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

by Jack Jones

Chapman told the psychiatrists he was especially disturbed by his mother’s liaisons with “beach bums,” boyfriends who were about his own age. “I would get mad with her, and say, you know, ‘What are you going around with this bum for?’ ’Cause she has big breasts, you know, and that’s all they want.” Diane Chapman confided in her son that she didn’t want his seventeen-year-old sister to come to Hawaii. Just as she had turned to him when he was a child to protect her from her husband, Chapman told the psychiatrists that his mother again thrust him into a role reversal as her confidant and adviser. “She’d say, ‘Well, I’m worried about Susan, and Susan wants to come out, but I can’t have her out because I’m starting my own life.’ “I said, ‘Don’t worry about any of that stuff,’ you know. I was the one who got her a lawyer for her divorce. She didn’t know what to do. I had to take care of her. I found her a job at Sears. “You know, I had to take care of her.” After her son was imprisoned for the murder of John Lennon, Diane Chapman told a reporter of her first concern: “I loved my life and I wanted my life back,” Diane Chapman said in a People magazine interview. “My first thought when this thing happened was ‘My God, I’ll never be happy again.’ ” Nearly twelve years after John Lennon was killed, the killer’s mother had visited her son twice at Attica prison.