The Novel and Its Themes
Salinger’s novel centers around Holden Caulfield, a disillusioned 16-year-old who’s railing against the hypocrisy and phoniness of adult society. Caulfield narrates the book through the voice of a postwar adolescent over a weekend after he’s been expelled from prep school. Caulfield’s also dealing with alienation, tragedy and finding his own identity.
In Chapman’s case, his fixation with Caulfield turned dangerous because it tapped into his own personal problems and deep obsessions with religion.
Kenneth Slawenski, author of the bestselling biography J.D. Salinger: A Life, tells A&E Crime + Investigation that Chapman didn’t interpret The Catcher in the Rye as Salinger intended.
“He interpreted the book in a twisted way,” Slawenski says. “I'm sure, in part, he superimposed himself on Holden's character because this is how Salinger wrote—he hands most of the story over to the reader to be completed.”
Chapman fixated on the novel’s darker and more violent themes and turned it into a religious crutch that he believed spoke to him.
Jack Jones spent hundreds of hours talking to Chapman about how the book influenced Lennon’s murder for his biography Let Me Take You Down: Inside the Mind of Mark David Chapman, the Man Who Killed John Lennon and a documentary by the same name.
“He read The Catcher in the Rye the way that nuns and priests do the rosary, the way real dyed-in-the-wool, believing religious people do the Beatitudes and try to walk in the footsteps of Christ,” Jones tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “Chapman tried to walk in every way in the footsteps of Caulfield and took that extra step by moving into the violence that Holden only wishes he could do.”
According to Jones, Chapman was an angry and explosive child who was coddled by his narcissistic mother. Chapman saw himself “in every comma period, adjective, cliche” of the book, Jones says, until Caulfield’s rage and alienation became his own.
“There's violence and grief throughout the book, and Mark tapped into that,” Jones says.
The Murder of John Lennon
Chapman’s worldview warped the book’s themes into a personal crusade against phoniness. He grew up as a fan of Lennon and the Beatles, even idolizing Lennon as a “Jesus figure” when he was young.
But over time, in Chapman’s mind, Lennon became the ultimate phony: preaching peace and self-denial while living a life of wealth and comfort at the posh Dakota Apartments on New York City’s Upper West Side.
“Some very dark wheels started turning in his mind that he had to eliminate John Lennon, who was leading another generation into phoniness and hypocrisy and betraying all of the values that Holden Caulfield and The Catcher in the Rye imputed to children before they cross that line into the realization that we have to survive in a world that is not perfect, not cruel, that is very hypocritical and very dangerous,” Jones says.
Chapman even framed Lennon’s murder as part of his “mission” to protect children and uphold the values he projected onto Caulfield and the book, per Jones. “He became totally infused and believed in every respect, to be the Holden Caulfield of his generation.”
That mission was to go to New York City in December 1980, lay in wait outside the Dakota for John Lennon armed with a copy of The Catcher in the Rye and a .38 caliber pistol loaded with five hollow-point bullets.
Just before 11 p.m. on December 8, Lennon stepped out of a limo with Yoko Ono. Chapman called for Lennon, who’d walked just by him on the sidewalk. Lennon turned slightly and from about 20 feet away, Chapman fired five shots hitting Lennon four times, killing him on the street.
On June 22, 1981, Chapman pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, and two months later, he was sentenced to 20 years to life. At the sentencing, he read from The Catcher in the Rye. His requests for parole have all been denied and he continues to serve time in prison in New York's Wende Correctional Facility.
Were Other Crimes Just Copycats?
After Lennon’s murder, other high-profile cases reportedly referenced The Catcher in the Rye, including the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan by then-25-year-old John Hinckley, Jr.
Just four months after Lennon’s death, Hinckley fired multiple shots at Reagan and his staff with a 22-caliber revolver as they left the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C. Reagan was struck once, while others, including his press secretary James Brady, a Secret Service agent and a police officer, were severely injured.
During a search, federal agents found a copy of The Catcher in the Rye among Hinckley’s possessions in his hotel, and he was said to have been following Chapman’s story closely. But Hinckley was obsessed with Jodie Foster and not Holden Caulfield. Hinckley believed he could win Foster’s love if he became famous.
A jury had found Hinckley not guilty by reason of insanity in his 1982 trial. He was fully released June 15, 2022, after serving most of his time in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital.
Similarly, 19-year-old Robert John Bardo was infatuated with 21-year-old rising Hollywood star Rebecca Schaeffer. Bardo had been stalking her for two years when, on July 18, 1989, he rang her Hollywood apartment doorbell and shot her in the chest at point-blank range. Schaeffer died later at a local hospital.
A superior court judge found Bardo guilty of first-degree murder and guilty of special circumstance of lying in wait, which required a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. He’s currently serving his sentence at Avenal State Prison in California.
Dr. Park Dietz, a forensic psychologist who testified for the defense at Bardo’s trial, said Bardo told him he’d read The Catcher in the Rye twice just to see how it inspired Chapman, but he couldn’t even figure it out.
Jones and Slawenski both tell A&E Crime + Investigation they believe these were two instances of “copycats,” and sensationalism by the media, rather than two more murders linked to the book.
“After [Chapman], you had a couple of clever criminals and probably even more clever lawyers who said, ‘You know what? Make sure they see you in jail reading The Catcher in the Rye,'” Slawenski says. “I think with Mark David Chapman, he really felt that way. But anything after that, I have big question marks.”
Press coverage around these high-profile cases likely also helped tie the book to violence and crime, as it propelled the narrative that it could have been the motive, or one of the motives, for the murders. That sensationalism helped simplify and even mask the real causes—mental health issues, social isolation, obsession, psychopathy—and reinforce that the book could be inherently dangerous for certain readers.
A Shot at Notoriety
Chapman, Hinckley and Bardo were all looking for some kind of notoriety or fame. Hinckley and Bardo needed a narrative to explain their crimes and seized on Chapman’s story and Salinger’s novel to give meaning to their behaviors.
Documentary director Bill Badgley tells A&E Crime + Investigation he couldn’t even find proof Hinckley ever read the book.
“The book becomes a mask,” Badgley says. “These guys, to some level, they're going to do this anyway, and so they're looking for the thing that helps them do it.”
But Chapman didn’t just like The Catcher in the Rye—he built his worldview around it, and ultimately used it as his justification for murder. Even today, Jones says Chapman treats the book like a drug he can’t risk being around. When Jones recently asked Chapman what he thinks about The Catcher in the Rye now, he told him the book is “anathema” and that “he knows he can't go there,” comparing him to “an addict who knows he can't be in a room with a bunch of people shooting up.”
"The Catcher in the Rye was J.D. Salinger's masterpiece,” Jones says. “The murder of John Lennon was Mark David Chapman's masterpiece."
