to happen. chapman has been denied parole eight times despite claiming to have found god and to have lost the demons that drove him to kill lennon. can you imagine being lennon s family and thinking that this guy is running around the streets, and every place you go, you are looking around him. there are a lot of people who believe that he does not deserve to be walking the streets, including you. well, i am one of them. and one of the many who still mourns the loss off a legend. the many who still gather at his strawberry fields in central park. and the family still moved by his memory. it s beyond sadness that he is not around, obviously, but one just takes the love that you have had with that person, and you remember and the fondness that you have of that person, and you carry it forward.
lennon would safely reach a sandy beach in bermuda. alone and isolated, he wrote and recorded these demos for what would become himself final and most emotional work. double fantasy and milk and honey. people say i m crazy doing what i m doing he s playing acoustic guitar and singing into a boom box. it was magical. magical and pro fephetirophe. along with his new found inspiration came an eerie sense of his own mortality. he talked about it quite often. i ve never worked with an artist that had a sense of his own demise. as lennon contemplated death, a man with voices in his head
this is the voice of a murderer, the voice of the man who killed john lennon. if you d had told me a year previous you were going to murder someone, anyone, i would say, my goodness, there s no way. i honestly never met someone as out of touch with reality as he was. was he crazier than you thought? he was a lot crazier than i thought, yeah. journalist jim gain spent hundreds of hours with mark david chapman at attica prison in the recall 80s. i have something to tell you, demons i have going on in me. these are exclusive recorded conversations. the first tim i met him, he was telling me this murder was meant to be from before time. were you thinking, oh, my
and very religious. she was that impressionable. credulous, you could say. gloria believed her husband was going to counseling. he didn t. chapman was beyond help. was the plan was in gear, i couldn t stop it, even though it ebbed for a few weeks. next, a cold-blooded killer goes back to new york and goes face to face with john lennon s son. chapman reached around to shake john s hand.
that suicide attempt got him the attention of one young woman, a 26-year-old named gloria, a volunteer at the hospital where he sought treatment. they started dating and married in 1979. but for chapman, the marriage offered no honeymoon from his demons. just months later, his frenzied descent down the path to murder began. you don t usually get this kind of primary document. and the fact that he had it was extraordinary to me. chapman kept a detailed calendar of the manic months leading to lennon s death. you can almost see the progression of his illness in the increasing chaos of this calendar. many days were spent at the library obsessed with the cult classic catcher in the rye and its main character holden caufield. i really identified with him.