Mark David Chapman has claimed he murdered Beatles legend John Lennon “to be famous” and apologized at his recent parole hearing, but officials didn’t buy his crocodile tears and locked him back up, RadarOnline.com can reveal.
The hearing was Chapman’s 14th since he was locked away for 25 years to life since pleading guilty to second-degree murder for the December 8, 1980, ambush slaying of Lennon, then 40.
A Disturbing Confession
Mark David Chapman admitted he killed John Lennon out of selfish desire for fame.
When a board member asked him his motive, Chapman, 70, replied: “To be famous, to be something I wasn’t. And then I just realized, hey, there is a goal here. I don’t have to die and I can be a somebody. I had sunk that low.”
He also admitted: “My crime was completely selfish. This was for me and me alone, unfortunately, and it had everything to do with his popularity.”
The board denied him parole once more, sending him back to mull over his terrible crime in his cell in New York’s Green Haven Correctional Facility. Chapman, who was 25 at the time, admitted plotting to kill the music legend, flying from Hawaii to New York two months before his crazed attack and stalking Lennon.
Finally, he screwed up his courage to cowardly sneak up behind the Imagine singer and shot him four times in the back outside his Dakota apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
The convicted killer said he felt driven to act on December 8, 1980, after stalking Lennon for months.
“That morning of the 8th, I just knew. I don’t know how I knew but I just knew that was going to be the day that I was going to meet and kill him,” Chapman said.
Two slugs hit Lennon in the left shoulder and two in the left side of his back.
Chapman has claimed he felt a connection to Holden Caulfield, the mixed-up hero of J.D. Salinger’s 1951 novel Catcher in the Rye, and thought Lennon was a “phony.”
Next Parole Hearing Set For 2027
Chapman apologized to Yoko Ono and fans for the pain caused by Lennon’s murder during his latest parole hearing.
Chapman also told the board, “I apologize for the devastation” he caused Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, and his fans and “the agony that they must have gone through. I had no thought about that at all at the time of the crime, I didn’t care.”
His next parole hearing is in 2027.
