The Final Hours of John Lennon

MORE THAN FOUR DECADES LATER, A NEW DOCUSERIES SHEDS LIGHT ON A BEATLE'S TRAGIC DEATH-AND THE KILLER WHO ENDED A DREAM

- RACHEL DESANTIS

The last time producer Jack Douglas saw John Lennon, the former Beatle was headed home after a hard day’s work in the studio. He and his wife, Yoko Ono, had been at Record Plant in New York City, recording what would become Ono’s 1981 single “Walking on Thin Ice,” and Lennon smiled at Douglas as he went to the elevator. “He was very positive,” Douglas recalls of the end of that session on Dec. 8, 1980. “They were both just so happy.”

It would be the last time Douglas saw his friend. As Lennon and Ono were about to enter the Dakota—the building where they lived with their son Sean—Lennon was shot and killed by Mark David Chapman, a young fan who’d sought the musician’s autograph earlier that day. The shocking murder—which is being reexamined in