New York State Dept. of Corrections

Mark David Chapman is seen in this May 15, 2012, photo from the New York State Department of Corrections.

The killer of ex-Beatle John Lennon says he used hollow point bullets to shoot the singer “because they were more deadly.”

Mark David Chapman retold chilling details of his Dec. 8, 1980, crime during a New York parole board hearing on Aug. 22. He was denied parole for a seventh time the next day and remains at Wende Correctional Facility in western New York. The parole department released transcripts of the hearing Wednesday.

Chapman said he was living in Hawaii when he decided to target Lennon “because he was very famous.”

He said he also considered targeting television host Johnny Carson and actor George C. Scott.

But Lennon was more famous, Chapman said. He insisted he had no anger toward Lennon: “If he was less famous than three or four other people on the list, he would not have been shot.”

Associated Press

John Lennon is shown performing Aug. 30, 1972, at New York's Madison Square Garden.

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Chapman said he bought the gun he used in Honolulu and needed only to show a driver’s license to get it. However, he said he got the hollow-point bullets from an old friend in Atlanta who was a police officer.

“I made a phone call in New York and the fellow said, ‘you’re not going to get any bullets out of me. It’s just not done here.’”

He said he told his Atlanta friend he needed the bullets for protection.

“I didn’t tell him what I was going to do,” Chapman said.

When asked why he chose hollow-point, Chapman responded “Because they were more deadly.”

Asked if he wanted to “inflict death,” on Lennon, Chapman responded, “Yes. Absolutely.”

Chapman said he had flown from Hawaii to New York twice to check out Lennon’s apartment building, called the Dakota.

He said on one trip, he saw the film “Ordinary People,” and called his wife, who was in Hawaii, and told her of his deadly plan but that he decided not to go through with it.

The compulsion to kill grew again after he returned to Hawaii, so he flew back to New York without telling his wife he planned to kill Lennon, said Chapman, who was 25 at the time.

Chapman said that on the day he shot Lennon, he staked out the Dakota from before noon and talked to him early in the day.

“He was very kind to me” and signed an album while his wife, Yoko Ono, waited in a limousine, Chapman said.

“Very cordial and very decent man,” Chapman said. “… But I was so compelled to commit murder that nothing would have dragged me away from that building.”

Just before 11 p.m., Lennon and Ono arrived at the apartment building. Ono got out of the car first, Chapman said, and went into the alcove of the Dakota as Lennon lingered at the car a moment.

“And then when Mr. Lennon passed me I turned, pulled out my weapon and shot him in the back,” Chapman said.

The record, he said, shows him calling out “Mr. Lennon,” but he told the parole board he didn’t say that.

“I just shot him,” he said.

Chapman fired five shots with a .38-caliber revolver, hitting Lennon four times in front of Ono and others.

There was a scream, and the Dakota doorman, Jose, grabbed Chapman’s pistol, the gunman told the parole board.

Chapman said he was carrying a copy of J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” when he shot Lennon. He claimed to identify with the main character, “who seemed to be lost and troubled.”

While in prison, Chapman said, he has been in his cell writing letters, reading and thinking.

He also said he has been having conjugal visits with his wife “pretty steady” for 20 years. His wife lives in Hawaii, he said.

He also said he has a “deep relationship with Christ” that started when he was in a Christian camp at age 16.

“So this is obviously very embarrassing for me now, having committed murder,” Chapman said.

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If he were to be paroled, Chapman said, he would go to Medina, N.Y., about 50 miles northeast of Buffalo, where a minister whom his wife met offered to refurbish an apartment and give him two jobs on his farm.

Chapman said he had corresponded with the pastor but met him just two days before the parole hearing.

The reason for the crime, according to Chapman: “Attention, bottom line.”

He said he received the attention but now he feels it was an “absolutely ridiculously selfish act to take another human life so that I could be pumped up into, you know, something that I wasn’t to begin with.”

He also told a parole commissioner, “Fame is ridiculous. It holds no value.”

“It was a very selfish act and I deeply regret it,” Chapman told the board. “I’m sorry for my crime.”

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New York State Dept. of Corrections

Mark David Chapman is seen in this handout photo taken May 15, 2012, from the New York State Department of Corrections and released to Reuters August 23, 2012.

John Lennon's killer, Mark David Chapman, was denied release from prison in his seventh appearance before a parole board, New York corrections officials said Thursday.

Chapman, 57, was denied parole by a three-member panel after a hearing Wednesday, the state Department of Corrections said.

Chapman shot Lennon in December 1980 outside the Manhattan apartment building where the former Beatle lived. He was sentenced in 1981 to 20 years to life in prison after pleading guilty to second-degree murder. The musician, singer and songwriter was 40.

Chapman was transferred in May from the Attica Correctional Facility in western New York to the nearby Wende Correctional Facility. Both are maximum security. The prison system doesn't disclose why inmates are transferred.

In its denial, the panel called Lennon's killing a "callous disregard for the sanctity of human life." It told Chapman in a written statement:

"The panel notes your prison record of good conduct, program achievements, educational accomplishments, positive presentation remorse, risk and needs assessment, letters of support, significant opposition to your release and all other statutory factors were considered.”

“However, parole shall not be granted for good conduct and program completions alone.  Therefore, despite your positive efforts while incarcerated, your release at this time would greatly undermine respect for the law and tend to trivialize the tragic loss of life which you caused as a result of this heinous, unprovoked, violent, cold and calculated crime.” 

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A hearing transcript will be released in a few days, the Corrections department told NBC News. Chapman can try again for parole in August, 2014, the board said.

At his 2010 hearing, Chapman recalled that he had considered shooting Johnny Carson or Elizabeth Taylor instead, and said again that he chose Lennon because the ex-Beatle was more accessible, that his century-old Upper West Side apartment building by Central Park "wasn't quite as cloistered." Chapman fired five shots outside the Dakota apartment house on Dec. 8, 1980, hitting Lennon four times in front of his wife, Yoko Ono, and others.

The former security guard from Hawaii said that his motivation was instant notoriety but that he later realized he made a horrible decision for selfish reasons.

"I felt that by killing John Lennon I would become somebody and instead of that I became a murderer and murderers are not somebodies," Chapman told the board two years ago.

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Ono, 79, had said two years ago that she was trying to be "practical" in asking that her husband's killer remain behind bars. She said Chapman might be a danger to her, other family members and perhaps even himself.

In a 1992 interview at Attica, Chapman told Barbara Walters that it was dark when he shot Lennon in the back with a .38-caliber revolver after he exited a limousine, headed up the walkway to his apartment building and looked at Chapman. "I heard this voice — not an audible voice, an inaudible voice — saying over and over, 'Do it, do it, do it,'" Chapman said. He explained, "I thought that by killing him I would acquire his fame."

He has been in protective custody with a good disciplinary record, according to corrections officials.

This article includes reporting by The Associated Press.

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By John Baiata, NBC News Senior Editor

John Lennon spends the day befitting a man whose intellectual curiosity shows little signs of waning in this, his 70th year. In the morning, he tinkers with the melody to a song he is contributing to a collection commissioned by U2’s Bono, the proceeds of which will go toward Bono’s “ONE” campaign to eliminate extreme poverty and preventable diseases in Africa.

Setting aside his guitar, Lennon sifts through some unattended pieces of mail, the most prominent of which is a letter from former President Bill Clinton, thanking him for his work as a special ambassador to the Clinton Foundation’s Global Initiative, an organization whose wide body of work Lennon describes as “more substantive than anything going on at the United Nations – they’re too busy over there drinking their lunches. ”Yes, his tongue remains as sharp as his legendary wit.

After a quiet lunch with Yoko at the Dakota apartment building that has been their home for nearly 40 years now, the two walk the four blocks to the art gallery they have owned and overseen for years. Afterwards, John and Yoko walk arm-in-arm back to the Dakota. As familiar to the area now as any local landmark, they go unmolested on their way.

It’s folly, of course, to try to imagine the possibilities, for they were snuffed out – along with John Lennon’s life – 30 years ago. And yet that is in essence what Lennon asked us to do, through his art and through his actions. To dream of the possibilities. To consider a world where war was anathema, and love would trump all. To imagine.

Lennon was a confounding soul. Churlish and brutally direct, he could be withering in his criticisms. Yet he was generous and introspective – a complicated amalgam of a man. “A man,” said radio personality Ken Dashow, “of absolute contradictions.” 

Dashow, a disc jockey at New York’s classic rock station Q104.3 and host of its popular “Breakfast with the Beatles” program every Sunday morning, says Lennon would be just as relevant if he were alive today. “He would be outraged at the callousness toward the general working man in America. He would have railed against the military/industrial complex. He would have been involved in the political process.”    

In 1971, Lennon sat for an exhaustive nine-hour interview with Rolling Stone. Asked to conjure his own future, à la the Beatles’ “When I’m Sixty Four,” Lennon said, “I hope (Yoko and I) are a nice old couple, living off the coast of Ireland or something like that. Looking at our scrapbook of madness.”
  
It’s a nice image, if one that sounds suspiciously like one of Lennon’s many interview toss-offs. Certainly it’s one that Dashow is not buying. “This country was his home. And he felt that New York was the only place he wouldn’t be mobbed by fans.”  
   
‘My whole life is a tribute to him.’
Sean Lennon, the youngest of Lennon’s two sons and the only child between John and Yoko Ono, was just 5 years old when his father was taken from him.

In Philip Norman’s well-received 2008 biography, “John Lennon, The Life,” Sean tries to reconcile the icon with the man he knew, however briefly, as his father: “I feel like my whole life is a tribute to him. But to go to a museum or see a movie that depicts his life, it just hurts… I don’t need to see movies or shows about him. I don’t need to prove to the world that he did all those things.”     
    
As painful as those exercises may be for those who knew and loved him, they’re all but requisite for the many who never knew the man, but feel as if they do because his work is so personal, his music so resonant. The slew of projects that coincided with what would have been his 70th birthday just two months ago is testament to that. The bottom line, says Dashow, is “anything that brings him closer to the listener, to his true fans, gives you a deeper understanding of his work.”

MSNBC.com readers recall the night John Lennon died

Early musician activist    
Lennon’s life, particularly his post-Beatles life, was defined as much through his activism as through his music. The two, of course, were two threads of the same cloth. He practically invented the musician-as-social-activist persona that is so ubiquitous now. Songs like “Gimme Some Truth,” a diatribe against the political machinery of the era (embodied by the Nixon administration’s attempts to deport him for his anti-war stance), seem particularly apt today.

He leveraged his celebrity to try and affect change to an extent, arguably, that no musician had before. Could he have sustained his place? “He couldn’t help himself,” Dashow argues. “Great artists can’t just turn off the spigot… He had to comment on everything that was going on.”

Yoko Ono, asked this past October what Lennon’s take on the world’s state of affairs  would have been now, told the Associated Press: “He would have been totally angry. He would have felt like he wanted to run somewhere and just bang something or strangle someone, you know?  But then I think, I’m sure he would have relaxed and decided he should still be an activist.”
       
What is the legacy?
So how do you measure a legacy, 30 years on? Through the lives of his wife and sons, and their noble efforts to keep him relevant? Through the discographies and exhibits, the downloads and documentaries? By counting the number of times protestors have taken to the streets to the strains of “Power to the People” echoing in their ears, or a parent has sung “Beautiful Boy” as their child drifts off to sleep?  In all of these ways.
 
On the morning of December 8, 1980, the day of his senseless murder, John was joined by Yoko for an interview with RKO radio. He talked about the turmoil of the 1970s, and spoke hopefully of the future: “It’s still up to us to make what we can of it.”

That simple, declarative sentence neatly sums up Lennon’s mindset.  It’s not up to the authorities, or fate, he was saying, to pave the way forward. Had he lived, he would  almost assuredly have carried the torch further. Needling the cradles of power, denouncing the status quo, and exalting us all to just… Imagine. It’s easy if you try.

Lennon's last interview: 'There's plenty of time'

Newsweek: Lennon's other legacy

John Lennon: Imagine him at 70