Brooke Gladstone: This is the On the Media midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week, Monster: The Ed Gein Story, is the most-watched show on Netflix. It's a dramatized retelling of the life of the serial killer who inspired Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Adeline Watkins: There's something real dark about you, Eddie Gein.

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Ed Gein: What did you do?

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Ed Gein: You're the one who can't look away.

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Brooke Gladstone: The Monster franchise, which includes two earlier seasons about Jeffrey Dahmer and Lyle and Erik Menendez, is one of Netflix's splashiest hits. The Dahmer season is still the fourth most-watched English-language show in the history of the platform. People love this stuff, and the obsession only grows each year. On Netflix last year, 15 of the top 20 documentaries were true crime docs, compared to just six in 2020, but what does it mean for the subjects of these documentaries that Americans endlessly crave stories about murder and bloodshed?

John J. Lennon is a contributing editor for Esquire and writes frequently for The New York Review of Books and The New York Times. This week, he called me from Sing Sing Correctional Facility, where he's serving the 24th year of his 28-year-to-life sentence for murder, drug sales, and gun possession. He recently wrote the book The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us. How was it that he ended up being the focus of a true crime documentary in 2018 called Inside Evil with Chris Cuomo?

John J. Lennon: Well, actually, I had gotten a letter from the woman I knew at CNN, and she had introduced me to her colleagues. I was telling my brother about this. He's like, "Cuomo's got that show on CNN," and he's like, "It's called Inside Evil." I was like, "What?" When I went down to visit, they were like, "No, no, no. First season, it was just called Inside. The second season is called Inside Evil. We're going a different route. We're telling stories of redemption."

A couple of weeks after that, when they came up for the filming, that's not what it was. To be fair to Chris Cuomo, he did level with me that this is the show. I had the governor's brother in front of me. What am I going to do? Just walk out and give him my back? I told them my story. Look, he gave me a fair shake for anybody on that show. I was introduced to the dark side of the media.

Brooke Gladstone: You saw your crime being reenacted on that show.

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Clip: There was definitely a dark side, another side to him.

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Clip: Alex was shot about 18 times.

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Clip: He blew parts of his body off. He's a killer.

John J. Lennon: Doing the interview, you have this idea in your head of how the interview went. Then watching the show almost a year later, it would cut to these reenactments of somebody playing me killing my friend, and slow motion of the AR-15, the bullets coming out of it. It was a lot to process because it was quite different from the context of the conversation I had, which was a vulnerable one, I'd like to think, at times.

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Chris Cuomo: Were you able to process it with regret?

John J. Lennon: No, there wasn't regret yet. Regret comes when there's a possibility of getting caught.

Clip: He was captivated by the lore of the street. He wanted to be a thug.

John J. Lennon: Then the tone, with certain answers that I would give, how proud I was of what I'd become, and see those juxtaposed to the sister of the man I killed. Oftentimes, she was understandably emotional. I just thought the editing was just, wow. It just made me really emotional about what I'd done, the harm that I caused, thinking I was perhaps not as insightful about what I had done, at least in the context in which it was rendered. The identity of who I was as a writer was put up against who I was as the killer 18 years before. That conflict was constant in that 40-minute show.

Brooke Gladstone: How did this experience lead you to this book?

John J. Lennon: First, it was criticism. I just started thinking about the stories that others tell about us. I had an idea in my head that true crime just corrupts our cultural understanding of crime and punishment. I wondered what I could bring to the genre, so I started getting the stories of the men around me. Not everyone is introspective about their crime, but some people are. There's not always a happy ending. It's not always just grappling with remorse, but some people do. What about them?

I knew I had access to a lot of that. I knew on one level, I could tell a narrative story different from the stories that were told by traditional true crime tellers. I knew I could be a trusted narrator for the reader because I was already doing that with my magazine writing. I say in the book, "I didn't go out looking for true crime. I'm minding my business here, writing magazine features about life in prison. True crime came looking for me, but they got the right one. You did that with the right one because you saw me as a murderer." I'm talking to the producers, but you were talking to the journalist.

Brooke Gladstone: There's a YouGov poll from last year that found 57% of Americans consume true crime content. If 57% watch true crime about murder and go to sleep watching it on TV, you were convinced that more than anything, you wrote, "This is what's keeping me and not just you in prison. True crime." How so?

John J. Lennon: Well, I have a hunch that many of these people going to sleep to murder, they wake up grateful for all the prisons. They're like, "Whoa, thank God them little lives are in prison." You could see it when you flip to CNN and Fox. Both sides are in on this.

Brooke Gladstone: This is from the book, "The stories we tell about the worst of humanity are a reflection on all of us. True crime is the antithesis of the notion that we're more than our crimes. It turns back the clock and replays the worst moments of someone's life, reconstructs, reenacts it all for entertainment, usually by exploiting the people most affected by the violence. Victims whose wounds haven't healed, perpetrators who haven't reckoned with their guilt. This is the tragedy of true crime." What we mean here is true crime on TV shows like Dateline or Inside Evil or Netflix, not so much the literary genre like Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.

John J. Lennon: Or Emmanuel Carrère's The Adversary to go more contemporary. They called that work "The French in Cold Blood." He's probably the most famous nonfiction writer in France. 1993, Jean-Claude Romand kills his whole family. He's fronting as a doctor for the World Health Organization. He wasn't a doctor. He would drive around all day and do nothing. Emmanuel Carrère was a novelist at that point. He was circling the story about how to get into it and ultimately put himself in the story.

One of his most famous lines is how he opened the book. He said, "While Jean-Claude Romand was killing his children, I was at the student meeting with my wife, with my kid." He does this fascinating thing where he occupies his own position and tells the truth about himself and doesn't really judge him in the way a traditional journalist would and look down on him. He tries his best not to. I wanted to adapt that style, but with a different agency. What I did in my book about three men who've killed, I'm able to put myself beneath them.

Brooke Gladstone: It is remarkable how you weave what you did in and among the chronicles of what your subjects in the book do.

John J. Lennon: Right. Well, thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: Structurally, it's very interesting.

John J. Lennon: Structurally, I was trying to do something different than what traditional true crime does. I think, structurally, most true crime stories start in the media and raised in the middle of things. Usually, at the crime, 911 calls, it's police tape. With me, when I start getting into the three men, first Michael Shane Hale, then Milton E. Jones, and then Robert Chambers. I do it as I meet them in prison instead of just learning about them through their crime.

Brooke Gladstone: It's a profoundly compelling book. You write with a great directness and clarity. Your engagement with these people doesn't lead you to excuse or, in any way, whitewash the gruesomeness of what they did. It can be quite graphic in places, but it is so contextualized. Let's start with Michael Shane Hale and Milton E. Jones. The first two share certain elements. They were dealt a God-awful hand, they committed gruesome murders, they're in prison, and they've changed.

John J. Lennon: Sure. I first meet Michael Shane Hale in 2017. I used to run the yard with him. Shane was the kindest man I've ever met in prison. I call Michael Shane Hale "Shane." I didn't know what he was in prison for. Eventually, you get drips. I remember a guy in my ear said, "Oh, he's got one of those crimes you see on Snapped. He killed his lover. He dismembered his lover. He's gay, he's this, he's that."

The prison rumor mill is a lot like the internet. It has some truths, some untruths. I used to work with him in a building. He used to prep guys for getting out. I remember sitting in his classes. He's showing guys how to use Narcan, and he's serving 50 to life. I was like, "Wow, that's an interesting job for a guy to do that's probably dying in prison. That shows character." Then this happened to me with the whole Chris Cuomo thing. He had empathy. He liked my work. I sat with him, learned his story.

He was abused growing up in Kentucky. There's a very dysfunctional household. He joins the army at 18. He gets rejected there, and then he runs to New York City, and he gets rejected there, too. He never quite finds himself. He's constantly being rejected. There is a lot of domestic abuse, primarily in the relationship that led to the crime. Then we get to the killings, and then we see his life unfold in prison, which is pretty impressive. Milton Jones, at 17 in 1987, he kills two priests with his co-defendant, Theodore Simmons. I meet him also in Sing Sing in 2019. He's a classmate of Shane's.

Brooke Gladstone: What do you mean "a classmate"?

John J. Lennon: There's a master's degree program in Sing Sing. It's in theology. By 2019, Shane was in it, and so was Milton. One of the clerks told me, "There's a guy here that killed two priests years ago. He's studying for theology." I was like, "Really? I want to know more."

Brooke Gladstone: You said he was ostracized, too.

John J. Lennon: Well, he was ostracized, too, because he suffered from schizophrenia. It was very difficult in this environment. He had already earned a bachelor's degree. He was going to classes every day. He had his vices, but he also spoke truth. His sentences were declarative. I was just like, "Wow, this is a character. This is an interesting guy." I do the same thing with him. We meet in the cell block and take me to the scenes of talking to him, but then I drop back. I tell the story of his younger, more vulnerable years.

He grew up in the rough side of Buffalo. His mother was 14 when she had him. He had some uncles that were criminals. One of his uncles got murdered when he was younger. I remember talking to him about getting beatings when we were younger. He told me about his incident. I told him about an incident of my mom whipping me. We both laugh because what do you do? You can't cry in prison.

The ones closest to us are the ones that introduce us to violence. Then we get to the killings, too. I don't hold back with the killing because I think what happens in a lot of criminal justice writing is it's the opposite of the true crime. The true crime, it's all about that, and then the criminal justice is all about the punishment. It obscures the accountability, and it obscures the harm we do to families.

I won't do that. I'm going to go in there, and I'm going to explain it. I use my own crime to do that, but only in furtherance of their crime. It's illuminating these dark spots that most writers and most storytellers can't go. None of these true crime producers can do that. Sometimes, the criminal justice journalists, they won't do that. They don't think it's relevant sometimes to even talk about that. I disagree.

Brooke Gladstone: Can you tell me how they view their crimes now and how they feel about them?

John J. Lennon: Michael Shane Hale was remorseful from the gate. He killed somebody he loved. He killed somebody he resented. I'm talking about somebody who was 63 years old, his lover.

Brooke Gladstone: When he was in his 20s.

John J. Lennon: Yes, at the time.

Brooke Gladstone: His lover was also abusive, physically abusive, as well as mentally abusive.

John J. Lennon: The documentation, that shows that.

Brooke Gladstone: What about Milton Jones?

John J. Lennon: Milton served much of his years at the beginning in Attica in the '90s, and that was tough. Attic is a tough joint. He killed two white priests, and he's a Black man. Attica is almost an all-white staff. Most of the prisoners are people of color. Milton had it tough, and he was always accountable from the door. He held the hands of Ray, the younger brother of one of the priests that Milton killed, and his wife, and looked into their eyes and apologized for what he did.

Brooke Gladstone: The person who stands apart from Shane and Jones is Robert Chambers, the famous one. He murdered 18-year-old Jennifer Levin in 1986, was surrounded by an instant media frenzy, was dubbed the Preppy Killer and the Central Park Strangler by the press. As recently as 2019, three decades after he killed her, there was a five-part docu-series called The Preppy Murder. What kind of narrative did this true crime coverage superimpose on Chambers' life on his character? How does it differ from the one you learned about?

John J. Lennon: Well, just your introduction right there. You said he murdered, and then you referenced the documentary Preppy Murder, right? He was never convicted of murder. He was convicted of manslaughter.

Brooke Gladstone: Ah, right.

John J. Lennon: People are fast and loose with calling people "murderers." They're so used to calling people "murderers." The jury couldn't convict Rob of murder, but I was corrected as a matter of fact, right? I was convicted of murder because they call it mens rea. It's like I intended, and I had that on my mind. I knew what I was going to do when I killed the man I killed. That was unequivocal. I do not believe, walking out of the bar that night, that Robert Chambers had murder on his mind.

He had his coat back at the bar, but something happened, obviously, where he did kill her. He did strangle her. It was in the moment. When I meet him, I moved to Sullivan. I landed in his cell block, and we started living together. Eventually, I asked him if he'd be open to participating in this book. I shared my work with him, and he said, "I'd rather have you tell my story than whatever's out there. If you want to tell the same story, then that's just going to be the same thing that's out there."

I assured him I was looking to tell something different. What I was looking to tell, to answer your question, what does it mean to live a life with the media telling you who you are? I had one instance where the media treated me, perhaps unkindly, with this Inside Evil episode. I was pretty bent out of shape about it. How do you really overcome who people say you are?

Brooke Gladstone: How did your narrative differ from the tabloids and the documentaries? What did you tell the reader about him that true crime would have missed?

John J. Lennon: From one addict to another, I understood why he did heroin. Heroin is a big drug in prison. It helps you not feel, kills the fear. Prison is fearful. What happens is if you don't eventually get sober, you don't grow. Ultimately, that's what Rob's biggest problem was. He could not really get sober. That's what I observed with him. I was trying to show what this looked like on a day-to-day level with Rob. Look, it's a difficult character. When we think of story, we think of a sympathetic character trying to overcome a complicated situation, which is prison. I may not want to pick Robert Chambers. I had colleagues, women, tell me, "Be very careful."

Brooke Gladstone: Yes, he sounds like a journalist's nightmare. He was both a willing and an unwilling subject, sometimes entirely unresponsive. Do you think you were able to fill for readers some of the missing pieces of his character, like what he did in prison?

John J. Lennon: Along the way, he had learned sign language. I see him helping men that were hearing-impaired, were deaf. They were always going to Rob. I wanted to capture those moments, too, because I think that's part of the story. I'm also tough with him with questions when reflecting back on what happened that night with Jennifer. I wasn't satisfied with his answers.

Brooke Gladstone: He had trouble expressing remorse. You've said that one of the heartbreaking moments in the book is when he goes back to prison with a 19-year sentence for drugs in 2008. He's surrounded by another media frenzy. He told you, "I guess at that point, I felt maybe I'm the guy in the newspapers. Maybe they're right, so just leave me alone. Let me go back to prison. Let me get high and die."

John J. Lennon: That is heartbreaking. You see that exasperation on him. Part of me was like, "Am I doing what everybody else is doing? What is the point of telling this guy's story?" Even right now, as the book comes out, I'm thinking, "Who am I to drill this guy?" I hoped that he would be vulnerable with me, maybe put some clarity to what happened that night, but that's not what happened. At the end, I see a guy that's broken from some of the themes that I've explored in the overarching theme of the book. Maybe in part, this is what happens when the media tells you who you are. I just ended this idea of how Rob hasn't been too kind to himself his whole life.

Brooke Gladstone: Are you projecting remorse onto him?

John J. Lennon: Perhaps. Some of us can't put words to remorse. There's not a happy ending to every story. That's not what this book is. I think that's the complexities of these characters, right?

Brooke Gladstone: You told my producer, Candice, that writing for you is everything. It's the major conflict of this book and in your life. It's what brings you pride, "brings the family that I hurt pain." It's what brings you shame. "Am I the murderer or am I the writer? Perhaps I'm both." What is the most important thing for you, the writer? What do you want to accomplish?

John J. Lennon: Well, what writing has done for me, it enables me to figure out myself. I think before you tell the stories of others as a first-person narrative journalist, you have to figure out yourself because there's no other way to come to terms with that in here. In 24 years, nobody that's worked for corrections has ever asked me, "John, what do you do with what you did?" Murdering a man. That's not what goes on in here, but it is what goes on on the page. It is what goes on between my editors. It is what goes on between men that I mentor.

Brooke Gladstone: Tell me about that.

John J. Lennon: Over the years, sometimes you come to people with a story idea. They don't want to be your subject, but they may want to tell their own story. Last year, I hosted a workshop at Sullivan. Nine guys attended. Seven of the men were published. One of the prerequisites is coming to terms with what you did on the page. Readers are not going to want to read what you have to say about prison if you don't level with them.

Brooke Gladstone: That helps them come to terms with what they did, that process?

John J. Lennon: I'd like to think, yes, there is that back-and-forth with the first thing you put on the page. That may not be how you feel. That's crap. That sucks. That's not how you feel, right? No, let's go back and forth. Let's talk about this. I killed a man, too. What do we do with that? I do this with them because my editor has done this with me. I remember when I was working on my first piece for The New York Review of Books. I was writing about Jack Henry Abbott, and I had a bone to pick with him.

Brooke Gladstone: He is the man who was profiled by Norman Mailer, which is said to have helped get him out of prison.

John J. Lennon: Well, he was mentored by Norman Mailer. He had went back and forth writing him letters. That's what Jack Abbott's book was about, The Belly of the Beast. Norman Mailer helped advocated for him to get out in '81. Six weeks later, Jack Abbott killed a night manager in Lower Manhattan, "I stabbed him." This is like an albatross on the neck of prison writers. My first draft, it was angry. I was so bothered by this guy. I remember my editor saying, "John, I want you to rewrite this with poised ambivalence."

Brooke Gladstone: Poised ambivalence?

John J. Lennon: Yes, like, "Don't come to him thinking you got all the answers, and have a little grace with him. Drop your resentment, and just take another whack at it, right? You haven't dealt with reentry." He made some good points. It's these back-and-forths that help me grow. In that essay, I get to my own reckoning with my crime, how I feel about it. These are the back-and-forths to deal with the men I mentor, so that's what writing does.

Brooke Gladstone: This just occurred to me. John, you're eligible for parole in 2029.

John J. Lennon: Correct.

Brooke Gladstone: If you get it, do you worry, to use a business word, that your value-added [chuckles] special insight will no longer be applicable? What will you write about?

John J. Lennon: Oh, I hate that question.

Brooke Gladstone: Oh, well, you don't have to answer it. You really don't.

John J. Lennon: I want to answer it because the ability to find story is the most important thing for any journalist. I look at the world as a story arc. I look at my experience, and it's before prison. I've been in the total institution for much of my life. To your point, I'm institutioned out. Then there's the reentry part, right? There's a lot of conflict. Look what we just talked about with Abbott.

He couldn't figure it out. The story that swirls around me, the real story is the one that swirls within me. When I get out there, there's so much conflict that's going to be with these stories and these people that come into my life. I lean into that. What is it like to experience a true crime cruise with CrimeCon? The stories are endless. They don't stop. The story starts within you.

Brooke Gladstone: John, thank you so much.

John J. Lennon: Oh, thank you, Brooke.

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Brooke Gladstone: John J. Lennon authored the recent book, The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us. He's also a contributing editor for Esquire and writes regularly for The New York Review of Books and The New York Times. He's currently incarcerated at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, eligible for parole in 2029.

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