Over forty-four years ago, a married man in his mid-twenties flew from the tropics of Hawaii to the cold streets of New York City with one thing on his mind: killing music icon John Lennon.
On Dec. 6, 1980, Mark David Chapman, who was then 25 years old, said goodbye to his wife in Honolulu and boarded a plane for the East Coast. Two days later, Lennon would be dead — shot five times, with a .38 caliber revolver, from a distance of fifteen feet.
“I was feeling like I was worthless, and maybe the root of it is a self-esteem issue,” Chapman told The New York Times. “I felt like nothing, and I felt if I shot him, I would become something, which is not true at all.”
Does this scenario sound familiar? It should. In an event that dominated the news cycle last week, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione shot and killed UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson outside a Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Hawaii was Mangione’s last official residence.
What’s more, the man who made an attempt on Donald Trump’s life in Florida earlier this summer, Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, had flown to Palm Beach — from Hawaii.
It begs the question: “Why, yet again, another high-profile crime was linked to suspects who recently moved to Hawaii,” asked Hawaii Public Radio host Catherine Cruz on a recent episode of her popular show, The Conversation.
One of her guests, a former FBI agent, Arnold Laanui, was not surprised by what he sees as the three shooters’ similar stories: running away from America to the isolated islands of Hawaii.
“It’s not unusual for people to run to Hawaii thinking they’re running away from something,” Laanui said.
The Shooters: Three Sad Literary Men
Two murderers and one failed assassin. Each one was born in suburban America: Texas, Virginia, and North Carolina. All of them are speculated to have suffered from mental illness. And two of them — Chapman and Mangione — were only 25 and 26 years old.
But the most compelling through line in their stories is this: they all loved books.
Chapman was famously flipping through pages of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye as he waited for Lennon to leave his apartment building in 1980 — before killing him.
Mangione, who graduated from University of Pennsylvania in 2020, started a book club in Hawaii before making the fateful trip to New York. Most news outlets have harped on the fact that he posted an online review of Ted Kaczynski’s infamous Unabomber manifesto, but a former UPenn classmate, Jackie Wexler, says this mischaracterizes her friend.
For instance, Mangione was first inspired to start a book club after reading Yuval Noah Harari’s widely acclaimed best-seller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, noted Wexler, who spoke to local news outlet Honolulu Civil Beat.
“He was just such a thoughtful and deeply compassionate person at everything he did,” she said. “It just makes me sad to think how alone he must feel.”
Routh, for his part, wrote his own book — and not a very good one, according to journalist Julia Ioffe, who reviewed the 291-page memoir for Puck magazine.
“A close reading of the wannabe Trump assassin’s self-published memoir, documenting his time in Ukraine, reveals a mentally ill man grappling with existential comedown from his delusions of grandeur,” she wrote.
Something To Do With Hawaii?
Perhaps these stories reveal something about Hawaii, too — once an independent monarchy of Polynesian descendants, who at first welcomed the white missionaries and businessmen from the U.S. — until they overthrew the Hawaiian government and seized control of all its land. In a move widely condemned by native people, the islands were annexed.
Residing on an isolated island in the middle of the Pacific, these men must’ve had time to think. Maybe they saw their home country in a new light — a nation built by taking; home to a bunch of greedy capitalists. Perhaps they sought notoriety and wanted to take a stand against “the man” — to be forever known as a martyr. Or maybe it’s something else entirely.
The Targets: Larger Than Life
Three prominent U.S. figures: John Lennon, Donald Trump, and Brian Thompson. What ties them together? Each man symbolizes an industry larger than themselves: music, politics, and health care. More than that, they represent power and American culture.
“Richard Cory” is a song about class inequality, written by Simon & Garfunkel, based on a poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson.
They say that Richard Cory owns one half of this whole town
With political connections to spread his wealth around
Born into society, a banker’s only child
He had everything a man could want, power, grace and style
But I work in his factory
And I curse the life I’m living
And I curse my poverty
And I wish that I could be
Oh, I wish that I could be
Oh, I wish that I could be Richard Cory
The papers print his pictures almost everywhere he goes
Richard Cory at the opera, Richard Cory at a show
And the rumor of his parties and the orgies on his yacht
Oh, he surely must be happy with everything he’s got
But I, I work in his factory
And I curse the life I’m living
And I curse my poverty
And I wish that I could be
Oh, I wish that I could be
Oh, I wish that I could be Richard Cory
He freely gave to charity, he had the common touch
And they were grateful for his patronage, and they thanked him very much
So my mind was filled with wonder when the evening headlines read
“Richard Cory went home last night and put a bullet through his head”
Ashley Elizabeth Miller 
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