Mark David Chapman: John Lennon’s killer denied parole in New York

Chapman will be up for parole again in 2022

John Lennon appears during a press conference in 1971. (AP)

John Lennon‘s killer has been denied parole for the 11th time.

Mark David Chapman was denied after being interviewed by a parole board on 19 August, according to corrections officials.

Chapman, 65, is serving a 20-years-to-life sentence at Wende Correctional Facility, east of Buffalo, New York, after pleading guilty to second-degree murder.

He shot and killed the former Beatle on the night of 8 December 1980, hours after Lennon autographed an album for him.

Chapman has said previously that he feels “more and more shame” every year for the crime.

Mark David Chapman on 31 January 2018. (New York State Department of Corrections via AP)

“I was too far in,” Chapman told a parole board in 2018. “I do remember having the thought of, ‘Hey, you have got the album now. Look at this, he signed it, just go home.’ But there was no way I was just going to go home.”

Chapman’s next parole hearing is scheduled for August 2022.

The murder of Lennon stunned the music world, the British-born musician’s adopted home of New York City, and a generation that grew up with “Beatlemania”.

At 40, Lennon had just emerged from a musical hiatus with the release of his Double Fantasy album when he went to a nighttime recording session on 8 December 1980. When he returned to his home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Chapman was waiting for him and shot him four times in front of his wife Yoko Ono.

Since 2000, the first year Chapman was eligible for parole, Ono, 87, has steadfastly opposed his release. Her attorney, Jonas Herbsman, said she submitted comments to the parole board, which he said are “consistent with the prior letters”.

At his previous parole interview in August 2018 Chapman said he was a changed man and a religious Christian who would welcome freedom even though he said he did not deserve it.

Chapman has worked as a porter and wheelchair repairman at the prison hospital and has occasionally been visited by his wife whom he married about 18 months before the murder.

Additional reporting by agencies