Booksellers at Chevalier’s Books — L.A.’s oldest indie bookshop, located in the heart of Larchmont — were untangling projector cords near the rear of the store on Wednesday night when a woman strode in.
“I thought there was an author event tonight,” she said as she stopped in front of the screen displayed in front of rows of folding chairs. “What’s with the screen?”
“The author is phoning in, ma’am,” the bookseller said.
“He’s not coming to his own event?” the woman said, turning to leave.
“Ma’am, he can’t come,” the bookseller replied. “He’s in prison.”
Journalist and author John J. Lennon, wearing prison greens and gel in his graying hair, appeared on screen. “I’m excited to be joining you all in L.A. tonight, straight out of Sing Sing,” he said in the video.
His debut book, “The Tragedy of True Crime,” which hit bookshop shelves in September, is Lennon’s first-person, journalistic account of the lives of four men serving time for murder, himself included.
Portraying Murderers in True Crime
Divided into four acts, the book follows the men from life before prison through their crimes to their reckoning behind bars. Lennon profiles Michael Shane Hale (he goes by Shane), who murdered and dismembered his decades-older lover in 1995; Milton E. Jones, who robbed, bound and fatally stabbed two priests in 1987 with a friend when he was 17; and Robert Chambers, best known by true crime fanatics as “the Preppy Killer,” who strangled Jennifer Levin in Central Park in 1986 when they were both teenagers.
And Lennon weaves his own story throughout: In December 2001, when he was a 24-year-old drug dealer, he shot and killed a former friend on a Brooklyn street over a drug dispute. He is serving his 24th year of a 28-year-to-life sentence and is currently housed at the infamous Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison that overlooks the Hudson River in New York.
Locked up in Sing Sing, inmates are just as obsessed with true crime television as people are on the outside, he says. While Lennon admits he’s no exception when it comes to the true crime mania of modern popular culture, he’s sought through his writing a deliberate departure from the true crime documentaries and television series, à la the “Law & Order” franchise, all of which are mainstays on the televisions inside prisons.
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During a recent call with Lennon, he said “Law & Order” stories were produced with access to real-life investigators and prosecutors who do an important job. “I clearly have a different lived experience. I’m telling the side that they can’t see, that usually ends at the end of a ‘Law & Order’ episode, when the justice is done.”
In the book, he wrote: “Who should tell our stories? There’s a profound responsibility that comes with telling someone else’s story. Our perspectives, lived experiences, and biases all shape and color how we craft a narrative. You can distort a timeline, smudge the facts, and leave others out to pursue one angle in favor of another, depending on your agenda. It’s hard to leave all that at the door and give your subject as fair a shake as possible — but it’s necessary.”
This central question — whether a man can be more than the worst things he has done — serves as the basis for the profiles of the men featured in “The Tragedy of True Crime.” And for Lennon, the idea that true crime stories should transcend the genre’s tired norms is personal.
He wrote in the book that in October 2018, he was approached by two HLN producers who said they were impressed by the journalism career he’d built from behind bars. By then, he’d penned prison-centric pieces for Esquire, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, New York Review of Books and more.
The producers, he said, wanted to feature him on a new docuseries hosted by Chris Cuomo (who was still prime-time with CNN at the time). According to Lennon, his brother googled the HLN series and reported back: the show was called “Inside Evil.” When Lennon voiced his concerns about the title, he said the producers assured him each season had a distinct theme, and the third season would focus on redemption.
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He felt he’d been duped. “Clearly, they didn’t see me as the journalist back then. Else, they would not have done that. I’m sure they regret it now.”
Developing Empathy Through Writing
In his book, he grapples with the same questions of identity: Is he a writer or a murderer? Can he be both?
“My feelings are fluid,” he wrote. “It’s absurd to think I am as much a murderer as I am a writer. The murder was a moment in time, while writing has become my life. But even writing that feels wrong. Murder is so final and far-reaching, and the man I killed was so young (only twenty-five, one year older than me), and here I am all these years later, living a life — experiencing things he never will.”
Lennon said that he was drawn to each of the men’s stories for different reasons and that he was uniquely positioned to capture the lesser-known side of these men, as he lives with them day in and day out. He catches glimpses of their tenderness when they don’t realize they’re being observed. He’s discussed their childhoods with them when he posits no one else bothered to ask.
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With Shane, who’s serving 50 years to life, Lennon said he was never one of those guys claiming to be innocent, rambling about appeals and getting screwed by lawyers. “I thought, wow, this guy’s got character,” he said, adding that Shane’s positive demeanor made him curious.
In the book, Lennon paints a picture of Shane redesigning the prison library with a romance section decorated with hearts and an LGBTQ+ section adorned with a handmade rainbow flag crafted by the inmate.
“He was gay — a conflict in prison — even when I was in the yard with him, I would talk with him, but I was worried about what people were thinking,” he said, noting the prison’s culture of homophobia. “There are do’s and don’ts, and that’s one of the don’ts.”
“But I wanted to lean into that,” he continued.
The portrayal of Jones over the course of several years illustrated a man who suffered from debilitating mental illness and frequent bouts of psychosis.
“Milton Jones, I met him when he was 50,” Lennon said. “He came to prison for killing two priests. I didn’t know the details, but I did know he was in Sing Sing to pursue a master’s degree in theology. I thought that was really complicated, and I wanted to know more.”
After being stabbed inside prison, he ripped the hardcovers from books to fashion a vest that would protect him from getting shanked. Still, he was able to pursue various degrees and obtained a Bachelor’s degree in science in the ’90s and a Master’s degree in theology in 2021. Shane spoke at the graduation ceremony.
Choosing true crime tabloid sensation Chambers as a man on the inside to portray was more complicated for Lennon. Female friends of Lennon warned him that writing about Chambers could be a bad bet for his career, which made him want to write about Chambers even more.
“I wanted to show the world what it feels like to have that moniker and live a life being told who you are,” Lennon said. “It was quite a task to try to show some empathy for a man that everybody hated. People hated him because he couldn’t take full responsibility and express what he did.”
Lennon, who’s in a 12-step program, said he believes Chambers couldn’t grow because he never got sober. “When you’re stoned on heroin your whole life — and he did a lot of dope in prison — you’re not growing, right?”
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In the book, Lennon recounts conversations with Chambers that left him frustrated and defeated. Chambers, he speculated, was incapable of being honest with himself. Still, Lennon wrote of his fondest memories of Chambers in which he communicated with hearing impaired inmates using sign language he learned through a prison course. “ . . . the moments he didn’t know I was watching him. I’d see him from the mezzanine view of my cellblock, signing with his hands in the air, his face expressive and sincere. . . I sometimes wonder if I will be resented for rendering him like this, as some of my female friends warned I would be. For depicting Robert Chambers’ humanity.”
Chambers was released from prison in 2023 after his second lengthy term and will be under post-release supervision until July 2028.
“Sometimes I get flak from my peers, saying, ‘Oh, that John Lennon. He’s just trying to use you for your story,’” Lennon told me. “And I’m like, bro, I’m trying to humanize us in here!”
Lennon’s favorite book is Janet Malcom’s 1989 “The Journalist and the Murderer,” a birthday gift from his publicist, Megan Posco, a few years back. The book examines the morality of journalistic choices through the critique of Joe McGinniss’s “Fatal Vision,” in which he befriended, lived with and (what has been argued, swindled) former Green Beret physician Dr. Jeffrey R. MacDonald, who was convicted of murdering his family.
Lennon told me he uses the book as an ethical guide when writing, and no, it’s not lost on him that he has the unique perspective of both the journalist and the murderer.
“It’s all about untruths and truths, and that’s why I’m telling this story,” he said. “This happens to a lot of people in prison, but they have no voice.”
Lennon admits even he has struggled to be fair to other criminals over the course of his career. “I once read that artistic growth doesn’t always parallel moral growth,” he wrote in the book, and yet, while there are no therapeutic programs in prison that require inmates to face having taken a life, Lennon said it’s writing, and specifically working with some of the best editors in the business, that has helped him sort out his relationship to his crime.
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“The first piece I ever wrote that was a true crime piece was in the New York Review of Books,” he told me. “I wrote about Jack Henry Abbott. Now, when you think about prison writers, Jack Henry Abbott cast a dark cloud over prison writers for a generation.”
Bestselling author Norman Mailer (known for an interest in true crime as well as his own history of violence) mentored Abbott and petitioned the court for his early release, persuading the parole board on the grounds of Abbott’s talent as a writer. Upon his release, he was widely celebrated by the literary community, but then, just six weeks out, Abbott stabbed a waiter and aspiring playwright to death outside of a New York restaurant.
On February 10, 2002, Abbott hanged himself in a New York State prison cell. That same day, the body of the man Lennon murdered washed ashore on a Brooklyn beach.
“I turned in my first draft. And, I had a bone to pick with this guy, right? He screwed it up for all of us, and my editor was like, ‘I want you to do a rewrite of this piece, and come to the revision with poised ambivalence. I’ll never forget that – ‘poised ambivalence’ – like, give this man a little grace, because that’s what you want. And if anybody should have empathy for a damaged man . . .”
“I’ve been so lucky to have grace from some of the smartest editors in the world,” he continued. “And this is the kind of feedback they give me. You think that anybody in my 24 years of prison has ever asked me, ‘John, what do you do with what you did, killing a man? How do you live with that?’”
“There’s nobody that ever asks you that. It’s just cell time, rec time, lot of rationalization, lot of bull—, lot of idle time in prison.”
His editors, he said, pushed him to go deeper, think deeper, be better. Sure, as a writer but also as a human being. “And from that, you learn how to act better.”
Prison Writing Ain’t Easy
While writing has given Lennon’s life a newfound meaning and purpose, it hasn’t come without hurdles and setbacks. There’s the logistics of communicating with editors and publishers and sending revisions back and forth, 5 pages at a time for a 100,000-word book.
There are the tools: a Swintec typewriter, which comes with enough memory for only seven thousand characters and runs $350, which he uses for penning magazine stories, and his JPay tablet, on which he penned “The Tragedy of True Crime,” sending chapters out like they were long-form text messages.
And there’s the prison notoriety, which once landed him in an involuntary protection unit and on a bus out of Sing Sing, after a Sports Illustrated story he wrote about gambling in prison put him in the hot seat among inmates.
“Recently, maybe six months before the COs [corrections officers] raided our cells and caught my neighbors with cell phones, the gang intelligence officer (a guard who investigates gang leaders and contraband) ransacked my cell. I stood on the tier watching him search it, stacks of my papers and books tumbling over.
“‘What’s this about? You know what I do,’ I said. ‘I’m a writer. I have a career.’”
“‘You mean, hobby?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know if convicts can have careers.’”
Last year, Lennon’s legal team met with Gov. Kathy Hochul’s clemency staff to review the application he submitted in May 2023. He wrote that prosecutors were split on his petition; they would neither oppose nor support. Lennon was told that deputies pressed the team with questions that referenced his episode of “Inside Evil.”
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“Just as I had hoped the show would focus on who I was at the time, I was hoping the governor and DA would focus on who I am today: a working journalist, a mentor, someone who is sober,” he wrote in Vulture earlier this year. While his publicist, Posco, told me there’s been no response from Hochul’s office, Lennon will be eligible for parole in 2029.
Writing After Prison
At Chevalier’s, Lennon discussed “The Tragedy of True Crime” with LA-based journalist Joe Garcia, who similarly launched a writing career from San Quentin State Prison. He earned parole in 2024 after 21 years of incarceration on a life sentence for murder.
Garcia moderated, taking questions from the audience and interspersing with his own. “I’ve got a question for you, John,” he leaned into the receiver. “What are you going to write about when you get out of prison?”
“I hear they have these fascinating true crime cruises,” Lennon said. “That should be an easy layup for the New York Times.”