DENIED PAROLE FOR SEVENTH TIME
John Lennon’s Killer Practices Circular Logic: ”Fame Holds No Value”
FAME IS RIDICULOUS. IT HOLDS NO VALUE,” CLAIMS THE MAN WHO MURDERED FOR INFAMY.
Mark David Chapman, the prison guard who shot John Lennon to death on December 8, 1980, was denied parole for a seventh time last week. And Wednesday’s release of the hearing’s transcript provides yet more attention to the man who practices circular logic. (Fame holds no value, indeed.)
In a transcript of the Aug. 22 hearing, Chapman reveals more insights into why he targeted Lennon for murder. He says the former Beatle just happened to be the most accessible and most famous among six or seven individuals on his list of potential targets. (Johnny Carson and George C. Scott are among the others.) He began planning the crime three months before actually pulling the trigger, traveling twice from his home in Hawaii to scope out Lennon’s residence in New York. Blockquote“And why did you target this victim?,” a parole commissioner asked.
“Because he was very famous,” Chapman replied.
And what did you want to get out of it?”
“Attention, bottom line.”
Lennon, according to Chapman, “was very kind” and “very patient” with him when he encountered him earlier in the day outside the Dakota. “He took his time with me,” he said, even though Yoko Ono was waiting inside a limousine. After Lennon signed Chapman’s couple of the Double Fantasy album, the singer-songwriter asked him if there was anything else he could do for him. Chapman claims to have wrestled internally with the idea of walking away and returning home, “but I was so compelled to commit murder that nothing would have dragged me away from that building.”
Here is the hearing’s full transcript:
