John J. Lennon was 24 years old in December of 2001 when he shot his former friend Alex Lawson with an M-16 assault rifle, then transferred Lawson’s body to a laundry bag with a cinder block inside and hurled it into the Atlantic Ocean. The bag washed ashore on a Brooklyn beach in February of the following year. Lennon is now serving his 24th year of a 28-year sentence at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York, where he has become a prolific and celebrated writer on matters of criminal justice.
There is considerable demand for content related to true crime; streaming services are awash with episodic shows delving into crime and criminal investigations; podcasts in the same category number in the tens of thousands. Much of the output that falls within that category is true—fact-checked, verified—but what Lennon suggests in his book, The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us, is that a deeper look into the lives of true crime’s villains can reveal a much more ambiguous picture than the genre’s good-versus-evil formula tends to permit. Many people who commit heinous crimes have a history of criminal victimization themselves. From this vantage, evil becomes something dauntingly diffuse, with culpability for any given bad act branching outward through society like spidering veins.
The Tragedy of True Crime is devoted to challenging the simplistic narratives advanced by the true-crime genre, largely by establishing that there is more to the prototypical antagonist than his crimes. In this way, Lennon seems to be making an implicit argument that murderers’ identities should not forever be defined by their worst act. For Lennon, the book itself is an assertion of his identity beyond that of a killer: He is earnestly insistent that his book is a work of journalism, which is hard to dispute, and that he himself is a journalist, which is equally hard to dispute. Lennon is a contributing editor at Esquire, and has written for a wide range of respected publications, including The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, New York magazine, and The Atlantic. His crime precipitated his career, and his work is two things at once: legitimate, solid journalism, and a bid at redemption. It achieves the former; the latter may be beyond journalism’s power.
Lennon’s book certainly demonstrates an interest in the facts—many of which fall outside the usual true-crime purview, but are just as horrifying. The first of the cases Lennon considers is that of Matthew Shane Hale, who was convicted of the 1995 murder of his partner, Stefan Tanner, with whom he’d had a tumultuous and occasionally abusive relationship. When Hale decided to permanently end the affair, a fight broke out between the two men, and Hale bashed Tanner’s head against a concrete floor before stuffing him into the trunk of his car and later covering his head with a plastic bag. In 1999, a New York jury sentenced Hale to a minimum of 50 years in prison with parole eligibility after 50 years.
That much is public record. What Lennon adds to the facts of the case are the elements that preceded it. Hale, Lennon writes, grew up gay in Kentucky, and was sexually abused at age 10 by the father of one of his friends, and by age 11 or 12, in his estimation, he was sexually servicing older boys, and then friends of his father’s, and then, finally, his father himself. “When I did this, dad’s hand would wind up on my head or ass,” Hale tells Lennon. “There was a part of me that had plausible deniability that what was happening was happening. Dad was passed out, and I was so starved for dad’s attention and affection that I would resort to molesting my father.”
Here Lennon offers an account of sexual abuse so frank and blunt, it almost seems addressed to fans of true crime, who may be used to tales of graphic violence but less acquainted with the torture, desperation, and privation that tend to mark the lives of murderers before their offenses. Typically, the gory detail marshaled by true-crime creators serves to heighten a forthcoming catharsis: The more heinous the murder, the more satisfying the eventual incarceration, death, or execution. But here, the level of detail devoted to the crimes committed against Hale in his early years serves to complicate, rather than accentuate, the notion of Hale as irredeemable. The fact that many murderers live horrendously difficult lives prior to their crimes is disquieting: It suggests that murder arises not necessarily from some deliberate private initiative but also from factors outside a person’s control, including innate limitations (such as intellectual disability and mental illness) and psychological and emotional damage inflicted upon them by others.
Lennon is careful not to present any of those factors as an excuse for murder, especially when he considers his own background. He describes a turbulent and impoverished childhood amid a culture of criminality that he credits with his early engagement in using and selling drugs. But Lennon also acknowledges that he is responsible for the catastrophic choices he made leading up to Lawson’s murder, as well as the ones that came after. Lennon writes that he came to prison entirely unreformed, and immediately immersed himself in the violent subculture of prison gangs.
Lennon’s other case studies concern Milton Jones, a New York man who murdered two Catholic priests in 1987, when he was 17 years old, and Robert Chambers, the so-called “preppy killer,” who strangled a teenage girl to death in Central Park in 1986. Milton’s background was marked by poverty, abuse, neglect, and early exposure to violence, and he showed signs of untreated mental illness at an early age. Lennon intimates that childhood experiences beyond Milton’s control inclined him to violence—and then, in an interesting contrast, introduces Chambers’s case, which unfolded in a seemingly opposite way. Unlike Milton, Chambers was born into relative privilege, then attended expensive prep schools and earned admission to Boston University; his upscale background, in conjunction with the youth of his victim, led to a media frenzy around the case. But Lennon’s examination of Chambers’s case reveals an isolated and alienated person, adrift in society, who had descended into drug use, alcoholism, and petty theft. Lennon documents Milton’s struggles with mental illness in prison, where psychiatric disorders are rarely treated adequately—a commentary on incarceration as a form of warehousing the mentally ill. Lennon also tracks Chambers’s experiences with release and reincarceration, a fair-minded acknowledgment that some people are too damaged to take advantage of second chances.
True-crime fans may be primed to prize a neat wrap-up to harrowing tales of violent crime—the perpetrator goes to prison and the matter is settled—but Lennon observes that those conclusions, too, mask deep ambiguities. He reports, for instance, that he interviewed the lead detective on Hale’s murder case and learned that the specific events leading up to Tanner’s death were presented differently by the prosecution than by the detectives. Lennon takes this to suggest that the prosecution may have fabricated some elements altogether. What Lennon finds is not dispositive of prosecutorial misconduct, but the discrepancy ought to give one pause. Many offenders’ cases continue long after they are convicted and imprisoned, often leading to evidence that complicates official narratives.
Crime is criminogenic, meaning that criminal victimization increases a person’s likelihood of committing crimes themselves. This is somewhat difficult to accept, because it reveals that criminal activity is often part of a chain of wrongdoing into which the offender was drawn, and because it implies that abuse might inflict moral damage, among its many harms.
But murder is not something you can undo with the undertaking of a new career. In 2019, The Washington Post Magazine ran an essay by Lennon titled “The Apology Letter,” in which he explores his struggle to come to terms with his remorse for Lawson’s murder, explaining that he has changed radically since the homicide, largely due to his career as a journalist. “The more I published, the more I felt like I was earning a new identity,” Lennon wrote. “I no longer wanted to be the killer, I wanted to be the writer.” Months later, the Post ran a letter to the editor from Lennon’s victim’s sister, Taisha Lawson, who excoriated Lennon as insincere, with an appetite for notoriety. She also posted a petition several years ago on MoveOn.org protesting the possibility of Lennon receiving clemency, which argued that Lennon’s “occupation does not change the fact that he is capable of murder or lying for his own self interest … John J. Lennon the writer is still the man capable of cold-blooded murder.”
Humanizing the criminals behind true crime is, in Lennon’s case, self-serving, and his efforts to fashion a new identity have been met with resistance. For him, insisting upon his identity as a journalist as opposed to a killer means laying claim to the kind of dignity and credibility typically denied to people behind bars, and perhaps the sort of validation and respect he had been searching for when he started down the criminal path that eventually led to murder.
No one in Taisha Lawson’s position could be expected to feel anything but skeptical of that effort. Lennon ended her brother’s life, and he doesn’t deny this; in this instance, he is not looking so much for forgiveness as an opportunity to be something other than a killer. In writing this book, he has inarguably achieved that.
