Imagine: John Lennon shot on his doorstep 40 years ago
PARIS: Late on a mild December evening in 1980, a young man with a revolver shot John Lennon four times in the back as the singer arrived home from a recording studio with his wife, Yoko Ono.
Police found his killer reading a book as he waited for them to arrest him outside the Dakota apartment in Manhattan.
Lennon was rushed to hospital on the back seat of a police car but “did not have the slightest chance of surviving” despite receiving several blood transfusions, a doctor told reporters.
An AFP breaking news dispatch on December 8 read:
“Former Beatle John Lennon was assassinated in front of his home in New York.” It was the start of a flood of media coverage that would rival the reach of the world-famous singer, who was just 40 years old.
Mark Chapman, then 25, had travelled from Hawaii and had got Lennon to sign his copy of the British singer’s latest album, Double Fantasy, earlier that day as Lennon left the building.
“I saw the photo where he signed the autograph. It was flashed on TV again and again,” Yoko Ono would write to fans a month later in an ad she took out in major newspapers across the country.
“Somehow that photo was harder for me to look at than the death photo. John was in a hurry that afternoon. He did not have to give his autograph but he did, while the man watched him, the man who was to betray John later.”
Years later from a prison cell, Chapman, an evangelical Christian, told a journalist he was “angry at (Lennon) 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”. Lennon’s quip that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus” also irked him.
Chapman was deemed competent to stand trial and was sentenced to life in prison, where he remains. His 12th parole hearing is set for 2022.