Word: chapman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Atlanta, where Chapman spent most of his childhood, he joined a high school rock band and, like millions of others, worshiped the Beatles. He wore his hair long, in the distinctive Beatles cut, with strands flopping like a sheepdog's over his forehead. He experimented with drugs, which his idols condoned, and dropped acid when he was only 15. His parents strongly disapproved of the drugs, as well as of the Beatles, and would not let him play their records in the house. They searched his room, and once, when his mother warned him not to lock his bedroom...
After he shot Lennon, Chapman said, "I've got a good side and a bad side. The bad side is very small, but sometimes it takes over the good side and I do bad things." For most of the '70s, the good side seemed to be in control. After graduating from high school in 1973, he got a full-time job at the Y, going so far as to sign up in 1975 as a missionary in Lebanon. The trip was his dream, but civil war broke out shortly after he arrived in Beirut, and he was forced...
...Chapman's other side appears to have begun its ascendancy a year later, after a college romance fizzled. He dropped out of Covenant College, a small Presbyterian school in Tennessee, after one semester, worked as a security guard in Atlanta, then moved to Hawaii. Depressed, however, by the unhappy love affair and the impending divorce of his parents, he tried to kill himself with a car exhaust. Treated at Castle Memorial Hospital outside Honolulu, he stayed on to do odd jobs...
...time he seemed more stable. His father, a loan collector in an Atlanta bank, gave him money for a round-the-world trip. In June 1979, the stocky (5 ft. 11 in., 195 Ibs.) Chapman married Gloria Abe, the attractive Japanese American who planned the itinerary. Though Chapman earned only $4 an hour as a security guard, money seems not to have been a problem: the couple lived in a $400-a-month apartment in a downtown Honolulu highrise, and Chapman was able to indulge his newest passion, art. He bought expensive works and last year purchased...
Some time in October, Chapman's bad side took over completely. On Oct. 23 he quit his job, signing out in the logbook, John Lennon. Four days later he walked into J and S Sales, a gun shop just a block from the main Honolulu police station. Because he had no arrest record, a salesman sold him a Charter Arms .38-cal. revolver (price: $169). "It's the type used by detectives and plainclothes police because it is easy to conceal," explains Steve Grahovac, the store's owner...