John Lennon – Murder Without a Trial review: Irresponsible Apple documentary peddles crackpot conspiracy theories

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Chapman would go on to claim in his defence that he’d grown to resent Lennon over the years. He would also claim that killing the rock star – and this should’ve been an indication of what investigators were dealing with – would transform him into Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye. Chapman didn’t attempt to flee the scene of the crime, nor did he resist arrest when NYPD police officers apprehended him mere feet from Lennon’s slain body. He was found leaning against a wall, reading JD Salinger’s novel. As one investigator muses in the show, all Chapman had to do was wander into the sea of humanity right next to him, and he’d have never been found. Chapman was clearly disturbed. But Murder Without a Trial flushes documented evidence down a toilet, and wonders out loud, “What if he wasn’t?”

After rounding up an admittedly fine roster of talking heads in episode one — we hear from the Dakota’s porter and doorman, the record producer Lennon and Ono met some minutes before the killing, the journalist to whom he gave his final interview, and even a cab driver who happened to be outside the building during the incident — the show pretty much runs out of things to say. This was, after all, an open and shut case. And because Chapman pleaded guilty — he said that Jesus told him to — the case never went to trial. Chapman was jailed, which is where he remains to this day. The end.

But having resolved to keep charging on, no matter what, Murder Without a Trial latches onto the flimsiest excuse to go complete bonkers for roughly an episode and a half. A family friend shows up, and claims that in the days following Lennon’s death, Ono urged him in hushed tones to look into the many conspiracy theories doing the rounds at the time. What if, the show asks, Chapman wasn’t a deranged lone gunman, but a stooge who’d been hypnotised by the CIA to assassinate Lennon, a vocal critic of the Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan administrations.

Don’t believe it? Why, here are some out of context documents that clearly state “steps were taken at the highest level of the government to take care of the Lennon problem,” the show says, shoving stills of the said documents down our throats. The Beatle himself was worried about his phones being tapped by the government, and had even voiced these concerns on the record. The CIA was notorious for using “mind-control” as a political tool in conflict zones, Murder Without a Trial what-ifs, and who’s to say Chapman wasn’t another of its zombie soldiers? The show even ropes in a random consultant to nod along, as if that’s the clincher we’d been waiting for.

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All of this clearly suggests that nobody had any idea how to approach this story, but at some point during production, it was decided that they’d throw everything at the wall and hope that something sticks. In the last 10 minutes of episode three, for instance, the issue of gun control is suddenly brought up. The pointlessness of the exercise begins to truly set in when a psychological analyst who had nothing to do with the case shows up to read the court documents and offer her opinion. Murder Without a Trial wastes the considerable access at its disposal in the service of sleazy storytelling, when it could’ve easily examined the personal and cultural ramifications of the tragedy. It’s reprehensible.

John Lennon: Murder Without a Trial
Director – Nick Holt, Rob Coldstream
Rating – 1/5