That December night in 1980, a young man with a revolver shot John Lennon four times in the back while the singer was returning home from the studio with his wife, Yoko Ono.
Police found his killer reading a book while he was waiting to be arrested in front of a building in Manhattan.
Lennon was taken to hospital in the back seat of a police car, but "had not the slightest chance of surviving" despite several blood transfusions, doctors told reporters.
The world-famous singer was only 40 years old.
His killer Marc Chapman, then 25, arrived from Hawaii, and the day before, as Lennon left the building, he got a signature on the singer’s latest album, “Double Fantasy”.
"I saw a photo of him signing an autograph. It was spinning on television over and over again," Yoko Ono wrote to fans a month later in an article that appeared in all the major newspapers across the country.
"Somehow that photo was harder for me to look at than the photo of him dead. John was in a hurry that afternoon. He didn't have to give an autograph, but he did it, while the man was watching him, the man who would betray him later."
Years later Mark Chapman, a Protestant Christian, told a reporter from his prison cell that he was “angry at Lennon because (in the song“ God ”) he said he didn’t believe in God, that he only believed in himself and Yoko, and that he didn’t believe in the Beatles.
Lennon’s words that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus” also irritated him.
Chapman was declared accountable for the trial and was sentenced to life in prison, where he remains. The 12th parole hearing is scheduled for 2022.
Then-US President Ronald Reagan - who would later survive the assassination attempt himself - called the assassination a "great tragedy" as thousands of mourners gathered in front of the building where Lennon lived with Ono and his son Sean.
It announced that no public funeral would be held. Instead, she sent a message to fans who gathered under her window and sang, to gather at an amphitheater in nearby Central Park that Sunday to pay tribute to her late husband.
On December 14, despite the cold, about 200,000 people in New York paid tribute to Lennon, while all radio stations stopped broadcasting for ten minutes.
Across the U.S., tens of thousands of people headed to “parks, squares, parking lots or theaters - even the natural amphitheater of the Rocky Mountains, where the Beatles performed in 1964.
Millions of others in the world have joined them.
In Moscow, where the Beatles ’albums were banned but circulated on the black market, paying homage lasted for days. Police eventually dispersed the young men who had gathered near the university carrying Lennon’s portraits.
A similar dispersal of Beatles fans occurred in Prague.
Emotions were especially strong in Britain, especially in Lennon’s hometown of Liverpool. About 20,000 people sang "Give Peace a Chance" at the end of the concert in honor of the singer.
Decades after his death, Lennon’s legacy is still present, while items associated with it arrive at auctions.
The piano on which he composed the song “Imagine” sold in London in 2000 for $ 2.45 million, while one of his guitars in the U.S. in 2015 fetched a price of $ 2 million.
Other expensive relics include a pair of his round sunglasses that someone bought in 2019 for 137,500 pounds and a lock of his hair that sold in Texas in 2016 for $ 35,000.
Forty years after Lennon's death, the remaining surviving members of the Beatles, Paul McCartny and Ringo Starr, are still involved in music.
Sir Paul may be 78 years old, but on December 18 he will release his 18th solo album, "McCartney III".
It will be the third album released by McCartney, on which he not only wrote all the songs, but also played all the instruments, from piano to drums.
Legendary drummer Ringo is 80 years old and doesn’t enjoy the same level of global fame as Lennon and McCartney, or even the late George Harrison, but he still holds on.
If covid-19 allows it, Ringo should be on a US tour in 2021, as the frontman of his band "All Starr Band".
John Lennon was not afraid of aging: how many times he sang to his wife Yoko Ono, he wanted to "grow old with her." However, fate had other plans - John Lennon was killed by a deranged fan on December 8, 1980. Today we remember the great musician.