Usually when I read a new book, I try to immerse myself in its scenes. I close my eyes and envision places I’ve never been. I inhale deeply, trying to get a whiff of smells I’m unfamiliar with. While reading John J. Lennon’s debut book The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us I didn’t do any of these things—because it describes a world I’m already living in.
Lennon, an incarcerated writer and journalist who serves as a contributing editor to Esquire, confronts society’s fascination with true crime and how spun narratives affect victims and perpetrators alike. He interweaves his own story with the lives of three other men in candid scenes that only he can tell. Like his main subjects, and like me, Lennon is serving time in the New York prison system for murder. He was arrested in 2001, at the age of twenty-four, on a warrant for a gun charge. He was then linked to the murder of a childhood friend on a Brooklyn street, and subsequently sentenced after two trials to twenty-eight years to life.
The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us
By John J. Lennon
Celadon Books, 368 pages
Publication date: September 23, 2025
In The Tragedy of True Crime, Lennon tells about how, while in Green Haven Correctional Facility in 2008, he was attacked by a friend of the man he murdered. During a workout session in the yard, the man approached Lennon and reached out to embrace him. However, instead of offering a hug, the man stabbed Lennon several times, leaving him with a collapsed lung.
Within days of this attack, when I was sixteen, I killed a friend and intimate partner in Queens during a meaningless argument. I wasn’t arrested until eight years later, in 2016, after forensic evidence linked me to the crime.
These were life-shattering moments for both Lennon and me. Being assaulted led Lennon to be transferred to Attica Correctional Facility, where he joined a writing workshop that sparked his career as an acclaimed journalist. My crime, on the other hand, led to an eight-year pattern of anxiety, alcoholism, and womanizing.
In the book, Lennon writes about his 2019 appearance on “Inside Evil with Chris Cuomo,” a true crime show that airs on HLN, a subsidiary of CNN. The show attempts to give the audience a closer look into the psyche of America’s most famous killers. Lennon, who had at that point been incarcerated for seventeen years, was featured on the finale of the third season.
When I saw the episode in 2021, I was sitting on a deflated mattress, staring at the thirteen-inch television perched atop a rusty locker. I was in Attica, the same maximum security prison in western New York where Lennon launched his writing career. “This guy’s a dick,” my neighbor said, referring to Lennon. I agreed. Lennon seemed to carry this air of arrogance about him. It also didn’t help that the producers recreated scenes of his crime throughout the episode. As they flashed between these recreations and Lennon’s interview, he sometimes seemed remorseless.
But what really struck me was, despite how they portrayed this guy, his success as a writer seemed to brazenly challenge the picture they painted.
Much of The Tragedy of True Crime does just that. Lennon’s book takes care to challenge those conventional norms that society has created around people who have committed crimes.
When Lennon introduces one of his main subjects, Michael Shane Hale, who is currently serving time in prison for the murder of an abusive boyfriend, he mentions that Hale has “[n]o bad habits, no addictions. Just a hunger to please and love and be loved.” To me, this characterization is important. The genre of true crime does an excellent job of dehumanizing the people they cover. Mainstream media has created this perception that these individuals, often convicted of murder, are incapable of having any other emotion than rage. Of course, this is far from the truth. We wrestle with our actions and go through bouts of immense guilt, depression, and self loathing. We also find moments of happiness, laughter, and connection within our respective communities.
Despite living in a hyper masculine environment and experiencing unthinkable trauma throughout his life, Hale has dedicated himself to assisting those in need. This is the highest form of selflessness, especially in such a toxic place like prison.
Lennon also tells the story of Milton E. Jones, a prisoner housed in Sing Sing Correctional Facility serving fifty years to life for killing two priests when he was seventeen. During his nearly forty years of incarceration, Jones has had frequent bouts of schizophrenia and other mental health struggles. Over the course of his incarceration, Jones met with the brother of one of his victims several times. This brother ended up writing a book about Milton’s victim, “Joe’s Story.”
Celadon Books
Like Jones, I committed my crime as an adolescent, which makes me more empathetic towards him. And while I’ve never been diagnosed with any mental health disorder, I’ve suffered from anxiety and possibly post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Taking someone’s life at any age is traumatizing, but to make such a horrible decision as a teenager is transformational. When you take a life, you also permanently alter your own life and the lives of others.
Lennon’s final subject, Robert Chambers, has fascinated the public for the past forty years. In 1987, Chambers pleaded guilty in the strangulation death of Jennifer Levin, an eighteen-year-old woman that he had dated. A number of documentaries and made-for-TV movies have been made about the case, most without Chambers’s participation.
What fascinates me about Chambers’s story is his struggle with taking responsibility for his actions. In their interactions, Lennon often has to push Chambers to get a straight account of Levin’s death from him; his story changes from day to day, as if he’s trying to dodge the truth. The issue of accountability is one that many of us in prison are forced to confront.
When I was arrested in 2016, I was denied bail and sent to Rikers Island, the infamous jail complex sprawled on the East River, to await my conviction. I’d talk to other prisoners about what I was in jail for. Most times, I would deny any wrongdoing. I spent time in the law library looking for some kind of loophole. Eventually, over time, something shifted. I thought about the harm I had caused to my victim and her family. I reflected on how my action stole moments and experiences from not only my victim, but her loved ones as well.
Before my trial, a visiting family member urged me to take the prosecutor’s plea bargain: nineteen years to life. To me, and to most prisoners, anything with life as a maximum sentence isn’t a deal. After serving nineteen years, I could be held until the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision felt I was deserving of parole.
But I thought about my victim. I thought about her family and the unimaginable grief that I put them through. I thought about how I was able to graduate from high school, get my driver’s license, and start college—all moments she wouldn’t experience. I thought about how one day, if I were released, I could experience happiness and joy beyond those walls, but she would still be gone. And so, in 2018, I pled guilty.
Many of Lennon’s conversations with Chambers take place in Sullivan Correctional Facility, a small prison in the Catskills that was shut down in 2024. Chambers was serving his second stint in prison on drug-related charges.
In December 2021, I was transferred from Attica to Sullivan. The first person that I built a relationship with was Simon Dedaj. Dedaj appears in many scenes with Lennon and Chambers, and has known Chambers since his first prison stint.
While in Sullivan, I formed a tight-knit bond with Dedaj, who is serving fifty years to life for double homicide. We’d work out together, spin the yard (prison lingo for taking endless laps around the recreation yard), and watch movies over scalding cups of coffee in the facility’s chapel area. To most, it was an odd pairing: a twenty-something-year-old Black man hanging out with an Albanian man in his late fifties.
In 2023, Dedaj was transferred to Shawangunk, another small prison near the Catskills, yet he and I remain close friends. The following year I, too, was transferred to Shawangunk, and we have remained close friends since.
The Tragedy of True Crime is a culmination of Lennon’s career, driven by his ability to relate to his subjects. In the book’s final pages, Lennon writes of a writing workshop that he started before Sullivan closed. “I began meeting every Friday night in a white-walled cinder block classroom with nine others,” he writes, “all men of color in for murder, who had collectively served almost three hundred years.”
I was one of those nine men. Since leaving the workshop in late 2024, I’ve had seven pieces published in The Progressive and other publications—including a piece I worked on alongside Lennon.
The Tragedy Of True Crime tells the personal stories of men who have committed murder and the struggles they face reckoning with their actions. It has what producers of true crime shows often lack: empathy for those who have been driven to their darkest moments, and who will struggle always to come to terms with it.