Mark David Chapman had come to the conclusion that John Lennon was a hypocrite and a phony: A rich man singing about peace and love, unwilling to actually make changes in the world. He recalled having listened to John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band in the weeks before the murder: “I would listen to this music and I would get angry at him, for saying that he didn’t believe in God… and that he didn’t believe in the Beatles. This was another thing that angered me, even though this record had been done at least 10 years previously. I just wanted to scream out loud, ‘Who does he think he is, saying these things about God and heaven and the Beatles?’ At that point, my mind was going through a total blackness full of anger and rage. So I brought the hate home, into this The Catcher in the Rye milieu where my mindset was Holden Caulfield and anti-phoniness”. Chapman had decided that taking the life of someone so famous would, finally, make his life meaningful. He would later go on to say: “I felt that by killing John Lennon I would become somebody and instead of that I became a murderer, and murderers are not somebodies”.

Stories of Indian Cinema: Abandoned and Rescued