THE shots were heard around the world – and left millions of Beatles fans mourning for their idol.
Forty years after he was gunned down outside his apartment in New York, John Lennon’s legacy lives on in his timeless music and enduring messages of peace and love.
But the murder, at the hands of 25-year-old Mark David Chapman, has also been the subject of wild conspiracy theories, including a CIA plot to stop Lennon “radicalising” young Americans with his “leftist” views.
Chapman, jailed for life with a minimum of 20 years and still languishing in prison, claims he shot the 40-year-old Imagine legend because he wanted to “become somebody.”
But friends say the ultra-religious killer had been enraged by comments Lennon had made – including claims that The Beatles were “more popular than Jesus” – since he was at high school.
Here, we go inside the twisted mind of Lennon’s assassin.
Growing up in Decatur, Georgia, Chapman was bullied at school for disliking sports and his home life, with a father who was “abusive” to his mother and “unloving” to his son, was desperately unhappy.
In the sanctuary of his bedroom, the young Chapman invented an army of “little people” who lived in the walls.
Through frequent bouts of depression, he later revealed, he would “delegate my insanity” to these “powerful and evil” imaginary creatures.
As a teenager, he was a huge fan of The Beatles, especially Lennon. When he began to dabble in drugs, he even believed he had become his idol during one acid trip.
“I always wanted to be a Beatle,” he told journalist Jim Gaines in a series of interviews conducted at the Attica Correctional Facility in New York.
“I’d always think, man, what would it be like to be a Beatle?”
But the love turned to hate when Chapman became a born-again Presbyterian, at 16.
Citing Lennon’s flippant comment that the band were “more popular than Jesus”, made in a 1966 interview, he accused him of blasphemy and, according to high school friend Miles McManus, destroyed all his Beatles albums.
After reading J.D.Salinger’s stream of consciousness novel The Catcher In The Rye as a teenager, Chapman became obsessed with the central character, Holden Caulfield.
“I really identified with him,” he told Gaines. “His plight, his loneliness, his alienation from society.”
Like Caulfield, Chapman began to form a deep-seated hatred of “phoniness” and, after reading a book about Lennon’s lavish lifestyle, he became enraged with what he saw as the singer’s hypocrisy.
“He told us to ‘imagine no possessions’ and there he was, with millions of dollars and yachts and farms and country estates, laughing at people like me who had believed the lies and bought the records and built a big part of their lives around his music,” he later said.
“I would listen to this music and I would get angry at him, for saying [in the song God] that he didn’t believe in God, that he just believed in him and Yoko, and that he didn’t believe in the Beatles.
“At that point, my mind was going through a total blackness of anger and rage. So I brought the Lennon book home, into this The Catcher in the Rye milieu where my mindset is Holden Caulfield and anti-phoniness.”
Suffering from depression, in 1977, Chapman moved to Hawaii where he attempted suicide by carbon monoxide posioning, but ended up in hospital.
There he met travel agent and hospital volunteer Gloria Abe, who he wed in June 1979.
Amazingly, despite Gloria revealing he was abusive during the 18 months they lived together, the pair are still married.
After a decade of simmering resentment towards Lennon, Chapman’s fragile mental health began to decline and he began to have psychotic episodes, hearing voices from the “little people” in his head.
Convincing himself that he had to rid the world of his nemesis, in the autumn of 1980, he began to pray to Satan to give him the strength to murder Lennon.
After quitting his job as a security guard in October 1980, he bought a .38 caliber gun and flew to New York, where he realised he couldn’t legally buy bullets.
He then flew to Atlanta to meet a police officer friend who, unaware of his intentions, provided the deadly hollow point bullets that would kill the former Beatle.
This time, however, he didn’t go through with it – but rang his wife telling her what he had planned to do before flying back to Hawaii.
Tragically, loyal Gloria told no one.
Despite his cold feet, Chapman’s hatred continued to knaw at him and, on December 6, 1980, he flew back to New York and booked into the Sheraton hotel.
Two days later, he bought a copy of The Catcher In The Rye and wrote inside, “This is my statement,” signing it “Holden Caulfield.”
Then, despite the freezing New York weather, he stood outside the Dakota building all day, talking to fans and the doorman.
While he waited, he saw the family’s nanny, Helen Seamann, returning from a walk with Lennon’s five-year-old son Sean.
Chillingly, he shook the little boy’s hand, quoting lyrics from the song Beautiful Boy that his father had written for him.
At 5pm, as Lennon and wife Yoko Ono walked out of the apartment, Chapman asked him to sign a copy of the Double Fantasy album but didn’t shoot him, because “I was just so excited to see him.”
But when the couple returned from a session at a recording studio, at 10.30pm, Chapman stashed the album behind a plant pot and fired six shots, four of which hit Lennon in the back.
He later revealed the voices in his head were urging him on.
“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.
“I stepped off the curb, walked, turned, I took the gun and just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
“I was frozen, standing there frozen and the gun was hanging at my side, still in my hand.”
“When the car pulled up and Yoko got out, something in the back of my mind was going ‘Do it, do it, do it,’”
Mark David Chapman
Doorman Jose Perdomo leapt at Chapman and knocked the gun out of his hand but, rather than fleeing, Chapman waited at the scene until police arrived.
John Lennon was rushed to hospital but was pronounced dead on arrival.
His death triggered an outpouring of grief around the world with chanting fans gathering outside the Dakota and at the Roosevelt Hospital.
Millions responded to a call for a ten minute memorial of silent prayer, the following Sunday, with 225,000 gathering in Central Park and a crowd of 30,000 converging in Lennon’s hometown of Liverpool.
At least three Beatles fans committed suicide, prompting widow Yoko Ono to appeal for mourners not to give in to despair.
While Chapman’s legal team advised a plea of insanity, he entered a guilty plea, claiming that while he “had touches of schizophrenia and paranoia” throughout his life, he was not “under control of that” when he committed murder.
Talking to Gaines, Chapman said: “Shooting Lennon was an answer to all of my problems, I guess. It was to cancel all my past, to give me an identity.”
He has also claimed he wanted to make a name for himself by killing someone famous, and considered shooting chat show host Johnny Carson, Elizabeth Taylor and actor George C. Scott.
“I felt that by killing John Lennon I would become somebody, and instead of that I became a murderer, and murderers are not somebodies,” he said in 2010.
He chose Lennon because “he seemed more accessible to me” as his apartment building wasn’t as “cloistered” as other celebrities’ homes.
“If it wasn’t Lennon, it could have been someone else,” he said.
The legend’s untimely death has sparked a raft of conspiracy theories.
In an explosive 2017 book, Drugs as Weapons Against Us, author John Potash claimed Chapman was trained to kill the ex-Beatle by the CIA.
The US agency, he claimed, wanted to stop the influential star spreading “radical leftist” ideologies after he held a series of anti-war events and a benefit concert to free imprisoned activist John Sinclair.
Barrister Fenton Bresler obtained classified documents from the FBI and CIA that claim Lennon was being tracked by the intelligence agencies during the 1970s.
He claims the security services controlled Chapman through drugs and hypnosis and that he was in Chicago for three “missing days” before arriving in New York, suggesting he was being trained to kill Lennon.
He quotes the New York police lieutenant who interrogated Chapman the night of the murder in 1980 as saying: “He looked as if he could have been programmed.”
Others have suggested that Chapman was not the real killer with one wrongly accusing the doorman of the Dakota.
One of the most outlandish conspiracy theorists claimed the real killer was author Stephen King.
But Chapman has never denied that he was the gunman and was acting alone.
Despite being eligible for parole in 2000, Chapman remains behind bars at Wende Correctional Centre in New York.
He has been denied parole 11 times, with letters from Yoko Ono to the parole board supporting the decision to keep him locked up.
In a recent statement to the parole board, he said he now feels ashamed of his crime.
“Thirty years ago I couldn’t say I felt shame and I know what shame is now,” he wrote.
“It’s where you cover your face, you don’t want to ask for anything.”
