American homicide; a schizophrenic, he shot and killed John Lennon outside the door of his New York brownstone on 12/08/1980, 10:50 PM EST, just hours after getting his autograph. A Beatles fan since he was ten, he signed his name “John Lennon” at motels before leaving Hawaii for New York.
Chapman was born to David and Kathryn within a year of their marriage. His father was an Air Force sergeant and his mother was a nurse. The family moved to Indiana where David enrolled at Purdue University for a degree in electrical engineering. His mother worked for three years while his father took care of him. His mother recalls that as an infant, he rocked and shook the crib to the point they had to take off the casters. When he was 12 he told his mother about his friends, “the little people.”
The family moved to Decatur, GA where his father worked for an oil company. In 1964 his IQ was measured at 121, the lower end of the gifted scale. He had lots of friends, worked in the school library and filled his free time with projects. He collected coins, started a neighborhood newspaper, opened a shop in the garage where he would oil and wash bicycle for 50 cents. He attended Sunday school, liked music and became a devoted Beatles fan.
Mark described his mother as “dreamish and moody” and afraid of getting old. His experience of his father was that of an unemotional, shy and reclusive man. He got involved in drugs the late 1960s and rebelled. He ran away from home, returning two weeks later. Chapman had a record of arrests from 1972, most recently 3/19/1980 for armed robbery and abduction. He had gone through life periods in which he was extremely religious and would not play Beatles’ records because they had been considered more popular than Jesus. In August or September, 1975, he lost his virginity to a refugee worker. His parents were divorced in 1978.
He worked as a security guard while battling bouts of depression and thoughts of suicide. He decided to go to Hawaii and kill himself but accepted his failed attempt as God’s will. Mental health specialists speculate that suicidal individuals who fail to take their own life sometimes reverse the need to “succeed” by taking the life of another.
Chapman’s life history was a series of failed attempts to succeed at anything at all. He held different jobs and went through a dizzying array of interests in brief periods of time. Soon he was referring to the little people who gave advice and counsel as they had when he was a child. It was they, he told his psychiatrists, who told him to kill John Lennon. He later attributed the orders to kill Lennon to God. He has also said the reason for killing Lennon could be found in J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye.”
He married Gloria, a Japanese girl in Hawaii in June 1979. She was a 26-year-old travel agent when she met Mark in March 1978. The relationship was soon unhappy as Mark sold off most of their valuable belongings while borrowing large sums of money for art, dining out and trips.
Mark Chapman resides at Attica state penitentiary in New York state, where he is known as a model prisoner. On 10/03/2000 he was given and parole hearing which was denied. He has pictures of Jesus taped to his wall, a renewal of his on-again-off-again avowal of Christianity. A kitchen worker at Attica, he is certified as a law clerk and helps other inmates with legal questions. He is an avid reader and is allowed a few hours each day to mingle socially with other prisoners. His wife, Gloria, visits him two or three times a year. His mother visited him only once in the first 12 years he was imprisoned, but gradually the tension of their relationships began to ease. His father made one visit, in 1997, a year before he died.
Link to Wikipedia biography