Mark David Chapman may not be as famous as any of the Beatles, but their more devoted fans will always remember the name of the man who gunned John Lennon down on December 8 1980.
Following his arrest for Lennon’s murder Chapman initially shunned interviews, although three years after the crime he did one at the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York.
CNN has dug the interview up, yesterday being the 35th anniversary of Lennon’s death, so let’s look at some of what Chapman [pictured below] had to say:
“When the car pulled up and Yoko got out, something in the back of my mind was going ‘Do it, do it, do it,'” he said, recalling the night of December 8, 1980.
“I stepped off the curb, walked, turned, I took the gun and just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom”…
To the surprise of many, including [interviewer] Gaines, Chapman said that throughout his childhood in Decatur, Georgia, he was a Beatles fan.
“I always wanted to be a Beatle,” he told Gaines. “I’d always think, man, what would it be like to be a Beatle?”
Chapman specifically idolized Lennon. Recalling a particularly intense acid trip, he told a friend he thought he had become the former Beatle. However, his affection for Lennon eventually waned.
High school friend Miles McManus said Chapman became angry at Lennon when he discovered he had proclaimed the Beatles “more popular than Jesus” in a 1966 interview with the London Evening Standard. Chapman, a devout Christian, destroyed Beatles record albums and “even said he changed the words to ‘Imagine’ to ‘Imagine if John were dead,'” McManus recalled.
the book that truly influenced him was “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D Salinger, and its protagonist, Holden Caulfield. “I really identified with him,” he told Gaines, “his plight, his loneliness, his alienation from society.”
Eventually, the lines between his own life and Caulfield’s began to blur. Chapman developed a deep-seated hatred of all things fake and, spurred by that and Fawcett’s book, began to direct his rage toward Lennon — “a poser,” Gaines explained, who “espoused virtues and ideals that he didn’t practice.”
Chapman soon decided that it was up to him to rid the world of Lennon.
I would really suggest reading that entire piece HERE, Chapman’s story makes for riveting reading. Of course Beatles fans spent days camped outside the New York hotel where Lennon was killed, these pictures below from Mashable part of their photo series called ‘Mourning Lennon’.
I wonder what he would think of Paul McCartney doing a collaboration with Kanye West…didn’t Kanye say he was bigger than Jesus too?
