Style & Culture |

Web monkey: www.lennonmurdertruth.com

Did Stephen King kill Lennon?

By Tony Reaves

Posted on Thursday, April 29th, 2004, 12:00 am

E-mail

Tell us what you think!
Send a letter to the editor about this or any other article in The Maine Campus.

The great thing about the Internet is that it gives everybody equal time. From furries to ninjas to people who claim they are from the future, the Internet lets everyone speak. One internet voice is Steve Lightfoot, who wants to open our eyes to a vast conspiracy.

What if I told you that Stephen King, not Mark David Chapman, murdered John Lennon? What if I said that Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were behind it? That’s exactly what Steve Lightfoot says on his Web site, www.lennonmurdertruth.com.

His evidence is intriguing. First of all, Chapman, the man convicted for killing Lennon, looked a lot like Stephen King at the time. Also, as Lightfoot writes, “Almost all of Stephen King’s material exhibits possible relationships to the assassination of John Lennon,” as well as, “images relating to horror and terror.”

He cites every place in every book King published between 1975 and 1982, where one character shoots another character, and every instance where King mentions “The Beatles.” As you explore his Web site you can almost imagine Lightfoot beside you, jumping up and down shouting, “See? See?”

The “government codes” are great. According to Lightfoot, the U.S. Government delivers top-secret messages by distributing them across dozens of newspaper headlines. These headlines include, “Le Monde Under Attack,” “Killing One’s Enemies” and “Jailing the News.” Lightfoot does not seem to understand that journalists, not government agents, write newspaper articles, and that editors write headlines.

There is also a place where Chapman’s name was distributed across two different letters to the editor in 1980 issues of U.S. News & World Report. The letters were from service members dreading Reagan’s presidency. It is not an incredible coincidence, in my opinion, that a man whose last name was Chapman might use the phrase “mark my words.”

Of course, I may be biased. I write for the media here at The Maine Campus, and King wrote for this newspaper when he was a college student. We may be covering something up. Some Maine Campus headlines for the past year have included “Horror Rock Lives On,” “Breathing Room,” “GSS Election Results Challenged” and “Open Your Heart, Not Your Legs.” Does this mean that Derek Francis, a style writer for The Maine Campus, murdered Weird Al’s parents? That’s for you to decide.

Better yet, take the coded message in last December’s issue of Penthouse. “Marshall … thrust his … knife … hard into … [Elliott] Smith’s…breast.” This message was distributed across six different pages, buried in otherwise innocent paragraphs. Did Marshall Dury, The Maine Campus’ opinion editor, stab singer-songwriter Elliott Smith in the chest? Hey, I’m not saying that The Maine Campus is a government training ground for assassins of celebrities, but I’m not saying it isn’t.

Maybe we should be concentrating on poor Steve Lightfoot. For more than 20 years, the man has been saving these random newspaper clippings, and now running a Web site trying to convince the world that Stephen King killed Lennon. John Lennon’s death obviously hit him pretty hard. Actually, many of Stephen King’s most memorable characters are paranoid or crazy. Perhaps every one of these is an explicit reference to Steve Lightfoot.