ALBANY, N.Y. — John Lennon’s killer said he used hollow-point bullets to make sure the former Beatle died, but that he did not suffer.

“I secured those bullets to make sure he would be dead,” Mark David Chapman said, according to a transcript released Thursday of his late August parole hearing.

MARK DAVID CHAPMAN

“It was immediately after the crime that I was concerned that he did not suffer,” Chapman said.

Chapman, who ultimately was denied parole for a 10th time, said amidst the chaos after he gunned down Lennon on Dec. 8, 1980, as the singer and his wife, Yoko Ono, returned from a late night recording session to their Dakota building apartment across from Central Park, he thought he might face an angry mob.

“Afterward I was maybe a little shocked myself and I am like, ‘You know, anything can happen here,'” he said.

But that fear passed once he was in the police car. He said the officer who cuffed him was “a big fellow” and professional.

Chapman said he also felt safe once he was behind bars, where he was separated from the rest of the inmate population.

At one point, he was sent to Rikers Island, where he said he had an entire tier to himself. He never feared the staff might try to hurt him.

Chapman called his 1981 plea to second-degree murder without a trial “the right thing to do” and said he would have accepted an even stiffer sentence than the 20-years-to-life he received.

Now 63, he reiterated he felt he was overcome by the devil in wanting to kill Lennon.