What Happens When the True Crime Story Is Over?

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.”

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.