On December 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman shot and killed John Lennon outside of his apartment building in New York City. “When the car pulled up, and Yoko [Ono] got out, something in the back of my mind was going, ‘Do it, do it, do it,’” Chapman told reporter Jim Gaines a few years after the murder. “I stepped off the curb, walked, turned, I took the gun and just boom, boom, boom, boom.” The former Beatles singer was just 40 years old.
Chapman initially refused to give interviews, leaving fans to speculate about what his motive was for the killing. He finally came to terms with what he’d done and agreed to speak with Gaines three years later, telling him, “I always wanted to be a Beatle.” Chapman idolized Lennon in particular, but as a devout Christian, his opinion changed when Lennon said in a 1966 interview that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.” In 2010, Chapman, who’s still in prison, explained to the parole board, “I felt that by killing John Lennon I would become somebody and instead of that I became a murderer, and murderers are not somebodies.”
But Lennon wasn’t the only celebrity Chapman considered shooting; he just happened to be at the top of the list. “If it wasn’t Lennon, it could have been someone else,” Chapman said during that same parole hearing. One of the possible targets he had in mind was David Bowie; in fact, Chapman even had a front-row ticket for Bowie’s December 9 concert—as did Lennon. Another would-be victim Chapman talked about was Tonight Show host Johnny Carson, and despite Chapman deciding not to kill the comedian, his actions still managed to have an effect on him. The night of Lennon’s death, NBC interrupted the live broadcast of Carson’s show with a special news bulletin about the shooting:
While speaking to the parole board, Chapman revealed that he had a very simple criterion when it came to the people who made it onto his list: “They are famous; that was it.” “It wasn’t about them, necessarily,” he continued. “It was just about me; it was all about me at that time.” As for why he eventually settled on Lennon over Bowie or Carson, Chapman ultimately felt that the singer was more accessible, oddly enough. Reflecting on the situation years later, Chapman said, “I made a horrible decision to end another human being’s life for reasons of selfishness, and that was my decision at that time.”
Chapman has been denied parole 14 times to date.
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