Before Mark David Chapman walked up to John Lennon and shot him in the back four times, just steps away from Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Manhattan apartment in the Dakota, he had told Gloria about his idea. Two months earlier, when Chapman returned from a trip to New York, he admitted to his wife he had planned to kill Lennon. He even showed her the pistol he was going to use. Gloria’s love, he said, had prevented him from going through with it. She thought that was the end of her husband’s strange idea of making a name for himself by killing Lennon. Even after he made another trip to New York City, she believed Chapman had given up his plan.
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For months, her husband had been acting out of character. He’d become withdrawn, started drinking heavily, and physically assaulted her more than once. But after she’d converted to Christianity at Chapman’s insistence, she took its tenets seriously and forgave him all his faults, even murder. “In the Christian belief, forgiving is one of the greatest things,” she told United Press International in December 1980. “I can’t recall when I’ve not forgiven Mark.”
