On 8 December 1980 a twenty-five-year-old former mental patient who had recently worked in the hospital where he had once been a patient struck out at what he saw as the phoniness of the world. He assassinated John Lennon. Mark David Chapman was a music fan who had been attracted to John Lennon in a most unusual way for years. He held that Lennon was the most talented of the Beatles, and for a period of some twelve years he was obsessed with Lennon's music and his writing. Perhaps as a result of his LSD use, patterned after Lennon's, or more likely because of a personality disorder that caused him to rely on others for his identity, Chapman found himself in a mental hospital in 1977, after attempting suicide. A year -later, when he worked at the same hospital in Hawaii, he taped the name John...