Let Me Take You Down: Inside the Mind of Mark David Chapman, the Man Who Killed John Lennon

by Jack Jones

“But she said no, she wouldn’t do it. She said she just felt so bad, she didn’t want to have any joy in her life. But I wasn’t thinking of her. I didn’t care if she had any joy in her life or not. There I was, just thinking totally of myself. And I began to feel angry at her for rejecting me. “This whole episode came back to me about four years ago. I was out of my cell because I was working at the time and I was in an area of the prison where a television was tuned in to one of the talk shows. “I looked up at the TV and I saw a woman on the show who seemed vaguely familiar. I would have sworn that I knew her from somewhere. The program was about the murdering of a child. Not a baby, but a teenage or young adult child. I remember this program was about parents who had been forced to come to grips with their children being murdered. The lady, the one who looked so familiar to me, said she had gone to Hawaii to recover and deal with her grief after her son had been killed. Then I knew. “It sent a shiver through me. It shocked me, like some of the things that shock me about John Lennon when I hear them on the radio or see them on TV or in the newspapers and magazines. It was a memory I had tried to wipe out, a memory that I was ashamed of and there it was, on TV. I had forgotten about that woman until then. But when I saw her again on TV, it made me remember the kind of person I had allowed myself to become. “Society meant nothing to me, except a tool to be used. People had b...