NATALIE Webster was one decade old when she ended up being good friends with “Mark the security guard”.
She understood Mark to be safety, “paranoid”, and an art enthusiast – before the globe came to understand him as John Lennon’s killer.
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Natalie, 53, had an uncommon childhood years and, in 1980, was living in Hawaii with her more youthful sibling Lana and their mum Donna-Gail – a recently transformed Scientologist.
Together, they frequently went to a structure in Waikiki, O’ahu, where the Church of Scientology had a base.
Sisters Natalie and Lana, after that aged 10 and 7 specifically, would practically be cost-free to wander the roads while their mum, after that 27, ended up being familiarized with the faith.
It was then that Natalie and Lana came one-on-one with Mark.
Read a lot more on Mark Chapman
Natalie remembered: “My sister and I, we would draw pictures. We would colour pictures and try to sell them to make money to buy candy.
“We obtained tossed out of the Scientology structure for doing that. They stated, ‘You can not do that in right here. You can not run a company in a Scientology organisation.’
“So we took our business to the streets. We went across the street and we would talk to a security guard named Mark, and he would buy the drawings from us for 25 cents.”
Mark rapidly ended up being the women’ “best customer”, buying most of their illustrations and motivating them to develop a lot more.
He was “a bit odd”, Natalie bears in mind reasoning, however all grownups were “kind of odd” to her at age 10.
She stated: “He was really into the art, and encouraging about the art.
“That attracted attention to me also since not just did he acquire a few of our illustrations that we did, he urged it.”
It appeared to Natalie that he was at least familiar with Scientology and “had not been open” to the religion.
Natalie said: “He appeared to be type of over the top. He was mentioning, ‘don’t decrease the road’, like it threatened outdoors and not a refuge to be.
“But I can remember thinking ‘he’s worked up about it’. Now, I can put words to it: agitated, paranoid, looking around. ‘Don’t go down there’, ‘don’t go down there.'”
Mark’s “power” and the means he interacted “scared” Natalie, however she stated, giggling as she informed The Sun, that she wished to preserve their partnership “because he was my best customer”.
On a number of celebrations, while talking with Mark, Natalie urged him to take a “personality test” – as she had actually heard her mom do to others sometimes before.
The “personality test” was a checklist of 200 inquiries that the Church of Scientology provides as component of its employment procedure, generally in public setups such as on the road, at neighborhood fairs, and at circus.
Following among Natalie’s spit up lines, Mark marched over to the Scientology structure and ruptured with its doors, proclaiming: “This is a cult.”
Natalie stated: “I inadvertently, I guess, ‘body-routed’ Mark David Chapman into Scientology.
“He believed it was a cult and he didn’t remain.”
I inadvertently, I guess, ‘body-routed’ Mark David Chapman into Scientology
She later wondered if his fury at the Scientology members stemmed from knowing that they regularly allowed two young girls to wander the streets outside their building alone at nighttime.
Just a few months after storming the building, Mark resigned from his job as a security guard and was on his way to New York City.
He murdered John Lennon on December 8 as the musician walked into his apartment on the Upper West Side, firing five shots at him from metres away and striking him four times from the back.
Lennon was rushed to hospital and pronounced dead upon arrival.
Mark pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and received a sentence of 20 years’ to life in jail.
He continues to serve his sentence today at the Green Haven Correctional Facility north of New York City, having repeatedly been denied parole.
It emerged following Lennon’s death that Mark, who grew up in Georgia, developed an obsession with the Beatles – Lennon in particular – when he was a teenager.
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He moved to Hawaii in 1977, where he attempted suicide and was taken to hospital, and where he later picked up work in maintenance.
In 1979, he married and became a security guard – becoming increasingly unstable and homicidal all the while.
Mark is said to have quit his job in October 1980, purchased a gun, and flown to New York City with the intention of killing John Lennon, before changing his mind and returning to Hawaii in November.
He flew back to New York on December 6 and, two days later, waited outside Lennon’s residence at The Dakota.
The ex-security guard reportedly remained at the crime scene reading The Catcher In The Rye until he was arrested.
He would have been 25 years old when he murdered John Lennon, and when he knew Natalie and Lana.
Mark’s arrest led to Natalie’s family being “temporarily banned” from Scientology, because they had “brought the FBI” to the organisation.
… we were in trouble for communicating with [Mark Chapman], that he went into the organisation
Natalie said the FBI began looking into whether Mark may have had ties to Scientology as they investigated his motive for killing Lennon.
She recalled: “I feel in one’s bones that we were in difficulty for interacting with him, that he entered into the organisation.
“It was being insinuated that that was somehow my fault, and it probably was, to a degree.”
For years, Natalie really felt a thrill of sense of guilt clean over her whenever she listened to songs by The Beatles play.
She clarified: “I didn’t do anything wrong. We had nothing to do with it. But we were made to feel like we did something so wrong by Scientology.
“It was not around John Lennon being killed and passing away. That was not Scientology’s trouble. They were disturbed that the FBI came to the door.”
Natalie escaped Scientology 14 years ago – along with her mum, her sister, and her children – and now lives in Minnesota.
After 35 years in the “cult”, she works in real estate and shares videos to her YouTube channel every day, “revealing the misuses within Scientology”.
What is Scientology?
SCIENTOLOGY is a spiritual activity that was started in the very early 1950s by American writer L. Ron Hubbard.
It advertises the concept that people’ analytic mind is shadowed by life’s injuries which avoids them from experiencing fact.
Members of Scientology get involved in “auditing” – entailing a collection of counselling sessions – to experience again stressful experiences.
The goal of bookkeeping is to neutralise people’ experiences and reassert the primacy of the analytic mind over the responsive mind.
Ultimately, the objective is for fans to attain a “clear” spiritual state.
Scientology has its very own collection of bibles, consisting of Hubbard’s works, and provides different training courses and programs for both individual advancement and spiritual development.
Some of the faith’s most well-understood fans supposedly consist of Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Elisabeth Moss, and Riley Keough.
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https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/27247712/met-john-lennons-killer-mark-chapman/
