Mark David Chapman will be eligible for parole in two years.
Mark David Chapman, the man who killed John Lennon in front of his New York City apartment on December 8, 1980, apologized during a recent parole hearing for murdering the former Beatle.
Chapman, 65, was denied parole for the eleventh time last month and during his hearing, he spoke in front of the board, where he called what he did 40 years ago a “despicable act,” and said that he shot and killed the “Imagine” singer for glory, the BBC reported.
Lennon, 40, was shot and killed as he entered the Dakota Building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side as he and his wife, Yoko Ono, were returning from a recording studio.
“I just want to reiterate that I'm sorry for my crime," Chapman told the parole board in August. "I have no excuse. This was for self-glory. I think it's the worst crime that there could be to do something to someone that's innocent.”
Chapman is incarcerated at the Wende Correctional Facility in Upstate New York, where he has been since 2012. He expressed his remorse and apologized to Ono for killing her husband.
"He was extremely famous. I didn't kill him because of his character or the kind of man he was. He was a family man. He was an icon. He was someone that spoke of things that now we can speak of and it's great,” he said. “I assassinated him, to use your word earlier, because he was very, very, very famous and that's the only reason and I was very, very, very, very much seeking self-glory, very selfish.”
"I want to add that and emphasize that greatly. It was an extremely selfish act. I'm sorry for the pain that I caused to her [Ono]. I think about it all of the time,” he added.
Chapman will be eligible for parole in two years.
“It was just a very sudden thing,” Ono told Inside Edition in 1997. “It was so sudden that it was very difficult to me."
“You never get over it — you just have to go on, I suppose,” she later told Inside Edition in 2000. “We thought that we were going to be together forever... John’s spirit in a way is still alive in people’s hearts — the statements he made, the music he made, it is still going around the world. It is like he is still alive in a way."
Chapman pleaded guilty in Lennon's killing.
When Chapman appeared before the parole board in 2018, he was told “someone may attempt or succeed in harming you out of anger and or revenge, or for the same reason that you did John Lennon, to assume notoriety.”
Chapman had traveled from Hawaii to kill Lennon in New York City in the fall of 1980. Chapman, a married Christian, said he loved The Beatles but felt inspired by Holden Caulfield, the protagonist in The Catcher in the Rye, and believed Lennon was a phony who had sold out his humble roots.
“I think in the end, the fact that he was too honest may have offended some people and may have really shortened his life,” Ono said of her husband to Inside Edition in 1997. “I think that sometimes you have to pay a high price and he did it and he gambled on it.”
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