I have been looking for Janis Joplin for weeks now, and found her. She became Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!, an alternative news program funded largely by the Ford Foundation. Want proof?
The immediate left above (and right above that) are of Goodman. She put this photo out in a documentary on peer pressure for young girls. So we have no doubts as to that photo, as Goodman herself asserts it is her as a young woman. (Oddly, any information about the person in the photo is cropped out of all versions seen on the Internet.) On the right is Janis Joplin, an undated photo that had to be 1970 or before, since she supposedly died that year. Here is what we get when we compare the two:

Matches do not get better than that, and I excitedly emailed MH this morning to announce that I had located the elusive Joplin. He responded “Weird. I tried that one and didn’t match for me. Maybe I matched the wrong twin?” We have been running into twins now and then. MH has a long list of possibilities. More about that in the future.
In order to be thorough, I grabbed four more photos of Goodman against those I already had of Joplin, but encountered difficulties. Some matched beautifully, others not.
To resolve the matter. I decided to match the Joplin photos against each other, starting with the one on the left here, which Wikipedia tells us is Joplin’s high school graduation photo from 1960. I matched it against the one of Joplin seen above, the same one that matched up so well with Goodman. They did not align. Janis Joplin did not match up with Janis Joplin.

We have encountered this before. When people do not align with their own photos, we recheck our measurements, and try again, and then try against other photos. With enough results right in front of us, we know we are dealing with twins. MH was dead-on. Janis Joplin is twins.
One of them transformed into Amy Goodman. The other I do not know, although MH has suggested I try Janet Reno. I did that once and it did not work, but I’ll try again with Twin #2. Today I am all Joplined out. But to finish out this round, below are Amy Goodman and Janis Joplin, Twin #1, side by side.
Hello Janis! I knew you were still alive! I just knew it!

Of course, this match-up presents problems. Goodman is said be have been born in 1957, Joplin 1943. Goodman then is 59, Joplin 73. I have wrestled with this. Since facial match ups like this are extremely rare, I took a closer look at Goodman. She has always struck me as a dour kind of person, humorless and matter-of-fact. In the photo above, which I blew up on my screen, it is easy to see she is heavily pancaked with makeup. Her lower jaw is protruding, as tends to happen to us as we enter old age. Her hair has been gray for years now.

On the other hand, Joplin, would be close to 27 in the above photo, labeled “circa 1970.” She could as easily be early-to-mid twenties if not late teens. So if we split the difference between them, suppose we guess that Goodman is not 59, not 73, but rather 65. Since they lied to us about her death and having a twin sister, I don’t imagine that we can rely on age or published date of birth for either.
However, age is a problem. All the other evidence is overwhelming, however, so I am settled on the idea that Goodman is older than she claims, and Joplin younger.
To close out here, below are two sets of photos, the first of “Joplin Twin #1,” the one who became Amy Goodman.
And these are photos of Joplin Twin #2, the one whose whereabouts we do not know.
Notice with Twin #2 that we actually see her teeth in three photos, where #1 is taciturn in all five, as Goodman tends to be. Twin #2 is probably still alive, and we will continue to look for her. I’ll re-check Janet Reno, and even Sally Jessy Raphael, with whom we thought we had a match weeks ago.
All of that stuff about Janis being an alcoholic and drug addict back before her death, maybe one of them was that, but I tend to doubt it. They were in training, learning to conceal their true identities in public and to be actors, to be people they were not and be convincing about it. All of the photos that I have seen of them are of a pretty young girls with clear eyes and innocent faces. I suspected long before today that Joplin had clean habits back then, as now. But maybe not. Who knows? I don’t imagine Intelligence has much use for drunks and addicts, who tend to be undependable.
Which one was the singer? That I suspect to be twin #2, who exudes more emotive qualities than #1 in the photographs. They could have, like Paul and Mike McCartney, switched off. I’ll have another look. Not today. Joplined out, as I said.
(Which one had sex with Kris Kristofferson on first meeting? Neither. That was just planted rumor stuff, common as gerbils in Hollywood, press agents at work.)


The second photo has been stretched out and compressed, the object to give her a gaunt and wasted look about the mouth. The eyes are sunken like a corpse. That is easily shown to be fake by putting it next to the real living Karen Carpenter to the left here. Pupil distance is the same on both sides of that photo. They obviously monkeyed with her image, stretching it out like a plastic sheet.
This first one is odd, his original “mug shot.” Keep in mind, there are important pieces of information that prison officials want from a mug shot – height, scars, facial features, date of arrest, prisoner number. For that reason, mug shots are taken with bright lights in front of a camera that slides up and down so as to shoot straight at the face. When the photo is taken, the top of the skull is precisely even with the correct height line. Notice on this mug shot there is no height scale, and that Chapman’s face and neck are shadowed. That is because this is not a mug shot (even as someone is holding up a NYPD prisoner number in the lower left, not seen here). This is a portrait shot of Chapman, not taken in jail. We were easy to fool in 1981, so it worked.
Next we have what I call “Chapman 72,” a man six feet tall. I have scrolled the number 72 on each side of his forehead for reasons that will be clear later. Make no mistake, this man and the young man up above line up nicely, and are very close in appearance. In fact, I would say they match up perfectly, even as the one on the right is in his middle years, while the one above is in his twenties.
Next we have “Chapman 70.” He is two inches shorter than the one above. You might think it trivial that there is a two-inch difference in height between these two, and indeed that could be the case. Even though prisons try to do their best work, they cannot always be perfect, so it could be that camera angles were not working properly, and that these are the same man. But I doubt it. This man also has a narrower face. But I will do side-by-side comparisons down below.
Finally, we have old Chapman. Again, trust me on this, as this man, Mark David Chapman 72, is the same man as seen above with the numbers “72” on his forehead, and the same man as the young man showing at the beginning of this piece.
I was certain that all photos with “72” were the same man, as you can see at the left … we get perfect alignment of features.
And again, the young man and the old man, perfect alignment.
Now it begins to get a little murkier. This is Chapman 72 and Chapman 70. If it were a mere matter of camera angles, they would match up after the pupil distance is adjusted. And at first glance, they do line up. But look closer … 72 has a much lower ear, and the eye is lower. However, the mouth and nose align perfectly. I would guess here that we are dealing with identical twins, neither of whom is in jail.
Here I have done my best to align the features of Chapman 70 and young Chapman, but they are off just slightly, as with 72 and 70 immediately above. While I can get nose and eyes (mostly), the mouths are off, and the chins and ears do not match up.