John Lennon: Murder Without a Trial Review: A Closed Case Reconsidered

Murder trials, like funerals, are intended to provide closure – not for the dead, but for the living. The murder of John Lennon, similar to the Kennedy assassination, deprived a traumatized public of its constitutional means of catharsis—including a public plea and a public trial; God, the murderer said, told him to plead guilty. The three-part film “John Lennon: Murder Without a Trial” tries to be the Warren Commission into the death of the ex-Beatle, so to speak, without any miracle cures or grassy hills.

This is a big task. In many ways, the apparent simplicity of the Lennon assassination outside his home in New York’s Dakota Building on December 8, 1980, made it a crime for which there was no easy solution. There was never any doubt as to who pulled the trigger; the shooter never denied it; there were witnesses. Although the series touches on the Nixon administration’s paranoia about activist Lennon (the area is explored in more detail in 2006’s The United States vs. John Lennon), there did not appear to be any government conspiracy involving CIA brainwashing . It’s a profound moment in this three-part series when Kim Hogrefe, a prosecutor in the case, refuses to name Lennon’s murderer during his own interview; If fame is the goal, Mr. Hogrefe says, he refuses to contribute. But if notoriety War the motive in question Mark David Chapman (sorry) not only amorphous, but raises questions this series would prefer to avoid.