ATTICA, N.Y., Sept. 17 (UPI) -- The man who killed John Lennon told a New York parole board he signed up for protective custody to receive conjugal visits with his wife.
Mark David Chapman, who has been imprisoned at the Attica Correctional Facility in Attica, N.Y., since pleading guilty in 1981 to Lennon's 1980 shooting death, said he was in mandatory protective custody for the first few years of his imprisonment and he signed on voluntarily when he was offered conjugal visits with his wife, Gloria Hiroko Chapman, the New York Daily News reported Friday.
"The condition was to sign into protective custody because they opened up the program to only inmates in protective custody; so I did that," a transcript of Thursday's hearing quotes Chapman as saying.
Chapman, who was denied parole for the sixth time Thursday, is allowed up to 44 consecutive hours with his wife during the visits, the Daily News said. The newspaper quoted sources as saying Chapman sees his wife about once per year.
Chapman, who is serving a sentence of 20 years to life, told the parole board he found Jesus while in prison and is prepared to remain in jail for "however long it takes" to atone for his crime, even if that means "forever."
"My life has really changed and I'm thankful for my prison experience, because without it, I wouldn't have found it," he said. "I felt that by killing John Lennon, I would become somebody and instead of that, I became a murderer and murderers are not somebodies."
