The strange and surreal aftermath of John Lennon’s murder

The fatal 1980 shooting – 43 years ago this week – became a defining moment in popular culture. But, David Lister asks, can a new documentary really shed any new light on the Beatle’s assassination?

Yoko Ono and John Lennon shortly before the musician was murdered in New York (Getty)

They say, and they’re right, that just as with President Kennedy, everyone who was alive can remember where they were when they heard of John Lennon’s murder. We can remember the moment, the rest of the day and the ensuing week of worldwide grief and adulation.

Personally, I recall hearing on the car radio, in the middle of 9 December, three Beatle songs being played in a row and vaguely thinking it a little odd – as this was the one period in the last 60 years that they weren’t actually that fashionable. Then, just before the Six O'Clock News on BBC TV, I realised the reason, when the host of the BBC magazine show Nationwide, Michael Barratt, came on and said that grown men had been crying in the street. The subsequent news bulletin made it all clear. Lennon had been gunned down outside his New York home the night before.

Now, Apple TV is airing a three-part documentary, Murder Without a Trial, narrated by Kiefer Sutherland, which will reveal hitherto unknown information about Lennon’s shooting on 8 December 1980. Much is already known, obviously, about the deranged fan Mark Chapman getting an album autographed by Lennon outside the ex-Beatle’s apartment in New York, staying there until he returned from the studio that night, then firing several bullets into him, and staying until the police came and found him with a copy of The Catcher in the Rye.