The cursed book of Salinger - that inspired several murders.

"The guardian among the rye"

The novel "The catcher in the rye", by the American writer JD Salinger, also known in our country as "The hidden hunter" or "The guardian among the rye", was published for the first time in 1951 and immediately became very popular. because of his dark sense of humor, his provocative language and for portraying adolescent sexuality and anxiety without hesitation. The book narrates basically several days of the life of Holden Caufield, an awake teenager of 15 years who on the eve of Christmas is expelled from his high school and who is going to New York to see his younger sister Phoebe, passing by the intertanto by numerous chascarros, like a drunkenness that grabs in a bar or an encounter not consummate with a prostitute.

The book, told in the first person by its protagonist and marked by numerous moments of irony and humor, begins with the following paragraph: "If you really want what I'm going to tell you, the first thing you want to know is where I was born, how it was all that roll of my childhood, which my parents did before they had me, and other David Copperfield nonsense, but I do not feel like telling her about that. First because it is a can and, second, because my parents would be attacked if I started talking about their private life. For those things are very special, especially my father. They are good people, I do not say no, but fussy people do not win. Also, do not think I'm going to tell you my autobiography with hairs and signs. I'm just going to tell you about a crazy thing that happened to me during the past Christmases, before I was so weak that they had to send me here to recover a little ... "

In another part of the novel, Holden Caufield himself, a teenager obsessed with wearing a hunter's hat with big earmuffs and the ducks that used to live in a lake in Central Park, when he arrives in New York and gets into a taxi has a fun conversation with a taxi driver, who asks him precisely about the fate of those birds:
"... But, anyway, as I was saying, the taxi driver started to give me a little conversation shortly after getting into the taxi. His name was Howitz and he was much nicer than the last one. That's why it occurred to me that maybe he knew about the ducks.
"Look, Howitz," I said. Do you spend a lot by the lake in Central Park?
-What?
-The lake, you know. That small lake near Central South Park. Where are the ducks. Already knows.
-Yes. What's up with that lake?

• Do you remember those ducks that are always swimming there? Especially in the spring. Do you happen to know where you are going in the winter?
  -Where are you going, who?
  -The Ducks. Do you know by chance? Does someone come to take them somewhere in a truck, or do they go on their own to the south, or what do they do?
  That Howitz turned his head round to look at me. He had very little patience, but he was not a bad person.
  -How do you want me to know? -he told me- how do you want me to know such a stupidity?
  -Well, do not get upset about that, - I said.
• Who gets angry? Nobody gets angry ... "
  Salinger
  And, in the final part of the novel, when Holden finally finds his little sister Phoebe, and tells him that he has been expelled from his high school, and she tells him "Dad is going to kill you. He is going to kill you, "Holden confesses the following:" Do you know what I would like to be? Do you know what I would like to be if I could choose? ... Many times I imagine that there are a lot of children playing in a field of rye. Thousands of children And they're alone, I mean there's nobody older watching them. Just me. I am on the edge of a precipice and my job is to prevent children from falling into it. As soon as they start running without looking where they are going, I leave where I am and I take them. That is what I would like to do all the time. Watch them. I would be the guardian between the rye. It will seem silly but it is the only thing I really want to do. I know it's crazy".

A classic book, but controversial

With the passage of time "The catcher in the rye", thanks to its agile and funny prose and its ability to be placed on the head of a young man who would become an icon of adolescent rebellion, it became a true classic of the American literature, selling more than 60 million copies so far and becoming a mandatory reading in several American schools and institutes. However, simultaneously it would become a very controversial book, especially because of its relationship with famous assassinations, assassinations and attempted murders.
The best-known of these cases occurred on December 8, 1980, when Mark David Chapman, an unbalanced 25-year-old fan, murdered the legendary John Lennon in the entrance to the Dakota building in New York.

and lead voice of The Beatles. What few knew was that Chapman carried that day a copy of "The catcher in the rye", where he had written on one of his pages the following: "This is my statement", later signing as "The guardian among the rye." inspired Mark David Chapman, played by actor Jared Leto in the movie "Chapter 27", with the book "The catcher in the rye" in one of his hands. The unusual thing is that after throwing several shots at Lennon, Chapman, instead of fleeing from the crime scene, sat on the sidewalk, took out his copy of "The guardian in the rye" and began quietly reading the novel awaiting that the police arrived to arrest him. In his statement to the police three hours later, Chapman said: "I'm sure most of me is Holden Caulfield, the main character in the book. The rest of me must be the Devil. "Salinger's cursed book that inspired several murders Other subjects and murderers that have been related to reading this book were John Hinckley Jr., who tried to kill President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and who declared that "he was obsessed with the book"; Sirhan B. Sirhan, who was arrested for the murder of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, brother of John Kennedy; and Robert John Bardo, who when he shot and murdered actress Rebecca Schaeffer in 1989 carried a copy of this novel, which he threw on the roof of a building while fleeing the police. But what does this mean? Does anyone who reads "The catcher in the rye" run the risk of becoming a potential killer? The answer is rather negative. The explanation of this supposed and nefarious influence of that endearing book on the minds of certain people, according to several scholars of conspiracy theories, would be related to the dark program MK Ultra (Mind Kontrol Ultra), which the CIA implemented since the decade 60 'to perform certain mental control activities and operations, using electrical signals and drugs to change the functioning of the brain, in order to turn ordinary citizens into potential killers, that is, transform them into the "perfect weapon". The evidence published by numerous publications and websites indicates "that the MK ULTRA Project involved the use of many methodologies to manipulate individual mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs and other chemical substances, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation and sexual abuse, as well as various forms of torture. " Several It is claimed that certain passages from "The Catcher in the Rye" activated specific points in the brain of people who were previously subjected to the terrible experiments and hypnosis sessions that the CIA carried out until the 1970s, when Richard Helms, then director of the feared security agency, ordered the destruction of all documents and evidence about the MK Ultra. Only CIA agents, such as Mike Copeland, came to denounce these experiments and other revealing data, such as Mark Chapman, the murderer of John Lennon, was a guest of a CIA camp in Beirut when he was 19, where he was submitted to a therapy that combined torazina and hypnosis.