Mark David Chapman

• 1. Introduction

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  Mark David Chapman stood outside the Dakota apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for most of the day on the 8th of December 1980, talking to fans and the doorman, waiting. Around 5 p.m., he held out a copy of John Lennon's album Double Fantasy and Lennon signed it. An amateur photographer named Paul Goresh captured the moment on film. Less than six hours later, as Lennon walked back into the archway of the Dakota just before 11 p.m., Chapman fired five hollow-point bullets from a Charter Arms Undercover .38 Special revolver. Four of them struck Lennon in the back and shoulder. Police rushed Lennon to Roosevelt Hospital in a squad car rather than wait for an ambulance, but he was pronounced dead on arrival.

  Chapman did not run. He stood at the scene and appeared to be reading a copy of The Catcher in the Rye when officers arrived. He offered no resistance. What drew a man with no prior criminal convictions, who had once won an Outstanding Counselor award at a YMCA summer camp, to plan and carry out the killing of one of the most famous musicians in the world? The answers involve a religious conversion, a novel, a simmering fury at what Chapman saw as hypocrisy, and a mind that had been fracturing for years before it broke entirely.

• 2. The Making of a Troubled Man

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  Chapman was born on the 10th of May 1955, in Fort Worth, Texas. His father, David Chapman, was a staff sergeant in the United States Air Force, and his mother, Diane, worked as a nurse. As a boy, Chapman described living in fear of his father, whom he claimed was physically abusive toward his mother and emotionally distant toward him. He developed a childhood fantasy of wielding God-like control over imaginary "little people" who lived in the walls of his bedroom.

  The family moved to Decatur, Georgia, and Chapman attended Columbia High School, where he recalled being bullied because of his lack of athleticism. By age 14, he was using drugs and skipping classes, and he once ran away from home to live on the streets of Miami for two weeks.

  At 16, in 1971, he became a born-again Presbyterian. The transformation brought a period of genuine stability and warmth. He worked as a summer camp counselor at the YMCA in DeKalb County, Georgia, and the children there adored him so much they nicknamed him "Nemo" after the protagonist of the Jules Verne novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. He won an award for Outstanding Counselor and was promoted to assistant director.

  After high school, Chapman worked with Vietnamese refugees through World Vision at a resettlement camp at Fort Chaffee in Arkansas. He was named area coordinator and a key aide to program director David Moore, who later said Chapman cared deeply for the children in his charge. Chapman attended meetings with government officials, and President Gerald Ford shook his hand.

  Then things began to unravel. Chapman enrolled at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, fell behind in his studies, and became consumed with guilt over a prior affair. He dropped out after one semester and his girlfriend ended the relationship. In 1977, spending the last of his savings, he impulsively moved to Hawaii and attempted suicide by carbon monoxide asphyxiation; the hose he attached to his car's exhaust pipe melted before the attempt could succeed. A psychiatrist admitted him to Castle Memorial Hospital for clinical depression.

• 3. A Novel as a Manifesto

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  J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951, became the organizing principle of Chapman's disintegrating inner life. A friend recommended the novel, and Chapman eventually came to feel that its protagonist, Holden Caulfield, described who he was and who he should be. He reportedly wished to model his life after Caulfield, a teenage boy consumed by a hatred of what he called phoniness in the adult world.

  By September 1980, Chapman was writing letters to friends signing them not with his own name but with "The Catcher in the Rye." To a friend named Lynda Irish, he wrote, "I'm going nuts." When he bought a copy of the book on the morning of December 8, he wrote inside it, "this is my statement," and signed it "Holden Caulfield."

  At his sentencing hearing on the 24th of August 1981, Chapman rose and read aloud a passage from the novel. In it, Holden describes a fantasy of standing at the edge of a cliff in a field of rye, catching children who might fall over. Chapman had chosen this passage from a book about a boy who cannot stand deception as the public statement of a man who had just killed someone he accused of being a fraud.

  During a brief psychotic episode between his arrest and sentencing, the only public statement Chapman made was a letter mailed to The New York Times asking people to read the novel. In February 1981, he sent a handwritten note to the same newspaper calling The Catcher in the Rye an "extraordinary book that holds many answers." Chapman told his lawyers that he wanted to plead guilty because God had instructed him to do so, and that his original motive had been to promote the reading of Salinger's book.

• 4. The Rage Behind the Gun

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  Chapman reportedly began planning the murder roughly three months before the 8th of December 1980. The grievances he accumulated against Lennon came from multiple sources and reinforced each other over time.

  Lennon's 1966 remark that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus" had stayed with members of Chapman's religious community. The song "Imagine" prompted a joke among people in his prayer group: "Imagine if John Lennon was dead." A childhood friend, Miles McManushe, later recalled Chapman calling the song "communist."

  A book by Anthony Fawcett, John Lennon: One Day at a Time, detailed Lennon's wealthy lifestyle in New York City. Chapman quoted his own response years later: "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."

  In the weeks before the murder, he listened repeatedly to Lennon's song "God," in which Lennon stated he did not believe in God or in the Beatles, and Chapman described his own reaction in vivid terms at a later parole hearing. The anger built into what he called "a total blackness of anger and rage."

  Journalist James R. Gaines, who interviewed Chapman extensively, concluded that Chapman did not kill Lennon primarily to gain fame. Yet at another parole hearing in 2022, Chapman said he had wanted to become "somebody." Singer David Bowie, who was appearing on Broadway in The Elephant Man the same week, later revealed that he believed he had been second on Chapman's list; Chapman had a front-row ticket for the following night's performance, and Lennon and Yoko Ono had been expected to sit in the front row as well.

• 5. The Days Before the Shooting

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  Chapman first traveled to New York City in late October 1980 intending to kill Lennon, but he left the city to get ammunition from a friend named Dana Reeves in Atlanta before returning in November. While in New York on that first trip, a screening of the film Ordinary People prompted him to pull back from his plans.

  Back in Hawaii, he showed his wife Gloria the gun and told her he had been obsessing over killing Lennon. Gloria did not contact police or mental health services. Chapman later said he harbored deep resentment toward her for that failure. He made an appointment with a clinical psychologist, did not keep it, and flew back to New York on the 6th of December 1980.

  On December 7, at the 72nd Street subway station, Chapman confronted singer James Taylor. Taylor later described him as "glistening with maniacal sweat" and pinning him to the wall while talking about getting in touch with Lennon. That same night, Chapman and his wife spoke by phone about getting help through his relationship with God.

  On the morning of December 8, Chapman left his room at the Sheraton Hotel and deliberately left behind personal items he wanted police to find. He spent hours outside the Dakota, and in the late afternoon, when Lennon came out to leave for a recording session at the Record Plant, Chapman got the album signed. He later said that if amateur photographer Paul Goresh had stayed, or if a Lennon fan named Jude Stein had accepted his invitation for a date that evening, he might not have gone through with the killing that night, though he acknowledged he would have returned the following day.

• 6. Trial and Sentencing

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  Chapman was formally charged with second-degree murder, the most serious murder charge available in New York State for killing a non-law-enforcement officer. He confessed to police that he had used hollow-point bullets "to ensure Lennon's death." His original court-appointed lawyer, Herbert Adlerberg, withdrew from the case amid threats of lynching against his client. Police transferred Chapman to Rikers Island out of concern for his safety.

  More than a dozen psychologists and psychiatrists interviewed Chapman in the six months before trial. The six defense experts agreed he was psychotic; five diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia, while the sixth believed his symptoms pointed to manic depression. The three prosecution experts concluded that his delusions did not rise to the level of psychosis and instead identified personality disorders. Court-appointed experts sided with the prosecution's conclusion that Chapman was delusional but competent to stand trial.

  Chapman proved more cooperative with prosecution-appointed mental health professionals than with those for his defense. One psychiatrist suggested he did not wish to be seen as "crazy" and believed the defense experts had been hired specifically to declare him insane.

  In June 1981, Chapman told his new lawyer Jonathan Marks that he wanted to drop the insanity defense and plead guilty, saying God had instructed him to do so. Marks challenged the decision. At a hearing on June 22, Chapman told the court that he would never change his plea or appeal his sentence. Judge Dennis Edwards Jr. declared him competent to stand trial and accepted the plea.

  At the sentencing on the 24th of August 1981, Judge Edwards sentenced Chapman to 20 years to life, five years less than the maximum possible sentence of 25 years to life, with a stipulation that mental health treatment be provided during his incarceration.

• 7. Life Inside, Parole Denied

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  Chapman was imprisoned at Attica Correctional Facility outside Buffalo, New York, beginning in 1981. He was held in a solitary confinement unit for violent and at-risk prisoners, with the prison citing concerns that Lennon's fans in the general population might harm him. In February 1982, he fasted for 26 days; the New York State Supreme Court authorized force-feeding, and Central New York Psychiatric Center director Martin Von Holden reported that Chapman refused to eat with other inmates but agreed to take liquid nutrients.

  He worked as a legal clerk and kitchen helper. He was barred from Cephas Attica workshops and prohibited from attending violence and anger management classes, again for his own safety, according to prison officials.

  On the 15th of May 2012, he was transferred to the Wende Correctional Facility in Alden, New York. On the 30th of March 2022, he was moved to Green Haven Correctional Facility in Beekman, New York, in Dutchess County. Since 2014, he has been allowed conjugal visits through the Family Reunion Program, spending 44-hour periods with his wife Gloria in a trailer on prison grounds.

  Chapman first became eligible for parole in 2000. Before that first hearing, Yoko Ono sent a letter to the parole board asking that he remain incarcerated. New York State Senator Michael Nozzolio wrote to Parole Board Chairman Brion Travis in similar terms. The board denied parole and cited his media interviews as evidence of a continued interest in notoriety, despite a good disciplinary record.

  Parole has been denied 14 times in total. At a 2018 hearing, the board found Chapman to be at low risk to reoffend but still denied release, emphasizing that he had carefully planned the murder of a world-famous person in order to gain notoriety. The next parole hearing is scheduled for February 2027, when Chapman will be 71 years old.