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 state of mind at the time and his current perspective: “I told myself that killing him was the only solution. (That’s the absurdity of the drug game: we betray and kill our friends).” He also realizes now that he wasn’t solely influenced by the logic of the drug game. “I feared that others would discover things I was doing that conflicted with what I wanted to be in life,” Lennon writes. “Many of us who commit terrible violence struggle internally with something that drains us of our substance. ” Through The tragedy of true crime, he identifies fear as the catalyst for his violence.

When he was charged with the murder in early 2002, Lennon was already in jail at Rikers Island for gun possession and selling heroin. Two years later, he was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 28 years to life in prison. It would be years before Lennon began to understand why he committed such terrible acts. “Deep reflection can only happen, if it ever happens, when you feel far enough away from all the madness, from the version of yourself you once were,” he explains. “And sometimes it takes years, because after the crime comes the arrest, the prison sentence, the trials and the prison – watching TV in the cell block or getting high with the guys in the yard, telling each other how the system has screwed each of us up, respectively. »

For Lennon, it was a creative writing workshop he fought to attend at Attica in 2010 – as well as twice-weekly Alcoholics Anonymous meetings – that pushed him to break out of the numbness so common in prison and cultivate 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 Squire, where he is editor-in-chief. In his book, Lennon weaves reflections on his own past, his crimes and his time in prison through the stories of three other men guilty of suicide, with whom he served in New York prisons. With his personal reflections, he writes, he hopes to “explain why people like me do what we did.” He came to this conclusion largely while in his twenty-fourth year in prison, which is not an environment conducive to deep reflection. It was Lennon’s writing career, undertaken under extraordinary circumstances and with the help of many outside editors and writers, that allowed him to explore his guilt and, as he writes, to “develop further what I had always lacked: empathy.” This empathy allows him “to offer the felt life of men who took a life… to show you who we are, without diminishing the lives of the people we killed”, in The tragedy of true crime.