Lennon’s killer marks 25 years of infamy

Murder as a road to fame
Chapman has not been silent since being jailed. He has given several interviews, most extensively to Jack Jones, who turned their conversations into a book entitled “Let Me Take You Down: Inside the Mind of Mark David Chapman.”

It was announced just weeks ago that a movie is in the works about Chapman and the days leading up to the murder. The film will star Jared Leto as Chapman and Lindsay Lohan as a Lennon fan who befriends Chapman.

Though Ono has not publicly commented on the film, her spokesman, Elliot Mintz, has criticized a recent, two-hour “Dateline NBC” special on Chapman.

“The timing of this is macabre,” Mintz said. “[Ono] thinks it’s outrageous. ... It sends out a message to other disturbed people that killing is a way to fame.”

Newsman Larry Kane, who recently wrote the book “Lennon Revealed,” agrees.

“[Chapman] is not the story,” Kane says. “He’s the ending of the story, but he’s not the story. The story is the 25 years of achievement that John Lennon managed, the music and poetry he left behind and the feeling of creation.”

Chapman has come up for parole three times, and each time been denied. He’ll again be eligible next October, but according to Charles P. Ewing, a professor of law at the University of Buffalo (SUNY), his chances are between “slim and none” of ever being paroled.

“Very few people with a life cap ever get paroled and his case has generated so much negative publicity,” Ewing says.

In October, 2004, the parole board said Chapman killed Lennon for the attention, and that, “although proven true, such rationale is bizarre and morally corrupt.”

Petitions have been submitted opposing his release, and Ono has, at each parole hearing, sent a letter saying that if he were set free, “myself and John’s two sons would not feel safe for the rest of our lives.”

The murder, she said, “managed to change my whole life, devastate his sons and bring deep sorrow and fear to the world.” Releasing Chapman, would “bring back the nightmare, the chaos and the confusion once again.”

Speaking to the parole board in 2004, Chapman, who has apologized a number of times for the murder, acknowledged the depravity of his notoriety:

“I deserve nothing,” he said. “In some ways I’m a bigger nobody than I was before because, you know, people hate me now instead of, you know, for something positive. So that’s a worse state.”

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