John Lennon Autographed His Killer's Record Hours Before the Beatles Star's Assassination 45 Years Ago

The year the ‘80s began also marked the year the ‘60s died in the most tragic of circumstances.

On December 8, 1980, at 10:50 p.m., John Lennon was just about to enter his home at the Dakota apartment building in New York City with his wife, Yoko Ono, by his side. In the darkness, a man emerged, calling out “Mr. Lennon” and proceeded to shoot Lennon four times.

Eventually, Lennon was taken to Roosevelt Hospital, where a team of doctors failed to revive him. At 40 years old, Lennon died at 11:15 p.m.

Lennon was killed by Mark David Chapman, a former security guard from Hawaii who had a love/hate relationship with The Beatles. Growing up, he idolized them, especially Lennon.

But then he came across the novel Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. Chapman saw himself as the real-life version of the main character, Holden Caulfield, and Lennon as a “phony” based on the book's narrative.

On the night of the assassination, Chapman was captured in a photograph having Lennon sign his copy of Double Fantasy. After killing Lennon, Chapman carried a copy of the Catcher in the Rye and wrote inside “This is my statement” and signed it as “Holden Caulfield.” During the trial, he read a passage from the book in which Holden Caulfield seeks to be the "catcher in the rye.”

Chapman plead guilty and was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison. In September 2025, he was denied parole for the 14th time.

Millions of Americans first learned of Lennon’s assassination on a live Monday Night Football broadcast as the Miami Dolphins were playing the New England Patriots. It was the rabble-rouser of sports media personalities, Howard Cosell, who broke the story.

“There were three networks back then, no cable, it was an analog world,” Dr. Kenneth Womack, professor of English and popular music and expert on The Beatles, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “Like the Kennedy assassination, it became a subject that had legs.”

Cosell, much like Lennon, spoke out on pressing issues of the time, most notably supporting Muhammad Ali’s decision to refuse induction into the military during the Vietnam War. In fact, during one Monday Night broadcast, Cosell interviewed Lennon about American football.

“Like Walter Cronkite, he was one of the prominent voices in those days,” Womack says. “It was a shared moment. Back in those days, you had 50, 60 million people watching Monday Night Football. It was galvanizing in that sense, too.”

For many, learning of Lennon’s murder marked an earth-shattering moment as one of the most consequential musicians of all time was taken in the most senseless way imaginable.

The Beatles— the four mop tops from Liverpool, England— held an albatross around the neck of the pop culture landscape. Their catchy, infectious songs and distinct look made them the teen heartthrobs of all teen heartthrobs. Almost every song, every word, every move they made was documented for posterity. Even after they officially split in 1970, the fans remained, as each Beatle made a name for themselves through solo careers.

Lennon took it to a new level by combining his art with a sense of purpose with songs “Imagine,” “Give Peace A Chance,” “Working Class Hero,” “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” and “Power to the People.” His crusade for peace and his outspokenness on politics at the height of the counterculture movement of the '60s and '70s made him a target for some (e.g., Immigration and Naturalization, which sought to deport him), but a hero to others.

When he was killed, a spokesperson for a generation was forever silenced.

“That tragedy was galvanizing,” Womack says. “The cultural significance of the Beatles then and now is so enormous. The Beatles had so much bandwidth. This is just one of those wounds that doesn’t get better. It is amazing what he had accomplished by the time he was 40.”

The actions of Chapman crystallized the essence of celebrity stalkers turned killers.

“They get what they are after,” Womack says. “They are these fame monsters. They make these decisions to carry out these spectacular and public deeds. I think that is what they are about.”

Chapman has since admitted he sought fame in the killing. “I knew what I was doing, and I knew it was evil, I knew it was wrong, but I wanted the fame so much that I was willing to give everything and take a human life,” he told a parole board in 2022.

The next year, in the documentary John Lennon: Murder Without a Trial, he confessed, “I thought I would turn into somebody if I killed somebody. I thought I would turn into Holden Caufield.”

The era may have made it easier for Chapman to carry out the shooting than it would have been today. At the time, celebrities didn’t exactly have the security detail they do now. Lennon, in particular, was known to venture out into New York City by himself, without a large entourage of bodyguards. Also, the 1970s were a period in which the greatest fear was that of kidnappings, particularly in light of the kidnappings of John Paul Getty III in 1973, Patty Hearst in 1974 and the Chowchilla bus hijacking of 1976.

“Sometimes John and Yoko were criticized for not having adequate security,” Womack says. “The most significant concern in the 1970s was kidnapping, and that is what they were concerned about.”

Womack told the story of Lennon’s final days in his book John Lennon 1980: The Last Days in the Life of John, but with a catch.

“I purposely left him out of my book,” he says. “To me, I try not to give them any more energy because that is what they were trying to achieve. A lot of these are ways in which our culture is broken. Notorious celebrities are good celebrities in our eyes.”

Even after 55 years, the murder still baffles many.

“It is heartbreaking,” Womack says, “I don’t know what it says about us that there is this darkness that we want to kill our heroes. It makes no sense.”