In February 2014, veteran journalist Bill
Keller announced that he was leaving The New York Times, where he
had worked for three decades, to helm a new nonprofit newsroom focused
on criminal justice. As founding editor in chief of The Marshall Project,
Keller said he
sought to produce journalism that would provide “a bit of a wake-up call to a
public that has gotten a little numbed to the scandal that our criminal justice
system is.” The publication launched in November 2014 with a two-part
feature on 80 death-row inmates whose lawyers missed a crucial
deadline to file last-resort federal habeas corpus petitions. Though the
investigation, by Ken Armstrong, employed individual men’s stories to hammer
home the stakes, its focus was the intersection of two systemic faults—an
“unforgiving” law signed by President Bill Clinton that set a one-year deadline
for people condemned to death to file habeas petitions and the “lack of
oversight and accountability” for incompetent lawyers who miss the
deadline.
That same month, millions were tuning in to the first season of Serial,
a 12-part podcast series unraveling the case of Hae Min Lee, a high school
senior in Baltimore County, Maryland, who was killed in 1999. Her ex-boyfriend
Adnan Syed was convicted of her murder in 2000 and sentenced to life in prison.
The series was sparked by Syed’s claim of innocence, and the narrative was
strictly focused on whether this particular man ought to have been
convicted of this particular crime.
In an interview
with Vox at the time, Keller said that the entire newsroom was obsessed
with Serial. But, he said, “I don’t look at Serial as a sort of
reflection on the state of the criminal justice system, or the state of public
support for criminal justice reform. It’s just a really well done mystery
story.”
In turning the story of a 15-year-old murder
into a high-gloss mystery, Serial launched a new era of true crime,
coating morbid entertainment with an intellectually serious veneer. But where The Marshall Project prods
readers to confront a fundamentally broken criminal legal system, rarely does
even the most nuanced and rigorous true crime push the consumer to reflect on
how the case under consideration intersects with wider issues. And along with prestige
TV offerings like Netflix’s Making a Murderer and HBO’s The Jinx
came a barrage of slop. In 2017, the cable channel Oxygen pivoted to offering
24/7 true crime, sating viewers’ appetites for sensational stories of humanity
at its most gruesome. Current programming includes Buried in the Backyard (“stories
of homicide victims left hidden underground in idyllic places”).
For Marshall Project contributing
writer John J. Lennon, the public’s hunger for true crime raises urgent
questions: “What are the consequences of illuminating human darkness? Does it
increase our desire for punishment? Does true crime hinder the progress of
criminal justice writers and activists and reformers and policymakers?” This
line of inquiry is personal, as Lennon explores in The Tragedy of True Crime: Four
Guilty Men and the Stories that Define Us; depending on how
you tell his story, he is either an irredeemably evil murderer or a man capable
of genuine remorse and reinvention.
In December 2001, when he was 24, Lennon
murdered a friend and fellow drug dealer who was rumored to be robbing other
dealers. They had grown up in the same Brooklyn project in the late 1970s and
early 1980s; Lennon is white, his victim Black. In his book, Lennon explains
both his mindset at the time and his current perspective: “I told myself that
killing him was the only solution. (This is the absurdity of the drug game: We
betray and kill our friends).” He also realizes now that he was not influenced
solely by drug-game logic. “I feared others would learn about things I did that
conflicted with who I wanted to be in ‘the life,’” Lennon writes. “Many of us
who commit terrible violence struggle internally with something that guts us
hollow.” Across The Tragedy of True Crime, he identifies fear as the
catalyst of his violence.
When he was charged for the killing in early
2002, Lennon was already in jail at Rikers Island for gun possession and selling
heroin. Two years later, he was found guilty of second-degree murder and
sentenced to 28 years to life in prison. It would take years for Lennon to
begin to understand why he committed such terrible acts. “Deep reflection can
only arrive, if it ever does, when you feel removed enough from all the
madness, from the version of yourself that you once were,” he explains. “And
sometimes that takes years, because after the crime comes the arrest, the jail
time, the trials, and prison—watching television in the cellblock or getting
high with the guys in the yard, telling one another how the system fucked each
of us respectively.”
Lennon weaves reflections on his own past, crime, and time
in prison throughout the stories of three other men guilty of taking a life,
whom he has served alongside in New York prisons.
For Lennon, it was a creative writing
workshop that he fought to get into in Attica in 2010—along with twice-weekly
Alcoholics Anonymous meetings—that pushed him out of the numbing so common in prison and toward
cultivating reflection and remorse. He has since become a leading prison
journalist, writing for outlets like The New Yorker, The New York
Review of Books, and Esquire, where he is a contributing
editor. In his book, Lennon weaves reflections on his own past, crime, and time
in prison throughout the stories of three other men guilty of taking a life,
whom he has served alongside in New York prisons. With his personal
reflections, he writes, he hopes to “explain why people like me do what we
did.” He has come to this insight in large part despite being on his twenty-fourth year
in prison, which is not an environment that fosters deep thinking. It is
Lennon’s writing career, eked out under extraordinary circumstances and with
the assistance of many editors and writers on the outside, that has allowed him
to explore his guilt and, as he writes, “develop more of the thing I’ve always
lacked: empathy.” That empathy allows him to “offer the felt lives of men
who have taken a life … to show you who we are, hopefully without diminishing the
lives of the people we’ve killed,” in The Tragedy of True Crime.
Lennon uses his incomparable access to fellow
incarcerated men to highlight the context behind their crimes and to paint
portraits of how prison changed them, but he does not excuse their killings—or
his own. Most sympathetic is Michael Shane Hale, a white gay man from Kentucky,
who was 23 in 1995 when, after years of being controlled, physically and sexual
abused, and harassed, he murdered his 62-year-old partner, Stefan Tanner. On
the night he killed Tanner, Hale was trying to collect his belongings and leave
Tanner’s Brooklyn apartment when Tanner called 911 and falsely claimed he was
being attacked. The NYPD officers who answered the call declined to file a
domestic incident report. Later that night, Hale returned to the building to
retrieve the rest of his clothes and confront Tanner. The two got into a physical
fight in the garage and Tanner died after Hale knocked his head repeatedly on
the concrete floor. Hale immediately expressed remorse.
Lennon’s other two subjects—Milton E. Jones,
a Black man convicted of murdering two priests in Buffalo, New York, in 1987 at
age 17, and Robert Chambers, the notorious “Preppy Killer,” who killed 18-year-old
Jennifer Levin in Central Park in 1986—are more challenging. Jones killed the
priests alongside a friend from juvenile detention who suggested they rob rectories;
Jones was a “follower,” whose biggest role models were his uncles—two pimps and
a drug dealer. Lennon writes of learning of Jones’s crime before getting to
know him, in a passage that preempts the reader’s response: “Milton’s laugh was
loud and jolly, but it sounded almost filthy to me. When you learn about the
crime before you meet the person, it makes you recoil; it colors everything
about them.”
Of course, in true crime, the crime always
precedes the perpetrator. In 2020, Lennon watched the docuseries The Preppy
Murder: Death in Central Park on A&E in Sing Sing—inmates pay for cable
through fundraisers, and true crime is popular in prisons too, where it
provides both
entertainment and intel on peers’ crimes. A
few months later, he transferred to Sullivan and met Chambers, who was back in
prison for drug charges years after completing his original 15-year bid for
manslaughter. Chambers’s continuing resistance to admitting his full
culpability for strangling Levin when he was 19 frustrates Lennon. “You already
did the time,” he challenges Chambers. “Why not just cop to it?”
Lennon forces readers to consider the
consequences of our current system of punishment and what it might mean to
allow admitted violent criminals to be given second chances. Though Chambers
struggled to take accountability for his guilt, he kept busy in Sullivan,
working as a sign language interpreter for his peers and doing his best to
avoid the unrelenting press interest in his case. “His life has become a public
spectacle,” Lennon asserts, “and the narrative about him has grown so large it
has outstripped any sense of self.”
Hale, serving a sentence of 50 years to
life in Sing Sing, has carved a meaningful existence for himself there, serving
as an inmate program assistant in a reentry facilitation program, though he
fears he will die in prison. He has earned a master’s degree from the New York
Theological Seminary and participates in a theater group, a competitive-to-access
program funded by philanthropy, not the state or federal government. Jones,
also serving 50 years to life in Sing Sing, has similarly managed to complete a
theological master’s degree, despite a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder,
which has waxed and waned throughout his time in prison and has rarely been
adequately treated. Both Hale and Jones have directly expressed their remorse
to their victims’ families. Through these men’s stories and Lennon’s own, The
Tragedy of True Crime provides a challenging and bracing reckoning
with guilt and the possibility of changing the narrative of one’s life.
Some readers will immediately dismiss The
Tragedy of True Crime. After all, what does it mean when the
murderer is the journalist, telling fellow murderers’ stories? Lennon
brings such critiques to the surface throughout the book. The epigraph for his
first section comes from Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer,
a study of journalistic ethics through the case of bestselling true crime
writer Joe McGinnis: “The characters of nonfiction, no less than those of
fiction, derive from the writer’s most idiosyncratic desires and deepest
anxieties; they are what the writer wishes he was and worries he is.” Lennon
sees something of himself in each of his subjects, and he is not afraid of
laying bare his most unappealing traits and behaviors. “While journalism pushes
me to feel deeply for others, I’m still self-absorbed and coarse,” he writes.
“Cells will open, and I’ll say hello to my neighbor one day, then walk right by
him the next.… My lip will snarl a bit when I hear something I don’t like.”
The
Tragedy of True Crime provides a challenging and bracing reckoning
with guilt and the possibility of changing the narrative of one’s life.
It is this honest self-reckoning, along with
Lennon’s intimate, deeply reported treatments of his subjects’ stories, that
makes The Tragedy of True Crime an indispensable addition to the recent literature
of incarceration that kicked off with Michelle Alexander’s 2010 The New Jim
Crow. While Alexander’s book and the titles that followed—including Bryan
Stevenson’s Just Mercy and Ben Austen’s Correction—have offered
insight into the foundations and consequences of mass incarceration and
mandatory sentencing laws, The Tragedy of True Crime plunges the reader
into the lived reality of incarceration and guilt for violent crime.
At its best, life in prison is monotonous. Lennon
describes his daily routine of waking up with the 6:30 a.m. “count” (when correction officers account for the location of each inmate), brewing coffee through a
homemade strainer, reading “Daily Reflections” from A.A., and
getting to work on his writing before walking laps around the yard in the
afternoon. But Lennon’s relative peace is fragile. He writes about his cell’s
electricity being cut before C.O.s rifle through his belongings in search of
contraband—iPhones, “exotic weed,” and heroin, which C.O.s themselves allow into
prison—and being faulted for being over the “book limit.” And life inside was
once far more dangerous for Lennon, even though as a drug dealer he was at the
top of the “prison pecking order.” In 2009, a friend of his victim stabbed him six
times in the chest with an ice pick in the yard at Green Haven prison, and he
was transferred to Attica, “the worst prison in New York,” for refusing to
identify the perpetrator.
Lennon connects his subjects’ stories to the
larger forces shaping their crimes and their sentences, without ever losing
sight of their individual culpability. Hale was routinely sexually abused as a
boy growing up in Appalachia, and though Tanner began sexually assaulting and
trafficking him early in their relationship, Tanner was the first and only
person to make Hale feel “worthy of love.” The district attorney sought the
death penalty in his case—for the first time since its reinstatement in New
York in 1995—rejecting the defense’s argument that Hale’s case was a domestic
tragedy. Hale is currently seeking post-conviction relief under the Domestic
Violence Survivor’s Justice Act, which passed in New York in 2019 and allows
judges to resentence offenders who demonstrate that their abuse was a
“significant contributing factor” to their crime.
Jones is part of an overrepresented
demographic in prison—as Lennon points out, prisons have become “America’s de
facto asylums” in the aftermath of the 1960s movement against
institutionalization. Jones also represents the generational trauma of
incarceration in Black families—when he was a toddler, his father was in Attica
on a robbery bid and was injured in the notorious 1971 Attica Uprising.
Chambers, who started using drugs as a teenager in boarding school, has been in
active addiction for much of his life and used heroin throughout his first
stint in prison. Lennon, who admits to using dope in prison, understands its
numbing appeal. “You don’t know what to do with your crime,” he writes. “Your
future is lost. You’re miserable and fearful. So you do dope.”
At times, Lennon sacrifices depth for
breadth—The Tragedy of True Crime is a near-encyclopedic window into
life for men behind bars, touching on everything from conjugal visits to the
politics of communal showers to the distinction between being placed in
voluntary or involuntary protective custody. This blow-by-blow, though
revelatory, at times interrupts the opportunity for sustained analysis of
policies, like the 1994 crime bill, that have negatively impacted nearly every
aspect of incarceration, from lengthening sentences to defunding higher education
in prisons.
Though Lennon, Hale, and Jones have managed “to
find a sliver of rehabilitation” through educational programs, their cases are
exceptional. In one of the book’s most eye-opening passages, Lennon argues that
the punishments of prison land harder on those who have managed to cultivate
remorse—a rare feat, in his telling. “When I started writing, thinking deeper
and feeling genuine remorse for killing E., the time in prison got harder,”
Lennon writes. “Maybe it’s because I was becoming a better man. The more you
strive to be decent in prison, the more you see and feel the cruelty of it.”
It is in these moments of reflection that
Lennon illuminates the most disturbing parts of our culture’s obsession with
true crime. True crime, he argues, “turns back the clock and replays the worst
moments of someone’s life, reconstructs and reenacts it all for entertainment,
usually by exploiting the people most affected by the violence—victims whose
wounds haven’t healed, perpetrators who haven’t reckoned with their guilt.” In
constantly reprising what cannot be changed—the violent crime—these narratives justify
the punishment and lack of rehabilitative measures for people who can
change—violent criminals. We live in a culture where people lull themselves to
sleep with true crime stories of good versus evil droning out on their
televisions.
True crime, Lennon argues, “turns back the clock and replays the worst
moments of someone’s life, reconstructs and reenacts it all for entertainment.”
Lennon believes that one such story is
keeping him in prison. In 2019, he was featured on an episode of Inside Evil,
a show on HLN hosted by Chris Cuomo. He ended up on the show after contacting a
producer at CNN, seeking to promote a story he had written for The Marshall
Project in collaboration with Keller. Instead of treating Lennon like a
journalist, the producer referred him to Chris Cuomo’s show, which was at the
time called Inside. Lennon learned of the name change the morning of his
interview with Cuomo; he proceeded because at the time Cuomo’s brother was the
governor, “the one elected official with the power to commute your sentence and
set you free.”
The episode, “Killer Writing,” juxtaposed
their interview with “scenes of shadowy, faceless reenactments of the shooting
and photos of my mug shot, with close-ups of my eyes, bloodshot from all the
drugs.” Lennon writes, “I can no longer separate these images from my actual
memories of what happened that night.” For some of the New York State officials
responsible for reviewing Lennon’s clemency petition, the images from Inside
Evil seem to override anything else they have learned about how he has
changed during his time in prison. Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez was
reportedly “really spooked” by the episode, and the governor’s clemency bureau “fixated”
on “Killer Writing” in a meeting with Lennon’s legal team. “I couldn’t believe
that people at the highest levels of government were so influenced by this
lurid rendering of my story,” Lennon writes. But government officials are just
as susceptible to true crime’s simplistic storytelling.
The post What Happens When the True Crime Story Is Over? appeared first on New Republic.
