Watch the Trailer to Docuseries ‘John Lennon: Murder Without a Trial’
There have been a number of eye-opening Beatles documentaries through the years, from the Beatlemania doc Eight Days a Week; a tribute to the Fab Four’s loyal secretary, Good Ol’ Freda; Martin Scorsese’s poignant George Harrison: Living in the Material World; and last but certainly not least, Peter Jackson’s recent eight-hour opus Get Back, chronicling the recording of the group’s final album, Let It Be, and subsequent demise.
Now, we have what hopes to be the definitive documentary about the aftermath of Mark David Chapman’s 1980 assassination of John Lennon outside the Dakota.
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Premiering Dec. 6 on Apple TV+, and narrated by Kiefer Sutherland, the three-part docuseries John Lennon: Murder Without a Trial features new information gleaned from FOIA requests, as well as the first on-camera interviews with a number of people surrounding the tragedy, including Richard Peterson, a taxi driver/witness to the shooting; the Dakota concierge who desperately tried to save Lennon’s life; and Dr. Naomi Goldstein, the first psychiatrist who assessed Chapman.
“Crucially, and unusually in a case of this magnitude, Lennon’s murderer never stood trial. Consequently, a wealth of detailed argument and evidence relating to Mark David Chapman’s mental state and culpability was never publicly heard,” co-director Rob Coldstream and producer Louis Lee Ray tell Rolling Stone. “This series lays out for the first time the unseen evidence for the prosecution and the defense — using documents and firsthand testimony from those who were there. We’ve been careful to maintain an impartial approach throughout, simply laying out for the viewer the arguments that were never heard in court.”
Coldstream and Lee Ray add that they took particular pains “not to sensationalize the story” out of respect to Lennon’s surviving family, including Yoko Ono, Sean Lennon, and Julian Lennon.
“Furthermore, we’ve approached Lennon’s tragic murder not just as an event in isolation, but in the context of 1980s America, and explore the ripples the killing had across society more broadly,” they say. “What was striking is how many parallels sprung up between 1980 and the current day, from questions around mental health, the justice system, and gun control.” Watch the trailer to John Lennon: Murder Without a Trial here:
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