Acts of murder by fans seem to happen about once a decade. Howard Cosell broke the news to America about the most infamous example, on December 8, 1980, during a TV broadcast of an NFL game on "ABC Monday Night Football."
"An unspeakable tragedy confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City," Cosell intoned. "John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City, the most famous perhaps of all of the Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital."
He paused, and then added in his trademark punchy style, "Dead. On. Arrival."
Although he was among the world's most famous rock stars, Lennon loved to walk around New York. He and his wife, Yoko Ono, had moved in the early 1970s from lower Manhattan to the Dakota, a gabled citadel overlooking Central Park at 72nd Street. They lived on the top floor, the seventh, and bought several additional apartments at the Dakota. The building, dating to the 1890s, has always been popular with artists, actors and musicians. Its residents have included Roberta Flack, Leonard Bernstein, Rudolf Nureyev, and Judy Garland.
In 1980, "paparazzi" was still an Italian word. America's salivation over celebrity had not yet reached its peak. Even then, star-peepers often stood outside the Dakota to watch Lennon come and go. He didn't mind, and he said so in a BBC Radio interview days before he died. "People come and ask for autographs, or say 'Hi,'" Lennon said, "but they don't bug you."
George Harrison, Lennon's fellow Beatle, rued the "hounding" that the Fab Four faced. Lennon didn't. He could have come and gone by car from the secure confines of the Dakota courtyard, but he chose instead to step out in public, whether the public was humane or inhumane.
Lennon, 40 years old, had a busy day that December 8. Early that afternoon, he posed for photographer Annie Leibovitz, shooting for Rolling Stone. The iconic image from the shoot showed a naked Lennon curled over the clothed body of the reclining Ono, whose mop of hair topped the portrait like a Medusa crown. Leibovitz said that when she showed a Polaroid version of the photo to Lennon, he told her, "You've captured our relationship exactly."
Lennon then spent 90 minutes in an RKO Radio interview. At 5 PM, he and Ono left the building. As they walked to a limousine, they paused for a fan holding a copy of the couple's "Double Fantasy" LP. Lennon obligingly signed the record as another admirer photographed the encounter. Lennon asked, "Is that all you want?" The fan, Mark Chapman, nodded and smiled nervously.
The couple went 30 blocks downtown to the Record Plant Studio, on West 44th Street, where they worked on the mix for Ono's "Walking on Thin Ice," a fuzzed-up techno-pop song. They spent longer than expected there, so they postponed dinner to go home and tuck in their son, Sean, then 5 years old. They planned to kiss the kid goodnight and then pop in for a late bite at the Stage Deli, down Seventh Avenue. It was 10:49 p.m. when the limo driver pulled up at the Dakota's arched entrance on 72nd Street.
Chapman was waiting for him. A security guard from Honolulu, he was six feet tall and chunky, with dark hair and a weak chin. He was wearing shaded eyeglasses, a white shirt, a gray scarf, and a dark overcoat.
At 25, Chapman had gone through the requisite fads of his generation. An Air Force brat, he had dabbled in drugs, and then declared himself born again. He had been treated for depression after attempting to kill himself by inhaling carbon monoxide fumes. At about that time, he read "The Catcher in the Rye," and felt a bond to author J.D. Salinger's angst-ridden teen protagonist, Holden Caulfield.
He was self-aware enough to understand that he had mental problems. He told loved ones that he was obsessed with John Lennon and felt driven to kill him. Yet his family, including a woman he married in 1979, failed to intervene when he journeyed to New York in the fall of 1980 to do just that.
Chapman must have been gleeful when the limo returned. His plan was coming to fruition. He stood to the left as the rock star strode toward the Dakota. Chapman extracted a handgun from his pocket—a cheap .38—and tugged the trigger, rapid-firing five deadly hollow-point bullets. Four of them hit their target. Lennon was rushed to the hospital in a police car, but he didn't have a chance.
Chapman stood waiting with his wrists extended, eager to be arrested. Why didn't he attempt to flee? He was motivated by the expectation that he would live in the shiny reflection of Lennon's celebrity. Attention was the point. He wanted to run toward the klieg lights, not away from them.
He handed police a copy of "The Catcher in the Rye," which he had autographed as Holden Caulfield. He wrote in the book, "This is my statement."
Like Caulfield, Chapman fumed over "phonies," and he apparently believed that Lennon qualified because he lived in luxury while singing lines such as, "Imagine no possessions."
His mind was prodded by nine psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, who agreed that he was delusional but were split on whether he was psychotic. The suspect made it a moot point when he pleaded guilty—a direct order from God, he said. Capital punishment was not an option in New York, so he faced life in prison. At sentencing, the killer rose and read aloud the famous passage from "Catcher" in which Caulfield explains to his sister that he dreamed of protecting kids as they romped through a big field of grain.
The passage reads in part, "What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all."
Chapman was sent to prison. Thirty years later, in 2011, he was still there, paunchy and bald at age 55, at Attica in western New York. He has been denied parole six times, every other year since 2000, when he became eligible to apply. Yoko Ono has opposed his release, saying she would fear for her safety and that of John's sons. At Chapman's most recent hearing, in September 2010, the board said his release "remains inappropriate at this time and incompatible with the welfare of the community."
Chapman admitted in 2000 that he saw Lennon as a "cardboard cutout."
"I was very young and stupid," he said. "And now I've come to grips with the fact that John Lennon was a person. This has nothing to do with being a Beatle or a celebrity or famous."
Some 1,500 miles away from Chapman, another killer lives at Mountain View prison in Gatesville, Texas. Yolanda Saldivar killed Selena, a beloved Mexican-American music star who was on the verge of moving into mainstream pop. It was a murder so strange that even a dopey Spanish-TV soap couldn't create the storyline.
Yolanda Saldivar was the president of Selena's fan club. Even after she killed Selena, Saldivar called her "my best friend." Selena gave Saldivar a lucrative career in her musical empire—until Saldivar was caught stealing, prompting a dramatic showdown in 1995.
Selena Quintanilla was born into a musical family in 1971 in Lake Jackson, Texas, on the Gulf Coast 50 miles south of Houston. While still an adolescent, she began fronting a family band, Selena Y Los Dinos, which translates to "Selena and the Guys." In 1984, Abraham Quintanilla moved his family 175 miles down the coast to Corpus Christi to give his daughter more opportunities. There she became a star of Tejano (Spanish for "Texan") music, a mélange that some compare to Louisiana's Cajun music. Tejano often includes an accordion and horns, and one of its signature rhythms is "polka ranchero," a cowboy polka.
Selena made her first serious Tejano record at age 13, and she was declared the queen of Tejano before she was old enough to drive. She was created for the role. Slim and raven-haired, Selena spoke both English and Spanish without accent. With her single stage name, people compared her to Madonna. But she was kid-friendly, speaking out against drugs and promoting education and chastity.
For 11 straight years beginning in 1986, when she still just 15, Selena won best female vocalist at the Tejano Music Awards. In 1989, she was the first artist signed by the EMI Latin label. She had her first No. 1 single in 1991 with "Buenos Amigos." In '92, "Entre a Mi Mundo (Enter My World)" was her first gold record. In '93, she won a Grammy for "Selena Live," and in 1994 she hit No. 1 again.
Selena had big plans for 1995. EMI Latin had loaned her to a sister label for her first English-language pop record. She was on the verge of becoming a bilingual star in both North and South America. On February 26 that year, she played to her biggest audience ever, more than 60,000 at the Astrodome for the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. After more than a decade of carrying the standard for a niche musical style, Selena was finally making arena-rock money. She was on top of the Tex-Mex world and headed toward the American mainstream pop music market with a bullet.
Selena had a problem, and her name was Yolanda Saldivar.
Saldivar was born in 1960 in San Antonio, one of eight kids of Mexican immigrant parents. (Her father was a waiter.) Yolanda, the family's star scholar, finished high school in 1979 and went on to college to study nursing.
Short, stout and plain, she didn't have much of a social life, and when one of her brothers had marital and legal problems, she stepped in to help raise his three children. This commitment slowed her studies, but she persevered and finally graduated in 1990. She went to work as a nurse.
Saldivar's life turned on April 7, 1991, when a friend took her to a Selena concert at Market Square in San Antonio. She was a fan of American country music, not Tejano, but Saldivar was awestruck by the young singer. She said, "She lit up the stage." Saldivar became obsessed, and she called Abraham Quintanilla to pitch herself as president of the Selena Fan Club.
Eight months after the San Antonio concert, Selena met her No. 1 fan for the first time. Over the next three years, more than 8,000 people paid $22 each to join Selena's club. Saldivar quit her nursing job to focus on a new career with Selena. She became an adjunct member of the Quintanilla family, serving as a bridesmaid at the wedding of Selena's sister, Suzette. Selena, born on Easter Sunday, was a collector of jewelry and knickknacks with egg themes. Saldivar showered her with egg-shaped gifts, and Selena showed her gratitude by hiring Saldivar in 1993 to manage her new clothing line, Selena Etc.
As an indication of the Quintanilla family's trust or naiveté, Saldivar was given unbridled access to the singer's money, including the ability to write checks without a second signature. She controlled accounts for the fan club, which took in more than $175,000 in membership fees alone from 1992 to 1995, and she was allowed to transfer and withdraw funds from Selena's business accounts.
In March 1995, just after Selena's breakthrough concert in Houston, Abraham Quintanilla noticed suspicious activity in Selena's accounts as he began to assemble records for the April tax deadline. He suspected embezzlement by Saldivar, who had written dozens of checks to herself and transferred funds from Selena's accounts to her personal accounts.
Quintanilla phoned Saldivar in San Antonio and asked her to bring all business records for 1994 income and expenditures to Corpus Christi. Saldivar promised to provide documents, but made a Plan B when she began carrying a handgun that she bought at a shop in San Antonio. Following weeks of delays and excuses, she finally turned over the records on March 30 to Selena and her husband, Chris Perez, at a Days Inn motel in Corpus Christi. The documents proved to be irrelevant, and Selena called Saldivar late that night and fired her. The drama was just beginning.
The next morning, Saldivar begged Selena to return to the Days Inn. She said that she was bleeding from a rape suffered during a recent business trip to Mexico. Selena drove to the motel—alone this time—and took Saldivar to a hospital, where doctors found no indication of a sexual assault. The women returned to the motel and stepped into Room 158 for a final argument, which ended at 11:48 AM when Saldivar drew her new .38 pistol and fired a shot that hit Selena in the back. She ran to the office and collapsed, mortally wounded.
Saldivar left the room and got in her red pickup truck in the motel lot. When police arrived, she put the pistol to her temple and stayed in that position for nearly 10 hours. In the meantime, journalists and Selena's fans streamed toward the Days Inn as news of the murder of the Tejano queen made its way around the Spanish-speaking world. The media and fans set up camp, amid a chilly drizzle, in a gas station across the street from the motel. Selena's songs blared from car stereos, and overwrought teenagers stood before television cameras and scribbling scribes, swearing their devotion to the murdered star.
Finally, well after dark, Saldivar lowered her gun and surrendered.
Fifty thousand fans passed Selena's casket at the convention center in downtown Corpus Christi. Six months later, Saldivar was convicted of murder at a trial relocated to Houston. The killer tried to add intrigue to the proceedings by claiming she had secrets about Selena's love life, but prosecutors prevailed by presenting an unassailable case that the slaying was purely about money.
Saldivar escaped a death sentence and was sent away for a minimum of 30 years. She won't become eligible to apply for parole until 2025, and Selena's siblings and fans have promised to oppose her freedom even then.
Selena has sold more than 20 million records to date. Since her death, Tejano music has lost a measure of popularity. The queen is dead, after all.
If there's a lesson to be learned from the slayings of Lennon and Selena, it might go something like this: Be careful of those closest to you, whether in a given moment, in Lennon's case, or over time, in Selena's.
But that might not have done much good in the case of the troubled galoot who targeted "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott, a heavy-metal guitar hero.
On December 8, 2005, Nathan M. Gale lurked in a nightclub parking lot in Columbus, Ohio. He stood out, at 6-foot-5 and a few Happy Meals short of 300 pounds. Gale, 25, had strawberry-blond hair shorn tight. He wore thick, unfashionable eyeglasses that magnified his hazel irises. He had an open, oval face, and his look was a mix of dour and dumbfounded. Despite his size, he seemed approachable—the sort of fellow that a stranger might ask for directions.
Yet he was—yes—a loner.
Gale arrived by himself that Wednesday evening at the Alrosa Villa, parking his Pontiac Grand Am outside the club on Sinclair Road, off Interstate 71 on the North Side of Columbus. The Alrosa, with room for 750 customers, had been hosting rock 'n' roll shows since 1975, and it was a go-to place in Columbus for heavy metal. Central Ohio metalheads began to trickle in after work for that night's show, and the crowd built steadily as a procession of four local bands played sets, starting at about 7 PM. Nate Gale wasn't there to see the opening acts. He stayed outside that chilly night, sitting in his car listening to cranked-up CDs. For one thing, he didn't want to pay the cover charge—eight bucks. For another, he wanted to watch the big brown tour bus, with a dinky white trailer in tow, parked near the club.
The bus belonged to the headliners that night, Damageplan. Its guitarist, "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott, was a metal legend. The son of a country songwriter, he was a guitar prodigy growing up in Dallas area. He took the guitar licks and tricks of his idol, Ace Frehley of Kiss, to a new level. Dimebag was no Johnny One-Note. He was an inventive stylist, using harmonics, feedback, and sustained and bent notes to create a one-man wall of squealing sound. As a skinny 16-year-old, he began playing lead guitar for Pantera (Spanish for "panther"), a Dallas glam-metal hair band that featured his older brother, Vinnie Paul Abbott, on percussion. Then known as "Diamond Darrell," young Abbott played a Dean guitar with a lightning bolt body design. As his fame grew, it became the favored axe for aspiring heavy metalists.
As years passed, Darrell added the obligatory tattoos (including an image of Ace Frehley on his chest) and a singular beard style—a thin, flat panel of chin whiskers often dyed crimson, like a bloody waterfall. He changed his stage name from Diamond to Dimebag, but despite the drug reference, his vices were trifling by rock standards: Crown Royal and craps. Pantera went big-time in 1994 when its third record, "Far Beyond Driven," reached No. 1 on the pop album charts and was nominated for a Grammy. Even Jon Pareles, the discerning rock critic for the New York Times, paid a compliment: "As the haircuts suggest, Pantera merges the fits and starts of hard-core rock with the brute force of heavy metal, and for the moment it is as vociferous as any band around… Pantera plays virtuosic music, testing its players' fingers and memories as it zooms along."
Pantera became a headlining metal band, sharing arena stages with Mötley Crüe, Megadeth, Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, and Metallica. The band sold some 20 million records over its lifespan, surviving two decades before conflicts with its drugged-up frontman, Philip Anselmo, led to a break-up in 2003.
The Abbotts put together Damageplan, but they lost much of their Pantera following and stepped down from arenas to clubs like the Alrosa.
Vinnie and Darrell probably could have retired from touring. They had big houses in Texas, a recording studio, and an interest in The Clubhouse, a Dallas strip club. But they committed to relentless road work to reestablish a fan base for Damageplan and support its first CD, "New Found Power." Darrell Abbott, pushing 40, had been on the road as a rock star for nearly 25 years. He was a pro who gave his time graciously, whether it was a fan who wanted to chat or a video crew seeking a demonstration of his guitar techniques. Videos on YouTube show Dimebag sharing his secrets, and he reveals himself to be funny, sweet-natured and well-spoken. People noticed his kindness. Dimebag was not merely a guitar king; he was his fans' object of genuine affection.
As the holidays approached in 2004, Damageplan was on the bus, as usual. The quartet played in Buffalo, New York, on December 7. The bus arrived in Columbus the next afternoon for a one-nighter at the Alrosa. At about 10 PM, just before Damageplan was to begin its set, Nate Gale hopped a wooden fence surrounding a patio on the north side of the club. He entered the Alrosa through sliding glass doors, and then moved through the crowd toward the stage.
At 10:15, the house music faded and Damageplan hit the stage to a roar from the crowd of 400, many of them packed into a sunken mosh pit. Vinnie Paul Abbott kicked off the opening number, "Breathing New Life," with a drum flourish. Dimebag Darrell tossed his long hair in a heavy metal head bob and started in with deafening power chords.
"You can't take it away!" vocalist Pat Lachman bellowed. "I earned this with sweat and blood! You can't take it away, take what's mine! Breathing new life back into me! Challenging all the powers that be!"
It seemed like part of the act when, moments into the first song, a figure in a Columbus Blue Jackets hoodie stepped out from behind the amplifiers. He moved toward Dimebag Darrell, who was facing the crowd, like a good rock star should. But this was not part of the show. It was Nate Gale, arriving in the spotlight. As he reached Dimebag, he raised a 9mm Berretta to the back of the guitarist's head. The gun bucked four times, and Abbott crumpled into a heap.
The band's bodyguard, a 6-foot-8, 350-pound behemoth known as "Mayhem," rushed Gale. Jeff Thompson, 40, took his job seriously, often vowing to Dimebag Darrell and his mates that he would protect them with his life. Given the chance, that is what Mayhem did. He took three bullets—two in the torso, one in the leg. Only when Mayhem went down did the rest of the band understand what was happening. As most of the crowd pushed toward exits, a few brave crew members and fans climbed onstage to try to subdue the shooter and help Mayhem Thompson and Dimebag Darrell. A fan named Nathan Bray, 23, was shot in the chest and killed.
Gale had emptied his 10-shot Berretta. He snapped out the ammo clip and calmly loaded 10 more rounds. An Alrosa security guard, Erin Halk, 29, charged Gale when he realized the gunman was reloading, but he was a moment too late. He was shot and killed. Gale also fired shots that grazed the arm of another crew member and hit the legs of John Brooks, Damageplan's instrument technician.
The club was nearly empty within minutes. A dozen people had phoned 911, and Gale must have heard the police sirens screaming toward the scene. Gale grabbed Brooks, one of the last victims, and held him in a headlock as he faced out into the nightclub, standing roughly in Darrell's stage position.
Officer James Niggemeyer, 31, a six-year Columbus police veteran, was among the first cops to arrive. He picked his way through the parking lot, grabbed his Remington shotgun—standard procedure for large-group conflicts—and slipped in the rear door, close to the stage.
The gunman held his hostage and watched as officers rushed in through the front. He was unaware that an officer had moved in behind him. Gale's height made him an easy target. He was holding Brooks in a headlock at his armpit, so the officer had an unimpeded target from the shoulders up. Niggemeyer raised his Remington and fired from 20 feet away. The killer fell as Brooks scrambled away.
Niggemeyer later told a reporter, "You never want to shoot another human being. It's horrible."
Rescuers found Chris Paluska, Damageplan's tour manager, with a serious chest wound outside in the parking lot. He apparently was shot first, even before Darrell Abbott, when he tried to stop Gale from entering the stage. In all, five people were killed, including the gunman, and three wounded.
After his rampage, Gale was described by family and friends as a troubled young man, predictably enough. But no one saw the violence coming.
He was raised by a single mother, Mary Clark, who struggled to get by as a waitress. He lived in Marysville, Ohio, a city of 16,000 a half-hour northwest of Columbus. He joined the Marines after vocational high school but washed out halfway through his four-year hitch. His mother said he was discharged as a paranoid schizophrenic, a mental disorder that often brings grandiose delusions.
Gale worked a series of jobs leading nowhere: Landscaper, construction laborer, auto oil-and-lube man. He dabbled in semi-pro football, playing as a lineman in Lima, Ohio, 50 miles from his home. He lived alone in a dingy apartment above a dilapidated storefront. He hung out at a body-art parlor across the street, mulling a USMC tattoo that he never got, or down the block at a pawn shop, where he ogled the guitars and firearms.
Two passions had been a part of his life since his adolescence: Pantera and skateboarding. He was quite a sight, a man of his size surfing the streets on a sliver of wood. He carried his board everywhere, and he had scrapes with the law were for trespassing after riding in parks and parking lots. After the shooting, a friend of Gale called him "Pantera's No. 1 fan," but he was no mere fan. He was fixated. A year before the shooting, Gale showed his friends lyrics to Pantera's songs that he had copied by hand. He claimed the group had stolen the words from him—a grandiose delusion.
"He was off his rocker," a pal told reporters.
Gale proved that on April 5, 2004, eight months before the Columbus massacre. He drove his Grand Am 100 miles to Cincinnati to see Damageplan at Bogart's nightclub. A heavy-metal tradition allows fans to climb onstage so they can dive into the mosh pit. Gale got onstage that night but refused to get off. He tussled with security and sent stage lights and amplifiers tumbling. The club filed a police report, claiming $2,000 in damages. The band, moving on to its next one-nighter, declined to press charges.
Police found a Damageplan recording in the CD player in Gale's Pontiac outside the Alrosa. He left no note. He died without an explanation, so there are no satisfying answers. Someone in the club claimed he heard Gale curse about the breakup of Pantera as he shot Dimebag, but no one could have heard him say anything over the band's ear-splitting volume. The shooting happened on the 24TH anniversary of Lennon's murder, and that detail was played heavily in the first accounts about Columbus. The timing was likely pure coincidence.
His mother wouldn't say much about Nate, and her few comments to the Columbus Dispatch seemed nihilistic.
"Nothing I say about him is going to erase what happened," said Mary Clark. "People don't want to hear it. They'll just think, 'Well, she's the mom, what else is she going to say?'…I'm sorry for what happened, I'm sorry for those people who were killed, but I lost a son, too."
She did reveal one bracing detail: She bought the murder weapon for her son as a Christmas gift. "I'll never, never be able to live that part down," she said.
I asked Susan Raeburn, the California psychologist who has studied and counseled musicians, about the murder. She said the killer's claim to authorship of the Pantera lyrics offers insight into his psychosis. He imagined a personal stake with Dimebag, just like Chapman with Lennon and Saldivar with Selena.
"He was a fan who believed he had a personal relationship with this band or this musician," Raeburn said. "This was more than just a casual thing, in his mind. He had a whole psychotic, delusional system built around this relationship."
Perhaps Gale's heart was broken, like a one-way love affair.
Raeburn told me, "The fan projects his wants and needs onto the rock star. Then they get to know them a little, and maybe this object of the attachment proves not to be the man they thought he was. So the fan says, 'You're not meeting my expectations of what I expect you to be for me.'"
Most people move on to another idol, another target for projection.
Mark Chapman, Yolanda Saldivar and Nate Gale went and got guns.
The object of Gale's obsession is buried in Texas. His tombstone is etched with his Dean guitar and these words: "He came to rock."
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