{"id":6645,"date":"2025-10-01T14:25:18","date_gmt":"2025-10-01T18:25:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/?page_id=6645"},"modified":"2025-10-01T14:25:18","modified_gmt":"2025-10-01T18:25:18","slug":"from-the-washington-post-john-j-lennon-the-tragedy-of-true-crime-2025","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/from-the-washington-post-john-j-lennon-the-tragedy-of-true-crime-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Washington Post: John J. Lennon, The Tragedy of True Crime (2025)"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the Washington Post, a review by Marin Cogan of John J. Lennon’s The Tragedy of True Crime (Celadon, 2025).<\/a> Cogan writes about Lennon’s book, which is part journalism and part memoir,<\/p>\n

Lennon leans into the complicated moral questions his work raises. \u201cTo be clear, while some people in prison are wrongfully convicted, few of us are truly innocent; we just want to be,\u201d he writes. \u201cMost people in prison are guilty. And I\u2019ve always found the guilty man more interesting, perhaps because I am one.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s family even beyond the murder. Lennon writes that he\u2019d 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\u2019s 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\u2019d done, Lennon called the victim\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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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...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-6645","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/PasVL2-1Jb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6645"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6648,"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6645\/revisions\/6648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}