Chapman Parole Transcript Released

Speaking of bad weeks – how about a bad life? Does anyone think the world wouldn’t be a better place if Mark David Chapman had never been born?

The transcript of Mark Chapman’s recent parole hearing was released yesterday. It’s very sad:

John Lennon’s killer Mark Chapman shot the former Beatle because he wanted to “steal” his fame, he told a recent parole board hearing.
Chapman, 49, said in some ways he had achieved his goal, according to a transcript released on Thursday.

But in other ways, “I’m a bigger nobody than I was before”, he said.

….”People hate me now instead of, you know, for something positive. So that’s a worse state,” he said in the 5 October interview.

He said he deserved nothing “because of the pain and suffering I caused, I deserve exactly what I’ve gotten right now”.

….He also travelled to New York to kill Lennon once before, but did not go through with it, he said.

After that aborted attempt, he went to Hawaii – where he found a book containing photographs of the musician.

“It just angered me. You know, here I was with these struggles,” he said.

Chapman expanded on his reasons for the shooting by saying: “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.”

….He said he remembered Lennon’s wife Yoko Ono walking up to the police car where he was sitting after his arrest, and looking at him but saying nothing.

“That was a very traumatic thing that I blocked out of my memory for several months,” he told the board.

The parole board said it did not release him because of the “extreme malicious intent” he had shown. [BBC]

I guess that statement, though obvious, still bears repeating.

The living Beatles and the widows announced yesterday plans for a Cirque du Soleil extravaganza based upon the music of the Beatles coming to Vegas in 2006.