June 1, 2002

9:34 PM

Steven Lightfoot believes that author Stephen King murdered John Lennon, with the blessings of Ronald Reagan. Mark David Chapman was just an innocent pawn in their evil game. Witness the lengths Steven Lightfoot goes to to prove his theories. Here's the story that the media doesn't want you to read.
posted by iconomy (30 comments total)

Wow!

That must be the guy that used to drive down Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz when I worked at The Rossting Company there.

He had a van literally plastered with STEVEN KING KILLED JOHN LENNON articles and stuff.

I think he may have been, you know, a little off kilter.

From the rather long About The Author section:

Our enemies attack us on the basis that we ARE satanic infidels. I hate to disgust my fellow Americans, but they are right about that. HOW CAN YOU TOLERATE STEPHEN KING GETTING AWAY WITH ASSASSINATING JOHN LENNON if it were not true?
posted by Kafkaesque at 9:40 PM on June 1, 2002

Metafilter and it's ilk could be called the good side of self publishing being available to all. This is probably the downside. Although, if people choose to publicize their insanity on the web, it does give the rest of us fair warning.
posted by jonmc at 9:47 PM on June 1, 2002

HOW CAN YOU TOLERATE STEPHEN KING GETTING AWAY WITH ASSASSINATING JOHN LENNON if it were not true?
same way i tolerate the sun rising in the west, the arid effects of the sea, and the ever falling sky. i buy shit, i overeat. sometimes i spay paint "fuck" on the freeway overpass. yep. but mostly i just buy shit, and overeat.
posted by quonsar at 9:53 PM on June 1, 2002

Geez, this guy's up there with John Nash on the conspiracy theory stuff. Finding connections in the media? Would they really waste their time with that?
posted by gramcracker at 9:58 PM on June 1, 2002

It all makes sense to me.
posted by dong_resin at 10:13 PM on June 1, 2002

I would like to educate you to the evil world of the mass media, how it is controlled predominantly by Jews (I am NOT an anti-Semite)

Sorry, but he lost me there. I'm always willing to give insanity a few moments, but I have my limits. Excuse me,but I have to go back to controlling the planet. See y'all later.
posted by evanizer at 10:18 PM on June 1, 2002

Kinda reminds me of this new movie coming out.
posted by sadie01221975 at 10:20 PM on June 1, 2002

My English teacher lived on the same dorm floor as Chapman, back when he was going to Covenant College in Tennessee. Chapman dropped out though.

Hey, I'm only 3 degrees from John Lennon!

but mostly i just buy shit, and overeat.

What? But I thought I was a beautiful and unique snowflake.... Oh well, I'm too lazy to change.

Oh yeah, about this conspiracy 'theorist.' His website looks better than David Icke's, but this guy makes Icke look like a mentally stable, clear-thinking visionary.

I love this guy's government codes newspaper clippings section. Apparently, he's never heard of Occam's Razor, or conspiracies being needlessly complex.
posted by insomnyuk at 10:36 PM on June 1, 2002

In those dark, dank years before the internet, Lightfoot would have authored his wacked out tome and suffered in obscurity with his particular delusions. But, he's got the internet and he's become an internet celebrity.
posted by MAYORBOB at 12:03 AM on June 2, 2002

I met Stephen King once (right around that time too). I suspect several people here have had the same experience, since King used to make the bookstore tour circuit frequently. I recall thinking: "This might very well be the klutziest man alive." I doubt if he could hit the ground with a bazooka.
posted by RavinDave at 12:14 AM on June 2, 2002

MAYORBOB: Interesting. Implying that bookstore owners play a role in shaping the public voice...
posted by zerolucid at 12:54 AM on June 2, 2002

Hmmmmm. Not quite such a lone loony. I work in an office superstore, and while manning the copy center, I had an elderly lady come in and make many copies of an incomprehensible packet of papers. Out of curiousity, I asked her about it, and she told me it was proof that our local paper had carried coded messages (in the sports section and a syndicated parenting column) from the government authorizing the events of 9-11. That was not the first time, nor, I'm sure, the last, I've seen, or will see, such things. She finally revealed to me that she was copying all of these to give to the masses to open their eyes...
posted by Samizdata at 1:48 AM on June 2, 2002

Maybe it's an excess of local pride and cheap beer, but I'm left thinking:

"What have you done/Mark David Chapman?"
posted by one.louder.ash! at 1:59 AM on June 2, 2002

Err... perhaps it's just my government-conditioned brain closing down on me, but why exactly would Reagan et al go to all the trouble of secretly murdering him and then start leaving messages to draw attention to it? Seems something of a conspiratorial non sequitir a mon humblest of humble avis. Besides, everyone knows Lennon was murdered by Elvis. The whole of Weekend at Bernie's is riddled with clues supporting it, I tells ya.
posted by RokkitNite at 2:10 AM on June 2, 2002

If it had been the other way around, if Lennon had shot King, we'd have John Lennon writing tough, lonesome prison songs, and no Stephen King department in every book store. That's the sort of delusion I could almost get behind.
posted by pracowity at 2:33 AM on June 2, 2002

This is the most exciting thing written about or written by Stephen King I've ever read. His books are interminably boring and written to dissuade all imagination. In all my years I've never been able to finish a one of them. And when I have attempted a read at them at all, I continually skip to passages, paragraphs away, where certain flag-words pertinent to the story or dialogue are finally recommenced.

In that regard, I wouldn't doubt that this Lightfoot character had just been simply fed up with all of King's formulaic fiction and decided to smear him. Turning himself into a quack or no, this is the price of discouraging others from shit prose.
posted by crasspastor at 2:52 AM on June 2, 2002

Lightfoot got some media coverage in the San Francisco area back in the middle 1980's. IIRC, the East Bay Express did a long article on him. He had received a substantial inheritance a couple of years earlier, and was devoting all of his resources to speading the word about Stephen King having killed John Lennon. It was a really moving article about this man's insanity.
posted by peeping_Thomist at 5:29 AM on June 2, 2002

From the "Footnotes" section:

Perhaps a call to talk radio to SNEAK in my website address will sway more I can...slip in my website and let the public know that it is too legit to quit, before the host hangs up on you...then add; "..and I think all talk show hosts should be judged according to their position on this controversial topic."

Finally, a standard by which all radio hosts may be judged.

BTW, "too legit to quit" is hilarious... perhaps he's being secretly funded by MC Hammer?
posted by thatweirdguy2 at 6:55 AM on June 2, 2002

Gee ... you guys don't suppose they tried to gak King in that suspicious car accident cuz he was gonna spill the beans and implicate others. This is all starting to fall into place. Where was "horror-boy" when Vince Foster bought it?
posted by RavinDave at 7:17 AM on June 2, 2002

It is of course easy to belittle this guy and make fun of him. But if you click on his "About the Author" your lightheartedness might well turn to pity and sympathy for this poor soul.
posted by Postroad at 8:14 AM on June 2, 2002

This guy is a great example of how the mind can deceive itself into seeing what doesn't exist. There is virtually no similarity between the handwriting in the two "letters" and if the photo of Chapman looks like Stephen King, then I look like Marilyn Monroe.
posted by gordian knot at 8:29 AM on June 2, 2002

An interesting take on the psychology of conspiracy theory is that it exists because "If you think it's a rogue person or an unsophisticated group you start worrying about your daily life. If this can happen, what sense of security can you have?" According to this short article, "We create alternate realities because we reject the world where a single madman can bring down a president, a reckless driver can snuff out a princess... and a few men with knives can terrorise a country."

A more formal investigation can be found here.

For myself, I have a different theory. This 50 year old man, by his own account, has had two short relationships with the opposite sex in his whole life; one more than thirty years ago, one apprently twenty years ago. This seems to be a textbook case of the bluebies backing up into the brainpan.
posted by Perigee at 1:24 PM on June 2, 2002

Sad. Just so sad.
posted by UnReality at 2:49 PM on June 2, 2002

...eventually someone is going to buy into the conspiracy to a level where someone is going to get hurt for no good reason

skallas - the fellow who shot up the Capitol a few years ago was trying to get to the Ruby Radio receiver that controls us all (or something like that) which is housed inside the Capitol in the Crypt chamber (which is actually a real place). As far as I can tell, that was a conspiracy he manufactured all by himself. I don't think we need to worry about the mentally imbalanced picking up on other folks' delusions - their own reality-distortion fields are strong enough on their own.
posted by GriffX at 6:09 PM on June 2, 2002

This guy writes me letters at work just about every week.
posted by MrMoonPie at 7:20 AM on June 3, 2002

Talk about a lone nut.
posted by DragonBoy at 7:29 AM on June 3, 2002

Perigee, he says it himself: "No insignificant nobody killed huge and powerful John Lennon. It made no sense." I guess we all wish that were true.
posted by MrMoonPie at 7:34 AM on June 3, 2002

I assisted a paranoid schizophrenic in getting his meds this weekend. He was talking flat earths and purple people and aliens and "the truth is all a lie" and on and on.

It was surreal, quite a bit like a Dali painting. The guy was speaking English, yup. Individual phrases were English, and parsed, but oddly ("the purple people"). But string them all together and it was a series of disconnected bizarre thoughts that surely had great meaning to the nut, but meant nothing to any listener.

I asked some direct questions of him, and he admits that life is much better when he's on his meds, and doesn't know why he stops taking them.

It was, ultimately, very, very sad.
posted by five fresh fish at 12:05 PM on June 3, 2002

Kafkaesque- Agreed, it must be that guy who parked his grey van on Pacific Avenue all the time. Who else? Unless, of course, he's attracting a following ... eek! Takes ya back, doesn't it?
posted by sheauga at 12:09 PM on June 4, 2002

I have seen this guy's van in Washington DC, maybe he was on a Road Trip.
posted by cell divide at 12:30 PM on June 4, 2002