John Lennon’s killer MARK CHAPMAN told a recent parole board hearing that he shot the former Beatle because he wanted to ‘steal’ his fame.
In the transcript released yesterday (October 14), Chapman said that although in some ways he had achieved his goal, “I’m a bigger nobody than I was before.”
”People hate me now instead of, you know, for something positive,” he said in the October 5 interview. “So that’s a worst state.”
Chapman shot John Lennon outside of the star’s New York apartment in 1980 and has been in jail ever since.
As previously reported on NME.COM, Chapman’s third parole application was turned down earlier this month.
According to BBC NEWS, he said he deserved nothing “because of the pain and suffering I caused, I deserve exactly what I’ve gotten right now.”
He also revealed that he travelled to New York to kill John Lennon once before but did not go through with it. He also claims that he had planned the killing for three months and considered murdering other celebrities he felt were ‘phoney’.
Chapman went to Hawaii following that aborted attempt where he then found a book containing photographs of the musician, of which he said: “It just angered me. You know, here I was with these struggles.”
Expanding on his reasons for the shooting, Chapman said: “It was just a tremendous compulsion of just feeling this big hole. Of being what I thought was a big nobody, a big nothing, and I couldn’t let it go. And it just kept going very strongly, and I couldn’t stop it.”
During the interview, Chapman also revealed that he did not drop his gun straight after the shooting, as was previously believed, but instead was tackled by a doorman.
He said: “I didn’t drop it. I stood there and held it in my hand. And the doorman, José, came over and he said, “What have you done, what have you done?”
“He grabbed my hand and he shook it, and he shook the weapon out of my hand, and he kicked it across the asphalt about 30-feet away,” he added. “Pretty brave man to do that. But that’s what he did.”
The board denied Chapman parole due to the “extreme malicious intent” he had shown. He was also told that he had “a clear lack of respect for life” and subjected John Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono to “monumental suffering by her witnessing the crime.”
Chapman said that he remembered [a][/a] walking up to the police car where he was sitting after his arrest, looking at him but saying nothing.
He told the board: “That was a very traumatic thing that I blocked out of my memory for several months.”