«I killed John Lennon», so Chapman confessed to the murder of the ex Beatles

Four gunshots put an end to the dream life of John Lennon, killed by the inexplicable gesture of a madman, a psychopath. It was a fan who pulled the trigger on the 38 caliber Mark David Chapman. A “deranged man” who hit the former Beatles from behind, the group that had marked an era, a few steps from the door of his New York residence, where he lived with his wife Yoko Ono and son Sean. The rush to Roosevelt Hospital was in vain.

The Murder of John Lennon

That morning ofDecember 8, 1980Lennon and Yoko Ono posed for a shoot commissioned by Rolling Stone. «Nobody wanted her on the cover» said the portrait photographer, Annie Leibovitz, referring to his hated wife, accused of having been “the cause of the breakup of the Beatles”, but the famous author, one of the greatest icons of world music, had insisted. The magazine published on January 22, 1981 will be one of the most famous ever. The clock had just struck 3:30 when Leibovitz left the apartment.

At 17:40, a limousine awaits Lennon and his wife in front of the entrance to the Dakota Building, the luxurious building on 72nd street, not far from Central Park. They had to go to the recording studio: the two were working on a new song, Walking on thin icewhose text – which speaks of the absolute unpredictability of life and death – sounds almost like a tragic omen.

Waiting for them outside the building, as always, was a group of fans looking for autographs. He hid among them Mark David Chapman, but instead of drawing the weapon she handed him the pen. The boy asked Lennon for a signature on the copy of Double Fantasy, his latest album. «Is this all you want?» (“Is this all you want?”) he said. Chapman smiled shyly and nodded. A photographer Paul Goresh captured the scene. There are six hours until the crime.

A few hours after that meeting he will pull the trigger. Chapman fired five shots from a Charter Arms 38 Special revolver. The first one missed, the others were fatal. Lennon managed to climb five steps, muttering «I’m shot, I’m shot» (“They shot me, they shot me”), before collapsing to the ground, in a pool of blood, in the arms of the love of the life of him.

Chapman, who had taken out a loan from his father-in-law to fly to New York, did not flee. He took off his coat and sat on the curb to wait. «Do you know what you’ve just done?» (“Do you know what you just did?” asked the keeper of the Dakota Buildingthe building in which Roman Polanski filmed ‘Rosemary’s Baby’. «Yes, I just shot John Lennon» (“Yes, I just shot John Lennon”), replies with absolute calm, before starting to read a book, a copy of Young Holden of Salinger, one of his obsessions. The other was Lennongrew up without a father and without a mother (she died in 1958 after being hit by a car), cared for by her aunt Mimì, a poor boy who from the outskirts of Liverpool had conquered the world thanks to that meeting with Paul McCartney happened, as in the best fairy tales, almost by chance.

At 11:15 pm, one of the majors songwriter of all time is declared dead. He was 40 years old. On that cold New York evening, the myth of an entire generation disappeared. His songs, such as Imagine, remained in the world.

The confession

“I heard someone in my head saying, ‘Do it, do it, do it,'” murmured Chapman, 25 at the time, who quickly pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. “I was a total nothing and my only way to become someone was to kill the most famous man in the world,” she explained in a famous interview. «The thing that made me furious the most – she said – was that he had broken through, while I hadn’t. We were like two trains racing against each other on the same track. His ‘all’ and my ‘nothing’ ended up colliding head-on. In the blind rage and depression of that time, that was the only way out. The only way to see the light at the end of the tunnel was to kill him.”