From the Washington Post, a review by Marin Cogan of John J. Lennon’s The Tragedy of True Crime (Celadon, 2025). Cogan writes about Lennon’s book, which is part journalism and part memoir,
Lennon leans into the complicated moral questions his work raises. “To be clear, while some people in prison are wrongfully convicted, few of us are truly innocent; we just want to be,” he writes. “Most people in prison are guilty. And I’ve always found the guilty man more interesting, perhaps because I am one.”
In that vein, he devotes significant time to his own history, going deep on his crime and wrestling with the ways in which he continued to harm his victim’s family even beyond the murder. Lennon writes that he’d heard the victim, a friend of his, was extorting one of his drug dealers. So he picked his friend up in a rental car, drove to a secluded area, and shot him several times through the window of the car while the victim sat in the passenger seat. Lennon then drove the car with the victim’s body in his trunk to his home, and to a car repair shop, before eventually dumping it in New York Bay. Despite telling his own mother what he’d done, Lennon called the victim’s mother, pretending to be searching for his friend. In court, he continued to protest his innocence, and he kept using drugs after his conviction. It wasn’t until 2010, after being stabbed in retaliation for the killing and transferred to Attica Correctional Facility, that Lennon found a creative-writing class that changed the course of his life. Over time, his writing led him to become more introspective about the crime he committed.
