Figure 1: Entrance to Dakota as it looked in June 2003.
Figure 2(a): Full-view of bullet-ridden lobby door. (Broadcast on Channel 7 Eyewitness News, NYC, Dec. 8/9, 1980)
Figure 2(b): Closer view of bullet holes. (Broadcast on Channel 7 Eyewitness News, NYC, Dec. 8/9, 1980)
Figure 2(c): Close-up view of three bullet holes in lobby door. (Broadcast on Channel 7 Eyewitness News, NYC, Dec. 8/9, 1980)
Figure 3: Aerial sketch of lobby entrance from New York Times, Dec. 10, 1980. (cropped)
Figure 4(a): Recent photo of lobby stairs
Figure 4(b): Internet photo of Dakota entrance; source is unknown, but appears to be authentic. Lobby door is open.
Figure 4(c): Close-up/cropped version of photo in Figure 4(b).
Figure 5: Dakota Entrance in 1967/68 as it appeared in Rosemary's Baby was filmed.
Figure 6: Crime scene witness, Sean Strub (right)
interviewed live by Jeanne Downey, Channel 2, CBS.
Figure 7: Subtitles on screen reveal Jeanne Downey interviewed Sean Strub at the Roosevelt Hospital where Lennon was pronounced dead.
Figure 8: Unidentified witness at the Dakota does not mention a verbal exchange between Lennon and Chapman. (Broadcast on Channel 7 Eyewitness News, NYC, Dec. 9, 1980)
Bullet holes in lobby door
Figure 1 shows the front entrance of the Dakota from West 72nd Street, Manhattan. The guard booth is on the left. A doorman (guard) is shown standing beside the guard booth, under the archway. This is roughly where Jose Perdomo stood on Dec. 8, 1980, around 10:50 pm, when Lennon was killed. Chapman reportedly stood on the right side, under the archway, on the opposite curb from where the doorman is standing in Figure 1. After Lennon was shot, he ran up some stairs, on the right, and collapsed in a lobby. The stairs leading to the lobby are about 25-to-30 feet inside the walkway on the right side. Lennon collapsed in the lobby, about 10 feet beyond the stairs. Directly across from the lobby stairs, on the left side of the entryway, is a door leading to a service elevator. This is where once believed the true gunman fired the shots that killed Lennon; however, I have since concluded that the actual shooter was doorman Jose Perdomo. (See article.) Nevertheless, it is possible that support people may have exited the crime scene by way of the doorway across from the lobby stairs. The stated doorway also leads to a side exit. Across the alley from the side exist is a parking garage. (See photos of Dakota's side exit in an alley directly across from a parking garage.)
(Also see article: "Where was Mark David Chapman Standing?")
The film footage definitely shows multiple bullet holes in the glass lobby door (see Figures 2a through 2c); however, the film also shows the lobby door was open, but the picture is not clear. At any rate, the door is facing the archway, which would be within Chapman's view. How the door got in that position remains an open question. Was the door merely in an open position, or was it attached to a structure that no longer exists? Figure 3 is a cropped aerial sketch of the lobby area which appeared in the New York Times, on Dec. 10, 1980. The sketch indicates there was an enclosure surrounding the entrance to the lobby stairs, suggesting that the door shown in Figure 2 was facing Chapman, who stood under the archway entrance. If such an enclosure was present on Dec. 8, 1980, then Chapman could have easily created the bullet holes while shooting from his location under the archway entrance.
(Note: Since this article was first published in Aug. 2004, it has been learned that a temporary lobby door fixture was in place when Lennon was killed. A photograph of the door fixture was displayed on MSNB's website for a few days in November 2005, but quickly taken down. Apparently the photo was shown by accident. See Follow-up.
-- S.A., Jan. 16, 2006)
But if the lobby door was closed, and no additional structure existed, there is no way Chapman could have created the bullet holes in the door because the door itself would be outside his field of vision. A bullet would have to turn 90 degrees to the right to create such a hole. But if the shots were fired from the area of Jose Perdomo's booth (on the left side of the Dakota's entrance), that would explain the holes completely. (See article: "Where was Mark David Chapman Standing?")
The big question is this: Was there a structure around the entrance to the lobby stairs as Figure 3 indicates? If there was, it was torn down later because Figure 4(a)--a photograph I took of the entrance to the lobby, taken around June 2003--does not show such a structure. In addition, I found a photograph on the Internet of what appears to be a fairly recent photo of the Dakota entrance where the lobby door is open. (See Figure 4b, plus a close-up/cropped version of same photo is shown in Figure 4c.) Although the source of the photo is unknown, I have been to the Dakota four times in the past year, and believe photograph in Figures 4(b) and 4(c) looks authentic, except I've never seen the lobby door open as shown in those photos. Whenever I visited the Dakota, the lobby door was out of my line of vision, as shown in Figure 4(a), presumably closed. On two occasions, I asked the doorman if I could walk inside the entryway and take photos of the lobby door, but both times I was refused.
So it appears that the door shown in Figure 2(a)--which is from film footage taken at the time of Lennon's murder--is showing the lobby door in the open position. The only other possibility is there was a small structure surrounding the lobby door, as Figure 3 suggests.
If such a structure was in place when Lennon was killed, then it was built between 1967 or 1968 and 1980, because Figure 5 shows the Dakota entrance during the filming of Rosemary's Baby, which was released in June of 1968. As you can see, there is no doorway structure attached to the entrance, so if it existed, it was built later, then torn down after Lennon was shot.
More research is needed in order to determine whether a doorway structure similar to the one shown in Figure 3 was in place on Dec. 8, 1980, or if the New York Times sketch was a fabrication drawn to divert attention from bullet holes in the glass door that could not have been created by Chapman, if he had shot Lennon under the conditions described.
Jose Perdomo claimed Chapman called to Lennon
JEANNE DOWNEY, of Channel 2, CBS in New York, interviewed crime scene witness SEAN STRUB live outside the Roosevelt Hospital, where Lennon was pronounced dead (see Figures 6 & 7). Although Strub was a crime scene witness who heard the shots from nearby and followed police to the Dakota, Strub was not actually present at the Dakota entrance when the shooting occurred. As previously stated, Strub identified Dakota doorman, Jose Perdomo, as the individual who first stated that verbal communication occurred between Chapman and Lennon, moments before the shooting, a point Chapman later denied at his sentencing hearing, and the judge accepted his explanation.
The following is a transcript of Strub’s description of what he saw and heard:
STRUB: …I kind of waited for a minute and started to walk on; a police car drove by very fast. And so I followed it on down, I thought it was something in the park, but it was at the Dakota on Seventy-Second Street and Central Park West. As I got there, there were about a half-dozen people there, and very shortly there were that many squad cars.
JD: Did you see Mr. Lennon at that time?
STRUB: Yeah, they were just bringing Lennon out of the, sort of an entryway, the driveway between the sidewalk and the courtyard, and he was limp; there were about six officers carrying him. He had a little bit of blood coming out of his mouth.
JD: And Police tell us they do have a suspect. Did you see anyone?
STRUB: Yeah, they scuffled with a guy and arrested him; he was about thirty-five, he was white, brown hair.
JD: Was he alone?
STRUB: He was the only person I saw. Yoko was there.
JD: She was?
STRUB: And they put him in a squad car and took off.
JD: Was there any kind of an exchange, do you know, between Lennon and the suspect?
STRUB: That’s what the doorman [Jose Perdomo] said that there had been some sort of altercation or argument; I heard the cops say that Lennon was hit twice in the back. I heard someone else say that the guy had apparently been hanging around all evening, and another person said he’d been there all week, and he was just kind of like waiting for him.
JD: Thank-you very much, Sean, who is a witness who at least heard the shots surrounding the shooting and apparent death of John Lennon….
It's interesting how Sean Strub's explanation was so thorough, so detailed, but virtually all of it was second-hand. In other words, whether it was intentional or accidental, he planted the seeds of the official cover story to the media just minutes after the crime had been committed, but with virtually no accountability, since he didn't see anything other than blood on Lennon's mouth. It's quite possible Strub could have been a phony witness. For a crime of this magnitude, witnesses can be bought for a dime a dozen.
An unidentified female witness (see Figure 8) gave a slightly different account of the shooting than Strub's. The woman--whose description of the crime was broadcast on Channel 7 Eyewitness News--was at the Dakota when the shooting started, but apparently did not actually see the identity of the person who shot Lennon, she only heard the shots. Nevertheless, she witnessed events before and after the shooting, and did not mention anything about words being exchanged between Lennon and Chapman. The following is the unidentified woman's description of the shooting:
WOMAN: I heard Yoko Ono screaming moments later. They stepped out of the limousine, and they went inside of the gate there. Then all of a sudden, I heard five/six shots, and that was it.
Putting this information together with the newly obtained death certificate, it is highly doubtful that Mark David Chapman killed anyone, least of all John Lennon.
END
