A television news producer. An emergency room doctor. Two NYPD beat cops. Before that December night 25 years ago, they shared little but this: As children of the ’60s, the soundtrack of their lives came courtesy of the Beatles.
Alan Weiss, a two-time Emmy winner before his 30th birthday, was working at WABC-TV. His teen years were the time of “Revolver” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” In his 20s, he admired John Lennon’s music and politics.
Dr. Stephan Lynn was starting his second year as head of the Roosevelt Hospital emergency room. He remembered the Beatles playing “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
Officer Pete Cullen, with partner Steve Spiro, did the night shift on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. They would occasionally run into Lennon walking the neighborhood with his son, Sean. “The Beatles were a big part of my life,” Cullen said.
On the night of Dec. 8, 1980, Lynn was in the ER; Weiss was heading home from the newsroom; Cullen and Spiro were on the job – and Mark David Chapman was lurking outside Lennon’s home.
The chubby man with the wire- rimmed glasses stood patiently in the dark outside the Dakota apartment house. He carried a copy of “The Catcher In the Rye,” and a five-shot .38-caliber revolver.
Lennon, just two months past his 40th birthday, returned from a Midtown Manhattan recording studio at 10:50 p.m with wife Yoko Ono.
The limousine stopped at the ornate 72nd Street gate; John and Yoko emerged. Chapman’s voice, the same one that had beseeched the ex-Beatle for an autograph hours earlier, rang out: “Mr. Lennon!” The handgun was leveled at the rock world’s foremost pacifist.
Four bullets pierced his body.
The voice of a generation was reduced to a final gasp: “I’m shot.”
“Do you know what you just did?” screamed the Dakota’s doorman.
“I just shot John Lennon,” Chapman replied softly.
The cops
Back in 1965, while still in the Police Academy, 23-year-old Pete Cullen worked security outside the Warwick Hotel on West 54th Street. Upstairs were the Beatles.
Fifteen years later, the officer was staring at a dying John Lennon. Cullen and Spiro were first to answer the report of shots fired.
The doorman, a building handyman and the killer all stood frozen.
“Somebody just shot John Lennon!” the doorman finally shouted.
“Where’s Lennon?” Cullen asked. The rock star was crumpled inside a nearby vestibule, blood pouring from his chest. Spiro cuffed the gunman.
Two other officers lugged Lennon to a cruiser, which sped downtown to Roosevelt Hospital. Chapman directed Spiro to the J.D. Salinger book lying on the ground with the inscription, “This is my statement.”
“I acted alone,” he said.
Spiro later thought about 5-year-old Sean sitting a few floors above. Spiro had a boy the same age.
In the midst of the chaos, Cullen spotted Yoko Ono. A ride was quickly arranged for her. Cullen and Spiro then loaded Chapman into their car for a trip to the 20th Precinct.
The producer
As the wounded Lennon made the 1-mile trip to Roosevelt Hospital, Alan Weiss was already there. The TV news producer’s Honda motorcycle had collided with a taxi about 10 p.m., and he was awaiting X-rays.
The ER doors crashed open as a half-dozen officers burst through, carrying a stretcher with the victim. Two cops paused alongside Weiss’ gurney.
“Jesus, can you believe it?” one asked. “John Lennon.” Weiss was incredulous. He bribed a hospital worker $20 to call the WABC-TV newsroom with the tip that Lennon was shot. The money disappeared, and the call was never made.
Five minutes passed, and Weiss heard a strangled sound. “I twist around and there is Yoko Ono in a full-length fur coat on the arm of a police officer, and she’s sobbing,” he said. Weiss finally persuaded another cop to let him use a hospital phone, and he reached the WABC-TV assignment editor with the tip around 11 p.m.
Weiss returned to his gurney, watching in disbelief as the doctors frantically worked on the rock icon. A familiar tune came over the hospital’s Muzak: the Beatles’ “All My Loving.” It was surreal. And then too real.
“The song ends. And within a minute or two, I hear a scream: ‘No, oh no, no no no,”‘ Weiss said. “The door opens, and Yoko comes out crying hysterically.” Weiss’ report was confirmed and given to Howard Cosell, who told the nation of Lennon’s death during “Monday Night Football.”
The doctor
Dr. Stephan Lynn walked to the end of the emergency room hall where Yoko Ono was waiting in an empty room. It was his job to deliver the word that her soulmate and spouse was dead.
“She refused to accept or believe that,” Lynn recalled. “For five minutes, she kept repeating, ‘It’s not true. I don’t believe you. You’re lying.”‘
His 15 1/2-hour shift had ended at 10:30 p.m., with Lynn returning to his home in Lennon’s neighborhood. His phone was soon ringing; could he come back to help out? A man with a gunshot to the chest was coming to Roosevelt.
Lynn arrived by cab just before his patient did. The victim had no pulse, no blood pressure, no breath. Lynn, joined by two other doctors, worked frantically to save the life of one of the world’s most famous men.
Twenty minutes later, they gave up.
Ono left the hospital to tell her son the news, leaving Lynn to inform the media throng that Lennon was gone.
“I never again saw Yoko and Sean walking the streets,” the doctor said. “Going out in public? That ceased to take place.”
Yoko Ono never remarried, and still lives in the Dakota.
Chapman comes up for parole next year.
The cops from the 20th Precinct hold a reunion every two years.
Cullen comes up from his home in Naples, Fla., to hang out with the old gang.
Weiss, after getting the scoop of his career, wound up leaving the news business.
Lynn still works at Roosevelt Hospital.
“It’s hard to imagine it’s 25 years,” he said.
Imagine.
