The Tragedy of True Crime : Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us

In 2001, John J. Lennon killed a man on a Brooklyn Street. Now he’s a journalist, working from behind bars, trying to make sense of it all.

The Tragedy of True Crime is a first-person journalistic account of the lives of four men who have killed, written by a man who has killed. Lennon entered the New York prison system with a sentence of 28 years to life. Later, he stepped into a writing workshop at Attica, and his whole life changed. Drawing on first-person reporting from the cell block and the prison yard, Lennon challenges our obsession with true crime by telling the full lives of men who have killed. These men have completely different backgrounds and stories — Robert Chambers, a preppy Manhattanite turned true crime celebrity; Milton E. Jones, a burglar coaxed into something far darker; and Michael Shane Hale, a gay man caught in a crime of passion — and all are searching to find meaning and redemption behind bars. Lennon’s reporting is intertwined with his own story, from a young man seduced by the infamous gangster culture of New York City to a celebrated prison journalist. The same desire echoes throughout the lives of these four men: to become more than murderers. In this first of its kind book of immersive prison journalism, The Tragedy of True Crime poses fundamental questions about the stories we tell and who gets to tell them. What essential truth do we lose when we don’t consider all that comes before an act of unthinkable violence? And what happens to the convicted after the cell gate locks?