Twenty-five years ago, Mark David Chapman stamped his name into history by shooting four bullets into John Lennon’s back – a desperate, senseless grab for the kind of fame the voice of a generation was so steeped in. Instead, all he gained was infamy.

“I want to be important,” Chapman later said of his mind-set before the murder. The journey from nobody to notorious started in Decatur, Georgia, where he grew up with his parents and sister. After high school, Chapman worked as a camp counselor at an Atlanta YMCA and was briefly enrolled at Covenant College, a Christian university in Georgia. But he dropped out, broke off an engagement, and entered a dark period of depression.

In the spring of 1977, Chapman moved to Honolulu, where he attempted to kill himself using the exhaust from a car. In the following years, Chapman, a devout Christian, would take exception to Lennon’s perceived anti-religion beliefs. At the height of Beatlemania, Lennon had famously proclaimed the Beatles “more popular than Jesus,” and later sang in “Imagine”: “Imagine there’s no heaven.”

At the same time, Chapman developed an obsession with J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye,” the landmark novel that focuses on a disaffected youth, Holden Caulfield, during a trip to New York City. Though previously a great fan of the Beatles, Chapman began attaching Caulfield’s favorite slander – “phony”- to Lennon.

“At some point, after looking at those pictures, I became enraged at him and something in me just broke,” Chapman would explain later. “I remember saying in my mind, ‘What if I killed him?'”