Mark Chapman – better inside than out

Mark Chapman, John Lennon’s killer, is up again for parole next week, as he has been every two years for the past decade after he had served 20 years of his sentence. He’s been turned down every time.

Born 15 May 1955 7.30pm Fort Worth, Texas to a military and, he claims, abusive father, he had imaginary friends in childhood, took drugs, became a born-again Presbyterian, was treated for clinical depression and was reading Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, a novel about teenage angst and alienation, as he sat on a step after he shot Lennon waiting to be arrested. He was deemed psychotic but refused an insanity defence and plead guilty.

He has a startling chart. With a heavily aspected Pluto in Leo in the opinionated 9^th – on the focal point of a bleak T square to Saturn in Scorpio opposition a Taurus Sun; and also on the focal point a mini-Grand Trine of Neptune trine Mars in the 8^th sextile Pluto. Very controlling and obsessive. Plus Mars in the 8^th has a volcano of buried anger. He also has Venus in Aries in his performing 5^th opposition Neptune square Jupiter Uranus in Cancer – adventurous, fanatical, head-in-the-clouds, emotionally erratic.

His Capricorn Moon is unaspected which Bil Tierney describes as: ‘the most personally traumatic’ of any unaspected planet, ‘markedly unstabilizing or uncommonly vulnerable.‘

Plus a Yod of Venus sextile Mars inconjunct Saturn in Scorpio which has heavy karmic overtones and is tricky to handle well.

By 2019 tr Pluto will have moved a quarter cycle since he shot Lennon on 8 December 1980. Then it was approaching the square to his Uranus Jupiter. At the moment he has his Solar Arc Pluto square his Uranus Jupiter and tr Pluto will be in opposition by 2020/21.  He does have tr Pluto trine his Sun now which is generally positive; with tr Uranus heading to trine his midheaven and oppose his Solar Arc midheaven from mid September this year.

That all looks like a fair amount of change though his life outside if he ever gets there will be a considerable challenge because of irate fans and intrusive media, never mind having become institutionalized after 4 decades inside. Tr Saturn will return to conjunct his Moon in the autumn; and by 2020 he has his Solar Arc Pluto conjunct his Neptune which will bring considerable confusion.