Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Times Of London:

John Lennon’s killer has provided new details of the murder of the former Beatle in his latest unsuccessful attempt for parole.

Mark David Chapman, 53, disputed media accounts that he called out to Lennon before shooting him in New York on December 8, 1980. “I don’t recall saying, ‘Mr. Lennon’,” Chapman told the parole board. “I think that was something the press elaborated on. That didn’t happen. He didn’t turn. I shot him in the back,” he said.

Chapman fired five shots at Lennon, hitting him four times as the music legend and his wife, Yoko Ono, returned to their home in the Dakota apartment building in the Upper West Side, of Manhattan.

The former maintenance man said that he began planning the shooting three months earlier after seeing Lennon on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album.

“I just saw his face and it seemed like it all came together, the solution to my problem of being confused and feeling like a nobody,” he said, according to a newly released transcript. “And I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be something if I killed this individual? I would become famous, I would be something other than a nobody’. And that was my reasoning at the time.

“I perceived him at the time, and wrongly judged him to be a phony. Here he is at this ritzy building and he had been singing of love and other things at that time; it angered me.”

Chapman, then living in Hawaii with his wife, said he made a previous trip to New York in October 1980 to kill Lennon but aborted the attempt.

He returned in December, lying to his wife that he was “going to find myself, I’m going to write a book, kids’ book, and just try to get my life together”.

Chapman said he was ashamed and sorry for killing Lennon.

He has spent almost 28 years in the Attica prison in upstate New York. For the past 16 years he has been able to enjoy annual 44-hour conjugal visits from his wife, a former travel agent named Gloria Hiroko Chapman, who has stuck by him.

Ono, Lennon’s wife, who has previously written to the parole board opposing Chapman’s release, did not offer any testimony at his latest — and fifth — parole hearing on August 12.

But she told The New York Daily News: “There are so many people out there who dislike him. It’s safer for him to stay in jail.” Fifty people did submit testimony and more than 1,000 signed a petition urging that he should be kept in prison. Three called for him to be freed.

Chapman said he had a job offer on a farm in upstate New York. But the parole board rejected his request “due to concern for the public safety and welfare”.

His next parole hearing will be in August 2010.