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.”
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.
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.