An album that John Lennon autographed hours before his death at the request of the man who would later shoot him has gone on sale.
The former Beatle signed the Double Fantasy record outside his New York home on December 8, 1980, after it was thrust at him by Mark Chapman, who killed him at the spot later that day.
The record is priced at $1.5 million (£1.15 million). “It’s the most incredible artefact in rock and roll history,” said Bob Zafian of Moments in Time, a dealership acting for the private seller.
Chapman, 62, was convicted of second degree murder in 1981 and is serving a sentence of 20 years to life at a prison in New York.
Once a dedicated fan of the Beatles, he turned against Lennon after becoming a Christian and dwelling retrospectively on a controversial comment that the singer made in 1966 about the Beatles being “more popular than Jesus”.
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On the day of Lennon’s killing, Chapman loitered outside the Dakota building — an apartment block overlooking Central Park — where Lennon lived with his wife, Yoko Ono, and their son Sean, then aged five.
When Lennon emerged with Ono at about 5pm, Chapman got to shake hands with him and pose for a photograph as his former idol signed his album. At 10.50pm the couple returned home, whereupon Chapman fired four shots into Lennon from a revolver then opened JD Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye, with which he had become obsessed, and started reading.
To keep his hands free for murder, Chapman had placed the signed album in a plant pot, where it was found by a maintenance man and turned over to police, who returned it to its finder after the trial.