John J. Lennon was 24 years outdated in December of 2001 when he shot his former buddy Alex Lawson with an M-16 assault rifle, then transferred Lawson’s physique to a laundry bag with a cinder block inside and hurled it into the Atlantic Ocean. The bag washed ashore on a Brooklyn seaside in February of the next 12 months. Lennon is now serving his twenty fourth 12 months of a 28-year sentence at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York, the place he has turn out to be a prolific and celebrated author on issues of legal justice.
There’s appreciable demand for content material associated to true crime; streaming companies are awash with episodic reveals delving into crime and legal investigations; podcasts in the identical class quantity within the tens of hundreds. A lot of the output that falls inside that class is true—fact-checked, verified—however what Lennon suggests in his ebook, The Tragedy of True Crime: 4 Responsible Males and the Tales That Outline Us, is {that a} deeper look into the lives of true crime’s villains can reveal a way more ambiguous image than the style’s good-versus-evil components tends to allow. Many individuals who commit heinous crimes have a historical past of legal victimization themselves. From this vantage, evil turns into one thing dauntingly diffuse, with culpability for any given unhealthy act branching outward via society like spidering veins.
The Tragedy of True Crime is dedicated to difficult the simplistic narratives superior by the true-crime style, largely by establishing that there’s extra to the prototypical antagonist than his crimes. On this method, Lennon appears to be making an implicit argument that murderers’ identities shouldn’t perpetually be outlined by their worst act. For Lennon, the ebook itself is an assertion of his id past that of a killer: He’s earnestly insistent that his ebook is a piece of journalism, which is tough to dispute, and that he himself is a journalist, which is equally arduous to dispute. Lennon is a contributing editor at Esquire, and has written for a variety of revered publications, together with The New York Evaluation of Books, The New York Instances Journal, Rolling Stone, New York journal, and The Atlantic. His crime precipitated his profession, and his work is 2 issues directly: professional, stable journalism, and a bid at redemption. It achieves the previous; the latter could also be past journalism’s energy.
Lennon’s ebook actually demonstrates an curiosity within the details—lots of which fall outdoors the same old true-crime purview, however are simply as horrifying. The primary of the circumstances Lennon considers is that of Matthew Shane Hale, who was convicted of the 1995 homicide of his accomplice, Stefan Tanner, with whom he’d had a tumultuous and infrequently abusive relationship. When Hale determined to completely finish the affair, a struggle broke out between the 2 males, and Hale bashed Tanner’s head towards a concrete flooring earlier than stuffing him into the trunk of his automotive and later overlaying his head with a plastic bag. In 1999, a New York jury sentenced Hale to a minimal of fifty years in jail with parole eligibility after 50 years.
That a lot is public file. What Lennon provides to the details of the case are the weather that preceded it. Hale, Lennon writes, grew up homosexual in Kentucky, and was sexually abused at age 10 by the daddy of certainly one of his mates, and by age 11 or 12, in his estimation, he was sexually servicing older boys, after which mates of his father’s, after which, lastly, his father himself. “After I did this, dad’s hand would wind up on my head or ass,” Hale tells Lennon. “There was part of me that had believable deniability that what was occurring was occurring. Dad was handed out, and I used to be so starved for dad’s consideration and affection that I’d resort to molesting my father.”
Right here Lennon gives an account of sexual abuse so frank and blunt, it virtually appears addressed to followers of true crime, who could also be used to tales of graphic violence however much less acquainted with the torture, desperation, and privation that are likely to mark the lives of murderers earlier than their offenses. Sometimes, the gory element marshaled by true-crime creators serves to intensify a forthcoming catharsis: The extra heinous the homicide, the extra satisfying the eventual incarceration, loss of life, or execution. However right here, the extent of element dedicated to the crimes dedicated towards Hale in his early years serves to complicate, reasonably than intensify, the notion of Hale as irredeemable. The truth that many murderers dwell horrendously tough lives previous to their crimes is disquieting: It means that homicide arises not essentially from some deliberate personal initiative but in addition from elements outdoors an individual’s management, together with innate limitations (comparable to mental incapacity and psychological sickness) and psychological and emotional injury inflicted upon them by others.
Lennon is cautious to not current any of these elements as an excuse for homicide, particularly when he considers his personal background. He describes a turbulent and impoverished childhood amid a tradition of criminality that he credit together with his early engagement in utilizing and promoting medicine. However Lennon additionally acknowledges that he’s answerable for the catastrophic selections he made main as much as Lawson’s homicide, in addition to those that got here after. Lennon writes that he got here to jail totally unreformed, and instantly immersed himself within the violent subculture of jail gangs.
Lennon’s different case research concern Milton Jones, a New York man who murdered two Catholic clergymen in 1987, when he was 17 years outdated, and Robert Chambers, the so-called “preppy killer,” who strangled a teenage lady to loss of life in Central Park in 1986. Milton’s background was marked by poverty, abuse, neglect, and early publicity to violence, and he confirmed indicators of untreated psychological sickness at an early age. Lennon intimates that childhood experiences past Milton’s management inclined him to violence—after which, in an attention-grabbing distinction, introduces Chambers’s case, which unfolded in a seemingly reverse method. Not like Milton, Chambers was born into relative privilege, then attended costly prep colleges and earned admission to Boston College; his upscale background, together with the youth of his sufferer, led to a media frenzy across the case. However Lennon’s examination of Chambers’s case reveals an remoted and alienated individual, adrift in society, who had descended into drug use, alcoholism, and petty theft. Lennon paperwork Milton’s struggles with psychological sickness in jail, the place psychiatric issues are hardly ever handled adequately—a commentary on incarceration as a type of warehousing the mentally in poor health. Lennon additionally tracks Chambers’s experiences with launch and reincarceration, a fair-minded acknowledgment that some persons are too broken to make the most of second possibilities.
True-crime followers could also be primed to prize a neat wrap-up to harrowing tales of violent crime—the perpetrator goes to jail and the matter is settled—however Lennon observes that these conclusions, too, masks deep ambiguities. He reviews, as an example, that he interviewed the lead detective on Hale’s homicide case and realized that the precise occasions main as much as Tanner’s loss of life have been introduced otherwise by the prosecution than by the detectives. Lennon takes this to recommend that the prosecution might have fabricated some parts altogether. What Lennon finds will not be dispositive of prosecutorial misconduct, however the discrepancy ought to offer one pause. Many offenders’ circumstances proceed lengthy after they’re convicted and imprisoned, usually resulting in proof that complicates official narratives.
Crime is criminogenic, which means that legal victimization will increase an individual’s probability of committing crimes themselves. That is considerably tough to just accept, as a result of it reveals that legal exercise is commonly a part of a sequence of wrongdoing into which the offender was drawn, and since it implies that abuse may inflict ethical injury, amongst its many harms.
However homicide will not be one thing you’ll be able to undo with the enterprise of a brand new profession. In 2019, The Washington Put up Journal ran an essay by Lennon titled “The Apology Letter,” by which he explores his battle to come back to phrases together with his regret for Lawson’s homicide, explaining that he has modified radically because the murder, largely because of his profession as a journalist. “The extra I revealed, the extra I felt like I used to be incomes a brand new id,” Lennon wrote. “I not needed to be the killer, I needed to be the author.” Months later, the Put up ran a letter to the editor from Lennon’s sufferer’s sister, Taisha Lawson, who excoriated Lennon as insincere, with an urge for food for notoriety. She additionally posted a petition a number of years in the past on MoveOn.org protesting the potential for Lennon receiving clemency, which argued that Lennon’s “occupation doesn’t change the truth that he’s able to homicide or mendacity for his personal self curiosity … John J. Lennon the author continues to be the person able to cold-blooded homicide.”
Humanizing the criminals behind true crime is, in Lennon’s case, self-serving, and his efforts to style a brand new id have been met with resistance. For him, insisting upon his id as a journalist versus a killer means laying declare to the sort of dignity and credibility usually denied to individuals behind bars, and maybe the form of validation and respect he had been trying to find when he began down the legal path that ultimately led to homicide.
Nobody in Taisha Lawson’s place may very well be anticipated to really feel something however skeptical of that effort. Lennon ended her brother’s life, and he doesn’t deny this; on this occasion, he’s not trying a lot for forgiveness as a chance to be one thing aside from a killer. In scripting this ebook, he has inarguably achieved that.
