Introduction: Sing Sing -- Act I: The meet. Growing up gay in Kentucky -- Raised rough in East Side, Buffalo -- A preppy with privilege -- Act II: The killing. A killing in Brooklyn, a dismemberment in Kentucky -- Kids killing priests in Buffalo -- A death in Central Park -- The system doesn't care about remorse -- Act III: The Time. A visit with the victims -- The preppy is hooked on heroin and sent to solitary -- Mental illness in prison -- Never give up, never give in -- No parole for the preppy -- College and sex and self-discovery in prison -- Getting out, coming back -- Act IV: The reckoning. Back in Sing Sing -- God and psychosis in prison -- A new law, a new chance at freedom -- A turbulent mix of hope and desperation -- Can the preppy killer ever be more? -- Author's note -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index

"In 2001, John J. Lennon killed a man on a Brooklyn street. Now he's a journalist, working from behind bars, trying to make sense of it all. The Tragedy of True Crime is a first-person journalistic account of the lives of four men who have killed, written by a man who has killed. John J. Lennon entered the New York prison system with a sentence of twenty-eight years to life, but after he stepped into a writing workshop at Attica Correctional Facility, his whole life changed. Reporting from the cellblock and the prison yard, Lennon challenges our obsession with true crime by telling the full life stories of men now serving time for the lives they took. The men have completely different backgrounds--Robert Chambers, a preppy Manhattanite turned true crime celebrity; Milton E. Jones, a burglar coaxed into something far darker; and Michael Shane Hale, a gay man caught in a crime of passion--and all are searching to find meaning and redemption behind bars. Lennon's reporting is intertwined with the story of his own journey from a young man seduced by the infamous gangster culture of New York City to a celebrated prison journalist. The same desire echoes throughout the four lives: to become more than murderers. A first of its kind book of immersive prison journalism, The Tragedy of True Crime poses fundamental questions about the stories we tell and who gets to tell them. What essential truth do we lose when we don't consider all that comes before an act of unthinkable violence? And what happens to the convicted after the cell gate locks?"-- Provided by publisher