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 In the end, the compulsion to gain notoriety by killing one of
the most famous people in the world proved too powerful, a
remorseful Mark David Chapman told parole officials at an Aug.
22 hearing that ended in a decision not to release him.
"I was too far in," Chapman, 63, said in a transcript of the
hearing released on Thursday by the New York Department of
Corrections and Community Supervision.
On the afternoon of Dec. 8, 1980, the former member of the
Beatles left his New York apartment building on his way to a
recording session when he stopped to autograph an album that
Chapman, then a pudgy, bespectacled 25-year-old, was holding. It
is a moment captured in a now-eerie photograph.
"I do remember having the thought of, hey, you have got the
album now, look at this, he signed it, just go home, but there
was no way I was going to go home," Chapman, now leaner and
grayer, told the parole board.
But when Lennon returned to his home on Manhattan's Upper West
Side later that evening, Chapman was waiting for him, and fired
a five-shot .38 caliber Charter Arms revolver at him, hitting
him four times in front of his wife Yoko Ono.
The assassination-style murder stunned the music world, a
generation that had grown up with "Beatlemania" and the city the
British-born musician had adopted as his home.
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From his confinement at the Wende Correctional Facility in
Alden, New York, just east of Buffalo, Chapman told the two
parole board members at his hearing his sense of shame grows
constantly over the murder, the impact of which he realizes will
outlive him.
"A hundred years from now they're going to remember him and
they're going to remember him as someone that's been murdered
and it's going to be negative," he said.
Chapman was sentenced to 20 years to life after pleading guilty
to second-degree murder in 1981. He has been denied parole 10
times since 2000 and will not have another opportunity for
release until August 2020.
At the hearing, Chapman said he was a changed man who would
welcome being released but said he didn't deserve it.
He denied a suggestion by a parole board member that he had
channeled his obsession with fame into a ministry he runs with
his wife that supplies Christian pamphlets to churches in
Africa.
"I honestly have to disagree with that," he said. "We're
sustaining Jesus."
(Reporting by Peter Szekely in New York; Editing by Chris Reese)
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