Reviewed here
The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us
John J. Lennon
New York, NY: Celadon, 2025.
All genres become more interesting when they come into conflict with themselves, but true crime seems unique in that it is only at its best when thus self-divided. Consider Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, which attacks Joe McGinnis’s earlier true-crime bestseller Fatal Vision and then, still unsatisfied, attacks itself. Or there’s Chaos, by Tom O’Neill, which tears down the story of the bestselling true-crime book in history—Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter—and then, in its place, leaves us nearly nothing: a heap of tantalizing, incompatible leads. Or there are the exculpatory true-crime works: Malcolm’s Crime of Sheila McGough or the first season of Serial, which are also works of anti-true crime in that they undo the fictions of prosecutors.
I could name a few more examples—none of which would be Truman Capote’s lovely but disingenuous In Cold Blood. Beyond these texts and a handful of others, though, the genre is sensational but generally unsatisfying. It so often starts with great questions and ends with tiny answers. Who did it? This guy. Why did he do it? Evil is a mystery. For all that the word “monster” gets thrown around by true-crime writers and podcasters, what the genre most studies is demons: creatures that are so thoroughly evil as to possess a kind of anti-integrity. A monster, by contrast, scares and fascinates us because he is a mixed creature. John Carpenter’s Thing is most horrifying when it looks simultaneously like its victims, their screaming heads twinned, and like the bland whiteness that ate them both. The part of someone that makes him a sweet, encouraging elder brother should not be able to coexist, Thing-like, with the part that murders someone else’s older brother and perhaps enjoys doing it. Sadly, we are all mixed in this way to some degree. The part of me that drives hours to scream slogans and wave signs at a private prison that ICE is currently using—a part of me that I basically respect, though I pity his impotence—ought not to coexist with the part of me that keeps on buying chocolate bars at the CVS, knowing full well that slave labor likely constitutes part of these companies’ supply chains.
John J. Lennon is, at the moment, probably this country’s foremost imprisoned journalist. This title won’t be taken from him any time soon, not because there aren’t many talented and inquisitive people in prison but because the barriers to entry are so nearly impassible. A journalist’s life is a daunting prospect these days even to a person with freedom of movement, a real computer, the ability to make phone calls in private. Lennon’s new book, The Tragedy of True Crime, concludes with an author’s note that describes the makeshifts that he and his supporters have had to adopt so he can fulfill the most basic parts of an author’s job:
Receiving a 100,000-word work-in-progress manuscript in prison is harder than you may think, especially when that prison system is dealing with a K2 crisis. The drug looks like a regular piece of paper to the unknowing eye, but one sheet sprayed with K2 chemicals is worth about $1000 in prison.… Our regular mail, which was already limited to five pages at a time, was now being photocopied in the mail room. For a while, lawyers I knew would do me a favor and mail my book edits via legal mail; it’s privileged mail, so the CO opens it in front of you, inspects it, and then gives you all the pages. But dealers were using legal mail, too, and officials soon started cracking down on mail that didn’t appear to be official legal documents.… The most normal thing, a writer reading his manuscript, became a teeth-grindingly frustrating process.
And that’s just editing. We take emailing for granted but for years, Lennon had to cold-pitch editors by snail mail or dictate emails to colleagues on the outside. He wrote his first drafts on the one kind of typewriter most prisons allow, the Swintec with a clear plastic case (to prevent hidden contraband) and a 7,000-character memory. Later, he upgrades to an electronic tablet with a 6,000-word memory, and he composes and edits the book largely via email. (The tablet is provided by Securus/Jpay, a prison communication system that charges inmates a nominal fee to send and receive messages; this is not access to the Internet, merely messaging.) No matter what they may think of the rest of the book, nonfiction writers cannot fail to be moved and inspired by Lennon’s methods, though he certainly doesn’t do it all himself. “To be a journalist on the inside, you need help on the outside,” Lennon acknowledges, and he is generous and specific in praising his collaborators and mentors, especially his assistant Matt Litman and his publicist Megan Posco. (Another person he thanks is Hedgehog’s own Leann Davis Alspaugh; yet another is the writer Pete Davis, who many Hedgehog readers might know for his 2021 book Dedicated.)
Their efforts, and Lennon’s, were worth it. The Tragedy of True Crime is both a critique of and a major contribution to true-crime literature. Lennon tells his own story as well as he can, weaving it into the story of three other men, all of them convicted killers, whom he’s known during his time inside. He also describes how all four of them have been served and mis-served by the true-crime industrial complex. Journalists and prosecutors reduced these men to demons; Lennon’s richly detailed narrative restores these men to that mixed quality—that state of monstrosity—that makes them troublingly like the rest of us.
Lennon begins by describing his own brush with the true-crime industrial complex. It involved talking to broadcaster Chris Cuomo. (Prison wasn’t punishment enough?) The show was called Inside Evil, and it’s interchangeable with a thousand others. People in prison watch these shows, too: Lennon listens anxiously, the night his episode broadcasts, to hear whether any of his near neighbors knew his victim. The atmosphere of paranoia created by these shows is pervasive: “My ex-wife Danielly—like millions of American women—watches hours of sensationalist true crime shows,” Lennon writes. “Every night, before she falls asleep, she hangs a tiny bell on the knob of her front door to alert her if an intruder tries to break in.” She does so in a historical moment unusual for its historically low rates of violent crime. “If murder rates in many US cities are now the lowest they’ve been in generations, why do so many people feel unsafe?” Lennon asks, clearly suggesting that part of the answer to this question is We watch incredibly lurid content in order to feel alive.
By the time of his Inside Evil appearance, in 2019, Lennon was already established in his second career as a journalist, and so he sees the problem with the show’s approach. “Was it fair for the producers to approach subjects in the series with the theme—evil—already predetermined? I was taught that journalists should come to a story with an open mind and discover the heart of it in the material itself, in the characters.” He also knows the history of its genre—he’s read In Cold Blood and taken inspiration from Emmanuel Carrere’s strange, reflexive The Adversary. He decides to try his hand:
Who can most honestly tell our stories? Cuomo? Capote? Carrere? What about me? I live with the men I write about in this book. We share the same label and, regretfully, I have more of an understanding of what they did than any other true crime storyteller.… In typical true crime, people who kill are reduced almost entirely to the parts of themselves that supposedly explain what made them kill.… I contend that the lives lived in prison after a crime are just as fascinating, and important, as those that were spiraling before it.
So, in subsequent chapters, he tells us the story of Shane, a sweet-tempered gay man who is frequently forced by prison etiquette to bathe in his cell from a bucket—gay men are informally banned from the open showers, and the closed showers are available only at a guard’s whim. He teaches soon-to-be-released prisoners how to use Naloxone to save their own and each other’s lives. Shane turns out to be Michael Shane Hale, whom the state of New York sought to execute for the murder of an abusive lover. Then we meet Milton, who is studying for a degree in theology—and who, in his teens, helped a friend murder two priests. “I don’t know how you gonna make me look human,” Milton tells Lennon. He does.
One of the amusing minor threads running through The Tragedy of True Crime is Lennon’s repeated small disagreements with left-liberals who wish prisoners well: the exact sorts of people who will be among the first to buy this book. (I am hoping that these readers, in coalition with the morbidly curious, make it a bestseller.) This minor but persistent friction—which Lennon wisely chooses neither to ignore nor to make too much of—begins before the book does, with a note about vocabulary:
In recent years, many well-intentioned journalists and activists have been rethinking the vocabulary they use to describe people in prison. The convict has become the incarcerated person, ex-cons have become the formerly incarcerated, and the criminal justice system is now the criminal legal system.… I’ve tried to use more authentic prose—convict, prisoner, the joint.
I chuckled appreciatively at this. When I first got involved in prison-activist circles, I was admonished to say “prisoner” rather than “inmate.” The reasons I was given were mysterious but world-shaking in their implications. To say “inmate” was to “reinscribe” things like colonialism, racism, punitive and retributive justice, heteropatriarchy, and so on. Why? No one ever clearly said. But “prisoner” smacked less of euphemism than “inmate” did, so I adopted it. Eight or so years later, I began to hear from the same sorts of people that “prisoner” reinscribed colonialism, racism, etc., etc., and that I should instead use “person-centered language”: “person in prison,” “imprisoned person,” and so on. Whoever came up with this system was no writer—what a lot of syllables to say the same thing! I shrugged and went on saying “prisoner.”
Another area of activist-prisoner tension that Lennon identifies is far closer to the heart of his book. To his credit, Lennon chooses to write about at least one man who will challenge most of his readers’ sympathy. Any reader with a heart will feel for Michael Shane Hale. Milton Jones is a little harder—twice, he helped rob and kill a priest, after all, men who were dedicated and much beloved. Lennon entertains the possibility that Jones was helping an accomplice take revenge for childhood sexual exploitation by Catholic clergy, but this hypothesis doesn’t pan out, leaving Jones’s motivation or his lack of it—what can only be described as his bizarre malleability—unexplained. But Jones is a working-class black man with serious, undiagnosed mental health issues: left-liberal readers, at least, will have some vocabulary for extenuating Jones. We have none for Robert Chambers.
If you’re my age, or if you watch too much TV, you know Chambers’s case. In August 1986, at the age of 19, Chambers strangled Jennifer Levin, 18. Both had been drinking. Chambers claimed that it was a case of rough sex gone wrong, that he had snapped or blacked out, even that he was defending himself from an unprovoked physical attack. Journalists called him the Preppy Killer and fixated on his Kennedy-esque physiognomy. (Lara Flynn Boyle played Levin and William Baldwin was Chambers in the 1989 TV movie.) In outline, Chambers’s story now sounds like that of a handsome, well-off white man getting away with lustmord by presenting his victim as aggressor. It might even be that, though it is doubtful that the drug-addicted, dreamy, shame-filled Chambers that Lennon presents still knows.
Lennon knows that Chambers’s story will be hard for some readers to swallow:
When I told friends on the outside that I was writing about Robert Chambers, many of the women (some in their thirties, some in their forties) weren’t familiar with the case. But as soon as they watched the Preppy Murder docuseries at my behest, they got back to me and suggested I tread lightly, especially in this moment. One female pen pal remembered the case and hated that I had empathy for Rob. She thought it would ruin my reputation if I put him in my book. Her reaction, I told her, made me want to write about him even more. She stopped talking to me.
Lennon has run afoul, here, of the strange and largely unformulated rules around empathy-rationing that disciplined left-liberal circles during the first quarter of this decade. During the 2020–22 era, when some people went not so much too far as in some baffling directions in response to the exact right problems—now we instead openly celebrate those problems and seek to make them worse—you were constantly exhorted not to “humanize” certain kinds of evildoers (white men, sex criminals, Trump voters), nor to “waste” your empathy on them. These twinned, discursive trends always struck me as funny, first because they made left-leaning people sound like tough-on-crime Republicans in a Connecticut suburb in the year 1982, and second because they’re logically incoherent. To be a humanist at all is to know that “humanizing” others is not in our power: it’s a reality words fail to capture, rather than a spell words cast. And you can’t know whether someone is a waste of empathy until you’ve empathized with them—empathy being, in my experience, an emotional condition which is not really biddable anyway. The conviction that you feel someone else’s pain, as opposed to recognizing and knowing it, is an alchemical rather than a rational process. It’s sympathy that we can choose to experience—that’s why the eighteenth century recognized sympathy, not empathy, as fundamental to a decent social and political life.
Nor does empathy force you to take any particular course of action toward someone. I empathize with lots of people whom I would nevertheless never allow in my house. The problem with all the articles about why well-groomed and well-off white men kill women and children, whether with knives, policies, or votes, is that such stories are rarely balanced by any inquiry into why, say, women end up with life sentences (it’s almost always a kill-or-be-killed situation with a male abuser), or why young black men might break gun laws. It hurts nobody to know how the “Preppy Killer” appears to himself, as a man who doesn’t understand what he did, nor how he appears to a neighbor like Lennon, as a somewhat pathetic drug addict. These are all aspects of reality, as is the terror of the dying Jennifer Levin and the grief of her family.
If some readers will struggle with Lennon’s empathy (or sympathy) for a Robert Chambers, others will question Lennon’s right to write at all. Throughout The Tragedy of True Crime, Lennon tries square two things that can’t be squared: the humanity of his subjects, including himself, and the humanity that they negated by killing someone:
Am I a writer or a murderer? Am I both? My feelings are fluid. It’s absurd to think I am as much a murderer as I am a writer. The murder was a moment in time, while writing has become my life. But even writing that feels wrong. Murder is so final and far-reaching, and the man I killed was so young (only twenty-five, one year older than me), and here I am all these years later, living a life—experiencing things he never will.
Lennon notes repeatedly that his victim’s family still loathes him, that the appearance of his byline anywhere reopens old wounds.
Throughout the book, Lennon thus tries to solve the world’s hardest rhetorical problem: to take responsibility for himself, to acknowledge his subjects’ culpability, to never seem as though he is making excuses, while still appealing to his readers’ sympathies. In this way, the book reminded me of the parole and resentencing hearings and other court proceedings that I have sat through. (From 2014 to 2024 I edited a journal of creative writing by prisoners; through that work, and through my wife’s work running the Prison Creative Arts Project from 2014 to 2019, I have befriended a number of people who have done time.) These hearings are terrifying, because you are watching people who may have little training in rhetoric try to pass a test that Demosthenes would have failed, an argumentative Kobayashi Maru scenario designed so that nobody survives it: to narrate their crime in a way that genuinely contextualizes it, that shows how it is something a human being placed as they were, with their precise history and makeup, might very well do, but also to accept total responsibility. That sounds possible, except that “responsibility,” as judges in these settings seem to understand it, means not just “I did this,” but “Only someone as reprehensible as myself could or would have done this.” You have to say, simultaneously, “This is the kind of thing a person could have done” and “This is the kind of thing no person but I would have done.” Think of the worst thing you ever did, the thing you’ve told only one person in your life, or the thing you’ve never told anybody, and then imagine having to spend the rest of your life in a building at once inhumanly antiseptic and constantly smelly, surrounded by people who hate you and each other, if you can’t narrate the story of this deed to a smug, well-fed, hostile stranger, in a way that both makes human sense of it and disclaims all human sense, leaves it unextenuated, unexcused, singular. You would fail.
That’s a scary thing to watch, made scarier by my own family’s extensive experience with the system (my late father-in-law did twenty years). To understand it, you read. You go through the obvious books like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow or the works of Ruth Wilson Gilmore. You study publications like The Angolite (a well-made and essential, if obviously censored, review from Louisiana’s Angola penitentiary) and The Appeal. You start noticing how often the state of Texas kills people whose stories could serve as dictionary examples of “reasonable doubt.” You realize that you’re only hearing about these folks because they caught death penalty cases—nobody has enough time or money to double-check the stories behind life-in-prison cases, let alone somebody who pled out to a felony they may not have done because they’re going to lose either way. You end up with four or five former murderers as friends, whom you trust more than any cop you’ve ever met, and way more than any prosecutor you’ve ever met. While most people default to believing the prosecution’s side in any well-publicized trial—a bad habit—you default to believing the defendant’s side—also a bad habit. You ask yourself whether seemingly obviously guilty people like Casey Anthony or O.J. Simpson got a bad rap (probably not). You start to sound like a crank. You get paranoid. You’re right to be.
This creates the biggest tension I felt with the book. I think Lennon is so scared of letting himself off too easily, and so influenced by the everyday brutality of his surroundings, that he’s too easy on the system. He tells us that prosecutors “nearly always” get it more or less right—they don’t, and it would be a miracle if they did, given the incentives they face and the advantages they enjoy compared to defenders. (Emily Bazelon’s Charged, which Lennon mentions at one point, is a good introduction to these incentives and these advantages.) We need, someday, a true crime book that examines those prosecutors and judges who knowingly or unknowingly torment the innocent. How do they live with themselves? Do theyever try to explain their actions to their victims?
If you observe the workings of courts—the false convictions and “overconvictions” (charges that fit someone’s deed in a bare and abstract sense but wildly overstate its effects or its depravity), the way a half-decent prosecutor can narrate every detail of your life as though it were of one fabric with the bad thing you did or (maybe) didn’t do, the unembarrassed self-contradiction of these same prosecutors as they, for example, switch from portraying somebody as a crime’s main author and as someone else’s tragically pliable follower, depending on whose trial it is—if you observe all that for a while and don’t reach the conclusion that they could get anybody, for anything, for as long as they want, you weren’t really observing. And if people in my world—the world of anti-prison activists, prison reformers, in-prison volunteers—can sometimes, though not as often as we’re accused of it, become Pollyannish in the way we talk about prisoners, it’s partly because this system of incentives is scarier in its way than any single serial killer. It has a lot more reach than they do, and the same sort of inhuman implacability.
When “prison abolitionism” briefly became a popular hashtag—it has yet to become a popular movement—it drew many good criticisms, and many stupid ones. The best criticism, obviously, is that when this movement forces itself to be specific about the policies it advocates, it ends up reinventing either prisons or blood feuds. That is, it either tends toward a program of root-and-branch prison reform, which is fully justified and which our society desperately needs but which isn’t quite what the name advertises, or toward “community responses” which sound a lot like pre-state mob violence.
In turn, one of the stupidest criticisms was this: that only privileged people could favor prison abolition. In fact, if you’ve spent any time even slightly adjacent to that movement—especially the pre-2020 version of that movement—you know that it rests almost entirely on the shoulders of working-class black women. The rest of us amount to a rounding error.
It is true, though, that I haven’t met a lot of actual prisoners who favor prison abolition. The one time I have spoken with Lennon, for a 2018 interview that appeared in The Point, he was adamant on this, well, point. (Full disclosure: It was a fun conversation. I liked him.) Every prisoner knows a guy who really needs to be locked away, at least for now, and many of them remember being that guy. I can’t argue with this. I can name lots of guys who need to be locked away, some of whom govern the country. That’s the thing about prison: If you make it bad enough to function as punishment, you also make it the exact sort of place that privileged people will pull out every stop to save each other from, and—this is inherent in the concept “privileged”—they’ll often succeed in doing so. A Nixon will tend to get pardoned; a Trump will avoid jail even when convicted; a Harvey Weinstein will float long enough to see his career as a rapist turned into a joke on 30 Rock before he’s finally taken down. Charles Manson is an OK argument against prison abolition, but Jeffrey Epstein is a terrible one. (Even with Manson, the abolitionists have an argument that deserves consideration: Manson’s character was formed more decisively by juvie hall than by any family. I don’t think anyone seriously disputes this point. Unfortunately, once a Manson is created, you still have to do something about him.)
For accounting purposes alone, we need the concept of responsibility. Who do we blame for doing the thing? The adult or non-infant child who did it. Educated people read Dostoevsky and marvel at the beauty of the idea that we are all responsible for each other, and then we put the book back on the shelf: an impossible-to-realize truth. And cruel in some of its possible implications, too: I got tired of reading Lennon’s sincere self-recriminations, but I wouldn’t like the book better if he’d blamed his murder on his mother, or the victim’s family, or “society.” (This is more or less what John Henry Abbott—another prison writer whose example haunts Lennon—does in In the Belly of the Beast. It should have been all the warning Norman Mailer needed, except that Mailer suffered the same intellectual and moral debility.)
The comparison I started out by making—between the monstrosity of our everyday sins and hypocrisies and the monstrosity of the person who commits a major crime—has some truth to it, but in some ways it’s facile. We’re all monsters, morally mixed beings, but we’re not all murderers, rapists, child molesters, wifebeaters, or for that matter abusive cops, ICE officers, or sadistic prison guards. (Many people in prison are also not these things, but that’s a separate issue.) Lennon’s work challenges us to consider the ways that an ordinary sinner differs from a killer as well as the similarities. As a journalist, the profession that Janet Malcolm aligned so closely with that of murderer, Lennon offers a further deconstruction of Malcolm’s already-deconstructive book. The journalist’s crimes, which Malcolm overstated with such epigrammatic power, do not compare to those of the murderer. What they have in common is a tendency to destroy a complex thing—a live human being, a story—rather than letting complexity stand and figuring out how to live with it. The justice system, or the criminal punishment system, or whatever you call it, has the same problem.