(On December 8, 1980, the world was shocked by the news. Rock and roll star John Lennon was assassinated outside his New York City apartment. The murderer, Mark David Chapman, a pudgy, blue-eyed twenty-five-year-old, flew nearly 6,000 miles to fire four shots from his .38 revolver, silencing Lennon forever.The press and the public mourned the death of Lennon. Chapman, locked away in an upstate New York prison, was angrily dismissed as an insane loner, a deranged Beatle fan whose obsession with Lennon had soured. Believing his hero had long sold out and become as hypocritical as those Lennon himself had criticized, Chapman was portrayed as the darkest embodiment of the deluded fan.Author Fenton Bresler spent eight years researching police reports, court testimonies, and the psychological makeup of Mark David Chapman and found things did not add up.Why had Mark David Chapman just stood in the shadows near the bleeding body of Lennon?What significance did The Catcher in the Rye really hold for Chapman? Why did he begin reading it just after he fired the fatal shots?)