Category Archives: Book Review

Who Killed John Lennon? By Fenton Bresler was given to me (along with a copy of Fred Seaman’s The Last Days of John Lennon: A Personal Memoir) by someone who was trying to explain to me the conspiracy theories behind John Lennon‘s murder.

Again, this is a book (published in 1989) that has been on my shelf for over 5 years now and I decided it was time to finally getting around to reading it in its entirety. I had made two other prior attempts, but I finally dug up the patience needed to get through Fenton Bresler‘s belief that Lennon’s assassin (or better to known to Beatles’ fans as “He whose name shall not be spoken”) was not a lone gun man, but instead a CIA pawn who had been brainwashed and at the command of a ‘controller’  shot John Lennon.

Why did it take such an effort to read this book? Well, for one, the author (an English lawyer) spends an exorbitant amount of time detailing the CIA hypnosis/mind control programs of the 50’s and 60’s. In fact, he takes it even farther back to when the CIA didn’t even exist. Mr. Bresler even explains how the conspiracy theories tied to the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert and John Kennedy also help to prove his theory of a planned and well executed assassination of Lennon by the U.S. government because of Lennon’s political views and his power to gather masses to protest various political policies. The author also walks the reader through the premeditated killing on the night of December 8, 1980 and the days and months that followed as the killer was lead through the American judicial system. Bresler then backs it all up with documentation that he gathered in his 8 years of researching this book.

The more I read this book, the more I realized there was no conspiracy to kill John Lennon and that the assassin was a lone gunman who was psychotic. It seemed with every passing chapter, the theories became more and more far fetched with even the author seeming to become paranoid because the U.S. judicial system allowed Lennon’s killer to have visits and phone calls within days of the shooting, apparently bringing to a light that just about anyone (read ‘controller’) could have contacted Lennon’s murderer to continue to manipulate what he said to the authorities.

I will say, thought, that this book does have an upside in that it does quote many legal documents and court transcriptions that I had not yet read and that just about anyone interested in the case against the murderer would find very interesting. And for that reason…

I rate this book, 2 out of 4 Beetles!