Not long after music legend John Lennon was murdered, an old friend, state champion volleyball coach Marty Andrews enthusiastically told me he thought he once knew Lennon’s killer, Mark David Chapman.

Andrews told me that in the mid-1970s he had served in some sort of Peace Corps-type program through the YMCA in Lebanon and at one time he had a roommate named Mark David Chapman.

Andrews said he did some research and learned that Chapman indeed had been overseas in some kind of program in Lebanon, and was very insistent it very well could have been the same man who now was charged with murdering Lennon on the night of Dec. 8, 1980.

I learned just recently that Andrews very well could have been correct in his recollection. According to a biography I examined, “In 1975, Chapman applied for an international outreach program through the YMCA. Chapman requested to either be sent to the Soviet Union or Beirut, Lebanon. Chapman was sent to Lebanon, ostensibly because he was unable to speak Russian, but he could not speak Arabic either.
“But 1975 saw the beginnings of the Lebanese Civil War, and Chapman’s time in Lebanon was cut short.”

I was skeptical about Marty’s claim, almost with that really horrible attitude, “That’s nice, Marty, now run along.” My public apology now has to be posthumous because Marty took his own life in 1987 after coaching Concord to two consecutive state championships.

This all came back to me recently when I read the news that a Kalamazoo grandfather was being charged with shooting and killing his step-grandson. The accused was Bruce Embry, 53 years old, and he awaits trial.

In my earliest days as a sports editor at Albion, I remember all too well a Bruce Embry who was a first-class boxer in the Golden Gloves program run by coach and trainer Ralph Locke.

Though Ralph was a first-class and grandfatherly coach to a lot of underprivileged kids in the Albion area, he was one of the worst spellers I ever met. Every time he would call me with Golden Gloves reports he would talk glowingly about “Bruce Amburry” and would spell his name incorrectly for me. Even the Jackson Citizen Patriot spelled his name wrong, and I understood why.

After I finally got wise and started correctly spelling Embry’s name, I was told by a woman I was dating, a teacher then at Albion Junior High, that she worried about Bruce because he had a hair-trigger temper and was very competitive.

I finally met him in the flesh at Albion High School when I was a guest lecturer for a history class. He entered the classroom and referred to teacher John McGonigle as “Butch,” which indeed had been his childhood nickname. McGonigle immediately wrapped arms around him and said, “Bruce. I’m Mr. McGonigle, and when your’e 30 years old I’ll still be Mr. McGonigle to you.”

Not long afterward I noticed his name showing up too often in the Police Beat section of our newspaper. He was a suspect in a lot of petty crimes, but I moved away from Albion in 1984 and never heard from him again — until last week — at least I think so.

I have no hard evidence that the Bruce Embry who boxed in Albion is the same who now faces a murder charge in Kalamazoo, but there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that yes, it is, it’s true. The Bruce Embry I knew indeed should be about 53 years old and newspaper accounts said he had brushes with the law in his earlier years, much like the ones I noticed in the early 1980s. There was even a notice that he had done time in the 1990s after being convicted in Circuit Court in Marshall, the county seat in Calhoun County, of which Albion is a part.

I’ve done a lot of research on this, but what I reported here is all I have. I suppose all I can do is say it would be a weird coincidence, which is the same I thought about what Marty Andrews told me long ago about John Lennon’s killer.