A three-year investigation has thrown into doubt the official story of The Beatles frontman John Lennon’s murder by gunman Mark Chapman.

British author and TV producer David Whelan examined troves of documents and spoke to several key witnesses surrounding Lennon’s fatal shooting on December 8, 1980, and found troubling inconsistencies that raise questions about how the killing actually took place.

The official account of Lennon’s assassination was that disturbed loner Mark David Chapman waited for Lennon outside the Dakota Building in Manhattan as he and his wife Yoko Ono returned to his apartment before shooting Lennon five times in the back.

But Whelan claims that the evidence he’s reviewed shows Lennon was shot in the chest, not the back.

“I think Mark Chapman was potentially shooting a gun or thinking he was shooting a gun possibly blanks,” Whelan said.

“He thinks he’s done something he couldn’t have possibly done — therefore, the only conclusion I can come to is there might have been a second shooter or it was highly likely there was a second shooter in the vestibule area on the stairs, shooting John in a close group pattern in his upper left chest area.”

“When I spoke to the doctors and nurses at the time who treated John – and they saw his wounds many times – they all agree that whoever shot John was very close to him and standing in front one or two feet away.”

“And they managed to achieve a very professional grouping around John’s left chest area above his heart. It’s almost impossible for Mark Chapman to do that from where he was and it was dark. He was 20 to 25 feet away from John.”

“It’s a disturbing, troubling assessment, I’m well aware of that, but I can see no other explanation for John’s wounds,” he added.

Even more disturbing is that Chapman may have been “groomed” by the CIA to carry out the killing, Whelan claimed, citing an unusual series of events preceding his trial.

“Chapman’s lawyers were aiming for a trial and an insanity plea, but out of the blue, Chapman decided he wanted to forgo a trial and plead guilty, claiming that ‘a little voice inside his head’ told him to do this,” said Whelan.

From The Daily Mail:

Crucially, says Whelan, that volte-face only came after Chapman was visited in his cell by various psychiatrists employed by his defence lawyers.

Three of those doctors had been involved in hypnosis, and one of them, Dr Milton Kline, worked with the CIA on its notorious ‘MK Ultra’ mind control programme, which the Hollywood movie the Manchurian Candidate was loosely based on.

In 1979, Kline boasted in a TV documentary that a man could be programmed to murder via hypnosis, via the MK Ultra programme.

Why Kline, along with two other experts in hypnosis, was asked by the lawyers to meet Chapman, is not clear, though it is not impossible that the defence was already considering putting forward the notion that their client was hypnotised into carrying out his crime.

If true, this would mark yet another instance of U.S. intelligence involvement in the assassination of a peace-loving cultural icon who was critical of the military-industrial complex.