Why America is obsessed with true crime

In 2001, John J. Lennon killed a man on a street in New York City. He was convicted of murder several years later and given the maximum sentence—25 years to life in prison—on top of three additional years for two other convictions. From behind bars, Lennon began reckoning with his crime through in-prison writing workshops and soon fell in love with journalism. He’s since made a name for himself as an incarcerated journalist and has been published in The Atlantic, Esquire, and the New York Times Magazine, often writing about the criminal justice system and conditions in correctional facilities, all from the inside.

In the decades Lennon’s been behind bars, America has become increasingly fixated on stories like his —true crime—through endless podcasts, documentary series, and streaming shows. But Lennon argues that tragedy is too often being turned into entertainment. “I think with true crime, it creates this thirst for punishment,” he says.

On this week’s More To The Story, Lennon joins with host Al Letson to discuss how his first book, The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us, inverts the basic structure of the true crime genre. They also discuss how his portrayal on a cable news show hosted by Chris Cuomo inspired him to write the book and how Lennon now views the murder he committed almost a quarter-century ago.

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This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.

Al Letson: Can you tell me how you ended up in Sing Sing and all about your time there?

John J. Lennon: Yeah, for sure. I’m from Brooklyn and in 2001, at 24 I was involved in a criminal lifestyle, selling drugs and shot and killed a man on Brooklyn Street. And I was sent away with a 28 years to life sentence. Yeah, I mean, along the way I found myself. I guess a turning point for me was getting stabbed at a prison and transferring to another prison, finding a writing workshop. And that was around 2010, my first piece published in 2013 and just found journalism as something to help me with just my identity. Just helped me get a life and a place where you could really feel, frankly, like a loser, like you’ve screwed up your life and hurt a lot of people along the way. So journalism helped me with my identity.

I just want to break it down a little bit. So you were a part of a criminal lifestyle in Brooklyn for a while, and so correct me if I’m wrong, but in the state of New York, if you got, I think you said 28 to life, am I correct in that?

Yes. So I was convicted of, I was already serving time for selling drugs and I was already serving another sentence for possession of a gun. So I had a whole host of criminal charges. I’m on my 24th year right now and I’ll go to the parole board in about three-ish years.

So how long into your time in jail did the stabbing happen?

Yeah, so that was probably, it was around 2008. For me, that was the turn in my story, where I started at Sing Sing, went to other different prisons. In your first years, you’re finding yourself and honestly perpetuating that behavior. I was perpetuating the behavior that got me at doing drugs, selling drugs, just up to no good, gossiping in the yard. Prison was where I belonged in the beginning, and for me, that point, it was that point when I got stabbed pretty bad in the yard, it was retaliation for the man I killed in Brooklyn.

I mean, I knew the guy who stabbed me was his friend, and at that point I got hit pretty bad and you’re like, wow. I got hit in the lung and I was just like this is, everyone knew I was getting hit but me that day in the yard. And I was just like, this is a disgusting place and I’m a disgusting person. I just want to be better. It was just, at that point I transferred to Attica and in the worst prison in New York State, I’ve got sober and I joined that writing workshop.

Yeah. I think it’s really incredible that you came from the street, you’re in prison and you’re just doing what you’ve always done, just trying to survive in there, and then this moment where you get to reflect on your life and in probably one of the worst places in the world, a place that I think nobody ever wants to go, you realize that you have to make change. I mean, making change in those circumstances has to be really hard.

Yeah, it was ground zero. I had fantastically failed in life. Attica’s a tough joint, but I had a great 12-step meeting, though. Had these really cool volunteers, and if anything’s going on in prison, it’s always through the volunteer programs, people with a lot of decency that come in this nasty place and just try to show us some love. And I got sober around the same time that another volunteer came in and he was an English professor and he came in and started showing us, started tossing us some Best American Essays and started reading some of these pieces. And it was probably around that time, it was probably helpful that I was getting sober around the time that I was learning to write because it maybe edified, maybe, my voice a bit or at least gave me some clarity with my thoughts that I was doing some work on myself.

How did you gravitate towards journalism?

There was these pieces, again, there was these essays that I would write and that we were reading and I would see where these essays were published in these Best American Essay Collection and Best American Magazine Writing, that the professor would give us these books and I just started reading these pieces and I started subscribing to those magazines. It worked for me because I had a bit of a learning disability too. I wasn’t a great reader, but I loved story and magazine writing and my mom would subscribe to these different magazines and these different, the Atlantic, Esquire, [inaudible 00:08:04], all these different magazines. And interestingly, that’s the kind of writing I took to initially. So it was by reverse engineering and I also knew, I was self-aware enough to know that I had some personality issues. I was a mess.

So tell me about that first piece, the idea that someone who’s currently locked up could become a journalist and get published in The Atlantic, one of the most prestigious magazines in the country. How did it all take place?

I think you have to feel like you have something to say. I remember it was like 2013 at the time and it was this horrible shooting in Sandy Hook and I remember I had used the same gun in my crime and everyone was talking about gun control and I was just like, I know how to get guns easy. They don’t even know what they’re talking about. So I mean, I felt like I had something to say. It just clicked for me. From the beginning, I knew that I had a lot of conflict, but I knew to lean into that, and if I could write about this in a sober way and an accountable way, and I think people would listen to what I had to say.

So after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary happens, you feel like you have something to say. What was the process of writing the essay and submitting it for possible publication?

I wrote in my cell, I was workshopping it every two weeks, the workshop, sometimes every month. You’re hanging on the red ink, hanging on the words of the professor. His name is Doran Larson, he was a Hamilton College professor who would come in. And it was like five or six of us in the group and we would hang onto his words, but he would give me some red ink. I would go back and work it. I mean, eventually it looked clean and I kept reading it out loud in my cell. I’d read other op-eds, see how they read. It was a lot of reverse engineering and I sent it out just on a whim to the Atlantic. Even he was like, “Good luck, you’re shooting for this stars there.” And I got a letter back from David Graham, who’s a writer today for The Atlantic, and he said, “Man, I’d love to publish this piece.” My life changed after that.

Wow. And so did you send it out to anybody else or just the Atlantic?

Just one shot, the Atlantic.

Wow, that’s excellent. All right, so you write this piece, the Atlantic publishes it. Talk to me about that second piece, dying in Attica. What was that about and how did it come about? Because this is the first true reported piece.

That wasn’t really my second piece. I wrote … actually a piece on Nick Kristof’s blog, so it was another gun piece. But my instructor was like, “What, are you going to be the gun guy? Write something else.”

I wrote this piece about this guy, Lenny. He was dying of colon cancer on my tier and it was just so difficult for him because he had a colostomy bag and I was just like, wow. This was around the time that I got diagnosed with Crohn’s and my mother was always in my ear, saying, “That’s a terrible disease.” I actually have a mild case of it, but back then it was on my mind and I was thinking of this guy and I was seeing how he lived and I was seeing how people were holding their noses when he changed his bag because he was a few cells down, and it was just a terrible place, prison, to live with any kind of illness. I was just like, if I could capture that, and that would be cool.

After you were finished with that piece, I mean, I’m sure that just lit a fire and you just wanted to do more of this type of journalism.

Yeah, absolutely. I didn’t really realize how significant it was, but somebody said, “You could do something with this.” I felt like they gave me the rock and I was in the game and I was just like, I have to do something with it. I just started writing more and it was good timing that The Marshall Project opened at that time. Bill Keller who’s just, he runs the New York Times. In 2014, he shifts to open up The Marshall Project. I read that in one of my subscriptions my mom gave me, I’m connecting the dots. I’m like, oh, this is big. This could be something.

And I’m like, I reach out to him and then I write that story about Lenny, the bank robber. That was the first piece that wasn’t, I jumped in a little bit with relating to him, but I really made it about him. And if I was relating to him, it was about my own reflections. I mean, it’s not like I wasn’t incapable of empathy, but it was just the work itself boosted this idea of healing for others because prison’s a place where you mind your business. Journalism transcends that.

Can you tell me a little bit about A, how you came to think of true crime as a tragedy, and then also just about these men that you have talked to and written this book about?

Yeah, so we were talking about the kind of work that I was doing initially, which I thought, and which you framed as, I appreciate the way you put it. It was just substantive journalism. And I even took it further and I started writing long form features, like in magazines and Esquire and Vice. And by 2018, I had transferred from Attica to Sing Sing, and around that time, Bill Keller and I just wrote a piece in New York Magazine about a man who was suffering from schizophrenia, actually in this block. And so I was making my rounds, like who wants to talk? Maybe I could talk about this crisis on the radio. And we actually did, we did talk on the radio. So I had reached out to somebody I knew at CNN, but I didn’t know that they were working at H.L.M. And ultimately they had sent, I told them I wanted to talk up this crisis.

She lined me up with her colleagues and told me, and they had come to see me and they wanted to do a show about my redemption, they told me in this career that I had built for myself. It was a bait and switch. It was all a lie. It came up and it was really the show. They told me show was called Inside. It was Cuomo, and it was. The first season was, but the second season was called Inside Evil and the third season was the one that they were grooming me for, and they said it wasn’t going to be Inside Evil. They said it was going to be about our stories of redemption. And I was like, “Oh wow, this is great. I’m so glad you thought of me.” And by the time they came up with Chris Cuomo, it wasn’t about that at all. So that was my experience that I had. And I didn’t walk out on Chris Cuomo because …

Well, he’s Chris Cuomo.

Yeah. And it’s like brother’s the governor. It was just a lot.

Yeah, there’s a big power imbalance there. I mean, you are a prisoner. Chris Cuomo is a celebrity, CNN, at the time, guy and his brother, at the time, was the governor of the state that you are currently in prison. I mean, tell me if I’m wrong, but it’s possible that at the time the Governor Cuomo could have pardoned you, right?

Absolutely. And he was pardoning guys I knew. I’m talking about guys in the block, in cell blocks. I’ve seen guys right next to me walk right out. What happened was they showed me that they saw me as a murderer and not as a journalist. And the reason why I wrote this book was to show, well, twofold. Personally, I had a chip on my shoulders and I felt like I had something to say. It’s the first similar feeling that I had when I started writing. And I thought I could tell better stories than this dude and I have better access.

I’m not telling these stories from a perch, but I could tell fuller stories about the men I live with and the fuller stories, Al, included the punishment thing. You mentioned these other true crime shows, these podcasts. I mean they’re structured the same way, every story. You watch one, you watch them all. Bang, bang, police tape, 911 calls, drop back, you meet the characters. But I inverted that whole structure with The Tragedy of True Crime. So I write about three men. I introduce you to them where they are, in prison with me, at different timeline, and you get to know them before you learn about their crime. But I don’t shy away from their crime. I describe their crime, but I deliver it to the reader in a different structure than traditional true crime.

Do you feel like the structure is what separates what you’re doing from true crime? Or is it the structure is born out of the idea that you’re doing something different than true crime?

Well, it’s one of the things. Voice and agency is obviously the other. I write about three men who’ve also killed, but I would argue that the three men that I write about, one of whom has been the villain his whole life, and he hasn’t known how to overcome that. I was talking about Robert Chambers. Another one is a gay man named Michael Shane Hale, who, he’s an amazing person and killed his lover. And then the third is Milton Jones, who, at 17, killed two priests. These are different crimes, but ultimately I use my own agency to put myself, I don’t judge them. I tell their stories without, I would say, a lot different than how, say for example, Chris Cuomo told my story and told the stories of other people on that show, Inside Evil.

It’s ability to tell a story. I come clean about my own crime and I try to be candid with the reader and that enables me to be a trusted narrator. With that, I’m able to tell the stories of these other men, not judge them, and at times put myself beneath them in terms of just explaining, hey, I’m actually more culpable than Michael Shane Hale, who I call Shane, but why does Brooklyn decide to execute him? Why is he the first man selected in 1995, when New York brings back the death penalty, to execute? What’s that about? And I unpack that and I explain what happened in each of these cases. But you asked the question about voice and the narrator. I’m a narrator that’s done this as well. It’s pretty unusual. When you think of a trusted narrator, you don’t think of a guy in prison who’s killed a man. So I have to reckon with that, but I try to do that early on in the book and I tell the story, with my own woven through.

Yeah. So let me ask you, I think one of the complicated parts of talking about people’s stories, especially people that have killed somebody, is really that with that is the victim and what the victim’s family has gone through as well and how you handle both parts of it. There’s a story about redemption, which everybody wants to hear. I think that redemption stories are so powerful because we all want redemption. So I think that when you hear redemption stories, it pulls you in. On the other side of that redemption story, though, is a family who lost a family member. And I’m wondering how do you balance those two?

Yeah, I mean it’s difficult. Look, I mean, I knew going into this, this book was going to be more about me having access to these guys in here, showing you what the punishment side is. I do reach out to, I think doing the work, right? At a certain point, when we think about three of the men I write about, I reach out to the family members, people that they killed.

What about the family of the man you killed? Have you been able to reach out and talk to them?

It’s one of the toughest parts of my career. Yeah, I wrote a piece in Washington Post years ago about just trying to come to terms on my own of writing an apology letter. The sister of the man I killed, she rejected it and she asked, in a letter to the Washington Post, that I not use his name in my writing. That would serve her better than my apology. I’ve respected her wishes, and that’s why I don’t refer to him by name in the piece. But look, I don’t pretend to, I understand what brings me pride, writing, I mean, it may cause her and her family more pain. Look, that causes me shame. But that whole equation, at least for me, is this idea of remorse, because this inner conflict, there’s no easy answers to that.

Yeah. No, I mean, on one side of it, you should be able to talk about your story and the things that you’ve gone through. On the other side of it, there’s a family who lost a loved one, and I think it’s fair that they don’t want to hear it.

No easy answers.

So John, I want to go back a little bit and talk about true crime. I’m wondering, in your opinion, how has the genre influenced how we view crime and the people who commit those crimes?

I think with true crime, yeah, it creates this thirst for punishment. I started critiquing this stuff before I wrote the book, Al. I started developing these ideas, critiquing other writers of true crime, New York Review of Books and the New York Times Magazine, and I started really clocking the way we consume true crime and even critiquing Dick Wolf. And Rolling Stone, I had a big piece critiquing him. It’s just about who’s telling our story and how are they telling them? That’s one of the themes that runs through The Tragedy of True Crime. You zeroed in on, I think, a fair observation. Like, wait, dude, you’re a murderer. And it’s like, what if the people that I killed, the guy you killed, his family is not really digging this? What does it mean when people that are so disconnected … crimes are the ones that are telling, that are shaping the narratives?

He grew up on the Upper East Side. What does Chris Cuomo, this guy grew up in the governor’s [inaudible 00:26:02]. That’s who y’all are relying on? What if I can develop my voice and be fair-minded about it, give it to you guys real, and also be accountable? I’m just saying that. I’m not an activist, I’m a journalist. That’s not what I’m doing. I want to create an experience, but I want to just offer an experience. I’m a narrative journalist. I’m a guy that did a pretty terrible thing. I shot a man 10 times. I was deeply immersed in this lifestyle. I reckon with that on the page and people that read my stuff, and there’s a way that I connect with them and account for what I did, and I’m not blaming the system.

Do you wrestle with the possibility that you’re a little too close to these guys to write about them objectively? Is that something that you’re constantly thinking of as you you’re writing it?

I’d be lying to myself and the reader if I’m saying that I’m an objective journalist. I think we come to life and to our work with our life experiences, and I’m writing about men in prison who live behind bars, and I also go to sleep behind bars. So I think I’d be kidding myself and the reader to say I’m 100% writing an objective story. This is a first person, immersive, [inaudible 00:27:29] personal journalist. You call it what you want. It has many names, as you know, Al. I don’t know, was Hunter Thompson being asked, “Do you think you’re an objective journalist?” This guy’s riffing about all kinds of stuff. You know what I mean? But his work had value. And he had so many flaws. As do I.

I would just, can I just say something else about the objective thing?

Yeah, please. Please do, go ahead.

I would also like to think I’m being objective with scenic writing and with these riffs and these digressions that I do in the book. For example, there’s a scene in the book where guy just offers me some drugs. I deny it. I don’t want it. I’ve relapsed after I got sober. And it’s always a struggle to stay sober in prison. And prison, the heroin now in prison has fentanyl it all in it. I remember another guy, it was just stuff going around in a cell block and there was this guy that overdosed and the COs are running to his cell and the whole block is silent and they’re going to work on this guy, the COs, the guards.

They’re doing CPR, everything. They’re running in and the whole block is silent. And everyone knows there’s drugs in the block and everyone knows that it’s probably fentanyl, but it’s just this culture that we live in. It’s awful. We’re foul. There’s parts of us that are foul in here, and I acknowledge that in the book, that these COs are like, they’re working, they’re busting their ass trying to save this guy’s life. And it’s just like they’re contending with this foul culture and it’s just awful. And that’s the culture that we live in. And I think when you create those scenes, you show what it is. There’s a lot going on right there from that scene. There’s a lot.

Yeah. How do you rise above that culture? Everything you just described sounds really hard for somebody to figure out how to navigate that.

It’s harder at the end, Al. It’s harder at the end, when you know you’ve … I’m doing this interview with you, I’m outlining a piece for the New York Review of Books, and there’s just suffering and it’s a mix of just stupidity and suffering. Difficult to not get angry at it, and then just to have empathy. It’s really difficult when you can’t shake it, you can’t get away from it. It’s hard, Al. The time gets really hard at the end, when you’ve transcended this place and it’s just tough. I mean, it was so much easier when we started this interview and I came in and I was just like, wow, I am. I belong here. I’m a low life. This is where I belong. But fast-forward 24 years and where I am today, this is the toughest time.

You’re up for parole soon, two years from now. How are you feeling about it? I mean, you must know a lot of people who have gone through the parole process in the past, so what are your thoughts going into it?

I think one of my concerns is, it’s just the idea that I think society wants us to come to prison, get our lives together, and just not be criminals and get out. Just like go get a job, don’t be bad. I never went into this thinking writing would be a passport to freedom or anything like that. You know what I wanted? I wanted to just to get a life, not be a loser. I had some green lights along the way and this has become, I found some success and I’m grateful for that. But I just hope I’m not resented for that. That’s what I fear.