John J. Lennon was 24 years old when, in December 2001, he killed his former friend Alex Lawson by shooting him with an M-16 assault rifle. This American then places the body in a laundry bag weighted with a concrete block and throws it into the Atlantic. Two months later, the bag washed up on a beach in Brooklyn and John J. Lennon was imprisoned. Now 48 years old, he is serving his twenty-fourth year in Sing Sing Correctional Facility, New York.
Behind bars, he became a respected pen in prison journalism, writing for Esquire, the New York Times Magazine and Rolling Stone. His new book, The Tragedy of True Crimereviewed by the site The Atlantic, asks an uncomfortable question: can a murderer redefine himself other than by his crime?
THE true crime fascinates. Documentary series, podcasts, long-term investigations… The genre often thrives thanks to a simple plot mechanism: evil is identifiable, the criminal punished, justice served. John J. Lennon takes the opposite view: his portraits of murderers refuse the simplism of “good guys against bad guys”. Behind these criminals, he depicts lives marked by the violence suffered, abuse or marginalization. So many scars which – if not explained – shed light on their dramatic trajectory in a different way. This is not so much an excuse as an observation: the story of a murder often begins long before the act itself.
The first chapter of the work focuses on Matthew Shane Hale, sentenced in 1999 to fifty years in prison for the brutal murder of his companion. The facts are sadly banal: an argument, a smashed skull, a body abandoned in a trunk… But John J. Lennon wants to see further and digs further. As a homosexual child in rural Kentucky, Matthew Shane Hale allegedly suffered repeated sexual abuse from the age of 10, culminating in a perverse relationship with his own father. The story, raw and precise, shocks as much as it shifts the focus: before being guilty, Matthew Shane Hale was the victim of an environment in which paternal attention came through abuse.
Criminogenic journeys
This emphasis on the violence suffered before that committed disrupts the narrative model of the genre. In the true crime classic, the sordid details of the crime prepare a catharsis for the spectator: the arrest, the judgment, the sentence. In John J. Lennon, on the contrary, these details complicate the image of the culprit, making him less diabolical, more human. The reader is led to consider that certain crimes also arise from factors beyond their control: untreated mental disorders, early trauma, emotional deficits.
The other portraits continue this exploration: Milton Jones, who murdered two Catholic priests. Aged 17, he was coming out of a difficult childhood, full of abandonment and violence, and presented undiagnosed psychiatric symptoms. Robert Chambers, the “preppy killer” from a wealthy background, who slipped into drug addiction and theft before killing a teenage girl in Central Park. Their damaged destiny and their failed reintegration call into question the effectiveness of reintegration and the mediocre treatment reserved for incarcerated mentally ill people.
These stories highlight a disturbing fact: many criminals are also, before committing the act, victims. The equation is however simple: suffering a crime increases the probability of committing it. Accepting this means understanding that there is a chain of violence which, sometimes, is perpetuated from a victim to their attacker. But John J. Lennon is under no illusion: nothing can undo and “redeem” a murder, not even an exemplary career behind bars.
In 2019, John J. Lennon wrote a letter of apology to the family of his victim, Alex Lawson, in the Washington Post Magazine. Several months later, the latter’s sister, Taisha, responded publicly: for her, John J. Lennon remains an assassin in search of recognition and his literary production does not change his dangerousness. She also launched a petition to prevent any possible pardon. This frontal rejection reminds us that beyond debates on redemption, crime leaves people irreparably injured, unreceptive to the guilty party’s stories of redemption.
The Tragedy of True Crime is as much a journalistic manifesto as an identity plea: John J. Lennon claims his place among journalists, not among killers. There he undoubtedly finds the dignity and validation that he was looking for even before his crime. John J. Lennon does not ask for forgiveness, he knows full well that it is out of reach. It only asks for the possibility of existing differently. On a strictly literary level, he already succeeds. On a moral level, the answer lies with those whose lives he shattered.
