Millions of music fans pause every year on Dec. 8 to mourn the 1980 shooting death of Beatle John Lennon in New York City. But that wasn’t the last murderous attack on a Beatle.

My research indicates that few music fans today remember that Beatle guitarist George Harrison was nearly stabbed to death in his home in 1999.

Thirty-four-year-old Michael “Mad Mick” Abram, resident of the lunatic fringe, was a well-known paranoid schizophrenic in the suburbs of Liverpool, England. His neighbors watched as LSD, cocaine and heroin drove him ever deeper into hallucinatory delusions.

In and out of psychiatric wards, Abram became convinced that the Beatles were witches and George Harrison was their leader, a man Abram believed spoke in the devil’s tongue, and undoubtedly was an alien from hell. God then told Abram to kill George Harrison.

Unhinged and armed with a black-handled knife with a six-inch blade, Abram bought a train ticket from Liverpool to Henley-on-Thames, a six-hour ride to the north, where he located Friar Park, the sprawling, wooded estate of George Harrison.

The mansion is a massive, curious, neo-Gothic Victorian built in 1889, comprising 62 eccentric acres of caves, grottoes, underground passages, an Alpine rock garden with a scale model of the Matterhorn and a multitude of garden gnomes that were used on Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass” album cover photo.

After Lennon’s murder, a high-tech security system had been installed, monitored by guards based in a security booth at the front gate. The estate walls were topped with razor wire.

Despite these measures, on the night of Dec. 30, 1999, Michael Abram climbed through a gap in the razor wire, crossing the expansive moonlit grounds unnoticed on his manic mission. Inside the quiet house Harrison, his wife Olivia, and their 22-year-old son, Dhani, slept.

Just after 3 a.m., Harrison’s wife, Olivia, heard a great crashing of glass from their second-floor bedroom and woke her husband.

Harrison investigated in his pajamas, while Olivia tried to contact estate security personnel. Unsuccessful, she called the local police.

Harrison went out on the landing overlooking the hall, where he heard footsteps crunching on broken glass. He saw a dark figure in the shadows and called out. Spotting him, Abram rushed up the stairs.

Harrison backed into a large room, where time froze and chaos ensued as a violent, bloody scene unfolded.

Harrison, scrappy in his youth, but now in his mid-50s, charged Abram, hoping to grab the knife.

They fell wrestling to the floor. Abram landed on top of Harrison, who tried to fend off the wild-eyed Abrams’s furious blows, but the knife repeatedly struck Harrison’s upper body.

Olivia ran into the room, grabbed a brass poker, and commenced striking the attacker as hard as she could.

Angered further, Abram rose and chased Olivia toward the bedroom. He grabbed her as George, bleeding now, fell on him from behind and they tumbled to the floor. Olivia grabbed a heavy glass table lamp and began hitting Abram with all her might.

Harrison was weakening from blood loss. He later said “I could feel the strength drain from me. I vividly remember a deliberate thrust of the knife into my chest.”

With a collapsed lung, and a deep wound two inches from his heart, he felt blood gathering in his mouth.

“I believed I had been fatally stabbed,” he claimed in an interview.

Abram sliced Olivia’s forehead, leaving a bloody gash, but he was weakening from her repeated blows. He finally collapsed, and Olivia was able to grab the knife.

Two constables rushed into the house and found Olivia bloodied, clutching the lower stair rail in shock.

The bloodied Abram had crawled onto the upper landing. One officer took him into custody, as he screamed “I did it! I did it!” The other, along with Harrison’s son Dhani, who had now responded, attended to George, stemming the flow of blood from multiple knife wounds as he drifted in and out of consciousness. The paramedics arrived and rushed Harrison to the hospital. He survived the trauma.

Michael Abram was found guilty of two counts of attempted murder and other charges. Committed to a medium-security psychiatric hospital, he was released after just three years.

Though Abram couldn’t kill George Harrison, just two years later cancer would, as the throat cancer he had survived returned and spread to his brain.

On Nov. 29, 2001, after treatment in Switzerland and the United States, George Harrison died in Paul McCartney’s Los Angeles home of metastatic non-small cell lung cancer. Surrounded by family, he was 58.

Michael Abram, remorseful after the crime, still walks free in Liverpool.

John Steward lives in Waterford. You can contact him at tossinglines@gmail.com.