news and research.
What kind of things had you worked on before, and what did you utilize to track these people down?
It's a good question. I started off at Thames Television.
I don't know if you guys will even remember Thames Television in America, but back in the 80s, Thames was probably the biggest TV station in London, in the UK. It was based in London.
I had no real right to be there, to be honest with you, Jason.
I wasn't great in school, and I managed to get in there on some kind of training gig.
It was called a youth training scheme, and it was very hierarchical, Thames TV, in those days.
It was very much like It was like a kind of British establishment vibe.
You had the guys at the top, the producers and the cameramen, and they all went to Eton and Oxford.
And then you had the electricians and the set designers down the bottom, and they were kind of the guys with the screwdrivers and the London accents.
And I kind of tried to kind of swim in both circles, really.
I was completely naive, but I realized it was the opportunity of a lifetime, and I grabbed it with both hands and gradually worked my way through film research.
And that's kind of where I learned to Look for stuff in laboratories and look for film in different parts of the world and not take people's word for granted when they say there was no film that existed.
Sometimes that was contrary to the fact.
I then kind of, to be honest with you, I moved away from news and went into sports, started to work for the lovely FIFA. Which is probably another show we can have a chat about another day.
And I kind of did that really for, I would say, the wrong reasons.
I did it for money. I did it for travel.
I love sports. Hey, you know, it's great to work in sport.
I love soccer, as you guys call it.
So I did a lot of that. But I've always kind of felt that my career should have been more serious in the last sort of 20 years.
So I was always interested.
I'm a voracious reader. I just have thousands of books.
I can't stop reading non-fiction.
I've got so many holes that I'm pathologically trying to fill in my brain with non-fiction.
So I've got this amazing well of knowledge, but with regards to research, Jason, I think For me, it's all about not taking Google at face value is the first thing I would say.
You need to go deeper than that.
Archive.org is a really good place to start.
I actually spoke to Tom O'Neill.
Are you aware of the Chaos book?
Wait, wait, chaos.
Yes, you're talking about the—actually, really weird story about that.
You're talking about the Manson book and basically this connection to Charles Manson, the FBI,
getting him off, getting him outside of Mexico all the time, and the Central Intelligence
Agency in an era of MKUltra and, I would say this, Operation Midnight Climax, where they
were actually running brothels with teenage girls and everybody doesn't talk about that
aspect of it.
So when I heard a couple of his interviews, it's really funny because James Meggs was
his editor when he started that story.
I forget what the publication was for.
I think he was trying to do the piece, and Megs first okayed it, but it never saw the light of day and got published.
But he encouraged him on the case.
I would debate James Megs later on the fifth anniversary of 9-11, because I'm one of the guys that made Loose Change, the 9-11 documentary.
Yes. Yeah, great.
Yeah, so it was just really weird.
And now Megs is all over the History Channel, and I see him on America Heroes Channel, and he's in all these other mini-documentaries as an authoritative source on history.
And you just talked about it.
You've got to go beyond just the surface level and what Google now allows into the archives and into the hard copies because it's really hard to find things out that are outside of this mainstream narrative that prevails over all these large-scale Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I spoke to Tom, Tom O'Neill.
He was such a great help. Reached out to him very early on and said, look, I've got these doubts about the Lennon murder.
He gave me some great tips about looking into kind of police pension archives and stuff like that.
You know, Tom's a genius at this kind of thing.
I reached out to Lisa Pease, who did an amazing book on the RFK murder.
She gave me some great tips.
And I just kind of, you know, to be honest with you, Jason, I also use white pages, you know, and just kind of When searching in the phone books.
And I think the key thing you're saying there that I completely agree with is question everything.
Don't believe what the algorithms are going to give you on the first few pages.
You know, everything goes much deeper than that.
And the narrative, it really resonated with me, Jason, what you said when you talked about my investigation last week, or was it before, when you said that You know, the mainstream media are ignoring this, I think, on purpose because John Lennon is a very dangerous, divisive person, I think, for 2023.
You know, he was an original thinker who often spoke out of place, as they would call it.
He was fearless in what he said and what he thought, often changed his mind and wasn't scared to say he'd changed his mind.
And of course, he was an advocate for peace and he, you know, he walked it like he talked it.
So in 2023, You know, John Lennon would not be a welcome addition to the lexicon, so I think they want young people to forget all about him.
I spoke to my two daughters about it when I first started this project.
They're both of the late teens, early 20s, and they just said, yeah, kind of remember him.
Wasn't he the guy shot by the loony guy?
They don't know anything about him, and I think that's a tragedy, and I think you're right.
I think that's deliberate. I think the John Lennon murder was very well packaged, and the John Lennon persona has been very well assassinated.
I mean, even recently, Jason, there's a piece in The Guardian about a music genre called Merseybeat, which the Liverpool bands came out of and the Beatles came out of.
And they led with, I think, the title, John Lennon is some kind of violent thug.
And that was to lead into a music piece.
So there's definitely been an assassination of John Lennon recently.
And they're just trying to see him as this kind of crazy wild thug who kind of was married to some crazy Japanese lady.
And the Beatles are long gone now.
And let's just all focus on Katy Perry and all the rest of it.
And I just think...
You know, Lennon's still got a lot of lessons to teach us.
And I think you're right.
I was amazed when this dropped on the Mail Online in April that more people didn't pick this up.
Because the evidence that I've got, and I've got documents that prove this stuff now, I thought was quite compelling.
But I think you hit the nail on the head, Jason.
I don't think people want John Lennon to be back in the zeitgeist.
Yeah, and two of the things that you really said that I think are important, obviously the anti-war, but the ability to change your mind.
We really live in a world where even the leaders that are supposed to be on our side that get cult-like followings, I would say Donald Trump, far from perfect, but one of those imperfections is the inability to say, I was wrong.
I made a mistake.
It didn't happen that way.
And that's so important.
On top of that, you know, I've played it often on my channel, but when he was on Dick Cavett many years ago, he talked about the myth of overpopulation.
And, you know, I think that's something that is very relevant today.
Yeah, I think that you haven't seen him really in the last decade.
In fact, the only time they roll somebody out like Paul McCartney is when he's ready to tell you to take four shots and a fifth one.
It's that kind of world we live in now where so many people that were my counterculture heroes have shown their true colors.
Yeah. Lennon obviously isn't afforded that opportunity.
So whether or not he would be here now, we don't know.
But we do know what he stood for then.
So let's start traveling down the rabbit hole a little bit here.
First, let's start with the official narrative.
What actually was projected as to happen.
And, you know, as I understood it always, it was he was with Yoko Ono at the time.
This person came up behind him and murdered him, shot him several times, and he basically died right there on the sidewalk.
Then we see or hear about his obsession.
I believe Jodie Foster was one of them, right?
Was he the Jodie Foster or was it the other one?
No, that was Hinkley.
That was Hinkley. I'm trying to think, who was the celebrities?
Because you actually, in the article for the first time, showed the list of people which had George C. Scott, Johnny Carson on there.
Wasn't there another individual on there that they actually did publicize at the time?
Yeah, it's a strange one.
The hit list came from nowhere.
No one knows where it originated from.
It's almost certainly not from Mark Chapman.
The person that's most famous on there is actually not on there, and that's David Bowie.
Because at the time, the NYPD approached Bowie and said, look, you're on this guy's hit list.
He was going to go for you.
There could be others going for you.
And poor old David Bowie beefed up his security and was in fear of his life for many years after that.
So that was a complete nonsense because he's just not on the hit list.
But it's very important to kind of, in the narrative of making Mark Chapman out to be a guy who was just looking to kill someone to be famous.
To have a hit list of lots of different people.
So if he didn't get Lennon, he'd get the next one or the next one or the next one to fulfil his goal of shooting someone to become famous.
It's utter garbage. Chapman's never said he's written this hit list.
But interestingly, when it's brought up in front of him in his paroles, he sometimes mentions names on the hit list that are not even on there.
You know, oh, yeah, I was going to go for Elizabeth Taylor.
She's not on there, Mark. So he's kind of...
What Mark says now doesn't really carry much credence because he's been...
He's had so many off-the-record visits.
He's even admitted that the Secret Service visited him in prison.
So who knows what kind of has gone on and messed with his mind.
So Mark Chapman today, forget it.
I think the only thing that's important for Mark Chapman when it comes to a statement is a statement he made an hour after his murder, or after the murder of John Lennon.
In an article that I called Mark Chapman Unplugged.
And he just doesn't have a clue what he's done.
He can't remember it.
He doesn't know why he did it.
He's confused.
He has nothing against John Lennon and the Beatles, which is a nice segue into how the Mark Chapman official narrative was built.
So most of the media at the time went into he was a Lennon, Beatles obsessive.
He was a loser.
He wanted to shoot John Lennon to become famous, which he did.
And apparently as John walked past him, Mark called out John's name.
Shot John in the back, so there's a slight contradiction there, because if he called out his name, he'd expect John to turn, but he shot, by all records, including Mark's own account, he shot John in the back with four bullets, one bullet missing from a five-bullet revolver.
John then stumbled into a vestibule area, which is a kind of glass door entrance in the Dakota driveway, stumbled up some stairs and sort of roughly fell somewhere down in the concierge's lobby area.
But if you actually analyse the official narrative, What they're asking us to believe is that John Lennon walked past Mark Chapman by about 20 feet and he apparently turned or apparently didn't but according to the official narrative Mark called his name out so he must have somehow turned but even though he turned he got shot in the back so I think with the turn thing they're basically covering their bets because they knew he was shot in the front so he's got four bullets in his back four big holes in his back hollow bullets He then walks up to the vestibule door.
He pulls the vestibule door open, walks inside the vestibule, which is a small porch, then walks up six fairly steep steps, opens up two more big oak doors that pull open.
He walks into a lobby concierge area.
He's still got four bullets in him, by the way.
He turns left, walks through a swinging door, which is attached to the desk there on the left, goes into the concierge's front office slash post room, sees the concierge, has the ability to say to the concierge, I've been shot.
He then carries on walking, it's always comical, into the back office, which is another sort of 10, 12 feet away, opens the door there, goes into the back office and collapses and apparently dies.
It's ridiculous. There's no way on earth, when you talk to all the medical people at the time who treated him, the wounds that he had in his chest, in his upper left chest area, were very significant and the arteries to his heart were broken.
Most people I've spoken to said he was almost certainly dead on the impact of the bullets.
He would have died a few seconds later.
So the official narrative just doesn't add up.
There's no way the official narrative could have happened from a...
Just from a human endurance point of view, but also from a kind of physical point of view, someone with four big hollow point bullets in their back that's ripped into the arteries of their heart could ever imagine doing such a thing.
I mean, it's just ridiculous.
So then where do you think the discrepancies are?
Obviously, you're saying that he should have...
Fallen dead in the street or on the sidewalk and not even been able to make it into the vestibule, let alone the staircase and the back of the business.
What is the discrepancy there?
What are the ideas? Well, I think for me, I had to try and figure out first what part of the driveway he got shot in.
So if you can imagine the driveway is like a tunnel.
Mark Chapman is at the front of the tunnel by the street and he's on the left-hand side of the tunnel.
John is in the middle of the tunnel walking over to the right-hand side of the far end of the tunnel, which is where the vestibule doors are.
So John's walking from left to right away from Chapman.
When you're inside those vestibule doors, they're glass doors, there's glass panels in the doors.
Mark Chapman couldn't feasibly see John inside those vestibule doors.
I'm almost certain that's where John Lennon was shot, inside the vestibule, which is a place that Mark Chapman could not see, never alone shoot someone in.
Now, the evidence that I've got for that is pretty strong.
Number one, there is a video you can find, it's on my YouTube channel, of the lead detective, Ron Hoffman, an hour after the murder, outside the Roosevelt Hospital, declaring that John Lennon was shot inside the vestibule.
Now, Ron has told me that as well in a recorded audio interview that I've had with him.
I've had many interviews with Ron.
I said to Ron, just in the last interview I had with him, just remind me again.
Where did John fall down and die?
Where was he shot? He said he was shot on the stairway inside the vestibule.
So I'm almost convinced that's where he was shot.
You've also got a secondary witness called Sean Stroob, who turned up and was on lots of different TV news outlets at the time, who didn't actually see the murder, but he sat outside the hospital.
And again, the video's on the YouTube channel.
And he said that the doorman, Jose Podermo, told him that John was shot as they were walking inside the vestibule.
And I've got even more evidence.
There was a concierge, Jay Hastings, who was in the lobby area.
His office had a window that was open just behind the vestibule doors.
So Jay could hear everything that was going on inside the...
Inside the driveway area and Jay said he only heard gunfire after the vestibule door was opened.
So when you add all those things up, it's looking almost certainly that John Lennon was shot in an area that Mark Chapman could not see, never alone shoot John with bullets in.
So then we then get on to the medical evidence, which is I think the most explosive evidence of all really.
It's certainly the most compelling.
The reason why the medical evidence has been so clouded for so long is a doctor called Stephen Lynn who was the head of the ER at the Roosevelt Hospital in December 1980.
For 30 years Stephen Lynn has been claiming that he's done something that he didn't do.
Stephen's a bit of a fame junkie and he's the guy that actually came outside on the steps and spoke to the press when John was declared dead at the Roosevelt and ever since that point Stephen has made sure that he's got himself in every single documentary that's ever been done about John Lennon.
There's been many. And he always comes out with the same shtick.
I came in, I tried to save him, I pumped John's heart with my hands.
But what he fails to realize is that he's actually outside the hospital.
He's got a pristine white coat on when he's talking to the press immediately after John's declared dead.
So he kind of didn't quite get his story right.
So for 30 years, this guy has kind of clouded.
The medical evidence.
The real doctor, Dr.
Halloran, just allowed him to do it for 30 years.
And then in 2011, basically, Dr.
Halloran saw a CNN documentary where Stephen Lim was doing his usual stuff.
Speaking embellishments, let's call it that.
And he said, right, I've had enough.
I need to tell the world that this guy's lying.
I was the guy that tried to save John Lennon's life.
So in 2011, Dr.
Halloran came out. And what was great about that was when he came out, two nurses came out, Diatra Seto and Barbara Kammerer, who were by his side that night trying to help him save John Lennon's life.
And they have a really interesting story to tell because not only were they helping Dr Halloran save John's life, they were also helping to clean John's wounds and shroud him after John was declared dead, which of course gave these two nurses a very close up and clear view of John's wounds.
So, I've spoken to all three of these people now, the Doctor Halloran and the two nurses, many, many times.
In fact, the nurses I've become good friends with.
They're such wonderful people.
And they're just completely confused that the whole world has got this wrong for so long.
And basically, what they all say is quite clear.
When John was brought into the Roosevelt, they cut his clothes off, as they do, with scissors to quickly get a look at the wounds.
They turn his body backwards and forwards to see the wounds front and back.
And they all say the same thing.
John Lennon was shot with four bullets in his upper left chest area above his heart in a tight professional grouping, as they describe it, with three bullets coming out of John's left back in a direct line of fire, no moving around.
And they believe one bullet, the one that was closest to his left shoulder, stayed in John.
And they are all adamant about this.
They're all absolutely certain that's what they saw and there's no discrepancies in their accounts.
But what's interesting is the nurses then got a chance to wrap John and clean his wounds and put him in a shroud.
But here's where things get really sinister.
A very... I got told off for saying this word, but I'm sure I'm going to be alright on your show, Jason.
A very shady man called Elliot Gross.
Am I allowed to use the word shady?
My film is named Shade the Motion Picture, and shady is A-OK here, my friend.
Okay, good. Well, this guy, the reason I call Elliot Gross shady is he's had multiple accounts of fraudulent behavior, falsifying autopsies for the NYPD. He's managed to get off all those...
All those accusations, but he's had many, many accusations.
So in my book, that's a shady guy.
But anyway, Elliot Gross turns up at the hospital just after they shroud John, which is something that a chief medical officer is not supposed to do and never does because he was going to get John's body the next day to perform an autopsy on John.
But for some reason, it would have been around about 12.30 at that night after the nurses just shrouded John.
Elliot Gross comes into the ER and demands that the nurses unshroud John So he can see his wounds.
Now, the nurses were just flabbergasted.
Not only that a chief medical officer would turn up and do this, but he'd asked to see the wounds when they knew a few hours later he was going to see them anyway.
But he insisted that they unshroud John, which they were just staggered at.
A lot of arguing going on.
They tried to resist. They tried to get him to, you know, verify who he was because they just literally could not believe that a medical officer would do this.
But in the end, he won them over and they reluctantly took off John's bandages.
They had to sit John up.
Which is just completely ghoulish, and apparently he started to bleed out again.
And Elliot Gross silently walked around John's body three or four times, observing the four in the front, three in the back, and then left the room.
And they had to re-wash John and re-shroud him.
Now that was a guy who was in a real hurry.
To get to see what went down with John's wounds.
Now, the next thing Elliot Gross did was he jumped in a police car and rushed off to the crime scene, off to the Dakota, to talk to Jay Hastin, the concierge, and to look at the crime scene.
You know, matters at hand.
So Elliot Gross is a man of great interest to me, and his autopsy is an autopsy that I believe, from what I've heard about it, I've not seen it, but I've spoken to a lot of people who have.
It's not really a record that I will put a lot of faith in, but we'll get back to that in a moment.
One other thing about the night that's worth mentioning, Jason, is that the ER team put together what they call an ER report on John's John's visit there and John's wounds, and it's basically a stick man with a front and back stick man, and they put very carefully where the holes were for the entrance wounds, very carefully at the back they put where the exit wounds were, and they put down all the details of what they did and all the procedures to try and save John, and that report has gone missing.
After that night, no one has ever seen that report again, so somebody wanted to make sure, a bit like JFK and all the shenanigans with his autopsy, And all the stuff that happened at the Dallas Hospital there, someone wanted to make sure that the real truth of the medical condition of John Lennon was never going to get out to the public.
And to this day, the nurses can't understand where that ER report has gone and why it went missing.
But I've got some pretty good ideas why it went missing.
So, alright, let's rewind a little bit.
I've got two major questions here.
The first question is that you discussed that it appears that Lennon wasn't shot until he was inside.
And does that mean that Mark David Chapman shoots no shots at all, fires nothing?
That's a big question I have.
Is there evidence that there are lodged bullets?
And then the second thing that you said is that you had three bullets pass through John and And one stay in from this grouping, and yet they pulled two bullets out of him, and one of which appears to be a hollow point, which may account for the one they didn't pull out.
But if you have three exit wounds, then what are we really talking about here, David?
It's a really good question.
First thing to say is there is no spent bullets found at the scene in police evidence vouchers that I have.
I think I've got...
I should say how I got all this stuff, actually.
Through my discussions with the lead detective, Ron Hoffman, and I've spoken to him many, many times, I got to know him quite well.
I got the feeling he's in his 80s now, and I got the feeling that he's fairly sort of certain now that he didn't do a very good job.
I'm not sure guilt is the right word, but I think he wanted to absolve himself of the case completely.
And I think the way he felt he could do that was by selling me his notebooks and all his paperwork, which I just couldn't believe he was offering to do.
So I have a media lawyer friend who went over to Florida to see his home and he did it all properly.
You know, the detective's family involved.
We always seem to be exploiting an elderly man.
And we basically bought all the police evidence and all the police vouchers.
So I've got the law.
We called it the mother load at the time.
And what I can tell you is in those vouchers is no spent bullets.
So I spoke to Ron about this.
I said, where are the spent bullets? And he couldn't really, he was being a bit vague, and he couldn't really recall how many bullets they found.
All Ron wanted to focus on was the five empty shells that he found in the revolver.
So we know Chapman said he shot five times.
So if he did and we found two bullets, where are the other three?
There seems to be no sign of them.
And obviously they were found somewhere.
They must have been if three pass through John's back.
So there's missing bullets, which to me, the only thing I can conclude points to a cover-up.
Now, with regards to whether Chapman was shooting or not, I have to admit, originally I thought it was a bit of a Siren Siren situation, Jason, where he was shooting blanks.
I think Lisa Pease has done a really good scenario where Siren Siren was shooting blanks and, you know, Eugene Caesar, the security guard behind RFK, shot him from behind in the neck.
And I think Lisa's got that right.
And I think RFK Jr.
believes that as well. But with Chapman, what makes me think perhaps that's not true is there is another anomaly in the driveway and in the case, which I have to admit, I still can't quite figure out.
And that anomaly is three bullet holes in the glass vestibule doors.
There's two in the front that we can see from the roadside that Chapman could see in the door that John almost certainly pulled open.
Now, behind those doors, there's another vestibule door.
And there's one bullet. Yeah, you can see it there.
That's perfect. Now, if you can see above the All Visitors sign, there are two bullet holes.
There's also a little light there in the crack, so don't worry about that light.
But if you look sort of round down the bottom there, There's two bullet holes, one just above all and one above the visitors, probably about a foot up.
Now, if you look at the guy that's standing there behind those bullet holes, Those bullet holes are kind of lower back, middle back at best.
So if they were caused by the three bullets coming out of John Lennon's back, I'm not quite sure why they're so low down.
There's also no blood splatter.
There's another picture of these doors you can see from the other side.
And they seem to be clear bullets shot through the glass with no blood splatter.
With no blood coming from a person that they passed through.
The same goes for the other bullet hole on the other side of that door.
So I think the only person who could feasibly cause those bullet holes is Mark Chapman shooting wildly from the street.
And I think that's possibly what was going on there with the actual second shooter being inside the vestibule in the stairway area, which is where you'd consider a second shooter to be if it was a conspiracy.
You wouldn't want to be anywhere near the driveway where Mark Chapman might be shooting real bullets.
And I think he was there ready to finish the job off if Mark Chapman didn't actually complete his mission, which I don't think he did.
So I think John got into the vestibule.
I think Chapman started firing wildly.
Possibly one of the bullets hit John, possibly it didn't.
But I think the four bullets that were put into John in his upper left chest was done inside the vestibule by a second shooter.
What I'd really like to do is to get some forensic experts to actually analyze those bullets in those vestibule doors and analyze all the different scenarios of where Mark Chapman was and where John Lennon was.
Because at this point, I can't find anybody that can actually figure out how those bullet holes got there feasibly.
You know, if you go with the official narrative, it's impossible to see because obviously John was shot in the back.
He was walking towards the vestibule doors.
And apparently he turned.
Now, we should just quickly get to the turn thing.
The turn thing, I think, is something that was invented because I think they knew eventually people would find out that John was shot in the chest.
So I think they had to find a narrative that would confuse but would also back up the shot in the chest truth.
So Mark Chapman to this day has never said he's called out to John Lennon.
So that's point number one.
Yoko Ono, in a statement that she gave to Ron Hoffman in one of his notebooks, she gave five statements.
And the first statement I've actually posted on my Instagram, you can actually see it in her own words.
She told Ron that they didn't turn around.
So I think that's very important.
And the concierge who could hear John approaching The vestibule doors has also said he never heard Mark Chapman call out to John Lennon.
So I don't think John turned around, which, again, is a very important point if you want to, because a lot of the people who want to stick to the official narrative say, oh, well, he just must have turned around, and that's how he got shot in the chest.
But no. Chapman said he never did that.
Yoko said he never did that.
If the doorman did, we don't know.
The doorman's statement to this day is still being concealed from the public, and we can get into the doorman a bit later.
The concierge said he never heard Chapman call out.
So I think we can be fairly certain now that John didn't turn around.
And why would he, if you think about it?
You know, he's kind of close to home.
This is a guy who's been famous all his life.
You know, he's tired.
He's had a whole night at a recording studio.
If some dweeb calls out from the street, would John Lennon turn around?
I don't think so. I don't think so.
So we can be certain he didn't do that.
But again, getting back to your original question, the two bullets There's just no scenario where those two bullets work apart from I think the second shooter potentially was using mixed ammo to confuse or potentially one of those bullets was from a second shooter and Mark Chapman got lucky with one of his hollow bullets.
But Mark Chapman has always to this day said that he's used hollow bullets.
He's insistent about it.
It's part of the legend. It's part of the iconography of the case.
The NYPD to this very day have always stated hollow bullets.
The DA's office, Kim Hoggref, the DA's assistant prosecuting attorney, has been on every single documentary with Stephen Lin, always states hollow bullets.
He used hollow bullets because he was so nasty.
He was such a cold and calculated killer.
We know he used hollow bullets.
Now, you'd think the DA's office would check the bullets.
So if there was a bullet in there that wasn't hollow, how do they not know about that?
But apparently they don't. And the media have done the same thing, Jason.
They've always said it's just part of this Mark Chapman myth that he was such a cold and calculated killer that he got these hollow bullets and they're the ones he used to kill John.
That Brad Trent photography, that photo that you put up earlier, I should say how that came about actually.
In 1989, Brad was asked to go and shoot the gun that killed John Lennon and shoot the bullets.
Now he wasn't expecting to find the bullets, but in 1989 he was allowed into the ballistics department of the NYPD. And he photographed those two bullets and the gun.
And he left them in his archive until 2011, where he put them on his blog and talked about the story.
So they've kind of been hiding in plain sight, those two bullets.
But when you put those two different bullets, because obviously the mushrooms one is the hollow one, hollow bullets always mushroom, the one at the bottom there, It's almost certainly 99% certain from all the people I've spoken to, that's a hollow bullet.
They always mushroom. The one at the top is not mushroom, so it's therefore not hollow.
But if you look at the morgue receipt that was signed by a detective, not the shady Elliot Gross.
So I'm not sure Elliot Gross was even aware that these bullets were being put into the ballistics evidence package.
But the signing says, one lead bullet, one SWC bullet.
Now you think maybe SWC's semi-wag cut is not hollow, but then Elliot Gross in the Brad Trent picture describes an SWC as a hollow bullet.
So I think when you put the picture, the morgue evidence receipt, and the note that Elliot Gross wrote next to the bullets, we can be certain that there were two different types of bullets in John Lennon, which screams to me of a second shooter.
So before we get to the doorman and the second shooter, two of the questions that I have from everything that you just said here is, number one, what is Yoko's official take on this entire event throughout the years, kind of as an eyewitness?
And two... Yeah.
Yeah. Okay, should we start with Yoko?
Let's start with Yoko. What's interesting about Yoko is she's given five statements that I've managed to read from Ron Hoffman's notebook.
One she's had published in a book that came out in 1992, but four were unknown.
What is slightly disturbing about Yoko Ono's statements, and we have to give her credence that at the time they were given over a two, three day period, Where she would have been in shock, it would have been a difficult time for her.
But what's disturbing is she keeps on giving different accounts of where she was.
The official narrative is that she got out first, and this is what Mark Chapman has also said, and she's 15, 20 feet ahead of John.
When John gets out, she's way ahead, possibly in the vestibule area.
There's also a kind of courtyard iron gate at the back of the vestibule.
Behind that iron gate in that courtyard is actually the Lennon's offices, so she could have been walking towards there as well.
But what's problematic is, in the next statement, in the very next statement, she says that she was behind John, not in front of him.
So she's changed her mind Yet again.
This would have been probably five, six hours later she's changed her mind.
And then the following day, she decides that she's hedging her bets now.
Sometimes she's in front, sometimes John's in front.
So she's kind of changing her movements.
But the problem is that's not a massive driveway.
We're talking probably 25, 30 feet.
So I don't quite know how she could have been swapping positions with John in such a short space.
Finally, she kind of settles on that she was in front.
If you talk to Ron Hoffman, this is the lead detective, he's convinced she was behind John.
Now, if she was behind John, she would have seen everything.
And Hoffman believes, to this day, that Mark Chapman stood between Yoko Ono and John Lennon, with Yoko Ono being behind Chapman.
I mean, this is coming from the lead detective here, which is absolutely extraordinary.
But the problem is, Yoko Ono, to her credit, to this very day, has never said that she saw Mark Chapman shoot her husband.
She's never ever put that in a statement to the police.
She's never said it on a documentary.
She just talks about noise, violence, scared, John saying he was shot.
She does say that when he was in the glass door area, he said to her he's shot, which is another indication that He's in the vestibule when he got shot.
But she's very, very vague on detail, which is kind of disturbing.
I mean, she was there. I still don't think she shot her husband, to be honest with you.
A lot of people do.
If you talk to a lot of people who were in the Beatles camp back in the day, this won't surprise you, I'm sure, Jason, she's not a popular person.
A lot of people...
I think she's somehow played a part in it somehow.
I just can't find any evidence of that at the moment.
There was one slight problem that happened only recently, actually.
Is it Jan Wenner? Wenner?
The Rolling Stone editor?
The guy who set up the Rolling Stone magazine?
I think it's Wenner.
He set up...
He published a book last year.
Where he talked about going to visit Yoko Ono at the Dakota just after the murder.
And he said that he'd discussed the murder with her and she told him about how she saw Mark Chapman shoot her husband.
I thought, oh, blimey, this is news.
Okay, she's never told anyone else that.
So to his credit, I contacted Yan and said, look, I'm doing this book, I'm doing this documentary.
What you're saying is counter to everything she said.
Are you sure this actually...
This is what she actually said.
And to be fair to Yan, he said, actually, I might have embellished.
I'm not sure she did actually say that.
I might have actually read it somewhere else.
At least there's a little humility there.
That's important, right?
I was amazed.
And I asked him, can I quote you?
And he said, yeah, you can quote me.
I think I might have gone over the top.
But what's interesting about that particular visit, I then spoke to one of his biographers, who spoke to Yoko Ono about that visit, and she said, I don't remember the visit.
So I'm not even sure the visit took place.
But this is a very interesting point, actually.
I think people, because it's such a famous event, 20th century event, one of the biggest in the 20th century, so many people want to paint themselves into it and write themselves into it more than they deserve to be.
And that's been a massive problem for me and a massive learning curve for me.
You know, I've always been brought up to, you know, question everything, but sometimes people can be incredibly convincing.
There's another doctor, not Stephen Lynn, there's another doctor called Frank Veteran, who I spent an hour with very early on in this investigation, talking about his experiences, trying to save John Lennon, and he's the kind of left side guy.
He's been in lots of documentaries and magazines saying, oh, John was shot at the left side.
So I was kind of, you know, very intrigued by, you know, one hour, the most convincing one hour conversation you've ever had in your life, Jason.
And then I spoke to Dr.
Halloran and said, you know, why wasn't, you know, Frank Veteran in the Lennon Report, which was a dramatic film about the Roosevelt Hospital situation?
And he said, well, the reason Frank Veteran wasn't in it was because he wasn't in the hospital that night.
It's scary.
I think they've convinced themselves that they did these things.
And, you know, it's just clearly not the truth.
With regards to documents, I think the most valuable thing I've got is all the evidence, all the evidence vouchers.
That really is invaluable.
I've got every single interview that Hoffman did.
They didn't do a proper investigation, that's for sure.
But what they did do was interview everybody except the two people that I really would like to...
In fact, three people that I'd really like to talk to that are not in his notebooks, which I think he deliberately did an interview.
One is the doorman. The second one is Mark Chapman's wife, Gloria, a very interesting lady.
And the third person is a guy called Dana Reeves, who was an Atlanta cop who gave Mark Chapman the hollow bullets that he allegedly used to shoot John Lennon.
They are three very, very interesting people who the NYPD and the DA's office have, I think, carefully tried to omit from history.
So let's talk about, I guess, the combination of Chapman's wife and this gentleman that supposedly gave him the hollow bullets.
As I understand it, Chapman was in the security field at one time?
Yeah. Basically...
Chapman, round about the age of, say, 16, he was your kind of classic loser, desperate to get in with the cool crowd, desperate to please kind of guy, very gentle, had his drug episodes, but now was kind of into Christianity.
You know, he was your classic guy in the background, really.
And then for some reason, round about the age of sort of 16, he hooks up with this guy called Dana Reeves, who was a couple of years older than Mark at the time.
And Dana was a security guard at the time.
Dana was very much into guns.
And everyone that talks about Dana Reeves has said that he was a very dark, edgy individual who had a very bad influence on Mark.
And Mark apparently worshipped him.
And then Dana's the guy who got Mark into armed security guard work, which is interesting.
And Dana's the guy that kind of liked to turn up To meet Mark when he was at a Vietnamese refugee camp and Daniel would bring his guns along and Mark and Daniel would horseplay around with the guns and everyone's like, who is this guy that's suddenly turned Mark Chapman into a gun-loving idiot?
You know, yesterday he was this caring guy who was looking after Vietnamese kids.
So Dana's a really, really interesting guy.
Dana kind of disappeared from the Mark Chapman story when Mark went to Hawaii in 1977, but he appeared again in Mark Chapman's first attempt to go and kill John Lennon in November 1980.
Where he allegedly, true, the official narrative is that Mark flew down to Atlanta and surprised his friend Dana and said, look, I'm in New York.
I'm worried about getting attacked by sort of muggers and stuff.
Can you give me some bullets to protect myself?
And Dana said, yeah, sure, that's a feasible story.
You'd be in New York and then be worried about, you know, being attacked.
So then you fly all the way down to Atlanta to get some bullets off me to then fly back to New York to feel safe again.
That makes perfect sense.
So Dana takes Mark out into the woods, apparently, to do some shooting practice with his hollow-point bullets.
And Mark flies back to New York and the rest is history.
But what I've discovered is that Mark actually called Dana multiple times in the days before he flew down to Atlanta.
So I'm fairly convinced that Dana knew exactly why Mark was flying down to see him.
And I'm fairly convinced he knew why Mark was asking for bullets.
Dana's never been properly interviewed by the police.
Apparently, the detective who went down there to talk to Dana was told not to look into Dana's background and to give him an easy time.
Dana's never talked to the press or media.
He's kept a very, very low profile.
I think if Mark Chapman had a handler, I think a lot of people would believe that maybe Dana was one of the early ones, for sure.
What's interesting about Dana Reeves now, I can reveal, is he's no longer a police officer.
He lost his badge because he was put in prison for child molestation offences.
So, yeah, you can't make it up, can you?
So that's Dana, a guy I'd really like to talk to.
I think he's got a lot of interesting things to tell.
With regards to Gloria, Another person that some people, if you're being less than kind, could call maybe one of Mark Chapman's second handlers.
Gloria turns up in Mark's life around about 1978.
Mark, at this point, had already tried to kill himself and got himself hooked up with the Seventh-day Adventists via their psychiatric hospital called the Memorial Hospital in Hawaii, a hospital that Mark was treated in.
Again, we'd like to know how they treated Mark in there.
But the Adventists won't release records on confidentiality on a confidentiality basis, which is bizarre when you think it was 40 years ago and the guy's in prison.
But no, they won't release what they did to him.
There's lots of stories of all kinds of hallucinogenic jugs and strange programs they did on him.
These are just stories, though.
Sadly, I've got no documentation, so I can't back that up.
But we do know the Adventists back in the Korean War, back in the day, liked to give up some of their followers to the U.S. military because they were...
They were conscientious objectors and the way the Adventists got around this was by offering them up to take all kinds of horrible chemicals on behalf of the US military.
So we do know the Adventists had a link with the military and we do know they were based in Hawaii and we do know they were fusing religion and psychiatric treatment on Mark Chapman.
So you can kind of figure out what was going on in that hospital.
But when Mark came out of that hospital, he was a janitor at this point.
After being treated, they turned him into a janitor, as you do.
So he's down in the basement, sweeping the floor, and he decides as a janitor that he wants to go on a round-the-world trip.
And I'm talking a major round-the-world trip here, Jason.
If I listed the countries he went to, we'd be here all day.
He went everywhere.
He went to Asia. He went to Europe.
He flew all over.
Well, let's just stop it there.
Obviously, that's extremely suspicious because how is that economically viable, correct?
Well, exactly. Let's talk about that.
So what he does is he goes to his lovely Adventist accounting department and they give him a loan.
Would you believe? To do this, he gets the money from the Adventist hospital.
Now, how they thought he was going to pay this back, where was the collateral?
He was a janitor, for God's sake.
A janitor at the hospital he was treated at that then gives him a loan.
You got it. You got it.
To fly all the way around the world.
God knows what he was doing.
We know when he was in Switzerland, he hooked up with one of his old YMCA pals and went to some United Nations meetings, apparently.
I'd love to know more details about what he was doing at some UN meetings in Switzerland.
But anyway, a lot of what he did on that global tour wasn't documented.
But you can see in various documentaries lots of pictures of Mark.
There was one done in 2020. Where Mark is in India and he's everywhere, and there's lots of pictures, but what's interesting is, the question I want to ask is, Jason, who was taking the pictures?
He was supposed to do this tour solo.
There were no selfies in those days, so you had to have someone there.
There's Mark with lots of different poses in lots of different places, so clearly someone was with him on a lot of that trip, and I'd love to know who they were and what he was doing there.
But anyway, to get to Gloria, the reason he met Gloria was he was recommended by someone at the Adventists Memorial Hospital to go to this particular travel agent and meet this travel woman called Gloria Abe, who was a Japanese lady of descent like Yoko Ono, though her family, she was born in Hawaii, but her mom and her parents were from Japan.
Originally. And Gloria set the whole trip up for Mark.
She set up all his stays and all his flights.
That was very convenient. And then when Mark and her set up this kind of pen pal thing where he would send, as you do to your travel agent, send her postcards wherever you go.
And allegedly she was waiting at the gate when he came back from his final trip, you know, and grabbed him in her arms.
And they became an item from that very night onwards.
Wow, the original email love story right there.
Yeah, yeah. So Gloria was then, Dana kind of slipped out and Gloria kind of slipped in really.
And what's interesting about Gloria is she converted very quickly to Christianity.
And she converted to Christianity by another Christian group with dodgy ties called the Navigators.
Who are basically a kind of Christian military kind of amalgamation.
So they're kind of like the military's kind of pet Christian group.
And their big shtick is to go into military installations and convert soldiers and people in the Navy and stuff like that, and sailors.
And they're the group that somehow got hold of Gloria and converted her to Christianity.
Now, what's interesting about Gloria is she's become a bit of a Christian spokesperson.
She goes to lots of websites and talks about how the love of God has made her stick with Mark and become loyal to Mark, even though he's done these dreadful things.
But Gloria's had another, a bit like Dana Reid, she's got a bit of an interesting past.
She's revealed that in the past she was kind of into the occult, and she was into sort of, you know, kind of black magic, and she did a lot of naughty things when she travelled around the world as a travel agent.
So Gloria is a very interesting...
It's quite a swerve, isn't it, to go from the sort of...
One extreme to the other.
Yeah. And it just seems like when you start peeling the layers back of these events, you do find this stuff.
I mean, is it there to confuse?
Is it there to make it that much more unbelievable to the normal person?
Like, when you start talking about Mark David Chapman and mind control, maybe they're listening, you start bringing up black magic and the occult, all of a sudden, that's going to push some people away.
But at the same time, you see it...
Throughout history. I mean, you even see it as far back, for instance, as the Manhattan Project being launched at the Bohemian Grove, for instance.
You know, that's a hotbed for Oppenheimer and the gang.
Jack Parsons. And you could look at the Nazis themselves and all of their occult beliefs.
Sure, sure. Let's shift the gears to who may be the shooter, in your opinion, I guess.
Or is somebody that needs to be investigated this doorman?
Let's talk about the doorman.
He's a really important character, Jose Padermo.
I think for many years Jose's been a red herring, to be honest with you, Jason.
He's a man of great interest still.
But what happened was, after the murder, well, basically before the murder, quickly roll back.
How are we doing for time? Are we okay for time?
Yeah, yeah. We can always roll over.
Like I said, this is a pre-record, and I figure if we go a little bit over, we'll just cut out some of the first hour tomorrow.
They'll be fine with that.
Great. Okay. Okay.
So, Jose Padermo, the doorman, wasn't working the door in the weeks leading up to John Lennon's murder, which is highly suspicious.
He was working in the back office.
Now, he was a Cuban. Yeah.
Who started working at the Dakota in 1969.
So 11 years later, he's working the door, mostly, but in the weeks leading up to the murder, he decides he wants to work in the back office, which according to all people who worked at the Dakota at the time was a problem, because his English was so poor.
Now on the night of the murder, the night of John Lennon's murder, We'll start calling it the assassination.
The night of John Ennis' assassination, Jose decides, it was quite a warm night by all accounts, he wants to go out and take in the air and do the door that night, which is very strange.
So the concierge Jay Hastings says, yeah, sure, you go out and do the door tonight, Jose.
So he goes out and does the door.
So he's working the door that night.
And what happens, happens.
And Jose, the day after that, decides he never wants to work the door again.
And he's never, ever seen outside the door at the Dakota after that particular day.
So that was a kind of one night only deal for Jose.
He made sure, because if you think about it, all the cameras that were focused on those gates for days and weeks after the event, Jose, there's lots of doorman you can see in that footage.
Jose's not one of them. He made sure he was not going to be on camera.
But what's interesting about Jose is his name was hidden from the public for seven years.
So basically, whenever anyone talked about the murder from 1980 onwards, December 1980 onwards, It was always the doorman.
No one ever said his name.
And sometimes the concierge, Jay Hastings, got confused as the doorman.
And sometimes the lift operator, Joseph Manny, got confused as the doorman.
Now, what's confusing about that, and we'll give the media a bit of a pass, is sometimes the lift operator and the concierge, Jay Hastings, Joe Manny, sometimes covered the door for Jose Padermo.
So they were kind of part-time doormans.
You can perhaps see where the confusion come in.
But what I can't understand is, why...
The main witness to the murder of John Lennon's name was never revealed to the public and why this guy was never interviewed by the media.
He literally became a ghost.
So we only get to find out about Jose Podermo by a Jim Gaines People magazine article in 1987.
Jim had managed to blag his way into Mark Chapman's cell and take lots and lots of recorded audio interviews that he then put into a three-part article in the People magazine.
At the time, which is very official narrative heavy, let's call it that way.
It was very much, let's assassinate Mark Chapman.
He'd be talking to Mark Chapman's friends who were saying, oh yeah, I had this dream where Mark Chapman came and killed me in my dream with a knife, you know, and kind of, you know, that kind of stuff, you know, just shockingly one-sided stuff.
But in that, one of those articles...
Jim decided to reveal to the world that Dorman was called Jose Padermo, and he decided to drop in a few more details, which was one, he was an ex-Cuban, anti-Castro guy who was talking to Mark Chapman about the JFK assassination.
So people went, okay, anti-Castro, Cuban.
JFK assassination. And they, you know, I don't know what they were doing in 87.
They must have gone down to the library because there was no internet in those days.
But they found out that there was a Bay of Pigs operator back in the day, a very serious individual called Jose Podermo, a guy called Jose Sanginas Podermo, who was a CIA operative and was probably one of the world's most serious assassins.
And they thought, oh, it must be Dakota Jose Padermo.
They must be the same person.
And so then the CIA Bay of Pigs Padermo became Dakota Padermo and people kind of got carried away with it, really.
So I had to kind of, it was one of the first things It's the first things that got me interested in the case.
I'm kind of glad this red herring was out there.
But it was one of the first things I had to get sorted out.
So Jose basically started working there in 69.
He finished working there in 94.
So he basically had a 25-year stint working the door.
And I've got all that verified. I think he was born round about 1934.
Roughly. And he died round about 2010.
So I've kind of got all the dates.
I've spoken to people who've spoken to his family.
He retired in Florida.
What we don't know is what he did before he worked at the Dakota.
And what's interesting is he had a brother that nobody knows about who got him the job at the Dakota.
He must have been another Cuban Padermo.
So I'd love to know who that is.
Now the reason why people get excited about Padermo is Bay of Pigs Padermo was in charge of a group of CIA assassins called Operation 40.
Sometimes they were called Brigade 256.
And these guys were supposed to go in after the Bay of Pigs and basically execute anybody that wasn't going to go with the new regime.
So they were a very serious bunch of dudes.
So if Jose was in charge of these people, he would have been a really serious individual.
Now he was a pal of Frank Sturgis.
The Watergate burglar.
And Frank did a lot of operations with Bay of Pigs Jose.
So he's a fascinating guy.
We really would love to know more about this panel.
Basically, according to Frank, Bay of Pigs Padermo died in 73.
So you'd think, okay, the coat of Padermo, the dates don't match.
You can't see Bayer Pigs Padermo working the Dakota door for 25 years.
I just can't see him doing that.
And if he was put in there to be ready for the John Lennon assassination, 11 years is a long training period, you know, because we know he started working there in 69.
So I'm pretty certain Bayer Pigs Padermo is not Dakota Padermo.
But what's interesting is, here's the anomaly.
In 1989, a Bay of Pigs commander died and there was an obituary in the LA Times.
And one of the LA Times journalists got a quote from Jose Padermo saying what a wonderful commander he was.
So I think the 73 Bay of Pigs, you know, death that Frank Sturgis recorded of Bay of Pigs Padermo is a lie.
And I think the actual Bay of Pigs Padermo lived on way beyond 73.
But I'm still fairly convinced Dakota Padermo is not that guy.
But what's fascinating about Dakota Padermo Is we still don't have his statement because the DA's office has released quite a lot of witness statements.
They've released the list operator's statement.
They've released some of the witnesses who came after the fact.
But for some reason, they will not release Jose Padermo's statement.
And his statement, sadly, in Ron Hoffman's notebook, Ron just notes in one line, the doorman Jose Padermo saw everything.
And that's all we've got, which is deeply, deeply frustrating.
It is deeply frustrating.
And that's why we're going to end it right there as kind of a teaser for the assassination of John Lennon.
Now, this is going to be both a book and a documentary project, I understand.
That's right. So when do you think that it's going to be coming out, and how can people stay updated?
Obviously, we were just at your Assassination of Lennon YouTube page, where you've got what appears to be a plethora of archived videos, as we discussed in the beginning.
Tell people about it.
Thank you. Well, the book I'm hoping to come out at the end of the year.
The documentary was due to come out at the end of the year.
That may be a little bit later now.
How can I say? There's some editorial discussions on there that are ongoing.
So I'm hoping the documentary will come out at the same time, but I'm absolutely certain the book will be coming out at the end of the year.
If people want to know more about the case, I've put up lots of in-depth articles on my Substack.
Thank you, Jason, for putting out David Wien and Substack.
There's lots of information on there.
It's all in depth. There's also an Instagram page, Assassination of Lennon, and you can find me on Twitter, Lennon Murder, I think I am.
So, yeah, we've only just scratched the surface here, Jason, so I would love to come back.
There's so much more to this.
We haven't even got into the lovely CIA and their...
How can I put it?
Input in this particular case.
They're a big shadow on this case.
Well, I'll tell you what, when you're ready to pre-order the book at the end of the year, we'll make sure to get you on so we can get those pre-orders in and try to drive this thing onto the bestseller's list.
I want to thank you again for your time.
You've been an excellent guest and we can't wait to have you back.
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