By Aug. 15 Mark and Gloria had reached their goal. They were out
of debt. But still Mark felt unbearable pressure, pressure he
couldn’t define.
Now his obsessions changed even more rapidly. He got rid of his
records, then scoured record stores to replace them, then sold his
new collection. He bought new speakers for his stereo, then broke
his turntable and smashed it to pieces. After watching the movie
“Network,” he got rid of his TV set.
He made loyal Gloria’s life miserable. “The only place you
could go for privacy was the bathroom,” she told Gaines, “and so
often at night I’d go in there and lock the door and just cry.”
He bought two copies of The Catcher in the Rye and made
Gloria read one. He talked of changing his name to Holden Caulfield
and even wrote the Hawaii attorney general to ask the procedure.
On Sept. 20, he wrote a letter to a friend, Lynda Irish, in New
Mexico. On it he drew a picture of Diamond Head with the sun, moon
and stars above it.
“I’m going nuts,” he wrote.
He signed it “The Catcher in the Rye.”
He brought home books from the library on one subject after
another. One of them was John Lennon: One Day at a Time by
Anthony Fawcett. In it he read about Lennon’s life in New York. He
was furious.
“He was angry that Lennon would preach love and peace but yet
have millions,” Gloria told Gaines. He began to talk of going to
New York.
And he began, he would tell Gaines in prison, to pray to Satan.
“There were no candles, no incantations,” Gaines writes. “Just
Mark, sitting naked, rocking back and forth at the controls of his
stereo and tape recorder, splicing together his reasons for killing
John Lennon from the lyrics of Beatles songs, the soundtrack of
“The Wizard of Oz” and quotations from The Catcher in the Rye
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Yoko Ono and John Lennon
in bed in 1969 (AP) |
He told his Little People he intended to go to New York and kill
John Lennon. They begged him not to. They said, he told Jack Jones,
“Please, think of your wife. Please, Mr. President. Think of your
mother. Think of yourself.”
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