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

by Jack Jones

On the first day of the world trip he met in Tokyo with an official of the Japanese YMCA who praised him for the work he had done with refugees. The conversation caused Chapman to realize, for the first time in his life, that he was beginning to lose touch with the sense of compassion he believed he had always felt for other people. He had never felt more compassion than he had for the war-torn Vietnamese. “But as I talked with this man, he turned to me with tears in his eyes and he asked what I thought about the refugees—the uprooting of so much humanity,” Chapman recalled. “I just sat there, kind of numb. I was kind of in shock because of his question and I was surprised at myself because I realized that I couldn’t feel anything. It was weird, like all that feeling I had before inside me had dried up. I felt guilty. I just couldn’t say anything. My tongue was tied, and I just kind of nodded my head as he talked.”