John Lennon's Killer Mark David Chapman Denied Parole for the 14th Time By Rachel DeSantis

Mark David Chapman has been denied parole for the 14th time, nearly 45 years after he shot and killed John Lennon outside his home in New York City.

Chapman, 70, sat for a parole board interview on Aug. 27, but was denied release from the Green Haven Correctional Facility in Beekman, N.Y., the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision posted in online records.

Per the calendar, the convicted murder was first eligible for parole in December 2000, 20 years after he murdered the 40-year-old Lennon as he arrived at his New York City apartment building with his wife Yoko Ono on Dec. 8, 1980. Earlier that day, the former Beatle had signed Chapman’s copy of his new album Double Fantasy.

Chapman has been in custody since August 1981 on a second-degree murder conviction, and is serving a sentence of 20 years to life, according to online records. He last appeared before the board in March 2023, per the records.

He previously expressed remorse for his crime, saying in a 2020 parole board interview that he deserved the death penalty for his crime.

“I assassinated him .. because he was very, very, very famous and that’s the only reason and I was very, very, very, very much seeking self-glory. Very selfish,” Chapman said, according to the Associated Press.

He described his actions as “creepy” and “despicable,” and said he thinks often of Ono, now 92, who never remarried after Lennon’s death.

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“I just want her to know that she knows her husband like no one else and knows the kind of man he was. I didn’t,” he reportedly said. “I deserve zero, nothing. At the time I deserved the death penalty. When you knowingly plot someone’s murder and know it’s wrong and you do it for yourself, that’s a death penalty right there, in my opinion.”

Ono has opposed Chapman’s release over the years, and in David Sheff’s biography Yoko, which came out in March, he quoted her as saying the letter she wrote to the board when Chapman was up for parole in 2000 was “the hardest letter she’d ever written.”

The book said that Ono’s letter was about Lennon and what he believed in, and described the late musician with love: “For me, he was the other half of the sky. We were in love with each other like the most vehement of lovers to the last moment.”

The letter also spoke about the rocker’s sons Sean, 49, and Julian, 62, and how they’d lost their father, as well as Ono’s own pain.

Sheff wrote that Ono expressed fear that Chapman’s release would reignite the “nightmare, the chaos and confusion” she and others felt after Lennon’s murder, and would potentially lead to further violence and tragedy.

Ono told The Daily Beast in 2015 that she “never” thought about moving from the apartment building that the couple shared with their son Sean, as it contained things that the Grammy winner had “touched.”

“It’s very, very difficult for me to think about Chapman,” she said. “Especially because he doesn’t seem to think that was a bad thing to do. One thing I think is that he did it once, he could do it again, to somebody else. It could be me, it could be Sean, it could be anybody, so there is that concern.”

Chapman’s next parole hearing is in February 2027, according to the AP.

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