John Lennon Shot Dead Outside Manhattan Home

John Lennon was shot and killed in the archway of the Dakota apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on the evening of December 8, 1980, by Mark David Chapman, a twenty-five-year-old former security guard from Hawaii who had been waiting outside the building for most of the day. Chapman had asked Lennon to sign a copy of Double Fantasy, his newly released album, earlier that afternoon, and Lennon had obliged. When Lennon and Yoko Ono returned from a recording session at the Record Plant around 10:50 p.m., Chapman fired five shots from a .38 caliber revolver, four of which struck Lennon in the back and shoulder. He was forty years old. Police officers placed the bleeding Lennon in the back of a patrol car and rushed him to Roosevelt Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. He and Ono had just released Double Fantasy, their first album together in five years, and Lennon had spent much of the previous five years as a self-described "househusband" in the Dakota, raising their son Sean, who was five when his father was killed. Lennon had fled Liverpool, then London, then the world's attention, searching for the privacy that fame had denied him since he was twenty-two. Chapman remained at the scene after the shooting, sitting on the curb and reading The Catcher in the Rye. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to twenty years to life. The Central Park memorial, Strawberry Fields, was dedicated across the street from the Dakota in 1985. People still bring flowers every day.