The Tragedy of True Crime
Author: John J. Lennon
Date: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00
Description: 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. Lennon entered the New York prison system with a sentence of 28 years to life but after he stepped into a writing workshop at Attica Correctional Facility, his whole life changed. Reporting from the cell block and the prison yard, Lennon challenges our obsession with true crime by telling the full life stories of men n
Publisher: Celadon Books

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Table of Contents

About the Author

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To the writers who have the nerve to dream big in a small cell: Craft your comeback, tell your story and the stories of those around you, and don’t ever let anyone tell you what you can’t do.

In recent years, many well-intentioned journalists and activists and academics have been rethinking the vocabulary they use to describe people in prison. The convict has become the incarcerated person, ex-cons have become the formerly incarcerated, and the criminal justice system is now the criminal legal system. Words build worlds, and in this narrative nonfiction book written from prison, I’ve tried to use more authentic prose––convict, prisoner, the joint. I use terms like “CO” and “guard,” “tier” and “gallery,” interchangeably. This is the language I hear every day.

This book is also a true story, and I use the real names of all significant characters, even peripheral characters, though with many of them I only use their real first names or nicknames. In the few instances when I attribute illegal activity to someone, I’ve changed their nickname. The mother of Milton’s first child asked me to not use her name, and I changed it to Melina. In 2020, the sister of the man I murdered requested I not use his name in my future writings. I have respected her request ever since, and I refer to him in this book as E. All other names or nicknames are real.

Introduction
[SING SING]

October 2018

The corrections officer appeared before my cell bars and turned the key. It was time. I was escorted down the hill, under a canopy, with a picture-perfect view of the Hudson River and the rock-face mountains behind it for miles. The people who blew by on boats, seeing the big brick cellblocks, the thick walls of concrete and swirling barbed wire on our side, probably thought really scary people lived here. The structures on the shore had their own stories: Inside one brick building, Old Sparky had electrocuted 614 people; the remains of another building, the prison’s first cellblock, dating to the 1820s, sat crumbling and empty. This was Sing Sing, the maximum-security prison roughly thirty miles up the river from New York City. This was my home.

The schoolhouse, a three-story brick building with caged windows, was where prisoners took college classes and played instruments and tried to discover something more—more than what they saw out the window in the yard, where handballs thwacked, weights clinked, and groups of men smoked spliffs and talked shit. As I was escorted in, walkie-talkies crackled off the hips of other COs. I saw Jing, a producer, outside a classroom set up with TV cameras. “You nervous?” she asked. “Just be yourself, you’re going to be great!”

Weeks earlier, Jing Feng and Kim Launier, two HLN producers, had visited me at Sing Sing. It was a Friday in September, and the visiting room, with the smells of microwave popcorn and buffalo wings wafting, bustled with love and life. They told me they were impressed with the journalism career I’d built for myself, and were excited to consider me for a new season of a show featuring stories of redemption. I asked about their careers. Jing used to work in finance on Wall Street, she told me, but her real passion was telling true stories. Kim had dark, thick curly hair and bushy eyebrows, and had been working with Chris Cuomo for over twenty years. She was the one in charge. She leaned in and made intense eye contact, as if she were searching for something behind my eyeballs, and mentioned that she had studied criminal behavior at Quantico. It made me leery.

This was before the fall of the Cuomo brothers. Andrew Cuomo was still the governor of New York; Chris, his younger brother, still had his nightly prime-time CNN show. My own brother googled the HLN show hosted by Chris Cuomo and told me it was called Inside Evil. The series aimed to “hone [sic] in on the psychology of evil and try to understand how the most dangerous minds in the world work.” During the visit, I confronted Jing and Kim.

“You guys aren’t looking to put me on that show, right?” I asked them.

Kim told me the first season was called Inside with Chris Cuomo, and for the second season, it was renamed Inside Evil. For the third season, they were pivoting again—the theme would be redemption. She said “evil” wouldn’t be in the title. Jing stayed quiet. A baby cried in a prisoner’s arms at the next table, and Kim melted and moaned and made sad eyes and told me she was a new mother. I felt relieved, safe. I was excited that they saw my redemption story as worthy enough to be included in the series.

Now, in the schoolhouse, I waited in the college computer lab while Jing, Kim, and their colleagues set up for the interview in another room. The college clerk was the only other prisoner in the building. The superintendent had selected him when the producers asked for an extra man to film for a few B-roll shots. He called me over and asked, “Yo, did they tell you the name of the show? The superintendent told me it’s called Inside Evil.”

I stared at him, stunned. Wait, I thought “evil” was last season. They lied to me?

I looked across the hall, through the windowed walls, at Jing and Kim and the COs in the interview room, chuckling. I felt like it was a setup, like they were all in on it—the superintendent, the COs, the producers, Cuomo—and laughing at me. This guy thinks he’s a journalist! Let’s show the world who he really is. The superintendent and another Albany suit from Central Office walked by with Cuomo. A moment later, a CO came into the lab and said, “Lennon, here’s what’s gonna happen. You’re going to walk across the hall, enter the room, greet the man, and sit down at the table.”

When I opened the door, COs and sergeants and lieutenants and suits lined the wall. I shook hands with Chris Cuomo. “I hear you have some concerns about the name of the show,” he said right away, as a producer clipped a mic to his shirt, then mine. I imagine he knew that it was a headache for his producers, and Kim probably told him that she wasn’t exactly forthcoming with me. Even villains don’t want to be called evil. I bet this wasn’t the first time Cuomo had to schmooze a murderer. “It’s like this Q and A,” he told me, pulling a printout from his folder of a recent interview I had done with a literary magazine. “‘Character and Deed’—this was good! I disagreed with your take on Capote, but that’s maybe a conversation for another time. Think of this as a conversation about what we’ve done and who we are. I wouldn’t be too concerned with the name of the series. Are we good?”

Sitting across from Cuomo, I realized I’d been duped. To be fair to him, he hadn’t been the one who’d told me that “evil” wouldn’t be in the title. It was his producer Kim, who sat off to the side and avoided eye contact. According to CNN, an unsuccessful attempt was made to change the name, so it’s possible that Kim tried to make good on what she told me. I suppose I could’ve walked away, told the CO to take me back to my cell. Then again, I understand how some would believe that I am evil. I murdered a man.

My mind was racing. They were about to start filming.

So what do you do when you’re talking to a journalist whose brother is the governor, the one elected official with the power to commute your sentence and set you free? You proceed.

In December 2001, when I was a twenty-four-year-old drug dealer and drug addict, I shot and killed a man on a Brooklyn street. I was soon arrested and sent to Rikers, an island with several different jails for detained people booked in New York City until their criminal cases are resolved. I’d just murdered a man and had to live with that secret.

Here’s the thing about jail. It’s the toughest time you’ll serve because you’re the closest to the worst version of yourself, and the environment is taut with tension because we don’t know what will become of us. As a white boy, I was in the minority. The next two years of my life were spent at Rikers, immersed in gangs, shanks and razors, smoking weed and sniffing heroin. In the dayroom at the front of the tier, a television droned—“Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry!”—and men fought over extra chicken or boxes of Frosted Flakes or who had next on the phones. Every couple of months, cuffed and shackled, we rattled to court on caged buses for hearings about our cases, waiting hours in crowded bullpens in the courthouse, eating bologna sandwiches. We appeared before a judge, who talked in legalese and gave us another date to appear in court a few weeks later. Hands behind our backs, we were led back to the bullpens and bused back to Rikers.

A day after the opening statements of my first trial, in 2003, a CO tossed me the paper, telling me I’d made the news. The headline: “DA Seeks Instant Karma in Drug Killing”—a reference to the song by the man with the same name. The first line of the article read, “This John Lennon didn’t give peace a chance, according to prosecutors.” After a two-week trial, the jury was hung, five for acquittal, seven for guilty. The judge declared a mistrial.

The prosecutor offered me a plea of fifteen-years-to-life. I rejected it and decided to go back to trial. In 2004, I was found guilty: “M-16 Thug Guilty of Buddy Slay,” a New York Post headline read. The more media-savvy version of me cringes when I read those clippings today, but back then, I carried them with me to prison for cred, to show my new peers what had brought me there. It was a crime that would earn me good standing in the prison pecking order. I received the maximum sentence of twenty-five years to life, on top of three years for two other cases, drug sales and a gun charge—a total of twenty-eight years to life.

For so long, I was devastated by how my time nearly doubled after trial. And even now, having done most of that time, it still stings, but what I was oblivious to then, and realize now, was that me trying to get away with it at trial, not once but twice, compounded my culpability and hurt my victim’s sister and the rest of his family all the more.

My first stop: Sing Sing. While in that old prison on the Hudson, I took an orientation class taught by a Muslim prisoner who had a master’s degree in theology. I had a ninth grade education; I was inspired. He’d earned his degrees through programs offered at Sing Sing. He sported a kufi skullcap and a quiet kind of confidence that came from once having been where we were. In the same classroom where I would sit with Chris Cuomo fourteen years later, I took a seat in a desk-chair combo alongside half a dozen other men. With a sentence that amounted to more years than I’d been alive, I wondered what was going to happen to me. The facilitator told us the “dos and don’ts” of Sing Sing—mind your business, and stay away from the female guards, drugs, and gangs. He explained that most of us had “transit status” and would soon be transferred farther north. When one of his Muslim brothers came into the class and recited a poem, I wrote it down in my composition book:

Two natures exist inside my chest

One that’s foul and one that’s blessed

One I love, one I hate

The one I feed will dominate.

I met Kenny Shannon, one of the Westie gangsters I’d heard about growing up in Hell’s Kitchen on the west side of Manhattan. When Kenny heard that a kid from the neighborhood had arrived, a net bag of peanut butter, jelly, and cigarettes appeared at my cell bars. Kenny went away in the late ’80s, and he was finishing up an eighteen-years-to-life sentence for shooting and killing a man who had a beef with the Westies. I told him how much time I had, and he looked at me, stunned, as if he knew something I had not yet come to understand. He told another old-timer Italian mobster, “My God, they’re loading these kids up with so much time.”

Kenny told me I’d be heading upstate to a tougher prison, where I’d get perspective in the mountains. When I made my way back to Sing Sing, maybe I’d return with a bit of prison wisdom. Kenny was around fifty years old, in good shape, with a pushback of white hair that he would run his fingers through every once in a while. He’d ask me how old he looked, vain preoccupations that I would come to take on, too, as my hair grayed over the years. I’d eventually realize what Kenny knew back then but didn’t have the heart to tell me: The gangster image he represented, and that I had romanticized growing up, was all bullshit, and it was now about to take from me the best years of my life.

After a few months, I was sent up to Clinton Correctional Facility, a maximum-security facility near the Canadian border. It was a more serious place than Sing Sing: The guards seemed to be all white, and the weather, except for two or three months of the year, was almost always bitter. At first, I kept to myself, watching hours of Law & Order reruns on a black-and-white thirteen-inch television in my cell. I liked the show but was struck by how the defendants, like me, were mostly depicted as one-dimensional characters, and the detectives and Assistant DA Jack McCoy, as these morally righteous heroes. It’s why many guys refuse to watch the show, or any of those cop shows. I did watch true crime network shows: Dateline, 48 Hours, 20/20. The stories weren’t usually about criminals who killed other criminals; to an extent, that was expected. They were about seemingly normal couples, mostly white, in love, until someone, usually the boyfriend or husband, killed their partner. An unexpected and unexplainable loss.

On Rikers, it had been mostly fistfights and slashings: Sneakers screeching on the tier, rumbling in a cell, bodies thrown against walls, screams for help—those were the sounds of violence. In prison, the violence seemed less frequent but more serious, almost professional. The first shanking I witnessed was in the Clinton yard, on the flats, an open field of sandy dirt. Moments earlier, someone had told me, “Be on point—it’s about to go down.” In real life, there’s no foreboding background music. It’s silence, then action. Everyone knows what’s about to happen to the guy except him. A man made a beeline to the pull-up bar. The tender part of you, the part that doesn’t yet realize how foul prison truly is, wants to yell out to the guy doing a wide-grip set, “Hey, man, watch out!” But in just a few arm thrusts and a scuffle, it was over. The victim stumbled away holding his side. The hitter passed off the shank, real smooth like. He got away with it. The next morning, I saw him on the chow line, beaming, with people approaching him, dapping him up and smiling. I would come to understand all of that as fake love, fake respect, but back then, it was hard to see that and not think, So that’s what I have to do to survive in here. You could convince yourself to stab someone to set an example. Many do, but I never wanted to be that guy, and I haven’t been. But my reluctance made it more likely that I’d be on the receiving end.

A few years later, in another prison yard, I bumped into a friend of the man I killed. He shanked me six times in the side of my chest with an ice pick. I was ambulanced to the hospital with a punctured lung. Nobody warned me. Alone in the hospital room after surgery, I suddenly realized that, if I had died, there would’ve been no one around who truly loved or cared about me. I’d be the killer who got his karma, who bled to death in a prison yard with a chest full of holes while everyone just watched. I realized then how little I actually mattered. But in the same moment, I felt a deep desire to take a shot with my life.

By 2009, after refusing to identify the guy who stabbed me, I was transferred to Attica. In the worst prison in New York, I began to build a better life. In an AA group, I got sober. In a creative writing workshop, I discovered my passion. The class was competitive. I’d yet to find my voice, and a handful of the others were already publishing essays in literary journals. We read the Best American Essays collections. When I asked the instructor how hard it was to get into the magazines the anthology republished from—The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire—he told me it was unheard of for a prisoner to get to write for those outlets.

My first published piece was loaded with conflict. I described how I illegally obtained the gun I used to kill a man and advocated for gun control. I workshopped it and revised it for months. Then, on a lark, I mailed it to one of those legacy magazines. A month passed, and I didn’t get a response. My writing instructor told me not to expect one. I wondered if the correspondence CO had tossed it when he saw that it was addressed to the media, or if it had been lost in the magazine’s slush pile. Weeks later, I heard back from David A. Graham, a politics editor, who said he’d love to publish my essay. And so, in August 2013, my first ever piece of writing ran in The Atlantic.

I had never felt that kind of joy and pride. I’d never had any real accomplishments. When I sold drugs, years earlier, I felt like people needed me. But I also knew that another dealer would take my place as soon as I was gone. And when I bought stuff with the money I made, it was a false kind of pride, hollow. But I brought my hustle mentality to writing, and it was so much more fulfilling. Editors and readers wanted to hear my point of view. I could make someone behind the wall relevant by telling their story to the world. This is what I wanted to do.

In early 2014, Bill Keller, who had run the New York Times as executive editor for years and was then an op-ed columnist, left the paper to lead a start-up called the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that would cover the US criminal justice system. “Dying in Attica,” a story I wrote about a man with colon cancer, was part of the Marshall Project’s launch, debuting its “Life Inside” section. Bill became an early mentor of mine. The man was taciturn. He communicated—in speech, in writing—with thrift. Whenever I finished a conversation with him, usually over the phone on the tier in Attica, he made me feel like I should talk less and listen more. By 2016, he had agreed to put me and another couple of prison writers on the masthead of the Marshall Project. Soon I started publishing feature spreads. I wrote about my peers, using my own story to relate to theirs, connecting the personal to the universal. I covered a range of subjects, like the culture of verbal and physical abuse in Attica, mental illness in prison, and college behind bars, along with lighter stories about working out and fashion and sports betting in the joint. By 2019, I was named a contributing editor for Esquire. By 2021, when I signed the contract for this book, I was contributing regularly to the New York Times and writing criticism for the New York Review of Books.

Over the years, writing also helped me sort out my relationship to my crime. There are no therapeutic programs in prison that require you to face having taken a life. I’ve tried to figure it out on the page in some of my essays. In 2019, I wrote about my struggle to write an overdue apology letter to the sister of the man I murdered. The essay was also about identity. Am I a writer or a murderer? Am I both? My feelings are fluid. It’s absurd to think I am as much a murderer as I am a writer. The murder was a moment in time, while writing has become my life. But even writing that feels wrong. Murder is so final and far-reaching, and the man I killed was so young (only twenty-five, one year older than me), and here I am all these years later, living a life—experiencing things he never will. Months after that essay was published in the Washington Post Magazine, his sister responded to the article in a letter to the editor. In it, she questioned my remorse and requested I not use her brother’s name in my future writings (as I mentioned, I refer to him in this book as E.). She preferred that much more than an apology.

I’ve had good timing with my journalism career from prison. When I joined that writing workshop, people were becoming curious about what was happening behind the walls of the American prison. Books like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption popularized catchphrases like “mass incarceration” and “each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” Legacy media outlets were publishing more criminal justice stories. But by the time Chris Cuomo came into Sing Sing to interview me with his HLN Inside Evil crew, another cultural phenomenon was exploding: true crime.

Some people peg the true crime boom to Sarah Koenig’s 2014 hit podcast, Serial, about then teenage Adnan Syed’s 1999 conviction in the murder of his girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, which led to a renewed legal fight that ultimately freed him. Serial, interestingly, debuted the same year the Marshall Project launched. What does it mean for true crime to have such a massive audience when America has the highest incarceration rate in the world? Serial itself was technically a true crime spin-off; it was a story of “true innocence.” The audience is drawn to a moral uncertainty: A prisoner declaring innocence may either be the victim of an injustice or a calculating liar.

The reality is that many in prison refuse to take responsibility for their crimes and fight to overturn their convictions because the courts load them up with too much time. To be clear, while some people in prison are wrongfully convicted, few of us are truly innocent; we just want to be. The “innocent man” is the hero wronged by a corrupt system. His plight sounds like a tagline for a movie. He hopes to become the next cause célèbre, get exonerated, and sue for millions. When I came to prison, that was my plan, too. I postured as innocent, hoping to win my appeal and get out. That didn’t happen, obviously. As much as we want to blame prosecutors for overcharging and seeking maximum sentences, they do almost always get it right. Most people in prison are guilty. And I’ve always found the guilty man more interesting, perhaps because I am one.

If true innocence reveals a potential injustice, traditional true crime retells stories of violence for pure entertainment. In these narratives, there’s usually the backstory of the victim, then the perpetrator, and then their relationship, if there was one. Oftentimes the victim’s family is given a voice, like E.’s family during my episode of Inside Evil. Detectives and prosecutors are the heroes, fighting to get the family justice, and a conviction usually provides a resolution. The end.

Today, true crime is everywhere. There are books and podcasts, both narrative-driven and discussion-based; the network shows that I’d get sucked up in; and shows on channels like Oxygen, which, since 2017, has run true crime content full-time. Streaming platforms are in the game, too. One Netflix show, called I Am a Killer, interviews people convicted of murder in prison. My ex-wife Danielly—like millions of American women—watches hours of sensationalist true crime shows. Every night, before she falls asleep, she hangs a tiny bell on the knob of her front door to alert her if an intruder tries to break in.

What does it mean for a swath of Americans to fall asleep to murder? What are the consequences of illuminating human darkness? Does it increase our desire for punishment? Does true crime hinder the progress of criminal justice writers and activists and reformers and policymakers? Does retelling narratives of decades-old murders lead to increased support for keeping us locked up? If murder rates in many US cities are now the lowest they’ve been in generations, why do so many people feel unsafe? Why does true crime mostly showcase white-on-white violence, when punishment meted out by the American criminal justice system disproportionately affects people of color?

Despite what it’s turned into, true crime’s origins are in literature. Truman Capote’s 1966 nonfiction novel, In Cold Blood, is a work of art that renders a tender portrait of two killers, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock. In 2000, Emmanuel Carrère, the French writer and journalist, published The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception, considered the French In Cold Blood, about a killer named Jean-Claude Romand. Unlike Capote, who is invisible in his narrative, Carrère writes in the first person. In the opening pages of The Adversary, Carrère describes what he was doing with his family in the exact moments Romand was killing five members of his own. His style of writing intrigued me.

Who can most honestly tell our stories? Cuomo? Capote? Carrère? What about me? I live with the men I write about in this book. We share the same label and, regretfully, I have more of an understanding of what they did than any other true crime storyteller. But to even think that I can pull this off—that a murderer can be the trusted narrator to tell stories of others who killed—strains credulity. While I’m full of flaws—my revving ego, the inferiority complex that fuels it—I hope that by sharing my shortcomings and vulnerabilities, I’ll open a portal into the minds of the men I profile.

I will tell the full stories of three men convicted of killing, sharing some of my own story along the way. I reexamine our pasts and the crimes we committed, then focus on our post-crime selves, exploring our inner conflicts, how we look to live more meaningful lives while reckoning with the ones we took. In typical true crime, people who kill are reduced almost entirely to the parts of themselves that supposedly explain what made them kill. The saga ends at the crime-and-punishment phase, but that’s only half the story. I contend that the lives lived in prison after a crime are just as fascinating, and important, as those that were spiraling before it.

Michael Shane Hale, who is serving fifty years to life, has been locked up since he was twenty-three. In 1995, he killed his sixty-two-year-old partner, Stefan Tanner, a man he became involved with while doing sex work. Hale was the first person New York City sought to execute after New York reinstated the death penalty in 1995. He has managed to live a whole life in prison. Same goes for Milton E. Jones, who’s been locked up since 1987, also serving fifty years to life. When he was seventeen, he killed two priests, Father Joseph Bissonette and Monsignor David Herlihy. I met Jones in Sing Sing, when he was fifty, studying for his master’s degree in theology. The third person I profile is Robert Chambers, dubbed the Preppy Killer by the press. In 1986, Chambers strangled an eighteen-year-old friend and hookup partner in Central Park. Her name was Jennifer Levin. He accepted a five-to-fifteen-year plea deal for manslaughter. After serving the full fifteen years in prison, Chambers was released as an untreated addict. He couldn’t stay sober, and a few years later, busted in a drug sting, he received a fresh nineteen years. I met Chambers when he was finishing up that sentence.

In the summer of 2019, the third season of Inside Evil aired on HLN. It featured four episodes about people who’ve killed: three men and one woman, all white. The first was a two-hour premiere about a serial killer who, according to HLN, murdered more women than Jack the Ripper. The man hanged himself a few weeks after his interview with Chris Cuomo, while waiting on San Quentin’s death row. Then Cuomo speaks to a young man serving forty years in Texas for killing his four-year-old sister when he was thirteen. In the third episode, he speaks to a woman who’s been in prison for more than thirty years for a revenge attack: As a teenager, she and some friends killed a man in the Ozarks who tried to rape one of her friends. My episode was the finale: “Killer Writing.”

I watched it on the TV in my cell in Sing Sing, the same cell I was filmed in for the show. Others on my tier were watching it, too. They’d seen the trailers for my episode. During the commercial breaks, I’d put my ear to the bars, listening for any guys talking about me, wondering anxiously if anyone had known E. The episode begins with Cuomo talking to the prosecutor. “Inside Evil is the name of the series. Does this qualify as an evil act?” Cuomo asks.

“In 2001, he was the embodiment of evil,” the prosecutor replies. “I can’t tell you what he’s like now.”

While Cuomo does give me credit for it, I soon realized that it was the writing career I had built from prison that made my crime twenty years earlier a compelling story for Inside Evil. The bulk of the episode is me taking Cuomo through my old criminal lifestyle, growing up in a Brooklyn housing project, then Hell’s Kitchen, looking up to the Westies, and explaining how I came to kill a man who was from the same project as me. As I recount the details, the screen cuts from our interview to scenes of shadowy, faceless reenactments of the shooting and photos of my mug shot, with close-ups of my eyes, bloodshot from all the drugs. Then Cuomo shifts to a voice-over. The scene depicting the night of the murder was difficult to watch. A dark figure representing me, pulling the AR15’s trigger in slow motion, shots firing from the barrel, the shell casings ejecting from the chamber—this scene replays several times throughout the hour-long episode. I can no longer separate these images from my actual memories of what happened that night. In my mind, they’re all mixed up.

As part of the show, Cuomo interviewed E.’s sister. The last words I had heard from her were during my sentencing, when she quoted the words of William Ernest Hocking: “Only the man who has enough good in him to feel the justice of the penalty can be punished.” I carried that quote with me. Now I watched her cry on the television inside my cell, still carrying the pain I caused her.

What did she think as she watched me on that show? A guy guns down your brother, drops his body in the bay, then tries to get away with it at trial, and now he’s some kind of celebrated writer in prison? Of course she was disgusted by me. But why were we reliving the trauma—so personal, so private—on a true crime television show? I was the one who set it all in motion and put myself in the public eye by first becoming a writer and then agreeing to do the episode. If you asked me at the time, I would’ve said that I did the show because I thought I had a comeback story. I was too proud of who I’d become, less insightful about what I’d done.

Cuomo probably gave me a fairer shake than many other hosts would have. An accurate portrayal of my life should include the darkness. The show made me think a lot about the stories out there about people who have killed, how the simplistic narratives and sensational details exploit both the victim and the convicted. Was it fair for the producers to approach subjects in the series with the theme—evil—already predetermined? I was taught that journalists should come to a story with an open mind and discover the heart of it in the material itself, in the characters.

I spoke to Jing, one of the HLN producers, a few weeks after Cuomo came to interview me. She told me that she didn’t agree with how it had all been handled. It wasn’t her call. I hadn’t yet realized how intertwined my two identities had become: Being a murderer deeply informed my journalism because I could access things other journalists could not, while being a journalist pushed me to better understand my crime and why I did it. Writing this book, and immersing myself in the lives of my subjects over the years, would reveal all of this to me, and so much more.

“Your colleague lied to me because she saw me as the murderer,” I told Jing. “But I’m going to show you all that you were talking to the journalist.”

ACT I
The Meet

The characters of nonfiction, no less than those of fiction, derive from the writer’s most idiosyncratic desires and deepest anxieties; they are what the writer wishes he was and worries that he is.

—Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer

1
Growing Up Gay in Kentucky
[SHANE]

In 2017, when I first met Michael Shane Hale in Sing Sing, his receding hairline and man-bun made me uncomfortable. I had just transferred from Attica. Hale, who goes by Shane, is a marginalized minority in the New York prison system: white and gay. Despite that, he got along well with others. He stood about six feet, with a big smile and a creamy complexion. His body seemed soft, like that of a teenage boy who wished his muscles were more defined. Still, at around forty-five years old, Shane was fit and healthy. No bad habits, no addictions. Just a hunger to please and love and be loved.

Before talking to Shane, I observed him for months. When the weather warmed, I saw him one morning in the A Block yard, which sat on the shore of the Hudson River wrapped in fences capped with whorls of razor wire. I put my net bag with my shower gear at the table where the knockaround white guys hung out.

That morning was cardio for me, a jog around the yard. Shane put his bag, with a towel and water bottle, on the ground by the fence. He stretched, adjusted his knee brace, then started jogging. I stretched by the table and then hit the track, too. The track wasn’t really a track. It was a slanted blacktop; a few blades of grass sprouted through the cracks. The Mexicans and Central Americans and Albanian Eddie kicked around a soccer ball. Bloods G-macked and blew bud. Plastic Black and Mild cigar tips littered the ground; men mostly bought cigars at commissary to roll up weed or K2 (synthetic marijuana, sprayed onto green leaves or, more recently, paper, which is then torn up and sprinkled in a roll-up cigarette), usually smuggled in on visits or in the mail, or sometimes by guards. Jogging the A Block yard was like running through an obstacle course. We weaved around the huddle loitering beside the row of phones and past the man with mental illness looking for cigarette clips on the ground, holding our breath through clouds of cigarette and weed smoke. We ran past Africa, who speed-walked alone.

I pushed my pace. Couldn’t let Shane lap me. Nor could I stop before him. After he finally stopped, I sprinted my last lap. My heart pumped. Chest rose and fell. I walked it off and passed Shane. We nodded to each other. He sat on the ground and unstrapped his knee brace. I asked how many laps he got. He told me that he ran for time.

“Hey, I read your op-ed in the New York Times about college in prison,” Shane said. “I thought it was amazing.”

“Thanks, man.”

“Were you doing that on the street?”

“Nah, man,” I said.

Shane tilted his head, smiled. “I’d love to read more of your stuff.”

And that’s how it was. I got to know Shane in drive-by conversations, always wishing we could talk longer. It’s a shame, but I was wary of the prison culture and let it influence my early interactions with Shane. Locked up, you don’t have the luxury of not caring what people think of you. Your reputation is everything, and you have to protect it. It dictates how people treat you, if you have a table to sit at, whether you can get through the day without someone bothering you or testing you. You live on top of one another. You can try to find your people, but you can’t shake the shitty ones.

I don’t think I had a story in mind when I met Shane. Then again, thinking about how someone could work as a character on the page, especially when I see someone like Shane, whose everyday existence in this place is full of conflict—well, it’s not something I can turn off.

After a jog, I’d head off to the outside shower area. Crowds of men in their underwear shared four shower heads: lathering up, talking smack, rinsing off. Shane knew the etiquette: Guys who were openly gay should avoid the open showers. He knew this from an experience he had in the Army after being found out. He knew men in prison, too, could be ignorant and homophobic and mean; the irony was that some of the ones who would ostracize him in public were probably jerking off to him in private. So Shane never showered in the yard. One time I was in a packed shower when Africa came in. Men squeezed under the three other shower heads, like a bunch of assholes.

Everyone assumed Africa, thin with effeminate mannerisms, was gay, but he always said he wasn’t. Africa is Mulumba Kazigo, whose story, like Shane’s, is a domestic tragedy. Mulumba, who is Ugandan, grew up in a yellow house in Westchester, not far from Sing Sing, with his six siblings, mother, and father, Dr. Joseph Z. Kazigo, a surgeon. On August 24, 2005, after decades of experiencing unthinkable violence in their picture-perfect home, Mulumba broke into the apartment his father rented near the Nassau University Medical Center on Long Island and beat the sixty-seven-year-old with a baseball bat and slit his throat. Then Mulumba wrapped his father’s body up in plastic bags and drove it back to Westchester, where he dumped it in the woods near the family’s home.

Mulumba’s sister Nakizito N. Kazigo, an Army doctor, wrote to the district attorney and her brother’s sentencing judge, in 2006, from a makeshift Army chow hall in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, to plead for a lesser sentence. She explained how her brother was on antidepressants, how he tried to commit suicide, and how their father had kicked him out and cut him off, telling him to get his meds from the hospital emergency room. She explained “the sick way we were all beaten as we grew up, screaming, begging for mercy, running away only to be forced back for more or tied up so we couldn’t move.”

The district attorney considered the abuse and allowed Mulumba to plead guilty to manslaughter. He received a flat twenty years, for which he could earn good time and be out in seventeen. Prison would only compound his trauma. I didn’t know much about his story when I first observed Mulumba in the A Block yard, walking alone, arms swinging. I did know how Mulumba was treated in prison, how he served harder time than most—that much I could observe. Even though he had about ten years in by the time I first saw him in the yard, in 2017, Mulumba didn’t understand or choose to abide by the prison norms. I realized that when I saw him soaping himself up that one afternoon, with a shower head all to himself, and joined him. He had a quirky personality. We talked about politics and racism and Trump. And when I would laugh glibly at things, he would get serious and say, “That’s not funny! Why are you laughing?”

After the yard, I sometimes walked up the hill with Shane, too. He would try to get a quick shower on the tier. Showers on the cellblock are converted cells, and guards have to open and lock you inside them alone, per the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) passed by Congress in 2003. PREA was the first federal law intended to deter the sexual assault of prisoners and requires correctional facilities to enforce a zero-tolerance policy toward sexual assault, for both prisoner-on-prisoner and staff-on-prisoner misconduct. In a different era, Shane would have had it harder.

If the guard was too busy or being lazy, Shane had to wash up in his cell: his sheet hanging across the bars, his towel on the floor, cups of cold sink water poured into a bucket, where’d he soap up a washcloth and bathe—a bird bath. After the noon count, Shane would head to the mess hall if something edible was on the menu, or make a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich in his cell. Then it was back down the hill to work. Aside from the brick school buildings on the shore of the Hudson River, there were three identical tan buildings that used to be a medium-security compound called Tappan, which closed in the early 2000s. One of the buildings was renovated and housed various programs. Shane’s office was on the second floor. As a Phase Three reentry facilitator, he readied guys who were scheduled to be released. His official label was inmate program assistant, or IPA. The incentive for most IPAs was that if you did the job for two years, you’d be eligible for a six-month time cut. Shane had fifty years; he was an IPA because he liked helping people.

During my first year and a half in Sing Sing, I was locked in A Block. Tiers stacked on top of tiers, four stories high, the eighty-eight cells on each stretching the length of two football fields; it was the largest cellblock in the world at the time of its construction. Steam pipes snaking along the wall banged and hissed; cell radios tuned to Hot 97, New York City’s hip-hop station, bumped; the Blood Hounds yelled out their roll calls—“Whoopty!” to responses of “Can’t stop! Never stop!” Many, like me, were on a waiting list to get out of the madhouse, hoping to land a cell in the quieter Five Building block.

In early 2018, I got a job working with men categorized as SMIV (“seriously mentally ill, violent”). A few of us from the general population were assigned as aides. The SMIV guys lived on the fourth floor of the Five Building cellblock. Because my job was to help wake the men and escort them down to the Tappan building to attend groups, I jumped the waiting list and moved into a cell on C Gallery, the third floor. Five Building’s floors were leveled off, so it was less noisy. My new cell had a view of the Hudson, obstructed though it was by the thin mesh screen on the window. There was a gym in the basement, too. To be housed in the block, you had to be in one of the mental health programs or an aide or a facilitator. Shane lived a few cells down from me.

I worked with the SMIV guys on the third floor of the Tappan building. Mornings and afternoons, we worked alongside staff from the Office of Mental Health (OMH) in bright white windowed rooms (visible to guards at a nearby station) as they participated in group sessions: managing psychosis, life skills, recovery, and reintegration. I was often asked by female psychologists and social workers to keep my eye on the snipers, who would slide their hands into their pants during group and masturbate.

On a bright spring day, the sun beaming off the river and into the room, there was a new social worker running the group session. She was young and blond and pretty and heartbreakingly green. There were about eight of us. Raymond Jones, a sixtyish Trinidadian man who’d been locked up and taking antipsychotics since the Carter administration, kept scrunching his face and licking his lips. Another man, with tears tattooed on his face, masturbated in his pants as he stared at the social worker. He didn’t have a severe mental illness. He was a Crip likely feigning mental illness and hiding in the SMIV unit so the Bloods wouldn’t get him. I’d had words with him before, so to avoid a beef, I didn’t try to get his attention. I didn’t raise an eyebrow. I couldn’t tell the guards because that would be snitching. Plus, I didn’t really think it was my job to police these guys, not for twenty-five cents an hour. Another young man with braids and a neck tattoo shared about how he lived by the principles of respect and love and loyalty, and he believed everything happened for a reason. I was thinking about how much I hated hearing that cliché, and the miserable monotony of this place, when Jones suddenly burst out into hearty schizophrenic laughter. Something came over me, and I started laughing, too. So did the guy next to me. Soon the whole room was hysterically laughing, tears and all. Even the Crip pulled his hand out of his pants and joined in. The social worker sat there and smiled awkwardly. Nobody asked why we were laughing. We all knew we needed it in that moment, and it felt good. It was like that on the unit. Funny and sad.

Sometimes the OMH staff wouldn’t show up for group, and I’d go downstairs and hang out with Shane. In the Phase Three room, he had a desk with a computer and a printer. On the walls were posters about smart goals; another was of a mountain climber with an inspirational quote, something about getting to the top. Shane had reorganized all the resources in the office: housing, employment, treatment. There were neat piles of handouts, like an Adverse Childhood Experience questionnaire: When you were growing up, did a parent or adult swear at you, put you down, or humiliate you? Did a parent ever hit you so hard that you had marks or were injured? Did you often feel your parents were too drunk or high to take care of you? For me, that’s check, check, and check. Another handout described New York’s 911 Good Samaritan Law, which allows people who witness overdoses to call 911 without any fear of arrest, even if they are on parole or high or in possession of drug paraphernalia. One time, while hanging out with Shane, I sat in one of his classes and took notes as he demonstrated to three soon-to-be free men how to administer Naloxone.

“The number one cause of death for people leaving prison in the first two weeks is an opioid overdose,” Shane told the class as he stood in front of the whiteboard. “That’s why you’ll be offered a Naloxone nasal kit on the day you leave. The three things that contribute to overdoses are low tolerance, mixing substances, and doing it alone.”

Two of the guys in the class were totally tuned out. One drew graffiti on the back of a handout, and the other stared off while twisting his hair. The last one, a scraggly white guy on his second parole violation, took Shane more seriously. The last time he was released, he used the Naloxone spray he got at the gate to save the life of a friend.

“I’m a fuckup,” he told me later. “But I know this shit works. It saved my life.”

“You want to rub your knuckles across the sternum,” Shane said. “Then, if they are not breathing, you’ll need to tilt their head back, hold the nose, and start rescue breathing.”

Shane used lingo like “opioid receptors” and “neurotransmitters.” It’s the language we learned while studying behavioral science at Mercy College, in those schoolhouse classrooms with the caged windows. Like me, he had to luck up to get a transfer to Sing Sing for college, and even though Shane had fifty years to life, he was a straight-A student.

Back then, I didn’t know the circumstances of Shane’s crime. I knew he wasn’t a typical criminal. The prison rumor mill is a bit like the internet in that it offers both reliable and unreliable information. I heard that Shane had been a Navy SEAL who was discharged because he was gay. I’d come to learn that he was actually in the Army, he did get discharged, and it may have had something to do with his sexuality, but he wasn’t in Special Forces.

“Shane’s got a crazy crime,” Panama from Harlem told me. “Some shit you’d see on Snapped”—one of the many shows available to watch on the TVs in our cells. I soon learned Shane’s crime had all the shocking elements those shows loved: sex, murder, dismemberment. He was lucky a true crime producer hadn’t yet reached out. Then again, Shane was a gay man who killed his lover, and that could have given producers pause.

Why do true crime storytellers favor certain crimes over others? I’d argue that producers don’t see gay men who kill their lovers as compelling subjects. (Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed several gay men, is an exception because of his serial killer status and the bizarre things he did with the bodies of his victims.) And yet this was one of the reasons why I wanted to profile Shane. In prison, a particularly vexing frontier for LGBTQ rights, Shane is more marginalized than he was in society. Despite that, he’s managed to be of service to the men around him. As I continued to report and write this book over the years, I watched from prison as the true crime genre continued to grow. And my theory that a crime like Shane’s would be hands-off for producers would be tested.

By the time I was living with Shane, he had shaved off his man-bun. He was now a skin-bald, middle-aged man with a baby face. On weekend evenings, when he wasn’t busy with college, we sat at a metal picnic table in the gallery with mustard-colored walls. In Five Building, the cells faced each other, so we felt a bit on display. A PA speaker screeched about med runs and basement rec. Over the din of the hall, Shane would tell me about his life.

Born on June 12, 1972, Michael Shane Hale was raised in Baldrock, Kentucky, a small community in rural Appalachia. Loretta, his mother, was a housewife. A year after Shane was born, his sister, Angela, came along. Then, in 1980, Nathan was born. Their father, Harold, was a coal miner, and before that a Marine, a Vietnam veteran. The war, as they often do, wounded his soul and stripped him of kindness. The first time Shane saw the ball drop on TV, New Year’s Eve, he remembers being in the living room with his parents, asking his dad if he loved him. His dad didn’t answer, and his mom told him to go to bed.

“So weird that a kid would ask that sort of thing, right?” Shane asked, staring past me down the tier.

Loretta often locked herself in her bedroom, and was not the kind of mom who cooked for her kids. They had to figure it out on their own when they got hungry. After the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services was called to investigate a bruise on Angela’s face, Loretta was given probation.

When Shane lies on the bunk in his cell and feels the scar on the back of his right thigh, it takes him back to a day when he was with his dad in the woods. He was excited to be with him and was fidgety, moving around too much. His dad nicked him on the back of the leg with the chain saw. Another time, when a teacher complained to Shane’s parents that he was too hyper, spinning in circles during the Pledge of Allegiance, his father beat him until he bled.

At ten years old, Shane and his sister, Angela, had a sleepover with some friends at the cabin of a man named Herb, who was in his fifties and had skinny limbs and a big belly. Herb reminded Shane of a frog. He was the father of one of Shane’s friends. At one point, Herb was telling the kids a bedtime story about a grizzly bear that was going to eat them. The four children and Herb were under the blanket in the queen-sized bed. Shane was playing with what he thought was a squishy Chinese water snake toy. Then it stiffened.

When Shane realized it was Herb’s penis, he automatically felt that he had done something wrong. Later that night, when the kids were having a pillow fight, Herb called Shane back to his bedroom and told him he wasn’t in trouble and to come into the bed with him. Herb molested Shane. Turns out, Herb molested Angela that night, too. When they returned home, Angela told their mom. Loretta marched Shane and Angela down the dirt road to a trailer Herb’s family rented. When they entered the trailer, Herb’s family was there. Loretta confronted Herb, who then asked Angela, in front of everyone, if he’d done anything to her. Angela said yes. But when Herb asked Shane, he shook his head.

“It’s the moment that cemented when I lost my innocence,” Shane told me, eyes welling up with tears. “I never looked at myself the same way. I was the older brother. I was supposed to protect my sister. Instead, I allowed her to be labeled a liar. Years later, I’d learn that Herb had molested a lot of kids.”

Angela got into drugs when she grew up, and she even did a prison stint for robbery. So did Shane’s younger brother, Nate. Last Shane heard, Angela was living in Ohio and running a dog-grooming business. She and Shane are not close, though Shane has talked to her sporadically over the years, when she goes home for the holidays. “I’m such a piece of shit,” Shane told me, wiping his eyes.

By eleven or twelve, Shane knew he was gay. He wasn’t motivated by the pleasure of sex—only the desire to please someone else. He’d let his cousin have oral and anal sex with him. A friend, an older girl who worked a booth at the flea market, gave him his first Playgirl. He took it home and stared at the photos of naked men, which he tucked away in his bedroom wall. Then there was the time his father was hosting a cockfight in the barn. Harold had Shane feed the stoves stationed throughout the barn with coal. Shane heaved the pails in from outside. He wore his He-Man and the Masters of the Universe T-shirt. At one point outside the barn, one of his dad’s friends struck up a conversation with him. Inside he felt invisible among the adults, and all of a sudden this man was giving him attention. It felt nice. The man told Shane that he wanted to show him something and led Shane to a wooded area. Shane planted his knees on dead pine needles and took the man in his mouth. He remembered how he used to do it with his cousin.

“I don’t know why I do this,” the man told Shane. “I have two boys.”

“It’s all right, it’s over,” Shane said, wiping his mouth. “It was a mistake.”

He walked back to the barn to get another pail of coal and feed the fires.

Shane stayed with his grandparents on the weekends. They owned a farm down the road. He baled hay with his grandfather, who showed Shane the most affection. They attended a Southern Baptist church on Sundays. It’s where he first learned that being gay was bad. But they treated him well.

In the years when Shane was coming into adolescence, feeling those feelings, he would sometimes be home on the couch in the living room and his father would come home drunk and pass out next to him. On a few occasions, Shane would see his father’s penis erect and exposed.

“By that time in my life, I had been having sex with a few of the teenage boys in the neighborhood. This was a cue to provide oral sex,” Shane later wrote me in a letter. “When I did this, dad’s hand would wind up on my head or ass. There was a part of me that had plausible deniability that what was happening was happening. Dad was passed out, and I was so starved for dad’s attention and affection that I would resort to molesting my father.”

Shane attended Laurel County High School. It was beyond confusing to be a kid from Kentucky, in the 1980s, trying to sort out his sexuality. His mom enrolled him in a Taekwondo class, and he got as far as a yellow belt. He tried out for sports and landed a spot on the junior varsity football team, but he played terribly, and his father told him to quit. He tried tennis, but that didn’t take, either. He was an average student. He jerked off a boy on the bus. He also tried sex with girls. In his senior year, Shane’s mother, Loretta, found his stash of Playgirl magazines plastered with nude men, and she chased him out of the house with a butcher knife. Then Loretta, with help from Nate and Angela, stuffed Shane’s belongings into trash bags and tossed them in a ditch beside the house. As Shane dragged his bags down the road, rain poured and poured.

He moved in with his grandparents. They’d pick him up from after-school activities like chorus group and the drama club. He wrote for the school newspaper. Barbara, who dated Shane in high school, told me that he was the kindest boy she knew, her confidant. They soon ended their relationship and became close friends. She knew he couldn’t come out. It was London, Kentucky. She doesn’t know what the repercussions would have looked like if he had because she never knew anyone bold enough to try. One time, in journalism class, she got a glimpse. Their teacher didn’t hover over the students, so the class was left alone to be their adolescent selves. Barbara remembers a jock named Chip calling Shane a faggot, then Shane leaving class. Barbara told Chip to back off. Years later, Chip came out himself.

Shane gave Barbara books on witchcraft, which he did not want to chance keeping in his room at home—Raymond Buckland’s Complete Book of Witchcraft; Scott Cunningham’s Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner. The books would shape Barbara’s life; she became a witch. Shane’s tragic pain, all the secrets they shared, it was all a heady potion—but what Shane really taught Barbara, she told me, choking up when I called her from the cellblock, was that it was okay for her to be different.

In 1990, after Shane graduated high school, he joined the Army. It was another attempt to please his father. He did basic training in Fort Benning, Georgia, was named an expert marksman, and was transferred to Fort Myer, Virginia, to the honor guard. When Shane called home to tell his father, he got no reaction.

The base was near Washington, DC. One time Shane was sightseeing and met a guy who offered him a ride. In the car, the guy offered him a soda. Shane, who does not drink or do drugs, remembers feeling tired, then blacking out, then getting fucked. Later that day, after Shane woke up, the guy was all smiles and gave Shane a lift back to base. Shane felt violated. He told a friend, but remixed the details and said the guy had put a knife to his neck and raped him. He didn’t want his fellow soldiers to think that he could be so easily taken advantage of, or, even worse, that he’d wanted it. His friend told a superior. A rape kit was done. Detectives interviewed him. The local district attorney got involved, but no charges were filed. Back on the base, everyone was talking about it. Shane was the fag who liked it in the ass. In the barracks, he’d hear guys talking shit.

“I never heard of a guy getting date-raped…”

Laughs.

“They can take showers with us?”

The Army considered charging Shane with sodomy and making a false statement, but they didn’t. His superiors offered to reassign Shane or put him on reserve duty. He chose the latter.

When Shane returned to Kentucky, he felt like he had failed his father yet again. He stayed, back and forth, with his grandparents and his friend Dale, another gay man, in Lexington. He went to visit a friend in Ohio and started hanging out at a gay bar in Cincinnati called the Dock. He enjoyed the scene.

“Is this the head faggot?” Shane’s father, Harold, barked over the phone to Shane’s friend Dale.

“In fact, I am,” Dale said.

“Tell Shane to call me,” Harold shouted to Dale. “I got him a job at the mine.”

Dale went to high school with Shane in London, Kentucky. He was a year ahead of Shane and Barbara. Dale was tall with a heavy build—a blond-haired, black-trench-coat-wearing outsider. He and Shane became close after high school. They were both gay, trying to find their way in Kentucky. During that phone call, Dale remembers, Harold told him about how Shane used to perform oral sex on him when he was drunk. Dale thought Harold must have been drunk during the phone call, and Harold kept assuring Dale that he wasn’t gay, that it wasn’t Shane’s fault that he turned out the way he did. Dale didn’t know what to make of the confession, and he never shared the conversation with Shane. Why mention it? He told Shane only that Harold had a job for him.

When Shane got the news, he was excited. Another chance to please Dad. His day started before the roosters on his grandparents’ farm started crowing. Grandma Hale woke him up at four a.m. He washed up, grabbed an insulated lunch pail that she had prepared with sandwiches, cookies, and juice. He drove to the mine in a beat-up beige Pontiac Bonneville that his aunt had sold him for $500. The commute was a couple hours on highways and parkways and a narrow dirt road until he reached the tree line at the bottom of the ravine and saw the mountain of coal being fed by an absurdly tall conveyor belt.

In his first week of training, he got his gear: overalls, hard hat, goggles, and the mask he needed to wear to prevent black lung. “If people are not going to make it, they’ll find out when they go down in the mines,” the safety instructor told Shane with a chuckle. When Shane rode the track car miles underground, the turns and twists jostled his body. Then the car came to a stop. There was no light at the end of the tunnel.

On his weekends off, he would study the “Other” section of the Lexington Herald-Leader. At the time, there were no dating apps; it was newspaper ads and 900 numbers. “Fit 19-year-old white male looking for some company…” He set up a message box and calls came in. He hooked up with a trans woman who took him clubbing, and her friends fawned over Shane. It felt good. He hooked up with a man who had a wife and kids, and after they had sex, the man said he wanted to leave his family. One man identified as straight but said he wanted to experience what it would feel like to be with a man, and during sex kept saying, “Oh my God—this is so different.” It was exciting, experimenting with his authentic self, but Shane was doing so in a context of betrayal, in the shadows. For a love-starved young man more accustomed to sexual abuse than pleasure, this, like all his experiences, was a tinderbox.

Shane soon realized he was not cut out for mining. He longed for New York City and the glitter of its gay culture. After one long weekend, and another tryst with another closeted gay man in Kentucky, Shane called in sick to the coal mine. The foreman told him not to bother coming back. Shane took it as a sign. He had to find his people.

It was June 1992, a few weeks before his twentieth birthday. He loaded his Bonneville with clothes and CDs—Sinéad O’Connor, Madonna—and with his last paycheck, he drove from coal-country Kentucky to Greenwich Village in New York City. Along the way, he listened to the Pet Shop Boys with giddy excitement. He slept in the car to save money. When he arrived, he turned off the West Side Highway and parked the car in a lot. He walked a few blocks and asked directions to the Village. Eventually, he asked a man walking a dog if he was there. “This is it, honey!” the man said.

And so, after driving hundreds of miles, Shane sat down on the stoop of a deserted corner. It all felt so anticlimactic. The first night, Shane met an older white man who had seen him sitting alone. He knew Shane needed a place to stay for the night, and Shane knew what he wanted in return. The man took Shane home and slept with him. Shane got a good night’s sleep, and the next day the man showed him to a shelter for runaway boys. But Shane didn’t consider himself a runaway, and he wasn’t going to live in a shelter. He was on the precipice of a new life.

2
Raised Rough in East Side, Buffalo
[MILTON]

“I got a story for you, man,” my friend Alim told me one day, stopping by my bars. Alim was a former stickup kid from Brooklyn who’d converted to Islam and recently earned a master’s degree. He smiled. “But I want my cut, man. You ain’t never heard a twist like this.”

Alim didn’t really want a cut. He knew that I was always looking for interesting characters to write about, and he figured Milton was one. It was ironic, Alim said, that this guy Milton, who’d just transferred in, was pursuing a master’s degree in theology. He was in prison for killing two priests. Alim told me that Milton was a bit of a “bugout,” prison-speak for a person with mental illness. “You know, he’s like out there, man.”

In the summer of 2019, fifty-year-old Milton E. Jones landed in Sing Sing to attend the New York Theological Seminary. At that point, Milton had been locked up for almost thirty-three years. NYTS offers a graduate program in professional studies with a concentration in urban ministry. The first graduate classes started in Sing Sing in 1982. It’s the longest-running master’s program in any American prison. The class is made up of fifteen men. Some are already in Sing Sing and earned undergraduate degrees from the in-house college program, while others received degrees from programs like the Bard Prison Initiative, or even came to prison with a college degree (though few do), and transferred to Sing Sing after their applications were approved. The criteria: no sex crimes, a clean disciplinary record, and an agreement to limit their visitation privileges.

Even though Milton and I lived in the same cellblock, I hadn’t yet met him. I lived on the first floor, A Gallery, and he lived on the second, B Gallery. (I’d moved to A Gallery by the end of 2018; it had hot plates and a washer and dryer on the tier.) When the PA crackled off runs on the tier, in the mornings and afternoons, to “release NYTS to the flats,” he’d lumber to class, down the steps, clearing a metal detector, then down a dark corridor that led to another brick structure with an auditorium. Deep in the basement, through a narrower hallway, were two rooms that made up the NYTS campus. One was a classroom. The other had old computers with Bible and encyclopedia programs, but no internet. This is where Milton and the other guys in the program, including Shane, took courses on leadership, systematic theology, and foundations of ministry. Shane had just earned his bachelor’s from Mercy College, funded by the Hudson Link for Higher Education in Prison, an education nonprofit run mostly by ex-cons. Graduating with the highest GPA in his class, he was accepted into the 2019–2020 NYTS cohort along with Milton, who had earned his bachelor’s degree in the early ’90s in Attica, when Pell Grants were still accessible to prisoners. Now, in these Gothic windowless rooms, they wrote papers, debated the necessity of war, and wrote proposals, known as “ministries,” describing their ideas on how to improve society.

I met Milton in the fall of 2019. A group of us from Five Building were walking to the visit room to see the facility play. Once a year, a few dozen prisoners put on a play in partnership with the nonprofit Rehabilitation Through the Arts, which was founded in 1996 and operates in ten of New York’s state prisons. That year, the play was 1776. I remembered Alim’s description of Milton, and realized he was actually the man ahead of me, lumbering with our group to the play. The visit room had been converted into a theater. The prison’s vocational carpentry class had built the set. Milton’s laugh was loud and jolly, but it sounded almost filthy to me. When you learn about the crime before you meet the person, it makes you recoil; it colors everything about them. In your mind’s eye, another sick scene plays out—stabbing, strangling, dismembering—all while you’re trying to have a conversation with the guy. It’s why I try to avoid learning details about my subjects’ lives before I meet them. It’s too disorienting, and it feels unfair. My advantage as a prison journalist is my access. I’m enmeshed with my subjects, all the time, whether I want to be or not. And without being able to search the internet, I’m not combing through pages of Google results and going down rabbit holes doing research in advance—I’m going straight to the source. While Alim had told me Milton had done something terrible, I didn’t know the details.

In the visit room, I sat next to Milton, a Black man who stood six feet and three inches tall and weighed more than three hundred pounds. His body smothered the chair. I introduced myself to him, and we got to talking before the play started. I mentioned how Alim had told me that he was in the master’s program. He nodded and smiled. He had a chipped front tooth, a friendly face, and round cheeks. He wore glasses and had a lightness about him, even sweetness. He seemed genuinely friendly. His voice lilted and swayed in an easy rhythm. We watched the play, and he jiggled when he laughed. “It’s funny that it’s all Black prisoners playing the founders,” he said.

“I am the Reverend Witherspoon, the new delegate from New Jersey,” Shane, the only white actor in the play, said, introducing his character. I enjoyed seeing Shane acting with the others. Onstage, he had a confidence about him, one that I knew took many years to find in prison. I admired it. He was a talent among other talents, showing us that he deserved to be seen.

When the play was over, I told Milton I was writing a book and asked if he wanted to speak with me when he had free time. He agreed. We started meeting on the weekends in the Five Building basement, a small rec area with weights and TVs and showers. All floors could go to basement rec, even guys I worked with as an aide on the fourth floor. I’d written articles about mental illness in prison, so I knew the history of how jails and prisons became America’s de facto asylums. In 1963, after the abuse in psychiatric hospitals was exposed, President John F. Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Act, but the plan to phase out mental hospitals and open community outpatient facilities didn’t happen. The more than half a million people in state-run psychiatric beds dwindled to fewer than 40,000 at the start of the year in 2020, and our incarcerated population, which was around two hundred thousand in the 1960s, has grown now to around two million. Today people with mental illnesses are ten times more likely to be locked up than sent to a hospital, and around four out of ten of us prisoners have been diagnosed with a mental illness.

In addition to the guys from the fourth floor, there was another step-down program on the third floor, where men with serious mental illness who’d recently stabilized on their meds were living among guys in the general population. About half the cellblock was taking psychotropics or antipsychotics, or both, and when I interviewed Milton, some of these guys would walk among us, skulking around, looking disheveled, talking to themselves. You don’t want them to feel like you’re watching them or making fun of them, so you act as if they don’t exist, which makes you feel complicit in society’s indifference.

When I began interviewing Milton, I had just appeared on Inside Evil, and I was thinking a lot about the tragic stories being told about crimes that happened so long ago, and how the gap of time in between seemed inaccessible. So here I was with this fifty-year-old guy who, at seventeen, killed two priests. Now, all these years later, I met him as he was studying for a master’s degree in theology. How did he get here? I wanted to try to understand Milton’s whole story.

We sat at a metal picnic table as a punching bag got beat in the background. Weights clinked and slammed. At the next table, a group of guys sat watching Criminal Minds on the TV in the corner. Milton had large hands, like porterhouse steaks, and talked in declarative sentences that spoke truth, felt powerful. When we talked, I often had to lean in and say, “Not so loud, Milton.” He wore the state-issued green uniform, his department identification number, 88B2329, ironed on above the shirt pocket. His black-rimmed eyeglasses were held together by Scotch tape where the right eyeglass met the right temple, broken from the time he’d accidentally sat on them.

Like Shane, Milton was serving fifty years to life, and planned to appear before a parole board for the first time at sixty-seven. I was amazed by his good spirits and desire to pursue higher education, even though there was little hope that he would get to use it in free society. I approached Milton’s story with the same clichéd questions in mind that anyone else might have: Why’d he do it? Had the priests molested him? I would search for those answers, but Milton’s story was also about a life spent in prison, and would show me what resilience and forgiveness looked like in a system that didn’t foster either.

“I don’t know how you gonna make me look human,” Milton told me during one of our first interviews.

I reminded him that I had murdered a man, too. I told him I wanted to try my hand at telling true crime stories in a more thoughtful, sensitive way than I so often saw it done, understanding what it’s like to have been in that dark place where you take a life and then get to a better place where you want to live a meaningful one. Milton met with me in that basement on several weekends for scores of hours. I didn’t know where Milton’s story would go. I just knew I wanted to tell it, if possible, beyond his crime.

Milton Eltroy Jones was born in Buffalo on June 30, 1969, to a fourteen-year-old child named Valina McDaniel. In the westernmost tip of New York, Buffalo in the ’70s was a blue-collar city with jobs at plants and factories, Bills football, bars, and street crime. The East Side, where Milton grew up, was a mixed neighborhood. Valina had been with his father, Milton “Babu” Jones, for about a year prior to her pregnancy; she doesn’t remember how old Babu was, but she remembers a five- or six-year age difference between them. Babu was a neighborhood kid; a “street guy,” as Milton described him. When Milton was five months old, Valina says, Babu was arrested after robbing a taxi driver and landed in Attica Correctional Facility, the maximum-security prison that was about to become the nation’s most infamous. During his brief time in Attica, Babu likely experienced racism and mistreatment from the start. He must have heard that the militant brothers had presented a manifesto to the warden, and felt the tension in the days before it all jumped off.

On September 9, 1971, Babu found himself in the middle of a riot in the D Block yard. The prisoners had taken COs hostage, their fists in the air, yelling “Power to the People!” During the fifth day of the takeover, on September 13, COs and state troopers in Grim Reaper getups—gas masks, raincoats, no name tags, locked and loaded—fired hundreds of rounds into the D yard, where more than one thousand prisoners were gathered. When the shooting stopped and the gun smoke cleared, twenty-nine prisoners, six officers, and four state workers were dead. Adding the three prisoners who were stabbed to death and a CO who died a month later from injuries sustained during the riot, the toll was forty-three. It was the deadliest prison uprising in the US. Among the more than one hundred wounded was Milton’s father. Babu took a bullet in the leg, received pellet wounds in his head, and lost the tip of his toe during the retaking. Aside from the physical injuries, Babu also claimed, in a class action civil lawsuit later filed against the State of New York, that the Attica riots left him “mentally messed up”; he began to suffer blackouts and hear voices.

Babu got out around 1975, but Valina didn’t want anything to do with him. And Babu didn’t show much effort to become part of Milton’s life. In 1974, Valina had another son, named Rama, with a different man. By this time, Babu was completely out of the picture—Milton doesn’t remember seeing him at all as a child—and Rama’s father soon left them, too. Milton was living on and off with his grandmother Mildred, Valina’s mother, who was renting a house on Woodlawn Avenue. Valina lived a few blocks south, on Landon Street.

Milton was always shuffling back and forth between his mom’s house and his grandmother’s. At the time, Valina was attending nursing school at Buffalo State Hospital, where she worked shifts and took classes and lived on the nearby campus. She still wanted to pursue her education and needed a job to support Milton and Rama; her mom and siblings took care of them when she wasn’t around, which was often in those days. Mildred lived in the kind of neighborhood where everyone knew one another, and people were always in and out of the house. Milton hung out with the Bennifield brothers and with Frank, Wanda, and Fay. Some nights, Milton’s grandmother made her signature barbecue pork ribs, and his mother made banana pudding with vanilla wafers and chopped-up bananas. He would go to church with his great-grandparents—his grandmother’s parents, who lived nearby—but had trouble staying awake through the preacher’s sermons. Someone would always wake him up and scold him. They put him in Sunday school for a bit, too. After the classes, his great-grandfather would give him money to get snacks from the corner store. He was always the biggest boy in class, in Sunday school and elementary school, and everyone told him he should play football when he got older.

On Milton’s eighth birthday, he received an aqua blue Huffy BMX bike. He loved it, rode it around the neighborhood for only six hours. When he left it alone for a moment, someone stole it. He never found out who, and not long afterward, he started stealing, too. He swore that the next time someone stole from him, it would be from some of the things he’d stolen himself. That way, it wouldn’t hurt so bad.

Milton stopped going to Sunday school. He was less enraptured with God than with the lifestyles of his maternal uncles. When Milton lived with his grandmother, his uncles were the best. People were always coming in and out of the house. He smelled the weed wafting from their room, heard the girls giggling. Stanley and Buster were pimps; Uncle Skip sold weed. They’d roughhouse with him, play horseshoes outside, and would sometimes watch Milton play basketball at the Boys and Girls Club. They were cool—there was no other way to say it. They had girls. They had money.

To covet forbidden things is a lifetime urge. As I write this, my neighbors in the cells on either side of me smoke blunts of Bubblegum Exotic. One’s a head Blood. He’s younger, cool and cavalier and powerful. He’s got all the accoutrements that come with his status in prison: people stopping by his cell to show homage, delivering him bowls of cooked food. He’s got an illegal iPhone on which he watches episodes of Ozark and has phone sex with different girls over FaceTime. He showed me what articles came up when he googled my name. When he asked if I wanted a phone for myself (the fee: $1,500 sent through Cash App), I told him I was good. At forty-six, I was handling peer pressure better than I used to. But they made it all seem so tempting, and I couldn’t escape them. I smelled my neighbors smoking weed, heard them, felt them. Having a cell phone in the joint is the closest thing to being free. The phone would also make reporting and researching much easier. I could avoid the politics of navigating the phone line in the yard, but buying a cell phone off the black market would also make me illegitimate. Getting caught with one lands you a stint in solitary and a transfer to another prison. I had too much to lose, and I no longer considered myself a criminal, though I wouldn’t have said that to my peers. It is a constant tightrope I have to walk, respecting the codes of the prison subculture while trying to follow the rules of the institution. I knew how my neighbors’ stories would end. So did they. They just didn’t give a fuck.

When Milton and I were younger, without a strong father figure to help build our characters, we had little restraint. We were vulnerable to peer pressure and made poor decisions. Looking back, Milton thinks it was during these years that he became a follower, and started desiring a way of life that seemed to offer a lot on the surface but had little meaning underneath. He didn’t just steal from others because people stole from him; it was also the allure of meeting the dares that his friends would throw at him.

One time Milton got caught swiping a bag of popcorn seeds from Bells supermarket. The supervisor called his mom. “She took me home and whipped me,” Milton told me.

We both laughed. I told Milton about the famous “liar-thief” ass-whipping I got when I was younger. My mom and I lived alone in a housing project in Sheepshead Bay, southern Brooklyn. My dad had left when I was one. We had a three-bedroom apartment—Mom claimed my two brothers and sister from her first marriage on the public housing application, even though they lived with their father out in Long Island—and paid about a hundred dollars a month for it. It was the ’80s. I grew up hearing gunshots, smelling piss in the elevator. When I flipped on the kitchen light, cockroaches scattered. Mom had obtained vending permits and bought hot dog wagons; she hustled the avenue where fishing boats docked, to entice hungry anglers. Our freezer stayed packed with hot dogs and frozen fruit bars. Value-sized cases of soda and cans of onions and sauerkraut lined the walls in the hallway.

There would always be coins in Mom’s dresser drawer, and I’d find them and buy grape Now and Laters and play Street Fighter at the pizza shop. A few times she’d catch me coming from the arcade with a purple tongue and ask where I’d gotten the money to buy candy and play video games. I’d lie. Then, one time, she set a trap and left some quarters on the desk in the hallway. I swiped them. When she asked me where the coins had gone, I lied, as usual. She shouted as she beat me with a hanger throughout the apartment: “Liar”—whap—“Thief!”—whap.

“Did you give up the quarters?” Milton asked.

“I eventually did,” I said, chuckling.

I’ve found myself doing that in prison, laughing with others about our shared abuse, the sad homes we were born into, listening to others talk about the ass-whippings they got as kids—the blows, the belt, the switch, the hanger—followed by hearty laughter. For some of us, the first people who introduced us to fear and pain and violence were the ones who were supposed to love and protect and nurture us the most.

Milton was ten when he was placed in a special education class. He said it was because he was “slow.” One time, when we were in the rec basement, Milton was on the phone talking to his mom; he called me over, and I talked to Valina. I told her I was writing about Milton, and I asked her about his younger years. She said that they hadn’t put him in special ed because he had a learning disability; it was because he finished his homework before everybody else in the class and became bored and disruptive. It was actually, in her recollection, because he was too smart.

When I was in third grade at public school, the teacher told my mom she was recommending a special education class for me. Like Valina, my mother refused to accept the suggestion that her son had a learning disability. With the money she made from selling hot dogs, she eventually enrolled me in boarding school. She’d also tutor me herself, hovering over me with breath smelling of pot, making me read Jack London’s Call of the Wild aloud. I hated when she interrupted the narrative, stopping me mid-sentence to ask what certain words meant. When I shrugged, she’d make me look up each word in the dictionary and write down the definition by hand. I still remember those words today—“demonstrative,” “toil,” “peril.”

In her mid-twenties, Valina was working a job at the St. Francis nursing home, and she eventually settled down with a no-nonsense white man named Raymond Little. He was a Canadian veteran who had a job in a Chevrolet plant, and was around thirty years her senior. Milton and Raymond didn’t start out on good terms; as a child, Milton thought Raymond was stealing his mom away from him and didn’t trust him. But Raymond tried to endear himself to the family. He had Valina and her kids over for dinner one night, and he served them macaroni and cheese. Milton, who was used to the feasts his grandmother would prepare of ribs, collard greens, and ham hocks, topped off with cheesecake, was a bit underwhelmed. But Valina was won over, and they became a family. They first lived on Zenner Street in Buffalo; Milton had a room upstairs, near the front of the house. Through his window, Milton would yell out to the people passing on the street.

When Milton was around twelve years old, his family—Valina, Raymond, Rama, and Milton—moved into a two-story house on Bailey Avenue in Buffalo. Milton and Rama had their own rooms. Milton’s room was cramped, with two mattresses stacked on top of each other, a table, a small television. He became a huge Buffalo Bills fan and watched Monday Night Football on the thirteen-inch television in his room, lying on his belly as he did his homework, Howard Cosell’s voice booming in the background. His grandmother would cook chili so spicy that Milton’s nose ran. Growing up, Milton never saw Raymond as a father figure, just as his mother’s husband, another man to deal with. He and Raymond would argue about little things, like why Milton always had to eat four eggs instead of two. They never really got along.

Around this time, a boy named Mario chased Milton with a box cutter and threw it at him. The blade caught him in the back. He went to the hospital and received stitches. Milton remembers his mom arguing in the street with Mario’s family. After that, Milton went to live with his grandmother again. His uncles, who ran the streets, would come and go. He looked up to them, especially Stanley, the pimp. He had a white girlfriend named Roseanne whom Milton considered an aunt. He was sad when he learned that Stanley had died. The news spread that some guys had killed him. No one had the chance to say goodbye. At the funeral, he saw his uncle Skip crying, and he started to cry, too. He heard that three guys had beaten Uncle Stanley with a tree trunk, then put him between two car bumpers and pressed the gas.

“Why’d they kill him?” I asked.

“I heard it was over fifty dollars my uncle owed them,” Milton said.

At fourteen, Milton met Melina. She was eighteen, but told me that Milton lied about his age when they met. He’d seen her at the neighborhood Boys and Girls Club. She thought he was sweet. Others did, too. Robert Reeves, the director of the Boys Club, saw Milton as the “Gentle Bear of the Club.” With his size, Reeves thought, Milton could have easily been a bully, but he was a gentleman. It’s why, when other kids made fun of Melina because of her weight, Milton started talking to her and walking her home. She had an apartment nearby. Melina was on public assistance and had a two-year-old daughter. They’d drink cheap Canei white wine and watch Purple Rain and have sex.

In Milton’s early life, he did things for people who he thought were his friends because of a sheer, often unfounded, belief that they would do the same for him. “When I take people on as my friends,” Milton told me, “I’m willing—I was willing to do anything for them.”

Since Milton was big, nearly six foot two and over two hundred pounds at age fifteen, he hung out with older kids. One time, at the mall, they told him to grab some coins out of the wishing well. When he leaned over, they pushed him in and ran away, laughing. He was all wet when the mall police came. Another time a friend busted his head with a rock, just for a laugh. And once, when Milton was sitting on the toilet in a public restroom, one of his friends climbed up on the panel dividing the stall and peed on him. Still, the kids hung out with Milton, included him in their plans, and he followed them.

In 1983, at fourteen years old, Milton had been attending Burgard Vocational High School, but he dropped out. In February, Milton and his friend saw some white boys down by the railroad tracks throttling a motorbike. His friend suggested they rob them of the bike. Armed with a pipe, Milton approached, striking a twenty-one-year-old man in the head while his friend took the motorbike.

“Did the guy get hurt?” I asked.

“No. He had a helmet on. But he probably had a headache.”

Milton laughed. So did I. There was an absurdity to his forthrightness.

“My friend wanted the dirt bike, and I was helping him,” he said.

“But why?”

“Because he liked dirt bikes.”

The way Milton put it, he was caught between two worlds: one that wanted him to do good and another that wanted him to do bad. The pull of the latter was stronger than the former, and there were no father figures or role models to help him correct the course. There was Raymond, but the man was much older and white. Milton resented his mother for always kicking him out and taking Raymond’s side. As he grew up, Milton was left to figure things out for himself; no one knew what he was up to. While he had been a good student in school and his teachers had liked him, he was also taken in by gangster films like Scarface and Mario Puzo’s crime novels. Later he read Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family, by Nicholas Pileggi, a nonfiction reported narrative about the Mafia. The idea of running the streets was already in Milton’s head; these narratives just showed him a way forward.

The first book I read about gangsters hit close to home. The Westies: Inside New York’s Irish Mob, by T. J. English, which came out in 1990, is a true crime book, you could say, and it resonated with me in a romantic way. We’d just moved to Hell’s Kitchen, into my stepfather George’s rent-stabilized apartment. He had grown up with the characters in the book. I’d always heard him talk about them, and now their stories lay upon the dresser in my mom’s room; Kenny Shannon, the Westie I would later meet when I first arrived in Sing Sing, was in the book. What went on in those pages happened right outside the window of our apartment. Some of the kids who hung out in front of the bodega on our corner, a mix of Irish and Puerto Rican teenagers, sporting Timberland boots and hoodies, were related to the Westies, most of whom, in the mid-’80s, were sent to federal prison for life. I’d nod to them when Mom sent me to buy half gallons of milk and Wonder Bread. After I read the book, I found myself captivated by my proximity to the neighborhood scene, as if I had a ticket to the hottest show and was able to go backstage to meet the talent.

The irony, I suppose, was that I had worked for a time on the Broadway play Death and the Maiden (many people from my neighborhood worked in local theaters as stagehands and ushers). I’d enter the theater through the backstage door and catch glimpses of Gene Hackman and Glenn Close, but I was more enamored with the kids who hung out on my street corner. When I was thirteen, on break from boarding school, George took me to see Donald Mollay, a former forger for the Westies, who made me ID papers that said I was older. That’s how I was able to work as an usher on Christmas and spring breaks. It didn’t hurt that I was over six feet tall. After I was expelled for beating up an exchange student, I started hanging out with the corner kids and stopped coming home.

Around that time, movies came out about the Westies: State of Grace, starring Sean Penn, and Sleepers, starring Brad Pitt and Kevin Bacon. After my friend Terrence and I saw Sleepers, walking outside back to the corner, he said, “That was all bullshit.” Terrence’s father, Eddie “The Butcher” Cummiskey, was a Westie who was murdered by the Italian mob. Terrence grew up without a father, like me, but unlike me, he rejected the lifestyle because it had already taken so much from him. Terrence’s mother and sister were bartenders at Irish Eyes on Ninth Avenue. The bar was our hangout, and served as the origin of my criminality. I remember when one of the younger Puerto Rican kids, standing next to me outside Irish Eyes, smacked a Black kid in the face with a Heineken bottle. The kid came back later in the backseat of a cop car and pointed me out.

In 1992, at fifteen, I wound up in juvie, booked on assault charges from the incident. It was three months in Spofford Detention, a white brick building in the South Bronx. A family court judge found me guilty of assault. Another found me guilty of assaulting a fellow student in boarding school. I was a problem. I was sentenced to juvie for eighteen months; I opted to go to a military shock camp called the Youth Leadership Academy, in upstate New York, for six months. They made me shine my boots, buff the floor, press my fatigues. Drill sergeants barked orders in my face. I didn’t take to it so well. I once sucked in my teeth and was taken down to the floor. The sergeant lay on my back for forty minutes, interlocking his arms through my elbows, which made me wheeze when I tried to breathe. I never sucked in my teeth again. My bunky at the juvie camp, Eto, was from the seedier side of Brooklyn, in Bushwick, and years later, when we met up again on the street, he turned me on to selling heroin.

In February 1984, Milton was arrested for assault and robbery for that motorbike. He was sent to Erie County Detention Center, a secure juvie facility. It was the Buffalo version of Spofford. There Milton met Theodore Simmons, a slim boy with thick eyeglasses who was a year older. They were locked in cells across from each other. Teddy grew up in a Buffalo home with twelve children, five of whom were adopted. In school, he was deemed to have “low average intelligence” and, like Milton, attended “learning-adjustment classes.” Teddy was mischievous, having been arrested for stealing belongings from cars in an auto plant parking lot and burglarizing a home for cash and credit cards. It’s what landed him in juvie with Milton. Their cells had doors with eye-level slots, so they were able to talk to each other. Teddy cracked jokes; Milton laughed. They were talkative, in the way that fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds might be. Teddy egged Milton on when he made smart-ass comments to the guards. A friendship formed. They planned to meet up when they got out.

By early 1985, Milton’s case was dropped down to family court, and as a result, he was placed in the Buffalo Youth Developmental Center, a nonsecure Division for Youth facility on Genesee Street. It was pretty much a boys’ group home. After two weeks, Milton ran away. A juvenile warrant was issued, but it apparently wasn’t the serious kind, where police were aggressively looking for him. The facility might have called his mother, but it wasn’t like he was on the lam from the law. He bounced around, stayed with his uncle or his grandmother, or sometimes Melina. Her cousins would come over and eat up all her food, but Milton put a stop to that, telling them to stay out of the refrigerator and steal from somewhere else, which they did. Sometimes Milton would grab the steaks from his mom’s freezer and bring them to Melina’s for dinner. Eventually, Melina got pregnant, and in 1986, their son, Kevin, was born at a hospital in Buffalo across the street from a church. Milton, only sixteen, remembers when the nurse brought in his newborn baby: “I held him in my arms. He didn’t cry or nothin’.”

Living with Melina, Milton watched over Kevin, tried to take care of him as best he could. Once, at nighttime, he put Kevin in a stroller and walked him over to his grandmother’s house so they could meet. “I didn’t really know how to be a father at the time,” Milton told me. “I didn’t know what being a father was.” Milton and Melina butted heads when she wanted to go out and spend time with her friends, leaving him alone with Kevin. Sometimes Melina would ask Valina to take care of Kevin and the daughter she had from a previous relationship.

Trying to be the father of a newborn overwhelmed Milton, and as a teenager himself, he craved structure and a stable home. It’s why he moved back into his grandmother’s house on Ivy Street and, in September 1986, enrolled as a junior at McKinley High School. He lost thirty pounds and joined the football team, starting as defensive tackle. Milton had never played football before, but he loved when Coach Chelf praised him at practice. He started two games, but was sidelined after a shoulder injury in mid-October. He still showed up for practice, but the coach wouldn’t play him without a doctor’s clearance, which Milton couldn’t get. He played for the junior varsity basketball team, but was frustrated that he didn’t make varsity and soon stopped showing up for practice. He was dropped from the team in December.

Meanwhile, Teddy, who was sent to another Division for Youth state facility called Lincoln Hall, had been released around this time. Back on the East Side of Buffalo, Milton and Teddy hung out together at Melina’s house, and sometimes Milton would go over to Teddy’s on Wyoming Avenue. Teddy’s parents, Pemberton and Helen, were an elderly couple. Their foster kids kept them busy. One day, when Milton came over, Teddy told him to come down to the basement. He wanted to tell him a way to make some easy money. Milton, like he had done for most of his life, followed.

3
A Preppy with Privilege
[ROB]

In the winter of 2020, after an evening spent interviewing Milton in the cellblock rec basement, I returned upstairs to my tier. My neighbor told me that there was a true crime documentary on TV about Robert Chambers. The Preppy Murder: Death in Central Park was an AMC limited docuseries that was playing for three nights on the A&E channel, which was part of the Sing Sing cable package. (Prisoners get cable? Yes, we do, but the prison population pays the bill with fundraisers and a cut of the profits from the visitor room vending machines.) It had been a big case at the time. In 1986, Chambers strangled eighteen-year-old Jennifer Levin under an oak tree by a bike path in Central Park. The name resonated with me because for as long as I had been in prison, both prisoners and COs had been telling me that I looked like Robert Chambers.

In 1988, the trial was everywhere. At eleven years old, I remember hearing my mother talking to my aunt about the case, expressing a clairvoyant sort of empathy for Chambers’s mother. The documentary, like most traditional true crime, retold the saga of his crime, the investigation, the trial, and, in this case, the sensational media frenzy. Rosanna Scotto, a Fox 5 news anchor who covered the case at the time, said Chambers “looked like a Hollywood Adonis.” Another described him as Kennedyesque. The fact that Chambers was an Upper East Side preppy added a whiff of irony—in these elite circles, violent crime just didn’t happen. It soon turned into a cautionary tale about the ’80s, the era of excess and inebriation—young people in the throes of addiction, uninhibited and numb. Sure, there was crack, and the city was on fire (in the first ten months of 1986, there were 1,309 homicides in New York City alone, while in 2023, there were 391), but that violence was mostly contained to the ghettos, where life seemed cheap, where people were killed over fifty dollars. Jennifer Levin’s killing made people question debauched culture itself, its ability to penetrate the moral insularity of the upper class. The show reminded the world how Robert Chambers was at the center of it all. Arms crossed, as pictured on the cover of New York magazine in November 1986, he seemed defiant, empowered.

Meanwhile, a young woman had lost her life, her future, and Chambers had taken it from her. The Preppy Murder questioned whether it would’ve gone down the same way in today’s post-#MeToo environment. Alex Kapp, a new voice that had never before spoken about the case, was featured throughout the series. She was the girl Chambers was seeing at the time. During the investigation in the ’80s, Kapp’s parents lawyered her up, and she was not part of the case. She moved to Hollywood, became a sitcom actress, and was writing a novel about the ’80s when producers for the series came calling. She agreed to talk.

The show reminded me that Chambers took a plea deal for manslaughter and received five to fifteen years. Many felt he got off easy. He did the full fifteen and got out in 2003. But he couldn’t stay sober. He was busted a few years later for selling drugs and received nineteen years. Near the end of the television series, there was an overhead shot of the Sullivan Correctional Facility, a small maximum-security facility in the Catskills, where Chambers was housed.

Months later, on a scorching day in the summer of 2020, Covid in full swing, I was in the back of a blue corrections van with tinted windows, clad in prison greens, cuffed, shackled, and face-masked. I was transferring out of Sing Sing. I carried Shane’s and Milton’s stories with me. In one of the draft bags was my Swintec typewriter. (I’m not allowed to own a computer; Swintec is one of the only companies that still makes and sells typewriters; mine comes with enough memory for seven thousand characters. You can buy them for $350.) The rest of my property—clothes, sneakers, stacks of notes, magazines, and books—was in three other bags. I was the only prisoner in the van, a special security transport. A Sports Illustrated story I’d published about gambling in prison had caused a stir within the population; a couple of guys had hatched an extortion plot against me. I was whisked into an involuntary protection unit, and the Sing Sing superintendent decided to transfer me to another prison. I watched the world pass by through the grates that covered the van windows. We drove through Scarborough, one of New York’s toniest towns, and beautiful homes flashed through the lush trees. I wondered if any of the people who lived in those homes had read my words, if any of the magazines I’d appeared in were stacked on their coffee tables. That’s the peculiar kind of freedom that comes with publishing from prison: Your body and mind are in here, but your thoughts and words are out there.

Then we approached my new home. The van pulled off the country road into a depressing town in the Catskills, about a hundred miles north of New York City. At the dead end of a climbing driveway, the prison crouched low over the hillside, like a cinder block spider, windows ringed with orange. Built in the mid-1980s, Sullivan was newer and smaller than the other prisons where I’d served time, with two-story beige cellblocks that looked like Tetris pieces. The prison housed about 450 men. Many had special needs: serious mental illness, hearing impairment, blindness. The others were gang members who’d racked up too many beefs over the years to be locked up in the bigger prisons. Then there were the high-profile people who were more easily monitored here: Ronnie DeFeo Jr., who killed six members of his family in Amityville, Long Island, in 1974, and who has been the subject of a generation of cult films. It was for many years also home to David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam,” who killed six people with a .44 caliber, terrorizing New York City in 1977, the year I was born.

The good thing about prisons with small populations is that they process your arrival quickly. The nurse took my temperature and cleared me for Covid; then I was escorted to D North, a two-tiered cellblock in an octagonal shape. Gray and white walls and orange banisters wrapped a common area with tables, two TVs, four phones, and a kiosk for JPay tablets. (In 2019, New York prisoners were issued electronic tablets that allowed us to download music and send and receive emails, pictures, and videos, all for a fee. I used it to do all of that, and write articles. But the Sing Sing administration began to hold up all my incoming and outgoing JPay messages—I’m talking for weeks—so it made the technology useless. When I arrived at Sullivan, I leveled with the superintendent, told him I’d always be fair and give him a heads-up about my journalism. My JPay messages started going through. I ordered a rubber keyboard from JPay and began typing and editing this book in a series of six-thousand-character emails in the edit mode of the tablet, which allowed me to cut and paste. It made things easier.) In nearly twenty years of prison living, Sullivan’s cells were the best I’d seen. There was hot water in the sinks, and a window, and I could stretch out both arms without touching the walls. The view from the second tier was like that of a mezzanine seat in a theater. I could see the common area and the cells across from me on both floors. The sixty men of D North would be my neighbors.

Arriving at a new prison gives you an odd sense of joy. It’s the excitement of a new place, new faces and new stories, a break from the miserable monotony of your old prison. But coming into Sullivan, I was on edge. My writing had gotten mixed reviews in Sing Sing; I wondered how I would fare in here.

A man called Midget stood outside a row of cells. I had been with Midget, or Frank Sepe, years ago in Clinton. Midget had been in since he was seventeen; now in his late fifties, he had over forty years in, a ticker implanted in his chest to help his heart beat, and a raspy voice that made it sound like he had throat cancer. Midget was in front of Mike Antinuche’s cell. Mike was round and rough, a forty-nine-year-old gangster from Queens. Tattooed on his back were the words “Young Guns” and two revolvers inked into a maniacal face, laughing. People called him Mikey Meatballs.

“Oh yeah, you’re the writer. I read the story you did in Men’s Health about working out in the yard,” Meatballs said. “We all read it in the box last year.”

As we talked, I saw an older version of myself, a tall wiry white guy, enter the cellblock. His face was stubbled, striking—unmistakable. “Is that Robert Chambers?” I asked.

“Yeah, that’s Bobby,” Midget said. “He’s all right. Been around for years.”

“I just watched the documentary on him,” I said. “I couldn’t believe they were still talking about his case.”

“Yeah, guys watched it in here, too,” Midget said. “Bobby didn’t watch it. He hates the press. They’re always writing him letters, asking to come see him. He never writes them back.”

Robert Chambers glanced our way, offered a half nod, and sauntered upstairs to cell 247. He’d been cutting grass all day. He had to shower and get ready for his next job: serving turkey tetrazzini (sounds fancy, tastes nasty) in the cellblock pantry.

At fifty-four, Chambers seemed whipped and wary. He was still handsome. Six foot four, he was lean and broad shouldered. He had a long, sharp jawline, square chin, and piercing blue eyes, but his thick head of hair was thinning, graying. He was hardly the symbol of privilege I’d seen on TV. He wore dirty black Skechers and an oversized state-issued green short-sleeve buttoned shirt, which dangled off him like he was a mannequin. Above the pocket was an ironed-on label: “Chambers 08A4763.”

I first talked to Chambers two days after I arrived in Sullivan. He was sitting with a half-blind man in the belly of the block, watching a big-screen TV designed for the visually impaired. I introduced myself. He said Mikey Meatballs had told him I was a writer.

“Were you a journalist in the street?” Rob asked.

“Nah, man. I was a drug dealer when I was on the street,” I said. “Tell you what—I’ll send you a few of my articles.”

“I’d like that.”

A couple days later, Chambers was outside my cell, elbows on my cell bars. After handing out food in the cellblock pantry, he got to walk around while we were still locked in. In the essays I’d given him, I must have accidentally included the resignation letter that controversial op-ed columnist Bari Weiss had written to the New York Times’s publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, which was the buzz of the moment. Weiss described her liberal colleagues at the Times as mean-spirited and the paper’s constant coverage of Trump as lacking in intellectual rigor. “Why edit something challenging to our readers,” Weiss wrote, “when we can assure ourselves of job security (and clicks) by publishing our 4000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world?”

“Trump’s the only president that got a criminal justice reform bill passed,” Chambers told me, with raised eyebrows. “Biden wrote that 1994 crime bill.”

Chambers was a Trump supporter?

I steered the conversation away from politics. We talked a bit about the dark side of the media business. I mentioned the Inside Evil episode. I told him I had seen the recent docuseries on him. He said that he knew one of the producers, a woman named Ricki Stern, who had attended a prep school on the Upper East Side. A couple of years ago, Stern wrote him a letter and explained that she and her partner, Annie Sundberg, were doing a documentary about the 1980s and would love for him to be involved. Stern reminded Chambers of the parties they attended, their mutual friends. He described the tone of the letter as light. But he felt nothing good would come out of replying. When The Preppy Murder came out, it was a gut shot, because so many younger men and COs who had never heard of his original case were now watching it all play out on the TV in the common area.

Back at my cell, Chambers said that, out of all the articles I gave him, the one about writing an apology letter to E.’s family resonated with him the most. I was surprised he took to that essay.

“You know,” I told him, “the whole world wants to know where you’re at with your apology.”

“Yeah, when I read that article, I was jealous that you found a way to say you were sorry,” Chambers continued. “I guess I feel like, how could I not have figured out how to do that? I think it was always something I felt like I needed to earn. You found this outlet, a profession, to say what you needed to say. Your words matter.”

I once read that artistic growth doesn’t always parallel moral growth, but my entry point to becoming a journalist was when I joined that creative writing workshop in Attica, in 2010, having failed in life. A handful of prisoners met monthly for years in an otherwise deserted school building with yellowing education posters taped to the walls. Volunteer programs like this were a rare gem, and prisoners involved with them often acted as gatekeepers and blocked certain guys with difficult personalities (like me) from signing up. Which was shitty, but prison is shitty. I lucked out when another prisoner circumvented the politics and signed me up. Doran Larson, a fedora-sporting Hamilton College English professor, taught the workshop. Heat pumped as we sat in a semicircle, competing for praise, resenting the guy who got it. Most wrote vignettes: a cell search, a walk to the chow hall, a pat frisk that left one feeling violated. The writer would read it aloud; then we each took copies of the piece and made comments in the margins. At the next session, we offered our thoughts as the writer sat in silence. Whenever a writer left out his crime or any mention of how he wound up in prison, I said that it made me feel like he was hiding something. Why would a reader care about how a writer was treated in Attica if the writer wasn’t vulnerable enough to share what landed him there? When I called this out, Doran usually intervened, siding with the writer. Looking back, it was cruel of me to keep calling this out. I had convinced myself that I was superior to the others because my crime was an accepted result of the drug-dealing lifestyle, whereas theirs—killing wives, girlfriends, parents—were more cringe. The workshop was intense. I was intense.

To me, the workshop was less about making friends than it was about learning what good writing looked like and finding my voice on the page. The goal of the workshop was getting our work published. And that was my goal, too: I wanted to take this life on the inside and share it with people on the outside, and when something bothered me, I wanted a platform to say it. So, Chambers was right. I was lucky to have found an outlet to express myself. But the family of the man I murdered ultimately rejected my apology, so sometimes I’m not sure how much my words matter.

By the time I met Rob, as I’ve come to call him, in the summer of 2020, he was at the end of his second prison stint. With about a 15 percent time cut for good behavior, plus another six months off for attending two years of college, he’d have to serve just under sixteen years of his nineteen-year sentence and get out around 2023, unless he ran into some serious trouble in prison and lost good time. Prison, until the Preppy Murder docuseries came out, was a kind of safe haven for him from the media. And yet here I was, writing a book on true crime. I had my notes on Milton and Shane, but now I’d landed with this true crime celebrity, an enigma who hardly ever talked to the press. A few weeks passed, and I asked if Rob would let me tell his story, the part of it I knew so well: not the “preppy” part but the convict part. He could take time to think about it, I told him, but he agreed on the spot. If he was going to talk to any journalist, he said, he wanted it to be me.

While I freed up my time to write, Rob kept busy doing prison work out of his cell. He told me he did this to stay out of his head. He would get up early and serve breakfast: toasting bread and scooping oatmeal. He wasn’t an official pantry worker, his actual job was lawns and grounds, but the CO let Rob do it because he was a good worker. The pantry job had its perks in exchange for his unpaid labor: extra sugar packets, coffee cake, breakfast pizza. Then, at 8:30 a.m., he’d leave the cellblock and head to the wooden maintenance shack. Big Barcelona rode the mower, and Rob gassed up the weed trimmer and worked on the sidelines, a guard in tow, grooming the grounds.

“Yeah, Heartthrob Rob, that’s my boy,” Big Barcelona told me, months later, on a snowy day at a stone table in the yard. Barcelona, or Louis Robinson, was thirty-six, halfway through an eighteen-year stint for robbery. At six foot five and 350 pounds, he resembled The Green Mile’s John Coffey.

“Rob’s case was weird. It wasn’t like he set out to kill that girl. If that incident never happened—he would have never had this prison experience. He had that chick, the one who convicted the Central Park Five,” Barcelona said.

“Linda Fairstein?” I asked.

“Yeah, she was wicked, calling him the monster in the midst. She couldn’t convict him on murder charges, but then she went and convicted those Black kids, though. Look, Rob’s my man, I don’t think he meant to kill that girl. At first, I looked at him like a bad guy ’cause he liked Trump,” Barcelona said. “But he’s a good guy. He’s always pushed me to finish my GED. He stayed on me. He cared.”

“Did you get it?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’m in the college program,” Barcelona said.

In the afternoon, Rob worked as a sign language interpreter. He had learned to sign years before, in a class in Wende Correctional Facility, another small maximum-security facility, near Buffalo. There were four deaf men in D North. He’d help the men with algebra and essay writing in a windowless pre-GED class. His pay: $3.75 a week. He’d get another $3.75 for his morning lawns-and-grounds job. In the evenings, with a mezzanine view from my cell on the second tier, I’d observe Rob in the common area, by the kiosk, contorting his face, waving his hands and fingers and signing. It was an unusual scene: Rob, tall and lanky and pale; the man with a disheveled Afro, short and stout and deaf. The man was having trouble with his JPay account. “I’m their counselor, their friend, their lawyer. Deaf people are ostracized,” he told me. “They get frustrated when others don’t understand them—so I sign and explain. But it’s emotionally exhausting.”

He continued, “This culture is hard for them, too. They’re used to dealing with authority figures for everything—but I have to explain snitching to them. And when they get it, they start signing to me that people are rats.” Rob signs the symbol for rat, curling his index finger into a lowercase r by his nose. He had to tell them to stop calling people rats, using that sign, because it could cause problems.

During his first prison stint, Rob’s parents, and sometimes female admirers, ordered him the kind of accoutrements I have now—soft bedsheets; subscriptions to the New York Times, Esquire, Rolling Stone. When I was getting to know him, I regularly ordered thirty-five-pound packages from vendors—sealed cold cuts, fresh produce—and lugged net bags back to my cell filled with commissary after biweekly buys: oysters, clams, oatmeal, instant rice, black beans, spaghetti, tomato sauce, onions, garlic. But Rob was too ashamed to take money from his parents this time around. Bob and Phyllis Chambers, who were both in their eighties when I met Rob, lived off modest retirement savings and social security payments. On his second prison stint, Rob embraced the humiliation of it all, walking back to D North with a jar of Folgers and a tube of toothpaste and a few pouches of roll-up Top cigarettes in his commissary net bag, sometimes swinging it in the air as he walked like a schoolkid.

In the mornings, I’d stay in my cell and write. In the afternoons, I’d go out to the yard and work out in the weight pit with Simon Dedaj, a fifty-seven-year-old mobster with olive skin and a boxer’s nose. He was fit, though aging, with lower back pain, and spoke with mobster mannerisms—hand waves, head tilts, smiles. You’d swear he was Italian until you heard him break into Albanian. Simon was a fixer, meticulous, always prepared. If it started raining unexpectedly in the yard, he’d be the only one wearing a rain jacket. After workouts, he’d pull a small Ziploc bag of peanuts out from his crotch (food wasn’t allowed in the yard) for a protein fix; he’d share them and tell me to turn my back to the tower guard so he wouldn’t see me chewing. One time he showed up at my bars with an empty lotion bottle, the kind you would pump, which were hard to come by. He had smuggled it from the officers’ bathrooms he cleaned. “I know you shit a lot because of the Crohn’s,” he said. “Just fill this bottle with the lotion you buy from commissary and put it beside your toilet and pump a little lotion on the toilet paper. You’ll get a clean wipe.”

I nodded and thanked him. It was the most thoughtful thing a prisoner had ever done for me.

In 1996, Simon, his brother Victor, and another Albanian associate all attended a private birthday for a mob guy at Scores, a gentlemen’s club in Manhattan. Simon was a regular. When they arrived, the mob guys were pretty drunk. Simon got into a fight with a waiter. It was horseplay; then it got real. At trial, Victor testified that he shot the bouncer and the waiter, who was fighting with Simon, in the head, in self-defense. But the prosecutor pegged Simon as the shooter, Simon believes, because he had a more dangerous reputation in the street than his brother. In the end, Victor was found guilty of a lesser charge and served about fourteen years. He’s free today. The jury found Simon guilty of the two murders, and the judge gave him fifty years to life.

I told Simon my plans for this book. He had known Rob for years. They had been together in Auburn, where Rob had been imprisoned for killing Jennifer Levin, and became friendly before Rob was released in 2003. He’d watched him go home (Rob wrote him a long letter before he left) and now saw him return. “You gotta be careful writing about that guy,” Simon said. “If the administration finds out, they may transfer you, or him. And he runs from his demons. You see that phony smile? He’s not like us. He’ll say yes, but you never really know what he’s thinking. I actually feel bad for the guy. I feel bad for the girl’s family, too.”

I had colleagues send me a stack of articles on Rob. Tabloid articles, all snarky and crude and relentless. Joan Didion’s 1991 New York Review of Books essay “New York: Sentimental Journeys” offered a poised and contrarian reflection:

Crimes are universally understood to be news to the extent that they offer, however erroneously, a story, a lesson, a high concept. In the 1986 Central Park death of Jennifer Levin, then eighteen, at the hands of Robert Chambers, then nineteen, the “story,” extrapolated more or less from thin air but left largely uncorrected, had to do not with people living wretchedly and marginally on the underside of where they wanted to be, not with the Dreiserian pursuit of “respectability” that marked the revealed details (Robert Chambers’s mother was a private-duty nurse who worked twelve-hour night shifts to enroll her son in private schools and the Knickerbocker Greys) but with “preppies,” and the familiar “too much too soon.”

As the years passed, a calm came over Rob as he realized his name didn’t automatically register with the younger generation of prisoners and guards. I could understand the impulse to break free from outsiders’ stories about him, but it was clear he hadn’t entirely succeeded. Ricki Stern dredging up his case, looking to analyze him in today’s context, didn’t help. Maybe my reporting wouldn’t, either.

On September 25, 1966, a healthy Irish baby with sapphire eyes was born to a Catholic, college-educated couple from Queens. His name was Robert Emmet Chambers. When Rob was four, his mother enrolled him in Saint David’s, a prestigious all-boys Catholic grade school on East 89th Street, off Fifth Avenue. It was attended by the children of Manhattan’s wealthy elite. It was the early 1970s, and Rob’s parents were living in Queens. While most of his classmates came from wealthy families, Rob’s was middle-class. Bob Chambers was a mid-level employee at MCA Records. Phyllis, with an impressive work ethic, was an Irish-born private nurse who tended to some of the most influential Manhattan families: the Hearsts, the Kennedys, the Hammersteins. Phyllis sacrificed so her only son could have the best. Saint David’s consisted of several connected brownstones on the block. Quiet and conservative. Polished floors. Winding staircases, whose banisters Rob would slide down. Classes were small, and teachers took their time with the boys.

Phyllis picked him up after school, and sometimes brought him and some of the other boys across the street to the sandwich shop for ice cream sundaes. Kids would get embarrassed when their mothers would pick them up, Rob told me, but not him. He loved his mom. So did the other boys. They thought she was cute and fun, with her joyful brogue, and when she talked to the kids, it seemed like she was taking them on an adventure. They’d call after her, “Mrs. C! Mrs. C!”

“I never realized the kind of kids I was around back then in Saint David’s,” Rob told me outside my cell. “We’d be playing soccer in Central Park, and there would be bodyguards lingering around. It was for my friend Ali. He was the son of the shah of Iran. He stayed at the school for a year. He wrote me years later, after all this happened, when I first went to prison. I wrote him back. I liked Ali. He was a nice guy.”

When Rob was eight, Phyllis enrolled him in the Knickerbocker Greys, a military drill group, which he attended after school on Tuesdays and Fridays. Phyllis raised funds from her clients for the Greys, which earned her a seat on the board. By 1975, his parents had moved from Queens to the Upper East Side. It was another sacrifice, as Phyllis wanted her son to be close to his school and the Greys. She was putting her all into her only son, believing, as many parents do, that the trappings of privilege would form for him an unbreakable armor. Rob rose to lieutenant colonel in the Greys. “We would train at the Seventh Regiment Armory, where the National Guard was based,” he told me. “We did drill and ceremony, you know, polished our shoes and medals. We did riflery. The colonel used to say, ‘Respect for another person starts with respect for yourself.’” It was fascinating to hear the details of a decent and nurtured life, one that was never expected to wind up in prison.

Indecent banter on the tier below interrupted us: “That bitch wanted to see it!” Jay Stone, who had life without parole and one eye (somebody had stabbed out the other one), was talking loudly about his eleven-inch cock. He’d recently received a misbehavior report for masturbating as the night guard did her rounds, and was now explaining to his neighbor how it was all a misunderstanding. He had a sheet up across the bars blocking the view inside his cell, but the guard was too damned curious and pulled back the sheet. What he was doing now was really a stunt. He was talking loudly about his huge cock because another female guard was at the desk, in earshot. She was a rookie, so Jay figured he could get in her head. These kinds of things happen all day long. Instead of leaf blowers, planes passing overhead, or the thundering of the subway, this is our noise pollution.

“Jesus Christ, eleven inches,” Rob said.

“Who the hell wants that thing in them?” I said.

We started laughing. Then I wrote it down on my notepad. Rob asked if I was going to put that in the book. I nodded and smiled.

“My God. What’s my mother gonna think when she reads this?” he said.

Rob was an altar boy and sang in the glee club. I had only heard of glee from the TV show, I told Rob. “It wasn’t as corny as it sounds,” he said. “It was part of Saint David’s curriculum. You went to ten a.m. Mass, prepared the Eucharist, the wine, then we sang. It was fun.” In the sixth grade, Rob was confirmed under the sponsorship of the then auxiliary archbishop of the Archdiocese of New York and a friend of Rob’s parents, Theodore McCarrick. “I knew him as Uncle Ted. He used to come over to the house for dinner.”

Another thing that Rob’s old friend Ricki Stern teased in the Preppy Murder docuseries was a new theory about why Rob snapped and strangled Jennifer in the park. Back in the ’80s, some surmised that Rob was drunk or high, or had killed Jennifer for her earrings. Now the show suggested that it might have been an expression of Rob’s repressed rage as a survivor of sexual assault. This stemmed from a suspicion that Rob was a victim of Theodore McCarrick, who would become a cardinal and the archbishop of Washington, DC. By 2019, following a Vatican investigation into years of sexual abuse allegations around the time Rob was an altar boy, McCarrick was defrocked. McCarrick, it turned out, was Rob’s godfather. In 1986, after Rob was arrested, McCarrick, as archbishop of Newark, wrote a letter to the judge vouching for Rob’s character. It helped secure him bail. Maybe McCarrick did it because he wanted Rob to keep their secret. Maybe not.

Did Uncle Ted molest him? It was too soon to ask. But he did talk to me about him.

“You’re always remembered for the bad,” Rob told me as I stood outside his cell during evening recreation. He sat on the edge of his bunk and pulled on a cigarette as the tip glowed red. “I don’t know what was in his head when he was doing whatever he was doing with those kids. It was some kind of sickness, I guess. Like these things,” he said, tossing the cigarette clip in the toilet. “That’s what Jesus is about, right? He knew we were all flawed. I don’t know if any of the good he did in his life will even matter now.”

“You mean McCarrick?” I asked.

“Yeah, he wasn’t just those things he did, as terrible as they were.”

In the mid-’70s, when Rob was in the Greys and the glee club, my mom left my two older brothers and sister with their father in Long Island. He was an abusive man, so she divorced him and moved to Manhattan. She met my dad, an Irish-born bartender with a brogue dripping with charm. They married and had me in 1977; he left us when I was one year old. Mom and I wound up in the Sheepshead Bay housing project.

When I was growing up there, my mom met a teenager named Robby, who was in the local YMCA’s Big Brother program. Soon my mom started dropping me off with Robby’s parents, Danny and Glenda Sherman, who lived in a nearby two-bedroom co-op with a pool. Robby’s older brother, Steve, had a Datsun stick shift, and he used to do peel-outs and call me “Johnny Farny.” The Shermans had thick wall-to-wall carpet and HBO and a black poodle with bad breath. Glenda fed me Froot Loops and big hamburgers with no cheese. I surfed on Danny’s back in the bed. I loved staying with the Shermans. I spent the Jewish holidays with them and ate gefilte fish and wore a yarmulke. Glenda wanted me to convert, get circumcised, and marry a nice Jewish girl.

By 1986, my mom had married my stepfather, George, a longshoreman who moonlighted as a fishing boat captain in Sheepshead Bay. My mom had met him while hustling her hot dog stands by the boats. When we moved to Hell’s Kitchen, on Manhattan’s west side, my mom enrolled me in Lincoln, a prep school on the east side. I attended the fourth grade and took the crosstown bus every morning. My mom had a knack for getting the money for tuition. During the summers, she was able to send me to a Jewish summer camp, receiving financial aid by listing her name as Feinstein on the forms. In the fifth to seventh grades, I attended the private Malcolm Gordon School for Boys. It was a boarding school for which she managed to get partial financial aid. About twenty-five of us lived in a mansion overlooking the Hudson River, across from West Point. I was the only poor kid who had grown up in a housing project. One kid used to tease me, “Brooklyn bo-o-oy!”

At Malcolm Gordon, we learned to sit up straight, pulled out chairs for the headmaster’s wife and mother. We received weekly standards: punctuality, integrity, behavior. In the seventh grade, I won a second-prize writing award, a seventy-five-dollar savings bond. I’d written a historical fiction story about the traitor Benedict Arnold, from the perspective of his cane. It may have been the last time I showed promise for a bright future.

When Rob was in seventh grade, he also won an award. His was for public speaking, a presentation about the Irish rebel and traitor Robert Emmet, for whom he was named. Around this time, Rob was the photography editor for his school’s newspaper. He covered various sporting events. Developing film, understanding speed and aperture. He preferred black and white over color, capturing the gray areas of the people and world around him. He used to shoot in Central Park, the Great Lawn, Belvedere Castle, behind the museum, not far from that oak tree by the bike path. During the summer, he would teach photography to kids from underprivileged schools—kids like Ed Crespo, a pudgy Puerto Rican from East Harlem. “I was Rob the slob, and he was Ed the head,” Rob told me, smiling.

“After that summer, I called him up,” Crespo told Michael Stone for the 1986 New York article. “I remember thinking, ‘Ed, you’re making a fool of yourself. Why should Robert Chambers bother with a fat, pimply-faced, long-haired kid? He’s not even going to remember you.’ But he did. He came to my house like it was the most natural thing in the world.”

When Rob talks about Choate, where he began high school, he lights up. It was the last time he was on the path that was set out for him. Choate, perhaps the most prestigious boarding high school in the nation, also offered risky indulgences. Exposed to hard drugs, Rob was hooked. His mother wasn’t around, and for the first time, he felt free to do whatever he wanted. “I may have snuck some beer at parties when I was in Saint David’s,” he told me, “but at Choate, I was around older kids, juniors and seniors who got their kicks from turning out freshmen. I remember crushing and sniffing black beauty speed pills.”

Rob was tall and good-looking and popular, and so he was automatically part of the “in crowd.” There was a pressure to fit in with these older kids who knew themselves a bit better than he knew himself. There was also the pressure that came from all the sacrifices his mother made, but he wasn’t thinking about making Mom proud when he was partying with the preppies. He had status, and before long, he had cocaine.

At the end of my seventh grade year, Malcolm Gordon closed, and my mom told me that my father, the man who left us, had killed himself. A shotgun under his chin. After she told me, I listened to Sinéad O’Connor and cried. She said he was an alcoholic, and that I had the gene, too. She convinced me that I was allergic to alcohol and shouldn’t drink. She sent me to Hoosac, an eighth through twelfth grade coed boarding school in Hoosick Falls, New York. It’s where I first had a crush on a girl. I told one of the older kids, a junior, what my mom told me after the news of my father’s suicide.

“Nobody’s allergic to alcohol!” he told me.

We started drinking in the dorms. We did shots, funneled beer. I made a fool of myself. Alcohol freed me. I became brave, kissed girls. It was fun until I was expelled. Then Mom enrolled me in a New York City public school. Classes had fifty kids in them and I felt invisible. I didn’t fit in. I started cutting class, selling dime bags of weed with the kids on the corner, and hanging out at Irish Eyes, the neighborhood bar. I stopped coming home and started staying with the super of a high-rise rent-controlled apartment building nearby; the neighborhood kids often crashed at the super’s place, and it was where I first sniffed cocaine. The apartment was on the thirty-first floor with a terrace overlooking the city. If it weren’t so grungy, it could have been a swanky one-bedroom apartment. Sometimes the super would rent the bedroom to an older drug dealer, and the super would sleep on a futon in the den off the kitchen. I would set up a bed on the carpet in the living room, surrounded by empty beer bottles and ashtrays full of Newport Lights, and wake up hungry, in a funky film of grime and sweat.

Rob tried cocaine for the first time at a house party in Manhattan, home from Choate on the weekend. A girl passed him a laced cigarette. “Hold it up—you gotta light it holding it up,” she told Rob. “When I smoked it,” he said, “my eyes flew open.”

Rob liked theater class at Choate. He played the part of Biff in Death of a Salesman. The teacher pulled him aside and told Rob he was a natural talent and wanted him to read for a Hollywood friend when he stopped by Choate. All these years later, it made me sad to listen to Rob recall all these early opportunities in his life. He never did read for the theater teacher’s friend, and because of bad grades and poor adjustment, he wasn’t invited back to Choate after his first year.

He did get to go on the summer class trip to Spain. It was an exchange program. He stayed with an older couple in the Asturian town of Gijón. They had two beautiful granddaughters. Rob lost his virginity to one of them, Maria.

For tenth grade, Phyllis enrolled Rob in Browning, a prep high school in the city. He didn’t last a full year there before he was expelled for drugs and stealing. Then Phyllis got him into York Prep School. I’ve read that Rob’s mom was strict but out-of-touch and enabling. To her credit, though, Phyllis did recognize Rob’s substance abuse and sent him to rehab in Louisiana, during one of the periods he was switching schools. I was around the same age, maybe fourteen, when my mom sent me to a twenty-eight-day rehab upstate called Arms Acres, in Carmel, New York. At the same time, she admitted herself to a twenty-eight-day rehab called Conifer Park, outside Albany. My mom was mostly a pothead, but she loved the language of the 12-step recovery programs. Meanwhile, Rob’s father was drinking at the bar after work a lot in his younger years. He wasn’t a mean drunk who came home and knocked him around. Nothing like that. He just wasn’t around that much. His parents separated in his pivotal adolescent years, which probably played its part in his dysfunction. “I had a kick-ass life—up until…” Rob said, then paused. “I mean, until it happened, and I was arrested. If there were problems, I made them. But everything was offered to me.”

My mother wanted the same things for me that Phyllis wanted for Rob. If you asked my older brother Joe or the Shermans, they’d say that my mom was selfish and neglectful—leaving me alone in our project apartment at age five or six while she went out at night. I switched schools a lot. But my mom suffered, too; she had her demons, and yet she sacrificed a lot for me. She tried to set me up for a better life, despite my tendency to screw everything up. After a year of public high school, which I wound up never attending much because I was hanging out in Hell’s Kitchen, my mom convinced the headmaster of the Hoosac boarding school to take me back. I returned with the kind of edge that hanging with a tough crowd gives you, but I got the prettiest girl. Her name was Nicole.

I didn’t last long at Hoosac. One day, on the smoker’s path behind the dining hall, I got into a staring match with a Japanese exchange student. My friend told me the kid knew karate. He walked up to me with a smirk on his face and choked me with my own tie. Others on the path broke up the scuffle. I went back to my dorm room and started playing with my friend’s butterfly knife, talking shit. Then the exchange student appeared in the doorway and nodded at the knife in my hand.

“You got a knife?” he said, seeming fearless.

I was scared, almost in awe, of how indifferent he appeared to be, and ashamed at how terrified I was. Then, as though fear itself had pulled the trigger inside me, I leapt toward the kid and pummeled him. While on top of him, I had enough awareness to drop the knife. But I was landing all of my punches, and his face was all bloody, and I could hear everyone yelling that he’d had enough, to get off him.

That was the moment I realized fear ignited my violent streak.

State troopers arrested me, and I remember writing a confession. The headmaster picked me up from the barracks, a duffel bag of my clothes in the backseat of his Camaro. He drove me straight to the Amtrak station. My mom was waiting for me at Penn Station. Her face was stony, disappointed, angry. I was too big at that point for her to beat me. I gave her the arrest papers and my statement. We took a cab in silence back to our railroad apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. I wondered if Nicole would still love me. Later Mom sat me down at the kitchen table.

“John, I don’t know why you attacked that boy. But don’t you ever talk to the police again without a lawyer present,” she said. “You gave them this beautiful handwritten statement against yourself. They ain’t looking to help you, they’re looking to put you away.” I mean, she was right. They did send me to juvie.

My mom was street-smart, and I always knew she was a bit of a schemer. Bill collectors would call asking for people who had my mother’s first name but a different last name. I’d say the wrong thing, and she’d scold me for talking too much. She ran up credit cards, took out multiple student loans. Early one morning when we were living in Manhattan, I remember waking up to a banging at the front door. When I rolled out of bed and walked to the kitchen, I heard a pssst. Mom was sitting in the dark, finger over her lips, and she waved me back to my room. I’d later learn that it was the FBI knocking. One time, as we walked into our building, two men in suits stopped her and called her by one of her fake names. She looked them calmly in the eyes and told them that she didn’t know who they were referring to. We kept walking. Mom was never arrested. She kept her mouth shut.

When Rob would blame others or create excuses for his behavior, his mother seemed to believe him. It was enabling, but perhaps it was also that Phyllis was simply stunned with disappointment. Her kid squandered all the opportunities that she tried to give him. With my mother, I always felt she knew I was a bit damaged—her beatings, my father’s suicide—and capable of violence. Maybe that’s why she wanted to send me to those boarding schools, that Jewish summer camp; she was trying to make me a preppy, to give me a chance. She knew I was troubled. And yet it took a sort of nurturing toughness to put all that aside and still think to protect me, to tell me to never talk to cops without a lawyer. It’s not that my mother didn’t want me to be held accountable; it’s that she feared what would become of me if I entered the system.

Back in 1986, years before the incident at Hoosac, standing by her boy’s side on television as cameras flashed, Phyllis was living many mothers’ worst fears, including my own. There’s no upside for the murderer’s mother—and it’s the ultimate test of unconditional love. Let’s say you get your kid a good lawyer and he beats the rap. Then what? Or he gets convicted and sucked up into the system. Then what? After we kill, the world shifts; everything is sideways. And the effects of our crime ripple; they are almost kaleidoscopic.

I read a personal essay Rob wrote in 2018 for an English composition class in the Sullivan college program. In the essay, he quoted Pink Floyd lyrics between a narrative about the pressures he faced before he killed Jennifer in the park. It was titled “Lust in the Clutches of a Dreamsleep.” It reads like an East Coast version of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel Less Than Zero, about rich kids racing through life fueled on cocaine and sex.

In his essay, Rob writes a scene about growing up as a preppy teenager coming of age in Manhattan in the ’80s and being inducted into a secret society called the Seven Silver Keys, along with three girls and three other boys, during a party at a fancy triplex on Fifth Avenue. The adults at the party told them they were the chosen ones. Money, drugs, travel, connections, and college—“everything was for the taking. But once you take, you will give forever,” he writes. “The Master of Ceremonies entered the room. He said everything we wanted to hear, yet there was a certain undertone to his speech. The adults smiled and laughed. They swayed to his words as if a preacher were blessing their entrance to Heaven; words of distrust, hate, prejudice. This was Hitler in an Armani suit.”

He didn’t give me the name of the “Hitler in the Armani suit.” He did claim that the Keys would meet at 720 Park Avenue, Billionaires’ Row, to receive their orders. They would infiltrate parties of older wealthy people, have sex, gather information, and pass messages. They made deliveries to Wall Street offices, sealed envelopes that Rob surmised contained information that amounted to insider trading and securities fraud:

At 15, I had secret money, a secret apartment, and more secrets of the who’s who of politics and finance than I knew what to do with. All we had to do was act. We were the birdies who collected and sang songs of sweet secrets to our hosts. We entertained: we provided what the adults wanted more than anything—our youth.

Around this time, Rob writes, he got involved with an older woman, a friend’s aunt. She was tall and slim, had dark hair and light skin. They met at a party, stared and smiled and flirted. She sold art. The next day they met up, and it was a waterfall of perfect-date scenes. At MoMA, she showed him the art and whispered about the pieces in his ear, sprinkling in French and Italian. They had lunch at Brasserie. Rob had waffles, and she smiled and smoked as she watched him eat. Then they went to McSorley’s and drank dark beer. They walked on cobbled streets, a bit buzzed, and made love against a pillar under the Brooklyn Bridge.

Rob writes about how she came to York Prep during the day once and explained to the headmaster that she had to take him to an important meeting. Somehow it worked, and she drove Rob out to the Hamptons. They sniffed cocaine, popped Valium. At a yacht club, they snuck off to a sailboat docked nearby, and she guided him, telling him to “slow down and lay down.” “I was scared of her,” Rob writes. “I loved her.” It was a seven-month affair. She was married.

This is Rob’s version of those years. I imagine there’s some truth to it, but I couldn’t report out and vet what he told me and what he wrote about in his 2018 essay. Kids from the ’80s, especially ones in his circle, and particularly him, had faces that were more hardened, more seasoned. When I look back at those old photos and see his young smile, it has a mysterious confidence that is all but gone in Rob’s face today. Being with an older married woman did give Rob more courage at the time, especially with girls. He was tender; he went slow. He listened. He smiled. He complimented. Soon the older woman stopped calling, stopped seeing him.

Then there seemed to be so many girls, too many girls. By July 1986, Rob told me, he’d met Jennifer Levin at Dorrian’s Red Hand, a bar on Second Avenue where he and his friends were regulars, even though most were underage. Many reports revealed excited feelings from Jennifer’s side and dismissive ones from Rob’s. Even as Rob explained to me how he didn’t know Jennifer that well, it seemed painful for him to admit. They had spent some time together, he said, they had hooked up a few times, but that was pretty much it. One time they had sex at the home of one of Jennifer’s friends, Rob told me, another time on a roof. He didn’t offer details. And I didn’t ask.

ACT II
The Killing

We won’t know anything about extreme acts of violence until some author makes such acts intimately believable, that is, believable not as acts of description (for that is easy enough) but as intimate personal states so intimate that we enter them. That is why likely we are never to know: Where is the author ready to bear the onus of suggesting that he or she truly understands the inner logic of violence?

—Norman Mailer

4
A Killing in Brooklyn, a Dismemberment in Kentucky
[SHANE]

It didn’t take long for Michael Shane Hale, the teenager with the baby face and combat boots, to settle into New York City life. On his second day in the city, walking down the street, he met Javier, a medical intern in a leather jacket the same color as his lips, which reminded Shane of coffee beans. Javier asked Shane if he was hungry. He took Shane to a gay lounge called Rounds on the Upper East Side, near the Lipstick Building. The place had mirrors on the walls, a jukebox, and a grand piano. In an add-on room, a pinball machine flashed and rang.

That night, Javier took Shane back to his one-bedroom, and they had fun. The next day, Javier asked Shane to stay with him. They found Shane’s car in the Village parking lot, drove it up to the Upper East Side, parked it by Javier’s apartment, and unpacked Shane’s belongings. He soon got a job at Kentucky Fried Chicken; the real colonel had lived only a few towns away from where Shane grew up in Kentucky.

Shane wanted to experience the places he’d heard about. He ventured alone to Fire Island. It disappointed him. Shane had fantasized about a more welcoming embrace from his people, and he never quite got that. He visited the Pines and saw net bags of condoms and lubrication hanging from tree branches. He walked the beach, lost his bathing suit in the crashing shores of the Atlantic. When he lay out, an older couple took him back to their place and they both had sex with him.

One time he was part of the audience in an MTV studio on the west side. At the end of the taping, there was an audition for another show on the network, called The Grind. Shane was selected. In high-waisted jeans and a T-shirt that read “Jackie ’60,” he moved his hips in time with the music. When the show aired, Javier, and even his friends Barbara and Dale back in Kentucky, saw him on TV. Shane partied and danced at a nightclub with RuPaul. A photographer took some professional shots, and he put together a modeling portfolio. Opportunities seemed everywhere, but when you’re starting with nothing but the kindness of strangers, the edge is always closer than you think.

Soon after, Shane had to undergo an emergency surgery for appendicitis, and when he got out of the hospital and returned to the apartment, Javier told him he was moving out. Shane had lost his KFC job and couldn’t take over the rent. He stayed in the bare apartment for a few days, then left. He was now broke and homeless.

Around this time, a porn star recognized Shane’s good looks and talents, and told him he could make a lot of money. He explained how the worlds of gay porn and escorting were intertwined. More than money, the Southern boy was seeking love and validation, something he could never get at home. He started working the Manhattan bars known to be hustling spots. At Brandy’s Piano Bar, Shane met a thirtysomething man with cherubic cheeks, named Lee, who sported custom-made baseball caps that a designer friend made for him. Lee took Shane to his apartment, two blocks from Javier’s empty one, and fucked Shane while covering his face with a piece of plastic, introducing Shane to a new kink and pleasure he had never experienced.

But Shane began to feel like he was spiraling. He had so many layers of shame. Shame for his sexuality. For getting molested. For being hated by his father. For doing sex work. Shame for so many other things he was ashamed to even think about.

This was the ’90s, and anti-gay violence was also on the rise. Between 1991 and 1993, four gay and bisexual men were found hacked up and discarded in New Jersey and upstate New York. They were all middle-aged men between the ages of forty-four and fifty-seven. Most had last been seen in Manhattan gay bars. Some men were found dead along the side of the road. That July, Thomas R. Mulcahy, age fifty-seven, who was last seen hanging out in a gay bar in the same area that Shane was frequenting on the Upper East Side, was discovered dismembered in different garbage bags off a New Jersey parkway.

In 1992, Shane received a call from a sixty-year-old man named Stefan Tanner. Shane had been recommended. When he arrived at a building in Sheepshead Bay, only a few blocks away from where I grew up in a nearby housing project, Stefan opened the door to his sixth-floor apartment wearing a robe. He was a handsome older man: olive skin; dark, hooded eyes; long lashes; sharp features; and a full head of salt-and-pepper hair. Shane was relieved. Stefan escorted him to the bedroom, which had two single beds and lamp desks, the perfect arrangement for two men to live together without suspicion they were lovers. Stefan dropped his robe, and Shane made love to his body, sucking his toes. “Ah, yes, you little fucker!” Stefan moaned.

After sex, Stefan asked Shane about his plans for the future. He told Shane that he was special and beautiful and had so much potential. When Shane left, high on Stefan’s praise, he didn’t bother taking payment. A few nights later, Stefan took Shane to a fancy restaurant, the kind with several forks. When Shane ordered chocolate cake and milk for dessert, Stefan said, smiling, “You are something special.” The two looked more like grandfather and grandson than a couple. “I want to help you reach your goals,” Stefan said.

Soon after, Shane moved into a brownstone owned by a friend of Stefan’s in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Stefan paid the rent, but there were stipulations. Shane had to quit The Grind on MTV, and stop his modeling and sex work, except when Stefan asked him to sleep with one of his friends. Stefan’s friend, a teacher, made Shane dress up as one of his high school students. The teacher paid in cash, and Shane gave it to Stefan. Another time a different friend of Stefan’s took Shane to the Vault, an S&M club on the west side of Manhattan, and took him home and walked him around with a dog collar and a leash. After Stefan heard about that, he stopped pimping Shane out to his friends.

Stefan owned S&T Famous Bags, a store on Kings Highway, in Brooklyn, which sold clothes, designer handbags, and other accessories. He wore custom-tailored suits and drove a Lincoln Town Car. Stefan had once been married to a woman but had no kids. He hid his homosexuality. This was when the AIDS epidemic was raging into its second decade in the US, with death rates about to reach an all-time high. It’s impossible to overstate the degree to which gay men, sex workers, and drug users were demonized.

When we moved to my stepfather George’s apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, his daughter, Teresa, had AIDS. She didn’t live with us. She was addicted to crack and running the streets doing sex work on Ninth Avenue. George was ashamed of her. Teresa had a crooked mouth and a tough life. When she was dying, I sometimes visited her at St. Clare’s Hospital with my mom. It was 1989 or 1990, I was twelve or thirteen at the time. We’d walk into her room, and she was emaciated but loud. “Hi, Ma!” she yelled when we entered. I remember giving her M&M’s—how, when our hands touched, I pulled away. “It’s OK, Johnny,” she told me. “You can’t get it like that.”

Stefan told his friend who owned the Park Slope brownstone that he was a friend of Shane’s father, who owned a coal mine in Kentucky, and was just helping Shane adjust to life in New York City. Eventually, Stefan got Shane a credit card. At the time, Shane was working an office job at a travel agency. Stefan would pick him up from work and have him sign over his checks. He sent Shane to a speech therapist to help him sound more refined. Stefan would run his finger along Shane’s face and nose, and say, “Maybe we can take a little off.” Stefan set up an appointment for Shane to see a dental specialist who did a mold and later sent over a model of what Shane’s teeth would look like with veneers. Stefan never took Shane back to get them, but he promised he would.

One day, Stefan made Shane throw away all his old clothes and took him to Emporio Armani to buy him a new wardrobe. The salesclerk complimented Shane. When they got back to the brownstone where Shane was staying, they had an argument, and when Shane tried to leave, Stefan took all the clothes he’d just bought Shane and hid them in the attic. Soon after, Shane took a razor and ripped into his wrists. He was tired of being unable to please Stefan. Blood squirted and splashed the cream-colored curtains. Stefan tried to take Shane to the hospital, but Shane wrapped his wrist in a towel and ran into the bedroom. Stefan pleaded and apologized.

As we sat together at a metal table on C Gallery, surrounded by yellow walls and over the sound of the PA system, Shane told me about the first time Stefan sexually assaulted him. It was domination and bondage that went too far. Stefan had him get on his hands and knees, tied them up, and put a pillowcase over his head. Then shoved what felt like a handle to a broom inside him. “I felt feces roll off my body and roll to the floor,” Shane told me. “I was so scared I think I started crying. Then he untied me and I went into the bathroom.”

After Shane took a shower, he couldn’t look in the mirror. When he came out of the bathroom, Stefan acted like nothing had happened. Then, a few days later, Stefan got mad at Shane again. Shane was working on a project for him, maybe organizing articles about health care—he can’t remember exactly what, but it was a small thing—and Stefan criticized the way Shane was doing it, and that sent Shane into a dark and empty place. On the one hand, Stefan was the only person who had made Shane feel he was worthy of love; on the other, he felt he could never please him. Stefan and Shane were often alone. Dale, Shane’s friend from Kentucky, told me that Shane would often call and tell him that Stefan was controlling and their relationship was toxic.

Soon after, Shane attempted suicide, cutting his wrists again. Stefan wrapped them to stop the bleeding. Shane didn’t go to the hospital.

He regrets how the younger version of himself gave away his power so willingly, but maybe this was what Stefan was attracted to: submission. It must be nice to have someone take everything you dish out and never retaliate. Shane felt like a human sex doll, and he was getting tired of it.

Shane told me that Stefan claimed to have had connections with the Russian mob, and he’d sometimes do the accounting books for their operations. He told Shane that he got his last lover’s legs broken for disrespecting him, that he kept bars of gold in his apartment. One time Stefan directed Shane to a stash under the floorboards of the closet, where he retrieved stacks of cash and delivered them to a hotel in Manhattan where Stefan was waiting. Stefan also claimed that an ex-lover of his was a drug lord in South America. He began telling Shane that he would soon be responsible for Stefan’s accessory store, making all the financial decisions, because Stefan had to go to South America. He mentioned a series of deposits Shane would have to make, each no more than $10,000 so as to remain undetected by the feds. Shane had so many questions. What would happen if he did something wrong? Why did Stefan have to go to South America? He never got any answers. He doesn’t know if Stefan ever went on the trip.

“I do not know what was true about Stefan,” Shane told me. “I only know that he controlled everything about my life.”

The question always is, well, why did he stay? He didn’t. By late 1993, a little more than a year since he and Stefan had got together, Shane decided to return home to Kentucky. He packed up all the clothes and belongings that Stefan had bought him and hid in the attic. He had to wait for Stefan’s friend, who also lived in the brownstone, to leave. He worried Stefan would have people track him down.

Back home in Kentucky, Shane got a job doing data entry, and it was there that he met Carol. Shane was one of the few men in the office, outnumbered by women. Carol was a beautiful brown-eyed girl with curly brown hair. Her father was a preacher, and she and Shane began going to church together. One day, Carol heard the Lord tell her that they were meant to be married. She told Shane, and he hoped God would help him change.

“Jesus, Christianity, became a refuge in my mind,” Shane said. “I was desperate and wanted to be straight.”

When Shane attended services at another coworker’s church, he agreed to a gay exorcism. They laid hands on his head and pleaded the blood of Jesus. At one point, a woman placed a hand on his stomach and said she could feel the demon inside him. Then there was a miracle: She said it was gone and exclaimed, “Hallelujah!” Another time in Kentucky, Shane and Carol went to visit a coworker whose husband was a minister at a local Church of God. Shane told him he’d practiced homosexual behavior. After a few visits, they burned Shane’s club clothes outside the couple’s trailer, and a rise and quiver in the flames signaled to the minister that the clothes were, in fact, demonic.

One night, Shane and Carol were making out, and it was leading toward sex. Carol was a virgin. All Shane could think about was how special this should be for Carol. His grandparents taught him that marriage was forever, and he knew that if he took Carol’s virginity, he would have to marry her. It hit him all at once, the heavy, shameful feeling of it, and he broke things off.

Last Shane heard, Carol had developed multiple sclerosis. A part of him, for years, felt guilty that he couldn’t become straight for her.

In the meantime, Stefan had hired a private investigator, a retired NYPD cop, to track Shane down. The PI was making calls to his mom and grandparents, accusing him of stealing artwork. When the PI got in touch with Shane, he told him Stefan wanted his Armani clothes back. He also wanted Shane back. Shane ignored it all.

He got a job at a department store in Lexington and met Michael Holland, a gorgeous young man who worked the jewelry counter. Michael had olive skin and green eyes and reminded Shane of a young Elvis. They soon became a couple. Michael told Shane he wanted to transition, so they shopped for wigs, and Shane would buy him Victoria’s Secret lingerie. But Lexington wasn’t too progressive back then. One time, in the parking lot of a convenience store, some guys harassed Shane and Michael. They were homos. They were freaks. They were targets.

Around this time, Stefan worked his way back into Shane’s life. During one five-month period, in 1995, he called Shane more than sixty times. Sometimes Shane took his calls. In one call, Stefan asked: “Shane, do you really see yourself working as a phone operator for the rest of your life?”

Stefan would also call Dale, Shane’s friend from high school, and tell him elaborate tough-guy tales about his dealings with the Russian mob. Stefan explained how he once watched a man get killed in a basement for agreeing to testify against him for his work with the mob. Dale didn’t know what to make of these calls, which went on for months.

Eventually, Michael cheated on Shane. The more things soured with Michael, the more Shane was drawn to Stefan, who began flying him into New York for weekend visits.

By September 1995, Stefan’s mother had died. He called Shane and pleaded for him to return to New York and be with him. Shane felt needed. He dropped everything and flew to stay with Stefan in his Brooklyn apartment. Then Stefan started making plans to move to Scottsdale, Arizona, and open a spa. He told Shane that he was going to buy him a red sports car and promised to get his teeth done. “They are going to miss me,” Stefan once ruminated about his Russian mafia pals, “but I should still be able to help them when we get set up out there.”

Maybe Stefan was connected to some seedy guys, or maybe he was just a bullshit artist. I’ve known plenty of those. When I was a kid, I remember my stepfather, George, telling my mom stories about the Westies, how he and a friend once had words with one of them in a bar. The gangster, George said, let it go because he knew George and his friend were skilled hunters and didn’t want to be in their crosshairs. This sounded like pillow talk to me, mentioning dangerous guys you know to give yourself a bit of edge—it’s sexy. Maybe that’s what Stefan was doing, and George, too. I mean, I loved George—he was a man’s man, a hunter and fisherman and longshoreman—but he was a bullshitter. And I guess I was one, too. My whole image when I was selling drugs—the cars I drove, the jewelry I wore—was a costume. Between Stefan’s tales of the Russian mob, the bundle of cash that Shane once delivered to Stefan, and the comment Stefan had made about keeping bars of gold stashed in the apartment—was the man who offered him love and security a fraud?

Shane purchased a metal detector. If he found the gold, he’d find the truth. But when he searched the apartment, even under the floorboard of the closet where Stefan had told him to retrieve the bundles of cash, there was no gold. That night, Shane couldn’t sleep.

On October 14, the next day, he confronted Stefan—was he lying to him about all these stories? Was he a bullshit artist? Stefan became angry. Shane told him that he was going back to Kentucky and started collecting his clothes, more items Stefan had recently bought. Stefan stopped him and said he’d send him his clothes. Then Stefan called 911 and told the dispatcher he was being attacked by someone with a knife. When he hung up, Shane grabbed the receiver and called 911. Stefan snatched the receiver and swung it at Shane’s head. Shane grabbed a suitcase and started packing his belongings.

Moments later, cops were at the sixth-floor apartment. When Stefan opened the door, two officers entered. They saw it as a domestic dispute: an old guy and a young guy, no knife, no assault, no robbery. The cops stayed in the apartment for twenty-eight minutes. Shane gathered his clothes into the suitcase. Stefan told him not to pack certain things. They argued. The cops rolled their eyes. The awkward silence was interrupted by walkie-talkies that bleeped and crackled. When Shane asked Stefan how he was supposed to get home, Stefan gave him five crisp hundred-dollar bills. Shane left down the stairwell, leaving his suitcase on the landing. He needed to clear his head. The cops took the elevator.

As they left, one cop radioed in, “Still out, clothes job.” A “clothes job” is when police officers are called to oversee partners or roommates splitting up their belongings. The cops did not file a domestic incident report, which was required if the officer believed domestic violence between the couple had prompted the call. Earlier that year, the NYPD had mandated that disputes between same-sex couples qualify as domestic incidents. But the cops probably didn’t want to lock anyone up. They couldn’t have foreseen what would happen next. Neither could Shane.

Shane walked up and down Ocean Avenue after leaving Stefan’s apartment. Here he was again, being discarded. He was in my neighborhood; the Sheepshead Bay housing project where I grew up was only a few minutes’ walk from Stefan’s place. The rest of the neighborhood consisted of low-rise co-op apartment buildings on the avenues; on side streets, private semi-attached brick homes sat with small patches of grass and stoops. Halloween decorations, pumpkins and scarecrows, appeared in bay windows and on lawns. I know the corner on Ocean Avenue where Shane stood after he left Stefan’s apartment building, the one with the pay phone. The subway station was just a few blocks away. It would have been rough lugging his suitcase up the stairs to the platform, on the D train, feeling angry and rejected as the conductor yelled over the PA, “Stand clear of the closing doors…” Pulling his belongings through the Port Authority’s bustling bus terminal on 42nd Street would have been torture, too. But he could have done it, and now he wishes he had bought that ticket to Lexington, Kentucky, got on the bus, and never looked back.

If Shane had simply left, he would never have become a murderer. I believe that. I think about Shane’s crime compared to mine. The murder I committed was all criminal—the mindset, the guns, the drugs. The street cred that came after. Every time I was betrayed in the drug game, it inched me closer to murder.

Instead, Shane walked around the neighborhood, pacing and thinking. He called Stefan from the pay phone on the avenue. Stefan, who already had a locksmith over installing new locks, blew Shane off and hung up. Shane wanted all his clothes, not just the few that Stefan had let him take. He wanted it to be over this time. He was tired of being toyed with, tired of being this guy’s fuck doll. The Shane who sits across from me all these years later, the one who tilts his head and smiles when he listens to you, the one with the wisdom of hindsight, hates thinking about their relationship, how much he relied on Stefan, how toxic it was, the shame and self-pity it kicks up. Most of all, he hates thinking about what he did next.

After Stefan hung up on him, Shane walked by the apartment building. He saw the basement garage door open as a Volvo rolled out. As the door rolled shut, Shane slid in. He waited in the dark garage, breathing air that smelled like fumes. With his back against the wall, he slid down and sat on the concrete floor, elbows on his knees, head in his palms. Stefan appeared almost immediately, walking to his car. Shane called out to him. He wanted the rest of his stuff, he pleaded. Stefan grabbed him and shoved him. “Get out of my way, you little fuck,” Stefan said. “I’m going to have you taken care of…”

When Stefan went to push him again, Shane put his leg behind Stefan and pushed him backward, a Taekwondo move he had learned as a kid. Stefan fell, and there was a loud sound as his head hit the concrete floor. Shane got on top of him and smashed his head on the floor, again and again, knocking Stefan unconscious. There was blood. Stefan was dead. Or maybe he wasn’t. Was he still breathing? Shane took his car keys and wallet, opened the trunk of Stefan’s Lincoln, lifted Stefan under the arms and dragged him to the lip of the trunk, then stuffed him in.

He drove around Sheepshead Bay with Stefan in the trunk. He drove past his gym, the salon that once made his curly hair straight. He drove past the water and the fishing boats in the bay.

“Michael! Michael! Michael!” Shane thought he heard Stefan screaming from the trunk. (Stefan called Shane by his first name.) He turned on the radio to drown out the pleas. He thought about pulling up to Coney Island Hospital, a few blocks away. But how would that look, pulling a bloody man out of the trunk? He couldn’t get Stefan help or let him go. He would retaliate. Or he’d call the cops and Shane would go to jail. When the yells stopped, Shane pulled over by a deserted area overrun with weeds. He was scared to open the trunk, but he did, slowly. He expected Stefan to jump out, start berating him. Another part of him hoped that Stefan would open his eyes and reach his hand out gently. Shane would take it, pull him out of the trunk, and Stefan would tell him that it was all going to be okay. That they loved each other and they would work it out. They’d go back to the apartment, Stefan would sit on the turned-down toilet, and Shane would dab his wounds with peroxide-doused cotton balls. But when he saw Stefan in the trunk, he wasn’t moving. His bloody face was haunting and still. Then Shane thought he saw Stefan’s hand move. He laid a plastic bag over Stefan’s face. He couldn’t look at it. I, too, covered the face of the man I killed with a blanket in the trunk. I didn’t want to see what I’d done.

Shane called his ex-lover in Kentucky, Michael Holland, the one who looked like Elvis, and told him what happened. Michael told Shane to drive to him. He’d help.

Shane hung up, drove back to Stefan’s apartment, parked on the street, went upstairs, put the bloody clothes he was wearing in a plastic bag, and took a shower. He grabbed the rest of his belongings, including the suitcase in the stairway, then jumped in the car and drove. He got lost for a bit. Stefan had always driven him everywhere. He had once yearned to be in this city, and now all he wanted was to leave it. It broke his heart, and now he was a murderer. As he exited the shadow of the city, his suitcase and bags of clothes in the backseat and Stefan in the trunk, he drove down the road as rain poured and poured.

Shane headed west to Kentucky. He drove for hours. Sometimes he wondered if Stefan was still alive. When he reached West Virginia, he thought about burying him. He pulled off the highway, stopped at a Lowe’s, and bought a shovel. He drove down a dirt road. It was all browns and greens and flat farmland and smells of manure. Shane thought about his grandparents. What if someone had come on their land and buried a body that they had to discover? That would be awful. He made his way back to the highway, but not before hitting a mud hole. As if the car had enough of the drama, the Lincoln overheated, and a red light appeared on the dashboard. Smoke wafted from under the hood, a signal to the world that Shane had killed its owner. He pulled to the side of the highway. A friendly man stopped and told Shane to put some fluid into the radiator. It worked. But he needed a better fix.

He got to the next exit and pulled into a mechanic’s shop. He feared Stefan would yell from the trunk. He didn’t know if the yells that he kept hearing—“Michael! Michael! Michael!”—were in his head. He figured they were. He’d been up for hours, and he was delirious. The mechanic sized up Shane and the car. He lifted the hood. The permanent fix would take parts and time and money. The mechanic offered to pour fluid in the radiator that would temporarily fix the problem. Shane agreed and stood by the trunk to make sure the mechanic didn’t look inside. Then he was on his way.

Back on the road, Shane felt like a drone. Everything just was—the sun, the sky, the trees. When he arrived on the outskirts of Lexington, he called Michael, who met Shane in a McDonald’s parking lot. Michael saw him and hugged him. He held Shane’s face and kept telling him how different he looked. Shane felt different.

Shane’s story takes me back to the insanity of my own crime.

In December 2001, one of the dealers who sold for me claimed that a friend of mine, E., was shaking him down, calling him up and demanding his drugs. My dealer feared for his life, and E. said he would kill him if he told me. E. was someone I had grown up with. He had just lost his father, and his dope habit was growing out of control. I heard he was robbing other drug dealers. I told myself that killing him was the only solution. (This is the absurdity of the drug game: We betray and kill our friends.) I rented a green Nissan Altima and placed an AR-15 in the trunk. I didn’t need such a big gun. Days before, I’d shot up an empty parked car owned by some other guys who tried to rob me. It was a chaotic time. When I heard the sirens, I tossed the handgun down a storm drain. When I asked my gun dealer for a new piece, he told me he only had the assault rifle. He put on gloves, loaded the clip, pulled back a handle, chambered a round, switched off the safety, then laid it in the trunk and said, “All you have to do is pull the trigger.”

When I picked E. up, I told him I had to meet someone and drove to a deserted area. But he seemed suspicious, so I scrapped that plan and drove over to Williamsburg, the other side of Brooklyn. We were going to pick up Kristy, a Puerto Rican girl with a neck tattoo, who bagged up drugs for me. E. knew her, too. I didn’t want to involve her, but I knew her being in the car with us would put him at ease. While I drove, I went back and forth about whether or not I would do it. I wasn’t determined or enraged; I was more concerned about what would happen when E. found out that I knew he was extorting my dealer. I would become a liability. When we picked up Kristy, she jumped in the backseat with a friend, another girl who would also sometimes bag up drugs for me. At a gas station, E. went inside to buy a phone card, and I turned around and told Kristy my plans. She agreed to come along, but her friend asked me to drop her off when E. came back. I did; then the three of us drove to another deserted area, Stagg Street in Williamsburg. He was talking on the phone, distracted. I made the decision. I stopped the car, pulled the trunk lever, got out, grabbed the rifle, and shot him several times through the driver’s side window as he sat in the passenger seat. I took his body and put it in the trunk, then jumped back in the car and sped away. At a red light, Kristy, frantic, jumped out of the backseat and ran home.

I managed to make it to my mother’s house and parked the shot-up rental in her driveway at one in the morning. I saw Dennis, my mother’s gay best friend, still up and watching TV in the living room. I asked him where the keys to the Mercedes truck were. The car was mine, but my mother registered and insured it, and since I’d been chased by the cops in it weeks before, she told me I couldn’t drive it anymore. When my mother woke up the next morning with a rental full of blood and bullet holes in its place, she knew I was behind it. She called me on my cell phone and told me to bring back the truck and get the rental out of her driveway. When I arrived, I told her I was glad she didn’t call the cops, that I’d just killed a man and his body was in the trunk. She turned serious, tightened her jaw, and told me to go. “Sick bastard,” she said. I think the comment was more of an affirmation than an insult. It was as if my mom was saying, “This is what you wanted to be, but I never wanted this for you.” In that moment, any life that she had hoped or imagined for me, any idea that I would outgrow this lifestyle, was over.

It feels much more treacherous and painful to write about my crime today than it felt to commit it more than twenty years ago. It’s why I have to write about it this way, in a declarative voice, without reflection, because it happened like that, swiftly and cowardly and instantly. To add moments of insight during the action would be an inauthentic rendering of what happened. Deep reflection can only arrive, if it ever does, when you feel removed enough from all the madness, from the version of yourself that you once were. And sometimes that takes years, because after the crime comes the arrest, the jail time, the trials, and prison—watching television in the cellblock or getting high with the guys in the yard, telling one another how the system fucked each of us respectively. In the minutes and hours after I killed, I was not thinking about my culpability or remorse. That’s not where my head was at.

When I dropped off the rental at my mom’s and took the Mercedes, I drove it to a hotel to snort cocaine and have sex. When my mom called me the next morning, berating me over the phone, it was go time again. I left her the Mercedes and took the rental, with E.’s body in the trunk, through Sheepshead Bay’s residential streets, the same ones Shane drove with Stefan in the back of the Lincoln, and made my way to a friend’s body shop. A few Mexican men were just opening the gates when I arrived, and recognized that I was a friend of their boss. They saw the car, the bullet holes in the door. They knew I was dangerous, and that emboldened me. “Fix the door,” I told them, glaring. “And don’t open the trunk.”

Shane hadn’t slept in three days. He and Michael sat in the front seat of Michael’s car and analyzed the situation. Shane would dismember him. That was the plan. And they might as well get it over with. They went to Walmart, to the hardware section, bought a handsaw, garbage bags, and yellow dishwashing gloves. Still in drone mode, Shane didn’t pay attention to whether the cashier reacted to the suspicious items. Shane followed Michael in the Lincoln to the parking lot of their friend Wayne’s apartment complex. It was in the middle of Lexington. Not exactly discreet. Michael sat in a car parked nearby as Shane cut up Stefan’s body. He tried to knock out the trunk light, but it kept blinking on and off. It was dizzying, Shane sawing Stefan’s limbs, the light blinking and blinking. He cut him into pieces and put him into four bags. He tried to tell himself that it was just a piece of something that was dead, the soul gone, hoping Stefan’s spirit wouldn’t haunt him afterward. But it did. Still does.

When he was done, as he sat with Michael in their car, several undercover cops surrounded them, flashlights piercing through the car. They ordered them out of the car and searched them. They had gotten a call from a resident in the building about someone trying to break into a car. The dish gloves were turned inside out on the seat.

“What’s the deal with the gloves?” the cop asked, circling the gloves with the light, like a halo.

“Fetish?” Shane shrugged, smiling.

Their friend Wayne lived there, Shane explained, and they were waiting for him to get home. They showed the cops their IDs. Realizing they were gay, the cops moved on. But before they left, one of them flashed the light inside the Lincoln. “Look at this,” the cop yelled. “They’re begging for this car to get broken into.”

Shane had left cash in the console.

It wasn’t a well-thought-out plan. It never is. You think rural Kentucky, you think secluded. When you’re a detached voyeur, say, a true crime aficionado, you think about how you’d do things differently. But when you’re getting rid of a body, you’re not in a normal mental state. You make mistakes.

After I picked up the repaired rental car, with E.’s body still in the trunk, a guy who used to bag up my drugs, a heroin addict with construction-worker hands, helped me get rid of the body. I had thought about burying it, but the ground was frozen in mid-December. We put the body in a laundry bag and affixed a cinder block to it. Then we dropped it off the pier into the bay. I returned the rental as if it weren’t a crime scene. I tried covering my tracks, too. Days after I dumped his body, I called E.’s mother to ask if he was home. Aside from killing him, it was the cruelest thing I’d ever done. After that, I was free for maybe a month or so. I started using heroin regularly. I needed it to function and to avoid thinking about it. The bag with his body washed ashore months later. I would learn about it in the dayroom on Rikers Island, locked up for unrelated drug charges and another case for which I had a warrant. I had no bail. Someone passed me the Daily News and said, “Yo, a body washed up in your hood.” The article described how a “hogtied corpse stuffed into a laundry bag washed ashore on a Brooklyn beach.” I sat in shock, imagining the tide pulling the bag to the surface. I felt the weight of my crime, and the secret I had to keep, tugging at my chest. Soon, I knew, it would all be revealed.

In those years, I was still wrapped up in my desire to be a gangster. When I went to prison for what I’d done, a mobster told me that weighing down E.’s body wasn’t enough, that I should have punctured his lungs to let the air out. When I watched Inside Evil, it was the first time I saw the photograph of the washed-up laundry bag on the beach; it was the first time I saw the results of my actions. It was chilling. At trial, they show the photos to the jury, not you. I suppose my lawyer would have shown them to me if I had requested. I did not. They try to keep the traumatic evidence away from the family in the audience, too.

Shane and Michael left the Lincoln in the parking lot, drove to a nearby hotel, and rented a room. Exhausted and delirious, Shane still couldn’t sleep. He and Michael fell into each other’s flesh. “It was intense,” Shane told me at the metal picnic table in C Gallery. “And I know it seemed crazy to have sex. But I think I just needed to feel another human being.”

The next day, Shane drove the Lincoln to a storage unit, pulled the bags with body parts from the trunk, and put them in Michael’s car. When the sun set, they drove around and dropped the four garbage bags in the dumpsters of random apartment complexes with pleasant names. The police never found Stefan’s body.

Over the next week or so, Shane felt some normalcy. He rented an apartment in Lexington, moved in, started sleeping again, and finally stopped hearing Stefan’s voice in his head. Soon after, when Shane and Michael were walking in the mall, Halloween decorations were draped everywhere. When Shane saw a fake bloody limb, he felt sick, and they left.

Shane wondered if he could live with what he did. Nationally, only 61 percent of murders are solved. Plenty of people who have killed are living among you in free society, without ever receiving any punishment. But Shane would never have rid himself of the guilt. Getting away with murder emboldens the typical criminal. If I had been acquitted, as I almost was, I would’ve had more credibility on the streets and I would’ve been back in the drug game as soon as I could; I might’ve even killed again or been murdered myself. When you beat a murder charge, your future enemies will likely look to take you out because you’re too dangerous for them to simply wound. Fear forces violence, which creates more fear.

Back in Brooklyn, homicide detectives started their investigation. Stefan’s niece Michelle, who worked at his store, called the police when he didn’t show up to work. The police soon made the connection that the missing person was the same one involved in the domestic dispute they’d responded to days before. Later that month, detectives searched for foul play in Stefan’s apartment and the garage. They found what appeared to be blood on the ground near Stefan’s empty parking space. The NYPD began looking for Shane, calling his friends in Kentucky, and alerting local detectives in Lexington. On October 24, Michael and Shane heard from Wayne, the friend whose apartment parking lot they had used to dismember Stefan. Lexington detectives, perhaps recalling their suspicious encounter with Shane weeks before, had found Wayne and told him to contact his friends. When Shane showed up at Wayne’s, the detectives asked him to come down to the station to answer a few questions.

It was a casual conversation. It always is in the beginning. The Lexington detectives told Shane that they had received a call from Brooklyn detectives who said that Stefan had not been seen since the police were called to the apartment back on October 14. Shane explained that he’d taken a Greyhound back to Kentucky, after Stefan had put him out. Any idea where Stefan was? Shane lied: Maybe South America? Shane told the detective about Stefan and his shady friends and secret bank accounts and gold and the Russian mob and an ex-boyfriend named Richard who might be dead. Shane was babbling, and the detectives weren’t getting anywhere. They finished the interview and dropped Shane off back at the apartment he had recently rented on South Locust Hill Drive.

Two days later, on October 26, Brooklyn detectives John Schwartz and Edward Delahunt showed up at Shane’s apartment in Lexington and asked him to come to the precinct. He sat in the backseat of their rental car, uncuffed. He gave the same statement he’d given days before. Schwartz, clean-shaven with slicked-back silver hair, pressed Shane about a few inconsistencies in how he’d gotten to the Port Authority to catch the bus to Lexington. Then they drove Shane back to his apartment.

Shane’s last day of freedom was October 28, 1995. That morning, Detectives Schwartz and Delahunt knocked on Shane’s apartment door again. No answer. They staked out the apartment and soon saw Michael Holland leaving. They approached him and asked if he’d let them into the apartment. Michael agreed. Shane was in the shower, and Michael yelled that the detectives were there. They asked Shane to come to the precinct, and he agreed. Michael went, too, following in his own car. They were questioned separately. First Shane, then Michael. It’s an eerie feeling when you lie to detectives, and they know you’re lying, and you know they know. On top of that, it feels awful killing somebody you love. It didn’t take long for the detectives to get Michael to tell them what happened. At around 12:40 p.m., about an hour and a half after they arrived, Schwartz and Delahunt walked into the interrogation room and said, “Michael told us everything.”

Shane cried. He was almost relieved. He believed that these detectives would understand he wasn’t some hardcore criminal; he waived his rights and told them everything. They started the tape.

Det. Schwartz: You put—a plastic bag over Mr. Tanner’s head?

Hale: To cover up the blood and everything.

Det. Schwartz: Okay, did you tie it at all or did you just place it around over his head?

Hale: No, I just put it, I couldn’t—I just put it over, like, the body was like—the body was like laying like this, his head was right here and there were some shopping bags over here in the corner, and I just put them over his head. […]

Det. Schwartz: Do you remember where the dumpsters are?

Hale: I wrote them down, they’re like in four different places.

Det. Schwartz: Can you tell me where?

Hale: Cedar Run, Stony Brook, Brandy Wine, Forest Oaks.

Det. Schwartz: Those are the names of the apartment complexes?

Hale: I’m really sorry, I mean it’s just that I felt like it was like the only thing that I [could] do, I mean it was the only option, it wasn’t like I had any other options and I was scared to death—that he’d haunt me, that his ghost or whatever, it’s just like—it’s really hard because after it happened I was able to forget about it, I was able to say, okay, it didn’t happen, it was just something that—a bad dream, it was a nightmare and you guys came and you talked to me and it was very easy just to make up something. So I wouldn’t have to think about it so I wouldn’t have to deal with it. I mean little by little the story started coming out and finally I mean the whole thing came out and I mean it’s awful because I mean I just wanna die, I don’t wanna—I mean I realized what I did and it’s just […] I’m really, really sorry. I mean—I didn’t think this could possibly happen, I mean it wasn’t my—I just didn’t think I could, that this would ever happen, I didn’t—I don’t know, I mean don’t know how I’m going to go on, I mean, I don’t know, whatever. I mean that’s it, I’m sorry, I’m really, really sorry I didn’t mean to cause you guys all this aggravation or anything.

5
Kids Killing Priests in Buffalo
[MILTON]

“I know some people we can rob,” Teddy said. “But you gonna have to kill ’em.”

“All right,” Milton said.

It’s tragic that such a violent plan was hatched so simply.

It was a freezing Tuesday night in Buffalo, February 24, 1987, when Teddy came over to Milton’s grandmother’s and asked if he was ready. Milton said he was. Teddy said the priest knew him personally, so he’d let them inside. Once they were in, they’d tie the priest up, Teddy would grab the money in the room, and then they’d kill him. Milton nodded. As they were walking over to the rectory, Milton wondered if there was more to it, if the priest had done anything to upset Teddy, but he didn’t ask. They walked to St. Bartholomew’s Parish on Buffalo’s East Side, across the street from the county hospital—the same one where Milton had held his newborn boy a few years before.

Father Bissonette had been named administrator of St. Bartholomew’s in February 1980. At this point, the parish was mostly Black folks with some older whites who hadn’t yet moved out of the neighborhood. Father Bissonette was a rebel who liked being in the trenches. In 1982, he refused to pay his federal taxes to protest President Reagan’s anti-communist politics that led to bloodshed in Central America. He called out the power structure of the Catholic Church. One of his colleagues, similar to how the Boys Club director described Milton, called him a “gentle giant” but at the same time “the most confrontational priest in the diocese.”

Father Bissonette was part of the Buffalo sanctuary movement, which helped find homes for refugees from Central America. He and other priests and nuns housed people from El Salvador and Guatemala who were stranded in Buffalo, waiting to be interviewed and accepted for sanctuary in Canada. It was Underground Railroad–type work, God’s work. Father Bissonette had just finished two meetings and was about to leave for a party at a nearby parish when he heard a knock. Turning on the porch light, he saw Teddy, a young boy he’d helped before with food and money. He opened the door. Teddy was with another boy, whom Father Bissonette had never seen.

He told them to have a seat. There was a bag of groceries on the table that Father Bissonette had bought for his mother. He opened the brown cabinets, grabbed two plates and some sliced bread, then went to the fridge for bologna. There was another room off to the side of the kitchen, a pantry, with a green chalkboard on wheels. The board was blank. So were Milton’s and Teddy’s faces.

There’s a moment before it happens, when everything seems normal and safe, and that’s the most important moment, the one we all wish we can return to. That time when we contemplate and ultimately convince ourselves that it has to be done—this is what makes some of us more culpable than others. It’s called criminal intent.

The boys left their bologna sandwiches untouched, and Teddy pulled out a screwdriver. Father Bissonette followed Teddy’s demands, walked into the room, bent over and opened the black cabinet, grabbed the cash from the cigar box, and threw it at Teddy’s feet. Milton held his uncle’s large hunting knife to the priest’s neck. Then he led him to the pantry and sat him in a chair.

“Are you with him?” Father Bissonette asked Milton.

He nodded.

Milton was about to cut the drapes with the knife when the priest told him to stop, that there was twine in the drawer. After Milton’s poor attempt at tying him to the chair arms, Father Bissonette lifted his hand. “Well, if you’re gonna do it, you might as well do it right.”

While Milton stood behind, Teddy leaned in front of Father Bissonette, and through his thick eyeglasses steadily stared into the priest’s eyes.

“You believe in God?” Teddy asked.

“Yes,” Father Bissonette said.

“Well, you’re gonna meet ’im,” Teddy said.

Teddy took off one of the priest’s shoes, peeled off his sock, then stuck it in his mouth and gagged him. Milton stood behind the priest.

“Father Bissonette must have seemed frightened?” I asked Milton as he recounted the story to me.

“Didn’t seem it,” Milton said. “Seemed like he was going to meet Jesus—seemed like he was accepting of that.”

Father Joseph Bissonette never screamed for help. That might have had less to do with being content to go to the afterlife than with looking out for the safety of others. At the time Father Bissonette was being tied up by Teddy and Milton, two Salvadoran refugees were living in a room on the third floor of St. Bartholomew’s, watching TV. If he screamed, Father Bissonette may have reasoned, the men on the third floor could become victims, too.

Milton told me everything in declarative sentences, blinking, nodding. I’ve heard a lot of terrible things, and of course I’ve done terrible things, but it’s hard not to wince when you hear the details of an innocent priest being murdered.

Milton hit the priest on the back of his head with a can of chow mein, then stabbed Father Bissonette several times with the hunting knife and passed the knife to Teddy, who stabbed him, too. (At trial, Teddy claimed that it was only Milton who did the stabbing.)

“So where was the other priest? I thought you guys killed two priests?”

“We did.” Milton nodded. “Monsignor Herlihy was at a different rectory. That happened another time, couple weeks later.”

“Basement rec terminated,” rang out over the PA, ending our conversation for the day.

It was Father Bissonette’s roommate, Father Robert Stolinski, who discovered his body. He called the police. Homicide detectives canvassed the entire rectory. They discovered the Salvadoran refugees, Jose Guillermo Rodas and Rafael Carballo Mancia, and took them down to the precinct for questioning. They were arrested and jailed as material witnesses in the case. Rodas and Mancia, both twenty-seven years old, had fled the civil war in El Salvador. Trying to make it to Canada, they had only been staying with Father Bissonette for three days. Sitting at the kitchen table with the priest, they taught him a bit of Spanish as they ate dinner together. Their time with him was pleasant. As they sat in jail, it hit them that their fingerprints might be on the chairs at the kitchen table, Mancia’s on the knife he had used to open a can. Both men were sad for Father Bissonette but fearful for themselves.

The detectives also found a substantial amount of male homosexual pornography in Father Stolinski’s room, but did not make their findings public. They did tell the higher-ups in the church about what they’d found and the incident was documented in a “black binder” of diocese secrets. Father Stolinski was counseled and disciplined internally.

Am I shamelessly sleuthing for a motive? I can see how people get sucked up in it. True crime enthusiasts go down these rabbit holes all the time, and they often post their suspicions online in forums and comment sections. I had to stop myself. Was it that weird for a grown man who wasn’t allowed to have a partner to consume porn? Did his secret—his sin—make him a less effective priest or human being? And what, if anything, could this have to do with Father Bissonette’s murder?

Days after the first killing, Milton was in the kitchen with his mom when a news report made her gasp. Two refugees had been arrested for killing a priest in the neighborhood church. Milton fixated on the segment. He felt nervous, but knew he couldn’t show it. He carried his secret as he walked through the bustling halls of McKinley High School. In class, he drifted off. Milton knew what he had done was wrong, much like he knew when he did the right thing. This time, he had gone too far.

Meanwhile, friends of Father Bissonette suspected it was a bit too convenient to arrest the two Salvadorans for killing the priest who put them up. Leading the charge was Sister Karen Klimczak, then forty-three years old, a woman whose reputation in Western New York as a peace and social justice activist far exceeded her petite stature. She was a Lackawanna native and taught at Buffalo’s Mount St. Joseph Academy. She dressed simply, in jeans and colorful sweaters, and was known for the signs she’d leave at the sites of Buffalo’s homicides that read “Nonviolence begins with me.” Later, she’d begin to leave “peaceprints” around town, a cut-out paper dove with the message “I Leave PEACEPRINTS” written across the bird’s body. She hosted annual Christmas parties for the children and siblings of murder victims. She believed in civil rights and progressive ideas, and incorporated them into her ministry. By all accounts, Sister Klimczak was a literal apostle of love, caring for those most neglected and underserved. But she understood the danger of her work and, in case anything ever happened to her, she had written a chilling letter forgiving her possible future killer.

In the early 1980s, the sister had spent a summer working at Bedford Hills Correctional, New York’s maximum-security prison for women, in Westchester County. The experience inspired her to start a halfway house in 1985 for recently released prisoners called the Home of Positive Experience—the HOPE House—in an unoccupied convent on Sycamore Street. Like Father Bissonette, she was also deeply involved in the sanctuary movement. She held a vigil for his murder, but at the same time rallied with another formidable nun to raise bail money for Rodas and Mancia.

With his share of the cash they robbed from Father Bissonette, barely $200, Milton bought a boom box radio and steak subs from Soul Birds, a local chicken spot. Then Milton and Teddy went over to their friend Robert Nawrocki’s house to hang out. Nawrocki, age twenty-two, who used to date Milton’s mom, Valina, listened to Teddy and Milton brag about how it was them who had killed the priest in the news and that they’d do it again. Milton mentioned how he wore gloves and Teddy was touching everything. Since the Salvadorans were in custody, Nawrocki didn’t believe the two teenagers. Seasoned criminals, knowing that others were in custody for what they did, probably wouldn’t commit the same crime with the same MO, as it would alert detectives that the real killers were still on the loose. But Milton and Teddy were kids. Milton slept over at Nawrocki’s house for a couple of days. Another friend saw Milton sharpening a hunting knife on a grinding wheel. He thought it was strange.

On March 3, 1987, another Tuesday night, Milton and Teddy, having run out of money, went out to rob and kill again. Teddy knew a priest named Leo McCarthy at St. Matthew’s, a church on the East Side, about a mile from St. Bartholomew’s Church and only three blocks from Teddy’s home on Wyoming Avenue. They knocked after eleven p.m. Unnerved by Father Bissonette’s murder almost two weeks prior, Father McCarthy had begun sleeping with a sword by his bed. The boy on the stoop looked like Ted Simmons, whom he’d seen around the church in the past and thought to be a troubled boy. He was with another “big and burly” youth. Father McCarthy, likely trusting his gut more than his obligation to God, did not open the door for the boys. They left.

A few days later, on March 7, a Saturday night, the duo returned, undeterred, to St. Matthew’s. Father McCarthy had been called away from the rectory that night, and Monsignor David P. Herlihy, age seventy-four, was drafting a sermon when he heard the knock. Father Herlihy, who was ordained in 1938, had been a high school principal, a hospital chaplain, and a priest for fifty years. An IRS audit would reveal that he gave away more than he earned. Now retired, he was stationed at St. Matthew’s, assisting Father McCarthy. He once said, “What is the sense of saying you love your neighbor if you don’t want to live near him or eat with him?”

Father Herlihy opened the door for the boy he saw on the stoop. It was freezing outside. Teddy entered the rectory, waited for Father Herlihy to turn his back, and opened the door for Milton. The boys quickly became aggressive. Teddy told Monsignor Herlihy to open the safe, but he didn’t have the combination. Teddy found it hidden behind the safe.

“Monsignor David P. Herlihy was an old man,” Milton told me at the metal picnic table in the basement one November weekend in 2019, nodding and blinking through his eyeglasses held together with Scotch tape. “We tied him up, ransacked the place, and gagged him.”

“Did you gag him with his own sock, like last time?”

“We brought duct tape.”

“Did he say anything?”

“He couldn’t say anything—he was gagged. He seemed scared. He seemed like he didn’t want to die, which doesn’t mean that he didn’t want to meet Jesus,” Milton told me. “He was just less accepting of it. He was moving around in the chair a lot. Then I hit him in the head with a jar of Mott’s apple juice. It was thick, it didn’t break.”

Milton told me that they took turns stabbing the priest, twenty times in total. Then they left. The getaway was as poorly planned as the crime. Hoping to get into Toronto, they paid a cab (up front, per the driver’s request) to take them from Buffalo to the Peace Bridge. Without the proper identification, they were turned away on the Canadian side, and when they reentered the US, immigration officials discovered Milton’s warrant for running away from that state juvenile facility on Genesee Street. They drove him back to the group home Sunday morning. Teddy hopped on a flight to San Diego, where he had family. On Sunday afternoon, Milton’s mother came to see him at the group home. He gave her $505, his cut from the crime.

Meanwhile, Father Herlihy’s body was discovered that afternoon. Bishop Edward D. Head addressed the media, saying the murdered monsignor was known for his “gentleness of spirit and by his humility.” The bishop continued, “We pray for forgiveness for those who have caused the great sorrow in our lives.”

Homicide detectives were on the job. Father McCarthy told them about the bad vibe he got from the boys who had knocked days prior. Teddy Simmons, the detectives learned, was hanging out a lot lately with Milton Jones, and by Sunday night, detectives learned that Milton had been picked up on a juvenile warrant trying to enter Canada and was now back in the group home on Genesee Street. Earlier that day, Milton thought about making another run for it, but the counselors were watching him closely this time. When Mr. Bird, the house counselor, got Milton out of bed late Sunday night and told him that the police wanted to talk to him, he added, “If you know anything, you better not take the rap alone.” They’d picked up Robert Nawrocki, too, who told them what Milton and Teddy had said to him. It didn’t take long for the seasoned homicide detectives to get a statement from seventeen-year-old Milton. By 5:30 on Monday morning, he had fully confessed and implicated Teddy. The Buffalo police notified the San Diego police, who promptly arrested Teddy at a family member’s home.

The media was all over it, too. It was the biggest story in Buffalo. By Monday evening, front-page stories appeared in the Buffalo News’ late edition: The headline read “Two Charged in Priests’ Killings; Teens Arrested in Similar Slayings in Rectories on the East Side,” and it was complemented by a photograph of stern-faced detectives and the police commissioner standing over the mayor, seated at his desk. Other stories were headlined “Family Believed Youth Had Turned His Life Around” and “Slain Monsignor Described as Exemplary Priest.” On Tuesday, a picture of a handcuffed Milton, an officer at each elbow, being led to the courtroom, was on the front page of the Buffalo News. Then came the predictable “why’d they do it?” articles. Since neither of the two had significant father figures, a clinical psychologist attributed the violence to that void. “It was the last step in killing all that is good in the world,” Dr. Paul Fazekas said. “That’s a tremendous amount of built-up rage when you’re talking about 18 stab wounds. That was built up rage over 18 years.… The more the [victims] resembled the people in the [killers’] lives who couldn’t meet their needs, the more their rage would be directed at those people.”

After Milton and Teddy were arrested, the two Salvadoran men were released on bail from the money raised by Karen Klimczak and her allies. As murder cases go, this one moved swiftly through the courts. They both made statements. Milton blamed Teddy; Teddy blamed Milton. The grand jury indicted them both on two counts of murder and robbery. There was physical evidence, too: Milton’s left thumbprint was on the can of chow mein with which he hit Father Bissonette; Teddy’s fingerprints were found on a bottle of apple juice that was used to beat Monsignor Herlihy; a roll of duct tape that matched the piece they used to tape the monsignor’s mouth was found in Milton’s grandmother’s house; and Milton’s mother turned over that cash he gave her at the boys’ home.

On March 19, 1987, they were arraigned in Judge Frederick M. Marshall’s courtroom. Teddy showed up with a paper bag over his head. There were some witness-identification issues, so Teddy’s lawyers wanted to create some anonymity for their client. They were also probably concerned about his safety in the county jail. The brown paper bag over his head had cut-out eyes, and Teddy’s thick-lensed glasses with black frames popped through. Everyone knew Teddy by his thick bifocals, and if anything, this disguise only made them more pronounced. It was ridiculous.

They offered Milton forty years to life. At seventeen, it didn’t seem like the bargain it does now that Milton is fifty. Had he taken the deal, he would have seen a parole board in 2027, at fifty-seven, maybe gotten out and worked in a church or a mosque, maybe a criminal justice reform nonprofit. The extra ten years he wound up with will probably have him die in prison. Few people can do fifty years, even when they come in as teenagers. Plus, Milton has an array of health issues. In 2003, he was diagnosed with hypertension; in 2007, he was diagnosed with obesity, and later, in 2017, it was upgraded to morbid obesity. His body, which fluctuates between 300 and 350 pounds, flattens the thin plastic prison mattresses. After more than three decades of sleeping on them, he’s developed piercing back pain. Sometimes it’s so bad he can’t walk to class. In 2019, Milton received an X-ray of his lower spine, and the attending doctor found he suffered from degenerative lower-lumbar disc disease. The average lifespan for prisoners is sixty-four years; an analysis in Michigan found that the lifespan for Black prisoners serving natural life sentences there is fifty-six years. One afternoon, in the cellblock basement during one of our long interviews, Milton told me, “I wish I would have took the deal.”

Back in the 1980s, priests in the Catholic Church weren’t yet scrutinized for sexually abusing young boys. This was before the Boston Globe’s Spotlight investigation won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for uncovering generations of pervasive sexual abuse by priests. It was before the movie with the same name, Spotlight, went on to win an Oscar. Internal investigations were launched within the Vatican, and thousands of lawsuits were filed. Eventually, the stigma caused a significant membership drop in the Catholic Church worldwide.

When I asked Milton directly if he thought Teddy was sexually abused by the priests or any other priests, he told me that Teddy had never told him that. The detectives asked him the same thing. And yet there were more than just suspicions of sexual abuse surrounding the murders of these two priests. An alarming report had come in the day after Father Bissonette was murdered. A pastor named Swami Pashupati, who at the time led a small congregation outside Buffalo called Mother Serapi’s Church of the Holy Quietness, told a retired local TV journalist that he had been counseling the recently murdered priest about inappropriate sexual relationships with young Black males. The journalist reported it to the police, who investigated Pashupati and deemed him to be a “crackpot,” according to a 2005 biography of Father Bissonette, Joe’s Story, written by the victim’s younger brother, Ray.

On Tuesday, January 19, 1988, less than a year after the crime, Milton’s jury selection began. By Wednesday, an all-white jury of eleven men and one woman, plus two alternates, also white women, was selected. Judge Frederick M. Marshall sat black-robed on the dais with a serious facial expression, under the words “In God We Trust.” The attorneys sat on either side—Jeffrey A. Sellers and John J. Carney III for Milton, and Dennis C. Vacco and Elizabeth Collins McNamara for the prosecution.

It’s in these moments at trial, before battle, observing the collegial interactions between the judge and lawyers and stenographer and court officers, acknowledging one another with pleasantries, smiles, and handshakes, that the murderer feels most like a stranger to humanity. In Albert Camus’s famous novel, The Stranger, his protagonist, an Algerian man who has killed another man, experiences this alienation. In these moments at trial, I imagine Milton felt how I had felt, too. Alone. Apart. Ashamed. And listening to the details of your deeds, hearing the family’s wails, makes you feel uglier and smaller, like a reptile. I didn’t know at that moment how I would make my comeback, and perhaps Milton felt this, too. But I knew I wanted to be a human being whom people like these professionals would one day respect.

Milton’s trial, from opening statements to closing statements to the verdict, lasted only a few days. After two hours of deliberation, the jury found Milton guilty of all charges: several counts of second-degree murder and robbery, including felony murder. The judge wanted to wait for Teddy’s trial to sentence both boys together. Teddy’s trial was in September. His defense suggested that he assisted Milton under duress, something about Milton threatening to kill his mother if he didn’t lead him to these robberies. The story rang hollow to the jury. Like for Milton, justice for Teddy was swift, and the jury found him guilty of several counts of murder and robbery. When Theresa Birner, Monsignor Herlihy’s sister, saw Teddy being led out of the courtroom in chains, she thought of her own three sons and felt compassion for the boy. “Then I get mad at myself and think, ‘Why do I feel that, after what he did to these (two) men? Is there something wrong with me?’” Then Ms. Birner thought of what her brother might have been thinking when these teenagers were killing him. “We knew when they were doing that to my brother, he was forgiving them. That was his whole life. How could he preach the Gospel and tell others to forgive, if he didn’t forgive?”

On November 2, 1988, Milton Jones and Theodore Simmons were escorted into a packed courtroom for sentencing. Milton sat next to his two lawyers, wearing a dark blazer over a light collared shirt, hands together in front of him, handcuffed. Sellers spoke for Milton. “Mr. Jones has indicated to me that he would like to express his regrets and his sympathies,” Sellers said. “That something happened that he got caught up in and just did not know how to extract himself from it.… He has often said to me in our conversations, ‘That if I had one wish, my wish would be to undo what was done.’”

Teddy then spoke and pinned the entire crime on Milton. Judge Marshall wasn’t buying it. He called Teddy a “cunning individual,” a “pathological liar,” and the “prime mover” of the crime. Marshall went on, addressing them both: “You were invited to enter these rectories, you were offered food, both individuals trusted you, they had faith in your motives. And you set out to steal the church funds, you assaulted them, you tied and gagged them, you stabbed them repeatedly until they were dead. You stripped them of all human dignity. Both of these kind, gentle souls had more courage in their little finger than you do in that lump that sits on your shoulders. Now, the two priests, I’m sure, forgive you, because they preached and lived that religious concept, but forgiving is one thing, justice is another.”

Then Judge Marshall added that if New York had the death penalty, he would’ve “without a doubt” ordered them executed. With a resounding bang of the gavel, Judge Marshall sentenced Milton and Teddy each to fifty years to life.

6
A Death in Central Park
[ROB]

Expelled from Boston University after one semester in the fall of 1985, Rob was back in the city for the winter, floundering. His mother, Phyllis, told Mrs. Hammerstein, a rich woman for whom she was caring at the time, about her son Robert’s passion for photography. The next week, Rob was sitting in the office of the dean of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. The dean told him to go out and take pictures of what he thought defined him: his mood, his passion. “Show me who you are, and what you’re hiding from,” the dean said.

“Basically, the dean told me he could get me in if I went and took those pictures,” Rob told me. Then he smiled sadly. “I’m fifty-four years old, and I still think about that.”

When I asked him if he even attempted to take the pictures, Rob told me a friend had gotten into some trouble, and he wound up selling the camera to help him out. I wondered if Rob realized how absurd he sounded when he lied. He squandered the opportunity at the Tisch School like he did so many others. It’s almost as if he’s as lost today as he was when he met with the dean.

As the summer of 1986 approached, Rob did another twenty-eight-day stint in rehab and was taking classes for the spring semester at Hunter College, on the east side of Manhattan. He was also, he claims, trying to break away from “the Keys.” A part of me rolls my eyes at Rob’s stories about the Seven Silver Keys. Then again, it was the ’80s; it wouldn’t be that outlandish for Rob to have been involved in debauched relationships with rich and powerful older people.

When I pressed Rob for more details about the Keys, he was vague, like always. “It was rich people trying to one-up one another. ‘Oh, I have to go to the Hamptons this weekend, you must come, Robert’—as if it were a burden to live such a hedonistic lifestyle. I was supposed to be in the Hamptons that night.”

“You mean the night it happened?”

“Yeah.”

In many respects, that night at Dorrian’s Red Hand was like many others—buzzing with drinks and laughter and preppies. It was probably past midnight, the cool time to arrive, when Rob joined the crowd on August 26, 1986. “I went to Dorrian’s, and I saw Alex and Jennifer were there. Alex, you know, threw condoms at me.”

Before Rob had arrived, Jennifer Levin approached Alex Kapp, the other girl Rob was dating, and gave her a friendship bracelet. Kapp got the vibe that Jennifer wanted Rob, and she had heard the rumors that Rob was seeing other women. So, when Rob strolled into Dorrian’s, Kapp threw condoms in his face.

“It wasn’t, like, a big deal,” Rob said. “The night went on, people started leaving, Alex left, and Jennifer wanted to talk, so we went for a walk,” Rob told me, elbows on my bars. “I left my jacket at the bar. We wound up walking in the park.”

They were talking; then they were by a tree in the grass. She was messing around and pushed him to the ground, tied his hands with her panties, he said, and straddled him with her back to his face, stroking him. Suddenly she dug her nails into his testicles. He broke free, struck her with his forearm across her neck, and drove her off him to the ground.

“Did you hold your forearm across her neck?” I asked.

He shook his head no.

“You don’t remember striking her again?” I asked. “They said she had a broken nose, and you had a broken pinky.”

“No, I just reacted. I struck her hard with my arm, drove her to the ground to get her off of me. I think my pinky broke pushing off the ground.”

“How’d you know she was dead?”

“I said, ‘Come on, let’s go.’ Then she didn’t move. And I looked at her and her eyes were open. And then I freaked out, backing up, all the way to the rock wall by the path. If I were a responsible person, I would have called 911. But I freaked out. I just got scared—I wanted to hide. So I hid in plain sight.”

“What happened to her earrings?”

“I don’t know,” he said, eyes widening. “I didn’t take them.”

“They think you, like, staged the scene to look like a robbery.”

“I stayed at the scene, sitting on the rock wall. I was in shock. I’m doing that, setting up the scene, then staying at the scene with the earrings on me?”

“How did you get the scratches?”

“It was when she straddled me, she reached back and was grating me with her nails, down my face and chest. It’s not like I picked some secluded spot. We were fooling around, just off the path. A jogger saw us! Fairstein describes it like it was a fight to the death, said I looked like I had a fight with a lion. If I were disheveled and all scratched up on the wall as the crowd formed, wouldn’t that have raised suspicion? Linda Fairstein—”

“Fuck Linda Fairstein!” I shouted, frustrated with his endless excuses. “Her self-righteous ass got her comeuppance with the Central Park Five. And look at her. She’s not fully accountable, either. Shocker! Look, man, what I’m saying is you gotta clean your side of the street. Nobody believes you didn’t hold her neck. Me, Simon, the world. And that’s the problem, you don’t fully own it! You don’t say, ‘I reacted, pushed her off me, grabbed her by the neck, and held her too long, and I have a really fucking hard time living with myself for what I did.’ You know what I’m saying?”

Rob stared at me, sullen.

“I mean, wasn’t there expert testimony for the defense that said it could have happened in five seconds, you driving her off you, holding her, her jacket strangling her?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“But now you’re saying even that didn’t happen.” I took a breath. “You already did the time. Why not just cop to it?”

Rob didn’t respond. He just stood in front of my cell, his face blank through the bars. My best guess is that he still can’t understand how one minute he was walking into the park and talking with Jennifer, and then, minutes later, strangling her. How do you explain something you can’t believe you did? Could Rob have convinced himself that what he did to Jennifer was only a mistake?

“People (like Robert) might want to minimize their role for any number of reasons,” the prominent psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, whose work focuses on the malleability of human memory, emailed me when I asked her about Rob’s retelling. “One is that they have honestly convinced themselves of their more minimal role—that is, they have distorted their own memory. It’s sometimes called ‘autosuggestion.’ Of course he could be deliberately lying.”

It didn’t take long for detectives to learn that Jennifer was last seen walking out of Dorrian’s with him. And when they arrested him at home days later, he had scratches on his face. He told the detectives it was from a cat. But after a few hours at the precinct, Rob confessed, explaining they were from fooling around with Jennifer in the park. His hands were tied, she squeezed his nuts, then he struck her. “I liked her very much. She was a very nice person. Easy to get along with. Easy to talk to. She was just too pushy.”

He was nineteen.

I would sometimes stop by Rob’s cell, too. He was on the east wing of D North. Unlike in my cell, there were no throw rugs or magazine subscriptions stacked on the floor. He never had money to order movies or buy music on his tablet. His blanket was the itchy, green, state-issued one. His three-inch mattress was wrapped with brown sheets a friend had left him after he was released. On his desk, a metal slab bolted to the wall, sat a clear Swintec typewriter. The same model I used to write articles. When I’d appear at his bars, he’d usually be smoking a cigarette or working on a legal motion or an essay for school—tap, tap, tap.

All these years later, he still received fan mail. He handed me a letter he’d gotten from a teenage boy who said he collected true crime memorabilia and asked Rob for his autograph.

He passed me the letter through his bars. I read it and asked, “Did you give it to him?”

“He seemed like a nice kid,” Rob said. “But it was inappropriate.”

With Rob, everybody’s a nice guy, a nice girl, a nice kid. I wished Rob would tell me he was ashamed to have a kid asking him for an autograph. I wished he would tell me that he couldn’t believe that he killed Jennifer, even to this day. Many journalists go through this with their subjects, wishing they would say the things that will make them relatable, or more emotionally complex, sympathetic. But Rob was subdued, stuck.

Mostly, Rob and I commiserated about the insanity and anxiety of prison. Rob was helping Mikey Meatballs file a lawsuit. A year before, Mikey gave a guy his stash to hold—strips of Suboxone, some K2—and the fella put a shank in the garbage can in the common area, stuffed Mikey’s stash in his ass, and wrote a note directing security to the weapon he planted, saying he saw Mikey put it there and he feared for his life. The guy was placed in protective custody, and Mikey was put in solitary for almost a year. These are the greasy prison shenanigans that go on. Now, out of the hole, Mikey wanted to sue: The administration should not have relied on one informant’s testimony, with no other supporting evidence. From my cell on the second tier, I had a view of Mikey’s first-floor cell across from me, and I saw Rob in front of Mikey’s bars, nodding, as Mikey flailed his arms, shirtless. “These are the worst kind of rats,” Mikey ranted, rasping. “Lying rats!”

It was no surprise Rob would rather help Mikey Meatballs sue the system than field my questions about Central Park and Jennifer and scratches and earrings. It made me uncomfortable to ask him these questions, and I know it pained him when I picked at the earlier scabs of his life that never seemed to heal. When it comes to placing blame, it’s hard to separate the part that is his fault from the part that is the fault of the prison system itself, which fails at helping most of us correct our behaviors. And then, of course, there’s the media. It is torture to constantly be asked about the shameful parts of your past. He told me he felt like a dead frog in a high school biology class, constantly being dissected.

As I was writing about Rob, I was putting together a clemency petition for myself. For the past few years, New York governors Andrew Cuomo and then, after he resigned in 2021, Kathy Hochul had been using their executive powers to commute sentences, even those for violent crimes like mine. Reginald Dwayne Betts, a poet, writer, and lawyer, had offered to assemble a team—Mark Osler, the national expert on clemency, and Alexandra Cox, a mitigation expert—to put together a clemency petition for me. Dwayne, at sixteen, had carjacked a man in a Virginia mall parking lot. He served over eight years, and in prison, he became a poet. In 2019, the Poetry Foundation reached out to me in Sing Sing and asked me to review Dwayne’s book, Felon. When the review came out, Dwayne saw it and responded in a tweet: “I’m certain no one has written anything about my writing and life that has hit me so hard in the gut.” We quickly became friends. Just becoming a successful writer, Dwayne told me, wasn’t going to get me out of prison. If anything, some of the people in power might resent—not respect—my success. You could be a great writer and a psychopath. He’s right.

When it comes to prison writing, the first name that many think of is Jack Henry Abbott. He became pen pals with Norman Mailer while Mailer was writing The Executioner’s Song. Abbott called himself a “state-raised convict.” He’d been locked up since he was a kid and, in his letters, offered Mailer visceral accounts of prison life. Mailer helped publish those letters into a collection called In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison, which one reviewer described as having “knife-like” prose. With Mailer’s help, Abbott was released in 1981, just as his book was exploding. Six weeks later, Abbott got into an argument outside a restaurant with Richard Adan, a waiter and an aspiring playwright, and stabbed him to death. On February 10, 2002, while Abbott hanged from a makeshift noose in a New York State prison cell, the body of the man I murdered washed ashore on a Brooklyn beach.

The prison writer’s story could be a cautionary tale. Dwayne wanted to paint a fuller picture in my clemency petition, which is why he asked Alexandra to compile an extensive investigation of my life: my childhood growing up in a housing project; my father’s suicide; my mental health; the eighteen schools I attended, only completing ninth grade; the adolescent violence; juvie; packing guns; selling drugs; murder. I understood the necessity of mitigation and realized judges often knew too little about defendants before they sent them away forever, but I hated any hint of self-pity. I had opportunities. I chose to be a criminal. What happened to me growing up, as far as I was concerned, didn’t explain why I chose to run the streets and kill a man. There were a bunch of reasons. I had a void in the place where, say, a father instills morals and character in his boy. And maybe I was wounded by the idea that, in these years, my father decided to take his own life rather than become a stable presence in mine. Whatever it was, I know that I made several conscious decisions, for years, to break the law. To me, the story was that I went to prison a lowlife and became a working journalist. I wanted to lean into that, I told Alexandra.

“I don’t know how you would even know what I will lean into or not,” Alexandra replied to me, “except to make assumptions about what I think matters from the questions I’ve asked so far. I wouldn’t tell you how to report your stories. I would appreciate it if you refrain from telling me how to do my job.”

Alexandra was right. She was trying to get me out of prison. She wasn’t looking to put up with my shit. Good for her: She was the expert, not me. My point is, it’s hard to be vulnerable and honest about your younger years and the terrible things you’ve done. And unlike with Alexandra’s work on my case, this book I’m writing isn’t going to help Rob get out of prison. He’s getting out regardless. What right do I have to pester the guy? To what end was I telling Rob’s story?

When Peter Davis approached the synagogue for Jennifer Levin’s funeral, a crowd of reporters trailed him. Peter had met Jennifer a year or so before, through his longtime friend Jessica Doyle, who was even closer with Jennifer. In his mind, and in his crowd of Upper East Side kids, nothing bad like this would ever happen to them. They didn’t think it could. They were supposed to go to college, travel the world, live a life, and now, one of his best friends was dead. Jennifer, who was pretty and funny, who made jokes about being the only Jew in their friend group. Jennifer, who was from SoHo, cool and stylish and mature beyond her years, so put together and probably one of the most responsible people he knew. They called each other on the phone almost every night. Now, eighteen-year-old Peter was being followed by reporters on the way to her funeral, their cameras flashing in his face as they threw questions at him. He had never been confronted with death before. His grandparents were still alive.

“You don’t expect your friends to die, especially a friend you saw the night before,” Peter told me when I called him from the Sullivan cellblock. After Jennifer’s death, Peter fled the city and went to Bennington College in Vermont. When people on campus brought up “the Preppy Murder,” he kept his mouth shut. After graduating, he became a journalist and editor, and today is the editor-in-chief of Avenue, a high-end fashion magazine with a Manhattan readership. Peter never bought the “rough sex” narrative. Jennifer was petite, five foot four; Rob was a foot taller than her and much stronger. How could she have hurt him? He and Jennifer and the rest of their friends used to meet at that exact spot in Central Park all the time. It was right by the Metropolitan Museum.

“I don’t know if I have ever really gotten over it,” Peter said.

In 2018, despite his reluctance, Peter was interviewed for Ricki Stern’s The Preppy Murder. When it aired in November 2019, he didn’t watch it. He still hasn’t. Someone even came up to him on the street, recognizing him from the docuseries, and Peter had completely forgotten he participated in it.

“I mean, I don’t even think of Jennifer’s death as true crime,” Peter said. “I’m personally obsessed with true crime. I’ve read the classics: In Cold Blood, Fatal Vision by Joe McGinniss, who taught at Bennington. I watch all the shows. It’s become such a sensation that Netflix and Amazon and Hulu are making good stuff. But then there’s the core TV channels that have true crime all the time—Discovery ID. I used to have that on so much until, like, all I could hear in my sleep was like, ‘She googled arsenic…’” Peter told me, laughing.

I thought it was ironic that he watched the tragedies of other lives for entertainment, but couldn’t watch the tragedy of his own. I was also surprised he didn’t think of The Preppy Murder, and the other shows and movies and books that retold Jennifer’s death, as true crime. I pushed him on it.

“I know it is true crime,” he said. “I guess just because I know the story, maybe it’s too real, too true for me to see it in any kind of genre. I just see it as a weird fucked-up thing from my childhood. […] But this is how much I compartmentalize. It’s just easier not to watch. I don’t think it’s gonna do me any good, it’s not gonna bring me any kind of peace.”

I mentioned how Rob and I had talked about him writing an apology letter to the Levins. Would that help?

“I can’t speak for the family. I think a mother will probably never forgive for something like that,” Peter told me. “Whether or not people forgive him—it’s a brave thing, to write that letter, cathartic and healing. But he really doesn’t strike me as remorseful.”

What could he do?

“You know, I think that there are good people who do bad things, and who shouldn’t be ultimately defined by something bad that [they] did,” Peter went on. “But if you’re a good person, then you say, like, ‘I fucked up, I did a horrible thing. I can’t change that. But I can recognize that I made a big mistake.’”

Rob, Peter said, “seems like someone who actually thought they got away with it.”

Murder trial lawyers must have a confident swagger—almost arrogant but not quite—to be likable to a jury. As a young prosecutor in the Manhattan DA’s office, Jack Litman had tried nearly forty cases and lost only one. Then he switched sides and became a private defense attorney, winning acquittal after acquittal, including one for a New York City cop in Brooklyn who shot an unarmed Black man. But it was a highly publicized murder at Yale, years before—in which a recent graduate named Richard Herrin beat his girlfriend, Bonnie Garland, to death with a hammer—that made Litman the right guy for Robert Chambers. Using a defense of temporary insanity, Litman won Herrin an acquittal on the top murder count, and Herrin was convicted of a lesser charge of manslaughter. He served seventeen years. Rob’s parents probably saw Litman as their best shot.

Rob was arraigned on murder charges and bused to Rikers Island, housed in a protected high-profile unit. His memories of that time are foggy. They had him isolated, on suicide watch. Then locked down in his cell. He wrote letters to Alex Kapp. Priests and his parents visited. It was all an accident, he explained. He’d be out on bail soon. On top of the pressure from the press, Rob was concerned about what people in jail thought of him. “Ayo, you that white boy on the news, right?” a voice tumbled down the tier from a few cells away. Then another: “You Robert Chambers, right?”

Meanwhile, Litman managed to get a bail hearing before Judge Howard E. Bell. By then, Archbishop Theodore E. McCarrick had written that Rob had “a true respect for his neighbor and an unwillingness to cause pain.”

“When I receive letters from a person of that stature, I do give them consideration,” Bell said. “It’s hard for me to believe that an archbishop may not know what he’s talking about.”

Judge Bell granted Rob a bail of $150,000. Priests from Phyllis’s congregation and Jack Dorrian, the owner of the bar who would later be sued by the Levins for allowing Rob and Jennifer to drink underage that night, put up property to help Rob make bail. Rob lived at a church for a bit, waiting for things to cool down. Then he moved back home with his mother. His father, who had his own place, would stop by and show his support. Rob also had to strategize for trial.

“I remember Jack [Litman] came over, and I was at the kitchen table with my mom, and he wanted to know every single girl I had sex with,” Rob remembered. “You know, like, in that time period. Then Jack called all the girls, and they came over. Oh my God, it was so embarrassing. I felt so bad that they were, like, summoned there by my attorney. My mom was looking at me with such disappointment. It wasn’t easy telling Jack everything.”

Litman leveraged the media when he could.

A couple of months after the arrest, Litman orchestrated that cover story in New York magazine. He called Rob, told him to put on a blazer and tie, and get to his office. When he arrived, a journalist, Michael Stone, and a photographer were there. The photographer started adjusting the blinds for lighting. “Listen to what the photographer tells you,” Litman told Rob, “and don’t talk.”

When I told people that I was writing about Robert Chambers, many of the women (some in their thirties, some in their forties) weren’t familiar with the case. But as soon as they watched the Preppy Murder docuseries at my behest, they got back to me and suggested I tread lightly, especially in this moment. One female pen pal remembered the case and hated that I had empathy for Rob. Despite my own crime, she told me, I was fortunate to have made a career for myself, and she thought it would ruin my reputation if I put him in my book. Her reaction, I told her, made me want to write about him even more. She stopped talking to me. Another friend of mine was a French woman named Anne with a PhD and two children. She also watched the show and visited me afterward. She told me, “You must have respect for Jennifer when you write this book, John.” Her eyes got watery. She was a few years younger than Jennifer would have been, but Anne told me that she felt Jennifer’s soul.

As the case progressed, Jack Litman started filing motions in a less clandestine way so that the media would be able to pick them up, like when he wanted Jennifer’s diary to be made available to the defense. After he filed that motion in court, “‘Sex Diary’ Kept by Jen?” was splashed in bold across the pages of the Daily News. Yet the strategy backfired on Litman. Judge Bell read the journal and deemed that nothing in it was relevant to the defense’s case. For the diary request, the American Lawyer magazine gave Litman their annual “Now You Know Why People Hate Lawyers” award.

“What about Alex Kapp?” I asked Rob. “The one who’s now coming forward. She seems to think you guys were in love. She was the one who threw condoms at you that night at Dorrian’s, right?”

“She was a nice girl. I mean, I don’t want to sound like a jerk, but that’s not how I remember it,” he told me. “She wasn’t in the group that came over when Jack told me to call up all my ex-girlfriends. I remember her parents didn’t want her to be involved back then. I think her parents sent her away or something. So I don’t know why she’s saying all this stuff in the documentary now. I mean, I think she’s, like, a writer or actress or something. I don’t know.”

In The Preppy Murder, Kapp describes visiting Rob at his home when he was out on bail, which she later rehashed in a Q and A with Vulture. “He was wearing a dark blue turtleneck. His eyes were this piercing icy black,” Kapp says. “It’s a little embarrassing to say now as an adult, but I remember thinking, Are we going to make out?” In Rob’s room, she remembers seeing “a couple of stacks of newspapers” under his desk, with their coverage of the case, and saying, “Well, I guess you got what you always wanted. You’re famous.” Rob gave her a strange, off-putting look, Kapp says, and she got scared and left.

Shawn Kovell, Rob’s wife, who had met him around this time while he was awaiting trial, watched the docuseries and hated Kapp’s interview. Rob gave me Shawn’s phone number, and I called her from the cellblock. She told me why Kapp’s appearance on the show, all these years later, bothered her so much. “Anyone who truly knows him knows that he never reads any articles about himself, and he definitely never collected them,” Shawn said, talking fast, with a manic vibe. “This girl never says a word before. Where does she come from? Thirty years later. Oh, she’s writing a book now. Got it. She said he had piles of newspapers in his room. He hates those tabloids. It’s just such bullshit!”

On many occasions, when I’d call Rob to my cell bars, I’d have a stack of articles on my bunk about him, old ones about the case, new ones about the docuseries, Linda Wolfe’s book Wasted: The Preppie Murder flipped over on my bed. Never once did he ask to see what I was reading. It’s not that he didn’t care, he told me; it’s that he knew there would be nothing good, and reading or watching the stories about him would make him feel worse than he already did. It must have been uncomfortable, then, to have seen me so immersed in all these narratives about him. I initially hung out and observed Rob, asked him about his life, but I eventually needed to study how the media covered him. I couldn’t tell Rob’s story without doing that. Taped to the wall of my cell was an outline of his life: “Complication: Killing confounds Rob. Development: media hounds Rob; prison punishes Rob; drugs numb Rob. Resolution: Rob disappears.”

I read Rob a quote from Alex Kapp in Vulture: “Some people involved in this documentary told me that everyone has tried to reach out to him. He has never responded to anybody. There was a general consensus that if I had reached out to him, he more than likely would respond to me. I have to say I feel the same way.… I think a lot of people would love to hear his side of the story.”

Rob shook his head and smiled.

“So, no?”

“I don’t even know what to say to that,” Rob said. “She sounds like she’s on a press tour. I guess it’s like, all these kids I grew up with, they go on TV all these years later and say all this stuff.” He grew exasperated. “When I went away, I didn’t write people back from my past. Part of it was shame, but part of it was that I didn’t want to burden them, you know?”

To be fair to Kapp, she’s pretty candid about her motivations. When she learned that Annie Sundberg, Ricki Stern’s creative partner, who had attended Dartmouth with Kapp and was in the same sorority, was directing the docuseries, it was a connection she trusted. It turns out that Kapp had been writing her own fictionalized version of the story, “about the ’80s and rich kids and no parents.”

“The ultimate reason I did this was to selfishly cement my place in the story because I want to write this story,” Kapp told Vulture. “But, more importantly, because I knew that Jennifer Levin had been horribly murdered twice—when she died and in the trial—I felt I owed it to her family to tell my story, so that they understand that I wasn’t on a side. It was a very traumatic experience. I’m probably still not over it. It changed the course of my life.”

Rob was indicted for three burglaries after he was arrested for Jennifer’s murder. Prosecutors were provided with information by a twenty-year-old man named David Fillyaw who said he knew Rob from the Yorkville area and robbed apartments with him. When Fillyaw provided Manhattan prosecutors with this information, he was detained on Rikers Island for the attempted murder and rape of a Columbia student in her dormitory. Rob told me he knew Fillyaw, but they were not close. He said he did not have a burglary ring with him. He blames Fairstein for all the dark narratives about him. Did he steal money from the homes of house parties he attended? He might have. Did he swipe money from girlfriends? Sure, probably.

“I have enough things to work through, the pain I caused the Levin family, my family,” Rob said. “You want me to be the sinner of the Upper East Side.”

Indicting Rob for burglaries, which predated his killing of Jennifer, would show an unraveling young man stealing from others to feed his drug addiction. It reinforced the narrative that he robbed Jennifer for her diamond earrings. (They weren’t real diamonds, but Rob didn’t know that.) To get a guilty verdict for murder, Linda Fairstein knew that she had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Rob had “intended” to kill Jennifer. This is where narrative comes into play. Juries want to hear a plausible story. Desperate drug addicts were committing awful violence every day. Maybe that’s what motivated his actions. It was a better story than Rob being a pathologically violent young man who hated women. Nothing seemed to support that.

When Rob was bailed out and waiting for trial, he met Shawn Kovell. Even though Shawn grew up on the Upper East Side, she had a certain darkness in her own childhood and home life that perhaps helped her empathize with Rob. Her mother was a madam in a brothel; her father wasn’t around. She was exposed to drugs at a young age. She wasn’t scared of Rob and the circus around him. She went to court with him and avoided the photographers as best she could. Her name still appeared in the tabloids. She saw him as the sweetest boy she’d ever known. Girls loved him. In his New York magazine cover story, Michael Stone talked to dozens of women who knew Rob and dated him. One girl described him as brooding and shy. Another said he was gentle and wrote her poetry. The only incident of Rob being violent was in eighth grade, where he twisted a girl’s arm for kicking and teasing him. “I yelled at him to stop,” she remembered, “but he wouldn’t let go, and when I looked at his eyes, they were really weird, like he meant it.”

Days before the trial, around the holidays in 1987, Rob hung out with a bunch of friends, all girls wearing lingerie; it was at the Upper East Side apartment of one of his friends from York Prep. Shawn was there, too. They drank and smoked weed, and filmed the fun with a camcorder. During a game of charades, Rob started choking himself and held up a doll to the camera. The doll’s head popped off. All the girls laughed, and so did he. “Oops, I killed it.”

Months later, the friend from York Prep would sell the tape to producers at A Current Affair, a syndicated television news program originally hosted by Maury Povich, for $10,000. The way they packaged the home video was certainly eerie, with close-up shots of Rob’s eyes and chilling background music. A Current Affair served as one of the templates for the true crime network magazine shows that are so popular today. When I asked Rob about the party while out on bail, he said, “Look, it was definitely terrible timing and in poor taste, but I was just playing around with friends, not reenacting Jennifer’s death.”

On March 25, 1988, more than a year and a half after Jennifer Levin died under an oak tree and her nineteen-year-old killer sat stunned on a rock wall nearby, after Manhattan’s bridges and tunnels were shut down to look for her killer, after the kind of press coverage that seemed to make the rest of the world’s tragedies unseen, after more than three months of trial and nine days of deliberation, twenty-one-year-old Robert E. Chambers appeared in court before Judge Howard E. Bell to plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter. To avoid another trial, especially after what Judge Bell thought might be the longest-ever jury deliberation in Manhattan for a case with only one defendant, Linda Fairstein and Jack Litman had come to an agreement before the jury came back: five to fifteen years for first-degree manslaughter. Rob reluctantly agreed. It was better than the jury convicting him of murder, better than twenty-five years to life. Judge Bell had to ask him three times if “he intended to cause physical injury to Jennifer Levin,” causing her death.

“Looking back on everything, I’d have to say yes,” he said. Then, shaking his head, he said, “But in my heart I did not mean for anything to happen.”

“No, no, no, no, no,” Linda Fairstein yelled, jumping to her feet. “I want you to ask him about his mind and his hands, not his heart!”

He made a clean admission, and the judge sentenced him to five to fifteen years for first-degree manslaughter and five to fifteen years for one of the unrelated burglary counts, to run concurrently.

As Rob left the Manhattan court, he was afforded one last night to sleep in his own bed at home with his parents, a home to which he would never return. When the Cadillac pulled up to their brownstone at 11 East 90th Street, off Fifth Avenue, a crowd of reporters were waiting. He got out with his father and mother, who held a bouquet of pink carnations, irises, and yellow zinnias.

The next morning, detectives picked Rob up from his home, still surrounded by a mob of media, and drove him downtown to the Manhattan Tombs. At least in jail, he thought, the media circus would be over. He knows now that he was naive. He wore a gray button-down with a T-shirt underneath, nothing fancy. He sat alone in a bullpen, waiting to be bused to Rikers Island. “You should do a lot of push-ups,” a female corrections officer said. “And pray.”

7
The System Doesn’t Care About Remorse
[SHANE]

When you get locked up, you’re not thinking about regret or remorse”—I once opened a magazine piece with that line. I was generalizing, of course. I don’t speak for all criminals, nor do I know what we’re all thinking. But most of us know to keep our mouths shut. We try to work out a good plea deal or beat the rap at trial. Most can’t muster up anything close to the remorse Michael Shane Hale displayed in his confession.

In the summer of 1996, when Shane arrived at Rikers, sent from Lexington, Kentucky, to New York City’s mega-complex of jails, he was sent to the North Infirmary Command, or NIC; it’s where Rikers provides protective custody for detainees with high-profile cases. He received a towel, sheets, a green plastic cup, toothpaste, and a bar of soap. He was allowed to wear the clothes he was arrested in, which was better than the jumper he’d worn for months in the Lexington county jail. A CO cut the metal Medusa head off the Versace jeans that Stefan had bought him; it could have been used as a weapon. Shane didn’t have anyone sending him money for commissary. His friend Dale was working more, and he couldn’t talk to Michael Holland because he was a witness for the prosecution. He didn’t call his parents or grandparents all that much. Too much shame. He had to ask other prisoners to use the phone, and sometimes they’d let him, telling him to make it quick. Shane would get hungry at night. He once washed a guy’s underwear in exchange for cookies. But he didn’t do it again after someone told him, “You’re a bitch if you wash another man’s drawers.”

A year earlier, in March 1995, New York’s newly elected Republican governor, George Pataki, signed a law that reinstated the death penalty. Brooklyn district attorney Charles Hynes, despite expressing opposition to capital punishment, vowed to follow the law. He knew his first decision to pursue a death sentence would be scrutinized. On September 24, 1996, with a detailed confession in hand, Hynes announced that his office had filed a notice of intent to seek the death penalty, charging Shane with multiple counts of murder, robbery (he’d stolen Stefan’s car and other items), and kidnapping (Stefan was alive in the trunk). When a reporter asked Hynes why he chose Shane’s as the first death case, he said, “It will become clear during the trial why I chose this case.”

On one radio report, citing anonymous police sources, a broadcaster floated the idea that Shane had eaten Stefan’s body parts, putting him in the same category as the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who, years before, had murdered seventeen men, dismembered them, preserved their body parts, and, in some cases, ate them. The next day, a Daily News headline read, “DA Seeks Death in Gay Saw-Slay.” Beside it was an article that featured Stefan’s niece and his former employees talking about the case. The executive director of the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, or AVP, told the New York Times that it was hard to believe that Shane being gay “was not one of the factors that made this case more compelling to go for the death penalty.”

While the tabloids and TV news sensationalized, LGNY, or Lesbian & Gay New York, the community’s most prominent city newspaper at the time, doggedly covered Shane’s case. (Today the publication is called Gay City News.) At the outset, Duncan Osborne, the lead LGNY reporter, let his personal feelings be known in an op-ed that lambasted Hynes’s decision to pursue the death penalty. “Hynes knows that when the jury looks at this kid they are going to see one more faggot,” Osborne wrote. “Hale will be perceived as a sick little queer charged with killing and butchering his queer boyfriend.”

Meanwhile, Shane’s lawyers from the Capital Defender Office, an agency that represented defendants in New York State who were eligible for the death penalty and could not afford legal representation, thought it was inappropriate to seek death in this case. Kelley Sharkey and Sonya Zoghlin expected it to be used for the “worst of the worst”—not in “a tragic domestic dispute.”

I know Shane didn’t get up that morning with murder on his mind. I know it in my gut, as someone who did get up one day and have it in my head that I would kill a man. Even when Shane snuck back into the garage, he wasn’t mapping out a way to attack Stefan and then stuff him in the trunk. That was never the plan. There never was a plan. This was desperation, not premeditation. To me, it seemed that the government was the one plotting with meticulous premeditation: notice of intent to seek the death penalty.

It was freezing on January 12, 1997, when about a hundred demonstrators took to the Brooklyn streets, led by two men holding a black banner that read, “DA Hynes: Justice Not Death Penalty.” Others held signs calling Hynes a killer, and group chants echoed through the residential neighborhood of Bay Ridge. “Stop the death, stop the hate—no more murders by the state” was followed by “Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth—death penalty is murder and that’s the truth.” There were props, too: a mock electric chair, a two-foot cardboard syringe. In front of Hynes’s home, activist leaders yelled through a bullhorn that “Michael Shane Hale represented a man who Charles Hynes knew most New Yorkers could hate.” Soon after, Hynes’s office issued a press release saying that the demonstrations “will in no way alter” his decision to seek death against Shane. Hynes added that “it is a pity that the demonstrators expressed no sorrow for the victims of these crimes.”

Duncan Osborne followed up with an analysis in LGNY of the racial politics behind Hynes’s decision. “Though activists have few facts in the Hale case, the level of suspicion is high. Hale is seen as a convenient defendant for Hynes,” Osborne wrote. “By seeking death first for Hale—a white defendant—Hynes can argue he is applying the penalty equally should he select an African American or Latino defendant later and deflect any charges of racism.”

As all of this was going on, Shane was simply trying to survive Rikers Island. He lived in a communal dorm. It was a room full of beds and lockers, a dayroom with a TV. He eventually got a job in the mess hall for the perk of extra food. For fun, he became a tarot card reader. Stefan had been into astrology and often called psychics, though none of them had predicted what would happen to him.

In jail, Shane had adopted some of Stefan’s quirky hobbies. He missed the man. He loved the man. He still couldn’t believe he had killed the man. He couldn’t believe that the government now wanted to kill him. Everyone around him faced serious charges and wondered about their outcomes. One time, when Shane was reading the cards for a fella, he felt a lot of female energy demanding justice around the man. Months later, Shane read in the papers that the man had been convicted of several rapes.

Classified as a high-profile detainee, Shane was bused to the Brooklyn courts every couple of months with some of the most dangerous men on Rikers Island. In these years, the Bloods were forming their ranks and rising up against the more organized Latino gangs. Rattling to court, Shane would be locked in a single-seat cage next to a shot-caller who was locked in his own cage, wrapped in chains, his hands stuffed in red mittens and cuffed behind his back. One time, in the bullpen of the Brooklyn courts, he saw a man get slashed across the face. The man yelled, and blood spilled from his cheek. COs ran to the bullpen, keys jangling, their feet pounding heavy on the floor. When they opened the gate, they yelled for everyone to get against the wall, pulled the bleeding man out, then frisked Shane and a handful of others in the cell. They didn’t know who did it. They couldn’t find the weapon. Shane’s only comfort was that the others didn’t see him as a threat, so they didn’t pay much attention to him. In these moments, it was a relief to be unseen.

Meanwhile, members of Shane’s legal team flew out to Kentucky to meet with his family and friends. When the lawyers explained to Harold, Shane’s father, that the purpose of the meeting was to gather mitigating evidence to convince Hynes not to pursue the death penalty, Harold said, “I didn’t think anyone would much care, one faggot killing another.”

Shane’s lawyers had one shot to win his case. They had to get the statements from Michael Holland, which led to Shane’s own confession, thrown out. The statements, they argued, were obtained through coercion and threats. For three days in August 1997, Shane found himself watching the detective to whom he had confessed—the one with the silver pushback, the Silver Fox, that’s how he saw him—get interrogated by his lawyers.

Kelley Sharkey called John Schwartz to the stand. It made Shane emotional watching Sharkey fight for him. No one had ever stuck up for him like she did.

“Isn’t it a fact your brother officers called Mr. Holland a little faggot and told him if he didn’t give a statement, he would get raped in jail?” Sharkey asked Detective Schwartz.

“Objection,” Prosecutor Reeves yelled.

“Sustained,” Judge Albert Tomei said.

Sharkey tried again and again, irritating Judge Tomei. “Miss Sharkey,” he said, “I’m going to tell you one more time—no, I’m not going to tell you one more time. I don’t want you to go into this area; it’s irrelevant.”

“It’s not irrelevant.”

“It’s irrelevant.”

“It’s not irrelevant—”

“It’s irrelevant as far as this court is concerned,” Judge Tomei said.

In October 1995, when Shane confessed to killing Stefan and was about to arrive on Rikers, I had just started a one-year sentence on the island. While hanging out with my friends in Hell’s Kitchen, I had been caught with a gun. I was seventeen. I had dropped out of high school and started hanging in the streets, selling drugs, no longer living with my mother. The judge had initially sentenced me to probation, but I violated the conditions. So I was sent to C-74, the Rikers jail for teenagers, known as “Adolescents at War.” On my first day, I was in a reception bullpen with a bunch of Ñetas, a Puerto Rican gang. They wore beads around their necks, saluted one another by bouncing two twirled fingers off their chest—“corazón,” from the heart.

We were allowed to wear our street clothes back then, and I was dressed nice, wearing brown Ralph Lauren corduroys and an Izod rugby shirt of green wool fabric patterned with brown deer. One of the guys in the bullpen suddenly pushed a razor out of his ass. The razor was in a holster, slid within a folded matchbook, wrapped in black electrical tape (which avoided detection from the metal detector), padded with tissue, and stuffed into a rubber glove. The reason for the retrieval was me. He told me to take off my black Nike Barkleys. I refused, then steeled myself for what came next. They jumped me and ripped the sneakers off my feet. They didn’t cut me. But when they punched me, my face ricocheted off the cell bars. I bled a lot.

The C-74 jail was built close to the ground, like many on Rikers, with two low-ceilinged hallways. One led to the even-numbered side, the other to the odd side, which stretched half a mile long. Most of the adolescent cellblocks had three levels. Every fifty yards or so was an entrance that led to a vestibule with a staircase. Two-Upper was called “Two-Top the Butcher Shop”; Four Main was “House of Pain.” There were other vestibules that led to open dorms, or “mods,” which had less privacy.

As a white boy, I was in the minority in C-74. I only ever felt safe when I acted violently. That was the sick paradox. If the violence subsided for a day, the tension never did. The housing units averaged around thirty kids each. There were two phones that hung in front of the officers’ station, or “the bubble.” Back then, calls were free. You’d pick up the receiver, press nine, and call whoever you wanted. Most of the time, the two toughest kids in the house would each claim a phone, sometimes disconnecting the handset handle and walking around with it in their pockets. You had to ask them to get on the phone or fight someone else for slot time. Sometimes guys would stay on the phone for hours. My mind was filled with violent thoughts; I imagined running up on some guy on the phone and slashing his face with a razor, thinking about the respect I would get for doing it. I fought a lot for the phone, because that’s just what you had to do, and I eventually earned a reliable half-hour slot. I would see E. in the hallways. He was locked up in another housing unit, but it felt good to see a familiar face from the neighborhood. E. was fighting a murder case, for which he would win an acquittal.

I got out of Rikers at nineteen, in the summer of 1996, around the time Shane got there. In hindsight, the year I spent on Rikers for packing a gun changed the trajectory of my life. My mom had saved a few thousand dollars for me from my father’s monthly social security checks, which stopped when I turned nineteen, and gave me the money when I came back home. I used it to buy drugs to sell in Hell’s Kitchen. I again stayed with the older neighborhood super. When I ran out of money, I went to live with my older brother Joe in Brooklyn. By then, my mother had also moved back to Brooklyn to work as a real estate agent. She had sublet our Manhattan railroad apartment, but the landlord became hip to it and took her to court; she and George eventually lost the rent-stabilized unit. All of my family was now based in Brooklyn. Joe, twelve years older than me, was an electrician for the city. He’d bought a house on a canal in Gerritsen Beach, just one neighborhood over from where I’d grown up in Sheepshead Bay. Joe let me stay in his basement. I had a felony and a ninth grade education.

I had another older brother, too, Eugene, who was a year younger than Joe. He had olive skin and long eyelashes and a serious drug addiction. He was a sweet soul and laughed hard, but he was unreliable. Eugene, also an electrician for the city, had recently lost his job. For years, after getting paid on Thursdays, he’d go on a crack hunt and never show up to work on Fridays. He developed psychosis and started experiencing bizarre manic episodes. My friends would see him strolling along the avenues in Brooklyn and call me to come get him. Eventually, Eugene was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and began living off a government disability check. In my absence, he had only gotten worse.

A year after I got out of Rikers, in the summer of 1997, I got a job as a lifeguard on Coney Island Beach. There I met a woman who lived in a housing project in Bushwick. We started dating, and I bumped into my old juvie bunkmate, who lived in the same project. He hung out with a crew of stickup kids who would trail big-time drug dealers as they left nightclubs. His team would then kidnap the dealer and pistol-whip him until he gave up his stash of money, drugs, and jewelry. My bunkmate also ran a dope spot and introduced me to selling heroin. I started delivery services in Sheepshead Bay and Hell’s Kitchen, recruited dealers to work for me, and began making money of my own, and with it, my own set of troubles.

Beyond drug-dealing beef that would end in murder, other forces were at play, too. I feared others would learn about things I did that conflicted with my idea of who I wanted to be in “the life.” Many of us who commit terrible violence struggle internally with something that guts us hollow. What really drove Shane to kill Stefan? I’d say much of it was pain from rejection and the struggle with his own identity.

In 1995, the same year Shane killed Stefan, and before I did that stint on Rikers, I was staying with the super in Hell’s Kitchen and dealing drugs. I’d wind up getting high on my own product with the super; we’d snort lines of blow, watch porn, have sex. I’d wake up the next day full of shame. The super was in his forties. At my youngest with him, I was seventeen. I’d always initiated the sex, so while it might have been inappropriate, I never felt he took advantage of me. Maybe I feel that way because I don’t want to admit to being a victim. Maybe I’m remembering it all wrong, or, shit, maybe I was confused and ashamed because I enjoyed the sex. I do think that’s the simple truth. When I later became a drug dealer back in Brooklyn, I built my status in “the life,” and returned to Hell’s Kitchen with a new car, a thick gold chain, a Cartier watch, and plenty of product. But I always feared being found out—about my past with the super and other experiences I had in nightclubs, high on ecstasy—and it bred confusion and anger and resentment within me. I knew, from a young age, what would quell it all: violence. By revealing this now, I’m trying to reject the tough-guy persona I had always pursued. There’s always the worry about what my peers in prison will think when they read this, but my sexual experiences were what they were, and now, at forty-seven years old, I know that my most intimate desires have always resided in my relationships with women. Still, I would have felt like a fraud, or at least like I was holding back, if I didn’t share this. I wish I would have told Shane back then, when I was interviewing him for hours in Sing Sing and living on the same tier as him. But prison doesn’t let you feel safe with your secrets.

When I recently talked with my neighbor about writing, Jack Henry Abbott came up. My neighbor held a mirror in his hand, which was stretched out through his bars, and tilted it so he could see my face in its reflection. When we were locked in our cells, this was our version of a face-to-face meeting. I shared my thoughts about Abbott’s writing.

“You know Abbott was a homo, right?” he replied.

Judge Tomei ruled that Michael Holland’s statement to the police, Shane’s confession, and pretty much all the other evidence against him would be admissible at trial. Still, Hynes’s office was beleaguered by the media attention. They offered Shane a plea deal of fifty to life. But Judge Tomei, an opponent of the death penalty, argued that the only way he would accept the deal was if the prosecution first withdrew their death notice. It’s a safe bet that what Judge Tomei was really doing was trying to chip away at the death penalty statute. The case would go on hold for more than a year, until an appellate court sorted it out. Whichever way the ruling went, Shane’s lawyers were telling him, the deal would still happen.

In the meantime, in a 1998 interview with LGNY, Hynes reiterated his narrative that Shane’s crime justified death, then patted himself on the back for showing mercy. “Hale had an opportunity to save Stefan’s life and instead chose to suffocate him. The fact that I offered to accept a penalty other than execution should be a clear indication that where I am given an opportunity … I am going to be inclined to do it whether the defendant is gay, African-American, or Irish or Italian.”

Seared into Hynes’s brain was the image of a bloodied Stefan looking up at Shane and pleading with him to stop as he wrapped a bag over his head and suffocated him. Sitting at the metal picnic table years ago, I remember Shane telling me that he did not do that, and never said anything like that to the detectives. One could infer that from the statement he made, I told him, and that’s why he never should’ve talked to those detectives. I told him what my mother told me all those years ago: “They ain’t looking to help you.”

Shane looked at me sheepishly.

I wonder if Hynes sought the death penalty in this case because he suspected Shane for several other murders that had involved dismemberment—the ones that had been taking place during Shane’s time in New York. Since he had been on Rikers Island, the reports of men disappearing from gay bars had stopped; body parts were no longer being discovered in garbage bags.

By February 10, 1999, the higher court had decided on the legal issues, and Shane went ahead and pleaded guilty. It was sentencing day. A few members of Stefan Tanner’s family sat on benches in the audience behind the man who killed and dismembered their loved one. The only people there for Shane were his two attorneys from New York’s Capital Defender Office. They sat next to him at the defense table. Kyle Reeves, who would be the supervising prosecutor in my case a few years later, stood up and addressed the court: “The District Attorney agreed to accept this just disposition because it ensured finality.… The family wishes me to advise the court that in their opinion, it was anything but a tragic domestic dispute. In their opinion, and ours, it was a brutal, calculated and gruesome crime motivated solely by this defendant’s greed.”

Then Shane spoke.

“I can only hope that what I say conveys what is in my heart. To the friends and family of Stefan Tanner … the pain you are experiencing is my fault,” Shane told a courtroom, turning toward the Tanner family. “I hope one day you can move on with your lives, find healing, and, I pray, forgive me … I pray every night that I won’t wake up the next morning, not because of my environment or my future, because I must wake up and know that I’m responsible for Mr. Tanner’s death. I can only pledge to Stefan Tanner’s memory to live every day and be the best person I can be. While I endure the incredible guilt and shame of what I have done, [all] I have left to say [is] that I’m eternally sorry.”

Then Judge Tomei sentenced Shane. He was all business. Twenty-five years to life for murder in the second degree, plus twelve and a half to twenty-five years for the kidnapping, and twelve and a half to twenty-five years for the robbery. The sum: fifty years to life. Shane wouldn’t be eligible to see a parole board until he was seventy-three.

ACT III
The Time

Only the man who has enough good in him to feel the justice of the penalty can be punished; the others can only be hurt.

—William Ernest Hocking

8
A Visit with the Victims
[MILTON]

On December 15, 1988, after nineteen-year-old Milton Jones was sentenced to fifty years to life for killing two priests, he landed in his first prison, Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Comstock, near the Vermont border. As soon as he arrived, a counselor conducted an intake interview.

[Inmate] states he wants school and electrical trade. A product of a broken home, he was living with his grandmother when arrested. He has no salable skills.

For nearly a year, Milton enrolled himself in an electrical trade shop at Great Meadow while taking high school courses. He was trying to survive. He became a general clerk at the law library, then a typist, and then a paralegal assistant during the spring of 1990. (Rob would soon join Milton in Comstock, but they never met each other.)

Then, in July 1990, Milton was transferred to Attica. The prison has been romanticized in Hollywood (Al Pacino, in Dog Day Afternoon, yelling, “Attica! Attica! Attica!”), in music (the other John Lennon’s “Attica State” or Nas rapping, “I’d open all the cells in Attica, send ’em to Africa”), in the press (iconic photos of prisoners in the yard, fists raised, yelling “Power to the people!”). Milton’s connection to the place was more personal: It was the same prison where his father, Babu, had been shot and tortured during the retaking.

Attica’s four three-story cellblocks are wrapped in more than a mile of brick wall. Together, blocks A, B, C, and D form a square. Each block has its own yard, and from above, the prison looks like a four-pane window. The yards are identical, with a patch of grass, a softball field, a blacktop with a basketball court and two rims with half-moon backboards. It’s a picture many have seen in the various aerial shots of the infamous 1971 uprising. On the roofs of those corridors, which are the hallways that split the four yards, guards sometimes walk and look down at those gathered in the yard. Other guards sit perched with an AR-15 atop the corners of every cellblock.

Of New York’s max joints, Attica has long been considered the worst for those inside. When I was there, about 80 percent of the two thousand or so prisoners were people of color; the six hundred guards were almost all white. The walls, the sky, the mood—they’re all gray, seemingly every day. Stories about setups and beatdown crews have long reverberated among prisoners serving time in New York. They’ve also been documented by the Correctional Association of New York: harrowing tales of harassment, racism, retaliation against prisoners filing grievances, excessive box time in disciplinary hearings, and more. Until 2015, when high-tech audio and video surveillance came to Attica, the prison operated with little transparency.

There had been other uprisings since the infamous one in 1971. In July 1984, after a tower guard shot a prisoner in the yard, a couple hundred men rioted in the C Block yard. Two months before Milton arrived in July 1990, there had been another riot, when a prisoner died after getting into a fight with guards. Two days later, more than four hundred prisoners refused to enter their cells for the night. When Milton arrived, Attica was an institution filled with tension. There were no cells ready for him, so he spent about a month on the hospital floor. He was eventually placed in D Block, just as his father had been nineteen years earlier. His cell was typical: the foot of the bed up against the bars, toilet and sink at the back of the cell. Windows were on the tier, and whether one stayed open or closed depended on what the strongest men in the vicinity wanted. I’ve seen knife fights over opening and closing windows. That’s how it is with all trivial shit in prison. Men try to control phones, prison food, seating areas, windows—anything that’s left for them. In Attica, the floors were leveled off. No open tiers stacked on top of one another. There wasn’t a lot of noise because Attica COs didn’t tolerate it. When the guys would get too loud, say an argument over football or a beef, the CO would cut off the electricity for the entire company. Some COs would make it personal, take to the catwalk in the back of the cells and yank out the electrical wires or pull out the fuse of a particularly loud prisoner. This happened to Milton. He would sometimes be in the dark for days.

Milton found refuge among the Muslim brothers. They helped him find his way, got him toiletries. They told Milton about the “credit card swipe” frisks (when guards patted you down, they’d sometimes run their hand between your ass and ding your balls), about walking in the corridors with a group and keeping his eyes forward and staying paired off, about how he had to be on point when the CO walked the tier with the sign-up list, a clipboard and pen in hand. Milton had to say his cell number and then “chow and yard” in fast succession, or else he wouldn’t be put on the list and his cell wouldn’t open for the day.

Soon the D Block COs learned about Milton’s crime and started calling him “Bissonette.” He wanted to get into the college program and move over to C Block. One of the prisoners’ demands during the 1971 uprising had been access to better education programs. Decades later, college programs in prison began spreading widely. Milton caught the tail end of those years. It was called “the consortium”: Three nearby colleges in Western New York—Daemen College, Niagara College, and Canisius University—came into Attica, and men worked toward a degree in social science. Soon Milton was accepted and moved over to C Block.

The cells in C Block had doors with a slot at eye level, no bars, and they faced one another with a gallery runway down the middle. Milton warmed his food on the elevated radiator. When a CO pulled the lever at the front of the tier, Milton’s cell door slid open and made a loud pop! At the back of each cell was a slice of window. Milton’s looked out onto the C Block yard. Whenever tear gas dropped, usually due to a group fight, he pulled his window shut. There was a dayroom at the front of the tier, which was used for a computer lab. He typed papers and used the digital encyclopedia for research.

By the time I got to Attica for the first time in 2007, C Block was the toughest. The college programs left after the 1994 crime bill pulled Pell Grants for prisoners. The computer lab was now an empty room where COs would sometimes pull a prisoner off the tier, out of view of the men peeking out of their slots with eye-spy pieces of mirrors, and beat them. When I went to the school building once a month in the evenings to attend a creative writing workshop, the rest of the classrooms were empty. But when Milton attended classes in the early ’90s, the school building was filled with men learning.

College or no college, when you’re the big Black kid who killed two priests in Buffalo, the white guards in Attica have you on their radar. They were bullies, ballbusters, with the mentality of high school jocks. It was like walking through a gauntlet, passing all the COs hanging out in the lobby, the batons strapped to their wrists, tumbling in and out of their hands like yo-yos. Returning from a callout (prison-speak for appointment) at the clinic, Milton would unlatch the door to the stairway to his tier and hear, “Hey, Bissonette!”

Guards at Attica knew what we all were in prison for. Sergeants had clearance to go on a computer and look up your security file, find out about your crime. The sergeant was not supposed to tell the details to the guards. But they always did. They were a tight crew. In Attica, it seemed like the guards could almost smell my fear. Once, when my tier walked out into a single-file line, the COs pulled me out and told me to get on the wall. While one frisked me, another came to my side and asked who I killed, warning me not to lie. It was some drug dealer shit, I told them, back in Brooklyn.

“Was it a nigger?” the guard asked.

“I mean, he was Black,” I mumbled, “but it wasn’t like that.”

“Like what?” the guard said, inching his face closer to mine.

I stayed quiet.

Seconds passed that felt like minutes. They all stood behind me.

“Go ahead. Have fun in the yard,” the guard said, letting me go. “There’s plenty of niggers out there.”

One evening, on his way to the school building, Milton was pulled out from the group by the COs. They told him to get on the wall, hands high and flat, legs spread apart, then frisked him and, to try to get him to react, grabbed his balls. Assaults like this were common and calculated.

When I was in Attica the second time, from 2009 to 2016, I’d hear beatings but never see them. I’d be in my cell, hear batons tap on the floor—clack, clack, clack—then two short fire alarm bells—ring ring! Then I’d hear the boom of the boots, keys jangling, the timbre of COs running to the scene.

“Stop resisting!”

“I’m not resisting!”

Then screams. Then silence.

It would happen so regularly that it made me apathetic to violence and suffering. I’d hear screams and bells and become immediately frustrated that my trip to the commissary or the yard would get delayed. If it wasn’t them hurting us, it was us hurting one another. One night in the A Block yard in 2015, this Crip kid got into a knife fight with a few Bloods, lots of thrusts both ways. The Crip kid dropped dead like someone hit his off button. The ice pick pierced his heart. Danielly, my wife at the time, visited the next morning, having taken the eight-hour bus ride up from New York City the night before. But because of the incident, fewer guards were available to process visitors and I didn’t get down to the visit room until noon. I was angry that the extra security measures—they wanded me, frisked me, sat me in the boss chair (which detects any metal objects you may hide in your ass)—kept her waiting. Danielly had overheard the guards talking about the killing. When she saw me, she told me she was happy I was safe. Did I know the boy who died? I shook my head. Her eyes got watery, and she wondered out loud if the prison had contacted the dead boy’s mother. I shrugged. Then she cupped my face, looked into my eyes, and said, “I’m so sorry you have to live here.”

When the C Block COs squeezed his balls, Milton took the pain. He didn’t move. He knew they wanted him to come off the wall so they could pummel him. After the guards saw Milton wouldn’t react, they told him to go to class. By then, Milton had been in Attica a few years, and he’d heard other max joints were mellower, but he didn’t want to ask for a transfer until he finished his degree. He did file a grievance about the incident, though.

A grievance system was one of the demands prisoners had made in the 1971 uprising, and many prison systems across the nation had implemented them. In New York, each cellblock had a prisoner grievance rep who was given a pass to move around the prison. In Attica, the reps worked in an office with a civilian who cataloged and investigated the complaints. If the issue wasn’t resolved in-house, then a prisoner could petition a court to hear the violation. When I was in Attica, I never filed a grievance. The civilian told the guards everything, and everyone I saw who filed grievances did harder time. Retaliation usually followed; then they’d put you on the wheel, moving you from cellblock to cellblock. Some guys were set up, had shanks or razors planted in their cells; some were beaten by the guards, then falsely charged with assaulting staff, then sent to solitary, sometimes for years. The surveillance quelled this behavior, but Attica didn’t have cameras back then. Complaints like Milton’s were his word against the COs’. But it did provide a paper trail. So if he was pummeled in C Block, there would be previous complaints on the record. When the guards did get wind that Milton filed a grievance, they left him alone for a bit. But they’d eventually get him.

Milton occupied himself with schooling. He told me the English courses were hard for him: “I wasn’t too good at writing.” Other classes intrigued him more. His professor of biological psychology brought in a real brain. “It was a jar with liquid,” he said. “There was a lot of gray matter—we saw the cerebral cortex, the frontal lobe…”

I asked Milton if he studied personality disorders in college, and if he knew about antisocial personality disorders.

“Sociopaths, you mean,” Milton said.

“Yes,” I said. “Do you think you are one?”

“No. I feel like I can be sympathetic and giving of help to people—but I tried to help the wrong person.”

“Do you blame Teddy for the murders?”

“It was both of us. It was him leading and me following,” Milton said. “I could have said no, but I didn’t say no.”

On February 4, 1992, Milton was in his cell in C Block when the guard in the station at the front of the tier pulled a lever and Milton’s cell popped. It’s always a bit eerie in Attica if your cell opens when you’re not expecting it to. Milton peeked out his head. The guard at his station yelled, “Visit!”

Milton lifted his mattress and removed the green pants that his body weight had pressed. In the joint, you keep the wrinkles out of your clothes by meticulously arranging them on your bed frame and laying the mattress on them, using your body weight as a kind of dry iron. Then he tossed on a brown sweater that his mom had sent him. She hadn’t come in a while, but he thought maybe one of her friends had brought her up. Milton didn’t get many visits, so he was excited. His mom would buy him one of those microwavable super burgers. He headed down the corridor. The gate at the Times Square control booth, a corridor where all four yards intersect, motored open. The guard said, “Forward.” He showed his ID card, then turned right, down the corridor, through the A Block lobby, and past the red-faced guard who used to call him “Devil.” When Milton reached the room that led to the visit area, a guard patted him down, then opened the door. He scanned a handful of faces but didn’t recognize any. He checked in with the guard perched at a wooden desk, next to a row of vending machines. The guard pointed to the elderly white couple. Now Milton recognized the man.

“Do you remember us?” Ray Bissonette, Father Joe’s younger brother, asked. He was seated next to his wife, Ann. “We wanted to come and visit and get some answers, but this is not a peace offering.”

Milton sat down.

Ray had braved the trip to Attica with Ann because he wanted to know how his brother had died. He expected the visit would be like in the movies—maybe a conversation using phone receivers, a thick pane of glass between them. He didn’t think he’d be sitting at a cabaret table, toe to toe, awkwardly close to the young man who, five years before, had killed his brother.

As I sat with Milton in the cellblock basement in early 2020, he vividly remembered that first visit with Ray and Ann almost thirty years before. He felt like the guards knew who was visiting and that they were watching him to see if he would go off. But Milton wasn’t looking to go off. “I was looking to heal them as much as possible,” he said.

Milton remembers telling Ray that his brother didn’t suffer: “The endorphins numbed his body up when I hit him in the head with a can of chow mein,” he told me matter-of-factly. “You know how you hurt yourself and it don’t hurt till later?”

I nodded.

“But there was no later for him,” he said softly.

“That’s what you told them?”

Milton nodded.

“How did they respond?”

Milton told me that Ann got up to go to the bathroom while Ray stayed and listened.

“Do you see how that could have been hard to hear for them?”

“I thought I was helping them.”

Milton’s answers had the “portrayal of passivity and bad judgment, a bid for some absolution,” Ray writes in Joe’s Story, the biography about his brother. He delivered them “in measured, gentle speech, eye contact steady and anxiety apparent. Then you remind yourself that he did it twice in ten days, and between times, was seen sharpening the hunting knife on an electric grinding wheel.”

I’ve never met the family members of the man I killed, except for E.’s sister a couple of times before the murder, when he and I would hang out. I knew they were close. I remember when we were driving around, his sister would often call him on his cell phone. If I ever sat across from her now, in a healing context, I would certainly welcome guidance from a professional on the language I should use and avoid. I don’t know what I don’t know, but I know I would need that. I wouldn’t want to inadvertently cause her more pain.

While New York’s prison system lacks protocols or structures to assist victims in preparing for an in-person meeting with an offender in prison, Texas has one. Its Department of Criminal Justice’s Victim Services Division has a program that, since the 1990s, has been providing mediators to facilitate meetings between victims and offenders in prison. Mediators work with both sides for months—as each side keeps a journal, fills out questionnaires, drafts letters—before the meeting.

The preparation could help us sort out our warped perspectives. Many in prison create false narratives that turn them into heroes, or victims, instead of villains. I’ve done it, too. For years, I pumped the narrative that I killed a gangster, not a law-abiding citizen, and in prison, that was respected. Walled off from society, we create our own social hierarchies. Those of us at the top of the pecking order—gangsters, drug dealers, stickup kids (all of whom may also be killers)—rationalized that our crimes were merely the predictable result of what we called “the life.” As I’ve mentioned, there are barely any programs that require us to engage sincerely with and take responsibility for our crimes, the pain we caused, and the lives we ruined far beyond the ones we took. I mean, who wants to think about that? It’s easier to watch TV or work out or get high or gossip about prison politics. No corrections employee has ever asked me how I’ve tried to get right, emotionally or morally, with killing a man, let alone support me in doing so. They’re not required to ask, and we’re not required to answer.

Some argue that the increasing power of the victims’ rights movement (VRM) supercharged the policies of mass incarceration. The VRM got its momentum from high-profile crimes, like the Manson murders. The killings of other white girls in the 1990s, like Polly Klaas and Kimber Reynolds, ushered in the “Three Strikes” laws that ultimately resulted in keeping people of color in prison for life. The movement was further energized by child abuse scandals involving the Catholic Church and other organizations, and, more recently, fueled by #MeToo, which in some cases led to extensions of statutes of limitations for sex offenders long after their crimes were committed. Today, victims’ voices are regularly heard and deeply considered at the front end—sentencing—and the back end—parole appearances and clemency applications. A victim’s (or their family’s) forgiveness, I’ve come to realize, will likely get someone freed quicker than any self-reflection or achievement in prison. I was surprised to read a report, however, that showed most survivors it surveyed preferred rehabilitation over retribution. Yet the former, specifically restorative justice programs, is rarely offered in American prisons.

While I sort it out on the page, I’ve met others over the years who’ve turned to the arts to better understand the pain they caused. In 2017, Joseph Wilson was about ten years into a twenty-five-years-to-life sentence for shooting and killing a man in Brooklyn. He had a linebacker’s build and an ear for music. A Christian, he was known to fellow prisoners as Preacher. He used to be a member of the Crips gang, but now he’d made the turn. Other men in the program called him “the Rain Man” of composing. One Friday afternoon, I sat in the Sing Sing auditorium and watched Joseph up on the stage singing with Joyce DiDonato, the famous soprano with short, spiked blond hair. This was Joyce’s third trip to Sing Sing, accompanying Carnegie Hall’s Musical Connections program. When Joseph first heard Joyce sing, he knew he wanted to try his hand at writing an opera for her. For the past few years, he’s been working on Tabula Rasa, a story of murder and retribution set in a futuristic dystopia. Joseph and Joyce were rehearsing a scene onstage as Craig Terry, DiDonato’s pianist, pounded the keys. DiDonato played Eohis, the lover of a murdered man, while Joseph played Katham, the man’s killer.

“I can be free again if you can forgive me,” he sings.

“I will not forget, I will not forgive,” Eohis responds. Then, in the gorgeous mezzo-soprano voice for which DiDonato is known, she bellows: “I want revenge!”

During a break, I overheard Joyce say to herself, “That’s so hard for me to sing.”

When Joseph was not making music, he was working in his office in the basement of the school building as a clerk for the Osborne Association, a nonprofit organization that runs family-oriented programs inside and outside prisons in New York. One of the programs Joseph oversaw offered men who’ve killed an outlet to cultivate remorse: the Longtermers’ Responsibility Project, a fifteen-week workshop developed by the Osborne Association. The curriculum, called Coming to Terms, is taught by one of Osborne’s facilitators. Group members learn the language of making amends, and eventually meet with a person whose family member was murdered. Toward the end of the workshop, participants are required to write an apology letter with the option to send it to the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision’s Office of Victim Assistance, or OVA, which maintains a venue for communication called the apology letter bank.

This letter bank was put in place because it is against the rules for New York prisoners to correspond directly with their victim(s) or a member of their victim’s family. (I suppose it doesn’t apply if victims seek us out, like Ray and Ann did Milton.) The OVA only consists of a corrections employee forwarding letters. Here’s the department’s language about it: “The apology letter bank is a safe system for the victim to either receive a copy of the letter of apology that was written by the prisoner; or be advised orally of its contents, when and if the victim wishes to take that step.” The OVA contacts only victims or families who are registered with the office, and the prisoner isn’t informed about whether the victim or family has read the letter.

When Joseph wrote a letter to the mother of the man he killed and sent it to the apology bank, he told me, he explained how getting married and fathering his daughter, the result of a conjugal visit, had changed how he felt about his crime. Having a family, he wrote, helped him understand the “soul investment, the feeling of being chained to someone by the heart.” Joseph feared a sort of karmic retribution, that his daughter might get murdered one day for what he did. That fear and helplessness helped him relate to his victim’s mother, if only in a small way. “It’s the internal conflict,” Joseph told me. “That’s what survivors want you to have. They want you to never imagine yourself hurting someone like that again.”

In October 2018, around the time I was interviewed by Chris Cuomo, I was living on A Gallery with Joseph in Sing Sing. When I first met him, he asked me if I’d ever sent a letter to the apology letter bank. I told him I had apologized several times publicly, in my published writings. The apology bank was a passive tool, I blustered, with no purpose other than allowing corrections officials to check off a box for fostering some form of assistance with accountability. It was bullshit. I know now, and perhaps I even knew then, that it was arrogant to suggest that my words in print equaled a personal apology. Joseph just listened. He’s wise like that. Then he said he’d try to get me into the Longtermers’ Responsibility Workshop. (In 2020, when Covid came, Longtermers, like all volunteer programs, was prohibited from coming into Sing Sing; a couple of years later, when they were allowed back in, Longtermers never returned.)

In November 2018, a month after my interview with Cuomo, I received a follow-up email from Kim and Jing, the producers. They let me know that they had met with the family, who were saying I had never contacted them to apologize or ask for forgiveness. Did I have a response? So many emotions, fear and excitement, swirled in my gut. It was the closest thing to a direct message I’d ever received from E.’s family. Would they want to meet with me? Was I ready to hear their hurt, answer their questions? Would I have to grovel? Would I have the courage, the ability, to do what Milton had—reach for their hands, look into their eyes, and say that I was sorry? If there were to be an intervention, I didn’t want it to be on Inside Evil. I didn’t want those producers to have anything to do with it. I didn’t trust them.

“During this documentary, I’m sure your cameras have caught the hurt that I caused, hurt that I’ve been able to see up close, and the hurt that I still rationalize in many ways…” I dictated a response to the producers, through a colleague, over the prison phone. “Forgiveness, I’ve read, can be transformative, especially for the victims. Yet I’m not sure how to go about asking for forgiveness. I’m not sure about a lot with all of this.… Perhaps it is best to do so in a letter.”

I asked Joseph and a couple of other guys for their help. When I eventually wrote my apology letter, I addressed it to E.’s sister and mother. I put his family through a horrible time: Weeks and months of doubt, hope, and helplessness passed before his body finally washed ashore. I admitted my foul behavior at the trials in the letter: acting innocent, hiding behind my lawyer, making outbursts, staying silent at sentencing, lying on the stand. I told them I hated that I was the maker of all their hurt. “I was a criminal, empty inside, and that’s what made me capable of this,” I wrote. I also explained how I felt guilty for having written about him so dispassionately, and the murder so glibly. At that moment, all the pride I had from my work turned to shame. I suppose this was the humbling insight I was meant to get from writing the apology letter. I asked them, “Is there a way, going forward, that I can better represent his memory?”

I never heard back.

Then, in the fall of 2019, I published a magazine piece in the Washington Post, about how it all unfolded with Cuomo and how I came to write my apology letter. The subtitle read, “I built a career as a prolific journalist. So why did it take me so long to write a letter to the family of the man I killed?” There were a lot of reasons, but beyond blaming the system for not fostering more restorative justice programs, I also blame my own fear and ignorance. There was so much I didn’t know about the language of amends.

In the summer of 2020, E.’s sister sent a letter to the editor of the Post. In it, she questioned the authenticity of my apology and whether I was even capable of remorse. It was in this letter that she asked that I no longer use E.’s name in my writing. Since the end of 2020, I have not.

Still, I do wonder what part the system should play in it all. New York’s Office of Victim Assistance is being outshined by Texas’s Victim Services Division. Since the ’90s, Texas has facilitated almost eight hundred mediations between prisoners and their victims. How does the Texas system have this long-standing restorative justice program in place and not New York? This kind of assistance would have likely been welcomed by Ray and Ann, and it certainly would have helped Milton and Teddy. Anything is better than what is currently in place to prepare each party for a face-to-face meeting, which is nothing. To this day, family members of victims are simply showing up in New York prison visiting rooms, looking for answers from the people who hurt them. And I’m afraid that many of us are telling them the wrong things.

“The wheel didn’t really sharpen the hunting knife,” Milton told Ray Bissonette in the visiting room. “It only roughed it up…”

Milton told Ray about Attica’s tough environment, and the mean names the guards called him. He told them about his upbringing, the violence, the fatherless household. Milton told the couple that he had earned thirty-three credits toward a degree from Canisius College, from which Ray and his big brother both graduated.

Weeks later, Ray writes, he and Ann went to see Teddy Simmons in Auburn, another unannounced visit. Ray describes Teddy entering the visit room in a red long-sleeve shirt with his signature thick eyeglasses, scanning the room and returning to the guard at the desk, who pointed to Ray and Ann, a few rows away. Much smaller than Milton, Teddy was about five foot ten and maybe 170 pounds. He approached, looked closer at Ray, recognized him, and sat down. Ray told Teddy why they were there.

“Sometimes you try to find something out and then wish you didn’t know,” Teddy told the couple as they listened in despair and horror. “Your brother did not die an easy death.” Teddy blamed Milton for the killings, saying he was in the hallway when Milton went off. He seemed to be contradicting himself from one sentence to the next. He told the couple that during both murders he was pressured by Milton, and that the priests actually appreciated him pleading with Milton to not kill them. Teddy said that Milton ordered him to look in both priests’ eyes before Milton killed them. When Teddy turned to his plight in prison, his tone oozed self-pity.

Ray’s overall take echoed that of the prosecution’s in both Milton’s and Teddy’s cases: “Teddy was the mind and Milton the muscle,” Ray writes. “Nothing about Teddy’s appearance, manner, or circumstances at Auburn argued against that impression.”

In February 1997, Ray and Ann visited Milton again, this time marking the ten-year anniversary of Father Joe’s murder.

Milton told Ray what he told me, that his troubles stemmed from being a follower. At one point during the visit, Ray writes, Milton reached out and held Ray’s hand and, with watery eyes, said, “I’m sorry about your brother.” He took Ann’s hand and apologized to her, too.

“That’s what he told us, that nothing he could do would ever compensate for what he’d done,” Ann told the Buffalo News in a ten-year anniversary piece. “I never felt he was putting on an act.”

“Milton always wanted to pull himself up by the bootstraps,” Dennis C. Vacco, by then the attorney general of New York, reflected in the article about the case he prosecuted years ago. “I give Milton an A for ingenuity and initiative, but an F for the route he took.”

On the outside, the article was a sentimental piece remembering the two priests, with a hint of forgiveness, but on the inside, it was another reminder of what Milton had done. And the guards at Attica, who surely read the Buffalo News, weren’t exactly a sentimental bunch.

9
The Preppy Is Hooked on Heroin and Sent to Solitary
[ROB]

It was the spring of 1988, and Robert Chambers was off to prison for five to fifteen years. Cuffed and shackled, Rob rattled on the caged bus to Rikers, wondering what his new peers were going to think about all those tabloid headlines: “Wild Sex Killed Jenny,” “Sex Play ‘Got Rough,’” and “‘She Raped Me.’”

His mother could no longer fix it. Neither could Jack Litman. Rob thought about suicide. But it would destroy his mom. This was his new life. Rob thought about something that Jennifer’s father had said. Something about Rob being so used to everyone cleaning up his spilt milk. It was true. He knew the man hated him. He hated himself.

At first, he waited for a few weeks in a Rikers unit that detained high-profile people, the one Shane was sent to years later. The others had their own problems. Rob met Anthony “Tony the Roach” Rampino, one of John Gotti’s guys, whom the guards had cuffed to his cell bed. The Roach called Rob “kid” and schooled him about his new home. Rob brought the Roach extra fruit from the pantry and listened and nodded and smiled as the gangster told him the dos and don’ts.

Rob’s first stop upstate was Downstate Correctional Facility, a reception prison in Fishkill, New York. There he was issued new white T-shirts and underwear and green uniforms. His new identity was ironed on his left-breast shirt pockets: “88A3630.” His mop of preppy hair was sheared off. Rob transferred to Sing Sing, but only for a few weeks; he was then sent to Great Meadow Correctional Facility, or Comstock, one of New York’s toughest max joints, about two hundred miles north of New York City. Cells were small, with open tiers stacked atop one another, and even the yelling felt violent.

“Yo, Chambers! Don’t sign into PC,” tumbled from the tier above. “Put down for the yard when you get off quarantine.” PC was protective custody, or pussy city, where guys who couldn’t live in the general population would go. When guys told prison officials the names of those who were harassing them, or worse, they were sent to PC. Word spread fast in the joint. A prisoner clerk had seen the change sheet, which listed the internal cell moves as well as the prisoners transferring in and out, and noticed Rob’s name on the incoming column. In New York, there’s no Aryan Brotherhood, just a bunch of knockaround guys, mostly from tough parts of New York City and Long Island. Rob had heard that protective custody would be a tough way to serve time. Even though his crime—woman, sex, strangulation—put him low in the pecking order, the white boys accepted him. They knew he had money. They’d soon give him his wings.

The first time Rob tried heroin, it was a little speck of grayish powder folded in a small square of glossy magazine paper. Three bags of it had cost him fifty dollars, a Western Union payment to someone with a Spanish name and a Bronx address. He made a phone call. Told a lie. Made the payment. He sniffed it, felt the drip, and threw up in his toilet. He’d tried all kinds of drugs before, when he was partying in New York, but this was different. He loved the way it made him feel—or not feel—in his cell, in the yard. His brain remembered the effects of the Demerol he had taken after a knee surgery from a basketball injury at Saint David’s. It took the pain away.

Rob soon learned that doing time was easier when he was high on heroin. At least that’s how it seems when you’re high. You tend to forget how you feel when it runs out and you’re hungover and depressed in your cell. You only remember how good heroin makes you feel when you’re on it, alone in your cell, staring down decades. It’s exciting to escape and feel joy in such a dark place. You don’t know what to do with your crime. Your future is lost. You’re miserable and fearful. So you do dope.

While Rob was settling into prison, tucked behind the thirty-foot-high, two-foot-thick wall, in an eight-by-five cell, his crime was still being rehashed for entertainment. “Tonight the Trash TV season begins,” writes Tom Shales in a September 1989 essay for the Washington Post. “ABC airs ‘The Preppie Murder,’ a faintly sickening exercise in pandering futility, and the sleazestakes are underway. ‘Preppie Murder’ is a disreputable example of an unsavory genre, the ‘fact-based’ film derived from lurid news events.” Mike Sheehan, the detective who picked Rob up at his home, had been a paid consultant on the show; he was played by Danny Aiello. William Baldwin played Rob. Jennifer, played by Lara Flynn Boyle, approaches Rob in a bar and tells him, “You’re the best sex I ever had.” The Levins didn’t participate in the production. They didn’t watch the movie. Neither did Rob.

The first time Rob saw a knife fight was in the Comstock yard. A bunch of Puerto Rican and Dominican guys were stabbing each other, the guards yelling, “Drop the weapons! Get on the wall!” The other white guys were smoking cigarettes, real cool like, as if they were watching TV. Within a couple of years, Rob started responding the same way, numb to it all. Prison has a way of turning any feelings of empathy into apathy. Heroin helped, too. Doing dope, or constantly being high on whatever, keeps you emotionally static. It’s why Rob has always sounded detached when he made excuses for his behavior.

Drugs also quell fear. At the beginning of my bid, I used to get high with Flaco, a guy with a teardrop tattoo on his cheek. We were porters on the same tier in Clinton, and that meant our cells stayed open during the day. After we swept and mopped, we could run around the whole cellblock. Flaco showed me the spot in the crevice of the radiator on the tier where he hid his shank, a sharpened piece of a metal locker. A piece of plastic was tied off at the tip, which he explained had actual shit on it; the plastic kept the bacteria alive. When he stabbed his future enemy, he told me, he would aim for the gut so that the man would suffer an infection on top of the wound. I stared at Flaco, slack-jawed, and nodded, making a mental note to never piss him off. It’s not lost on me that I’m writing a book that challenges these true crime tropes of evil, but some of us in here are demons. But, then again, who knows if Flaco’s still like this. Maybe that was just a moment in his past and he’s been able to work out those inner demons as, I’d like to think, I’ve worked out mine.

Rob soon started pissing positive for opiates. He spent a lot of time in solitary. For fresh air, he’d run through a gauntlet of guards, who would shove him and hit him with sticks, all to be outside in a cage for an hour. Each man had his own cage, connected to the others, like a row of dog kennels. You could talk to each other through the wiring, pass drugs, do push-ups. The guards did the gauntlet thing only to the new guys; then they left you alone.

“One time they ran in my cell and jammed a baton in my mouth, because they said I tried to swallow drugs,” he told me. “The tip of the stick had peanut butter on it. They had just searched another guy’s cell and stuck the tip in a peanut bar jar. So they ran in my cell, roughed me up, scraped my gums, and I’m bleeding out of my mouth. They took me to the infirmary to X-ray my stomach. Nothing there. Then the nurse was patching me up, and she’s like, ‘Why does he have peanut butter in his mouth?’ When I get back to my cell, guys are yelling down the tier that they’d just heard them talking about me on the radio. They were reporting that I’d just assaulted guards. It was remarkable.”

The Associated Press wrote about the incident, and the article was reprinted in local papers across America. It happened in mid-April 1990. A state corrections spokeswoman at the time, Amy Colodny, said that when officers asked Rob to leave his cell so they could search it, he “went to put on a pair of slippers … took something from under his bed and then he dove for the toilet to flush it.” Three guards ran inside and tried to keep him from flushing it down. “Chambers reached out and struck one officer in [the] chest and flushed the toilet,” Colodny said. One of the guards said he saw Rob put something in his mouth, so once they got him subdued, they checked it for contraband. They didn’t find anything. The struck officer was treated at the facility hospital and went right back to work. Rob was treated for a swollen lip, charged with assault on staff, sent to solitary, and lost four more months of “good time,” which could have shortened his sentence. For every infraction he received, hearing officers had the discretion to take away his “good time.” And they took it all.

Rob was mostly sent to solitary or the special housing unit (SHU) for drugs. Ninety days, six months, a year. The more infractions he racked up, the stiffer the punishment. During his first fifteen years, Rob had about five dirty urines and the assault on staff; he’d later get a possession charge. Each prison had its own SHU cellblock, and Rob made pit stops in all of them. After a while, he didn’t much mind the box. If anything, it was safer, and he could still cop drugs.

While in SHU, you could receive semi-contact visits in a booth. You could kiss through caged squares, big enough for pursed lips to fit through, and hold hands through slots. Or someone could pass you balloons of drugs. Sometimes Shawn Kovell came to see Rob. Other girls came, too. He tried to avoid having his mom visit him in the box. He got three showers a week, one rec hour a day. But they’d drape you in cuffs and shackles and chains every time you’d leave your cell, so sometimes Rob didn’t even bother. Plus, sometimes guys would randomly sling concoctions of shit and piss at you when you were walking down the tier. The cellblock carried an offensive stench, a mix of the worst human odors. Solitary in the summer was dangerously oppressive. No cell fans. They took all your property and bagged it up for when your SHU time was over. So the cells were pretty bare. But back then, Rob received a lot of subscriptions and fan mail. He kept a stash of dope to sniff. He read, did push-ups, jerked off, slept a lot. At a certain point, it started to feel like home.

Back then, the state had one prison dedicated strictly to solitary. Men serving long stints would eventually transfer from their prison solitary units to Southport Correctional Facility, in Pine City, central New York. When the stints were over, they’d transfer to another max joint, usually not the one from which they had come. Rob wound up in Southport for several stints. Southport had single cells, tiers stacked atop tiers. The cell bars were covered by a grate with small holes to prevent a prisoner from sticking out his arms. COs delivered food trays by opening and closing the feed-up slot outside the cell.

The ingenuity of those who were locked in SHU was impressive. To pass items from one cell to another, you had to roll up a piece of magazine paper, attach a thread from the state-issued cotton blanket, and shoot it through the small holes of the grate covering your bars. You shot to your left or right, depending on who you were trying to reach. It was called fishing. Your friend in the other cell would shoot his line out, they’d get entangled, and then one side would pull in, like reeling in a line, and then you were connected. At this point you could exchange items back and forth. Guys yelled from up and down the tier all day. Everyone knew whose cell the drugs would be coming from. And with drugs on the line, they had to fish with precision, reel the line in fast, or else a bandit on the tier would cast out their own and intercept it.

Since no one could really get at anyone else, because everyone was locked in, guys did a lot of grimy shit. This is how serious beefs spilled from solitary over to the general population. But the bandits who jacked the lines didn’t leave their cells for rec or even showers in order to avoid getting piss or shit thrown at them when they walked down the tier. These guys were called “box monsters.” They would purposefully rack up misbehavior reports to get more box time. They’d rather remain in the box than deal with the consequences of their actions in the general population.

The 1994 crime bill’s “truth-in-sentencing” provision offered states money to build new prisons if they agreed to change their laws to make fewer people eligible for parole and keep violent offenders in prison for at least 85 percent of their sentence. And so, when there is no longer any “good time” for prisoners to earn, they have nothing to lose and start behaving badly. New York was one of the twenty-eight states that took that federal money and built another prison specifically to house men serving long-term stints in solitary.

In July 1999, New York’s second SHU prison, Upstate Correctional Facility, opened for business. It’s where I served six months in 2006 for smuggling contraband. The prison, in Malone, near the Canadian border, was a shiny new hell with double-bunk cells and a shower and rec pen attached to the back of each cell, designed so we wouldn’t have to leave the cells for much. Solitary with another person may not seem like solitary, but in many ways it’s worse. I remember my first bunky was a Blood who acted like a buffoon and spent his days on the floor by the crack of the door shooting his line down the tier fishing tobacco, Buttman porno magazines, and hood novels. Guys would communicate in code: “Flags” were stamps; “Foxy,” the 1990s female rapper Foxy Brown, was tobacco; “Dino,” as in dynamite, was matchsticks; “Skateboard” was a piece of matchbook striker; “Al,” as in the R&B singer Al Green, was weed; “Alpo,” a brand of dog food, was heroin. (This was before synthetics like K2 and Suboxone took over the prison drug market in the 2010s; I’m sure they have new codes for those drugs.) So someone would yell, “Yo, I got that Al. Who got Foxy?” Translation: They were looking to trade weed for tobacco.

My bunky, the Blood, was a box monster. He’d been there for years by the time I arrived in 2006, and he’d caught so many tickets that now he was being punished with a “loaf diet,” which meant three times a day he received bread baked with cabbage. I couldn’t believe shit like this really went down. The system had swallowed me up, and I was now in its bowels. I shared some of the food on my tray with my bunky. I felt bad for the guy, even though I wanted to punch his face most of the day. The loaf, believe it or not, was actually pretty good. They baked it fresh.

The box is where I took my first steps toward becoming a writer. I got lucky and was moved to another cell, with a better bunky. He was in for shaking his girlfriend’s baby to death. He was a square. He’d been to college. When I told him I wanted to be a writer, he asked me what I read. I started ringing off books by John Grisham. He frowned. Then he made me a list of titles, which I mailed to my mom. When the package arrived, works by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Trumbo, and Orwell spilled through the slot. I enjoyed Hemingway’s simple sentences, Gatsby made me dream of my comeback, and Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath made me realize that things could be worse, as did Johnny Got His Gun.

Among the books was Jack Henry Abbott’s slim book of angry prison letters, In the Belly of the Beast. “If I were an animal housed in a zoo in quarters of these dimensions,” Abbott wrote, “the humane society would have the zookeeper arrested for cruelty.” Abbott had a finger-in-your-face bellicose tone. Everything was war. He used stark language like “convict” and “comrade.” Guards were “pigs.” “The only time they appear human,” he wrote, “is when you have a knife at their throats.” In the Belly of the Beast can be a false friend for an impressionable prisoner. But Abbott inspired me when he declared that the most dangerous prisoners were readers and writers—that resonated for me, in solitary, with my pile of books and aspirations of becoming a writer.

Yet to hear Rob tell me that he felt safest in the box is testament to how all these years in prison have left him, and so many of us, deeply traumatized. The fog I’d see in Rob’s gaze was once described by Stuart Grassian, a psychiatrist and former faculty member of Harvard Medical School, as one of the effects of long-term solitary: “After even a relatively brief period of time in such a situation an individual is likely to descend into a mental torpor or ‘fog,’ in which alertness, attention, and concentration all become impaired.”

In 2022, New York passed the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act, or HALT. A dirty urine sample, the charge that often sent Rob to solitary, was no longer enough to send somebody to the box. In fact, they’ve pretty much stopped doing random urine tests. And solitary itself is not what it used to be. The new law requires that SHU prisoners, after two weeks, be allowed out of their cells to attend programs. Granted, they are wrapped in chains and often locked to a bolted chair, but they are now given a phone tablet to use in their cell for several hours to call friends and family. Studies have shown that putting people in solitary for years, even months or weeks, can harm their physical and mental health; the United Nations regards solitary confinement longer than fifteen days and without meaningful human contact as torture. Back then, when Rob was serving most of his time, they punished you for being a drug addict. Now, in New York prisons, medical is issuing Suboxone strips to prisoners who can establish that they are addicted to opiates; it helps prisoners with heroin cravings, and the naloxone in Suboxone helps prevent overdoses, which happens often with today’s fentanyl-laced heroin.

I was sitting on a stool in my Sullivan cell, writing this book, when a guy appeared before my gate and reached his hand through my bars. In his palm was the paper of a Domino sugar packet folded into a square. Drug dealers in the joint used sugar packets to bag up their product; they dumped out the sugar, tore the packets apart. The powder didn’t stick to the paper, and the lightly waxed insides were good for holding dope. (Torn pieces of glossy magazine pages worked, too.) “Money said check this out,” the guy said, dumping it in my hand.

A few weeks back, I’d bought a few Percocets off Money; he must’ve thought I did dope, so he sent me a bag to check out. But I was prayed up and protected. Reading my AA Reflections book every morning, talking to God, meditating, trying to stay sober one day at a time. Sullivan had no help, no AA meetings, but so many people were working hard to get me out. I didn’t want to blow my second chance. I dumped the sugar packet right back in the fella’s palm.

“All right, no disrespect, John,” he said.

A part of me wondered if it was any good. A half hour later, when the gates opened for inside rec, I heard, “Code blue! Code blue!”

It was Jose, in the cell above mine. Jose, the seventy-year-old Cuban who cooked me rice and plantains and fried mackerel. He’d been in prison thirty-nine years, and I’d asked Chloe Serinsky, over at the Center for Appellate Litigation, to represent him for a clemency petition. Another prisoner had passed by Jose’s cell. Jose looked like he was dead, lying on his bed with his mouth open. The other prisoner called Jose. No response. Then he yelled for a CO, who radioed a code blue. More COs ran in the block, then a nurse, then a stretcher, then a red bag.

I felt grateful and angry and ashamed and scared at the same time. Grateful to God that He gave me the strength to refuse that shit. Angry that this motherfucker Money saw me as some kind of guinea pig who would try his shit out. Ashamed of myself that I’d recently relapsed. Scared that Jose wouldn’t make it.

Rob had told me he laid off the dope during this time, the 2010s, because there were always bad batches laced with fentanyl. It wasn’t like that when he was doing dope on his first bid. If he did anything, by the time I met him, it was mostly Suboxone. It’s what I did, too, sometimes—though I hated myself when I did, because it opened the door for guys to offer you other things, like fentanyl-laced dope. And when you’re a recovering addict, you don’t want people to come to you out of the blue, in your private space, and open their palm with a bag of shit. But that’s prison.

Jose was dead. No pulse, he wasn’t breathing. They started CPR—palms pushing on his chest, squeezing oxygen into his mouth. The block was quiet. All the shit we talk about COs, but here they were responding professionally, working to save Jose’s life. And shame on us, the prisoners, because while I suspected Jose must have sniffed the drugs I had just said no to, others knew for sure what it was and didn’t say shit.

This is the world I live in, the world Rob has lived in for much of his life, a world in which greedy drug dealers put the blame on the addict. Jose knew what he was getting into, the thinking goes. New York passed a Good Samaritan law, the one Shane told men about in Sing Sing while showing them how to use Narcan upon their release, so that people won’t leave overdose victims alone out of fear. They can call 911 without worrying about getting locked up for any drugs found on the scene. The law doesn’t apply in prison, but there ain’t too many Good Samaritans in the joint anyway.

When I was out, before prison, I was that kind of selfish and greedy dope dealer. I sold heroin in the late ’90s, when people were getting turned out on OxyContin, the notoriously overprescribed pharmaceutical drug from Purdue, marketed under the false premise that it wasn’t addictive. What we know now is that OxyContin actually increased the demand for dope, which was a cheaper alternative. I was making money off desperate people.

I sold to my own brother Eugene, the one who was bipolar. When I called him from prison, he always seemed out of it, numbed by the drugs, a diminished version of the man I remember when I was home. By 2011, when I was back at Attica, Eugene was living in a rooming house in Times Square, one of those seedy converted hotels for people living on the margins. He overdosed on opiates in his room. He was alone. No Narcan. He had been dead for days. No one knew he was gone until the neighbors noticed the smell.

Above me in Sullivan, the nurses had just hit Jose with Narcan. He came back from the dead.

In 1990, Rob was transferred farther north from Comstock, to Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, just miles from the Canadian border. The prison’s wall loomed over the main road and the whole town—its homes, its car dealership, its convenience store, its bar. The first fight Rob had, if that’s what you want to call it, was in Clinton. “The guy hit me so hard, I felt like my heels were on fire,” Rob told me. “I was sticking up for another guy.”

At first, he did okay in Clinton. He was taking college courses, had no misbehavior reports, and was even drug-free for a bit. He was trying to find himself in prison, which is difficult for any young man to do. But his persona continued to resonate in the media. In 1991, he was mentioned in Bret Easton Ellis’s satirical novel, American Psycho. Ellis’s protagonist, Patrick Bateman, is an overwrought investment banker who’s also a serial killer. In one scene, Bateman is leaving a lunch date at a restaurant with a woman:

When I come out of Vanities on the street, putting on my Wayfarers, chewing a Cert, I murmur something to myself, and then I kiss her on the cheek and make up something else.

“Sorry it took so long, had to call my lawyer.”

“Oh?” she acts concerned—the dumb bitch.

“Just a friend of mine.” I shrug. “Bobby Chambers. He’s in prison. Some friends of his, well mainly me, are trying to re-mount his defense,” I say with another shrug.

By 1992, Rob made his first appearance before the parole board. “I remember hearing the corrections spokesman on the radio before I went to the hearing,” Rob told me, “assuring the public that I’d be denied parole. When I left the hearing, the counselor handed me paperwork, which said I was denied. I mean, I’d been in the box for much of my first five years, so I really didn’t expect to get parole.”

At Clinton, Rob found himself at the center of another story that would wind up in the tabloids. Holly McCormick, a pretty, tall blonde, one of the many women who wrote and offered to visit, would drive up from Maryland. The prison town was in the Adirondacks but vibed Appalachia. One time, after Holly visited Rob, she was walking home to the place that she had rented in the town of Dannemora. She felt a car slowly following her as she approached her door.

“There was a knock at my door,” a fifty-six-year-old Holly told me in 2022, when I called her over the phone from the cellblock. “When I went to answer, the guy pushed in my door. He had on a guard suit, a scruffy beard—he looked really mean.”

Holly started to cry.

“It’s something I will never forget. Something a woman will never forget. He raped me, he held my wrists and my arms. And when he left, he was like, ‘You’re a good fuck!’”

Holly told Rob and his lawyer what had happened. Then the tabloids came calling.

“The press made me look like a piece of shit because I was visiting somebody convicted of murder. And, you know, she must be running drugs,” Holly said. After some back-and-forth, Holly admitted to me that she did smuggle drugs to Rob during this time.

While Rob was at Clinton, Holly also visited Allyboy, one of his friends. It’s what happens in prison when you get stacks of mail from women. Guys want you to hook them up with a girl. For love. For conjugal visits. For a drug mule. Or for all of the above. Rob told me he had no idea if Holly’s claims about being raped were true. He remembers the tabloids suspected some sort of scheme by him to get a transfer to a prison closer to the city. Days after Holly went public, Rob returned to his cell and smelled something. There was a wet spot of what smelled like gasoline on his bed; it had seeped into his blanket and sheets. His neighbors said that a CO had kept trying to throw matches in his cell.

Ten years after Rob’s stint in Clinton, I landed there, struggling with a drug addiction of my own. It was September 2004. I had been found guilty months before, and I remember a friend on Rikers consoling me, telling me I’d probably land in Clinton, and it was a good spot. I’d have a TV in my cell. I’d eat well. At twenty-seven, with a sentence of twenty-eight years to life, I left Rikers on a bus, relieved. Even though it was sad seeing New York City for the last time, leaving Rikers felt like a better chapter of your life was about to begin—even if that life is a life in prison. After a couple months in Sing Sing, I was drafted—my property packed and tagged, my body cuffed and shackled—and bused nearly six hours north. When we rolled into the town of Dannemora, I looked up at the ominous Clinton wall that loomed over the road, just like Rob had, hoping to find my place beyond it.

Built on a hill, the Clinton yard was like no other prison yard in America. In the 1970s and 1980s, it even had a ski jump. (Too many injuries made them shut it down.) It featured a bunch of courts where guys, six at a time, hung out and cooked and smoked weed and sniffed dope and talked shit and played chess and Scrabble and cards. Some of the nicer courts had stone floors, and in the summer, tomatoes and zucchini and basil sprouted in gardens. Each court, sectioned off by makeshift wooden fences, had its own metal drum, a makeshift stove. COs issued wood biweekly. At night, the hill lit up with burning fires, prisoners keeping warm like the homeless did in the Bronx in the ’80s, standing around fires on abandoned lots.

It was a violent yard, too. Between 2006 and 2015, an average of seventy-one prisoner-on-prisoner assaults took place every year, some involving a weapon. Clinton was where I first saw such an assault: they smashed a man’s head with a rock, chased him with a log of wood, shanked him, and threw him down a hill.

It’s where I tasted fried mackerel for the first time, dipped in batter and coated in crackers, served with oily octopus rice and fresh cilantro; the first time I had pepperoni sauce with crushed tomatoes and fresh basil and oregano; the first time I plucked those same herbs from a garden along with fresh tomatoes and strawberries; the first, and likely the last, time I split firewood by throwing it on a sharp cylinder buried in the ground.

But I wasn’t good at gardening or cutting wood.

I was good at getting dope into the joint. It made me feel important, and sniffing heroin brought me bliss, albeit followed by misery when it ran out. There’s nothing quite like a dope high. The heroin drip that falls down your throat moments after you sniff it—it’s a harsh, medicinal taste, but a familiar one you’ve learned to love because you know the feeling that will soon follow. This was before fentanyl. If you had a bunch of it, the key was to not sniff it for more than three days in a row, or else you’d get sick when you ran out. But for the most part, we were weekend warriors in the joint. On the court, I hung out with Caz, a wild Scottish white kid who grew up in Sunset Park, a Brooklyn neighborhood populated by Puerto Ricans. He had a bald head and a big nose, up which he snorted exorbitant amounts of dope. He was serving twenty years for armed robberies. Back then, Caz was a more seasoned prisoner than me. He knew I used to sell a lot of drugs, was fresh off the street, and still had connections. Right next to our court were the Rat Hunters, a Puerto Rican gang. It was convenient, in a way, to have the Rat Hunters next to us. They always knew when someone was about to get hit.

Caz knew who went on visits. When we found someone we could trust, I called my former drug-dealing partner on the street, and he’d meet the guy’s girl (it was always a girl) and give her two balloons of heroin, two grams in each. One would go to the guy who brought it back from the visit, and the other balloon would come to me. Fifty percent was steep, but that was the going rate when someone else was bringing in your drugs.

The drugs arrived on the weekend. My guy would get his visits on Sundays. The whole day, until I had the balloon in my hand, my stomach was filled with anxiety. In the morning, I’d push a broom and swing a mop with Flaco, the one with the teardrop and shit-tipped shank, and then go lock in my cell, half watching the TV, and pack my net bag with a few pepperoni sticks and a plastic bowl and head to the yard in the afternoon. We gathered around a grill. Bobby tended to the fire, and Caz chopped and browned the onions and garlic and pepperoni and spun the sauce. When they served the bowls, I was too anxious to enjoy the meals I had dreamed about on Rikers. I was praying everything would go smoothly with the move.

Meanwhile, our guy, with a dab of Vaseline behind his ear, would be in the visit room with his girl. She’d have traveled up on a charter bus all night from New York City, packed with other visitors who were dropped off at other prisons in the region. With a kiss, she’d push the two balloons in his mouth, and he would wait for his moment. When a new visitor came in, the guard at the desk was distracted for a few seconds. That’s all he needed. He would swipe the Vaseline from behind his ear, snatch the balloons from his mouth, slide his hand in his pants from behind, feel for his asshole, and push the balloons up, like a baseball pitcher—looking, winding, throwing—then slamming it home.

At 6:30 p.m., we had the option to go from the yard to night Mass. Clinton’s church is the most beautiful structure I’ve ever seen in a prison, with its stones and Appalachian red oak pews—paid for by Lucky Luciano—and stained-glass windows with biblical scenes crafted by prisoners. The church was on top of the hill, on the edge of the wall, a real sanctuary, and in the winter, the hedges and the roof would be covered in snow, picture-perfect. In those years, I’m ashamed to say, Luciano’s church served me only as a safe place to pick up drugs. Walking into the church from the snowy yard, I felt dead inside. The church smelled of wood and incense; the guilt of the men inside seemed to overwhelm the hall. During Mass, I’d tear open the balloon with my teeth, rip a piece of paper from the Bible, and sprinkle a bit for me and Caz to sniff in the pews, on our knees, as the father said, “Now let us pray.”

I bagged up the dope later in my cell, ripping out pages from Esquire into a bunch of squares, sprinkling in beige powder, folding, taping. That’s when I learned how the gloss on the pages prevented the dope from sticking. You’d get about thirty so-called jail bags out of a gram. The next day would be fun. Caz and I sang House of Pain’s “Jump Around.” Bobby played Scrabble. After giving out a few bags to the fellas, a few to the Rat Hunters, and a few to Flaco, I gave the rest to Caz to sell. Six jail bags was a hundred dollars in my Western Union account. I barely made enough to pay my partner in the street for the cost of the drugs. When we ran out, I’d become depressed and tell Caz I was done. “My mama didn’t raise a quitter,” he’d say.

After Rob told his dad about the gasoline incident in his cell, Bob Chambers reported it to an official in Albany, and Rob was immediately transferred to Shawangunk Correctional Facility, a small maximum-security prison in the Catskills, near Sullivan, which had opened in the mid-1980s and housed high-profile prisoners. When Holly showed up there out of the blue, Rob refused the visit. He felt bad about what might have happened to Holly, but he had his own problems. And he hated that the whole thing had turned into another spectacle.

“Prison officials yesterday denied there was a fire in Robert Chambers’s cell last week—spurring a lawyer for the so-called Preppie Killer to accuse officials of orchestrating a coverup,” a Daily News article read. “Lawyer Brian O’Dwyer also demanded yesterday that rape charges be brought against a guard who he says coerced a frequent female visitor of Chambers’ into having sex.”

At Shawangunk, in 1993, Rob was with Jimmy Burke, a.k.a. “Jimmy the Gent.” Robert De Niro had played the man in Goodfellas, which had just come out. (In the movie, they called him Jimmy Conway.) “You know you’re killing your mom, right?” the real-life mobster told Rob. “You gotta stop with the drugs.”

“I met a lot of guys over the years,” Rob told me, “and at the time, I didn’t realize how dangerous they were. I think society looks at these guys and thinks, ‘These guys are killers and schemers.’ And I mean, they are—but they were kind and empathetic to my mom. That really touched me.”

It could be that a lot of guys felt for Rob’s mother because she was a public representation of our own. Many criminals are mama’s boys. I am. With no fathers around, we become close to our mothers but also put them through so much pain and shame. I think about Phyllis Chambers, her strength and humility. The life she envisioned for Rob died when he killed Jennifer. He became a shell of the man she had dreamed he would be. There are rumors out there, so many narratives, that she knew he did it and enabled him, protected him. Of course she did. She was his mother.

On a November morning in 1994, when Rob’s cell opened for breakfast, walkie-talkies went wild, crackling with voices.

“Everyone lock in!”

All was quiet. A couple hours later, Rob heard a report on the radio that four prisoners in Shawangunk had escaped. He knew the four guys: Keith Hart, Patrick Proctor, John Beuther, and Sean Ryan. A Hell’s Kitchen Irishman who’d gone away for murder in 1977, Ryan had pulled off a similar escape from Rikers Island while awaiting trial. He hacksawed through bars, lowered himself from a two-story window with tied-up sheets, and swam down the East River to freedom. Ryan was caught four months later in Boston, trying to board an Ireland-bound plane.

This attempt was more of the same. The four were in the prison’s close supervision unit. They made it out of their cells, cut through their bars with smuggled hacksaw blades, and from the cellblock courtyard made it to Shawangunk’s main yard, a large open grass field that had a full-sized softball field, soccer field, and football field. A pal who had recently gotten out was supposed to tie off a rope to a tree, on higher ground in the woods across the street, and with a crossbow shoot the slack of the rope into the yard. The guys were then supposed to tie the rope to the post and shimmy-crawl to clear the barbed wire atop the fence. As I talked to men who knew the guys involved, the four were initially supposed to wait on the roof for the arrow, but the crossbow guy didn’t show (drunk, apparently, while waiting in his car), so they headed down to the yard, climbed the razor fences, and made a run for it. They were all quickly caught. Rob was relieved the press kept his name out of it, but he still suffered some of the consequences. The prison was locked down, and all the white guys were transferred out.

Rob landed in Wende, a small maximum-security prison on the outskirts of Buffalo. He stayed there a couple of years, then wound up in Green Haven, in 1997, in the town of Stormville. It’s where I would get stabbed a decade later.

In 2008, I landed in Green Haven with a friend of E.’s. We were all from the same Brooklyn housing project. We played on the same monkey bars together, sold drugs together, then tried to kill one another. When we saw each other in the prison hallways, E.’s friend and I spent weeks and months giving each other daily daps and expressing fake love. Violence in prison, just like the drug game, is treacherous, each move calculated like a dance. When I killed E., he never saw it coming. He was in the passenger seat dialing his cell phone. Now his friend in prison was waiting for the right moment. Word had spread that I was the one who killed his man, and he knew he had to get me. I saw him one morning in the yard, and when he pulled me in, I thought it was for another embrace. But he grabbed a fistful of my sweatshirt in one hand, and with the other shoved a shank six times into my lung.

After I got stabbed in Green Haven, I got stuck on an involuntary protection unit and then transferred to Attica in the summer of 2009. I stayed there for eight years. During my time there, I joined the creative writing workshop and the AA group, which met twice a week in the auditorium. It was good timing, learning about myself in recovery while learning how to write. In the back rows, guys would jerk each other off. Those who came for recovery sat up front with the outside guests, who were generous and kind, bringing in Folgers and cookies and recovery literature. Volunteers hailed from surrounding cities like Buffalo and Rochester. Sometimes their stories offered strength and hope, and it would make us vulnerable with each other, if only for a few minutes.

Once a year, we had a picnic in the summer, and I’d do step work with a banker who’d been bringing recovery to Attica for years. He was NBA tall and sported a Rolex. I loved the guy. He knew me, knew my ego, knew it cloaked my inferiority complex. He told me, straight up, that my instincts were warped. Him taking me through the twelve steps—listing my resentments (my father for killing himself when I was twelve, the system for judging me so harshly and never helping me), my fears (being found out, not being good enough to compete with real writers, never being forgiven or accepted because I murdered a man)—helped me clarify my thoughts and develop my voice as a writer. I’d never confessed my fears to another man. I’d never cried with another man. I did that with my sponsor during a picnic in Attica. I told him things about myself that I was ashamed of and hadn’t told anyone before, like my experiences with the super. He told me he’d done some of the same things, had the same shame, and that it was okay. “It doesn’t matter what others think of you—to thine own self be true.” A jailhouse tattoo artist, with a tattoo gun made out of a beard trimmer’s motor and a straightened coil from the inside of a lighter, inked the quote from Hamlet on my arm.

When it came to the ninth step, amends, my sponsor told me there were some wrongs we could never make right with the people we harmed. But I could make “indirect amends” by mending my ways: staying sober, helping others, and, one day, writing the family an apology letter. When I transferred to Sing Sing in 2016, I lost contact with my sponsor. With some success in writing came relapses. But I did write that letter.

Whenever a package of dope was smuggled into Green Haven, Rob had dibs. Everyone knew Rob got high—the prisoners, the COs, the administrators. Rob was the preppy drug addict. When a guy on Rob’s tier overdosed, the COs searched Rob’s cell and claimed to find a gram of dope stashed in the false bottom of a tube of deodorant, where the swivel pushed it up. Rob claims the COs planted it. He knew that the guy who overdosed had copped a gram, and figured the COs who searched his cell took the dead guy’s stash and put it on him. Even though I was skeptical of Rob’s excuses, I also knew the COs sometimes set people up, and probably hated him.

But Rob has also struggled to get honest with himself. He’s spent his life in active addiction. In a way, his whole life, from the moment he killed Jennifer, has been a relapse from which he has never able to recover. His life has become a public spectacle, and the narrative about him has grown so large it has outstripped any sense of self. There’s the made-for-television movie, the episodes of Law & Order, and the countless “Where Are They Now?” and “The Untold Truth of…” online articles. Even Sonic Youth wrote a song about him, called “Eliminator Jr.”; the Killers did, too, and called it “Jenny Was a Friend of Mine.”

It’s easier to numb the pain than face it honestly, so he just keeps getting high. It’s also tough to get sober in prison when every hustler in the joint knows you’re the white boy with money who gets high, where someone will come to your cell out of the blue, stick his hand through your bars, open his palm, and offer you an escape.

But then again, it comes back to this: the one requirement of recovery is the one thing he struggles with most. You hear it in the beginning of every 12-step meeting: “Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves.”

10
Mental Illness in Prison
[MILTON]

The ten-year anniversary feature about the killing of the priests, in the Buffalo News, closed with a quote from Sister Karen Klimczak, explaining how she had since moved her own halfway house, HOPE House, to St. Bartholomew’s rectory. “Joe died in this room, yet this is a room where new life is born, where people are given another chance at life,” Sister Karen told the reporter. “Joe stood for uniting all people, and Joe would give any person another chance. This ministry fits in with Joe’s spirit.”

The article went on to describe the room. “The 15-by-12-foot space on Grider Street, across the street from the Erie County Medical Center, is painted pastel peach. Photos, sayings and a painting of Father Bissonette’s life are on the walls. It’s the room where he died.”

Sister Karen would soon start to call it the Bissonette House.

By the late ’90s, Milton had managed to move over to Attica’s honor block, away from the COs who would call him “Bissonette” and “Devil.” He had a bigger cell, which stayed open for much of the day. He could hang out at the tables on the tier, cook on stoves at designated stations. Each of the three floors had refrigerators and irons, a dayroom with couches, a big TV, and a Ping-Pong table. At night, with a pass, he could walk up and down the stairs to the different floors.

By then, Milton had graduated with a bachelor’s degree in science from Canisius College, and honor block was probably the safest place for prisoners to do their time in Attica. Those who lived there didn’t want to act out and risk getting moved back to the other cellblocks. Still, there were several guards who hated Milton because of his crime. Prisoners did, too. Milton remembers one CO who told him that if he ever saw him on the outside, he’d shoot him in the back.

In 1998, a two-hour episode of the then popular television show Homicide was based on the Buffalo priest murders. The episode, aired during the show’s sixth season, was called “Something Sacred.” The plot and the motive for the murders were framed around a claim of pedophilia against one of the priests. In the end, the episode concluded that the claims were false.

In the honor block, one of the Muslim brothers, a dangerous man with a bald head and a mean face, was bothered by the bad publicity Milton’s crime was bringing to the Muslim community in Attica. One day in July 1998, the man approached Milton by his cell. He flashed a piece of steel and told Milton to sign into protective custody—or else. Requesting PC is a major blemish to a prisoner’s reputation. It is a terrible bid, too. You’re restricted to the tier, and maybe a little yard at the back of the cellblock. You can’t interact with the general population or participate in any programs. If you get a visit or a clinic appointment, you’re escorted by a guard. The worst of it is that you can’t leave the tier at all and are surrounded by the worst kind of convicts—lying, manipulative rats with the worst reputations, like the one who set up Mikey Meatballs, or dirty cops alongside their erstwhile suspects.

It’s common knowledge that the person requesting protection has to drop a name to get in; they have to tell the sergeant the situation and the name of the person, or identify him by nickname or his cell number. The disgruntled man suggested Milton use his. This made Milton suspect that the man was working with the guards. That happened a lot in Attica. When I was there, an imprisoned porter who was chummy with the guards would often do their bidding. The COs would feed the porter information on other prisoners, usually details of a sex crime, to prompt the porter to get the guy hurt. Milton told the man he wouldn’t ask for PC. The guy left the tier, then reappeared in front of Milton’s cell moments later with what’s called a “bone crusher”—a shank that looked like a sword.

“Come up outta there, you bitch-ass nigga,” the man said. “I got some big shit for dat big ass.”

Milton grabbed a can top and stepped out of his cell. The guy swung the shiv in an uppercut under-the-chin kill shot. He missed, swung again, and caught Milton through the face. Milton punched him in the mouth. This made the fella take a step back. Seeing blood leak from Milton’s left cheek, he must have felt he’d done enough.

With a wound he couldn’t explain, Milton was removed from honor block and placed in involuntary protective custody (IPC). He was there from July to September 1998. IPC is pretty much the same thing as PC, but your reputation isn’t as tarnished. You’re put there when you can’t, or won’t, explain a wound, and they don’t know who was responsible. IPC prisoners can’t mix with the PC prisoners. I was stuck on an IPC tier in Green Haven after I got stabbed in the lung. I didn’t give the guy up, so they had to put me there. I was with gang members who had similar situations—wild guys who’d been in knife fights. Most had been slashed or stabbed.

For Milton, life worsened on the IPC unit. He was stuck on the tier and in his cell all day, and the man who’d stabbed him and his friends intimidated Milton through the window, on a general population tier that looked into the protection yard. He became paranoid, psychotic. His head was shaved in patches. He thought the guards were targeting him again. He ripped the hardcovers off books and made a vest that would protect him from getting shanked. Voices flooded his brain, telling him people were going to kill him. He believed no one would ever forgive him for what he’d done. When Milton came out of his cell, he yelled at other prisoners up and down the tier. Most avoided him. Some saw him as a bugout. He had few friends.

Because of his bizarre behavior, in the first week of September, Milton was put into an observation room, which only amplified his psychosis. That night, Milton pulled apart his metal eyeglass frames and used the glass to cut his left wrist. A guard doing the rounds found him with blood dripping onto the floor. He ordered Milton to stop, which he did, and they took him to the hospital and placed him on suicide watch. In the write-up of the incident, the officer made a point to note that Milton had committed “an unhygienic act” by allowing his blood to pool on the floor. Milton’s glasses were placed in an evidence bag and turned in to the contraband office. At his hearing, Milton pleaded guilty to all the rule violations. For hurting himself, he was punished with seven days of keeplock, which meant he was confined to his cell, all day, for a week.

“I don’t know why I did that,” he told me. “In that moment, I guess I wanted to die.”

When the first penitentiaries opened across America in the 1830s and 1840s, they were intended to induce penitence (hence the name), not to caretake. And so, in 1843, during a presentation to Massachusetts legislators on the deplorable conditions she’d seen in penitentiaries across the state, the reformer Dorothea Dix called out the problem the government faced. “Prisons are not constructed in view of being converted into county hospitals,” she wrote. “And almshouses [jails] are not founded as receptacles for the insane. And yet, in the face of justice and common sense, wardens are by law compelled to receive, and masters of almshouses not to refuse, insane and idiotic subjects in all stages of mental disease and privation.” Dix’s solution—institutions dedicated to treatment of mental disorders—revolutionized psychiatric care. By 1880, when the US released its first demographic study of mental illness, forty thousand patients had been moved out of jails and prisons; only four hundred people with a disorder remained locked up in penal institutions.

But by the twentieth century, most of these psychiatric institutions were rotten with abuse. Thanks to a growing public awareness of mental health conditions and the development of thorazine, the first antipsychotic drug, the government concluded that there was no longer a need for Dix’s model. Mental illness, it was decided, should be treated through community-based services aimed toward an “emphasis on prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation,” as President Kennedy said when he signed that Community Mental Health Act in 1963. He added that we shouldn’t be interested in “confining patients in an institution to wither away.” Asylums closed, but community programs never got proper funding. People with mental illnesses found themselves caught in a cycle of homelessness, emergency hospitalization, and lockup. Like I wrote earlier, people with mental illnesses today are ten times more likely to be locked up than sent to a hospital, and more than 70 percent of people in America’s jails are dealing with mental illness or substance abuse disorders or both.

In 1981, the same year a man with a psychotic disorder shot him, Ronald Reagan called for a repeal of Jimmy Carter’s recently signed bill to expand federal community mental health programs. Then came the ’80s crack era, in which many people who likely needed mental health treatment began abusing drugs. They committed crimes and got locked up. This is how jails and prisons became the new asylums. By locking up those with psychiatric diagnoses, we’ve boomeranged back to the way things were done in antebellum America.

What we are now doing in America’s prisons is worse than what President Kennedy wanted us to stop doing: confining suffering people until they wither away. To see psychosis in prison, and our own indifference to it, is itself depressing. It’s always around me in here. I used to ignore it, until I started writing about it. And this is how journalism, in a sense, taught me how to be more empathetic. Men with serious mental illness aimlessly wander in prison yards picking up cigarette clips—shuffle, shuffle, stoop. It’s why I was impressed with what Milton was able to achieve, despite his suffering. Milton dealt with the bugout stigma for years. After he graduated college, he tried to figure out what came next—feelings of exuberance and energy, desperation and depression. He didn’t quite know what to do with these new mood shifts he felt. People in prison can go years without a diagnosis and proper treatment. It happens in society, too. It was like that with my brother Eugene—bolts of frenetic energy, episodes of odd behavior. Years passed until he was eventually diagnosed as bipolar and manic depressive. But that bizarre behavior, as Milton came to experience, can get you pummeled by COs and your peers.

In 1926, New York created the Department of Mental Hygiene; it was later divided into three autonomous agencies. One was the Office of Mental Health (OMH), which was created to run the state’s handful of remaining psychiatric hospitals. Since 1978, OMH has overseen mental health care in all of New York’s correctional facilities. Its in-prison employees are literal guests in the prisons, resulting in an unfortunate, if predictable, power dynamic. “There’s inherent conflict between what the mental health staff should be doing, which is engaging and empowering patients,” said Jack Beck, a former director of the Correctional Association of New York, a nonprofit that monitors the state’s prisons, “and that which corrections does: disempowerment and control, and in a very punitive way.”

One time, a year or so before I committed murder, I was booked for packing a pistol, and after the judge set bail, I was sent to the Brooklyn House of Detention, one of New York City’s jails. At intake, a nurse asked if I had a family history of mental illness. I told her about my father, who committed suicide. I probably said more, too much, because I was put on suicide watch. While the others waiting in the bullpen headed upstairs to a housing unit, I was escorted to an empty cell and given a smock to wear. Nothing else. Not even a magazine. It felt like a punishment. Hours passed. I was cold, the lights never went out, and nobody would tell me anything. I smelled. I spiraled. I flipped out and flailed my arms and demanded to see a psychiatrist. I yelled and paced, then lay back down. A guard stared at me like he was watching laundry on a spin cycle, as I tumbled, stopped, then started again. Days later, when I was out, I made a mental note: If I ever came back to jail or went to prison, I’d never again mention anything about my father or his suicide, or ask for help of any kind. In all my years of prison, I never have.

In New York prisons, we’re more likely to kill ourselves than each other. Between 2006 to 2015, there were 799 reported incidents of self-inflicted injuries, 1,246 suicide attempts, and 127 people who died from suicide. Every time I use the phone, a recorded message plays before I’m connected: “Preventing suicide is important. If you have concerns during this call, please contact the individual’s facility to communicate with them.” But that’s a generic warning, and we all know that we can’t ask for help. There’s no help, only punishment. When guys do it, you never really know if it’s a cry for help or a legit desire—either way, it’s sad—but I’ve seen psychotic men, or men who hate themselves, attempt self-harm in all sorts of ways. Some drank bleach or swallowed detergent balls. Others snapped the blade out of their prison-issued razor and used it to cut their necks, their wrists, their penises. Most survived and were placed on suicide watch, usually for seventy-two hours, but sometimes they were moved to special units for weeks or months. There they lived in these bubble-like plexiglass cells, given a heavy smock with fabric that can’t tear and paper utensils with which to eat. Many of them, like Milton, were punished with misbehavior reports for attempting to hurt themselves. The charge: damaging state property.

I’ve seen it firsthand. One snowy day in January 2010, at Attica, Tattoo, a fortyish Puerto Rican with long black hair and a biker vibe, returned to his cell in E Block after tossing around a football in the yard. Tattoo hailed from Brooklyn, like me, and we would both be eligible for parole in 2029. His cell door (one with an actual knob) was right across from mine. I could partially see into it through a square eye-level slot, but it was mostly covered with a sheet for privacy. He called me to my door and asked to borrow a pouch of tobacco. I didn’t smoke, but I had pouches—I always kept some in my cell as currency—and that day, I told him no. It was the middle of the day, and prisoners and guards were walking up and down the tier. During the med run, his boy a few cells down kept knocking, then opened his door, pulled back the sheet, and found him hanging from his window frame with a torn braided sheet around his neck. There was quiet, then chaos. COs, CPR, radios crackling, all in front of my cell. Then Tattoo was wheeled away on a stretcher. I wondered if he’d still be alive if I’d just tossed him the two-dollar pouch of tobacco.

Three years later, on the same tier, another acquaintance hanged himself. He was a Korean man, a wildly talented artist. Using wetted bread, dry spaghetti, and other food, he’d sculpt dead-ringer caricatures of the retinue of E Block guards. The night he did it, he’d spent hours talking to the guy in the neighboring cell. The neighbor said he never saw it coming. In my experience, you almost never do.

Milton’s life in Attica only got worse. In early 1999, he was released from the involuntary protection unit and placed back into general population. In A Block, taunts about his crime continued. He was a target; he couldn’t fit in. One night, Milton had been yelling and throwing water through his bars on the tier. This pissed off the porter, a big Jamaican man with dreads, who didn’t know what the liquid actually was, whether it was water or piss or something else. He was angry he had to mop it up, angry because he tried to keep the tier clean, angry that the bugout was bugging out. When Milton came out of his cell, the porter punched him in the face and broke his jaw.

“The next thing I knew, I was on the floor,” Milton told me. “I got up and tried to fight him, but he was too fast. I couldn’t hit him.”

Milton started laughing. I did, too. That’s how it was in the Five Building basement, Milton reflecting on his life with candor and clarity, despite the antipsychotics he was on.

“I remember the CO kept yelling for me to lock in. My glasses fell off my face in the fight,” he said. “They cost me forty-five dollars. So I kept looking for them. I think someone snatched them.”

Around this time, Kevin, Milton’s son, was living with his grandmother Valina, Milton’s mother. Kevin knew his father was in prison, but no one had ever told him the details. In fact, the first time he learned about his father’s crime was in a book. One day, when he was around twelve years old, Valina asked him to grab something out of her room. There he stumbled across a paperback called Kids Who Kill, by Charles Patrick Ewing. It piqued his interest, and he made a note to come back to it. Later he leafed through it and found his father’s name. In only a few paragraphs, Ewing describes Milton’s crimes as “theft-related” killings. It’s where Kevin learned his bloodline. “Both rectories were robbed and each priest was bound to a chair, gagged, stabbed, and bludgeoned,” he read.

Kevin was confused. But he wasn’t ashamed.

“My dad always prided me on being a man and standing up for whatever actions you take,” Kevin told me in an interview. “So to know that my dad was behind bars and being a man and accepting his consequences, it let me know, all right, well, he’s being a man about his situation.”

But more than anything, he wanted to know what made his father do such a terrible thing. Why did he go to Father Bissonette’s in the first place?

As Kevin got older, he, like everyone I spoke to about these killings, wondered if there was something else. He wondered if his father was keeping a secret, in the same way that I was. And Kevin has his own theory as to what might have occurred.

“Quiet as kept, I think the priest was touching [Theodore],” he told me. “Not even think, we know, like hands down. We know, Mom knows, like the family knows, that Theodore’s being touched by these priests. And that’s how they ended up gaining access into both places. It wasn’t like it was a forced entry. They didn’t kick in no door. They were welcomed in based off his face, Theodore’s face. They knew who he was, they knew what he was about. But Theodore knew the ins and outs of both these places. He knew that … after they, you know, do whatever they did to him that they were gonna pay him to be quiet.… Being caught up in the scenario, they thought my dad was on the same thing. So when they groped my dad, my dad just defensively hit him with a can of [chow mein].”

There is no evidence to support Kevin’s claims. Sometimes our families rationalize right alongside us because our actions have a negative spillover for them, too. I made my mother the mother of a murderer. My ex-wives were married to a murderer. My brothers were the brothers of a murderer. My brother Joe used to go with his wife to church on Sundays, but one time he saw the family of the man I murdered there and never went back. It’s sad how we burden our families with this, and sometimes they, too, want to understand how we can do something so terrible and inexplicable, perhaps so they can explain it to themselves or anyone who asks.

In February 2000, nearly thirty years after the Attica uprising in 1971, a settlement was finally reached for Attica victims. Milton’s father, Babu, was one of the more than five hundred plaintiffs in the class action civil lawsuit. Among injuries like a bullet wound in the leg, Babu claimed that the trauma had left him hearing voices and periodically blacking out; he added that he also had children on psychiatric medication, presumably referring to Milton. The state’s brutality, Babu’s trauma, his failure to father Milton, the intergenerational incarceration and trauma that continued—it’s a tracking of the larger forces behind the perpetual violence and suffering. In August, Babu received his share of the settlement.

Meanwhile, Babu’s son continued to deteriorate in Attica. Babu had never reached out to Milton. Soon, Milton again threatened to hurt himself and was again placed on a suicide watch. Released back into the population, he was disoriented; he stayed in his cell, talked senselessly into his Bible, yelled about his crime, and constantly threatened to hurt himself. He was assaulted again, this time in the yard, and the next day, a CO requested someone from Attica’s mental health office to assess Milton. After his visit, the social worker advised the unit chief that Milton should be transferred elsewhere.

In November, Milton was sent to Elmira Correctional Facility, another maximum-security prison in central New York. But the transfer didn’t help. In December, during Ramadan, Milton was found in the mosque, threatening other prisoners, yelling that he’d be back tomorrow night and would make someone pay. He was written up for the disturbance. At the turn of the New Year, he began hearing voices and took to screaming and yelling throughout the night in the cellblock. He became fixated on religion and suspicious of everyone. Even Ray Bissonette recognized a dissociative quality in Milton’s letters; he was quoting scripture, referring to himself in the third person: “Dear Lord God I beseech thee on behalf of Milton Jones who is incarcerated and whose identification number is 88-B-2329.” As Milton’s condition worsened, a CO put in a call for a psychologist, who observed Milton and entered him into Elmira’s residential crisis treatment center. There he was diagnosed with an unspecified psychiatric disorder and received a regimen of medications: Vistaril for anxiety; Zyprexa and Haldol, two antipsychotics; Neurontin for seizures; and Cogentin, an anti-tremor medication. Two weeks later, Milton was released from the treatment center and put back into Elmira’s general population. In September, his medications were reduced, and he began seeing a therapist and a psychiatrist for monthly follow-ups.

Milton improved. The medications were helping him stay calm. Sometimes he overslept and missed the morning med run, but for the most part, he was fully compliant with his treatment plan. He was calm and polite in his therapy sessions; he talked frequently about his crime, his remorse and desire for forgiveness. He found work in Elmira as a porter. As the months went on, his symptoms subsided. Milton participated in a program called Fathers Behind Bars, and Kevin visited him. By late 2002, he got a job at Elmira’s law library and was progressing so well that he wondered if he really needed his medication. By the following March, his entire treatment plan, including medications and follow-ups, was discontinued.

In 2004, Ray and Sister Karen visited Milton again. Now he was in Wende, a prison on the outskirts of Buffalo. Milton did a better bid there. About half the guards were Black, and they were less spiteful than the white ones in Attica. Ray was working on the first draft of Joe’s Story. He and Karen had their hands stamped, waited among girlfriends and wives and children. In his book, Ray recounts how Milton seemed more lucid than in the last letter he wrote to him, which had led to his commitment to the psychiatric hospital. As a mental health professional himself, Ray observed that Milton had been “on a course of medication that seemed to have been effective in relieving his symptoms but caused a rapid weight gain.” Ray continued, “Milton looked directly at me, as he had 12 years earlier, and apologized. In the same words as the first time he said, ‘I’m sorry about your brother,’ and then turned to Karen and added, ‘… and your friend.’” Ray continued, describing Milton’s attempt at asking him for forgiveness. Milton told Ray that his mother said Jesus forgave him. “That may have been a cue for me to offer forgiveness,” Ray writes, “but I simply told him he should believe his mother. Karen nodded in assent. […] I’m thankful I was not asked about my own forgiveness. I’m not sure I could ever forgive him, but I do believe he is sincerely contrite and has paid the price for his crime. I’d probably support his release were it possible.”

Sister Karen and Ray continued corresponding with Milton, and he remembers Sister Karen visiting two more times. She was a nice woman, he recalled, and he was grateful to her for the cookies she sent to the prison. And for giving him an opportunity to write to some of the guys at Bissonette House, who were starting their new lives in the place where he had taken Father Joe’s life. He reminded the men not to squander opportunities, and looking back, he told them that he wished that he had listened more to Raymond Little, his white stepfather, who tried to teach him carpentry. Milton appreciated how Sister Karen included him in her life. Sister Karen had every right to hate him, Milton thought, but she didn’t.

Soon Milton’s illness resurfaced. He experienced a psychotic episode, where he was convinced that guards were conspiring to have him commit murder and change his religion. The episode was so bad that he was sent to the Central New York Psychiatric Center, better known as Marcy, for the first time. It’s a hospital for prisoners in acute mental crisis. There are no COs. No cells. There are rooms with thick mattresses and orderlies and counselors who all wear regular clothes. There’s better food and group therapy and individual therapy. Regular follow-ups with a therapist and a psychiatrist. But things can still get violent. (In December 2024, officers who had just transported Robert Brooks to Marcy were caught on camera beating him while he was handcuffed in an intake room. The footage showed nurses standing by as the COs took turns pummeling him. Brooks died of his injuries, and his death was ruled a homicide, and several of the staff were indicted for murder.)

It was at Marcy that Milton was finally given a specific diagnosis of bipolar disorder. He was stabilized and sent back to Wende. A couple of years passed, and Milton made it to the facility’s honor block.

By 2006, Sister Karen’s work with Bissonette House and the larger community was well-known. She hosted the Christmas parties at a local church for forty families who had lost a loved one to murder. There was free pizza, a Santa Claus, and gifts from the Buffalo Bills. “The idea here is to show that people do care,” Sister Karen said. She demonstrated for prison reforms, and held annual memorials for victims of gun violence in the small park by Bissonette House.

On an April evening just after Good Friday, Milton was heating up water in the microwave of the honor block kitchenette. The local news played on the small TV above the fridge. He saw footage of a familiar street. The report went on to describe how Craig Lynch, a former resident of Bissonette House who was recently released from prison, had been smoking crack and had stolen a cell phone from a nun’s room. Maybe Lynch was going to pawn it for cash, but he was found out when the nun walked in on him in her room. He strangled and struck her, killing her, and later hid her body behind his mother’s garage. On Easter Sunday, he moved her to a grave in a shack behind a vacant house.

Milton stared and stared at the photo on the screen. It was Sister Karen Klimczak, her long nose, soft smile, and dark knowing eyes, on the TV in the kitchenette. She had died in the same building where Milton had murdered Father Bissonette nineteen years before.

During the trial for her murder, it was revealed that she had predicted her death years earlier, in that prescient letter she had written to her possible killer. As Craig Lynch was about to be sentenced to twenty-five to life, Sister Karen’s sister, Jean, also a nun, read the letter to the packed courtroom.

“Dear Brother,” it began. “I don’t know what the circumstances are that will lead you to hurt me or destroy my physical body.… Now my life is changed and you, my brother, were the instrument of that change. I forgive you for what you have done and I will always watch over you, help you in whatever way I can.”

As Sister Jean read the letter, those in the courtroom, including Lynch, wept.

The murder of Sister Karen clarified, for Milton, the effects of his own crimes. He wondered what God might think of him for killing those priests. With all the voices he had in his head, it sometimes felt like torture, and he wondered whether God was haunting him.

11
Never Give Up, Never Give In
[SHANE]

In 1999, Michael Shane Hale, like Rob and Milton years before, landed in Gladiator School, better known as Comstock, or Great Meadow Correctional Facility. With fifty years to life, he became inmate #99A1389. While Shane’s case wasn’t as high profile as Rob’s, guys still heard bits and pieces of it: gay lover, chopped-up body. The “in crowd” of white boys weren’t welcoming, but he was better off for it. Loners avoid prison politics—the gossip, the egos, the tests of toughness. Around the holidays, his mom sent him money for the commissary. He received about twenty-five cents per hour for his various prison jobs. He budgeted the money over the year.

Shane never found his place in society, but he would come to find his place in prison. He’d learn to stand his ground. He’d explore intimacy. He’d join a drama group, go to college. He’d volunteer for anything and everything to feel like his life still had meaning. Eventually, he would come to learn that what he did to Stefan might have been a reaction to the trauma he’d endured his whole life.

In prison, you’re told to stay away from three things: gambling, gangs, and gays. When I made the decision to try journalism, I made an effort to talk to everyone, and learned that the gay community had their own hierarchy. I once interviewed Johnnie Hardwick, or Pebbles, who thought of himself as a “femme queen.” He sported his prison-issued green pants skintight and lined his eyes with black colored pencil. Pebbles broke it all down for me: The “butch queens” are more muscular and fit but effeminate. The “homo thugs” are regular-looking men on the “down-low.” Then Pebbles gave me the rundown on the pejoratives, including “red dragon” (the Bloods’ term for gay people), “Frank Ocean” (the gay R&B singer), and “batty boy” (a term that Caribbeans use); the most common pejorative was “mook.” It was an ugly word, and Pebbles didn’t know the origin. Then there were the “booty bandits.” Think of the racist tropes, some big Black guy making someone his bitch in prison. I never saw this go down. Older booty bandits from a past era would occasionally try to groom younger kids, but someone would usually intervene. The population, as I see it today in New York, disapproves of prison rape. And gay men are still marginalized. I interviewed Pebbles in the yard for all to see. It was a nervy move, and not everyone made the connection that I was talking to Pebbles for a story I was writing. Some men I’d typically greet started ignoring me. They probably thought I was a down-low dude.

But back in 1999, when Shane was starting his bid in Comstock, he didn’t hang with the femme queens or homo thugs who hung out together near the television in the yard, which they called the “Blue Oyster.” And while Shane didn’t look effeminate to me, prison is such a hypermasculine environment, and when I think of how he looked in his late twenties, with his curly hair, skin still glowing, I can imagine how some saw him as a pretty white boy. He quickly learned to embrace the bass from his belly when he talked. Even with all the gossip about his case, Shane didn’t feel the need to let anyone know he was gay. The whole romanticized idea of finding his people—he was over it. He hung out by himself. Still, he stood out. He was a minority within a minority, a gay white boy with a kind smile. One afternoon, he was lapping the perimeter of the yard. When he passed a group of Black guys on the bleachers, one yelled out, “Look at this white boy—motherfucka soft as baby shit.” They all laughed. Shane pretended he didn’t hear them and kept walking.

At Comstock, Shane became a law library clerk, helping men write legal letters and motions. The other clerks charged prisoners, usually packs of cigarettes, to help them with their legal work, but Shane did not. He would wind up helping men who had the so-called bad cases—sex crimes. Though prison rapes were infrequent, it’s not like he was never threatened. An older man named Mr. Foot tried to cozy up to him. Shane knew Mr. Foot wanted to fuck him. One time, Mr. Foot called Shane to the back aisle of the law books, pulled it out, and smiled. “Come touch this dick,” he said.

Shane pulled out a pencil and said, “I’ll fucking stab you—back up!”

In 2000, Shane was working in the law library when the CO at the desk told him he had a visitor. Shane wasn’t expecting a visit. He was hoping it was Dale, his high school friend, or maybe his mom. Excited, he rushed back to his cell, peeled back his mattress, pulled out some pressed green pants and a shirt. When he reached the visit room, a CO directed him to a door. It was a narrow room with two homicide detectives seated. He recognized one as Detective Schwartz—the man he’d confessed to. They were there to ask Shane about other murders where victims had been dismembered. Three of the four men last seen in Manhattan gay bars—the same ones Shane frequented on the Upper East Side in the early 1990s—had been found in garbage bags off New Jersey highways.

“Isn’t this what you did with Stefan Tanner?” Schwartz asked Shane. “You know, we haven’t discovered any more bodies since you’ve been away. Do you want to tell us about the other murders?”

“I told you everything,” Shane told the detectives. “I took responsibility.”

Schwartz smiled and leaned in. “You could be famous. You’ll be a serial killer.”

“I don’t want to be famous,” Shane told them. “I don’t have anything else to say.”

In June 2001, Shane was in his cell reading the Times when an article in the metro section, about a Buddhist meditation program in the Green Haven prison, caught his attention. He wasn’t halfway through the meditation article when an article in the right column broke his concentration: “Possible Break in Killings of Gay Men.” Shane couldn’t believe it—these were the murders he had been questioned about.

Richard W. Rogers, a nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, had just been arrested for two murders—of Thomas Mulcahy (the man last seen in July 1992, a month after Shane arrived in New York City) and Anthony Marrero (a sex worker last seen in May 1993)—and would be charged in Ocean County, New Jersey, after new fingerprint technology matched Rogers’s fingerprints with those found on latex gloves and plastic bags from the crime scenes. Though Rogers wasn’t charged for the other three dismemberment murders, he was the lead suspect. It was complicated, though, because the other victims were found in different jurisdictions, in Pennsylvania and New York.

At the time, New Jersey, like New York, had the death penalty on the books. But New Jersey did not seek it against Rogers because a review committee, according to the Asbury Park Press, decided that the bodies being cut up did “not constitute an aggravating factor because the mutilations happened after death.” In 2005, New Jersey offered Rogers a plea bargain: He would receive two thirty-year sentences and see a parole board after fifteen years. If he agreed to the deal, Pennsylvania and New York would agree not to indict.

When I told Shane about the offer made to Rogers, as always, he responded with grace. “Maybe I’m resigned to the inconsistencies of the system,” he told me. “Different state, different prosecutors, all of which factor into a plea structure.”

Rogers was fifty-five when he was offered the plea deal, so he declined and took his chances at trial. He was found guilty and received two consecutive life sentences. He’s never talked about the crimes publicly—never acknowledged guilt or expressed remorse.

A year or so before, in 2004, Shane had learned that New York’s Court of Appeals had struck down the death penalty. It came down to the statute language in the sentencing phase, which occurs after a jury renders a guilty verdict: If jurors could not unanimously decide between life without parole or death, judges had to inform the jury that they would have to sentence the defendant to twenty or twenty-five to life, which meant the defendant would be eligible for parole. The Court of Appeals found the statute “coercive”—it tended to push jurors to choose death. It was an easy fix for the legislature. Several hearings were held to gauge the public temperature. By this time, violent crime had substantially dropped, and support for the death penalty had declined significantly. New York got rid of it.

Around this time, Charles Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney who had prosecuted Shane, spoke alongside Kevin Doyle, the head of the Capital Defender Office at the time, at a Fordham University symposium called “Catholics and the Death Penalty: Lawyers, Jurors & Judges.” Hynes defended his decision to pursue the death penalty in eleven cases, including Shane’s. From what I could tell from a transcript of the event, it appeared Hynes was using the statement that Shane gave to Detective Schwartz as a prompt to paint gruesome scenes—introducing a wooden plank as a weapon, suffocating Stefan as he begged for his life—that were not supported by evidence. At this symposium, he recounted his version of Shane’s crime:

The defendant decided to kill his lover after being thrown out of the apartment that was owned by the lover. Hale waited in the garage for his lover to enter his automobile. Hale, using a judo move, slammed the victim to the concrete floor and then with a wooden plank repeatedly hit him over the head until he thought he was dead. He then put the victim in the trunk and drove aimlessly for a while. He was startled when he heard the moaning from the trunk. When he approached the trunk, he heard the victim cry out, “Michael, please help me.” Hale threw open the trunk, put a plastic bag over the victim’s face and head, and held it until the victim expired. Finally, Hale took the body to Kentucky, where he dismembered it and disposed of it.

In my mind, I hear Hynes doing the thing I did for years: rationalizing. In order to feel better about what we did—or, in Hynes’s case, what he was looking to do—we create terrible portraits of the people on the receiving end of our actions. Since the death penalty is such a spectacle, and so controversial, Hynes attempted to make Shane look particularly evil—how else could he justify his decision to seek the death penalty against him? “I have no mercy for someone who kills the way Michael Shane Hale killed,” Hynes told the crowd at Fordham. “I think he should be locked up in a hole for the rest of his life. I think he should be held without communication with any other human being for ending the life of another person, that his life should be over.”

In July 2004, a couple of months before Hynes would attend the symposium, and after years on Rikers Island, two trials, and a guilty verdict, I was given the maximum term for murder: twenty-five years to life. My judge added my other sentences, for selling drugs and carrying a gun, on top of it. I wound up with a total of twenty-eight years to life. In hindsight, I can see how the judge saw me as irredeemable. At my sentencing, E.’s sister said: “Only the man who has enough good in him to feel the justice of the penalty can be punished.” The quote, I’d learn later, was from a Harvard philosopher named William Ernest Hocking, taken from his 1956 book, The Coming World Civilization, in which he tackles the secularization and modernization of society. In it, he riffs on crime and punishment, and the quote, which appears in the beginning of the book, continues: “The degree of goodness that alone can give a penalty the quality of punishment is something the state cannot compel. To put it crudely, only the good man can be punished.”

When I was making my way upstate to prison, Shane had already been locked up for nearly a decade. By this point, his transfer had come through, and he landed in Shawangunk, the max joint Rob was in ten years prior, where Shane got involved with a Buddhist group. He meditated and cleared his mind of self-hate and shame. Here, too, he worked as a clerk in the law library. With the death penalty defunct and a fifty-to-life sentence, Shane realized that he had gotten a raw deal. He reached out to the Appellate Advocates, in New York City, who helped prisoners file post-conviction motions. His situation seemed “coercive,” too—you take what you can get when the gallows await. But Shane had waived his right to appeal in open court when he accepted the fifty-to-life sentence. His new lawyer, Paul Skip Laisure, tried his best to get around that fact: He challenged the indictment, crafted nuanced legal arguments. The odds were against them.

When he heard that his permission to appeal had been denied and that his fifty-years-to-life sentence would stand, Shane wrote to Laisure’s superior, praising his lawyer for fighting so hard: “I have 50-to-life and have nothing but good things to say about the standard and level of representation I received.” I’d only heard prisoners complaining about how their lawyers screwed them; they never thanked them, especially if they weren’t able to get any time shaved off. In a response to Shane’s letter, Laisure suggested Shane give himself to the needy souls around him.

“The odds of being granted executive clemency in a murder case are probably one-in-a-million,” Laisure writes. “You, my friend, are that one-in-a-million. I really feel that you can amass the kind of inspirational record of remorse and rehabilitation that may get you an early release. Since we can’t know what the political climate will be 15 years down the road, we can’t predict what will happen. But just maybe crime will be looked at a bit differently. Maybe the climate will favor the possibility for clemency. If nothing ever comes of it in terms of a clemency grant, just imagine the number of people you will have touched along the way, and the self-actualization you will have obtained. Never give up. Never give in.”

12
No Parole for the Preppy
[ROB]

In the late ’90s, as I was working my way up to murder, Rob was winding down the fifteen years he would serve for killing Jennifer Levin. After another stint in solitary, for the drugs-in-the-deodorant debacle in Green Haven, Rob was transferred up north again. In 1999, he landed in Auburn, the oldest maximum-security prison in New York, hunks of steel cellblocks wrapped in a wall in the middle of the town of Auburn, near Ithaca. In the yard, he stayed with a group of dangerous white guys—Dino, Kevin, Mario, Horse. Simon, the Albanian mobster, had just arrived, too. They hung out in a weight court area that they’d claimed for themselves. Each crew—the Rat Hunters, the Kings, the Bloods—had their own weight court. Rob made his appearances at the white court, wandered the yard, copped some bags, sniffed some dope, watched the news in the TV area by the bleachers. There was weed in the air. Men yelled across the yard, talked shit in their own circles. Eventually, he pissed positive for drugs again and again was sent to solitary.

Up on Auburn’s solitary unit, he locked a few cells down from Sean Ryan, one of the guys who had busted out of Shawangunk back in ’94. Ryan was now in the box indefinitely. Even before the escape, Ryan was a dangerous dude. He doused his codefendant with gasoline in his cell and set him on fire. The man burned to death. These were the guys Rob had to navigate.

While in the rec tank—Auburn’s solitary unit allowed a few guys at a time in a rec cage—Ryan got into a fight with a Black guy, or maybe it was two guys, depending on which version you believe. He got beat up pretty bad, and when Ryan got back from the hospital, he had a swollen head, a black eye, and a broken jaw. A few guys were on their bars, snapping on Ryan, saying he looked like the Elephant Man. Ryan thought he heard Rob laughing. To me, this doesn’t sound like something Rob would do, but it speaks to the toxic climate in prison, where even the slightest hint of perceived disrespect, however baseless it may be, will have someone full of resentment and plotting on you.

A few days later, Rob’s time in the box was up and he was back in Auburn’s population. Ryan, who had a lot of respect among the white crew, sent a kite telling them that Rob disrespected him. Days later, while Rob was sitting by the bleachers, he felt someone come up behind him and drag something sharp across his right cheek. He realized he was cut, and he put up his hoodie and walked back into the cellblock with the rest of the crowd on the early go-back. He looked in the mirror and was relieved; the cut didn’t need stitches. It was just a bad scratch, so Rob planned to just stay in his cell until it healed. He knew who did it. He’d shared plenty of his dope with him. He thought the fella was a nice guy. The next day, walkie-talkies crackled in front of his cell. A sergeant and two COs took him to IPC. I would eventually meet the kid who cut Rob. He would run with me and Caz in Clinton years later. They called him Choate, ironically the same name as Rob’s old prep school. (Choate has since been released.) He was a big kid with a baby face, covered in prison tattoos. I liked Choate, and he told me he liked Rob. It’s why, when he did the hit, Choate didn’t dig in too hard with the razor.

When he got cut in 2002, Rob was about a year out from his release date. It appeared he’d be leaving directly from the IPC unit. He was fine with it. Simon, who ran into his own troubles, was placed on the unit a few months later. There were a lot of dangerous guys on the IPC tier. Sometimes prisoners would drop anonymous notes to the administration saying a prisoner’s life was in danger. It was a tactic to remove a threatening prisoner from the general population. These are the Machiavellian games prisoners play.

That August, about six months out from Rob’s release, Larry King interviewed Ellen Levin, Jennifer’s mother, on CNN. Like Sullivan, Auburn did not have in-cell TVs, so guys watched shows together on the tier, or sometimes the CO left the TVs on after they locked in. The screens hung at eye level. Simon remembers watching the Larry King interview. Armando, Rob’s other neighbor, watched, too. Rob put his sheet across his bars and stayed quiet. They were at the point of the show when Larry King fielded questions from callers. One asked Ellen how she felt about criminals becoming celebrities.

“Not great,” she answered. “You know. One of the things that I’ve said before and I believe that this media inspection that happens around trials, murder trials, I mean, it doesn’t—it’s not good for either the criminal or the victims.”

Rob hates how the press covers him, perhaps even more than the Levins do. I’m in a different position, though. As bothered as I was about my Inside Evil episode, my writing buries it when someone googles me. This is the conflict of my life: What gives my life purpose may be the thing that causes E.’s family that much more pain. I’ve often wondered whether I would have become a writer had I not murdered a man and gone to prison. Probably not. And yet, while Rob’s celebrity is strictly related to his crime and the stories that others have written about it, I’d argue that any recent visibility I’ve received is from the stories I’ve written about others. When I write about my crime, with the exception of some detailed descriptions offered in this book, I do so sparingly; I use it to help relate my own story to my subjects’. Which is to say, when I write about my crime, I do so not to entertain but to explore what causes such violence beyond a specific set of circumstances, both individual and environmental. I try not to glamorize my criminal past. But I know I haven’t always struck the right tone. When I read my earlier essays, there’s a glibness in how I describe my crime, as if it should be charged to the frivolousness of the drug game rather than the defects of my character. As if E. being in the streets made his family love or miss him any less. As if he didn’t have just as much potential as me.

Rob was turning down dope in his last few weeks. He could have scored some on the IPC unit. He could score anywhere in prison, any solitary unit, any yard. But Rob didn’t want to get out with a dope habit. He wasn’t a drug addict, he told himself; he just got high to cope in this place. Everything would be fine when he was free. He had a plan.

Days before he was scheduled to leave in February 2003, Rob stayed up late writing Simon a letter. He’d popped some Neurontins, painkillers that guys pilfered off the med line to sell. They make you feel loopy and don’t show up in a urine test. I’ve spent many days in prison high on these pills. They ease the pain of this place: The count bell ringing, neighbor rapping, gates slamming, walkie-talkies bleeping, keys jingling, beef brewing—it’s all easier to endure when you’re high.

Rob liked writing. He liked Simon. The poor guy had fifty years. Rob’s voice was confident, almost guru-like. “We have both been through some tough situations. Most people can’t survive prison. Most prisoners could never survive the attention that both of us have had to deal with,” Rob wrote to Simon, who also had plenty of press on his case about the double murder at Scores. Simon and his brother, Vic, had been featured on America’s Most Wanted after the shooting. “It’s a fine line between helping yourself and not hurting others. Balancing these two interests takes skill. Sometimes you push; sometimes retreat. But always diplomatically!”

Rob continued to give the mobster some of his prison wisdom.

Don’t ever let another person make you angry, sad, or hopeless. The only way they can do that is if you allow them to. Accept their jokes, teasing and criticism with the knowledge that only those who are in worse shape mentally/emotionally will try to abuse others to ease their own pain. Don’t let anyone know what you feel. Your feelings are yours and not to be shared with people who offer no true friendship. Show the same face in all the same situations so nobody will know what you feel or think. Cope with life. Don’t let depression win. Keep a diary, study yoga, and meditate. Expand your mind. Learn things you missed in school. Be prepared for your luck. One day that door will open and you’d better be prepared to step through it.

Simon, all these years later, kept the letter Rob wrote him. It was more due to Simon’s meticulous personality than his cherishing Rob’s words. Plus, it was a long letter from the notorious Robert Chambers, so he figured he’d keep it. During one of my conversations with Rob, I read the above portion to him as he stood outside my cell bars, stubble of gray sprouting from his jawline and beard, offering me the same face, same smile. “Damn, I sound pretty smart … too bad I’m an idiot,” Rob said, chuckling, shaking his head. “I can’t believe Simon kept that letter. At least I meant something to him.”

Days before Rob was released, Armando, Rob’s neighbor and the tier’s informal barber, cut his hair with beard trimmers on the tier in front of Simon’s cell. “Gotta look good for the cameras,” Simon teased from behind bars. “Think they’ll be outside?”

Rob nodded.

“It’s a fucking blizzard out there—what the fuck!” Simon yelped, laughing at the insanity of it all. “It’s been fifteen years. Fucking media—they’re sick motherfuckers!”

Rob smiled, shaking his head.

“Don’t move,” Armando said.

On February 14, 2003, Rob’s cell opened after the 6:30 morning count. Pale from being stuck on the ICP tier all day, every day, for the past year, Rob sported a maroon turtleneck sweater. He said his goodbyes to the boys on the tier, a net bag of personal items—mail, pictures, paperwork—slung over his shoulders. Armando gave him some pills for the road to get through the first couple of days. Rob needed them for what he was about to face. His mom had arranged a big interview with CBS on his behalf. She told him that he had to take responsibility and tell the world that he hoped to move on.

Rob sat in the reception bullpen with a guy who was also getting out that day. The man mentioned to Rob how he’d told his family that he’d take the bus because of the snowstorm. In a way, Rob envied the man. He wished he could take his forty dollars and his bus ticket, which everyone was given upon release, hop on a bus, look out the window, and ponder his new life as a free man. Maybe he’d order a Big Mac at a stop, then get giddy as he approached the city for the first time after so many years, seeing the jagged peaks of the high-rises pierce the sky. Maybe he would find a 12-step meeting, after landing at the Port Authority, and say, “My name is Rob, and I’m an alcoholic and addict. I just did fifteen years in prison, nearly five in solitary, and I’m really scared. I don’t want to go back. I need your help.”

I wonder what Rob’s father, Bob Chambers, was thinking while in the hotel with Phyllis and Shawn Kovell, waiting for Rob to arrive. His son was returning to the same spectacle he had left fifteen years before. Bob had been sober, going to a 12-step program, for years. He must have known prison had damaged his son, that his boy had his alcoholic gene. He knew that when his son asked him for Western Union payments, it was for drugs. He felt Rob shouldn’t be doing some high-profile interview. He also must have realized that his kid had no anonymity. His crime, what he’d done to Jennifer in the park, had consumed Rob. It affected all of them. Bob still prayed for the Levins. He knew that he couldn’t push sobriety on his son. He had to lead by example. Rob had to want it for himself.

It was close to eight a.m. when the two men walked out of the Auburn gates that led to the street. The doors of media trucks flung open, and reporters swarmed Rob with microphones and cameras. “Oh, shit, what’s all this?” the other guy said as Rob slipped on ice and fell. Then he popped back up and, without addressing the journalists, jumped into a blue corrections van that took him down the road to a bus stop, where more media waited. When Rob got out of the van, two big men broke through the crowd. They were bodyguards from CBS. They each hooked one of Rob’s elbows and tucked him into the back of an idling SUV with tinted windows, which sped off to an airstrip where a private jet was waiting. When Rob boarded, Troy Roberts of CBS’s 48 Hours introduced himself. The jet roared off the airstrip, and for a moment, thousands of feet in the air, Robert Chambers felt free.

13
College and Sex and Self-Discovery in Prison
[SHANE]

By 2007, Shane had arrived in Auburn Correctional Facility, the prison Rob had left a few years before. Shane signed up for a bunch of volunteer programs. He became a trained facilitator, joined the veterans’ organization, became a Buddhist, started a drama program, earned a college degree, and made a discovery.

For years before, Shane had flirted with Judaism. Then he pivoted to meditation and yoga and practicing Buddhism, where his sexuality wasn’t an issue. But when he arrived at Auburn, there were no Buddhist services available. After he reached out to the community, a Buddhist nun with a shaved head started volunteering in the prison. She donated cushions, and they sat on the dais of the chapel, their meditation sessions often interrupted by a resonant voice coming from the yard’s loudspeakers—“Break it up! Get on the ground! Drop the weapon!”

Shane also became a facilitator with the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP), an experiential workshop started by Quakers after the 1971 uprising in Attica. By then, I was attending AVP workshops, too, and while I was a hundred miles west in Attica, I was in a similar place to Shane, searching to become something more than I’d been when I first entered prison. Getting stabbed in Green Haven, in 2008, had been the turning point for me. The AVP workshops were three full days—usually including a weekend—of sitting in circles in the school building. There were plaques above the door frames to remind us that college classes used to be taught there.

On the first day of the AVP workshop, we did this corny icebreaker. We had to introduce ourselves and put an affirming adjective, one with alliteration, in front of our name. I was “Joyful John.” It was ridiculous. I was miserable. We all were. But by the end of the workshops, we were having vulnerable conversations with one another. AVP helped us humanize one another, to the point where if someone witnessed a beef about to start in the yard and was in a position to defuse it, they did.

One of the draws of AVP was that we got to hang out with civilian facilitators: Quaker women with wise words and gray hair, and a few younger, hippie-type girls who had glitter in their hair and hugged us. I was still pretty angry back then, and their kindness seemed odd to me. After I said something sarcastic during an exercise, one of the women pulled me to the side and said, “You know, John, sarcasm is like ripping the flesh.”

“Wow,” I scoffed. “Ripping the flesh. That’s a bit much.”

She smiled and rubbed my shoulder.

Most wanted to complete the AVP workshop for a certificate to satisfy a requirement to get approved for conjugal visits. I did, too. By late 2010, I’d been corresponding with Danielly, a woman I met on a prison dating website called Friends Beyond the Wall. She was a year younger than me and was living with her teenage son in a housing project on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. “I’m Dominican, and brown. Do you like that?” she wrote to me in her first letter. I assured her I did. Over the following weeks, we wrote each other love letters and she visited me in Attica, but I soon learned she still had a boyfriend. I broke it off and started writing Raina, a thirty-nine-year-old California blonde who had never been married and had no kids and no boyfriend. She told me it wasn’t a deal-breaker that I’d killed a man. Raina was funny and smart, and while she’d known darkness in her own life, she’d needle anyone who took theirs too seriously. Some of the AVP exercises helped me communicate in my relationship. One was called “I Messages.” Instead of saying to Raina, “You gotta tell me when,” I should focus on the “I” and say, “I feel hurt when I’m not included in the decisions that we should be making together in this relationship.” The trick was to try to avoid saying “you, you, you.” The idea was to own your feelings and not blame your partner.

Soon Raina and I married and started going on conjugal visits—forty-eight hours in a module home (we called them trailers) on a small fenced compound with a swing set and play area, apart from the prison cellblock but within Attica’s walls. The units had two bedrooms (the prison supplied pillows, bed linens, towels, cooking utensils), a living room, bathroom, full kitchen, TV, a few DVDs. A wire bolted to the counter next to the kitchen sink was connected to the handle of the kitchen knife, the only reminder of prison, besides the few times the phone rang during master count, and I had to say, “Lennon #04A0823,” then step out and wave hello to the guard in the tower. On our first visit, as soon as the door closed, Raina and I threw the groceries—including cuts of filet mignon and A.1. sauce—on the table and started kissing and undressing. We went at it for a while. It felt weird nobody else was watching us.

The first conjugals started in Mississippi State Penitentiary, or Parchman Farm, a revenue-earning plantation, in the early 1900s. To incentivize the Black prisoners, administrators arranged for prostitutes to visit the plantation. By mid-century, prostitutes were banned, replaced by prisoners’ spouses, common-law wives, and female friends. Still, the system was marked by prejudice. “The most important question concerning a program of conjugal visiting,” wrote Columbus Hopper, the leading conjugals researcher of his time, in his 1969 study of Parchman, Sex in Prison, “is whether it helps reduce the problem of homosexuality in prison.”

While I don’t want to suggest that prison rape is fully a thing of the past (there’s plenty of bullying and sexual manipulation that goes down in double-bunk cells across the US that is often never reported; women’s prisons are a whole different beast), but I will say that I’ve never personally seen or heard a man getting raped in prison. I think society has this idea that we’re all in here fucking. I’ve never had sex with another man in prison.

In 1977, six years after the uprising, Attica got conjugals, officially termed Family Reunion Program visits. By 1993, seventeen states allowed some version of extended visits. But as the era of mass incarceration began, many of those states discontinued their conjugal programs. Today, while countries like Qatar, Argentina, Brazil, Belgium, Sweden, Spain, France, Russia, and Saudi Arabia offer some version of conjugals, only four state systems in the US—New York, California, Washington, and Connecticut—still allow them.

Between 2014 and 2015, Raina and I went on six conjugal visits, but I felt like we weren’t connecting—sexually or emotionally—and that led to a disconnect. I started writing Danielly again. Raina and I divorced. Danielly said the boyfriend was out of the picture now, and we quickly got married, my second reception in Attica. Danielly was provocative, and that turned me on. Later, on our conjugals, we often had angry, shit-talking sex. We couldn’t have sex for the whole forty-eight hours, but it sometimes felt like we were trying to. Intimacy came in other forms. We watched The Notebook, and she recited her favorite lines. She introduced me to ASMR. I brewed Bustelo for her and microwaved the half-and-half so it wouldn’t cool her coffee too much. “Coffee,” by Miguel, became our love song.

Shane wouldn’t experience intimacy like this, even though by 2015, with same-sex marriage legalized, same-sex couples were finally allowed to participate in FRP visits in New York. Shane never put himself out there on prison dating sites. He knew that pursuing love, getting visits and conjugals from his potential husband, would offend homophobic prisoners and make his time harder. Truth is, when guys had sex in prison, it was usually consensual, for pleasure.

And that’s how it was when Ray, an older man in his sixties with a ponytail, propositioned Shane. Ray was a down-low dude. He was the porter, so he had a hot plate and pots and pans and clout with the COs. He offered Shane hot meals and an extra radio. Then came a tap on the wall, and Ray’s hand reached around and passed Shane a kite through the bars: “I’m like you. Just wanted you to know. I would love to suck your cock. Just leave your cell open during cell cleanup in the morning. I’ll arrange the rest.”

Shane figured, why not?

On Saturdays, Ray would slide into Shane’s cell, pull the sheet across the bars, and kneel between his legs while Shane pretended to read the New York Times to cover his head. Aside from the anxiety that another prisoner would see what they were doing and start to gossip about them, or, worse, try to hurt one of them, it was something to look forward to.

Then Shane met Jamie, a grungy, thirtysomething white guy. He had bad teeth, but kind eyes and a sweet soul. He was more Shane’s speed. They met at the industry job at Auburn. Shane made desks and laminated wood; Jamie painted and stained. They arranged to get moved onto the same tier. Shane soon fell in love with Jamie. When the cells opened for the mess hall, Jamie snuck into his cell, and they fucked. Jamie had been a virgin, but he was also a scrappy white boy who was quick to knuckle up. He was a junkie, too, and soon Shane was being approached to pay Jamie’s bills. Meanwhile, Ray got jealous. He said something to Jamie in the yard, and Jamie knocked him out.

“That pussy must be gold-plated,” Paris, a femme queen, quipped to Shane. “You got these boys fighting over you.”

At Auburn, Shane also cofounded the Phoenix Players theater group, which was facilitated by Bruce Levitt, a mustachioed Cornell professor in the Department of Performing and Media Arts. Every Friday night, Shane met with a dozen of his peers along with Bruce and a few of his students, often young women. When the fellas in the yard would see them leave the school building, they would pester Shane to get them into the Phoenix Players. But the members guarded the group. It was their safe space.

The actors did skits, from Shakespeare to personal narratives—anything that explored acting, or reenacting, as a way to deal with one’s trauma. It’s how, one day, Shane found himself acting out his crime for the group. The summer sun poured into the room. The group, including Bruce and his wife, watched in silence as Shane played himself and another member played Stefan. As the scene progressed to the fight in the garage, and Shane tried to move the body of the man playing dead on the floor, he stopped and stared, a visceral stuckness. Then tears fell from his face.

If you were doing a long stretch in New York prisons from the mid- to late ’90s through the mid-2010s, the “Lost Generation,” you’d be very lucky to land in one with the few remaining college programs that ran on private funds. When the federal Pell Grants were pulled, the 770 college programs that existed in nearly 1,300 facilities nationwide shuttered. It’s only possible to understand the real benefits of college in prison from seeing the costs of taking it away. Prison schoolhouses emptied, and yards filled. Instead of learning in college, young men joined gangs and caused havoc. The mid-’90s were also when the Bloods created their East Coast factions in jails on Rikers Island. They soon seeped into New York’s upstate prisons.

In 1999, in response to the decimation of public funds, a group of Bard College undergraduates, most notably a young man named Max Kenner, raised funding, got approval from the college and the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, and created the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) to bring college courses into New York prisons. The first cohort started in 2001. At Eastern Correctional Facility, BPI began offering a bachelor’s degree program that accepted a couple dozen guys; the first group to get a bachelor’s degree graduated in 2008.

When I was at Green Haven in those days, BPI had started a satellite program. I applied, but the prison education supervisor told me that I had to have a certain amount of years left on my sentence to enroll in the program. The guys in the program told me that, too. With twenty-one years until I’d appear before a parole board, I was ineligible. I remember sitting at a table in the mess hall, hearing BPI students talk about Kant and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, discussing essays on existentialism. Chewing tater tots, staring off like I wasn’t listening, I felt envious and invisible. Here were these guys, some of whom had killed and robbed, sitting civilly, thinking deeply and critically about philosophy. They were able to escape the monotony of prison. I was jealous I couldn’t do the same.

Trouble soon found me in the yard. When I got shanked and didn’t tell the administration who did it, they shipped me to Attica. Then came my transformation—sobriety, writing, AVP, marriage. By 2011, my writing workshop instructor managed to get Doris Buffett’s Sunshine Lady Foundation to fund a community college pilot program. I was one of twenty-three—out of Attica’s 2,300-man population—enrolled. The privileged one percent. Around the same time, Buffett funded a community college in Auburn; Shane was in its pilot class.

After every semester, Shane wrote to Doris Buffett and thanked her. Sometimes she wrote back. The first time Doris visited Auburn, her smile reminded Shane of his grandmother’s. She was the sister of Warren Buffett, the third-wealthiest person in the world at the time. She gave Shane and the other students Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, about the author’s survival in a Nazi concentration camp. Frankl observed a certain characteristic in Holocaust survivors. He called it logotherapy—a desire to find meaning in life. The idea spoke to Shane.

The next time Shane met Doris, around 2013, she arranged for a Steinway piano to be brought into the prison chapel so the men in the college program could experience a classical piano concert. Shane remembers entering the chapel and seeing the grand piano on the dais. “It was really a representation of power,” Shane told me, “that such a punitive institution would accommodate her.” Doris invited English composer and pianist Jack Gibbons, who played Gershwin. Shane sat next to Doris, and when the sounds of “Summertime” from Porgy and Bess filled the prison chapel, they both cried.

Meanwhile, in Attica, I discovered myself in the solitude of my cell, reading and writing magazine articles. I read magazines because it was difficult to order books. In the late ’80s, when several maximum-security prisons in New York were wired for cable and the commissaries started selling cell TVs, a new directive prohibited prisoners from receiving personal packages. We were now required to order food and clothes from an approved vendor with the money in our prison accounts, our commissary funds. If someone mailed me a book, the guard working the package room would deny it because I didn’t purchase it from my personal account. I was charged to mail it back home. Most guys just watched TV in their cells and didn’t bother ordering books. In all my years in prison, this was the cruelest shit I ever experienced. When my mom ordered me books years before, I was in solitary and we didn’t have TVs in our cells, so the TV directive that prohibited packages from home didn’t apply. I mean, these directives were constantly tripping over themselves. Anyone who’s served time knows the most frustrating part of prison is the ever-changing, nonsensical, and arbitrary rules. Initially, I thought they were put in place to keep us all stupid. But I realize today that those systemic failures were a result of poorly written directives and bureaucratic indifference.

My mother would subscribe me to a bunch of magazines—The Atlantic, the Sunday Times, Esquire, Harper’s, The New Yorker—to circumvent the scrutiny of the package room guard, because periodicals came with the regular mail that was delivered to your cell. And when I think about it today, it was reading nothing but magazines, because of the stupid rule that prevented books, that helped me become a journalist. I’ve always had a hard time concentrating. In the box, I was able to engage in those classics because solitary stripped me of everything. But reading magazines helped me understand stories in smaller bites. I studied the articles in every issue I got, especially the features, and reverse-engineered their structure, analyzing the opening scenes, the beats, the characters, seeing how the writer built tension within the piece. And soon I realized I had what most journalists didn’t: firsthand experience of everyday prison life and access to the men locked in with me. No one was telling these men’s stories because they couldn’t reach or find them, hidden as they were behind the prison wall. But I could. If I could just teach myself to write, I figured, I could get published.

It was around this time, when I realized that I could become a journalist in prison, that I stumbled upon the darker side of the media. Back then, I didn’t know enough about journalism to understand all its shapes and the negative effects of true crime storytelling. Like most people, I consumed those stories for entertainment. Danny Pelosi’s was one. Danny was locked a few cells down from me in Attica’s E Block. He vibed Marlboro Man; he smoked them, too. He walked with a strut in the yard, slung his jacket over his shoulder, holding it with his forefinger. Danny was always getting busted with a cell phone. He talked too much, told self-aggrandizing tales about the crime that led him to prison. Thing is, they were mostly true—except the part about him being innocent. I’d watched the saga unfold in my cell years earlier in an episode of 48 Hours.

In the early 2000s, Danny was an electrician and contractor, and he’d been hired to remodel a townhouse on the Upper East Side. He began an affair with the owner, a woman named Generosa. She was separated from her husband, Ted Ammon. In October 2001, Ted was found bludgeoned to death in the couple’s home in the Hamptons. Danny and Generosa married soon after. Then she died of cancer, and Danny inherited millions, including a castle in England. It became a battle for the estate between Generosa’s kids and Danny, all while he was being investigated for killing Ted. He was a star in the tabloids, and a producer named Loen Kelley told his story on CBS’s 48 Hours, in an episode called “Murder in the Hamptons.” He was eventually tried, convicted, and sentenced to twenty-five years to life.

Years later, in Attica with me, Danny still kept in touch with Loen. She mentioned to Danny that she had read an op-ed in the New York Times by a prisoner in Attica. Danny told her I was on his tier. When we eventually talked on the phone, Loen told me that she had just left CBS and was working on a few different projects, one of which was a website called PrisonWriters.com. She was publishing slice-of-life essays from people on the inside and paying them a pittance for each story. I told her that I was working on a story about a man with mental illness in Attica and I hoped to land it in a big magazine. She told me that was unrealistic. Magazines were crumbling, and only the most coveted writers were landing feature stories in print. This was true, but harsh to hear at the time.

In 2015, the Times, in collaboration with the Marshall Project, ran “Attica’s Ghosts,” a front-page story about the culture of abuse in Attica. I was a source for the article. Guards knew I wrote for the Marshall Project. It was a tense time. Afterward, the facility was fitted for cameras and microphones, which I could tell the COs resented. The story, reported by Tom Robbins, was a finalist for a Pulitzer. My gut told me that the culture would change when they flipped the switch. I knew the assault-on-staff reports, which I suspected were often falsified to justify use of force, would drop; they wouldn’t be able to fabricate them under surveillance. I told Bill Keller, my editor at the Marshall Project, and he agreed with my prediction. But Bill told me I needed to support my hypothesis with numbers, and they wouldn’t come in until the cameras had been on for at least a year. In the meantime, he suggested I report on prisoner and CO reactions to the surveillance. I had experience publishing shorter pieces, but long-form features required a level of writing and reporting that I had never done before. I see why Loen told me it was unrealistic to think I could write them. By this time, the Attica writing workshop had fizzled out, and with no real resources or guidance on the inside, I had to teach myself.

The Attica superintendent, Dale Artus, was a charismatic man with a youthful face. Whenever he made rounds on my tier, he’d stop by my cell, see me typing on my Swintec, and ask if I was okay. I’m grateful for that. The COs saw him checking on me, and this probably helped keep me safe for the remainder of my time there. During the 2016 election, my article titled “Guards Like Trump and Inmates Like Clinton at New York’s Notorious Attica Prison,” was published in the Marshall Project and in Vice, and it stirred up some feelings. Attica’s COs read Vice. In the article, I quoted one CO, a nice guy and a musician, who told me he hated Donnie and loved Bernie. He asked me to protect his identity, so I called him Mr. Smiley. A day or so after the piece came out, I was heading to a visit and I passed a group of guards in the A Block lobby, holding batons, staring. One knew me and told me to stop for a minute. He pulled me into the corner, and other guards surrounded me. I wondered if this was one of the cameras’ blind spots I’d been hearing about.

“Lennon, who’s Mr. Smiley?” the CO asked.

“Oh, I can’t reveal my sources,” I said, smiling, trying to be lighthearted about it.

It was another one of those moments suspended in time. Then the CO cracked a smile and said, “Go ahead, go to your visit.”

A week later, I transferred to Sing Sing. I left Attica a journalist.

Around that time, Shane left Auburn with his own revelation. When Shane heard about a fifteen-week domestic violence awareness class, he signed up. It was taught by a retired social worker in her sixties. Shane sat in a desk-chair combo among men who had killed their girlfriends and wives. They watched videos of toxic, controlling relationships and read illustrated handouts. Some didn’t take the class too seriously and sidebarred about prison politics.

It was always like that for Shane, him participating in earnest, gauging if it was safe to share the parts of his identity that made him feel insignificant or disliked, particularly when it came to being gay. After a few sessions in the domestic violence program, Shane mustered up the courage to ask the instructor a question: “Does domestic abuse apply to same-sex couples?”

The instructor assured him it did, and the next week she gave Shane a handout on same-sex couples. He read the material, and it settled, for him, that his relationship with Stefan had been abusive. He remembered how the prosecutor had rebuffed the “domestic tragedy” explanation of his crime, saying that Stefan’s family was offended by the description. But could someone who killed their lover point to the abuse they had endured as a prelude to their terrible act of violence? Well, yes. In that moment, Shane realized that the psychological and physical abuse in his relationship with Stefan, on top of the trauma from his younger years, all factored into what he did.

14
Getting Out, Coming Back
[ROB]

The private jet soared in the air for just over an hour. In it were the 48 Hours journalist Troy Roberts and his subject, Robert Chambers. Troy told Rob that he hadn’t told Dan Rather he was taking the jet for this interview. Rob listened and smiled. They landed in Washington, DC, where Rob’s parents and his girlfriend, Shawn, were waiting at a hotel. Shawn knew that Rob only had to do this one thing and then they could move on with their lives.

Rob greeted his family and ordered a deluxe cheeseburger from room service. Producers popped in and gave him the schedule for the next day. He’d talk to Troy in the room, and they’d do an outside shot for B-roll, walking and talking. They assured him that everything would be discreet, and that nobody knew he was in the hotel. Two days later, the New York Post ran a story called “Torture Chambers.” It set the tone for his return.

Excuse me, but didn’t anyone in the Department of Correction notice that they were releasing killer and rough-sex aficionado Robert Chambers on Valentine’s Day? Couldn’t they have waited until, say, President’s Day?

On the eve of his release, Chambers issued a statement saying, “There has not been a day since Jennifer Levin’s death that I have not regretted my actions on that day.”

Chambers did, however, take time out from regretting long enough to allegedly trade girls for drugs with other inmates, amass 27 disciplinary violations for assaulting a guard, and heroin and weapons possession. Thank God he’s free to kill again.

Of course, the “trading girls for drugs” bit was about Holly McCormick, who had been giving interviews to the Post’s Page Six columnist Cindy Adams. The media scandal with Holly suggested that Rob would trade the letters that women wrote him for packs of cigarettes or drugs. Another guy would write back, the woman would develop feelings, and she would visit. It would start with the guy telling her about his favorite candy. She would easily smuggle it in and surprise him. Then the door would be open for him to mold her into a drug mule.

When Rob thinks about all the women who wrote to him over the years, he doesn’t know what to make of it. When he thinks about Holly, he tells me, “She was a nice girl, but she was crazy. She was a stalker. But the media exploited her, too.”

I always thought it was wild that so many women were attracted to men who killed their female partners. It reminded me of a visit I had with Danielly. It was around December 2018 and Danielly had come up for a regular visit to Sing Sing. Our marriage was rocky. She missed a few of our conjugal dates, hadn’t quite let go of her ex-boyfriend, and we were always prodding each other. But she was never boring. When I arrived, I smelled the microwaved hot wings and popcorn and saw Danielly sitting in Lover’s Lane: two chairs placed beside each other. Usually the couples were seated there. Danielly would lay her head on my shoulder, and we’d take our chances kissing when the guards looked away. But as we caught up and felt the warmth of each other’s skin again, I noticed she kept peering behind us.

“Why do you keep looking back there?”

“That guy. I saw him on 20/20. They said he hired this guy to kill his wife,” Danielly whispered.

“Yeah, that’s TC. He’s on the white boy court with us,” I said. “Some dudes don’t like him. They saw that show, too.”

“The girl sitting with him is a brown girl like me,” Danielly said. “I like his beard. His eyes are so blue.”

I rolled my eyes and shook my head.

“Not bluer than yours.” She smiled. “Plus, he’s short. You’re tall and fine.”

“I’m not a beard guy, sorry,” I said.

Two rows back, Tom Clayton, or TC, was sitting with a petite girl. He had recently landed in Sing Sing; his sentence was life without parole. He told me that he’d met this girl while playing poker in Atlantic City, out on bail for plotting to kill his wife, who was blond with a bright smile and the mother of his children. And now she was dead. ABC had featured the tragic tale on 20/20 a few nights before. Danielly started musing about the attraction some women have toward men who’ve killed their wives or girlfriends. I thought it would be a turnoff, I told her.

“Some like to be loved hard—like, ‘I loved her so hard I had to kill her,’” Danielly said, giggling. “Like, he didn’t want anyone else to have her. Some shit like that. And, you know, that’s a turn-on for some women.”

“You’re sick,” I said.

“I’m not saying me.”

“Yeah, I know. I ain’t in here for killing a woman.”

Danielly turned around again.

“Stop looking back there.”

“Why you got an attitude?”

“I don’t think that’s what happened with this guy’s wife,” I said. “She was beaten with a pipe by a masked man while her two kids were home. And they were his kids, too. I think one of the kids witnessed it. It wasn’t some fatal attraction shit. It was betrayal. It was brutal.”

“No, I know, I know…”

“Just stop talking about it. I don’t want him to hear us.”

We sat there quietly for a few minutes.

“When we watched your show with Chris Cuomo, my niece Alizay was like, ‘When you go up there for conjugals, do you ever get him mad and get scared he’ll try to kill you?’”

I shook my head. I could feel my face warm.

“I was like, ‘John was a drug dealer. You act like you never dated a drug dealer—them motherfuckas be killing each other, not their girls!’”

Danielly grew up in Bushwick, Brooklyn, well before it became a gentrified hipster haven, back when dope dealers claimed street corners, drove foreign cars with chrome rims, and rolled down their tinted windows to catcall girls. Knickerbocker Avenue was lined with clothing stores and restaurants with pork shoulder and chicken cuchifritos, the meat spinning in the windows. Bachata, a genre of Dominican music, bumped from boom boxes in bodegas. She reminded me of the girls I liked when I was free, ones who were turned on by the lifestyle I lived. But she wasn’t just some girl from the hood; she was introspective and smart, and she was a nurse. And Danielly loved her some true crime.

Danielly turned around and looked at TC again.

“Stop looking back there—weirdo,” I said.

“I was seeing if the vending machine was open. You’re a weirdo.”

A baby started to cry. A couple laughed from the other side of the room. There was another reading the Bible together. A few tables over, while the COs weren’t looking, a prisoner shoved a balloon of drugs up his ass.

“You want me to get you wings or a burger, Pa?”

I ignored her. She leaned over, pulled me closer with her clawlike nails, stones glued onto them. She sucked my ear with her pillow lips. Then she whispered: “You jealous?”

The idea that Rob would do one big interview, be contrite and humble, and hopefully move on—well, that didn’t quite work out as planned. He seemed defensive, insincere, and spoke in a hushed tone. He seemed too earnest. At one point, Rob says, “Oh, I was responsible for her death. There’s no question about that.” But when Troy presses him on whether he intended to kill her, Rob replies, “I don’t believe I intended to kill her at all.” All of this despite the severe red marks found around Jennifer Levin’s neck, her swollen left eye, the bruises all along her body, and the scratches on Rob’s chest and face, which seemed like evidence of her fighting back. The tabloids picked apart the 48 Hours interview.

As the media raged in the US, Rob was on an island on another continent. Shortly after the interview, Rob and Shawn had flown to Ireland, where they stayed with Rob’s aunt and uncle. Since Rob had served every day of his fifteen-year sentence, he had no parole restrictions. The couple hung out in pubs, drank Guinness and Jameson. But the press soon found him at his family’s Irish home. One day, a reporter showed up in his uncle’s driveway. Rob didn’t need his prison intuition to feel the bad vibe. His female cousins seemed uncomfortable. An article in the Mirror ended with: “Have you seen Robert Chambers? If so contact the Irish Daily Mirror on 01 868 86…”

“I felt like I was dragging my baggage to my family in Ireland,” Rob told me. “I knew it was time to go.”

Rob and Shawn flew back to the States, settling in Dalton, Georgia, where Shawn had family. Rob found a job in a textile factory, making T-shirts. His job was to load material into a machine that would dye the clothing. At the end of the day, his own clothes tasted and smelled like chemicals, but he loved it. Most people in Dalton knew who he was, but nobody bothered him. It was small-town kindness. They just wanted him to be good and do good and move on. And he was doing all that. He was putting money in the bank. He wasn’t doing heroin. Maybe a few beers after work, maybe a few pills. It was a glimpse of normal.

Rob and Shawn stayed in Dalton for eight months, until they received a call that Shawn’s mother was sick and in the hospital. Rob drove Shawn through the night up to New York City. Her mom died soon after. Shawn cremated her mother and kept the ashes in an urn. Then they had to make a big decision. Shawn’s mother’s rent-stabilized apartment on 57th Street and Sutton Place was a score for them to take over. It was hard to pass up, and they decided to move back to the city.

Even though Rob was painted as a playboy in the media, he stayed with Shawn. He told me that in the chaos of it all, Shawn was his best friend, his safe place, sometimes his protector. It wasn’t easy for Rob to get work in the city. What about that fifteen-year résumé gap? One time he applied for a job at a gym on the Upper East Side, and the manager realized who he was and became all chatty with “What was prison like?” questions. He was a nice guy, Rob said. He didn’t give him the job, though.

“I can tell you it isn’t easy when you have reporters taking pictures of you,” Rob told me during one of our cellblock conversations. “It’s like, they are always asking—why can’t he move on? They never let me! But it was really the press. It wasn’t regular people. Strangers used to stop me and say, ‘I pray for you and your family.’ It made me feel like crying right there in the street.”

Shawn got a job tending bar. Rob eventually landed a job with one of Shawn’s friends who owned a limousine service, though not as a driver. His boss figured it was better to keep him out of sight; what if he was driving clients and the press ambushed the limousine? Besides, his license was suspended.

In 2005, cops had pulled him over in Harlem and arrested him for cocaine and heroin residue found on foil wrappers and straws in the backseat of the Saab. Eventually, Rob pled guilty to a misdemeanor drug charge and driving with a suspended license. He was sentenced to ninety days on Rikers, in addition to being fined $200, and got an extra ten days for showing up late to his sentencing hearing.

Rob told me the cops set him up. When I responded with exasperation, he came clean about his and Shawn’s heroin habits. The numbness that had helped him through prison was now getting him through life. They smoked crack, too, had dealers and other user friends, the kind who swing by and drop you off a bundle. The apartment smelled of dopesick sweat and a mix of cigarette and crack smoke that seeped into the carpet and curtains. To their neighbors, they were the two junkies who lived in 17B. “I learned the co-op board started writing letters to One Police Plaza,” Rob told me. I gave him a look. “If I wasn’t getting high, I know, all this wouldn’t have happened. I’m a scumbag—someone died. I get it,” he said, “but getting us thrown out because you want to raise the rent is foul.”

It is, but plenty of former prisoners, a majority of whom are Black and brown, are much worse off when they return to New York City. Many are prohibited from even moving in with family members who live in public housing. In 2021, around 23 percent of parolees released from New York prisons went straight to shelters; another 8 percent were “undomiciled,” or went to places like halfway houses and hotels. Maybe some would have done better for themselves had they returned to a rent-stabilized pad on Sutton Place. Then again, Rob’s issues were singular.

“Even though I was, like, thirty-six when I got out,” he told me, “I was still nineteen in my mind.” He broke it down further: “From the day I was born to nineteen, I was person A. In prison, I was person B. Then, when I got out, person C. Now I’m back to B.”

“Why didn’t you go to meetings? Wasn’t your father going to meetings?” I asked.

“He was, and when I saw him, he’d tell me how he saw some of my friends from school in the meetings,” Rob said. “I guess I didn’t want to see anyone from my past. But let’s say I did get into recovery. If I do remove the Robert Chambers identity—who am I? Do I even exist? From nineteen to thirty-six, I grew up in chaos—when I got out, I didn’t know who I was supposed to be.”

When we think of Robert Chambers, we often imagine the privileged young man, the one the press described as Kennedyesque, who had tremendous opportunities, more than most, certainly more than most of us in prison. After fifteen years in prison, with no kind of treatment, the guy was struggling. But beyond addiction, all of it probably had a deeper psychological effect.

“Survivors of trauma often begin to fear that they are damaged to the core and beyond redemption,” writes Bessel van der Kolk in his New York Times best-selling book The Body Keeps the Score. “We know now that their behaviors are not the result of moral failings or signs of lack of willpower or bad character—they are caused by actual changes in the brain.”

If prison is so traumatizing, people sometimes ask, what about me? What about Shane? That some of us manage to find a sliver of rehabilitation doesn’t mean corrections is doing a good job. Many who get out come back, and Shane and I haven’t yet faced the challenges of reentry. Shane would be the first to tell you that prison has traumatized him. With Milton, despite an impressive drive to educate himself, prison may have induced his psychosis. I’m not well, either. I’m a writer; I can express myself. I can bring you into this world, connect the universal to the personal. I can spot a good character, see the story. I’m often a character in my stories, and I’ve worked through some of my issues while writing this book. But I sometimes have a problem connecting with people in real life. While journalism pushes me to feel deeply for others, I’m still self-absorbed and coarse. Cells will open, and I’ll say hello to my neighbor one day, then walk right by him the next. I know this is true because I’ve reported it out. People have told me. My lip will snarl a bit when I hear something I don’t like. My eyes will narrow and squint when I’m deep in thought. These mannerisms of mine might be received differently if I weren’t someone in prison for murder. The first time I noticed them was while watching my interview in the episode of Inside Evil.

Around the summer of 2007, Rob and Shawn got on a Suboxone maintenance program to try to kick their dope habits. Back then, Suboxone was a new drug. The doctor told them it was a more discreet way to wean off heroin than traveling to a methadone clinic. Orange strips, taken daily, melted on their tongues to keep the dope sickness away. I was in Attica at the time, sober and going to 12-step meetings in the chapel every Wednesday and Friday night. Life was beginning to get better for me. Years later, my friend Chris Hynes, a jailhouse lawyer and prison politician, started coming, too. He was a little Irish fella with a big prison name; he’d been locked up since the ’80s for a robbery murder. Chris wondered if I was for real. He was approaching his parole board. If he got out and went to 12-step meetings and stayed sober, I told him, he’d live an amazing life.

Soon a dealer and user who was Shawn’s friend got arrested and apparently offered to give Rob up to the Manhattan district attorney. Rob believes that DA Robert Morgenthau, whose office had overseen Linda Fairstein’s prosecution of him in the ’80s, had always had it out for him because he felt cheated out of a murder conviction. So of course his office was game when this guy came along asking, “Any of you guys interested in Robert Chambers?” They wired him up and asked him to purchase cocaine from him. To Rob, it was odd that this guy who sold him drugs would ask him to call a friend he knew from prison to buy a couple of ounces of blow, especially since Rob knew the guy had his own connections. But in the moment, he didn’t think the fella he got high with and copped drugs from was setting him up in a sting. Over a few weeks, Rob played middleman and ordered a total of 246 grams of cocaine, totaling $9,600, for this running buddy of his who brought along an undercover with a camera in his cap. Each time, Rob stepped out and met the dealer with the blow downstairs in the lobby of his apartment building, and one time the dealer even came up. But the sting wasn’t targeting a particularly powerful cocaine dealer. It was meant to put the Preppy Killer back in prison.

On October 23, 2007, I saw the news on my cell TV in Attica. Robert Chambers was doing the perp walk again, scruffy and sickly, in a black T-shirt, remnants of his former identity as a “matinee idol.”

When the SWAT team banged on the door, Rob yelled back, “I can open it if you want.”

“Stand back!”

The door was knocked off its hinges, Rob told me, and he stood in the foyer of the apartment with his hands up. The squad rushed him with a shield, and he fell down. They piled on top of him, cuffed him, and punched him in the face.

As I edit this chapter, on New Year’s Day in 2024, I’m sitting on the bolted stool in my cell in B North, in Sullivan, typing on a rubber keyboard plugged into my JPay tablet. This is my routine. I roll out of my bunk after 6:30 a.m. count, put on the hot water. I hear “Count clear” crackle over the radio. Steve’s cell opens. He works in the pantry, the job Rob would do in D North, and he goes to get the breakfast cart. Moments later, the cart rolls over the lip in the sally port. I soon smell the bread Steve’s toasting in the pantry. I stretch, maybe meditate, read my Daily Reflections, mix hot water and Bustelo and pour it through my homemade strainer, a handkerchief sewn into a peanut butter jar lid with the top cut out of it. It’s a new year. Means nothing to me, though. My days are all the same in here. I’m living my resolution. I plan to stay in my cell this morning, like I do most mornings, and write. Later I’ll bundle up and hit the afternoon yard session, walk laps counterclockwise, round and round, and pull myself up on the bar, again and again.

On this day, though, around ten a.m., my lamp goes out. I get up from the stool, shuffle to the toilet to take a piss, but when I push the button, it doesn’t flush. Same with the sink. I knock on my neighbor’s wall, the shot-caller Blood kid with the iPhone who’s always smoking exotic weed, and ask him if he’s got power. I hear him ask others a few cells down. They all have power and water. Then we hear, “Coming in hot!”

About fifteen officers and a few sergeants and a lieutenant rush into the corner as our cells—mine and those of the shot-caller, his homey, and a few others on the tier above—all open at the same time. “Don’t move, don’t move!”

It’s like a game of hot potato to catch cell phones in prison. Guys pass them off to their holsters (other prisoners in the cellblock willing to hold hot shit) during the daytime shifts on the weekdays, when routine cell searches occur and the K-9 occasionally trots through the block. These special raids are rare, but they’ve been doing them more and more. Sometimes they come in the middle of the night.

It’s always jarring when your cell opens and COs run in and snatch you. I come out with ease. Hands up, put them on the wall. They pat me down, cuff me. Same with my neighbor. His phone and a clipped blunt are on his desk. He had a good run. He doesn’t give a fuck. I hear Shabanger, a few cells down, rumbling with the officers who ran in his cell. “Stop resisting!” the COs yell. “Fuck off me!” Shabanger grunts. He might have been in bed sleeping. Soon we’re all outside our cells, facing the wall, cuffed. Then they start finding more phones, three of them. Shabanger’s, my neighbor’s, and his homey’s. A big bust to bring in the new year. They are all taken to the facility’s special housing unit: the box. In a couple weeks, after they’re found guilty at their hearings and receive sanctions, they’ll be transferred out to a bigger prison with a diversion unit to serve several months. That’s what they call the new version of solitary nowadays, “diversion,” since the HALT law passed. I’ll likely never see these guys again. The real bust, of course, would be to catch the CO who’s sneaking all the phones into the prison.

A couple COs search my cell. They’re cool about it. I ain’t no holster, I tell them, and I don’t have anything. They know I’m a journalist. I’d rather my cell was on the hit list; if your cell doesn’t get hit when everyone else’s around you is hit—well, as you can imagine, that doesn’t look too good. The COs are meticulous but respectful with my stuff, fingering through magazine stacks, rows of folders stuffed with drafts and research articles on the floor, stacks of books on the radiator. Ten different drafts of this manuscript, stacked three feet high. Their gloved fingers rummaging through my commissary food, feeling the seams of my clothes, pushing up my deodorant bars—they take an hour to sift through all my stuff. When they finally leave, I sit on the stool and look at the mess they made. I get up and start putting my cell back together. It’ll take hours. I’ll get no work done today.

After the SWAT team raided Rob’s apartment, two officers claimed they injured their hands in the melee. Much like he was charged with assaulting COs when they rushed his cell years before in prison, Rob was charged with an assault on an officer and multiple cocaine sales, an A-1 felony. Shawn was arrested and charged, too. The police found no drugs in the raid. Only empty baggies and crack stems and stench. The cops trashed the apartment looking for drugs—and dumped Shawn’s mother’s ashes in the garbage with the rest of their belongings. “Chambers of Horrors” was the Post headline. “I would expect he would spend the rest of his life in jail,” DA Morgenthau told the press.

“I guess at that point, I felt, maybe I am the guy in the newspapers,” Rob told me. “Maybe they’re right. So just leave me alone. Let me go back to prison. Let me get high and die.”

In 2008, Robert Chambers took a nineteen-year plea deal for selling cocaine, a longer sentence than what he got for killing Jennifer. Rob knew Morgenthau wanted to put him away forever. His lawyer, court-appointed this time, told him what the DA had told the press. The prosecutor promised to offer Shawn a drug program if Rob took the plea. So that’s what he did. He stopped at Downstate; got his new ID number, 08A4763; stayed in Green Haven for a few months; then landed back in Wende, outside Buffalo. Milton was there at the time, too. They passed each other in the hallways but didn’t know each other. When he did see guys he’d served time with in the ’80s and ’90s, it left him demoralized. They shook their heads, called him an idiot. He’d nod in agreement and smile. What could he say? He took a sign language class.

By the early 2010s, the prison drug scene had shifted to synthetics. Suboxone, the new drug Rob and Shawn had used to try to kick heroin, was now everywhere in prison. In a way, it was good because Suboxone has buprenorphine and naloxone in it, and the latter prevents overdoses. Heroin was still around, but not like it was in the old days. Fentanyl frightened everyone. Rob couldn’t afford it this time around anyway. The dealers who remembered him from his first bid saw that he was no longer the fresh-faced preppy getting a bunch of fan mail. Some dealers would throw him a bag on the house, here and there. But for the most part, if Rob wanted to get high, he’d do Suboxone. A pack of Newports would get him a piece of an eight-milligram strip. He’d let it dissolve in a plastic spoon and sniff it, then feel finger-snap good. In 2015, he pissed positive for buprenorphine. Though the department would later be sued for its urinalysis rendering false positives for buprenorphine, Rob told me his positive test was accurate.

By 2017, Rob had transferred from Wende to Sullivan. When he arrived, he received word from Simon to go to the yard. Simon knew that Rob hadn’t yet received his property. He greeted Rob at a stone table with two pouches of tobacco and a lighter. To Simon, Rob looked older, grayer, worn out. His hair was thinning on top. Rob thanked Simon and offered him an embarrassed smile. Simon didn’t shame him. Instead, he thought to himself how sad it seemed, how the system was just killing Rob slowly. Rob told him how Morgenthau’s office had set him up. They filled each other in on what happened to this one and that one over the years. He had just left Chris Hynes in Wende. Keith Hart and Sean Ryan were still in solitary. Jimmy Burke, the Goodfellas gangster who told Rob to stop messing with drugs, had died of cancer. Simon told Rob he still had the letter Rob wrote him before he was released from Auburn. Rob was surprised. Simon didn’t tell Rob why he really kept the letter Rob was a true crime celebrity.

ACT IV
The Reckoning

So much of prison is trying to master the art of becoming: Who do you want to become?

—Reginald Dwayne Betts

15
Back in Sing Sing
[SHANE]

In November 2016, when I arrived at Sing Sing, the prison was much less intense than Attica. Batons stayed on hips. COs, who were mostly Black and Hispanic, and about half of whom were women, talked to you, not at you, and sometimes even laughed with you. They were from our communities. There was a mean-spiritedness that the white COs up in the mountains had for us that the Black and brown ones who guarded us in Sing Sing did not. When taking the mess hall and yard lists, COs stopped in front of your cell. They didn’t burn us or cut off our electricity out of spite. But Sing Sing was poorly managed, loud and chaotic and loose.

Now, with about fifteen years in prison, I understood what Kenny Shannon, the Irish gangster I’d first met in Sing Sing, had told me when he said I needed to spend some time up in the mountains, in the tough joints like Clinton and Attica, to appreciate the Sing Sing vibe. Like he predicted, I’d also come to see the absurdity of the gangster life I had once aspired to.

In October 2017, Shane and I attended the New York Consortium for Higher Education in Prison at Sing Sing, an event hosted by Hudson Link and Columbia University. Hudson Link’s executive director, Sean Pica, emceed. In 1986, at seventeen years old, Sean, the son of a New York City police officer, shot and killed a friend’s abusive dad after she hired him to do it. He was sentenced to twenty-four years for manslaughter. During his bid, he experienced the harm of the elimination of the federal Pell Grants. John Valverde, who served time with Sean, got out and started Hudson Link, and the organization gave Sean a second chance. He earned a college degree, and when he got out, in 2002, he quickly took over the organization. Today, Hudson Link operates in six prisons with eleven college partners across New York State. Sean had pull with Sing Sing superintendent, Michael Capra, and was always putting together these wonderful events, like the one Shane and I attended in the visitor area, a low-ceilinged cafeteria room. The chairs were rearranged. Politicians and philanthropists showed up, along with educators who taught in different prisons across the nation. A panel of about five students, including Shane, was slated to speak. A handful of recently released students, continuing their education outside prison, were also on the program.

There was catered food, smart conversation, and networking opportunities. I remember eyeballing the mini Boar’s Head hero sandwiches while another prisoner and I chatted with John B. King Jr., Obama’s education secretary. He was asking us about our class. For the first time in fifteen years, I wanted time to go slowly because I was enjoying the moment. I told Mr. King I had written an op-ed in the Times about college in prison, and he told me he had read it. I would do that a lot back then, plug my own pieces in a sort of desperate attempt to solicit validation. Please, please, please. See me as a writer, see me as anything but a prisoner and a murderer.

The panelists were called to the stage, and the rest of us took our seats. When it was Shane’s turn, he talked about how, in a course on human development, he had learned about “magical thinking.” According to Psychology Today, magical thinking is “the need to believe that one’s hopes and desires can have an effect on how the world turns.” His point—and he made it well, captivating everyone in the audience—was that when education is available in the darkest corners of society, like these prisons, it offers an opportunity for us to create a new ideal for ourselves, and that, in turn, can not only shift the tone of an institution but also spill over into the material world. Putting the argument into more concrete terms, Shane equated a college education to a vaccine and suggested that people in society “would be remiss not to invest in and further a vaccine that inoculates people with a 98 percent success rate.” He was referring to the low rate of recidivism for formerly incarcerated people who earned college degrees inside. Then he got more personal: “As the piece of shit who took someone’s life, I understand how my actions brought trauma to my family, friends and community and larger society.”

Prisoners sat among civilians, and it felt so civil. The woman next to me started crying. So did another man in green on the panel. So did the bald man in an expensive suit from the Mellon Foundation. Back then, before I knew anything about Shane’s story, his passion for education and candor about his crime were refreshing. When I learned about him being the first person a New York City prosecutor sought to execute after they reinstated capital punishment in 1995, I couldn’t make sense of that. I realized then that I would write about him.

As Shane came to a new understanding of himself in relation to his crime, it was still difficult to own his trauma and not sound like he was rationalizing what he’d done. While he was having these self-realizations, the public’s understanding of domestic abuse was also changing. Society was starting to accept that abuse creates trauma in people who go on to commit violent crimes.

In 2009, the New York Coalition for Women Prisoners, a group of women who had served time and were still serving time, began lobbying for a bill that would require judges to consider the abuse that many defendants had suffered and weigh how it related to the violent crimes they committed. In the ’90s, about 82 percent of women in New York prisons were severely abused as children, and 75 percent suffered serious abuse by a partner. (No comparable study has been done since.) Nationally, women’s prisons are a glut of trauma, and the population has grown at twice the rate of men since the ’80s. Today there are about two hundred thousand women behind bars, amounting to nearly the total US prison population in the early ’70s. This bill, called the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act, or DVSJA, was getting a lot of momentum. Even though the bill’s language was “gender-neutral,” it was not yet on Shane’s radar.

I couldn’t help thinking about the forces of different kinds of storytelling. During these years, as activists and scholars were trying to change the narrative about the role trauma plays in domestic killings, true crime was entertaining the public with them.

“From socialites to secretaries, female killers share one thing in common: They all snapped,” Maya Salam wrote for the New York Times in a 2023 review, quoting the tagline for the show Snapped. “But what this show delivers cannot be found anywhere else. Each episode explores a crime committed by a woman—crimes you probably would never have heard about otherwise, in part because they happen in America’s nooks and crannies. The stories are largely told through interviews with those involved, often including the criminals or victims themselves. And you get an entire story in about 45 minutes.” That a New York Times writer would suggest that any forty-five-minute episode of a true crime show could capture the entire story behind a woman’s crime is absurd. Articles like this are one of the reasons I wrote this book. I’m able to come at the story from a different point of view.

On the nights Shane didn’t have college, he attended Rehabilitation Through the Arts, or RTA, the drama program that organized workshops and put on plays like 1776. If they weren’t rehearsing the annual play, the class would be performing some cathartic exercise, much like the ones Shane used to do with the Phoenix Players. I’d be in a college class, maybe on a bathroom break, walking down the hallway, and see him through the door, clapping, laughing. It always jarred me to see joy like that in prison, as if part of our punishment was that we weren’t allowed to feel it. I didn’t. When I smiled, my cheeks twitched. Shane told me that he felt like this, too. His routine was just a way to distract himself from feeling how he usually felt, which was generally depressed. Many of us in prison are. Shane also attended his Buddhist group, sitting, legs pretzeled, alongside the others and meditating in a basement room in the chapel. On the weekends, he’d stroll down the canopied path, a big piano keyboard tucked under his arm, to the music room in the school building. As I jogged in the A Block yard, I could hear the music spilling out from the caged windows.

Sing Sing was its own world. Some prisoners were in positions of power, given to them by the superintendent, and tasked with organizing coveted events with civilians and catered food. These events were a flash of freedom, so guys were always looking to get their names on the lists. After the education consortium in 2017, I was seldom invited to participate in others. My writing kept me firmly on the administration’s radar. I believe that I was excluded because I was a journalist, someone the superintendent felt that he couldn’t control. To put my name down would bother the man, and the prisoners who organized these events knew this.

Michael Capra had worked his way up the ranks, from guard to superintendent of Sing Sing. He was a roundish, charismatic man. I’d occasionally see him strolling the halls in a pressed suit. Though approachable, he was used to dealing with broken young men. He’d walk by a cell, point his finger at a guy behind the bars, and say, “Enroll in college,” or, “Get your head out of your ass.” Capra embraced the media, but he didn’t embrace me. He relied on a handful of go-to guys in honor block to speak at these events, where men mingled with the public. The rest of the population called them the Illuminati, and Capra had a nickname, too: “Smile-for-the-Camera Capra.”

These events helped men learn soft skills, like small talk and networking. Shane would sometimes get invites, and over the years he came up with a method called “mentor minute,” in which he would ask a guest, whether it be a professor or documentarian or journalist, for a nugget of wisdom about their work. It helped him imagine who he could become in the world. It hurt that I seldom got an invite to these events. I could’ve practiced my people skills. But I told myself the real stories were back in the cellblocks and yards.

In 2018, the long-form stories I investigated and reported on back in Attica seemed to publish all at once. We had finally received the numbers that backed my hypothesis about the cameras quelling the abuse at Attica. In April, the Marshall Project ran “Spying on Attica,” which Vice copublished. “This Place Is Crazy,” about the mental health crisis in prison, ran in the summer print issue of Esquire. That same summer, Bill Keller and I wrote a story about a schizophrenic man named Andrew Goldstein who, in 1999, had pushed Kendra Webdale in front of an oncoming subway. The story had two twenty-year arcs: I told Goldstein’s story from the inside; on the outside, Bill unpacked the effects of Kendra’s Law, which helps people with severe mental illness get proper assisted outpatient treatment. In September, “A Turbulent Mind” ran in the Marshall Project and in print in New York magazine.

When I heard that Loen Kelley—the producer who told me that feature magazine writing was unrealistic for a prisoner—was now working at CNN, I figured I’d call her. I wanted to see if she could get me on the network, in a news segment; I saw print journalists doing this all the time after they published important articles. Loen congratulated me on my stories, and we talked for a bit about what she was working on. When I asked about a segment with CNN to talk about the mental health crisis in America’s prisons, Loen leveled with me. “All they want to do on CNN is talk about Trump,” she said. “I’m in the documentary unit. But let me ask around.”

A few days later, a note from Loen on CNN letterhead landed on my cell bars. In it, she wrote that they were “looking for prisoners who would make great interviews for a show with Chris Cuomo.” She didn’t mention the name of the show. “My colleagues are looking for people who will talk candidly and thoughtfully about their lives, about their crimes, and what they’ve learned and how they’ve changed—that sort of thing. So if you’re interested—just give my colleague Kim a call. She’ll explain everything!”

I feel foolish reflecting on it all today. Because she’d created that website, PrisonWriters.com, I figured Loen had my best interests in mind. She didn’t. I remember something she mentioned about the HLN documentary she was producing about John Wayne Gacy. I asked how she managed to keep the audience interested in stories about the same serial killers. “You gotta trick ’em,” she told me. “Trick ’em into thinking they’re getting new information.”

I’m hardly the only one who’s been approached by slick true crime producers. Mulumba Kazigo told me what had happened to him. Years before, he was contacted in Sing Sing by a television producer who told him that she wanted to retell his story, the tragedy of it. Mulumba was wary. But after the producer promised Mulumba $1,000, he agreed to participate. It bothered Mulumba to have to always ask his siblings for commissary money. After the film crew interviewed him in Sing Sing, Mulumba never again heard from the producer or received the $1,000. The show aired on Investigation Discovery in 2013, as part of the Blood Relatives series; Mulumba’s episode was called “Paging Doctor Death.”

The show itself is a caricature of true crime: a corny narrator, cringe-worthy B-roll, exoticism, and cheesy music. It’s all to set up the Kazigos as a family in domestic bliss on the cusp of a sudden unraveling: sustained glares from across the dinner table, clenched teeth, orchestral stabs, a shot of blood streaming out from a watering can, and an intense focus on sharp household objects (a shot of Dr. Kazigo holding a kitchen knife). The writing is terrible. After mentioning how one of Mulumba’s siblings had recently committed suicide, the narrator adds ominously: “Little does the family know that another member of this loving household is about to snap.” For his part, Mulumba is eloquent and soft-spoken. But the episode makes a mockery of what Mulumba and his family went through at the hands of his abusive father. “I thought that was so unethical, the way they could lie to you,” Mulumba told me one evening after class, walking back to our cellblocks. “I didn’t know it was going to be this exploitative thing that would hurt my family even more.”

Walking up the canopied path, Mulumba was always at the end of the pack; he felt safer knowing no one was behind him. Me, too. Plus, a guard walked at the rear. Everyone thought Mulumba was gay. I’d heard many guys call him a mook. I couldn’t help wondering if they thought I was gay when I was talking to him. I stopped feeling this way with Shane, because he was gregarious and better received, but I hate that I was consumed by what others were thinking about me when I talked to Mulumba. I hate prison. So did he.

It was Mulumba, on one of our walks up the hill, who expressed hope that a new bill would help him get out. He, who had been ostracized and rejected even more in prison than he was in his home growing up, was hoping that lawmakers would finally pass the DVSJA. He was hoping a judge would recognize the effects of the abuse that set his actions in motion. Mulumba and I had these conversations about the bill in 2018, thirteen years after he killed his father. He still had a few more to serve on his twenty-year sentence. I thought his hopes were a bit high, but I didn’t tell him that.

In the summer of 2019, one of Superintendent Capra’s guys asked me to be the narrative developer for an upcoming TEDx event. I was happy for the invite. Sean Pica was hosting and funding the talk. TEDx was an indie event, which meant we had to abide by TED’s standards but our speakers wouldn’t be prepped by TED professionals. The prep was left to a sharp English professor, wise with an alpha personality, and an energetic prelaw student, Sean’s assistant, along with a couple of my peers and me. We selected a theme: “Redefining What Matters.” We had tryouts, selected eight speakers. We met for practice twice a week in the afternoons, in the schoolhouse. Men rehearsed, pausing as a PA screeched out last names to report to the desk. I worked closely with Joseph Wilson, the fella who had urged me to write an apology letter and send it to the apology letter bank. His talk grappled with his feelings about his little sister coming out to him. I worked with Bruce Bryan on a talk about the children of people doing time, the invisible victims of our prison system. I helped shape Shane’s talk about his work as a facilitator helping people reenter a society to which his own sentence deemed him unworthy to return.

By August, the DVSJA, which had quietly been passed by the New York State Legislature months earlier, had taken effect. Most guys hadn’t yet realized the law wasn’t limited to women. Shane, who was usually pretty informed about new legislation, still hadn’t even heard about it. He was busy preparing for his TEDx talk.

The TEDx event went down on Friday, February 7, 2020. That day, I wore a pressed pink Ralph Lauren shirt with green pants, always those green pants (we were required to wear the state-issued greens, but could wear our own shirts and shoes), and walked down the canopied path to where everyone was gathered in a building by the Hudson. The day before, we had draped dark curtains over the windows and set up the stage with the TED emblem; professional sound and video folks worked beside us. Being involved felt like a furlough from prison. Guests were already arriving—families of the speakers, community activists, politicians, educators, and journalists. There were donuts and bagels and coffee. I felt free. I met my colleagues from the Marshall Project, with whom I’d spoken over the phone and exchanged emails but had never met in person. To talk and laugh and work the room, to have people tell me that they knew my work—it was what I needed. As Capra and other Albany suits walked by, we pretended not to see one another. Sean Pica told me that Capra was livid about my recent article in Sports Illustrated that described how bookies and fantasy football leagues operated in Sing Sing. Sean had invited the actor Tommy “Tiny” Lister, who played Deebo in the movie Friday. The college professor who worked with me on the prep team introduced me to Steve Forbes, who was one of the outside speakers. He gave me his business card and told me to pitch him. Then a colleague whispered in my ear, “Nobody reads Forbes anymore.”

I loved it all, the gossip, the envy, the conversation, the acknowledgment. Soon we all took our seats. The superintendent and commissioner gave their speeches, and then the speakers set it off. Shane started his talk:

“Twenty-five years ago, I took another man’s life, and then, like a coward, I tried to cover it up. Being fully accountable means I wake up each day knowing I can’t change the past. But the sorrow doesn’t stop me from doing atonement,” Shane said to the crowd. When I looked over at Susan Chira, the editor-in-chief of the Marshall Project, she wiped away tears. “Most [of the people I work with] do not have a reentry plan. In the beginning, this pissed me off. Most of these people are squandering their second chance. [But] we discovered an intersectionality of our shared fears: mine of dying in prison, theirs of returning to prison.”

After his speech, people approached Shane with praise. One woman told him that she passed Sing Sing every day on her commute and figured only bad people lived there. Now, when she drives by, she told him, she’ll be thinking about him.

A few days later, I wrote the superintendent offering to help with future events. I’d heard from Sean that they were renovating the Tappan building, where the TEDx event was held, and asked the superintendent if he’d give me a classroom to host a creative writing workshop. But the superintendent was still frustrated by my Sports Illustrated story. “You only want me to call upon you so you can say that the superintendent wants ME to do something,” Capra wrote back. “All you want is to have everyone tell you that you’re a great journalist.”

Of course I wanted to be told that. Who wouldn’t? But I also wanted to teach a creative writing workshop, to give others the experience I had in Attica. If the superintendent found my journalism problematic, maybe he didn’t want more of us writing from prison. Who bears the responsibility to foster creative arts programs that allow prisoners to reflect on their lives and what they’ve done? Wasn’t it an administrator’s job to create opportunities for rehabilitation by propping up those of us who have a particular talent or passion to share? Did I need to explain to Capra what writing had done for me? Without writing, I should have told him, I don’t know who I’d be. For me, becoming a writer was a way to overcome being a killer, though with time I have come to realize that I’ll never overcome it completely. With the personal parts of my writing, I feel like there’s an expectation that I need to explain why people like me do what we did. That’s what I wanted to teach, to the extent that it was possible, in a workshop. Exploring one’s guilt, I’d like to think, means taking an active role in one’s rehabilitation. I could’ve taught guys journalism, communing and connecting with subjects, which helps me understand the pain in their lives and mine, like we’re a damaged team. It’s this kind of writing that helps me develop more of the thing I’ve always lacked: empathy. I suppose I could’ve done a better job explaining this to Capra.

Looking back, it was a missed opportunity for me to pay it forward to my peers. I should have mustered up more humility with Capra. I let my ego get in the way. I regret that. I mean, I wish he would have approached me with some grace, too. Or at least been a bit more curious about what I had to offer. I had been living in a cell for almost twenty years, damaged, and then all of a sudden I was relevant. It was hard for me to figure all that out. But the next time I communicated with a prison official, I promised myself I wouldn’t make that same mistake.

The TEDx event would be the last gathering we would experience for years. By mid-March, the coronavirus outbreak began spreading through Westchester, and Sing Sing started taking preventative measures. All family visitation and access by nonessential prison workers was suspended. Cellblock gyms, the Five Block basement, and religious services were closed. Mess hall seating was staggered; medical callouts and commissary runs were limited to groups of ten. To us, it all seemed like an attempt to save face in a hopeless situation. Social distancing? In here? It was a recurring joke. We were all going to get Covid.

By then, Shane was in honor block, in Seven Building. The block was structured like a horseshoe, four floors of open tiers. His gate was left open almost all day. He could leave to go out to the private honor block yard, which sat atop a hill and had weights and a garden. Still, it was a dark time for him. For all of us.

Yet the passing of the DVSJA offered a glimmer of light. Those who petitioned the court for resentencing had to show that their abuse had been a “significant contributing factor” to their crime. Notably, the law didn’t mention gender. It also stated that the victim in the case did not have to be the abuser, meaning that a court could take a more holistic view of a defendant’s trauma. The law, Shane realized, could be his way out.

16
God and Psychosis in Prison
[MILTON]

Over the years, Milton heard from Val, one of his old girlfriends. He had been sleeping with her around the same time he was seeing Melina, Kevin’s mother. In one of her letters, Val told him he had a daughter. Her name was Lasaundra. Milton talked to her a few times over the phone, but they never met in person. By 2012, when Lasaundra was in her twenties, she was in prison herself, serving a two-to-four-year sentence for attempted assault and possession of a weapon. She was in a New York prison, counted three times a day just like her father. Her situation was a continuation of generational incarceration: Babu, Milton, and now Lasaundra. “No matter if I never met you, I still love you and I have a gap in my life that I have been missing,” Lasaundra wrote her father, from her prison to his.

In 2013, Milton was still in Wende. His mental health records show that he had been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type, an illness that includes symptoms of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. At six foot three, he weighed 344 pounds and had a heavy med regimen: Prolixin, an antipsychotic to treat schizophrenia symptoms; Prozac, an antidepressant; and Enalapril, which treats high blood pressure. He managed better in these years.

Milton’s first child, Kevin, seemed to be breaking the cycle. He had graduated from high school, attended local colleges, and in 2013, at twenty-seven years old, was working for temp agencies in Buffalo. He had just married and, in a letter he sent his father at Wende, explained how he was “still working on myself to become the husband type. My biggest accomplishment is to make you proud. I just hope that I am strong enough when God challenges me.” Kevin wrote neatly, in red ink. He ended with “I love you Dad and I need you to survive this.”

In another letter, written in 2015, Kevin explained to Milton how he just got accepted into the dental assistant program at the University at Buffalo. He told his father how he prayed “that one day the parole board understands that even tho you are imprisoned, you still managed to keep me away from the prison system. To live in a jungle means you have to adapt to the environment. But the devil is a liar!” Kevin wrote. “You’ve been away 27 years now. It’s not like you joined a gang. You found God! God will always make a way out for anything. Faith, love, and hope. These 3 keys have gotten me thru my darkest times. My faith in God, my love for family, and hope to have a better tomorrow.”

Kevin never went the dental assistant route. Today he has a job at a Buffalo Dollar General. After just seven months, he became the manager. It’s a source of pride. Sometimes he picks up double shifts to cover for his employees. As for his father’s crimes, Kevin still believes they were the result of inappropriate sexual behavior by the priests.

The idea of the church being a safe place for young men in Buffalo was a thing of the past. In October 2018, 60 Minutes did a story about the accusations of sexual abuse made against the clergy of the Diocese of Buffalo, and the criticism that Bishop Richard J. Malone had covered it up. They interviewed Deacon Paul Snyder, one of the first local clergy members to call for Bishop Malone’s resignation. “A crisis is, we look at our home and it’s burning to the ground,” Snyder said. “A scandal is, while it’s burning to the ground, you know how to put the fire out, but you don’t tell me.… You pretend to grieve with me about the fire, but the problem is, you caused it.”

Over the years, more accusations had come out about Father Robert A. Stolinski, the priest who had found Father Joseph Bissonette’s body in the rectory where they both lived. A “black binder” of diocese secrets kept by the Buffalo bishop had been made public. In it, there was an entry about the 1987 St. Bartholomew crime scene after Father Bissonette was killed: “When the police investigated, they found a great deal of pornography (male homosexual pornography not involving children),” referring to Father Stolinski’s living quarters. Another entry, in 2009, describes “complaints from parish personnel that they found pornography in Father Stolinski’s room at St. James Parish in Jamestown.” It says, “The pornography involved sexual acts between men and male teenagers, but not child pornography.” In the binder, there was a “reference to a third incident in 2010, but it is unclear what that entailed.” None of the allegations against Father Stolinski have been substantiated. Bishop Malone, in 2019, reinstated him to “active ministry.”

Milton had applied several times to the New York Theological Seminary, the master’s program at Sing Sing that offered a graduate degree in professional studies. He qualified because he had earned a bachelor’s degree back in the early 1990s, but he never heard back about his applications. He figured it was because of his crime. It could have been his mental health status, too. From 2013 to 2019, Milton didn’t receive any disciplinary infractions except for one in 2015, when he disrupted an evening count and threatened an officer, who noted his cell’s toilet was full of urine, feces, and toilet paper. His mental health records didn’t seem to reveal any alarming changes. He transferred from Wende to Green Haven in 2015, then to Auburn in 2018, but in 2019, he was back in Attica, in the general population. Then, in June, Milton received a letter telling him he had been accepted to the NYTS program. It was from one of his past applications. He took it as a blessing. He transferred to Sing Sing, and we met soon after, in the audience for 1776.

Even at a new spot, Milton had to deal with the “bugout” stigma. Some guys in the NYTS master’s program who locked with Milton on C Gallery sometimes wondered how he’d gotten into the program in the first place. Shane overheard a counselor say it was a mistake Milton had been selected. But Milton didn’t need that much support with the coursework itself, even though Shane sometimes helped him with his presentations. “Milton had no problem putting together a paper,” Shane told me. “He enjoyed getting the opportunity to talk. He was desperate to get his master’s degree, as we all were.”

This isn’t to say Milton didn’t have his issues. He still struggled with personal hygiene, his cell was messy, and he was always getting caught up in a junk-food-related hustle called “juggling.” On every tier of every prison, there’s a juggle man, a prisoner who stocks up on all the coveted items from the commissary, mostly sweets, and sells them back to you. If Milton took two eight-hundred-calorie iced honey buns, he’d owe three back. Same with the sodium-loaded Shabang potato chips. Milton ran up bills with the juggle man. Sometimes his NYTS classmates would bail him out. When we finished our basement sessions, Milton would often ask the CO stationed on my tier if he could wait while I ran to my cell and got him some instant Folgers.

Beyond mental health, religion is a major throughline in Milton’s life: his crime against the priests; the “eye for an eye” dishing out of justice (the judge, sitting under the words “In God We Trust,” who wished he could sentence Milton and Teddy to death); and the offer of forgiveness (Ray, Ann, and Sister Karen all on this Christlike mission, visiting and corresponding with Teddy and Milton in prison). While Ray never came right out and forgave Milton, he does say that his brother, Father Joe, would have felt that the boys had served enough time. Could Milton find a path to freedom?

In 2018, a year before Milton arrived, I sat in the Sing Sing auditorium listening to Steve Zeidman, a former legal aid lawyer and now a professor at CUNY’s School of Law, give a talk about clemency. He was a trim sixty-something with salt-and-pepper hair. “Everyone was saying to me, ‘Oh, clemency, it doesn’t happen,’” Zeidman told an attentive crowd. “And my response was always, well, maybe it doesn’t happen because not enough people are banging the drum.” Zeidman, with all his energy and optimism, sounded like a founder of a new tech start-up, filling a need that no one had yet realized.

In those years, it was true that clemency was largely a defunct power that presidents, who can address federal cases, and governors, who can take up state cases, didn’t much use. Clemency has two functions: a pardon can wipe out your conviction; a commutation can reduce your sentence. In reality, there’s more a governor could do: shave years off your sentence, immediately send you to a parole board, or outright free you. Pardons are almost always granted after someone has been out of prison for a long time, and violent convictions aren’t given serious consideration. In fact, before Zeidman’s presentation, I’d never even heard of a governor commuting a violent offender. But he told the men in the audience, men with life sentences who’d robbed and killed and now had receding hairlines and gray goatees and college degrees, that things were changing. He explained how in 2016, he got New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to commute the seventy-five-years-to-life sentence of Judith Clark, the getaway driver in the 1981 Brink’s heist that left a guard and two police officers dead; Cuomo made her immediately eligible for parole, and though the parole board initially denied her, on the next go-round, she was released.

He described the process, the requirements, and how to put together a petition. He was starting a clinic at CUNY and assigning his students to help people with their applications. I saw Shane in the audience taking notes. After he was finished, men swarmed Zeidman with clemency questions, asking how to contact him. I’m a big believer in timing, and back then, I didn’t feel it was the right time for me to submit an application. More work had to be done; more time had to be served.

In 2020, Steve Zeidman founded the Second Look Project: Beyond Guilt. The clinic works to get those of us who’ve served significant time out of prison through various means, like resentencing motions under New York’s new DVSJA and medical parole, but most notably through clemency. During Governor Andrew Cuomo’s decade in office, he granted forty-one commutations, nineteen of them in response to petitions prepared by Zeidman’s team. In 2021, after Cuomo left office and the lieutenant governor, Kathy Hochul, became governor, I published an op-ed about clemency in the New York Times. I called out the clemency process for its randomness, so much riding on unpredictable events like a governor’s sudden fall from grace, a victim’s forgiveness, or representation by an effective lawyer. I asked for Governor Hochul to create a clemency advisory panel with experts in the field. The panel could recommend the most compelling candidates to the governor every quarter, a reminder to my peers that redemption is important. Not long after, Hochul hired a full clemency staff, which soon assembled an advisory panel.

Around this time, in 2022, Reginald Dwayne Betts had convinced me it was time to submit a clemency petition. Alexandra Cox would write a mitigation report as part of my materials. Mitigation is the process of peeling back the many layers that make up our ugly backstories in order to offer something of an explanation—not an excuse—of how we came to commit our crimes. The report was hard for me to read. Even though I was a journalist, there were certain parts of my own life that I wasn’t looking to investigate. Yet the report illuminated the dark and hazy corners of my early years and helped me better understand myself—and forgive my mother. I didn’t know that my mother had once attempted suicide before I was born by turning on the gas stove and closing all the windows in her apartment; the fire department broke through a window on the fire escape and took her to a psychiatric hospital. I didn’t know that my father managed to stay sober the whole time my mother was pregnant with me, but then relapsed the day I was born. He never made it to the hospital. I never knew that, weeks later, my mom dropped me off at the bar where he was working and walked out. I didn’t know that he then dropped me off at New York Foundling for neglected and abused children.

While Alexandra was digging into my past, I was researching and reporting on Milton’s upbringing. I thought about how the judge had refused to consider Milton’s “underprivileged life” at sentencing. I started talking to Steve Zeidman about Milton. He had recently penned a law review article in which he used the term “rotten social background,” or RSB, to explain why poor people of color are overrepresented in the system. The term was first used by a federal appellate judge named David Bazelon in 1973. Judge Bazelon wrote that “there is no moral justification for punishing poor criminal defendants when society refuses to remedy conditions of inequality.” And while no state has allowed extreme economic deprivation or RSB to be used to absolve someone of a crime, there is a growing receptivity to the impact of social background and circumstances in resentencing. (For a couple of years, I worked closely with Emily Bazelon, the judge’s granddaughter and a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine, on the Prison Letters Project out of Yale; Emily assembles Yale Law students to look into some of the injustices prisoners claim in the hundreds of letters they’ve written her over the years. Her students would sometimes send me a compelling letter and I would write a piece on it.)

Milton’s rotten social background probably wouldn’t get much play, but new scientific research suggested his brain wasn’t fully formed back in 1987. Milton was seventeen when he committed his crime, which meant that Zeidman could potentially file a motion under the recent Supreme Court precedent that ruled the adolescent brain—specifically the prefrontal cortex—isn’t yet fully developed, and thus minors should not be given mandatory life-without-parole sentences. The challenge was getting a judge to see Milton’s sentence of fifty years to life as one that essentially amounted to life without parole. He’d very likely die in prison before his first parole appearance in 2037 at sixty-seven years old.

It stood out to Zeidman that at Milton’s sentencing, the judge had stated he wished he could sentence Milton and Teddy to death. It was similar to a case he had recently worked on with another lawyer. In 1986, a sixteen-year-old named Paul Leon murdered his neighbor and her daughter. At sentencing, the judge, Nicholas Colabella, had made a statement, just like Milton and Teddy’s judge had, that he wished New York had the death penalty. The judge sentenced Leon to two consecutive terms of twenty-five years to life: fifty years to life, same as Milton. He wouldn’t be parole-eligible until 2036. In prison, Leon had rehabilitated himself, gotten an education, and participated in programming. In 2020, as Leon entered his thirty-fourth year in prison, Zeidman put together a clemency petition for him. (Neither Governor Cuomo nor Governor Hochul approved it.) Another lawyer filed a resentencing motion in the fall of 2021, and at a hearing in June 2022, Westchester County judge George Fufidio reduced Leon’s term to two consecutive terms of eighteen years to life. Leon was granted parole soon after and is free today.

But unlike Milton, Leon did not suffer from schizoaffective disorder.

The more I spoke to Zeidman about Milton, the more interested he became in the case, and he eventually took it. My job as a prison journalist was to tell Milton’s story honestly; it wasn’t my job to get Milton out of prison. Yet I couldn’t help but feel invested in the outcome, even though I knew I shouldn’t be focused on trying to sway it. I closely considered how I assembled all the information I compiled—reporting, researching, relating, reflecting—on these men and how I rendered their stories. I tried to check my biases. Throughout this process, smart editors and writers have been peeking over my shoulder, keeping me honest. But I’m not objective. I live in a cell like my subjects. The writing I do, immersive reporting meshed with memoir, works only if I’m leveling and being honest with you, the reader, along the way. And I would be lying if I said I didn’t want one thing for the men I’ve written about in this book: their freedom.

Because Milton signed a release form authorizing me to view his mental health records, Zeidman eventually shared with me over a thousand pages of scanned and handwritten records. I agreed to use the records minimally, to track when Milton’s diagnoses had surfaced over the years, his medication regimens, and his violent episodes.

Was Milton a danger to society? Was he better off in prison? At what point does the punishment become less about the crime someone committed and more about their mental illness?

In March 2020, after Sing Sing went on lockdown and college courses were suspended, Milton, Shane, and the others in their class got word from the professors to finish up their capstones, or “ministries,” and mail them to the New York Theological Seminary campus. Milton was seeing a Sing Sing psychiatrist every ten weeks and on a stable regimen of Prolixin, an antipsychotic. The next year of “social distancing” was tough for Milton. With no classes to occupy his time, he mostly stayed in his cell watching television, playing on his tablet, or reading the dictionary. He went to the gym. He was moved from Five Building to A Block. By November, he stopped taking his medications consistently. He got sick, got scared. We all did.

17
A New Law, a New Chance at Freedom
[SHANE]

On the morning of August 26, 2020, Mulumba Kazigo’s cell number screeched over the A Block PA. The tier officer turned a switch and Mulumba’s cell motored open. The Nassau County court in Long Island, the county where he was originally sentenced, had granted him a hearing under the new Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act. It would be a video conference because of Covid. Mulumba wore his state greens, walked to the end of the long tier and down the narrow staircase, took his pass from the CO, left A Block, and walked through the dark corridors. He cleared a metal detector, then another. He stopped and showed the CO his pass; the gates opened and closed—clank, clank. Then Mulumba found himself in a room in front of a big-screen TV. He saw his lawyer and the judge and the prosecutor.

His lawyer began recounting the horrors of Mulumba’s childhood and quoted his siblings’ descriptions of vicious abuse. He argued that Mulumba was a traumatized young man when he killed his father. It was a domestic tragedy. He loved his father, hated his father, killed his father. The prosecutor didn’t say much. Then Judge David Sullivan resentenced Mulumba to five years. With fifteen years already served on his twenty-year sentence for manslaughter, the nightmare was over. Judge Sullivan ordered prison officials to release Mulumba immediately. Two COs escorted him back to his cell and told him to quickly pack whatever he wanted to bring, then took him to intake and processed his paperwork. Hours later, Mulumba Kazigo walked out of Sing Sing, free. He was the first man in a New York State prison freed under the DVSJA.

Shane was happy for Mulumba, but also envious. He remembers how Mulumba would always talk to him about the DVSJA, especially after the law had passed and his lawyers were about to file his motion. There is an emotional danger that comes with hoping too much for freedom when you’re serving life in prison. Shane had accepted life on life’s terms. When he did go to the law library and read DVSJA statute 440.47, however, he felt like the law was crafted expressly for him. The realizations he’d come to in that class about domestic violence now had a legitimate mechanism to validate them. He wanted freedom, but even more, he wanted some kind of acknowledgment that his actions and the suffering they had caused stemmed from his own abuse.

In December 2020, Duncan Osborne wrote a twenty-five-year anniversary profile of Shane and his crime in Gay City News, formerly LGNY, titled “Death Penalty Long Gone, Has New York Yet Embraced Rehabilitation or Mercy?” It pitted Shane against the backdrop of New York’s flawed death penalty, which was abolished in 2004. Osborne tracked down Kyle Reeves, the prosecutor.

After Shane’s case, Reeves ran into trouble. In 2008, he was removed from a high-profile grand jury case involving an illegal steroid ring and demoted to Brooklyn’s gun bureau. Reeves eventually left the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office in 2013 and started working at the Staten Island DA’s office, another step down. In 2015, the appellate division of New York’s Supreme Court found that Reeves had committed prosecutorial misconduct. In 2017, the murder conviction in a 1995 case that Reeves had overseen as the assistant district attorney was vacated after he was found to have withheld exculpatory evidence (favorable to the defendant) during the trial. After that, he moved on to practice civil law at a private firm. In 2020, he told Gay City News that he now doubted whether Shane was ever the “worst of the worst.”

Yet when I look back at the sentencing minutes, Reeves sounds like a man with no mercy. He asked that Shane get the maximum for three stacked charges—murder, kidnapping, robbery—and be sentenced to fifty years to life. Reeves also dismissed the defense’s description of Shane’s crime as a domestic dispute and argued that it was “a brutal, calculated and gruesome crime motivated solely by this defendant’s greed.” Why? Because Shane had bought a metal detector and searched for Stefan’s mystery gold? I used to run with stickup kids who kidnapped big drug dealers, threw them into car trunks, and pistol-whipped them until they gave up their stashes. Shane had never been arrested. He was a misfit kid, rejected by the world, but not a criminal. I still can’t understand how he was the first person New York City sought to execute.

I’ve also always felt that it must be a tough job for prosecutors and judges to see people at their worst, day after day, for years. Perhaps it’s numbing, too, in the sense that they become less able, or less willing, to see any redeemable qualities in those they prosecute and sentence. Over time, maybe some prosecutors age out of their punitive thinking, like we age out of criminal thinking. When I reached out to Reeves to talk about Shane, he sent me this message: “If this is the same John Lennon that was prosecuted and convicted of murder in Brooklyn around 2004, I’d have to decline because I was the homicide bureau boss that supervised the ADA who did the trial.”

I’d known Shane and I were prosecuted by the same office, but I hadn’t realized that the person who prosecuted him supervised the person who prosecuted me. I’d like to think that I’m not “the same John Lennon,” but I know that my past will always be a part of me. I think it’s a bit of an obfuscation for someone who committed murder to say that they aren’t the same person anymore. Well, where did that person go? What if my victim’s family wants to meet with me one day and ask me about the murder? I can’t pretend not to have access to that part of me anymore, that I can’t answer their questions because I’m a changed man. I’d need to reflect on what I was thinking back then. I’d owe them that, at least. But I was reaching out to Reeves as a journalist, not a murderer, and he had already given another journalist a comment about Shane. Why not me?

At least he changed his position on Shane. I did appreciate that.

“I wondered at the time if Michael Hale was the person [the death penalty] was designed for and I’ve reached the conclusion that it wasn’t,” Reeves said in Gay City News. “What he did was horrendous, but I don’t think it was any worse than any of the other 160 murders that I tried.… He’s not the guy if you put him out on the street 25 years later … he’s not going to kill again.”

I reached out to John Schwartz, the lead detective who worked Shane’s case. He was retired from the NYPD and, ironically, now lived in Kentucky, serving as the deputy commissioner for the state’s Department of Criminal Justice Training. After a few emails, we set up a time to talk. I was tucked in a partition booth next to 360, Rome, and Blue Steel as they talked to their families. We were all in for murder. Between the four of us, we had served more than a century in prison. So it was surreal to be on the cellblock phone, listening to a former homicide detective tell me that in his almost nine years in the unit, he’d made plenty of arrests and put a lot of people in prison for murder. I tried to focus. I asked Schwartz about Shane’s confession—specifically, the whole idea that Shane opened the trunk and suffocated Stefan with a plastic bag as he begged for his life. This seemed to be the action that Hynes had identified as the aggravating factor to seek the death penalty. Was that Schwartz’s understanding of what Shane had said in his confession?

“No, Hale never says anything like that,” Schwartz told me. “He says there was a noise coming from the trunk. And he pulled over and saw the blood and then he wanted to cover the head with the bag,” Schwartz went on. “I asked him, ‘Did you tie it or anything like that?’ And I think he said no. And I just left it. I was trying to establish jurisdiction for where [Tanner] died.”

I was surprised by Schwartz’s answer. I figured he would have backed up Hynes’s narrative of the crime. I also wondered if there was a follow-up interview—maybe that’s when Shane said he did the things that Hynes alleged? But Schwartz was candid, and all these years later, remembered the exchange just as the contemporaneous transcript of the confession reflects it. Schwartz also confirmed that he had conducted no further interviews with Shane. Turns out, Shane suffocating Stefan in the trunk as he begged for his life was a complete fiction that Hynes created. It certainly sounded sinister, the aggravating factor he needed to justify seeking capital punishment. To that end, I asked Schwartz if he thought Shane had been a good candidate for the death penalty.

“When I finally closed the case, I said, ‘Oh, this is a ground ball murder two, they’ll probably let this kid plead out to fifteen to life or something,’ because there was some emotional things involved,” Schwartz recalled over the phone. “And then, when they came around and said ‘death penalty,’ I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ You know, I’ve met people who probably are prime candidates for the death penalty and Hale was not one of them.… But the thing I realized is the majority of people I locked up for murder would never do it again.”

Days later, I managed to talk to Shane on the phone and told him what Schwartz had said. The line went silent. Then he said, his voice thick with emotion, “I wish Stefan’s family knew that he didn’t die that way.”

After Shane read about the prosecutor’s new stance in the Gay City News article, he recognized the political climate was changing, just like his former lawyer Paul Laisure, who couldn’t get him a sentence reduction, had hoped. Shane typed up a letter to Steve Zeidman. He asked for suggestions for an expert witness. Zeidman thought Shane was a good candidate for clemency but soon realized he was an even better candidate for resentencing under the new DVSJA legislation.

Among the eight hundred letters Zeidman receives annually from prisoners in New York, Shane’s stood out. Zeidman was baffled that Shane had been the first person Brooklyn prosecutors sought to execute. When Zeidman reached out to the Capital Defender Office, lawyers there told him that they were familiar with Shane’s case and had sixty boxes about it in their archives. This was good, as it raised the likelihood that Zeidman could find potential mitigating evidence for a DVSJA motion. Zeidman and his partner Erin Tomlinson took the case and assigned it to two CUNY law students. They sifted through the boxes of paperwork—medical and mental health records, investigations conducted by Shane’s original capital defenders—and visited him in Sing Sing.

The work of scholars and journalists—John Pfaff’s Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform; Emily Bazelon’s Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration—has identified punitive prosecutors as one of the main drivers of our ballooning prison population. As the public became aware of the power of local district attorneys, some cities started electing more progressives who acknowledged that their decisions play a part in our prison problem. One factor in Shane’s favor, and perhaps in mine, too, was that Charles Hynes—the Brooklyn district attorney who once said that Shane should be locked up in a hole for the rest of his life—was no longer in office. He lost a reelection campaign in 2013 and died in 2019. By 2016, Brooklyn had become a mecca for high-minded hipsters, artists, and writers, who elected Eric Gonzalez as the new DA. Gonzalez had grown up in Williamsburg. His brother had been murdered in the Bronx. He seemed to understand both sides and all the complexities of crime.

Scrappy and determined, Zeidman uses everything at his disposal: his law acumen, his tenacity, and, maybe most important, his connections. He can make fast friends with anyone. He can talk on the phone for an hour with a guy in prison for murder, like me, then grab lunch with a prosecutor. Zeidman is the guy, not only for clemency in New York but also for other avenues of release that require filing nuanced post-conviction motions, like the new DVSJA. Over the years, prosecutors and judges have been more receptive to him and his arguments about giving second chances to the guilty. When I call him, I hear all his energy and optimism. “This guy, in a fight in a bar, shot and killed two people,” Zeidman said, referencing a case of his. “I think that’s a violent crime. The question is, does he have to die in prison? You got fifty to life. Now let’s look at him after thirty years.” He went on: “The whole innocence movement has done a lot of unintentional damage. If you’re not innocent, it’s like we don’t give a shit about you—even though the biggest problem about mass incarceration is massive sentences.”

Doing so much time can’t help but make you think about time. The time I have left on my sentence, the time I have left to live, the time that has already passed. I want time to speed up; I want it to slow down. I push more weight and run more laps, as though it might reverse the damage that living in a cage has done to my health. I sport a high-skin fade to blend out the gray hairs that poke through my sideburns. When I look in the mirror, I see suspended youth, and am horrified at the chicken-gizzard skin that appears on my neck when I move my head certain ways. I dab thick lotion on the crow’s-feet around my eyes, and can’t help looking at the Prison Policy Initiative paper taped to my cinder block cell wall, which declares that each year of incarceration takes two years off the average person’s life expectancy. I’ve been in prison twenty-three years, I’d think. What does that even mean? I’d ask my neighbors, “Yo, how old do I look?”

Over the years, Shane and his mother had developed a healthier relationship. He forgave her for how she had treated him, and she was proud of who he’d become. Then, one morning in January 2022, the red-bearded imam, a Muslim civilian clergy on shift at Sing Sing, appeared before Shane’s bars. “Angela is your sister?”

Shane nodded. He knew what was coming.

“I just spoke to her,” the imam said. “She said your mother passed. She said it was sudden.”

Shane nodded and thanked the imam for letting him know. When the imam left, Shane wanted to scream and cry. He didn’t. He couldn’t.

During their DVSJA investigation for Shane, Zeidman’s students interviewed Dale, Shane’s friend from Kentucky, who told the students what Harold had said to him on the phone all those years ago—that Shane had performed oral sex on his own father. For so long, Shane had believed he and his father would die with the secret of what had happened between them on the couch. Dale had never told Shane about the conversation he had with his father. But what may be more relevant to DVSJA resentencing is the psychological abuse Shane endured from Stefan around the time of his offense.

“He has served nearly 29 years of incarceration, longer than the time he has lived at liberty,” a draft of Shane’s motion reads. “He was 20 years old when he met a man who he wanted to love and trust, but who instead abused him for three years. Now, almost three decades later, New York law has evolved, in keeping with current understanding of the impacts of interpersonal violence and trauma, to give victims of domestic violence a chance for relief. Mr. Hale was a young gay man from the South and a victim of chronic sexual and physical violence that ultimately led to his instant offense, which haunts him to this day.”

Others were getting out via DVSJA resentencing, too. Zach Gibian, whom the New York Post mocked in a 2018 article titled “Jail Graduation Day for Stepdad Slayer,” would be next. One afternoon in early 2022, Zach was making cheesecakes in the honor block cooking area, asking a guard to hook him up with vanilla extract. Shortly after, he went on a court trip and never came back. His father had hired a lawyer who filed a DVSJA motion. At that point, Zach had served around fourteen years on his twenty-five-year sentence. Over the next year, Zach lived in a cell in the Suffolk County jail. The last time he was there was when he was a skinny teenager, right after he killed his stepfather. Just being back in county was hard for him. Honor block, back in Sing Sing, was much more comfortable, but what was most unnerving to Zach was what the court required of DVSJA applicants: an “excavation of trauma.”

Once a week, Zach was chained up and bused from the jail to the courthouse to talk with a forensic psychologist for hours in the DA’s office. He told the psych about the worst parts of his teenage years, growing up with his mother and abusive stepfather. It was the story behind the pained gaze I’d always observed in Zach’s eyes. In October 2022, a judge finally held a hearing. It was a closed court. The media was kept out. Zach was resentenced to five years, and walked out of the courthouse free.

Shane had now seen two men he’d known well get out under the new law. To protect himself from too much optimism, he kept up his routine in Sing Sing. Most days, Shane’s cell in the Seven Building honor block opened at 6:30 a.m. He was already up and headed to the cellblock basement to practice viola, meditate, and lift some weights. Then he took a shower. It’s an open group shower in the basement, but it was usually empty in the early mornings, so he didn’t have to worry about anyone making him uncomfortable. By nine a.m., he was headed to his office in the chapel. He was now the New York Theological Seminary’s clerk at Sing Sing, preparing and assisting each year’s graduate students. In the afternoons, he worked in the general library, where he redesigned its layout and recently curated a section for LGTBQ+ books, a process he wrote about for the Marshall Project’s “Life Inside” section. Twice a week in the evenings, he led the Voices From Within group. On the weekends, he practiced piano with the Carnegie music program. In the evenings, he met with the RTA drama group; he had been given a lead role in Twelve Angry Men. At night, he usually unwound by reading. The Body Keeps the Score helped him realize the extent of his own trauma.

On an August morning in 2023, after his morning workout and shower, Shane attached his JPay tablet to the kiosk in the cellblock. A new message from a woman named Tracey Ford appeared in his inbox. She was writing to him from a TV production company in the UK called Transistor Films, which produced, Ford wrote, “factual TV programmes for networks across Europe and the USA, including I Am a Killer for Netflix: the first four seasons of which had already been aired.” She was writing to invite Shane to be on season five. “We are aware that a crime does not define an individual and there is always more to a story than what the headlines report. I appreciate that the title of this series may seem sensationalist but we assure you that these are responsibly produced documentaries.”

Shane was in prison, so he couldn’t fact-check Ford’s claim that they were “responsibly produced.” Had he had Google, he might have found this: “A new TV show called I Am a Killer pushes the genre to the absolute limit of acceptability—then goes right across it, arriving at the gruesome apotheosis of our obsession with killers and killing,” Jo Livingstone wrote in the New Republic, after the show’s first season aired in 2018. “It’s an unsatisfying conclusion, and in general the show delivers the profound sense of having short-changed all its subjects, from the murderers to the victims.”

When Shane sent me this message, I was excited, like a scientist whose study had yielded unexpected but interesting results. In a way, my hypothesis was disproved. I had a hunch that true crime storytellers were staying away from certain stories because of touchy elements in them—Milton’s age when the crime was committed, his mental illness, and his race (though Discovery ID came for Mulumba Kazigo), and Shane’s homosexuality—but I was wrong. It appears that producers are emboldened to search for narratives beyond the white-man-kills-white-woman archetype. This may be because the demand for content has increased. There’s only so many ways to remix cases like Tom Clayton’s, which has been featured on 20/20, Dateline, Tubi’s Meet, Marry, Murder, and HLN’s Lies, Crimes & Video. Under pressure to keep the true crime machine running, producers are now mining for new material, revisiting older cases, like Rob’s, and pinpointing those that have never been told, like Shane’s.

When Shane received this email, he was immediately reminded of what had happened to me. He remembered when CNN promoted the trailer for HLN’s Inside Evil, the shadowy figures of a man firing an AR-15, flashes of my face walking down the halls of Sing Sing. That was during the summer of 2019. I remember Shane pulling me to the side to ask how I was handling it when we were rehearsing his TEDx talk. I told Shane that Danielly had sent me a bunch of YouTube comments about the show. Some complimented my writing, but I remember the mean ones the most: I was a psychopath, I was a narcissist. One comment said that my mom, whose speech had become muffled because of her Parkinson’s, sounded like Marge Simpson. I chuckled when I told this to Shane, trying to play it off. He didn’t laugh. He looked me in the eyes and told me how sorry he was that I was depicted that way. I put on a confident face and told him that all they did was show me how the sausage was made. But I felt like a fool.

The Inside Evil episode about my crime aired nearly eighteen years after it happened. The Preppy Murder: Death in Central Park, about Rob’s case, came out thirty-three years after Rob killed Jennifer Levin. I Am a Killer wanted to showcase Shane’s crime twenty-eight years later. Which brings me back to my original questions about true crime: What are the consequences of illuminating human darkness for entertainment? When we do this, are we hindering the progress of those who focus on criminal justice reform? To me, the answer seems obvious. When lurid storytellers reach out to us a generation after we committed our crimes and seek to portray us as evil, killers, psychopaths, it mocks the idea at the center of criminal justice reform: Each of us is more than our crimes.

Who should tell our stories? There’s a profound responsibility that comes with telling someone else’s story. Our perspectives, lived experiences, and biases all shape and color how we craft a narrative. You can distort a timeline, smudge the facts, and leave others out to pursue one angle in favor of another, depending on your agenda. It’s hard to leave all that at the door and give your subject as fair a shake as possible—but it’s necessary. The stakes are only heightened, and more complicated, when you deal with people who have committed horrible crimes; people who, on first glance, seem to be nothing but evil. But should the entry point to their lives always be through their crime? I’d say no. What I’ve tried to do differently is offer the felt lives of men who have taken a life, while grappling with my own feelings about the murder I committed. I refuse to approach their stories through their crimes. Instead, I’ve tried to show you who we are, hopefully without diminishing the lives of the people we’ve killed.

According to Ford, I Am a Killer is an “observational documentary,” not true crime. That’s what she told a colleague of mine. To her credit, Ford was forthcoming about the name of the show. She also explained how she got their tips on potential subjects. They had teams who “cast the net quite wide” and had “access with the DOCs of certain states.” Through these relationships, the production team assembled a list of people convicted of murder with preliminary information about their crimes; Ford then made first contact either by sending a JPay message, as she did with Shane, or snail mail. “At the moment we’ve got ten DOCs that have agreed to let us interview—one other case in New York and the rest are across America.”

Having had such a hard time getting prison administrators to have a conversation with me, let alone allow me a classroom to teach writing, I was angry to learn that they gave producers the names of prisoners for their productions. I can’t help thinking that one of the reasons they do this is that true crime furthers narratives that justify the existence of their very jobs.

In the fall of 2023, Shane was part of a fourteen-member chorus for the inside performance of Dead Man Walking, based on Sister Helen Prejean’s 1993 memoir. There was a movie adaptation in 1995, and now an opera, starring Joyce DiDonato and being staged at the Metropolitan Opera. When they weren’t rehearsing for their performance at the Met, Joyce and her cast came up the river to Sing Sing to rehearse with the prisoners in the music program. In early October, they put on an abridged performance that featured Shane and other prisoners singing in the chorus. About 150 prisoners sat in attendance in the Catholic chapel at the back of Sing Sing’s auditorium. Afterward, a reporter from the New York Times worked the crowd. I missed those moments at Sing Sing, feeling seen, like a part of something. I missed Shane and wondered how he was holding up. Over the phone, someone read Shane’s quote in the Times to me: “We have to deal with the life we have left and move forward.”

On sunny days, in the basement of the auditorium, Shane would open up the two Gothic doors at the back of his NYTS office, which offered a breeze and a view of the tranquil Hudson. I always wondered about the view from the other side, looking at the prison from the river. I boomeranged Shane a message through JPay and asked if, after we got out, he would take a boat trip with me up the Hudson to see it. More than the view, I wondered if we’d experience the joy we expected freedom to give us, or if the emotional heft of all our years in prison wouldn’t allow it.

“The unprocessed trauma of our childhoods, crimes, and incarceration have become a part of our identity, John,” Shane wrote to me. “I know seeing this place from the Hudson will shock me; it will seem surreal and then I will feel a profound sadness because I will know some of the people inside.”

18
A Turbulent Mix of Hope and Desperation
[MILTON]

During the Covid lockdown in 2020, Milton unraveled in Sing Sing’s A Block. In December, he asked to be moved to one of the mental health units back in the Five Building cellblock. He was growing suspicious of the people around him. He said a prisoner put him on a three-way call with a woman, who asked him for his social security number. He wrote a letter to the FBI about it. Still, he was kept in the general population.

In the spring of 2021, Milton attended graduation in the chapel. Due to Covid, it was a more subdued celebration than the ones I had attended in the visiting room with families, media, and catered food. They had cake and juice. Milton took a few Polaroids of himself in his cap and gown and sent them home. Shane gave the valedictorian speech.

“The journey to this milestone began with poor choices causing harm,” Shane said. “By recognizing that harm, our journey of accountability began and led to the exceptionally rare thing that an incarcerated person can do, attain a master’s degree at Sing Sing.”

Shortly after Milton graduated, he was transferred back to Attica, where he had been housed when he applied for the program. When he arrived, a problem arose with his medication regimen. This can happen when prisoners are transferred to new facilities. His records may have been misplaced. His cell didn’t open for the medication runs. Milton started deteriorating into psychosis.

“I wasn’t thinking correctly because I needed my meds,” Milton told me over the phone one night as a colleague patched us through. We had arranged to call at the same time. “[The COs] were denying me mental health access.… I needed to talk to them right then. And I wasn’t thinking right.”

When Milton’s cell opened for the mess hall run on October 12, 2021, at around five p.m., he punched a CO in the face three times. As officers tried to subdue him, Milton struck another guard with an elbow to the back of her head. Bells rang, keys jingled, pepper spray spewed into Milton’s eyes. Pummeled, he was taken to solitary.

A report describes how Milton, in the holding bullpen, lay down and wouldn’t get up for processing. As he remembers it, Milton says he was handcuffed and needed help to get up. He was dizzy. Milton became “biligerent [sic], using insolent and abusive language,” and an extraction team had to be called to remove him from the room, a report of the incident reads. Milton remembers the COs saying they were God. And he told them, angrily, that they weren’t and they were going to hell. The COs punched him and sprayed him again in the eyes, and he kept moving his head to avoid the burning. Milton was finally brought to his cell in special housing. He told me the guards wouldn’t feed him for days.

In November, he was sent back to Marcy Psychiatric Center in central New York. He attended most of his programming there and did well. He met with a therapist every two to four weeks and continued reading books. He still experienced psychosis. In April 2022, Milton claimed his food was drugged and members of the staff raped him. He reported this to his therapist, but nothing was found to substantiate Milton’s claims. Afterward, Milton grew highly paranoid and desperate, thinking that officers were trying to sexually harass him. In May, he made a single cut across the inside of his elbow and was placed on suicide watch in Marcy’s residential crisis treatment center. When a psychiatrist approached him at his cell, Milton said he cut himself because he suddenly became overwhelmed by of prison time he still had left. He just wanted a break from prison, from being yelled at and told what to do. He saw dying as the only way out.

In hindsight, I can see how devastating it must have been for Milton. He was attending graduate classes, feeling intellectually challenged and nurtured, finally getting his degree (a huge accomplishment anywhere, but even more so in prison), only to be thrown back into the routine of punitive prison life. When you’re fortunate enough to slide into small pockets of rehabilitation—to learn a skill, to earn a degree, to grow emotionally—hopelessness can set in after you’ve achieved some accomplishments. You’re smarter now, so the buffoonish behavior all around you makes you bristle. You’re ready to go but unable to leave.

I realize Milton’s volatile behavior and violent outbursts may make some question whether he’s ready for release. But maybe we’re asking the wrong question. After almost forty years of punishment, doesn’t Milton deserve treatment? After serving so much time, you can feel like you’re having a crack-up. Lately, I’ve felt depressed and anxious and paranoid. I think people are plotting against me. I sometimes find myself in a frenzy, searching the storage bins near the front of my cell to see if someone walking by may have stashed contraband in there. I think the administration is holding my mail, reading my JPay messages, listening to my phone calls. I mean, I know they’re doing that—it’s their job—but I feel like they are doing it with malice, cherry-picking my correspondence, looking to get me on something, anything. I stay in my cell a lot. I talk to myself sometimes. Recently, maybe six months before the COs raided our cells and caught my neighbors with cell phones, the gang intelligence officer (a guard who investigates gang leaders and contraband) ransacked my cell. I stood on the tier watching him search it, stacks of my papers and books tumbling over.

“What’s this about? You know what I do,” I said. “I’m a writer. I have a career.”

“You mean hobby?” he asked. “I don’t know if convicts can have careers.”

He didn’t find contraband. I didn’t have any. But he told me I was over the “book limit” and had to mail some back home. I stared at him. He was sloppy and bald with a miserable stubbled face that needed shaving. I imagined punching him in the mouth. Then I pictured the response, how he’d press a button on his hip and a whole squad of COs would run into the cellblock and pummel me, like they pummeled Milton. Sane enough to show restraint, I didn’t act on my thoughts. The CO wrote me a misbehavior report for extra wires that I used for an antenna. A lieutenant later told me that when an officer had made her rounds, she reported that I was talking to myself. They thought I had a cell phone. I’m tired of being suspected of the worst. It makes me bitter, and I hate being bitter. I need 12-step meetings, and I need therapy, and I need to be around people who are rooting for me and love me. I won’t find any of that in prison.

My friend Alex Duran, who did twelve years for manslaughter, earned a degree from Bard College and now works as a program director for Galaxy Gives, a philanthropy that, among other things, awards fellowships to leaders in the criminal justice space. He’s a brown kid from the Bronx—an ex-con—who distributes $20 million annually to nonprofits trying to repair the damages caused by the system. In 2023, I was the first convict to receive a Galaxy Gives fellowship. It offers wellness resources. When we talk, Alex tells me to be kind to myself. He tells me he loves me. It’s hard for me to hear that. He recently connected me to a therapist, who told me that my anxiety stems from fear of the future, and my depression from self-hatred. Made sense.

But I don’t hate myself. I just hate prison, now more than ever. I did about five sessions, but they were in the yard and I had to navigate the phone lines to stay on for an hour. Calls cut off after half an hour. You can call back, but if someone asks for next, it’s disrespectful to redial and finish my session. It’s not like I could tell the guy, “Sorry, I’m in the middle of a therapy session.” Sometimes, though, I told guys beforehand that I had an important call and it worked out. Still, all the negotiating caused me anxiety, and with guys on either side of me, I wasn’t able to express myself fully. It was distracting, too. During one session, I sat next to a guy having phone sex and another cursing out his girlfriend. The conversations weren’t always that crude, some were loving and pleasant, but they always distracted me. When I wrote to an administrator and asked for a private room to use for therapy, I never got a reply. I stopped after a handful of sessions. I was alone. Unraveling, far apart from each other in our respective prisons—it was in these moments that I felt closest to Milton.

The struggles at that point in my bid reminded me of philosopher William Ernest Hocking’s words that E.’s sister quoted at my sentencing twenty years ago: “Only the man who has enough good in him to feel the justice of the penalty can be punished.” When I started writing, thinking deeper and feeling genuine remorse for killing E., the time in prison got harder. Maybe it’s because I was becoming a better man. The more you strive to be decent in prison, the more you see and feel the cruelty of it. I made a promise to myself that I would never again use violence. But that made me vulnerable because violence is respected in prison, and I was choosing not to play by the rules. It made me anxious—and also called to mind how Hocking wrote that the good man who’s committed a crime “would be better without the penalty; he is punished by the judgment.”

I received Milton’s mental health records in the fall of 2023. It was sad to read about Milton’s breakdown during Covid and his violent outburst when he returned to Attica. Because I was in Sullivan, I wasn’t with Milton for all this trauma. For many who had completed their NYTS degree in Sing Sing, the achievement would increase their prospects for release. I thought about Ray Bissonette, how he wrote that he would support Milton’s release in Joe’s Story, which was published way back in 2005. What did he think today? Was he still alive?

On a gray afternoon in October 2023, I called Ray Bissonette from Sullivan. His daughter Marya was on the line. I had a picture in my head of a photograph that Ray included in his book, the teenaged version of her sitting next to her parents in the audience during the 1988 trials. A lifetime of trauma for her and her family started with this crime. I was nervous. I didn’t want to offend them. We talked about Ray’s self-published book, the reasons he sought out answers from Milton and Teddy. The trials only provided filtered information, he told me, and he wanted to know how his brother died. I asked Ray if he thought he and his wife, Ann, would have benefited from some kind of preparation by restorative justice experts before their meetings with Milton and Teddy. I explained that other states had that service. Ray hadn’t considered it because it wasn’t an option, but he agreed it could have helped.

Then Ray told me about some developments with his brother. It all started with a front-page story on May 17, 2021, in the Buffalo News: “Child Victims Act Lawsuit Accuses Murdered Priest of Molesting Boy.” A fifty-two-year-old man, identified as M.D., was suing the late Father Joseph Bissonette and the Buffalo diocese, claiming that Father Joe molested him six or seven times in 1977, while he was a second grader at St. Bartholomew Church’s school. The man was represented by the Herman Law firm. The Buffalo News outlined the suit’s claims: under the guise of counseling and reading lessons, the priest would allegedly masturbate and perform oral sex on the boy in his private office. When the New York Child Victims Act was passed in 2019, it allowed childhood survivors of sexual abuse—that is, those who hadn’t done so by the time they were twenty-three years old—a one-year “lookback” window to file a civil lawsuit. With Covid, the lookback window was extended. This suit came in just three months before the final deadline. It was the first time Father Bissonette was accused of sexual abuse.

Ray’s daughter Marya was the one who told him about the article. Now in his eighties, Ray couldn’t believe it. He also saw glaring inaccuracies in M.D.’s claims and called the Buffalo News reporter to point them out. Between 1973 and 1979, the time M.D. says he was molested at St. Bart’s, Father Bissonette was at St. Brigid Church, about six miles away across the city. It wasn’t until 1980 that Father Bissonette was named pastor of St. Bartholomew’s Church. What’s more, in 1977, the pastor who was at St. Bart’s was another Father Joe, Reverend Joseph Friel, who would go on to become one of the Buffalo diocese’s most accused priests—named in eleven Child Victims Act lawsuits. Three days later, on May 21, the Buffalo News ran a follow-up story—“Murdered Priest’s Time at Parish Conflicts with Plaintiff’s Accusation of Sexual Abuse”—but the damage was done. When news like that got out, it was like smoke, Ray told me. He had no control over how these accusations would affect the memory of his brother.

Ray’s son, Brian Bissonette, filed a complaint against the Herman Law firm under the Rules of Professional Conduct for failing to thoroughly investigate their client’s claims. In November 2021, the firm responded and refuted that it was Father Joseph Friel, doubling down on Father Bissonette. They wrote that other witnesses, including M.D.’s mother, had identified Father Joseph Bissonette as the priest they’d seen at St. Bart’s in 1977. It wasn’t out of the question, the firm suggested, that Father Bissonette could have visited St. Bart’s and used the office there to tutor students, as priests tended to visit neighboring congregations. And they had something else: a corroborating letter from Milton Jones.

After the follow-up article seemed to cast doubt on their client’s allegations, a lawyer at the Herman Law firm, Steve McKean, had written letters to Milton and Teddy in prison, explaining the lawsuit. It appears McKean solicited them to come forward. On July 6, 2021, Milton mailed McKean a photocopy of his master’s degree in professional studies from the New York Theological Seminary, along with a neat, handwritten letter on lined paper.

“I received your letter today,” Milton wrote. “Thank you for writing to me. I was also a victim of sexual abuse by Reverend Joseph Bissonette. He grabbed my buttocks and told me he wanted to have sex with me while my friend Theodore was in the other room. Therefore, I robbed and murdered him. We later robbed Monsignor David Herlihy, and murdered him, because we lost respect for the church. I was 17 years old then.”

Ray was shocked when he read Milton’s letter. Blindsided. They were both unaware of the other’s torment and desperation: Ray, determined to keep his brother’s legacy intact while the Catholic Church’s reputation crumbled around it, and Milton, battling his own chaotic mind and a burning desperation to be free. Ray didn’t know that when Milton received the lawyer’s letter, he was on the brink of another psychotic break. Between the Covid lockdowns and suspended programs, Milton was in near constant isolation in his cell. I read and reread Milton’s letter to the Herman Law firm. It was short, rushed, reckless. It mentioned Teddy being in the other room—which, to me, was too convenient. My gut told me it was bullshit.

After reading the letter, Ray wrote Milton a reply and sent it to Sing Sing in December; he didn’t know that by then, Milton had been transferred back to Attica, that his meds were disrupted and that he’d had a violent psychotic episode and was now on a unit in Marcy Psychiatric Center.

I just read your letter to the Herman law firm. I never knew about your bipolar problem nor the completion of your Seminary degree. You have indeed changed. But the last time I saw you with Sister Karen you reminded us, with tears in your eyes, that you were sorry about my brother and her friend.… It was only today that I learned you accused Joe of sexually molesting you and killed him for it. That doesn’t at all sound like anything we ever discussed and I know you were always very honest with me and Sister Karen. If you also murdered Monsignor [Herlihy] because you turned against the Church, I’m surprised you continued your friendship with Sister Karen years later.

I wonder if the Herman law firm hinted at some help in return for your letter. I could surely understand that but you should know that they contacted you months after filing the accusations against Joe.… Of course you have no obligation to me but by supporting this accusation you are killing Joe twice—first his body, then his reputation and that of his supporters, family, and friends such as Sr. Karen who was your friend too.

Ray’s letter read like an open wound, words bleeding on the page. But Milton never got the letter, and this was where the story stopped. The lawsuit didn’t prevail, but the news stories remain. “The only thing that we want,” Ray told me at the end of our call, “is a written letter from Milton retracting what he said. But of course we’re never gonna get that.”

In October 2023, I offered to intervene. I promised to have a conversation with Milton about his claim of abuse. I wanted to do right by Ray. But was I getting too involved? I was on shaky ground. I wanted to get to the truth, but I wondered, too, if my desire to intervene was due to my guilt about my inability to offer something to my victim’s family. Here was a family of a murder victim I could help. Ray’s words played in my head: “By supporting this accusation you are killing Joe twice.”

I connected with Milton a few days later on the phone. It was about eight p.m., and men were coming back from evening programs. I could hear the chaos on his end, too. We were on the same schedule. Cells opened; men yelled on both ends. Shabanger nudged me and told me to give him the phone next. Milton told me he only had ten minutes. I reminded him of our first conversation at Sing Sing, when he asked me how I was going to make him look human. I repeated what I told him then: that I, too, carry the weight of killing a man. All he needed to do was be honest with me and trust me.

I asked Milton about changing his story, and told him that I’d seen the letter he had written the Herman Law firm. Was the letter Ray mailed to Sing Sing forwarded to him at Marcy? It wasn’t. I told Milton that Ray was heartbroken about his claims. “Tell me, man, did this shit really happen?” I said. “Was this something you thought they wanted to hear? And if it didn’t, I can understand if—”

“All right, all right,” Milton jumped in. He spoke slowly, pausing between phrases. He was almost whispering. “Well, I never expected [the law firm] to get in touch with me. I didn’t know what to do. People kept telling me that would be the best thing to do. Even though I’m not as much of a follower as I once was, I thought it would help me, so I told an untruth.”

I thanked Milton for being real with me. I told him that I would send him Ray’s December 2021 letter and suggested that maybe the best thing to do, if he wanted, was write an apology letter and explain why he lied. Ray was a smart guy, I told Milton. Empathetic, too. He knew all the forces at play. Milton agreed to write one. Then the automated message played, warning we had sixty seconds left, and we said our goodbyes.

For many years, Milton appeared to have made the best of prison. He pursued an education, earned degrees and certifications, made amends with Ray and Ann and then with Sister Karen. When his mind began to betray him, he battled the voices. Milton wanted to live well and do right, but prison is filled with so much wrong. He had pushed back for years against the lie. It felt like everyone wanted him to say it, even his son, Kevin. He saw what was happening to the Catholic Church. But in 2021, he was in a bad place, alone. And then the letter from the lawyer landed on his bars. In that moment—with the A Block madhouse screaming, the coronavirus swirling, the voices in his head growing louder and louder—he lied.

I knew Milton trusted me, and I knew he lied. I didn’t even have to press him. The way he said that he told an “untruth” felt like he was ashamed to even say the word. It’s as if he was incapable of living how so many other prisoners lived, refusing to face their truth or face their demons. Milton seemed tired of facing his. The time was harder now. His body ached. Now, more than ever before, he felt despair.

When we last spoke, Milton was working in the law library at Great Meadow Correctional Facility, helping people use the computer to find cases. It was the same job he had during his first few months in prison at Great Meadow, all the way back in 1989. More than thirty years had passed, and he was right back where he’d started. Prison has a way of staying the same, even though you haven’t. In 2024, he had started a new job as a food server in the cafeteria.

He still suffered from the occasional psychotic break. When he heard a voice in his head, he sometimes mistook it for that of a CO or prisoner. He got into the occasional fight. It was so loud on the tier; it was so loud in his head. Still, there was a group of guys who would help him whenever he was in crisis. “They know about my disease and they calm me down,” Milton said. One man, Javier, suggested he write down all his friends on a sheet of paper and tape it to the wall of his cell. That way, whenever he suffered from an episode, he could remember who his friends are and who he can go to for help.

When I first heard about Milton’s crime, I, like most people, suspected that something sexual must have motivated it. But the more I learned about him and observed his personality, the more I came to believe that it went down exactly the way he said it did. It may feel unsatisfying that there was no rational motive—and as tempting as the pervert-priest explanation is, I knew I had to reject it. Why are we so eager to believe in some scandalous theory—or that Milton is uniquely evil—when, more likely than not, the causes of his crime (and many others, too) are the same systemic issues that continue to plague our society: poverty, addiction, untreated mental illness, unemployment, poor access to health care and education. Priests like Joseph A. Bissonette, David P. Herlihy, and Sister Karen Klimczak dedicated and sacrificed their lives, literally, to confront these problems in the toughest parts of Buffalo. The sad absurdity of their stories is that their goodwill got them killed. They are the heroes of this tragic tale.

Milton’s life has been a turbulent mix of hope and desperation. He’s ambitious and lucid; he’s psychotic and incoherent. We can only work on ourselves and try to come to terms with what we did. But after a while, when the punishment never seems to relent, some of us regress, lose hope, become desperate, look for a way, any way, to get out. In the end, this is how too much time in prison strips some of us of our dignity.

The inside of Milton’s cell at Great Meadow is painted gray with yellow bars. It is messy like his mind, papers strewn across his desk, coffee stains, folders stacked on the floor, the itchy state-issued blanket thrown on the mattress. His pillow is his state jacket, folded and shoved into a pillowcase. When the zipper pokes through the fabric, he flips it. He sleeps on a bare three-inch plastic green mattress with no sheets; they are too hard to clean in the three-gallon bucket, and Tide is too expensive. He still has a sweet tooth, still owes the juggle man every commissary.

It was in this cell that, after our conversation, Milton, realizing how much he had hurt the man who had given him grace, wrote him an apology letter.

Dear Ray,

About the letter I sent to the Herman Law Firm. It was a lie.… I have no excuse for my actions. After 36 to 37 years in prison I want to go home.… In one way, I’m a very strong mentally educated person, but in another way … I’m weak. I need a supporting cast of people who know better, who know how to use me for the better, who will guide me, and who will help me help society and others.

19
Can the Preppy Killer Ever Be More?
[ROB]

When Robert Chambers settled in Sullivan, fewer prisoners and COs knew who he was. Younger people didn’t hear his name and imagine, in bold newsprint, the Preppy Killer. He preferred it that way. In 2019, the news came out about the church defrocking Cardinal Theodore McCarrick over sexual abuse allegations reaching back to the time when Rob was his altar boy. Soon he started receiving letters from the press again. Rosanna Scotto, the New York Fox 5 broadcaster who had once said Rob looked like a Hollywood Adonis, wrote him a letter. “I don’t know if you remember me, but I covered your trial,” Scotto wrote in a letter dated July 27, 2019. “I was friendly with your attorney, Jack Litman. I was hoping I could visit you and talk about your life and moving forward. What you’re planning to do when you get out.”

It wasn’t just Scotto who reached out to Rob. When the news broke about McCarrick, a New York Times reporter wrote to Rob at Sullivan and requested an interview. He never responded to the inquiries he received, but that didn’t stop producers from making content about him. By early 2020, Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg’s The Preppy Murder: Death in Central Park was being promoted everywhere. “I was watching TV on Super Bowl Sunday and I saw a commercial for the thing,” Simon told me. “My God, all these years later, they were still telling this guy’s story.”

When the show aired, Rob was in D North. He copped a piece of Suboxone, placed the orange speck into a spoon, dabbed a little water, let it dissolve, then sniffed it. A few moments later, he felt better. Men watched the show from the TV that hung from orange banisters on the second tier. During commercials, guys stopped by his cell, told him he was on TV, as if he didn’t already know, and asked him if certain things were true. Does he remember his old girlfriend so-and-so? Did he steal this, rob that? Some of us in the joint have a terrible bedside manner. The series played for several nights in a row. The final episode of the series introduced McCarrick and let the implication hang. At this point, Rob hung a sheet across his bars, which meant “Do not disturb.”

With the volume turned up, men sat quietly in the common area watching Mike Sheehan, the now-retired lead detective, speculate about whether Rob had been molested as a child. “Would I be shocked if I found out that Robert Chambers was sexually abused by Teddy McCarrick? Not at all,” Sheehan tells the camera. “Could it have happened? Absolutely. Robert, at the time, fits the profile perfectly. He’s very vulnerable. He’s the product of a broken marriage. To look back, your head spins.”

After Stern’s docuseries aired, letters from other networks appeared on Rob’s bars during mail call. I stood outside his cell one day as he dug through folders lined up on the floor, looking for the letter Ricki Stern wrote him. He couldn’t find it, but he’d found others. One was handwritten, a personal touch. It was from February 2020, written by Tim Uehlinger, a senior national producer for NBC News. Uehlinger reminded Rob that he and his colleague Marianne Haggerty had extensively covered Rob’s story, going back to 1986. He went on, “We have a proposal we wanted to talk to you about in person if you would allow us to come see you. Please know we only need a few minutes of your time—and I think you’ll be open to our ideas.”

I reached out to Ricki Stern and asked about the initial letter she wrote to Rob. Why didn’t she just tell him she was looking to do a documentary about him, reexamining the media’s role in his case, rather than one about the ’80s scene in New York City? Why be vague?

“I did write him a letter but I truly don’t remember what I wrote,” Stern replied in an email. “To answer your question specifically, if I had reached out to Rob and was vague, then it was probably to see if I could have a chance to speak with him. But if he agreed to speak, then I would have explained the nature of the series. I wouldn’t have met with him to conduct an interview without telling him about the series. I think it is unethical.… The series was never contingent on him giving an interview.”

All these years later, Rob still didn’t know what people wanted from him. With the revelation about McCarrick in the news, journalists sought him out as if they were looking for the missing piece to the whole Preppy Killer saga—as if they were entitled to know whether Rob had been abused, as if he didn’t have the right to keep the experience private if it had happened. Here’s the thing about Rob’s lies: They were like that of a teenager’s, full of excuses and rationalizations; they never struck me as malicious or manipulative, and I never believed they were told to avoid accountability. He doesn’t understand accountability, and for many years, neither did I. If he was looking to be manipulative, he could have told Rosanna Scotto that he was molested by McCarrick and shifted his entire identity from villain to victim.

When I arrived at Sullivan in the summer of 2020, I knew about the McCarrick business, but it wasn’t something I asked about right away. Eventually, though, an opportunity did present itself.

It was a warm Sunday afternoon in late September 2020, and I had dragged Rob out to Sullivan’s east yard, an open grass field nestled between the cellblocks. Rob threw a perfectly spiraled football that flew through the blue sky above until it dropped back below toward the grass field, into a prisoner’s arms. I told Rob that Simon, who was locked in a different block, wanted to see him. With Simon, we lapped the perimeter. A deaf man walked up to Rob and offered a fist bump. Rob smiled and signed with the man for a moment, then caught up with us.

We sat at the metal dugout bench by a well-manicured softball field. The facility priest, Father Stan, a small Nigerian man, entered the yard clad in black and sunglasses. He greeted the guards and the prisoners, then spotted Rob and made a beeline across the open grass field, heading our way. Rob didn’t come out much and didn’t attend church on Sundays, so Father Stan was surprised to see him. Father Stan ignored Simon and me and sat at the end of the bench, next to Rob. They chatted. We could hear their conversation. My ears perked up. “It’s like when the New York Times reached out to you,” Father Stan said. “They only want to know when the duck gets killed, never when the duck crosses the road safely.” Father Stan had apparently learned that the Times had reached out to Rob and assumed they wanted to ask him if McCarrick had sexually abused him when he was a kid.

Simon and I got up and lapped the perimeter of the grass yard. I told him some of the deep history with Rob’s family and the Catholic Church. At fifty-seven, Simon remembered the case vividly. He didn’t know the details of the revelations about Cardinal McCarrick, though.

I told Simon that McCarrick had been Rob’s godfather, that he would come over when Rob was a kid to have dinner with his parents. Now it comes out that the guy’s molesting a bunch of kids around that time. McCarrick was charged, the church deemed the allegations credible, and they defrocked him, so people think maybe the guy molested Rob, too.

Almost an hour passed before Father Stan finally trotted off, and Simon and I sat back on the bench with Rob. “He had ya hostage, huh?” Simon said. “He’s good for that, Father Stan.”

“You couldn’t shake him?” I asked.

“I can’t do that,” Rob said, smiling. “You just gotta weather it out.”

“Mom would be proud,” I said.

I asked Rob about Father Stan mentioning the Times and the duck-crossing-the-road bit—was that a shot at the media getting back in touch about the whole McCarrick business? Rob nodded and smiled. When the news broke about McCarrick, Rob told us, Father Stan had called him down to his office. Father Stan wanted to know if it was true. Had McCarrick molested him?

“It never happened,” Rob said.

Silence hung for a moment.

“Let me ask you this,” Simon said. “If it did happen, if you were molested—would you tell anybody?”

Good question!

“At this point, I would,” Rob said as he paced in front of us, while Simon and I sat on the bench looking up at him. “Everything else is out there. That never happened to me, though. I’m sorry for the kids who did have that happen to them. That’s a terrible thing. I know I could be selfish and self-centered and say it did happen and try to get some sympathy, but it’s not true. If it did happen, I would say it did.” He took a moment, then, mysteriously, smiled. “That would be this whole other thing for the media to spin, though. I don’t want to hurt anyone. Humans, animals, no one. I really wish I could just go home and work and pay the electric bill.”

“You can’t do that,” Simon said. “You gotta face it. You’re Robert Chambers.”

I followed up with Rob later, when he was in front of my cell, this time in private, one-on-one. He said that his father had been the first to tell him about McCarrick and asked him if anything had happened. Rob told him no. His father was relieved, but I imagine Bob Chambers was also a bit bothered that this new revelation about McCarrick, a man he respected, was spilling into his own life and resurfacing his son’s crime. When Rob called his mother, Phyllis didn’t even mention it. Rob didn’t bring it up, either.

In February 2021, Covid was running through Sullivan. The blocks were all on lockdown, the infirmary was full, another cellblock filled with quarantined people who had been exposed to Covid. Rob was one of them. The New York Times Magazine had commissioned me to write about how prisoners were living through the pandemic. The day Rob got out of quarantine, he came back to D North and stopped by my cell to tell me he was being transferred out. The superintendent had told him to pack up. He claimed he didn’t know what to make of it. Neither did I. Because of Covid, all transfers had been suspended. Had they found out I was writing about him?

Rob gave me his wife Shawn’s number, and we made a plan to boomerang messages through JPay. I tried to stay in touch with Rob through Shawn, but it wasn’t easy. Shawn was now fifty-two, and years of addiction had battered the radiant face of the punk rock girl who’d met Robert Chambers over thirty years before, when he was bailed out on the case with Jennifer Levin. Shawn was a bit cagey. That was understandable. No journalist had ever treated her or Rob well. A colleague of mine made initial contact with Shawn, and they became friends, sort of. They both had tattoos and piercings and knew pain. But Shawn seldom replied to her, either.

Meanwhile, Rob settled into Shawangunk. He had last been there in 1995, when Keith Hart and the boys had escaped. He got into the same routine that he’d had in Sullivan. He served food in the mess hall in the morning, took college classes at night, helped others with legal work during block rec period. He befriended Julius Reich, the once prominent attorney who, in 2016, stabbed his wife to death and was at that point a few years in on his twenty-year sentence. From prison, Reich had started a criminal justice nonprofit called Truth in Justice Now, and Rob had enlisted Shawn to do some outside duties for Reich. Rob was an inside consultant. According to a buddy of mine who was with Reich and Rob, the nonprofit was well intentioned but poorly run (a website for the nonprofit could not be found).

That buddy was Robert Lee Williams. When he was with Rob in Shawangunk, he’d read a chapter that featured me in The Sentences That Create Us, a craft book by PEN America, and it inspired him to want to be a prison journalist. One day, Williams mentioned me to Rob, who said he knew me well and that he had just left me in Sullivan. In the summer of 2022, serendipitously, Williams was transferred to Sullivan and sent me a message to come to the yard and meet him. I was by the pull-up bar when he introduced himself. At thirty-eight, Williams looked twenty-five, with long dreads and a face with sharp features, almost too pretty for prison. He’d just left Shawangunk, he told me, where he’d known Rob, who’d sent his regards. I went journalist mode and asked about Rob’s routine. “You know Rob,” Williams said. “He stays busy, he constantly complains, he gets high. He’s not a bad guy. He’s got a lot of pain.”

The more Williams told me about himself—they called him Kush in the joint—the more I liked him. Kush grew up in Poughkeepsie, adopted by his cousins’ family. His mother was addicted to crack; his father was murdered. As a teenager, he joined the Bloods. He had talent, too, performed spoken-word poetry and rapped. There was a confidence in him, the intellectual and artistic kind, one that seemed out of place in prison. By the time we met in Sullivan, Kush was more than halfway through his sentence, and he said he wanted to be a writer. He stopped gangbanging, he wanted more. I told him I’d work with him if he promised to always be accountable, not only about his work but also about his crime. Months later, he published his first piece about losing his friend in prison to a drug overdose. In it, he wrote tenderly about the young woman he killed. “In 2008, I met a girl named Anna, a kind-hearted woman, whose smile always squinted her eyes. She loved to smooch, dance and sing on- and off-key.”

In the summer of 2009, after a night of clubbing and dancing and drinking, they argued on their way home. At their apartment, they stabbed each other with kitchen knives. Anna stabbed him once. Kush stabbed her once. He almost died; she did. In February 2010, a jury acquitted him of murder but convicted him of manslaughter, the same charge that Rob Chambers pleaded to when the jury couldn’t reach a verdict after his trial. Unlike Rob, Kush was given the maximum twenty-five-year sentence by the judge. It wasn’t a murder conviction with a life sentence, so he wouldn’t have to go before a parole board like me. With good behavior, he’d serve about twenty-one years.

Kush was brown and poor. So was Anna. The case didn’t get much news coverage. But Kush doesn’t get hung up on the differences and parallels between his case and Rob’s when I point them out. He knows justice is arbitrary. Knowing Rob’s story and seeing how the publicity affected him, Kush is grateful the press never covered his crime. Besides, he could do something Rob never could. He could write his own story. During the time I spent with him, he went on to publish several essays, including in PEN America and Literary Hub and Slate.

In the past few years, as prison reform has become mainstream, philanthropies have been funding the arts in the criminal justice space. We are experiencing a renaissance of prison writing. There’s no question that readers want to be taken into our world and told a story. The problem is not prison stories or crime stories—the problem is who gets to tell them. To understand criminal acts, to read more substantive accounts and reflections, we may have to trust new narrators—prison journalists who, immersed in the culture, can offer on-the-ground reporting and narratives about the actual human beings who have committed crimes, including themselves, and their own moral reckonings. Kush and many other prison journalists, whose work is becoming more visible, are wresting their stories, and those of the prisoners they write about, away from the grasps of tabloids and the true crime–industrial complex.

When Rob went back to prison, Shawn went to rehab, but she couldn’t stay clean. When my colleague went to visit her at the rooming house where she lived, I called her phone and she handed it to Shawn, who called me honey and laughed while looking for her lighter and talked about the ridiculousness of the event they were going to for Reich’s nonprofit. They had just left Shawn’s apartment and were walking down the street. Shawn looked frail, with poppy-red dyed hair, dangling spiderweb earrings, and silver rings stacked on every finger. She wore her style like armor, protection against stares on the street from people who might know her story and, like so many people have, judge or hurt her. For the one person she knew would never hurt her, she kept a shrine in the corner of her room—snaps of Rob in his younger years, the two of them together in regular photos during the years he was out, as well as in prison Polaroids, smiling and in love. Neat script penned on prison-made cards expressed his affection for her. “He blames himself,” Shawn told me over the phone. “And I blame myself—that’s just how we are.”

Over the next year or so, I received sporadic messages from Shawn on JPay, asking how the book was coming and complaining about being broke, hinting that she needed some cash. I would send money for the stamps needed for our JPay correspondence, fifty dollars here and there, and also for phone calls. But once I sent it, she would seldom answer.

In early 2023, Simon transferred out of Sullivan and landed with Rob in Shawangunk. As Rob’s last months were winding down, Simon would again see Rob go home while he stayed behind in prison. I boomeranged a JPay message to Simon and asked how he was settling in, and asked him how Rob was doing. When Simon got back to me, he seemed bothered, suggesting that Rob was in a pretty pathetic state, running around the block as a porter—passing bowls of food, drugs, cigarettes—to get by. Simon also told me that I was cheap. A publisher paid me an advance, and Simon felt like I got Rob’s whole story for free and wasn’t even helping the guy. I had told him, time after time, that journalists lose credibility when they pay subjects for their stories. This book, I’d like to think, goes far beyond Robert Chambers. It’s a story about all four of our lives, and the lives we took, and what we do with what we did. Thing is, even though he was bitter, I missed Simon. We’d had long talks about culpability and responsibility, and when I reflect on them, they play back like therapy sessions.

“You have to see this segment they did on me—they called me an Albanian nationalist who frequented strip clubs. Can you imagine? An Albanian nationalist?” Simon had told me once, a couple of years earlier. He was talking about his appearance on America’s Most Wanted. “Then they got the guy John Walsh calling me a scumbag, that fucking jerk-off. They get the worst mug shot, zoom in on my eyes—you know, all that shit.”

Simon and I were walking and talking in the grass of the east yard. We talked about Rob, the media. Our conversations often shifted to the social hierarchy of prison. We had the same conversations I’d had with others in many prison yards. It was soothing, in a sense, because we were able to tell each other that we weren’t so bad.

“In Auburn, I remember Harold Konigsberg used to tell me, ‘I never hurt or preyed on regular people,’” Simon said. “‘I killed mobsters, criminals.’”

I knew Harold, too. He was an old mobster who used to do hits. I’m talking back in the Jimmy Hoffa era. I was with him in Attica, in the late aughts. He once told me that while Robert F. Kennedy interrogated him, he reached under the table and squeezed Bobby’s balls.

“When you kill a guy that’s a bad guy—why come at you so hard?” Simon asked.

While some people, and perhaps even some judges, may agree with this line of thinking in private, it’s not how justice is meted out in public.

“The courts don’t look at it like that,” I said. “They see us as outlaws, as antisocial personalities.”

“What do you mean? I’m social. You’re antisocial.”

“That’s not what it means to have an antisocial personality. It’s like the official term for psychopath,” I told him. “You have your own set of rules. You don’t respect society’s laws—think of it as anti-societal. You do what you want, when you want. You’re fearless, mean, impulsive—and you lack empathy, you know, regarding the suffering of others?”

“Wow, I didn’t know it meant all that,” he said, laughing. “Maybe I fit some of the others, but I have empathy.”

We had deep conversations about what happened that night in the Scores strip club, and I always pushed Simon to look past his resentment of his brother for shooting two men. I told him he played a part, too. One guy was a bouncer and the other was a young man working as a waiter, with his whole life ahead of him.

“You know,” I told Simon, “his family probably saw you guys as a couple of psychopaths, crazy Albanians, that had no value for life.”

“I didn’t shoot them, and I didn’t think my brother was going to, either. The fight wasn’t that serious,” Simon said.

“But you were fighting with the waiter. That’s how the melee began, right? We’re makers of our own troubles, you’re fearless, you never back down. There’s a gun, there’s alcohol, and all these egos. You start fighting. You don’t think somebody could get shot? So your brother shoots the bouncer and the young kid you’re fighting with, and then they put the shootings on you, because they don’t know who’s the shooter and you’re the more dangerous brother.”

“I have a hard time walking away from challenges, I do. But I never looked at it like that,” Simon said.

There’s this moment, when a guy you hang out with every day circles back to a story he’s already told you, and you realize the miserable monotony of this place. Spinning the same yarn with the same guys. It’s all we have—the stories of who we used to be. And so, Simon and I soon drifted apart. We went from hanging out every day to walking right by each other without saying a word. That’s how it is in this place. I can see how he saw me as a user, in a sense, a sort of story whore.

“Guys get tired of hearing about your stories and your articles and your friend Dwayne trying to get you out,” Simon said in one conversation before we stopped talking. “I’m dying in here. Sometimes guys resent that you have a career. What if I were a journalist and I was writing about you? Some days you’re quiet, don’t say a word, you’re, like, in your own world. I gotta carry the whole conversation. Then some days you’re talkative. You’re a difficult guy, you know?”

Robert Chambers has so completely absorbed the external media narrative about himself as an irredeemable figure that it is hard to imagine him finding the wherewithal to ever become more than his crime. Countless tabloid stories, prime-time specials, made-for-TV movies, books, song lyrics, and even the recent AMC docuseries—Rob’s internalized it all. And so, I imagine, have the Levins. The shaping of identity—it’s one of the unseen tragedies of true crime.

Violence has always troubled the creative minds who write about it. In these pages, I don’t know if I’ve shown that I understand the inner logic of violence better than any writer before me, but I do bear the onus of living with its consequences. I hope that I’ve offered a glimpse beyond the endless void that so many of us carried within us when we killed. I’d say the “why” of murder is this: To take another person’s life, you can’t be too invested in your own. Think of where we all were when we killed. I was a wannabe gangster in the drug-dealing lifestyle, full of the fear of being found out, looking to complete my image and defend a reputation that meant nothing; Shane, fragile and fractured, couldn’t stand another rejection from Stefan; Milton, adolescent and impulsive, was poor and intellectually disabled, mental illness likely broaching; and Rob was running through life—consuming, snorting, inhaling, ingesting—a depleted young man in the soul-sucking era of the ’80s. What’s tragic is that many of us never come to terms with what we did or understand how to make sense of it all.

Despite how life has turned out for Rob, and how it will continue to unfold when he’s out—maybe he’ll get sober, maybe he won’t—he is hardly the character who overcomes. My fondest memories of Rob are in the moments he didn’t know I was watching him. I’d see him from the mezzanine view of my cell on the second tier as he talked with the hearing-impaired men in the cellblock, signing with his hands in the air, his face expressive and sincere. In those moments, he seemed decent and selfless. I sometimes wonder if I will be resented for rendering him like this, as some of my female friends warned I would be. For depicting Robert Chambers’s humanity.

Big Barcelona, Rob’s former coworker on the lawns and grounds, the one whom Rob kept pushing to get his GED and was now in the college program, told me how Rob used to find animals and bring them back to the toolshed. “We had a salamander,” Barcelona said, “and we used to call him U.T., short for utility.”

One time, in the heat of summer, Rob whacked weeds by the fence, and Barcelona rode the John Deere lawn mower a few yards away. All of a sudden, Rob cut off the weed trimmer and started pointing, trying to get his attention. Barcelona stopped and watched as a CO walked toward Rob. Smiling, Rob was pointing to a frog on the ground. He wasn’t trying to catch it. He just watched as it leapt through a small hole in the wiring, away from the noise, back into the woods, out of sight. The guard shook his head and started walking away. “Fucking Chambers…”

“We even had a turtle,” Barcelona told me, laughing. “Rob used to feed them. When he transferred, I found a state sweatshirt in the shed. It had his name and numbers on it. One of the guys told me to keep it, that I could sell it online when I got out.”

Epilogue

On July 25, 2023, Robert Chambers walked out of Shawangunk. He was happy that there wasn’t any press in the parking lot. He had a check for the money in his commissary account, a few hundred, the forty dollars you get upon release, a bag of legal work, cosmetics, underwear and socks, and two pairs of sweats and T-shirts that he wore around his cell. (In May 2024, gate money was increased to $200 with the support of new prison commissioner Daniel Martuscello III.) Sean Pica, who ran the nonprofit that brought college courses into prisons, arranged for a ride for Rob, and got him a cell phone and a bed at a halfway house in Rockland County.

On his third day out, one of his housemates showed Rob an article on his phone. “‘Preppy Killer’ Robert Chambers Released from NYS Prison After Serving 15 Years in Drug, Assault Case,” the New York Post headline read. The next day, the Post was in front of Phyllis Chambers’s home in Long Island. Rob’s ninety-two-year-old mother did not open the door. Her niece Mary, Rob’s cousin, came out and chased the reporters away.

In a follow-up article, the press posted Rob’s photo, charges, date of birth, the name of his parole officer, and the halfway house’s address online. Community members complained that the Preppy Killer should be paroled back to New York City, where he was from. Parole soon moved him to a hotel in Sunnyside, Queens. Rob began reporting to the Queens parole office, and that’s where he bumped into my buddy Chris Hynes, who used to go to meetings with me in Attica. Chris, who’d been out a few years, was sober. He’d built a life around 12-step meetings, and he was happy.

Chris gave me Rob’s number. I called him one evening from the cellblock and listened to him complain about the state of society and the broken reentry process. He’d been out for months but couldn’t get a job or open a bank account because he didn’t have a New York State ID. (In January 2024, Governor Hochul expanded an initiative to provide nondriver ID cards to soon-to-be-released prisoners in all forty-three correctional facilities; it had previously provided about seven hundred IDs since its inception in 2022.) He didn’t like using his prison release papers for identification. While in limbo, he figured he’d do something, so he asked his parole officer about a drug program. When he showed up at the place, they needed to assess him. It would be weeks before he could start. “Parole makes no sense. Society is all fucked up. I have like twelve cents to my name,” Rob said. Then he paused and apologized. “I’m just frustrated with myself. I don’t blame anybody but myself. My whole life has been just getting high. So if I can avoid that, that’s 90 percent of my problems.”

There is a hunger, especially in this moment, to hate a man like Robert Chambers. Writing about him while living alongside him in prison offered me a unique point of view, perhaps a skewed one, too. Getting close, enduring punishment together, all of that, I’m sure, enhanced my empathy for Rob. We commiserated with each other, shared our shame with each other. I glimpsed a man who hadn’t treated himself too kindly throughout his life—a life filled with active addiction and furious self-hatred. I’d argue that getting high was Rob’s way of showing us how he really feels about what he did to Jennifer Levin. The disregard for his own life seems clearer than any crystallized expressions of remorse. I mean, I’ve accounted in detail what I’ve done, owned it fully, but I sometimes feel like nothing I say will ever be enough. Maybe that’s how it should be.

I think about what it will be like as a writer on the outside. Just being out of prison erases some of the crime from your identity. I will have done my time. I’d rather be an ex-con than a convict, a felon than a convicted murderer still locked up for my crime. What will it be like to live in free society with the details of my past just a few fingertip swipes away? Which identity will prevail? While writing this, I received a JPay message from a man in France named Franck, who explained how he’d seen an interview with me and Chris Cuomo, on a French version of the show called At the Heart of Evil, which was broadcast on the French TV channel Crime District. My God, I thought, my Inside Evil episode is now in French?

Still, my search results will be different than Rob’s, because my rendering of my story will always contend with the version others tell, but I imagine I will not always want my past to be instantly accessible. Maybe I’ll meet a woman I’m interested in, tell her my name, and before we go on our first date, she’ll have already looked me up and ghosted me, spooked by what she found. Perhaps some people will know of my work, respect me and validate me, and I yearn for that, but I imagine the praise will also make me uncomfortable. In prison, for so long, I got used to the indifference, and oddly, it fueled me. I do believe people in society want us to get out and be better and do better, but when it comes to being more than a murderer, I do wonder—how much more can they really stand? When I think about this book coming out, I fear critics will cut me down and say I should never have written it, that I’ll never be one of them. I think about shallow shit, too. I need several teeth implanted (all they do in here is pull them out), and I want a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan or Brooklyn (which I hear is the place for writers to live nowadays) in a high-rise building with a doorman and amenities. And I want to sport cashmere sweaters and scarves, and beautiful peacoats. It’s conflicting, and probably grating, I imagine, to hear how someone who once took a life now wants a good one. I hope you don’t resent me for that.

I understand why the family of the man I murdered doesn’t want me to overcome prison and find success; they want me to feel the punishment of prison forever, because their pain is forever. And so perhaps it’s brazen, insulting even, for me to want more for my life. I snuffed out his life when we were both at troubled points in our young lives. E. could have found his talent, fallen in love, made a family, even if he were in prison like me. It was wrong of me to take an account of his life before I killed him and tell myself, as I have hinted in some of my earlier writings, that I’m not so bad because I killed another criminal in “the life.” I can’t say that and then, in the same breath, ask that my character not be defined by my crime. It’s hypocritical. And though that may seem obvious, it didn’t feel that way to me for a long time. I took his life and all the life he could have had, and I have to live with that. The reality is that I will never be forgiven.

When Reginald Dwayne Betts submitted my clemency application, he hired a defense victim outreach expert to contact E.’s family and tell them I was seeking a commutation. It was a risk, but there’s no script on how to do this work, and it felt like the right thing to do. We had also made a conscious decision to not try to rally the media. Dwayne and I had plenty of connections but it felt wrong to leverage them. Forgiveness was a theme that we had both written about for years. Who deserves mercy? I wonder if there’s a world in which some victims become powerful advocates for it. It’s why Dwayne and Mark Osler and Alexandra Cox knew they had to hire an expert to try to create space for the family. In the end, the expert did speak to E.’s family. So did Dwayne. I do not know what was said. Only that the family did not forgive me and did not support my release.

Soon after, E.’s family posted an online petition opposing my clemency. “John J. Lennon might in fact believe he isn’t a threat to public safety because he is a writer and can earn a living as a writer,” the petition stated, “but don’t be convinced or fooled.” It then cites my article in the New York Review of Books about Jack Henry Abbott. “John writes that writing gave Jack a second chance at life; however, it also gave Jack a second chance to kill. John J. Lennon the writer is still the man capable of cold-blooded murder.”

That’s rough to read. In that essay about Abbott, I was trying to acknowledge that he was a tragic figure, and caused people pain and heartbreak, but the point of that piece was to express my desire to be better than Abbott. And I will be. Whenever the conversation turns to a successful prison writer, Abbott’s cautionary tale is almost always invoked. I can name many prison writers whose bodies of work overshadow Abbott’s, but you’ve probably never heard of them because they never committed his fantastic violence. Truth is, most of us will never do what Abbott did. His story, in many ways, speaks to what I’ve written about in this book. What made Abbott memorable wasn’t his writing. It was his killing.

By 2024, I had lost touch with Rob. I figured he’d done what he’s always wanted to do—disappear with Shawn, go to work, pay the electric bill. Then on August 15, Rob entered his wife Shawn’s room at the Upper Manhattan rooming house and found her dead in bed. She was alone. Rob declined to talk about Shawn’s death. He told Chris Hynes that he was anxious about it, especially now. I felt bad that, by reporting this, I might be creating the same thing I critique. Suspecting. Sleuthing. Sensationalizing. From what my colleague had observed a couple of years earlier when she visited Shawn, still struggling with addiction, her death wasn’t shocking to me. But it was tragic for Rob. He only spent one year of recent freedom with the one person who’d stayed by his side throughout his thirty years of imprisonment. Now that person was gone. He was alone.

Around this time, Steve Zeidman had decided to pursue a medical parole request for Milton. Zeidman had secured release for elderly prisoners with more traditional health problems like dementia, but he was now arguing that Milton’s recent incidents were a direct result of prison worsening his mental illness and that he should be released into a mental hospital to receive proper care.

After I interviewed retired detective John Schwartz, and he admitted to me that there was no evidence that Shane suffocated Stefan, I had a colleague send our taped conversation to Zeidman and Erin Tomlinson, and to Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzalez’s office. It seemed egregious to me that Charles Hynes used a fabricated story to establish the aggravating factor to justify pursuing the death penalty against Shane, which ultimately caused him to take a fifty-years-to-life plea deal. But Shane’s DVSJA motion, which was submitted to the Brooklyn DA in the summer of 2024, seemed packed with promising exhibits that supported his claims of abuse, and he hoped to soon get a hearing before a Brooklyn judge.

That same summer, I began meeting every Friday night in a white-walled cinder block classroom in Sullivan with nine others, all men of color in for murder, who had collectively served almost three hundred years. We sat in a circle, in desk-chair combos, as I led a nonfiction writing workshop. I had sent a letter to the new prison commissioner, Daniel Martuscello III, who had been expressing a desire to support more peer-run programs. I struck a humbler tone than the one in the letter I’d sent years before to Michael Capra, the Sing Sing superintendent; I explained that I was already mentoring men one-on-one, in the yard and cellblock. Some were coming to terms with what they had done on the page. I asked him for a classroom so I could expand my mentorship and teach a workshop. The commissioner sent word to the Sullivan superintendent and made it happen. One of the things I knew I had to do was talk the men through the right story—a personal essay, a first-person reported piece, or an op-ed—for each of them to write. In a short period, with the help of my publicist, Megan Posco, on the outside, seven of the nine men would publish pieces developed in the workshop, one even landing an op-ed in the New York Times.

By the end of the summer, news came that Sullivan was one of the two maximum-security prisons slotted for closure. It made sense. In the past twenty years, New York’s prison population had halved. Murder rates in American cities today hover around their lowest, even though true crime may make you think otherwise.

The workshop split up, guys landed in different prisons, and in mid-September, I was bused back to Sing Sing. As a group of us walked down a dimly lit corridor to the reception tier of B Block, I saw Shane in a group walking toward me. He smiled and hugged me. I hugged him back. I realized it was something I never would’ve done years before, embrace Shane so affectionately in a hallway full of prisoners. But so much had changed. I had changed.

Shane lived in honor block and I was locked a world away in B Block where, every day, men overdosed on drugs and slashed each other’s faces. When I went out to the yard to exercise, I sometimes had to tiptoe around puddles of blood on the tier. But I mostly stayed in my cell and wrote. Shane and I met on Tuesday evenings in the general library. Not as journalist and subject, but as friends. Writing this book, I’ve come to know him so well; he knew me, too. In the library, we laughed about the absurdity of prison and cracked self-deprecating jokes until our eyes filled with tears. Shane and others urged me to resume the writing workshop in Sing Sing. Superintendent Capra had retired, but when I asked the new administration, they denied my request. I didn’t bother complaining to the commissioner.

At this point, I felt exasperated with prison, the violence, the politics, the indifference of administrators. I wanted out. So did Shane.

By January 2025, Shane had met with the Brooklyn prosecutors who had received his DVSJA resentencing motion. They seemed to support it. For the first time, Shane believed he would soon be free.

My freedom wasn’t as likely. In recent years, the Brooklyn DA’s office had set up a panel to review clemency petitions. Getting support from the office that put you away could help persuade the governor, but prosecutors on the panel were split on my petition. They would neither oppose nor support it. According to one of his deputies, DA Gonzalez was “really spooked” by the Inside Evil episode. When the governor’s clemency folks took a meeting with my legal team, most of their questions fixated on Inside Evil, too. It devastated me. I couldn’t believe that people at the highest levels of government were so influenced by this lurid rendering of my story. It brings me back to my earlier question: Does illuminating human darkness increase the desire for punishment? I’m now convinced that one thing, more than anything else, is keeping me in prison: true crime.

I didn’t go looking to critique true crime; true crime came looking for me. When I think about how I came to write this book, it’s like most things I write about. Something I experience will aggravate me, then I’ll put my pen to it and figure out why. My entry point to true crime was appearing on Inside Evil. When I reported out the lives of Shane, Milton, and Rob, the experience became a foil for me to better understand that the good-versus-evil binary is lazy storytelling. It’s also an inaccurate depiction of why violence occurs.

The more accurate one, which I hope I’ve shown here, has less to do with the empty word of evil and more with all the forms of abuse and untreated mental illness and addiction, as well as financial and social and emotional insecurity. There was a moment during my interview with Chris Cuomo when he asked about my father abandoning me and killing himself. How did that affect my life? What I told Cuomo never made it on the show. I replied that the emptiness of my father’s absence had as much of an effect on me as his father, Mario’s, loving presence had on him. It’s one of the reasons why, after we wrapped filming, I was escorted back to a cell and he was rushed off to the CNN studio to host his prime-time show.

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 are more than our crimes. It turns back the clock and replays the worst moments of someone’s life, reconstructs and 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.

Author’s Note

In the early 2010s, when I was becoming a writer in Attica, my observations and curiosity about others in the cellblock and the yard drew me to journalism. I talked to guys, but it was tricky because it would make them uneasy when I wrote down the things they said—so I practiced the Gay Talese style of “hanging out” journalism. When something in the yard would distract the guy, I’d scribble down notes on my pad, then go back to my cell to type them up. The cells in Attica had no chairs or stools or desks. If I stretched my arms out, my hands would touch the walls of the neighboring cells. I’d sit on an upturned bucket, typewriter balanced on the edge of the bunk, hunched over, tapping away until my ass numbed and my lower back burned. The Swintec typewriter was a cheaply built machine that cost $350—it was clear; prison officials prefer electronics with transparent plastic casings so they can easily inspect them for contraband. With a seven-thousand-character memory, it worked for shorter articles, but it got tricky when I started going long. I had to print out the solid beginning pages, delete them from the typewriter to make more room in the memory, then start a new section. Because the ink cartridges were too expensive, I used carbon paper to print. I would read out loud and self-edit. Then I would mail out a clean manuscript with a cover letter, blind pitching editors. It wasn’t sustainable. Most editors wouldn’t communicate through snail mail. I had to create an email account.

To be a journalist on the inside, you need help on the outside.

Raina and Danielly, my two ex-wives, both helped in the beginning, but no wife wants to be a secretary to their husband in prison. When I’d ask Danielly to check my outside email to see if an editor got back, she would sometimes curse me out, frustrated that I’d rather use the few minutes we had for my career instead of our relationship. I had to find help somewhere else. After I published my first piece in the New York Times, in 2015, college students started reaching out to me. Harry Breault, who was then at Haverford, helped me pitch editors. Pete Davis, at Harvard Law, built an early version of my website.

In 2016, Leann Davis Alspaugh, an editor at the Hedgehog Review, a cultural journal, published one of my essays, and she soon started helping me build my career from prison. I was a criminal, a convict in Attica, and now I wanted to be a journalist, but my personality was a bit rough. I had never used a computer, never created a Word document, never sent a professional email. I was bad at small talk and pleasantries, maybe because my phone calls were timed and I was always talking in the middle of chaos. I snail-mailed Leann essays; she retyped and forwarded them to editors, then mailed me back their revisions and took my dictated edits. More than anything, Leann taught me how to conduct myself as a professional. It was a lot of work. I soon enlisted Devon Sherman, whose father is Steve, my Jewish big brother when I was growing up in the projects. Devon, who studied English literature in college, grew up hearing about me, and when he learned I was a writer in prison, he became my go-to guy.

When I was transferred to Sing Sing, the cells were even smaller, the cellblocks louder, but soon came a new connection to the outside world. In 2019, after we were issued seven-inch JPay tablets, I realized the draft section had a cut-and-paste feature, and allowed me to compose six-thousand-word emails. JPay is owned by Securus, the same company that provides phone services, all at a cost. Activists hate these private companies for capitalizing on prisoners and their families, but the truth is that most prisoners welcome the technology. As frustrating as the tablets are to use, they make this work somewhat easier. Each JPay message costs about twenty cents—both ways—and we have to plug, or sync, our tablet into a kiosk to send and receive messages and download music and movies and thirty-second videos from loved ones.

At Sullivan, each cellblock had one kiosk in their common area. During evening recreation, there was always a chaotic scene (“Who’s last on the kiosk?”), guys arguing about who skipped the line. You were limited to five syncs a day. A lieutenant monitored the messages, which would sometimes get held up for days. We learned that the JPay system automatically flagged certain words; replacing a letter in those words with a star—“m*rder,” “Bl*od”—avoided detection and messages got through quicker. To sync my tablet during the day, before evening recreation, I would ask the prison porters, who mopped and buffed the floors, to do it. It was a perk of their job, being out of their cells when the rest of us were locked in. I paid them a pack of Newport cigarettes every week. Over the years, “Cracker Thug,” a white dude from upstate with a bad drug habit who made good prison moonshine out of tomato paste, and “Big White,” a big Black guy from Queens, sent out more JPay messages for me than I can count. Sometimes officials in the front office would get petty and call the CO to tell him not to let the porters sync the tablets of the guys locked in their cells. On April 8, 2021, at noon, Cracker Thug sent out one of my messages to Vauhini Vara, my editor for a story I wrote in the New York Times Magazine. I later received a misbehavior report for sending a message when I was supposed to be locked in. At the hearing I was sanctioned seven days’ loss of yard privileges. (By late 2024, Securus had installed WiFi in New York prisons and the kiosks became obsolete. We were now able to send messages instantaneously and make phone calls with our tablets in our cells.)

I formed the idea for this book with Vauhini’s help in the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project. “It’s ideal for the central idea of the book—about how the true-crime genre has corrupted our cultural understanding of crime and punishment—to progress as the book progresses,” Vauhini wrote me in 2022. I had met her years before, when she was editing a criminal justice series at The Atlantic. She published a piece of mine and we got to know each other. Soon after, she reached back out to me explaining her work at Lighthouse, where she mentored a cohort of writers working on their first nonfiction book. Vauhini got me a fellowship, and from 2020 to 2022 I called into workshop on the weekends from the Sullivan yard, as Vauhini unpacked the elements of story: structure, people, world, and language. I imagined the faces of the other writers on the Zoom call, all arranged on a grid. I was told mine was a black box.

By that time, Shane and Milton were back in Sing Sing, and Rob was with me for a while until he transferred out. My typed-up notes of their lives filled folders that lined my cell floor. Vauhini and my literary agent, William LoTurco, helped me build out a ten-thousand-word nonfiction proposal. (A Lighthouse adviser, the former book agent Shana Kelly, also gave me invaluable advice on the proposal, as did my friend Clara Platter, a book editor.) Before it went to auction, in August 2021, I called William, my agent, from the phone in B North. He put me through to Ryan Doherty, an editor at Celadon Books, who was interested in my proposal. It was shower time. Men yelled. Walkie-talkies crackled. Trying to block out the noise, I told Ryan my vision for the story, how it would focus on individual prisoners and how I’d deliver the book from prison the same way I’d been publishing magazine articles over the years.

Ryan said he liked the idea. Then the bell rang, and I had to hang up. I locked in my cell and got tallied up with the rest for the master count. Back out for evening rec, I jumped on the phone with my agent to ask how he thought the call went. He told me that Celadon had made an offer. We accepted it. I was thrilled and grateful, though it was the kind of news I couldn’t share with anyone in here.

When I talk about getting paid for my writing, people often ask me about New York’s Son of Sam law, assuming it prevents me from doing so. If the law’s original intent were still on the books, it would have. After David Berkowitz, a.k.a. the “Son of Sam,” shot and killed six people in the mid-’70s, New York lawmakers feared he might capitalize on his notoriety and sell his life rights. They passed the Son of Sam law in 1977, which required convicted people, and even the accused, to turn over money received from any contracts with publishers for writing about their crimes in magazine articles, books, and movies.

In 1991, in Simon & Schuster, Inc. v. Members of N.Y. State Crimes Victims Bd., the US Supreme Court ruled that the Son of Sam law was inconsistent with the First Amendment. The Court really had a problem with how the law forbade writers from discussing their crimes—even in the most minimal detail. “Had the Son of Sam law been in effect at the time and place of publication,” the opinion reads, “it would have escrowed payment for such works as The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which describes crimes committed by the civil rights leader before he became a public figure.”

In 2001, the New York State Legislature revised the Son of Sam law, and all the language about convicted people publishing was removed. The law could now seize pretty much any funds—inheritances, lawsuit winnings—that a convicted person received over $10,000, with the exception of earned income. I earn my income as a journalist.

Aside from the legality of it all, there’s so much more that comes with doing journalism in the joint. I enjoy the kind of access to my subjects that any investigative journalist would envy if it didn’t require being in prison. Most journalists who write about people in prison interview them over the phone or visit them in a designated area, then write the story in the safety of their homes. By the time it comes out, they’re already working on the next piece. When regular journalists give radio interviews about their subjects (COs and prisoners), they are not usually under the control of those very subjects. Guards are responsible for my security, but it’s the prisoners themselves who run the prison and control my safety. They monopolize the phone lines; they can hurt me, try to extort me. COs and administrators can search my cell, move my cell, taunt me, hold up my JPay messages, my snail mail—all of which have happened to me.

I wrote much of this book for three years in a dark corner of the B North cellblock in Sullivan. I wrote this book as men watched the TV that hung from the orange banisters and yelled out answers to Steve Harvey’s questions on Family Feud—ding, ding, ding. I wrote this book as old Amir and Haiti played checkers at the table in front of my cell, accusing each other of cheating. I wrote this book getting interrupted by surprise raids and fire drills that made us file out into the corridor as a K-9 sniffed our crotches. I wrote this book getting interrupted by men fighting in front of my cell—Machete and G punched each other’s faces until blood splattered on the walls and my cell bars. This is where I wrote this book.

Writing is an internal and solitary process, and my cell, it’s sad to say, was my sanctuary. Scotch-taped to my cinder block cell walls were note cards with character outlines of Shane and Milton and Rob, arcs with plot points of rising action, and literary quotes: Ernest Hemingway’s “iceberg theory” reminded me that “what was omitted from a story outweighed in power what was left in”; Tad Friend told me how he used to think his job as a writer “was to convey facts, description, a few bars of color, and a verdict,” but he “gradually realized that how I responded to what I was writing about, how it made me feel wasn’t beside the point.” After I’d work in my cell all day, thinking and writing through painful parts of this book, searching the depths of why we did what we did and how we coped in here, I emerged to the surface, out of the story of prison to actually living in here, seeing and hearing and feeling the cruelty, crudeness, and senselessness of it swirling all around me, witnessing human beings unravel. At times I unraveled myself.

While many people lent a helping hand (Devon Sherman, Tammy Thorne, Tracey Long), I’ve always tried to cover their expenses. For the past three years, I’ve talked to two people about this book almost every day: Megan Posco, my publicist, and Matthew Litman, my assistant. By late 2021, Matt had just graduated from Brown University. He wanted to be a writer but was struggling to find a job, and that had made the ad I posted on the Yale bulletin—“widely published ‘prison journalist’ looking for assistant”—seem attractive. Megan reached out to me while publicizing my early mentor Bill Keller’s book What’s Prison For? After reading some quotes of mine in the manuscript, Megan found the announcement for my book deal. She wrote me a handwritten letter offering to publicize my book pro bono when it came out. She’s done so much more than that, including helping me with my freelancing. (After her three years of pro bono work for me, I paid her to publicize this book alongside the in-house team at Celadon.)

One of the many challenges of writing this book was tracking the lives of Shane and Milton and Rob. I had my typed notes for each of them about our time together and their backstories, but as their lives continued to unfold in different prisons, I wondered what became of them. Matt built a close relationship with Milton, and Megan did the same with Shane. They relayed updates on their lives to me and, on occasion, connected us when I needed to talk to them. Rob, being Rob, was always more elusive and less responsive. Matt researched articles, helped me with reporting on outside subjects, transcribed the phone interviews, and did some solo reporting, interviewing Milton’s mother, Valina, and son, Kevin, then mailing me his notes. Megan, too, would JPay and mail me articles and connect me with people I needed to interview.

As for developing the manuscript for Ryan at Celadon, I took pride in delivering clean drafts; I never wanted him to be palm-to-forehead frustrated about the complicated logistics of dealing with a prison writer. I wanted to set a standard and show that someone in prison could turn in the highest level of work. But writing a reported book from the inside is beyond complicated. Matt would compile my JPay messages into a Google doc, do a light edit of the text, and prepare any footnotes. After Ryan, and on a couple of occasions Vauhini, edited the manuscript, Megan would mail it back to me. I would read it, mark it up, then send snippets of edits on JPay or sometimes dictate my edits over the phone. Using an editing system I developed over JPay, I exchanged messages with Matt and Megan that probably looked like computer code to the security lieutenant in charge of reading my correspondence.

Receiving a 100,000-word work-in-progress manuscript in prison is harder than you may think, especially when that prison system is dealing with a K2 crisis. The drug looks like a regular piece of paper to the unknowing eye, but one sheet sprayed with K2 chemicals is worth about $1,000 in prison. Sometimes the paper is thicker; sometimes it’s not. The drug became popular because it couldn’t be detected in a urine test. Potheads at first started smoking the leafy K2 (think of the Spice synthetic packets sold in smoke shops), and soon the prison dealers started selling portions of the paper version, torn up and sprinkled in a tobacco cigarette and smoked. Since the chemicals weren’t dosed properly, guys started hallucinating and experiencing psychosis, stripping their clothes off in the yard, running and screaming about being on fire. Point is, this epidemic has caused prison officials to scrutinize the paper mailed into facilities. Our regular mail, which was already limited to five pages at a time, was now being photocopied in the mail room. For a while, lawyers I knew would do me a favor and mail my book edits via legal mail; it’s privileged mail, so the CO opens it in front of you, inspects it, and then gives you all the pages. But dealers were using legal mail, too, and officials soon started cracking down on mail that didn’t appear to be official legal documents. My edited manuscripts started getting returned. At one point, Megan resorted to stuffing my manuscript in thirty-seven envelopes, five double-sided pages at a time. The mailroom civilian, likely unhappy they had to copy all the pages in all those envelopes, would sometimes only copy one side. The most normal thing, a writer reading his manuscript, became a teeth-grindingly frustrating process.

Even though I enjoyed great access to my subjects, I had to get creative when hunting down records. Take Milton’s mental health records. When Milton signed a HIPAA form to release them to Matt, the Office of Mental Health counselors in his prison refused to send them. It was only after I asked Steve Zeidman to request them as Milton’s lawyer, and paid $1,100 for them, that we were able to get them. That required a significant amount of trust on Steve’s part. Then we faced the problem of mailing Milton’s records to me. Receiving a fat packet of another prisoner’s medical records in the mail could earn me an infraction. So Matt read more than a thousand pages of hard-to-decipher handwriting, all kinds of forms and medical jargon, and we talked over the phone about the relevant material to include in the book.

In January 2024, I dictated an email to Ricki Stern, in which I asked why she had been vague with Rob when she initially reached out about his participation in her documentary. She responded the same day by email, which I quoted in the book. Months later, she reached back out to me and retracted her response, saying it was off the record. I disagree. I clearly stated that I was a journalist. As far as I’m concerned, I was much more forthcoming with her than she was with Rob.

Over the years, Matt also corresponded with Teddy Simmons, Milton’s codefendant, who expressed that he suffers from mental illness. His method of self-harm was burning himself—I’ve talked to people who’ve served time with Teddy and they verified this. Teddy has made several trips to Marcy Psychiatric Hospital, and also told Matt several different versions about his crime and the claims of alleged abuse. In the end, he asked that his versions not be included in the book. What’s clear to me is that Teddy’s life has been a torrent of tragic suffering.

It was a bit of a thorny issue, too, when Megan, my publicist, got a message from Shane that Tracey Ford, the producer of the Netflix series I Am a Killer, had reached out to him. Megan and Shane had developed their own relationship. He was even corresponding with Megan’s mother. Megan was operating more as a friend to Shane. She felt protective and advised him against participating. But Megan was curious about how they found Shane so randomly. She told me that she was arranging a call with Ford. I didn’t want to orchestrate it, but I was curious to know their methods, too. Megan pursued the phone call on her own, told me what Ford told her, and I put it in the book. When my fact-checker repeatedly reached out to Ford about those lists that US prison administrators provided for her company, she did not respond.

Ethics also came into play when I reestablished a connection, through Matt, to Ray Bissonette. Since Milton never received Ray’s damning letter, Matt sent it over to him and then forwarded Milton’s response back to Ray, who was desperate to protect his brother’s legacy. Ray appreciated that Milton retracted what he had written to the Herman Law firm, but when Ray asked me to further press Milton about the letter he had received from the Herman Law firm—to ask him if they made false promises in exchange for him accusing Father Joe—I did not feel comfortable relaying that. It seemed out of bounds for my role as a journalist. When Milton lied in his letter, it appeared to be more about his own vulnerable state than the Herman Law firm trying to manipulate him. Besides, Milton told me he no longer had the letter the firm sent him in 2021.

Which brings me to the dilemma of this book: My subjects and I don’t want our crimes to define us, but the family members and friends of the people we killed are affected by our actions forever. I didn’t expect to get real access to the victims writing this book from prison, but since I had shown resourcefulness in so many other areas, it was my duty to reach out to them. Matt tried to contact family members of Monsignor David Herlihy, including his niece, but got no response. Megan emailed Jennifer Levin’s mother, Ellen Levin, and her sister, Danielle, but we did not hear back from them. I’m grateful that Jennifer’s friend Peter Davis agreed to speak with me. Matt also reached out to Stefan’s niece Michelle Freeman, who, it turns out, was still running Stefan’s accessory store on Kings Highway. Matt left a few messages, but Freeman never got back. Matt contacted Sister Karen Klimczak’s foundation, which shared with us the letter Sister Karen wrote to her future killer. As for reaching out to the family of the man I killed, they’ve made it clear they do not wish to speak with me.

Circling back to this idea about the ethics of paying my subjects for the time they spent talking to me, I appreciated what the famous author Jon Krakauer once told his fellow journalists at a conference, defending his practice of sometimes compensating his subjects: “I’ve made a boatload of money off the books I’ve written. Don’t you think I owe anything to some of my subjects, who got nothing for the crucial assistance they provided except, in some instances, unwanted publicity?”

After Rob’s release, when he told me he didn’t have a penny to his name, I asked Megan to send Chris Hynes, my buddy who was in touch with Rob, $1,500, and told Chris to give it to Rob. (My brother, who has my power of attorney, then paid Megan back.) I instructed Chris to tell him that it came from a collection from his 12-step home group. Rob was struggling and desperate, and I was in a position to help, if only a little bit. So I did. Plus, I wanted Rob to give sobriety a real shot. I suppose Simon’s words also gnawed at me. While Rob didn’t need to know it came from me, I do need to share it with you, the reader. While he was in prison, I also sent Rob (or Shawn), as well as Shane and Milton, a few hundred dollars on different occasions, for expenses. They took time to answer my follow-ups, sent JPays, and used the phone to talk to Megan and Matt. Rob’s story was verified using my handwritten notes from interviews, news reports, and books, as well as recollections from fellow prisoners and friends.

While writing this book, I talked to scores of people, and even immersed myself in the lives of two other characters who didn’t make it into the book. Some transferred out, and eventually, I realized my three subjects were more than enough. But to vet the stories that Shane and Milton and Rob told me about their lives in prison over the years, I would often talk to guys who were in those prisons with them at the same time, in the drama program with Shane in Auburn, in Attica with Milton in the ’90s, and plenty of men who sold Rob drugs in different spots over the years. Dialogue and interior monologues and reconstructed scenes were all drawn from my subjects and other reporting, including court transcripts, institutional reports, and medical records. I tried to signal to readers when I couldn’t corroborate events, like Rob’s story about the Silver Keys.

With the overarching theme of this book, Megan kept her ear to the street. A sign of a good publicist. She would always send me articles to help me understand how society consumed and critiqued true crime. (I had a bunch of print subscriptions, but Megan sent me the online content I couldn’t access.) We came to these stories and the genre of true crime with different life experiences—Megan has had no contact with the criminal justice system; I’ve been a felon as long as she’s been alive—and we had deep conversations about who should be able to write about murder. She rolled with me when I wrote a piece of true crime criticism in the New York Review of Books, “Peddling Darkness.” My editor Emily Greenhouse helped me articulate the problem I had with the genre while critiquing another problematic book of true crime writing. But I see this book as less of a true crime critique and more of a story in which characters, including my own, can become accessible in ways that they have never before been in nonfiction literature.

Vauhini helped me discover this book’s structure—the meet, the backstory, the crimes, the prison years, my own story—and Matt helped me put all the pieces together. Working so closely with me, he came to know my narrative voice, as did Megan. We created a system, through the mail and JPay and the phone, to overcome the complicated logistics. When Ryan received the drafts, his sharp cuts gave the manuscript velocity, always reminding me to “stay with the characters.” Soon, the Celadon team put it into production. And then it was done.

Acknowledgments

To Michael Shane Hale, Milton E. Jones, and Robert E. Chambers—thank you for your vulnerability and trusting me to tell your stories. I want to express my gratitude to the others inside who also talked to me, whether you wound up in the book or not: Simon “D-Day” Dedaj, Zach Gibian, Michael “Meatballs” Antinuche, Joseph “Preacher” Wilson, Louis “Barcelona” Robinson, Mulumba “Africa” Kazigo, Frank “Midget” Sepe, Robert Lee “Kush” Williams, Johnnie “Pebbles” Hardwick, Daniel Sanchez, Joseph Sanchez, Jose “Chino Blast” Matias, and Nicholas Brooks. A special thanks to Chris Hynes, the prison politician turned sober citizen, who helped my fact-checker, Brenna Ehrlich, tremendously.

Thank you to the friends and family members of my subjects, or their victims, who extended to me their time and grace: Lester Dale Wilson; Barbara Waters; Kevin McMillian (and his mother, whom I call Melina); Valina Little; Raymond Bissonette and his daughter, Marya; the kind people at the SSJ Sister Karen Klimczak Center for Nonviolence; Holly McCormick; Peter Davis; and Shawn Kovell, may she rest in peace.

I want to thank all the professionals on the outside who answered my emails and spoke to me for this book: retired detective John Schwartz; Dr. Elizabeth Loftus; Kate Mogelescu; Dr. Heather Ann Thompson; Jay Tokasz; Charles Specht; and a special thanks to Duncan Osborne.

Thank you to the people who helped me become a writer. Doran Larson, if you didn’t teach the Attica writing workshop, I don’t know if I would have ever become a writer. David A. Graham, at The Atlantic, if you hadn’t plucked my submission from the slush pile, I doubt my career would have taken this trajectory. Nick Kristof, thank you for always rooting for me and for sharing your op-ed rules, which I give to the men I mentor. Leann Davis Alspaugh, thank you for showing me decency and grace and accepting my many calls from Attica. Anyone who cares about prisons and how we punish people should join me in thanking Bill Keller, because he built the foundation on which the Marshall Project stands today; thank you, Geraldine Sealey and Carroll Bogert, for supporting my earlier work.

Eric Sullivan, thank you for showing me how to go long in Esquire. You’re one of the best feature magazine editors out there. Jay Fielden, thank you for putting my name on the Esquire masthead as a contributing editor. Thank you, Michael Sebastian, for continuing to ask me to write for Esquire. Thank you, Daniel A. Gross, for our years talking shop. Thanks to Lora Kelley and Vanessa Mobley for helping me make clearer arguments in my op-eds. A salute to all the great feature magazine editors—Raha Naddaf, Genevieve Smith, Whitney Joyner, Matt Seaton, Nikita Stewart, Marisa Carroll, Ben Court, Kate Storey, David Rhode—who taught me how to spot and develop stories, who protected me and confronted me, and who’ve made me a better writer. Thank you to the book review editors—Madeline Leung Coleman, Emily Eakin, Gal Beckerman, Maya Chung, Jacob Brogan—who helped me find my voice as a critic. To Emily Greenhouse at the New York Review of Books, you’re the best in the business and whenever I write for you, I learn so much. All of you gave me the confidence to believe I could write a book.

Thank you, Sam Raim, for being the first book editor to reach out to me and for mailing me a slew of books from Penguin and introducing me to William LoTurco, my literary agent, and Jack Greenbaum, my talent manager. William, it’s tough to get a literary agent from prison, and you’ve rolled with me for years; we did it. Thank you, Jack, for schooling me on the scripted and nonscripted world of stories for screen. Vauhini Vara, thank you for your guidance, wisdom, and for showing me how to “bring the heat.” I owe so much of what this book is to you. Thank you, too, Vauhini, for showing me the importance of paying it forward and mentoring my peers. Thank you for introducing me to the wonderful community at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop. To the Lighthouse director, Andrea Dupree, thank you for helping me secure the Cielo Fellowship.

I want to thank Ryan Doherty, my editor at Celadon, as well as Jamie Raab and Deb Futter, for taking a shot on me. You could have stayed away from this proposal for so many reasons, but instead you guys went all in. Never once did any of you at Celadon treat me like anything but a writer. That means more to me than you all know. Ryan, you knew my strengths and my shortcomings, and you called them out throughout this process. Thank you for that. Thank you to the whole Celadon crew.

“If there’s anything I know how to do, it’s how to tell a story,” twenty-five-year-old Matthew Litman wrote me a few years ago, in response to an ad I posted looking to hire an editorial and research assistant for this book. When I read that, I thought, I’m going to put this kid to the test. Over the past few years, Matt, you’ve showed up for me in so many ways, and you’ve proven those words true. You’ve also been a moral compass for me, with reporting and writing and editing. I’m proud of you, Matt, and I’m also very grateful for you.

Thank you, Megan Posco, my book publicist, who’s spent hundreds of hours talking to me over the phone and in visiting rooms, who takes calls from my mother’s aides, who helps me pitch and edit my magazine stories and prepares my taxes and orders me the best books. You’re able to listen to my ideas, process them, strip them of stupidity, and then repeat a crystallized and smarter version of my own thoughts back to me. That’s a rare skill, to sidestep the ego and nurture creativity. It’s like you can crawl into my brain and not only organize my thoughts but quell my madness. You do that when editing my writing, too. As a nonfiction book publicist, your job has nothing to do with a book’s development, but you’ve been there at every step and helped this book take shape for the past three years. Megan, you are my closest friend and staunchest advocate. I can’t thank you enough.

I also need to thank others—friends, editors, peers in prison—for reading early drafts or portions of this book and giving me their thoughts: Simo Stolzoff, Peter Clancy, Tracey Long, Tammy Thorne, Robert Lee Williams, Shabanger, Bill Keller, Moira Marquis, and a special thanks to Kate McQueen, Alexandra Cox, and Clara Platter for your smart suggestions and feedback.

Mary Beth Constant, my copy editor, thank you for your close attention and corrections. Much praise for Brenna Ehrlich, my fact-checker. You had to reach out to many men in prison and sift through my notes and documents, which Megan had to lug from prison in between my transfer and pass off to Matt, with the both of them working to get you what you needed. It was nuts. But thank you for protecting me and verifying everything. If anything doesn’t check out, it’s on me. Thank you to Michael K. Cantwell for a thorough legal vetting of this book.

Developing a community is important for any writer, but it was like therapy for me. Reginald Dwayne Betts, thank you for spending hundreds of hours talking to me about the “art of becoming more,” as you say, and introducing me to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. We used the literature to not only deepen our conversations but to talk through one of the ideas of this book: Who gets to tell our stories? I mean, you and me, we tell our own. But your nonprofit Freedom Reads, which installs curated libraries in housing units of jails and prisons across America, creates space for so many more to do it, too. To write well, we must read well. Dwayne, thank you for sharing your network. Thank you to Emily Bazelon. Working with you and your students on the Prison Letters Project taught me how to get along in a collegial environment. I’m not good at that. Thank you for sticking up for me and advocating for my freedom.

In 2022, I became the first currently incarcerated person to receive the Galaxy Leader Artmaker Fellowship. Alex Duran runs the fellowship, alongside the lovely Aliyah Salim. Alex, you’ve been the best kind of friend. You loved me, paid for me to call a therapist from prison. (Thank you to my therapist, Atash Yaghmaian.) I mean, who does that? Galaxy Gives is Mike and Sukey Novogratz’s philanthropy. By giving currently incarcerated people generous fellowships, the Novogratzes have created a new status to which people in prison can aspire—and, trust me, we need to strive for new ideals. Turns out, Alex and the Novogratzes may have started a new trend. In 2023, I was given a Writing Freedom Fellowship from Haymarket and the Mellon Foundation, which grants awards directly to formerly and currently incarcerated writers. Thank you to Lawrence Bartley for nominating me and Jyothi Natarajan for fostering the community of fellows. The renaissance of prison writing is real.

Thank you, Mark Osler, former federal prosecutor and national clemency expert, for submitting my petition with Dwayne. Thank you to the Honorable Frederic Block, a federal judge in New York’s Eastern District, for calling for my freedom in a letter in the Washington Post. Beyond helping me with so much information and insight for this book, and representing both Shane and Milton, I want to thank Steve Zeidman for lending his hand, alongside Megan, to lobby the governor’s clemency folks to get me out. Truth is, no one in New York has helped more people get a second chance than you, and it’s sad that the guy with the best results gets the least amount of funding.

Thank you, Raina, for listening to my dreams and mailing all those five-page envelopes filled with love letters and literature. Thank you to my aunt Mary Ann for loving me alongside Mom, attending family visits inside all those different prisons, as we watched episodes of Law & Order for hours. Thank you to Joe and Wanda for your trust and love and support on the outside. To Devon Sherman, thank you for being my go-to guy for years. You’re family. Danielly, thank you for making me feel the giddiness of love in Attica.

Finally, thank you to my mother, Laura. For so long, before these people entered my life, before I became a writer, it was just you and me and shame and regret and murder trials and prison. You believed in me when it felt like the world hated me, when I hated myself. In Attica, when I told you about the workshop and started reading my terrible prose over the phone, you told me it sounded amazing. We were so pathetic, the two of us: me with my delusions of grandeur, you bragging to anyone who would listen about your son, the murderer, publishing articles from Attica. Mom, you showed up for me and loved me when it all seemed so pointless. But it wasn’t. Your love carried me through those years. As the Parkinson’s eats your brain and all your money goes to your aides, you’re still waiting for me. I may not get out in time to take care of you, but thank you for giving me my grind, Mom. You are so much more than the murderer’s mother, and everything I am, and will ever become, is because of you.

Notes

Introduction

Old Sparky had electrocuted 614 people: For the figure of 614 executions, see “History of Sing Sing Prison” on the Sing Sing Prison Museum’s website: https://www.singsingprisonmuseum.org/history-of-sing-sing-prison.html.

“hone in on the psychology of evil”: “‘Inside Evil with Chris Cuomo’ on HLN Delves into the Psychology of Murder and Mayhem,” CNN, May 22, 2018, https://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2018/05/22/inside-evil-with-chris-cuomo-on-hln-delves-into-the-psychology-of-murder-and-mayhem/.

She said “evil” wouldn’t be in the title: In response to a request for comment, a CNN spokesperson said, “After season one, the series was renamed Inside Evil to better capture its new focus on exploring the psychology behind criminal behavior. The episode featuring John J. Lennon covered his story as a convicted killer and his work to create a literary life for himself behind bars.” CNN spokesperson, email to Ted Hart, November 15, 2021.

“This John Lennon didn’t give peace a chance”: Nancie L. Katz, “DA Seeks Instant Karma in Drug Killing,” (New York) Daily News, September 25, 2003.

a New York Post headline read: Denise Buffa, “M-16 Thug Guilty of Buddy Slay in Brooklyn,” New York Post, June 8, 2004.

the sister of the man I murdered: Taisha Lawson, “An Incarcerated Writer Wrote a Piece About Apologizing to the Family of the Man He Killed. Now the Victim’s Sister Has Responded,” Washington Post, September 1, 2020.

requested I not use her brother’s name: Lawson, “An Incarcerated Writer Wrote a Piece.”

America has the highest incarceration rate in the world: “United States Profile,” Prison Policy Initiative, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/US.html.

it was a story of “true innocence”: Bob Garfield, “Acquitting the Innocent: Beyond ‘Serial’ and ‘Making a Murderer,’” On the Media, March 31, 2017.

many in prison refuse to take responsibility for their crimes: I’m not insensitive to this, and I don’t mean to say that innocence claims shouldn’t be taken seriously. I’ve worked closely with the Prison Letters Project, which New York Times Magazine staff writer Emily Bazelon started after she published her cover story about the exoneration of Yutico Briley, who had written her from prison in Louisiana. After that story came out, in 2021, Bazelon started receiving even more letters from people in prison. A group of students at Yale Law School (where she is a lecturer) started logging portions of them into a public database. Most letters claim innocence, and we’ve given them deep consideration.

has run true crime content full-time: Rodney Ho, “Oxygen Introduces Latest True Crime Series ‘The Real Murders of Atlanta,’” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 17, 2022.

increase our desire for punishment: Wendy Sawyer, “Why Did Prison and Jail Populations Grow in 2022—and What Comes Next?” Prison Policy Initiative, December 19, 2023, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2023/12/19/bjs_update_2022/.

the American criminal justice system: Lindsey Webb, “True Crime and Danger Narratives: Reflections on Stories of Violence, Race and (In)justice,” Journal of Gender, Race & Justice 24, no. 1 (June 16, 2021). “True crime stories do not advocate for violence against people of color, but they do advocate for institutions that commit such violence.… Indeed, contemporary true crime has flourished at the same time as the rise of nationwide movements calling for reform of police, prosecution, and punishment.”

first person New York City sought to execute: Joseph P. Fried, “Brooklyn Case Is City’s First Seeking Death,” New York Times, September 25, 1996.

reinstated the death penalty in 1995: James Dao, “Death Penalty in New York Reinstated After 18 Years; Pataki Sees Justice Served,” New York Times, March 8, 1995.

What did she think as she watched me: For a perspective on true crime from a victim’s family, see Annie Nichol, “My Sister Was Murdered 30 Years Ago. True Crime Repackages Our Pain as Entertainment,” New York Times, January 8, 2024.

discover the heart of it in the material itself: “Impartial journalism doesn’t mean you have to pretend that evolution doesn’t exist, or that climate change is a myth,” Bill Keller said in a 2014 interview. “What it means is that you go into your reporting with an open mind. You’re led by the facts. Sometimes those facts lead to a conclusion; sometimes they lead to a disagreement. I have great respect for the advocacy kind of journalism. I’ve practiced it a bit myself. But I think both kinds have their virtues. And the virtue of the impartial form of journalism is that you’re less likely to be preaching to the choir. If you can convince readers that you went into the subject with a genuinely open mind, and were guided by the facts, not by some ideological groove that you travel in, you’re more likely to get an open mind in response. You’re more likely to get people to pay serious attention to the ideas that you’re trying to lay out.” See Dara Lind, “Why Bill Keller Left the New York Times to Put a Spotlight on Criminal Justice,” Vox, November 18, 2014.

“you were talking to the journalist”: On February 17, 2024, Jing Feng sent me the following statement via email: “At no point were any promises made that the series title would, in fact, be changed. There was a good faith effort made by the producer and the executive producer to explore the possibility of a name change. And at no point did you contact our team before your scheduled interview with Chris Cuomo to ask for an update. During the start of the scheduled interview, when Chris Cuomo shared the series title would remain Inside Evil with Chris Cuomo, you participated in the full anchor interview. Following the interview, you filmed a walk-and-talk on Sing Sing prison grounds with Mr. Cuomo. Afterward, you agreed to participate in extensive b-roll filming in Sing Sing’s library, your prison cell, various hallways, and next to windows. Additionally, we later filmed lengthy interviews with your mother and aunt—with your awareness and no obstruction by you.”

1: Growing Up Gay in Kentucky

“the sick way we were all beaten as we grew up”: Devin Smith, “20 Yrs. in Dad Killing—Kin Blame Slain Doc,” New York Post, May 11, 2006.

to deter the sexual assault of prisoners: “Prison Rape Elimination Act,” National Institute of Justice, March 7, 2014, https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/prison-rape-elimination-act.

In a different era, Shane would have had it harder: In the late 1970s, Wilbert Rideau, the editor of The Angolite, an award-winning newsmagazine in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison, described the sexual enslavement and feminization men underwent in his piece “Prison: The Sexual Jungle.” He interviewed victims and prison officials alike, and clarified the meaning of rape in an all-male prison: It was “an act of conquest and demasculation, stripping the male-victim of his status of ‘man.’ The act redefines him as a ‘female’ … and he must assume that role as the ‘property’ of his conqueror or whoever claimed him and arranged his demasculation. He becomes a slave, in the fullest sense of the term.” Wilbert Rideau, “Prison: The Sexual Jungle,” The Angolite, November–December 1979. Old-timers told me that in New York prisons, rape culture was more prevalent back in the day, but because of PREA and other cultural shifts in today’s prison culture, rapes are hardly as frequent as they used to be. (This doesn’t mean rape doesn’t occur in states with more double bunking, where men overpower other men, or in women’s prisons, staffed by male guards, that don’t have surveillance or have bodycams that can be turned off.) For further reading, see my interview with Wilbert Rideau: John J. Lennon, “How to Publish a Magazine in a Maximum-Security Prison,” New Yorker, April 14, 2024, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/how-to-publish-a-magazine-in-a-maximum-security-prison.

the largest cellblock in the world: See the “Historic Facts” section on the Sing Sing Prison Museum’s website: https://www.singsingprisonmuseum.org/quickfacts.html.

it was okay for her to be different: Barbara Waters, interview with author, December 7, 2023.

Harold had a job for him: Dale Lester Wilson, interview with author, November 2023.

2: Raised Rough in East Side, Buffalo
psychiatric beds dwindled to fewer than 40,000 today: Laura Lovett, “Psychiatric Bed Shortages Reach Crisis Levels as Occupancy Rates Skyrocket,” Behavioral Health Business, January 26, 2024.

ten times more likely to be locked up: Paul L. Reiber and Lawrence K. Marks, “National Judicial Task Force to Examine State Courts’ Response to Mental Illness,” National Judicial Task Force, October 2022.

suffer blackouts and hear voices: Al-Jundi v. Mancusi, 113 F. Supp. 2d 441 (W.D.N.Y. 2000). For further reading on the Attica prison uprising, see Heather Ann Thompson’s book Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, which won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in History.

She still wanted to pursue her education: Valina Little, interview with Matthew Litman, November 1, 2023.

thirty years her senior: Little, interview with Litman.

“Gentle Bear of the Club”: Gene Warner, “Why Did Priests Die Brutal Death?,” Buffalo News, March 15, 1987.

“I was willing to do anything for them”: Milton Jones, interview with Matthew Litman, September 19, 2023.

Milton approached, striking a twenty-one-year-old man in the head: Warner, “Why Did Priests.”

I never sucked in my teeth again: For extra reading on these kinds of boot camps, see Kevin Sack, “After 3 Years, Gains in ‘Decade of the Child’ Are Isolated,” New York Times, October 9, 1990; Doris Layton Mackenzie et al., “Effects of Correctional Boot Camps on Offending,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 578, no. 1 (November 2001): 126–143; Paul Klenowski et al., “An Empirical Evaluation of Juvenile Awareness Programs in the United States: Can Juveniles Be ‘Scared Straight’?,” Journal of Offender Rehabilitation 49 (April 27, 2010): 254–272.

After two weeks, Milton ran away: Margaret Sullivan and Gene Warner, “Lives of Suspects in Two Slayings Ran Strikingly Similar Courses,” Buffalo News, March 10, 1987.

dropped from the team in December: Anthony Cardinale, “Coaches Say Suspect Wanted Chance,” Buffalo News, March 10, 1987.

3: A Preppy with Privilege
in the first ten months of 1986, there were 1,309 homicides: Isabel Wilkerson, “Urban Homicide Rates in U.S. Up Sharply in 1986,” New York Times, January 15, 1987.

in 2023, there were 391: “Seven Major Felony Offenses” (crime statistics), New York City Police Department, updated as of January 15, 2024, https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_planning/historical-crime-data/seven-major-felony-offenses-2000-2023.pdf.

Swintec is one of the only companies: Daniel A. Gross, “A Prisoner’s Only Writing Machine,” New Yorker, July 20, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-one-of-the-last-american-typewriter-companies-survives.

a couple of guys had hatched an extortion plot against me: John J. Lennon, “The Shakedown at Sing Sing,” Esquire, August 26, 2021, https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a37396954/prisoner-writer-career-sing-sing/.

Weiss described her liberal colleagues at the Times as mean-spirited: Bari Weiss, “Resignation Letter,” July 14, 2020, https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter.

The jury found Simon guilty of the two murders: Associated Press, “Two Brothers Are Sentenced in Two Killings at Nightclub,” New York Times, July 15, 1999.

a stack of articles on Rob: When it came to Rob, a Google search on him, I was told, revealed salacious write-ups on sites like Murderpedia, Oxygen, and A&E. Wikipedia describes him as “an American criminal … dubbed the Preppy Killer.” I had someone order Linda Wolfe’s hallmark book Wasted: Inside the Robert Chambers–Jennifer Levin Murder in Rob’s name. (It would have seemed suspicious to send it to me; I don’t like the administration knowing what I’m working on, even though they should be happy I’m not focusing on them.) Back in the ’80s and ’90s, Wolfe published true crime stories in slicks like Vanity Fair, and Wasted was a book-length account of Rob’s case. It was deemed a notable book by the New York Times. Ann Rule, the titan true crime writer, blurbed it: “Fascinating, horrifying, and heart-breaking.”

Joan Didion’s 1991 New York Review of Books essay: Joan Didion, “New York: Sentimental Journeys,” New York Review of Books, January 17, 1991.

“He was the son of the shah of Iran”: Ian Black, “Shah of Iran’s Youngest Son Shoots Himself,” The Guardian, January 5, 2011.

Crespo told Michael Stone: Michael Stone, “East Side Story,” New York Magazine, November 10, 1986.

4: A Killing in Brooklyn, a Dismemberment in Kentucky
discovered dismembered in different garbage bags: John Holl, “Man Who Killed 2 He Met at Gay Bar Gets 2 Consecutive Life Sentences,” New York Times, January 28, 2006.

he called Shane more than sixty times: Doyle Aff. 3, February 10, 1999.

The cops stayed in the apartment for twenty-eight minutes: Duncan Osborne, “Police 911 Response Questioned Day of Tanner Murder,” Lesbian & Gay New York, May 25, 1997.

“Still out, clothes job”: New York City Police Department, “Sprint Readout,” October 14, 1995.

A “clothes job” is: Osborne, “Police 911 Response Questioned.”

disputes between same-sex couples qualify: Osborne, “Police 911 Response Questioned.”

then stuffed him in: Michael Shane Hale, statement to Detective Schwartz/NYPD, October 28, 1995.

the secret I had to keep: Michele McPhee, “Bound Body Found,” (New York) Daily News, February 11, 2002, 36.

only 61 percent of murders are solved: John Gramlich, “What the Data Says (and Doesn’t Say) About Crime in the United States,” Pew Research Center, November 20, 2020.

It was a casual conversation: Michael Shane Hale, statement to Detective Hampton/LFUCP, October 24, 1995.

They started the tape: Michael Shane Hale, statement to Detective Schwartz/NYPD, October 28, 1995.

5: Kids Killing Priests in Buffalo

“the most confrontational priest in the diocese”: Ray Bissonette, Joe’s Story: The Quietly Courageous Life and Death of an Inner City Priest (A. Joseph Bissonette Memorial Foundation, 2005), 128.

Both men were sad for Father Bissonette: Peter Simon, “2 Freed Salvadorans Harbor No Bitterness of Jailing,” Buffalo News, March 12, 1987.

a “black binder” of diocese secrets: Charlie Specht, “Bishop Malone Reinstates Priest with History of Pornography Problems,” WLBW, March 21, 2019.

She was a Lackawanna native: “Sister Karen Klimczak, Tireless Advocate of Nonviolence,” Buffalo News, April 19, 2006, B4.

she’d begin to leave “peaceprints”: Maki Becker, “Sister Karen’s Legacy Signs About Peace and Nonviolence Turning Up Throughout the Country,” Buffalo News, July 2, 2006.

She hosted annual Christmas parties: SSJ Sister Karen Klimczak Center for Nonviolence, “What We Do,” Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph, https://buffalossj.org/our-ministries/the-ssj-sister-karen-klimczak-center-for-nonviolence/.

he gave away more than he earned: David Briggs, “Clergymen Recall Monsignor Herlihy As Devoted to Church, Fellow Man,” Buffalo News, March 11, 1987.

“if you don’t want to live near him”: Gene Warner, “Father Figures in Life and Death: The Legacy of 2 Priests Still Stirs WNYers 10 Years After Slayings,” Buffalo News, February 23, 1997.

“for those who have caused the great sorrow”: David Briggs, “Monsignor Herlihy Remembered As Gentle, Compassionate Man,” Buffalo News, March 10, 1987.

“killing all that is good in the world”: Warner, “Why Did Priests Die.”

the two Salvadoran men were released on bail: Simon, “2 Freed Salvadorans.”

this disguise only made them more pronounced: Max Gryta, “2 Plead Innocent in Priests’ Deaths,” Buffalo News, March 19, 1987.

upgraded to morbid obesity: Milton Jones, “Medical Problem List by Type,” NYS Department of Correctional Services Health Services System, September 26, 2022.

Milton received an X-ray of his lower spine: R. J. Mueller, “Request for Radiological Examination,” NYS Department of Correctional Services Health Services System, November 1, 2019.

The average lifespan for prisoners is sixty-four years: Deborah LaBelle, “Michigan Life Expectancy Data for Youth Serving Natural Life Sentences,” ACLU of Michigan Juvenile Life Without Parole Initiative; see also State v. Nul, 836 N.W.2d 41, 71, which reports that “long-term incarceration” tends to “decrease life expectancy.”

deemed him to be a “crackpot”: Bissonette, Joe’s Story.

an all-white jury of eleven men and one woman: Matt Gyrta, “2 Priests Slain for Drug Money, Jones Jury Told,” Buffalo News, January 21, 1988.

“when they were doing that to my brother, he was forgiving them”: Gene Warner, “A Spirit of Forgiveness Survives Trials of Two Young Priest Killers,” Buffalo News, September 23, 1988.

Milton sat next to his two lawyers: Associated Press, “2 Get 50-Year Terms in Murders of Priests in Buffalo Rectories,” New York Times, November 3, 1988.

“my wish would be to undo what was done”: People of the State of New York v. Milton Jones and Theodore Simmons, #87–0258, November 2, 1988.

“forgiving is one thing, justice is another”: People of the State of New York v. Milton Jones and Theodore Simmons.

would’ve “without a doubt” ordered them executed: Matt Gryta, “Justice Regrets State Law Bars Death Penalty,” Buffalo News, November 2, 1988.

6: A Death in Central Park
a great writer and a psychopath: See my pieces about Jack Henry Abbott and Edgar Smith, two infamous prison writers: “The Murderer, the Writer, the Reckoning,” New York Review of Books, July 9, 2019, and “Peddling Darkness,” New York Review of Books, March 9, 2023.

Abbott called himself a “state-raised convict”: Jack Henry Abbott, In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison (Random House, 1981).

“knife-like” prose: Terrence Des Pres, “A Child of the State,” New York Times, July 19, 1981.

“thought they got away with it”: Peter Davis, interview with author, February 2, 2024.

“an archbishop may not know what he’s talking about”: Linda Wolfe, Wasted: Inside the Robert Chambers–Jennifer Levin Murder (Simon & Schuster, 1989).

“‘Sex Diary’ Kept by Jen?”: Patrick Clark and Joseph McNamara, “‘Sex Diary’ Kept by Jen?,” (New York) Daily News, November 14, 1986.

“Now You Know Why People Hate Lawyers” award: David Margolick, “The Law: At the Bar,” New York Times, January 22, 1988.

she got scared and left: Maria Elena Fernandez, “After 33 Years, Alex Kapp Is Ready to Talk About ‘the Preppy Killer,’” Vulture, November 22, 2019.

“hear his side of the story”: Fernandez, “After 33 Years, Alex Kapp.”

“It changed the course of my life”: Fernandez, “After 33 Years, Alex Kapp.”

“I yelled at him to stop,” she remembered: Stone, “East Side Story.”

the longest-ever jury deliberation in Manhattan: Kirk Johnson, “Chambers, with Jury at Impasse, Admits 1st-Degree Manslaughter,” New York Times, March 26, 1988.

“No, no, no, no, no,” Linda Fairstein yelled: Wolfe, Wasted, 301.

carnations, irises, and yellow zinnias: Johnson, “Chambers, with Jury at Impasse.”

7: The System Doesn’t Care About Remorse

“why I chose this case”: Joseph P. Fried, “Brooklyn Case Is City’s First Seeking Death,” New York Times, September 25, 1996.

On one radio report: Duncan Osborne, “Bitter Trail of Suspicion Led Protesters to Hynes’ Home in Bay Ridge,” Lesbian & Gay New York, February 3, 1997.

a Daily News headline read: Bill Farrell et al., “DA Seeks Death in Gay Saw-Slay,” (New York) Daily News, September 25, 1996.

“was not one of the factors”: Fried, “Brooklyn Case Is City’s First.”

“killing and butchering his queer boyfriend”: Duncan Osborne, “Ambitious Sacrifice: Why Charles Hynes Is Making a Killing for His Career,” Lesbian & Gay New York, October 20, 1996.

“a tragic domestic dispute”: Fried, “Brooklyn Case Is City’s First.”

a hundred demonstrators took to the Brooklyn streets: Osborne, “AVP Marshals 100 in Protest Against Brooklyn Death Penalty Case,” Lesbian & Gay New York, February 3, 1997.

“Hale is seen as a convenient defendant for Hynes”: Osborne, “Bitter Trail of Suspicion.”

“It’s irrelevant as far as this court is concerned”: Schwartz-Cross/Sharkey, Brooklyn Supreme Court, August 7, 1997.

“whether the defendant is gay, African-American, or Irish or Italian”: Duncan Osborne, “Death Penalty Long Gone, Has New York Yet Embraced Rehabilitation or Mercy?,” Gay City News, December 21, 2020.

8: A Visit with the Victims

“He has no salable skills”: L. Lepowski, “Intake Interview” of Milton Jones, New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, December 15, 1988.

a paralegal assistant during the spring of 1990: “Inmate Program Assignment” for Milton Jones, New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, downloaded May 2, 2023.

in July 1990, Milton was transferred: “Inmate Program Assignment” for Milton Jones, New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision.

documented by the Correctional Association of New York: “2014 Updated Correctional Association Report on Attica,” Correctional Association of New York, November 25, 2014, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/62f1552c1dd65741c53bbcf8/t/63f2859e1253b45175c37b92/1676838304691/2014_Monitoring-Attica.pdf.

pulled Pell Grants for prisoners: John J. Lennon, “Let Prisoners Take College Courses,” New York Times, April 4, 2015.

then a prisoner could petition a court to hear the violation: “There are several individuals designated as grievance representatives in each facility. These individuals have been elected by the incarcerated population. In Attica, the incarcerated representatives work in a separate office, next door to a civilian who manages grievances. This individual does not investigate grievances. The investigations are handled by other facility staff, and if a decision is being appealed, those cases would go to the Superintendent and then the Central Office Review Committee. The Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) deemed that incarcerated individuals must fully exhaust their administrative remedies (Grievance process) before a case may be brought to court. The Grievance Program is detailed in Directive #4040.” Thomas Mailey, director of public information, New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, email to Brenna Ehrlich, November 5, 2024.

“Do you remember us?”: Bissonette, Joe’s Story, 155.

“was seen sharpening the hunting knife”: Bissonette, Joe’s Story, 161.

New York’s prison system lacks protocols or structures: “Per DOCCS Directive #0500, the Office of Victim Assistance does offer a victim/offender dialogue. This is a victim-initiated, victim sensitive service for crime victim/survivors which involves preparation meetings for both the victim and the incarcerated individual/releasee and is intended to lead to a one-time direct dialogue between the victim/survivor and the offender.” Mailey, email to Ehrlich. (I was totally unaware of these services, and it’s unclear how a family member of a victim would come to learn about them.)

Texas has one: See “Victim Offender Mediation Dialogue” on the website for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice: https://www.tdcj.texas.gov/divisions/vs/vomd.html.

supercharged the policies of mass incarceration: For further reading, see Jill Lepore, “The Rise of the Victims’-Rights Movement,” The New Yorker, May 14, 2018, and Michael Vitello, The Victims’ Rights Movement: What It Gets Right, What It Gets Wrong (New York University Press, 2023).

preferred rehabilitation over retribution: Lenore Anderson, “The People Most Ignored by the Criminal-Justice System,” The Atlantic, October 31, 2023.

a fifteen-week workshop: See “Longtermers’ Responsibility Project” under “Our Services” on Osborne’s website: https://www.osborneny.org/our-services/longtermers-responsibility-project. (This workshop was discontinued in 2020.)

the apology letter bank: See “DIR #0510: Apology Letter Bank,” New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, September 19, 2022, and “Apology Letter Bank” on the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision’s website: https://doccs.ny.gov/victims.

almost eight hundred mediations between prisoners and their victims: Erin Orbey, “A Daughter’s Quest to Free Her Father’s Killer,” The New Yorker, January 17, 2022.

Teddy told the couple as they listened: Bissonette, Joe’s Story, 173.

Ray’s overall take: Bissonette, Joe’s Story.

the ten-year anniversary of Father Joe’s murder: Warner, “Father Figures in Life and Death.”

“That’s what he told us”: Donn Esmonde, “Face to Face with the Killer: An Elusive Search for Peace of Mind,” Buffalo News, February 23, 1992.

9: The Preppy Is Hooked on Heroin and Sent to Solitary

“Tonight the Trash TV season begins”: Tom Shales, “‘Preppie’ Pandering,” Washington Post, September 23, 1989.

The Associated Press wrote about the incident: Associated Press, “Preppie Killer Brawls with Prison Guards,” Star-Gazette (Elmira, NY), April 21, 1990.

“truth-in-sentencing” provision offered states money: Erick Eckholm, “Prison Rate Was Rising Years Before 1994 Law,” New York Times, April 10, 2016.

another prison specifically to house men: “Upstate Correctional Facility, built in 1999, is the only state correctional facility constructed for special housing. While most other facilities have designated blocks for special housing units, they were not built to solely house individuals in solitary confinement.” Mailey, email to Ehrlich.

“an individual is likely to descend into a mental torpor or ‘fog’”: Stuart Grassian, “Psychiatric Effects of Solitary Confinement,” Washington University Journal of Law & Policy 22 (2006): 325, https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_journal_law_policy/vol22/iss1/24.

can harm their physical and mental health: For the effects of solitary confinement on mortality, see L. Brinkley-Rubinstein, J. Sivaraman, D. L. Rosen, et al., “Association of Restrictive Housing During Incarceration with Mortality After Release,” JAMA Network Open, 2019. For solitary confinement’s effect on mental health, see Grassian, “Psychiatric Effects of Solitary Confinement.” For the United Nations’ rules on the treatment of prisoners, see General Assembly resolution 70/175, annex, adopted on December 17, 2015, known as the “Nelson Mandela Rules.”

OxyContin actually increased the demand for dope: See the American Psychiatric Association’s blog post, “Opioid Use Disorder,” https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/opioid-use-disorder.

“There was a knock at my door”: Holly McCormick, interview with author, February 16, 2022.

it even had a ski jump: Michael Pollak, “When Prisoners Had Ski Jumps,” New York Times, January 15, 2016.

an average of seventy-one prisoner-on-prisoner assaults took place: Brent Lovett, “Unusual Incident Report, January–December 2015, with Ten-Year Trends from 2006–2015,” New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, September 2017, https://doccs.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2019/09/UI_Report_Jan-Dec_2015.pdf.

biblical scenes crafted by prisoners: Suzanne Moore, “Documentary Tells Story of Prison Church and St. Dismas,” Press-Republican (Plattsburgh, NY), March 21, 2008.

“denied there was a fire in Robert Chambers’s cell”: Jere Hester, “Preppie Killer’s Lawyer Charges Coverup,” (New York) Daily News, February 2, 1993.

Keith Hart, Patrick Proctor, John Beuther, and Sean Ryan: While these men engage in obvious illegal activity, I’m naming them here because their names were included in news coverage about their attempted escape and are a matter of public record. It’s worth mentioning, though, that Ryan, who is now sixty-seven and imprisoned in Attica, has been locked up for close to half a century. He is not the wild young man he used to be, and he could probably use a bit of grace.

They were all quickly caught: Sharline Chiang, “Four Killers Caught After Prison Break,” (New York) Daily News, November 8, 1994.

10: Mental Illness in Prison

The ten year anniversary feature: Warner, “Father Figures in Life and Death.”

“This ministry fits in with Joe’s spirit”: Warner, “Father Figures in Life and Death.”

claim of pedophilia against one of the priests: Alan Pergament, “Slayings of Two Buffalo Priests Become Basis of a Chilling ‘Homicide,’” Buffalo News, January 28, 1998.

placed in involuntary protective custody: “Inmate Program Assignment” for Milton Jones, New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, 15.

Milton pulled apart his metal eyeglass frames: J. Bukowski, “Inmate Misbehavior Report” for Milton Jones, Attica Correctional Facility, September 4, 1998.

he was confined to his cell, all day, for a week: “Superintendent Hearing Disposition Rendered,” Attica Gen. Tape Number 98–3427, September 18, 1998. Milton Jones, New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision Institutional Records, 96.

as President Kennedy said: Jonathan Rosen, “American Madness,” The Atlantic, April 11, 2023.

more than 70 percent of people in America’s jails: Reiber and Marks, “National Judicial Task Force to Examine State Courts’ Response to Mental Illness.”

“There’s inherent conflict”: John J. Lennon, “‘This Place Is Crazy,’” Esquire, June 5, 2018.

,246 suicide attempts, and 127 people who died from suicide: Lovett, “Unusual Incident Report January–December 2015, with Ten-Year Trends from 2006-2015,” Table 2–1.

placed back into general population: “Inmate Program Assignment” for Milton Jones, New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, 15.

found his father’s name: Kevin McMillian, interview with Matthew Litman, September 12, 2023.

“each priest was bound to a chair”: Charles Patrick Ewing, Kids Who Kill (Avon, 1992).

“he’s being a man about his situation”: McMillian, interview with Litman.

“I think the priest was touching [Theodore]”: McMillian, interview with Litman.

a settlement was finally reached for Attica victims: David W. Chen, “Judge Approves $8 Million Deal for Victims of Attica Torture,” New York Times, February 16, 2000.

Babu received his share of the settlement: See Al-Jundi v. Mancusi, 113 F. Supp. 2d 441 (W.D.N.Y. 2000), and David W. Chen, “Compensation Set on Attica Uprising,” New York Times, August 29, 2000.

his entire treatment plan, including medications and follow-ups, was discontinued: C. Antenore, “Progress Notes (Outpatient)” for Milton Jones, March 20, 2003.

his death was ruled a homicide: Ed Shanahan, “Beating Death of Shackled N.Y. Inmate Is Ruled a Homicide,” New York Times, February 5, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/nyregion/robert-brooks-homicide-ruling.html.

“The idea here is to show that people do care”: T. J. Pignataro, “Grieving Families Are Not Forgotten,” Buffalo News, December 22, 2004.

The report went on to describe: David Staba, “Angel for Ex-Convicts Is Killed at Halfway House She Ran,” New York Times, April 19, 2006.

read the letter to the packed courtroom: Maki Becker, “Sister Karen Predicted Her Murder 16 Years Ago, Forgave Her Killer,” Buffalo News, March 8, 2007.

11: Never Give Up, Never Give In

“I don’t have anything else to say”: When I spoke to Mr. Schwartz in December 2023, he recalled the visit differently than Shane. “We didn’t even get that far into talking about it,” Schwartz told me. He said he talked to Shane for around half an hour before he brought up the other murders. According to Schwartz, he wasn’t trying to insinuate that Shane had committed the murders, but thought maybe Shane had gotten his idea for dismemberment from the person who did, or ran in a similar circle. When Schwartz broached the topic, he remembered, Shane stood up, said “I can’t talk to you anymore,” and left.

“Possible Break in Killings of Gay Men”: Thomas J. Lueck, “Possible Break in Killings of Gay Men,” New York Times, May 30, 2001.

New Jersey did not seek it against Rogers: Carol Gorga Williams, “Death Penalty Ruled Out,” Asbury Park Press, February 15, 2003.

New York would agree not to indict: Elon Green, Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York (Celadon Books, 2021).

12: No Parole for the Preppy

The man burned to death: Hart v. Artus, 6:16-CV-6808 CJS (W.D.N.Y. Jul. 15, 2021).

Larry King interviewed Ellen Levin, Jennifer’s mother: “Ellen Levin Discusses Her Daughter’s Murder,” CNN Larry King Live, August 26, 2002, https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/lkl/date/2002-08-26/segment/00.

“it’s not good for either the criminal or the victims”: “Ellen Levin Discusses.”

13: College and Sex and Self-Discovery in Prison
his 1969 study of Parchman: Hopper’s preoccupation with the “problem of homosexuality” in prisons seems to have been one of the main forces behind his advocacy for conjugals as a whole. See Columbus B. Hopper, Sex in Prison: The Mississippi Experiment with Conjugal Visiting (Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 84.

offer some version of conjugals: For further reading about conjugals, see John J. Lennon, “Sex, Love, & Marriage Behind Bars,” Esquire, December 5, 2022, https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a42113253/conjugal-visit-sex-in-jail.

I was ineligible: BPI later told me that they never had enrollment restrictions based on sentence length (Jessica Neptune, email to author, May 10, 2024). Still, it wouldn’t be the first time a program’s intentions weren’t adhered to by a prison administration.

poorly written directives and bureaucratic indifference: In late 2017 and early 2018, New York DOCCS was coming under scrutiny for their package room policies. I penned an op-ed for the Guardian explaining how the TV directive prevented us from receiving books. Days after the op-ed published, the directive was rescinded. See John J. Lennon, “For Prisoners Like Me, Books Are a Lifeline. Don’t Cut It,” Guardian, February 4, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/04/for-prisoners-like-me-books-are-a-lifeline-dont-cut-it.

an episode called “Murder in the Hamptons”: Marcy Erhard, “Who Killed Wall Street Tycoon Ted Ammon in His East Hampton, Long Island Mansion?,” 48 Hours, CBS, February 3, 2005, https://www.paramountpressexpress.com/cbs-news-and-stations/shows/48-hours/releases/?view=8919-who-killed-wall-street-tycoon-ted-ammon-in-his-east-hampton-long-island-mansion-quot48-hours-mysteryquot-saturday-feb-5.

She told me that was unrealistic: In a request for comment, Loen Kelley didn’t recall saying this but wrote that it wouldn’t surprise her if she did. “[B]ack THEN [sic], he was literally one of the first people in prison to be published in a general news publication.” Loen Kelley, email to Brenna Ehrlich, October 28, 2024.

14: Getting Out, Coming Back

“Thank God he’s free to kill again”: Linda Stasi, “Torture Chambers,” New York Post, February 16, 2003.

“Oh, I was responsible for her death”: Robert Chambers, “‘48 Hours’ Revisits ‘Preppy Killer’ Murder Case,” CBS Mornings, posted August 18, 2006, YouTube, 2:02, https://youtu.be/uu8X1v-azg4?si=MKHBUMhSQ6KihCwQ.

An article in the Mirror ended with: Paul Clarkson, “Preppie Killer Back in Ireland,” Daily Mirror (Ireland), March 12, 2003, https://www.thefreelibrary.com/PREPPIE+KILLER+BACK+IN+IRELAND%3B+After+15+years+in+US+jail%2C+lawyer … -a098636290.

showing up late to his sentencing hearing: Helen Peterson, “Preppie Killer Slapped,” (New York) Daily News, August 30, 2005.

percent of parolees: Thomas Mailey, New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, Director of Public Information, email to Megan Posco, December 5, 2002.

“actual changes in the brain”: Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (Penguin Books, 2015), 2–3.

“he would spend the rest of his life in jail”: Jen Chung, “DA Expects Preppy Killer Behind Bars for Good,” Gothamist, October 24, 2007.

15: Back in Sing Sing

Hudson Link operates in six prisons with eleven college partners across New York State: See “What We Do,” Hudson Link for Higher Education in Prison, https://hudsonlink.org/what-we-do/.

According to Psychology Today, magical thinking is: “Magical Thinking,” Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/magical-thinking.

In the ’90s, about 82 percent: Tamar Kraft-Stolar et al., “From Protection to Punishment: Post-Conviction Barriers to Justice for Domestic Violence Survivor-Defendants in New York State,” Avon Global Center for Women and Justice and Dorothea S. Clarke Program in Feminist Jurisprudence, June 1, 2011.

women’s prisons are a glut of trauma: A. Brown, B. Miller, and E. Maguin, “Prevalence and Severity of Lifetime Physical and Sexual Victimization Among Incarcerated Women,” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 22, no. 3–4 (1999): 301–322.

there are about two hundred thousand women behind bars: See Aleks Kajstura and Wendy Sawyer, “Women’s Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2024,” Prison Policy Initiative, March 5, 2024, and “State and Federal Prisoners, 1925–85,” Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin (1986), 2, https://perma.cc/6F2E-U9WL.

“an entire story in about 45 minutes”: Maya Salam, “The Best True Crime to Stream: Women Who Do Wrong,” New York Times, September 25, 2023.

“All they want to do on CNN is talk about Trump”: Kelley didn’t remember this exact conversation, but wrote, “I could see saying something like that because there was definitely a period where CNN covered Trump a majority of the time. It’s been a long time since CNN did feature stories or profiles of people on any sort of regular basis.… [I]f he asked me for help getting a segment/profile on CNN about him, I would likely have told him that’s not really the kind of thing CNN would do (still true) OR [sic] I could’ve said I don’t really have any influence with the CNN main newsroom because I was in a totally separate, unrelated documentary unit.” Kelley, email to Ehrlich.

“She’ll explain everything!”: Loen Kelley, letter to John J. Lennon, received September 12, 2018.

I figured Loen had my best interests in mind: When asked for comment, Kelley didn’t explicitly remember how she recommended I go on Chris Cuomo’s show but disagreed with my claim that she misled me. “[W]hat seems more accurate is that I told him the producers on the show were fair or something. And, as I recall, hae [sic] hated the story they did? I don’t even remember why. But I most certainly would never have tried to mislead him. I was on HIS side. I’ve only wanted positive publicity for anyone in prison because I’m hoping to change views people have of prisoners.” Kelley, email to Ehrlich.

“You gotta trick ’em”: “That sounds WILDLY out of context and I have no memory of saying that, especially the ‘trick ’em,’ part,” Kelley wrote. “For archival stories that have been done a million times, any television producer would tell you that it’s best to come up with a different way to tell the story, but that’s more about choosing the subjects you interview to tell the story and the order of how you reveal the facts, stuff like that.” Kelley, email to Ehrlich.

after the producer promised Mulumba $1,000: In a request for comment, a representative for the production company wrote: “We do not pay people for interviews on our shows, and we do not promise them that we will. We sometimes cover travel expenses when necessary. Any promised travel payments were made.” Mike Mathis Productions, email to Brenna Ehrlich, November 11, 2024.

“Twenty-five years ago, I took another man’s life”: To watch Shane’s full speech, see “The Power of Relationships to Redefine the Reentry Experience|Michael Shane Hale|TEDxSingSing,” TEDx Talks, posted June 16, 2021, YouTube, https://youtu.be/kThJ8Wr1Bss?si=fjI1DjnZybHbouPu.

a more holistic view of a defendant’s trauma: Steve Zeidman, “Rotten Social Background and Mass Incarceration: Who Is a Victim?,” Brooklyn Law Review 87 (May 25, 2022).

16: God and Psychosis in Prison
he has a job at a Buffalo Dollar General: McMillian, interview with Litman.

“but the problem is, you caused it”: CBS Mornings, “Whistleblower Who Called for Bishop to Resign Speaks Out on ‘60 Minutes,’” posted October 26, 2018, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyh5nudsOe4.

except for one in 2015, when he disrupted an evening count: K. Buric, “Inmate Misbehavior Report” for Milton Jones, Green Haven Correctional Facility, November 16, 2015.

“He was desperate to get his master’s degree”: Michael Shane Hale, JPay message to Matthew Litman, June 8, 2022.

Steve Zeidman founded the Second Look Project: Beyond Guilt: See “The Second Look Project: Beyond Guilt,” CUNY School of Law, December 3, 2020, https://www.law.cuny.edu/newsroom_post/the-second-look-project-beyond-guilt/.

I published an op-ed about clemency: John J. Lennon, “I Am Serving 28 Years to Life. Why Does One Person Decide If I Deserve Mercy?,” New York Times, September 16, 2021.

in which he used the term “rotten social background”: Zeidman, “Rotten Social Background.”

first used by a federal appellate judge named David Bazelon: United States v. Alexander, 471 F.2d 923 (D.C. Cir.) (Bazelon, J., dissenting).

Prison Letters Project out of Yale: To read more about my work with the Prison Letters Project, see Emily Bazelon and John J. Lennon, “The Prison Letters Project,” New York Times Magazine, September 2, 2022; John J. Lennon, “The Prison Letters Project: Considering Past Trauma,” New York Times Magazine, February 21, 2023; and John J. Lennon, “The Horrible Truth About Shaken Baby Syndrome Cases,” Slate, May 2, 2024.

life without parole: Kevin M. Doyle and Charles J. Hynes, “Catholic Lawyers and the Death Penalty,” Fordham University School of Law and the Committee on Capital Punishment of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, September 8, 2004, https://www.nycbar.org/pdf/report/Fordham9_8program_transcript.pdf.

It was similar to a case he had recently worked on: Jonathan Bandler, “1980s Pelham Double Murderer Eligible for Parole After Resentencing,” Lohud, June 21, 2022.

Was Milton a danger to society?: “It seems clear that untreated mental illness is playing a significant role in the rising incidence of mass killings,” wrote E. Fuller Torrey, founder of the nonprofit Treatment Advocacy Center and a psychiatrist specializing in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. “The widespread availability of guns obviously plays a role. It should be emphasized that mentally ill patients who are receiving treatment are no more at risk for violence than the general population. Yet it is also clear that without treatment some seriously mentally ill people are at greater risk for violent behavior than the general population.” See E. Fuller Torrey, “Mental Illness and Mass Murder,” Wall Street Journal, August 6, 2019.

17: A New Law, a New Chance at Freedom
demoted to Brooklyn’s gun bureau: Alex Ginsberg, “Setback in ’Roid Probe,” New York Post, June 12, 2008.

Reeves had committed prosecutorial misconduct: People v. Martinez, 127 A.D.3d 1236.

found to have withheld exculpatory evidence: See Jennifer Bain et al., “Shady Cop’s Victim Tastes Freedom for First Time in Decades,” New York Post, July 12, 2017; Alan Feuer, “Brooklyn District Attorney Hopes to Void 1997 Murder Conviction,” New York Times, July 11, 2017.

doubted whether Shane was ever the “worst of the worst”: Duncan Osborne, “Death Penalty Long Gone, Has New York Yet Embraced Rehabilitation or Mercy?,” Gay City News, December 21, 2020.

“motivated solely by this defendant’s greed”: Michael Shane Hale, sentencing minutes, 1999.

“he’s not going to kill again”: Osborne, “Death Penalty Long Gone.”

This seemed to be the action: For clarification, this is the back-and-forth I’m referencing in Shane’s confession, reflected in the contemporaneous transcript:

Det. Schwartz: You put—a plastic bag over Mr. Tanner’s head?

Hale: To cover up the blood and everything.

Det. Schwartz: Okay, did you tie it at all or did you just place it around over his head?

Hale: No, I just put it, I couldn’t—I just put it over, like, the body was like—the body was like laying like this, his head was right here and there were some shopping bags over here in the corner, and I just put them over his head.

“Hale never says anything like that”: John Schwartz, interview with author, December 20, 2023.

“the majority of people I locked up for murder would never do it again”: Statistically, if you put every person who’s been convicted of murder back on the street after they serve twenty-five years, nearly none will kill again. A Stanford Criminal Justice Center report tracked 860 people convicted of murder in California and released since 1995 and found that only 1 percent committed new felonies, none of which were murder. In 2012 in Maryland, the high court ruled that back in the 1970s, judges gave juries erroneous instruction. Between 2013 and 2018, two hundred people still serving time for first-degree premeditated murder, first-degree rape, or felony murder were resentenced to time served and released; their recidivism rate is low, at 3.5 percent (compared to roughly 40 percent statewide), and only three have been convicted of new felonies as of 2024. (See “Second Look Laws Are an Effective Solution to Reconsider Extreme Sentences Amidst Failing Parole Systems,” Sentencing Project, March 21, 2024.) Shane, with all his accomplishments and self-development, would never come back. Everyone knows this, even the prosecutor who once sought to execute him.

died in 2019: Joseph P. Fried, “Charles J. Hynes, Brooklyn D.A. in a Tumultuous Era, Dies at 83,” New York Times, January 30, 2019.

“even though the biggest problem about mass incarceration is massive sentences”: Steve Zeidman, interview with author, November 9, 2022.

Shane wanted to scream and cry: Michael Shane Hale, JPay message to Clara Platter, January 5, 2022.

a process he wrote about: Michael Shane Hale, “Prison Is a Dangerous Place for LGBTQ+ People. I Made a Safe Space in the Library,” Marshall Project, November 3, 2023.

“we assure you that these are responsibly produced documentaries”: Tracey Ford, JPay message to Michael Shane Hale, July 25, 2023.

“short-changed all its subjects, from the murderers to the victims”: Jo Livingstone, “TV’s True Crime Voyeurism Reaches Its Crude End,” New Republic, August 15, 2018.

It appears that producers are emboldened: “Whether considering bestselling true crime books, most popular true crime podcasts, the most widely watched true crime shows on Netflix, the results are the same: the vast majority of these narratives are about white-on-white crime,” Lindsey Webb writes in the Journal of Gender, Race and Justice. For further reading, see Lindsey Webb, “True Crime and Danger Narratives: Reflections on Stories of Violence, Race and (In)justice,” Journal of Gender, Race and Justice 24, no. 1 (June 16, 2021).

“observational documentary,” not true crime: Tracey Ford, interview with Megan Posco, August 8, 2023. Ford did not reply to multiple requests seeking further comment.

“one other case in New York”: Ford, interview with Posco.

“We have to deal with the life we have left”: Javier C. Hernandez, “A Death Row Opera Goes to Sing Sing, with Inmates Onstage,” New York Times, October 4, 2023.

18: A Turbulent Mix of Hope and Desperation
he punched a CO in the face three times: D. Rogers, “Inmate Misbehavior Report” for Milton Jones, Attica Correctional Facility, October 12, 2021.

Milton became “biligerent”: A. Snyder, “Inmate Misbehavior Report” for Milton Jones, Attica Correctional Facility, October 12, 2021.

they were going to hell: Milton Jones, interview with Matthew Litman, October 11, 2023.

the guards wouldn’t feed him for days: Jones, interview with Litman.

would increase their prospects for release: Per the New York Theological Seminary: “The recidivism rate for graduates from the NYTS M.P.S. program is well under 10% over the life of the program and close to zero for those who have been released over the past five years, compared to a 49% recidivism rate generally in New York State.”

claiming that Father Joe molested him: Jay Tokasz, “Child Victims Act Lawsuit Accuses Murdered Priest of Molesting Boy,” Buffalo News, May 17, 2021.

three months before the final deadline: The lookback window closed in August 2021. M.D.’s suit was filed in May 2021.

ran a follow-up story: Jay Tokasz, “Murdered Priest’s Time at Parish Conflicts with Plaintiff’s Accusation of Sexual Abuse,” Buffalo News, May 20, 2021.

complaint against the Herman Law firm: Jesse Seiden, Esq., “Complaint of Brian Bissonette,” Docket No. 2021.1980, Voice for Victims: Herman Law, November 17, 2021.

“I was also a victim of sexual abuse by Reverend Joseph Bissonette”: Seiden, “Complaint of Brian Bissonette.”

“Sr. Karen who was your friend too”: Ray Bissonette, letter to Milton Jones, December 3, 2021.

“we’re never gonna get that”: Bissonette, interview with author.

“I told an untruth”: Milton Jones, interview with author, October 17, 2023.

“Dear Ray”: Milton Jones, letter to Ray Bissonette, October 22, 2023.

19: Can the Preppy Killer Ever Be More?

“To look back, your head spins”: The Preppy Murder: Death in Central Park, season 1, episode 5, directed by Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, aired November 15, 2019, on SundanceTV.

“I did write him a letter”: Ricki Stern, email to author, January 15, 2024. In March, Ricki emailed me claiming that her response wasn’t on the record. I disagree. After asking her several questions in my initial email to her, I wrote, “I wanted to give you a chance to comment, and I’ll include your response in my book.”

looking for the missing piece: Various studies have established a connection between early-in-life victimization or exposure to violence and future offending. It’s known as the “victim-offender overlap” (see Caitlin DeLong and Jessica Reichert, “The Victim-Offender Overlap: Examining the Relationship Between Victimization and Offending,” Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority, January 9, 2019). A 2020 study of 64,329 high-risk youth offenders in Florida found that physical abuse, sexual abuse, or witnessing substance abuse at home “significantly and substantially” increases the risk of criminal behavior (Lauren N. Miley et al., “Does Childhood Victimization Predict Specific Adolescent Offending? An Analysis of Generality Versus Specificity in the Victim-Offender Overlap,” Child Abuse & Neglect 101 [March 2020], https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2019.104328). By no means do all, or even most, victims go on to offend, but a lot of offenders have a history of prior victimization.

maybe the guy molested Rob, too: Associated Press, “Defrocked Cardinal Charged with Sexually Abusing Teen Boy in 1974,” The Guardian, July 29, 2021.

how prisoners were living through the pandemic: John J. Lennon, “I’m Incarcerated. This Is My Covid Lockdown Story,” New York Times Magazine, April 6, 2021.

it inspired him to want to be a prison journalist: Robert Lee Williams, “Turning Sentences Around,” PEN America, August 17, 2023.

losing his friend in prison: Robert Lee Williams, “In Prison, the Networks of Addiction Run Deep,” Prison Journalism Project, May 7, 2023.

acquitted him of murder but convicted him of manslaughter: Oliver Mackson, “Middle Hope Man Gets Max in Girlfriend’s Death,” Times Herald-Record (Middletown, NY), March 10, 2010.

We are experiencing a renaissance of prison writing: Ginia Bellafante, “Upstart News Site Has Youth on Its Side, and Albany in Its Sights,” New York Times, June 9, 2023.

Shawn looked frail: Shawn Kovell, interview with Tracey Long, summer 2021.

While some people, and perhaps even some judges: Truth is, many in society agree with Simon’s sentiment. Even judges do, but they’ll rarely discount your sentence because you killed another criminal. Yet some federal judges, with more discretion under the First Step Act, are considering this when resentencing and releasing aging gangsters who’ve served enough time. “At the risk of sounding cynical, there are different types of murder with different degrees of culpability. For example, there are murders of passion and murders of revenge,” Judge Block of the Eastern District federal court writes in his United States v. Russo decision, in 2022, in which he reduces the sentence of Anthony Russo. “Here the murders were not directed at the public at large but were internecine executions of ruthless rival gang members. This turf warfare between rival factions of the Colombo family thirty years ago, where the mantra was probably ‘kill or be killed,’ is ancient gangland lore.”

Epilogue
gate money was increased to $200: Chris McKenna, “NY Would Pay Ex-Inmates $2,550 After Prison Under Bill to Aid Transition, Curb Recidivism,” Lohud, May 17, 2024.

chased the reporters away: Katherine Donlevy, “‘Preppy Killer’ Robert Chambers Released from NYS Prison After Serving 15 Years in Drug, Assault Case,” New York Post, July 28, 2023.

Governor Hochul expanded an initiative to provide nondriver ID cards: Governor’s Press Office, “Governor Hochul Announces Expansion of Program to Provide State-Issued IDs to Incarcerated Individuals Prior to Release,” January 12, 2024.

It then cites my article: Lennon, “The Murderer, the Writer, the Reckoning.”

“John J. Lennon the writer is still the man capable of cold-blooded murder”: See the “No Alex No Clemency” petition created by Taisha Lawson on MoveOn.org: https://sign.moveon.org/petitions/no-alex-no-clemency.

found her dead in bed: In November 2024, I reached out through my fact-checker to the City of New York medical examiner’s office, but they hadn’t yet determined a cause of death. According to a police report, Shawn was pronounced dead on the scene. She was fifty-five.

already mentoring men one-on-one: To read their work, see: Nicholas Brooks, “First Person: ‘I wonder about comeback stories. Danny’s might be one,’” Open Campus, March 22, 2022; Dyego M. Foddrell, “Uprooting the Lie,” PEN America, May 30, 2023; LaMarr Knoxx, “From Crip to Crochet Artist: How an Unlikely Hobby Changed My Life in Prison,” Marshall Project, December 2, 2022; Robert Lee Williams, “Good Writing in a Bad Place: How One Incarcerated Writer Feeds His Craft,” Literary Hub, August 28, 2023; and Joseph Sanchez, “Better Call Joey: The Life of a Jailhouse Lawyer,” Prison Journalism Project, October 22, 2023.

one even landing an op-ed in the New York Times: Joseph Sanchez, “After 17 Years in Prison, I’m a Different Person. Do Cases Like Mine Deserve a Second Look?,” New York Times, September 8, 2024.

Author’s Note
published one of my essays: John J. Lennon, “The Murderer’s Mother,” The Hedgehog Review 18, no. 2 (2016).

Jon Krakauer once told his fellow journalists: Ted Conover, Immersion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), p. 43. Conover cites Robert Bouton’s The New New Journalism, in which Krakauer describes how he paid one of the subjects in his book $20,000 to quote from her unpublished memoir. And, in the text, I’m quoting Krakauer telling this to a group of journalists.

Index

The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

- A&E channel
- Abbott, Jack Henry
- ABC
- Adams, Cindy
- Adan, Richard
- adolescent brain development
- Adversary, The (Carrère)
- Adverse Childhood Experience
- AIDS epidemic
- Aiello, Danny
- Albanian Eddie
- Alcoholics Anonymous (AA; 12-step programs)
- Alexander, Michelle
- Ali
- Alim
- Alizay
- Allyboy
- Alspaugh, Leann Davis
- Alternative to Violence Project (AVP)
- Amazon
- AMC
- American Lawyer
- American Psycho (Ellis)
- America’s Most Wanted (TV show)
- Amir
- Amityville murders
- Ammon, Ted
- Anna (murder victim)
- Annie (French friend)
- antidepressants
- anti-gay violence
- Antinuche, Michael “Mikey Meatballs”
- antipsychotics
- antisocial personality disorders
- apology letter bank
- Appellate Advocates
- Argentina
- Armando
- Arms Acres
- Arnold, Benedict
- arts programs
- Artus, Dale
- Aryan Brotherhood
- Asbury Park Press
- Associated Press
- Atlantic
- At the Heart of Evil (TV show)
- Attica Correctional Facility
- mental health office
- prisoner grievance reps
- surveillance and
- uprising of 1971
- uprisings of 1984 and 1990
- “Attica’s Ghosts” (Robbins)
- “Attica State” (song)
- Auburn Correctional Facility
- Autobiography of Malcolm X, The
- Avenue magazine

- Bacon, Kevin
- Baldwin, William
- Barbara
- Bard Prison Initiative (BPI)
- Bazelon, David
- Bazelon, Emily
- Beck, Jack
- Bedford Hills Correctional
- Belgium
- Bell, Howard E.
- Bennifield brothers
- Bennington College
- Berkowitz, David “Son of Sam”
- Best American Essays, The
- Betts, Reginald Dwayne
- Beuther, John
- Biden, Joe
- Big White
- bipolar disorder
- Bird, Mr.
- Birner, Theresa
- Bissonette, Ann
- Bissonette, Brian
- Bissonette, Father Joseph
- child abuse accusations vs.
- Bissonette, Marya
- Bissonette, Raymond
- Bissonette House (formerly HOPE House)
- Black prisoners
- blind and visually impaired
- Blood Relatives (TV show)
- Bloods
- Bobby
- Body Keeps the Score, The (van der Kolk)
- Boston Globe
- Boston University
- box monsters
- Boyle, Lara Flynn
- Boys and Girls Club
- Brazil
- Breault, Harry
- Brink’s heist of 1981
- Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office
- Brooklyn House of Detention
- Brooks, Robert
- Browning prep school
- Brown University
- Bryan, Bruce
- Bubblegum Exotic blunts
- Buckland, Raymond
- Buddhist meditation program
- Buffalo Bills
- Buffalo Dollar General
- Buffalo News
- Buffalo Police Department
- Buffalo State Hospital
- Buffalo Youth Developmental Center
- Buffett, Doris
- Buffett, Warren
- Buprenorphine
- Burgard Vocational High School
- Burke, Jimmy “the Gent”
- Buttman magazine

- California
- Call of the Wild, The (London)
- Camus, Albert
- Canisius University
- Capital Defender Office
- Capote, Truman
- Capra, Michael
- Caribbean Americans
- Carnegie Hall Musical Corrections program
- Carney, John J., III
- Carol
- Carrère, Emmanuel
- Carter, Jimmy
- Cash App
- Catholic Church
- child abuse scandals

- “Catholics and the Death Penalty” (symposium)

- Caz
- CBS
- cell phone raids
- cell TV
- Center for Appellate Litigation
- Central Americans
- Central New York Psychiatric Center (Marcy)
- Central Park Five
- Chambers, Bob (Rob’s father)
- Chambers, Mary
- Chambers, Phyllis
- Chambers, Robert Emmet
- AA and
- accountability and
- animals protected by
- appearance of

- arrest for murder, trial, and sentencing and

- arrest on drug charge, and plea deal and
- cell of
- Covid and
- death of Shawn and
- death of Shawn’s mother and
- Didion on
- drugs and
- early life and education of
- education in prison and, college courses
- fan mail and
- fights in prison and
- helps prisoners with legal work
- Holly McCormick rape story and
- humanity of
- IPC and
- Kush Williams and
- life with Shawn after release of
- marries Shawn Kovell
- media and
- media and Hours
- media and, Preppy Murder
- mother and
- murder of Jennifer Levin and
- parents provisions for, in prison
- parole board and
- possible sexual abuse of
- prison as safe haven for
- prison jobs and
- prison life and
- release of, after first stint
- release of, after second stint
- remorse and
- Rikers and
- sign language and
- Simon on
- solitary and
- struggle to get honest and
- tracking story of
- trauma and
- Truth in Justice Now and
- Charged (Bazelon)
- Chelf, Coach
- child abuse
- civil lawsuits and
- sexual
- children of people doing time
- Chip
- Chira, Susan
- Choate (prep school)
- Choate (prisoner)
- Church of God
- Clark, Judith
- Clayton, Tom “TC”
- clemency applications
- mitigation report
- Clinton, Hillary
- Clinton Correctional Facility (Dannemora)
- Close, Glenn
- CNN
- cocaine
- code blue
- “Coffee” (song)
- Cogentin
- Colabella, Nicholas
- college programs
- graduate degrees
- Colodny, Amy
- Columbia University
- Coming to Terms curriculum
- Coming World Civilization, The (Hocking)
- Community Mental Health Act (1963)
- commutations
- Complete Book of Witchcraft (Buckland)
- Coney Island Hospital
- Conifer Park rehab
- conjugal visits
- Consortium program
- Cornell University
- Correctional Association of New York
- Cosell, Howard
- Covid-19
- Cox, Alexandra
- crack
- Cracker Thug
- creative writing workshops
- credit card swipe frisks
- Crespo, Ed

- crime bill of 1994 (Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act)

- Crime District (TV channel)
- Criminal Minds (TV show)
- Crips
- Crohn’s disease
- Cummiskey, Eddie “The Butcher”
- Cummiskey, Terrence
- Cunningham, Scott
- CUNY School of Law
- Cuomo, Andrew
- Cuomo, Chris
- Cuomo, Mario
- Current Affair, A (TV show)

- Daemen College
- Dahmer, Jeffrey
- Dale
- Danielly
- Dartmouth
- Dateline (TV show)
- Davis, Peter
- Dead Man Walking (Prejean)
- deaf and hearing-impaired
- Death and the Maiden (Dorfman)
- Death of a Salesman (Miller)
- death penalty
- “Death Penalty Long Gone” (Osborne)
- Dedaj, Simon
- America’s Most Wanted and
- Dedaj, Victor
- DeFeo, Ronnie, Jr.
- Delahunt, Edward
- Demerol
- De Niro, Robert
- Dennis
- depression
- Didion, Joan
- DiDonato, Joyce
- Dino
- Discovery ID
- district attorneys
- Division for Youth facilities
- Dix, Dorothea
- Dog Day Afternoon (film)
- Doherty, Ryan
- domestic violence. See also child abuse

- Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act (DVSJA, 2020)

- Dorrian, Jack
- Dorrian’s Red Hand
- Downstate Correctional Facility
- Doyle, Jessica
- Doyle, Kevin
- drama programs
- drug dealing
- drug use. See also specific drugs
- Duran, Alex
- Dwayne
- “Dying in Attica” (Lennon)

- E.
- E.’s family
- apology letter to
- clemency application and
- E.’s sister
- Eastern Correctional Facility
- ecstasy
- elections of 2016
- “Eliminator Jr.” (song)
- Ellis, Bret Easton
- Elmira Correctional Facility
- El Salvador
- Emmet, Robert
- Enalapril
- English, T. J.
- Erie County Detention Center
- Erie County Medical Center
- Esquire
- Eto
- Ewing, Charles Patrick
- Executioner’s Song, The (Mailer)

- FaceTime
- facilitator training
- Fairstein, Linda
- Family Feud (TV show)
- family members of victims
- Family Reunion Program
- Fatal Vision (McGinniss)
- Fathers Behind Bars
- Fay
- Fazekas, Paul
- FBI
- Felon (Betts)
- Feng, Jing
- Fentanyl
- Fillyaw, David
- First Amendment
- Fitzgerald, F. Scott
- Flaco
- Foot, Mr.
- Forbes
- Forbes, Steve
- Ford, Tracey
- Fordham University
- Fort Benning, Georgia
- Fort Myer, Virginia
- 48 Hours (TV show)
- Fox 5 news
- France
- Franck
- Frankl, Viktor
- Freeman, Michelle
- Friday (film)
- Friel, Father Joseph
- Friend, Tad

- G (prisoner)
- Gacy, John Wayne
- Galaxy Gives
- gambling
- gangs
- Garland, Bonnie
- gate money
- Gay City News (formerly LGNY)
- gay men
- murders of
- prison community hierarchy
- generational incarceration
- George (stepfather)
- Gershwin, George
- Gibbons, Jack
- Gibian, Zach
- Goldstein, Andrew
- Gonzalez, Eric
- Goodfellas (film)
- Good Samaritan law
- Google
- Gotti, John
- Graham, David A.
- Grapes of Wrath, The (Steinbeck)
- Grassian, Stuart
- Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald)

- Great Meadow Correctional Facility (Comstock)

- Green Haven Correctional Facility (Stormville)

- Greenhouse, Emily
- Green Mile, The (film)
- grievance systems
- Grind, The (TV show)
- Grisham, John

- “Guards Like Trump and Inmates Like Clinton” (Lennon)

- Guatemalan refugees

- Hackman, Gene
- Haggerty, Marianne
- Haiti (person)
- Haldol
- Hale, Angela
- Hale, grandparents
- Hale, Harold
- Hale, Loretta
- Hale, Michael Shane “Shane”
- anti-gay violence and
- appearance of
- Army and
- arrest, trial, and sentencing of
- brief bio of
- Buddhist meditation and
- clemency and
- Covid
- death of mother and
- domestic violence class and
- drama programs and
- DVSJA and
- early life and abuse of
- early move to NYC and return to Kentucky
- education in prison and, college

- education in prison and, masters in theology

- friend Barbara and
- friend Michael and
- gay community in prison and
- gay identity and
- gay romances in prison and
- hopes for eventual release and
- Hynes on, at Fordham symposium
- loner in prison and
- media and, I Am a Killer
- mentor minute and
- money and
- murder of Stefan Tanner and

- New York Consortium for Higher Education in Prison and

- parents and
- personality of
- Phase Three reentry facilitator and
- prison events arranged by
- prison jobs and
- prison volunteer programs and
- remorse and
- Rikers and
- sister Angela and
- suicide attempt and
- TEDx talks and
- tracking story of
- trauma and
- Hale, Nathan
- Hamilton College
- Hamlet (Shakespeare)
- Hammerstein, Mrs.
- Hamptons
- Hardwick, Johnnie “Pebbles”
- Harper’s
- Hart, Keith
- Harvard University
- Law School
- Medical School
- Harvey, Steve
- Haverford College
- Head, Bishop Edward D.
- Hedgehog Review
- Hell’s Kitchen
- Hemingway, Ernest
- Herb
- Herlihy, Monsignor David P.
- Herman Law firm
- heroin
- Herrin, Richard
- Hickock, Richard
- HLN
- Hochul, Kathy
- Hocking, William Ernest
- Hoffa, Jimmy
- Holland, Michael
- Holocaust survivors

- Home of Positive Experience (HOPE) House (later Bissonette House)

- Homicide (TV show)
- homophobia
- homosexual sex in prison. See also gay men
- Hoosac boarding school
- Hopper, Columbus
- Horse
- Hudson Link for Higher Education in Prison
- Hulu

- Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act (HALT, 2022)

- Hunter College
- Hynes, Charles
- Hynes, Chris

- I Am a Killer (TV show)
- Illuminati
- I Messages
- In Cold Blood (Capote)
- industry jobs
- inmate program assistants (IPAs)
- innocence movement
- innocent man, posturing as
- insecurity, financial, social, emotional
- Inside Evil (TV show)
- insider trading
- In the Belly of the Beast (Abbott)
- Investigation Discovery
- involuntary protective custody (IPC)
- iPhones
- Ireland
- Irish Daily Mirror
- Islam
- Italian mob

- Jalalabad, Afghanistan
- Jamie
- Javier (Milton’s friend)
- Javier (Shane’s friend)
- “Jenny Was a Friend of Mine” (song)
- Joe’s Story (Bissonette)
- Johnny Got His Gun (Trumbo)
- Jones, Milton “Babu” (Milton’s father)
- Jones, Milton E.
- appearance of
- arrest, trial, and sentencing of
- Attica and assaults on
- brief bio of
- clemency and
- daughter Lasaundra and
- early arrests as juvenile and
- early life and education of

- education in prison and, high school and college

- education in prison and, masters in theology

- father in Attica and
- girlfriend Melina and
- half-brother Rama and
- health problems of
- hope and desperation of
- IPC and
- “juggling” junk-food hustle and
- learns of murder of Sister Karen
- letter on sexual abuse by Bissonette and
- letter to Bissonette House and
- media and, Homicide episode
- medical parole request and
- mental breakdowns and beatings of
- mental breakdown during Covid
- mental illness and diagnosis of
- mother and stepfather and
- murder of priests with Teddy Simmons and
- Muslim brothers and
- parole board and
- prison intake interview
- prison jobs and
- religion and
- RSB and
- son Kevin and
- tracking story of
- victim’s brother Ray and
- visit from Sister Karen and
- Jones, Raymond
- Jose
- Journalist and the Murderer, The (Malcolm)
- JPay tablets
- Judaism
- Just Mercy (Stevenson)

- K2 (synthetic marijuana)
- Kant, Immanuel
- Kapp, Alex
- Kazigo, Dr. Joseph Z.
- Kazigo, Mulumba “Africa”
- Kazigo, Nakizito N.
- Keller, Bill
- Kelley, Loen
- Kelly, Shana
- Kendra’s Law
- Kennedy, John F.
- Kennedy, Robert F.
- Kenner, Max

- Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services

- Kentucky Department of Criminal Justice Training

- Kevin (Rob’s friend)
- Kids Who Kill (Ewing)
- Kierkegaard, Soren
- Killers (music group)
- King, John B., Jr.
- King, Larry
- Kings (gang)
- Klass, Polly
- Klimczak, Sister Jean
- Klimczak, Sister Karen
- murder of
- Knickerbocker Grays
- Koenig, Sarah
- Konigsberg, Harold
- Korean artist prisoner
- Kovell, Shawn
- death of
- death of mother
- Krakauer, Jon
- Kristy

- Laisure, Paul Skip
- language of amends
- Larson, Doran
- Latino gangs
- Launier, Kim
- Laurel County High School
- Law & Order (TV show)
- Lee
- Lee, Hae Min
- Lennon (aunt)
- Lennon, Eugene (brother)
- bipolar disorder and
- death of
- Lennon (father)
- suicide of
- Lennon, Joe (brother)
- Lennon, John (Beatle)
- Lennon, John J.
- AA or 12 steps and
- apology letter to E.’s family and
- arrest, trials, and sentencing
- attempt to write true crime stories
- AVP workshops and
- brother Joe and
- cell phone raid and
- civilian events at Sing Sing and
- clemency petition and
- Crohn’s disease and
- difficulty of being honest about crimes and
- drug dealing and
- drugs and
- E.’s family and
- early arrests as juvenile and
- early life and education of
- education in prison and, college
- education in prison and, creative writing
- ethics of paying subjects and
- extortion plot vs.
- father’s suicide and
- Friends Beyond the Wall and
- Galaxy Gives fellowship and
- identity as murderer and journalist and
- imagining life after release and
- impact of crime on family and
- impact of prison and
- IPC and
- journalism career and publications of
- marriage and conjugal visits with Danielly
- marriage and conjugal visits with Raina
- Marshall Project and
- media and, Inside Evil
- Milton’s clemency petition and
- mitigation report and
- moral and artistic growth and
- mother and
- murder of E. by

- New York Consortium for Higher Education in Prison and

- nonfiction writing workshop and
- overdose of neighbor in prison and
- prison job as SMIV aide
- provisions ordered by
- reading in prison and
- relationship with own crime and
- relationships with women and
- Rikers and
- sentence of, and thoughts on aging
- sex with super and shame after
- Shane’s friendship and
- Sing Sing and
- Sing Sing superintendent and
- solitary SHU and
- stabbed in prison, by friend of E.’s
- stepfather George and
- stepsister Teresa and
- suicide and
- Sullivan and
- tattoo and
- TEDx event at Sing Sing and
- therapy sessions in prison and
- trauma of prison and
- true crime critiqued by
- violence and
- workouts in prison yard and
- writing challenges in prison and
- Lennon, Laura (mother)
- Inside Evil and
- marries George
- suicide attempt of
- Leon, Paul

- Lesbian & Gay New York (LGNY; later Gay City News)

- Less Than Zero (Ellis)
- Levin, Danielle
- Levin, Ellen
- Levin (father)
- Levin, Jennifer
- Preppy Murder and
- Levin family
- Levitt, Bruce
- Lexington county jail
- Lexington Herald-Leader
- Lexington Police Department
- LGBTQ rights. See also gay men
- Lies, Crimes & Video (TV show)
- life expectancy
- life sentences
- Lighthouse Writers Workshop Book Project
- Lincoln Hall youth facility
- Lincoln prep school
- Lister, Tommy “Tiny”
- Literary Hub
- Litman, Jack
- Litman, Matthew
- Little, Raymond
- Little, Valina McDaniel
- Livingstone, Jo
- loaf diet
- Locked In (Pfaff)
- Loftus, Elizabeth
- logotherapy
- London, Jack
- Long, Tracey
- Longtermer’s Responsibility Project
- LoTurco, William
- Luciano, Lucky

- “Lust in the Clutches of a Dreamsleep” (Chambers)

- Lynch, Craig

- Machete
- Madonna
- Mafia
- Mailer, Norman
- Malcolm, Janet
- Malcolm Gordon School
- Malone, Bishop Richard J.
- Mancia, Rafael Carballo
- Manhattan Tombs
- Manson murders
- Man’s Search for Meaning (Frankl)
- Mario (Milton’s childhood abuser)
- Mario (prisoner)
- Marrero, Anthony
- Marshall, Frederick M.
- Marshall Project
- Martuscello, Daniel, III
- Massachusetts
- mass incarceration
- Matchsticks
- MCA Records
- McCarrick, Cardinal Theodor
- McCarthy, Father Leo
- McCormick, Holly
- McDaniel, Buster
- McDaniel, Mildred
- McDaniel (Milton’s great-grandparents)
- McDaniel, Skip
- McDaniel, Stanley

- McDaniel, Valina (Milton’s mother). See Little, Valina

- McGinnis, Joe
- McKean, Steve
- McKinley High School
- McMillian, Kevin
- McNamara, Elizabeth Collins
- M.D.
- medical parole
- Meet, Marry, Murder (TV show)
- Melina
- Mellon Foundation
- Men’s Health
- mental illness. See also SMIVs
- Mercy College
- #MeToo
- Metropolitan Opera
- Mexican Americans
- Miguel (singer)
- minors, sentencing and

- Mississippi State Penitentiary (Parchman Farm)

- Mollay, Donald
- MoMA
- Monday Night Football
- Money (person)
- Morgenthau, Robert

- Mother Serani’s Church of the Holy Quietness

- Mount Sinai Hospital
- Mount St. Joseph Academy
- MTV
- Mulcahy, Thomas R.
- murder, “why” of
- murder rate
- Muslim brothers

- naloxone
- Narcan
- Nas
- Nassau University Medical Center
- Navy SEALs
- Nawrocki, Robert
- Nazi concentration camps
- NBC News
- Netflix
- Nets (gang)
- Neurontin
- New Jim Crow, The (Alexander)
- New Republic
- New York Child Victims Act (2019)

- New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project (AVP)

- New York Coalition for Women Prisoners

- New York Consortium for Higher Education in Prison

- New York Court of Appeals
- New York Daily News
- “New York” (Didion)
- New Yorker
- New York Foundling
- New York magazine
- New York 911 Good Samaritan Law
- New York Police Department (NYPD)
- New York Post
- New York Review of Books
- New York State Department of Corrections
- New York State Department of Mental Hygiene
- New York State Legislature
- New York Supreme Court
- New York Theological Seminary (NYTS)
- New York Times
- New York Times Magazine

- New York University, Tisch School of the Arts

- Niagara College
- Nicole
- Nietzsche, Friedrich
- Notebook, The (film)

- Obama, Barack
- O’Connor, Sinéad
- O’Dwyer, Brian
- Office of Mental Health (OMH)
- Office of Victim Assistance (OVA)
- orientation class
- Orwell, George
- Osborne, Duncan
- Osborne Association
- Osler, Mark
- overdoses
- OxyContin
- Oxygen (TV channel)
- Ozark (TV show)

- Pacino, Al
- Panama
- pardons
- Paris
- parole
- truth-in-sentencing and
- Pashupati, Swami
- Pataki, George
- “Peddling Darkness” (Lennon)
- Pell Grants
- Pelosi, Danny
- Pelosi, Generosa Ammon
- PEN America
- Penn, Sean
- Pennsylvania
- Percocets
- Pet Shop Boys
- Pfaff, John
- Phoenix Players
- Pica, Sean
- Pileggi, Nicolas
- Pink Floyd
- Pitt, Brad
- Platter, Clara
- Playgirl
- Poetry Foundation
- Porgy and Bess (Gershwin)
- Posco, Megan
- Povich, Maury
- prefrontal cortex
- Prejean, Sister Helen
- Preppy Murder, The (TV docuseries)
- prison administrators, true crime and
- prison events with civilians and prisoners
- prison jobs, pay for
- prison journalists
- Prison Letters Project (Yale)
- Prison Policy Initiative

- prison population. See also mass incarceration

- Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA, 2003)
- prison reform movement
- PrisonWriters.com
- Proctor, Patrick
- Prolixin
- prosecutors
- protective custody (PC)
- Prozac
- psychiatric hospitals
- Psychology Today
- psychotropics
- punishment, Hocking on
- Purple Rain (film)
- Puzo, Mario

- Qatar
- Quakers
- Quantico

- racism
- Raina
- Rama
- Ramadan
- Rampino, Anthony “Tony the Roach”
- rape, in prison
- Rather, Dan
- Rat Hunters
- Ray
- Reagan, Ronald
- recidivism
- “Redefining What Matters” (TEDx event)
- Reeves, Kyle
- Reeves, Robert
- rehabilitation
- Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA)
- Reich, Julius
- release from prison, challenges of
- remorse, cultivating
- resentencing motions
- restorative justice
- retribution
- Reynolds, Kimber
- Richard
- Rikers Island
- Robbins, Tom
- Roberts, Troy
- Robinson, Louis “Barcelona”
- Rockland County halfway house
- Rodas, Jose Guillermo
- Rogers, Richard W.
- Rolling Stone
- Romand, Jean-Claude
- Roseanne
- RSB (rotten social background)
- RuPaul
- Russia
- Ryan, Sean

- Saint David’s Catholic school
- Salam, Maya
- Salvadoran refugees
- Sanders, Bernie
- San Diego police
- San Quentin
- Saudi Arabia
- Scarface (film)
- schizophrenia
- Schwartz, John
- Scores, double murder at
- Scotto, Rosanna
- Second Look Project
- securities fraud
- Securus
- self-harm
- Sellers, Jeffrey A.
- Sentences That Create Us, The (PEN America)
- sentencing
- Sepe, Frank “Midget”
- serial killers
- Serial (podcast)
- Serinsky, Chloe
- Seven Silver Keys
- 1776 (musical)
- Seventh Regiment Armory
- Sex in Prison (Hopper)
- sex offenders
- Shabanger
- Shakespeare, William
- Shales, Tom
- shanking
- Shannon, Kenny
- Sharkey, Kelley
- Shawangunk Correctional Facility
- escape of 1994 from
- Sheehan, Mike
- Sherman, Danny
- Sherman, Devon
- Sherman, Glenda
- Sherman, Robby
- Sherman, Steve
- Simmons, Helen
- Simmons, Pemberton
- Simmons, Theodore “Teddy”

- Simon & Schuster, Inc. v. Members of N.Y. State Crimes Victims Bd.

- Sing Sing Correctional Facility (Ossining)
- 60 Minutes (TV show)
- Slate
- Sleepers (film)
- Smiley, Mr.
- Smith, Perry

- SMIVs (seriously mentally ill, violent). See also mental illness

- Snapped (TV show)
- Snyder, Deacon Paul
- social hierarchies
- sociopaths

- solitary. See also special housing unit (SHU)

- HALT act and
- renamed “diversion”
- UN defines as torture
- Sonic Youth
- Son of Sam law
- Southport Correctional Facility (Pine City)
- Spain
- special education
- Special Housing Unit (SHU)
- Spofford Detention
- Sports Illustrated
- Spotlight (film)
- “Spying on Attica” (Lennon)
- Stan, Father
- Staten Island District Attorney’s Office
- State of Grace (film)
- St. Bartholomew’s Church
- St. Brigid Church
- St. Clare’s Hospital
- Steinbeck, John
- Stern, Ricki
- Steve
- Stevenson, Bryan
- St. Francis nursing home
- St. Matthew’s Church
- Stolinski, Father Robert A.
- Stone, Jay
- Stone, Michael
- Stranger, The (Camus)
- Street Fighter (video game)
- Suboxone
- Suffolk County jail
- suicide
- Sullivan, David
- Sullivan Correctional Facility (Fallsburg)
- Sulzberger, A. G.
- “Summertime” (song)
- Sundberg, Annie
- Sunshine Lady Foundation
- Sweden
- Swintec typewriter
- Syed, Adnan

- Tabula Rasa (opera)
- taking responsibility for crimes
- Talese, Gay
- Tanner, Stefan
- Tanner family
- Tattoo
- TEDx events
- Teresa
- Terry, Craig
- Texas Department of Criminal Justice
- Texas Victim Services Division
- “This Place Is Crazy” (Lennon)
- thorazine
- Thorne, Tammy
- Three Strikes laws
- Tomei, Albert
- Tomlinson, Erin
- Transistor Films
- trauma
- true crime genre, critique of
- Trumbo, Dalton
- Trump, Donald
- Truth In Justice Now
- truth in sentencing
- Tubi
- “Turbulent Mind, A” (Lennon)
- Twelve Angry Men (Rose)
- 20/20 (TV show)

- Uehlinger, Tim
- Upstate Correctional Facility (SHU prison)
- urine tests
- US Army
- US Supreme Court

- Vacco, Dennis C.
- Val
- Valium
- Valverde, John
- van Der Kolk, Bessel
- Vara, Vauhini
- Vatican
- Vault S&M club
- Vice
- victim-offender meetings, mediators and
- victims’ rights movement (VRM)
- Vistaril
- Voices From Within
- Vulture

- Walsh, John
- Wanda
- Warner, Gene
- Washington Post
- Washington Post Magazine
- Washington State
- Wasted (Wolfe)
- Wayne
- Webdale, Kendra
- weed
- Weiss, Bari
- Wende Correctional Facility (Buffalo)
- Western Union
- Westies
- Westies (English)
- What’s Prison For? (Keller)
- Wicca (Cunningham)
- Williams, Robert Lee “Kush”
- Wilson, Joseph “Preacher”
- Wiseguy (Pileggi)
- Wolfe, Linda
- women prisoners
- wrongful convictions

- Yale University
- YMCA Big Brother program
- yoga
- York Prep School
- Youth Leadership Academy

- Zeidman, Steve
- Zoghlin, Sonya
- Zyprexa

Founded in 2017, Celadon Books, a division of

Macmillan Publishers, publishes a highly curated list
of twenty to twenty-five new titles a year. The list of
both fiction and nonfiction is eclectic and focuses
on publishing commercial and literary books and
discovering and nurturing talent.

About the Author

John J. Lennon is serving his twenty-fourth year behind bars, currently in Sing Sing Correctional Facility. His writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Esquire, and New York magazine. His work has been anthologized in the Best American Magazine Writing, and he’s twice been a finalist for the National Magazine Award, in feature writing and reviews and criticism. His essay “The Apology Letter” was part of the Washington Post Magazine’s special issue that won a National Magazine Award. He is eligible for parole in 2029. You can sign up for ebook updates here.

Contents

1. Title Page
2. Copyright Notice
3. Dedication
4. Language Note
5. Introduction:Sing Sing
6. ACT I: THE MEET
7. 1. Growing Up Gay in Kentucky
8. 2. Raised Rough in East Side, Buffalo
9. 3. A Preppy with Privilege
10. ACT II: THE KILLING

11. 4. A Killing in Brooklyn, a Dismemberment in Kentucky

12. 5. Kids Killing Priests in Buffalo
13. 6. A Death in Central Park
14. 7. The System Doesn’t Care About Remorse
15. ACT III: THE TIME
16. 8. A Visit with the Victims

17. 9. The Preppy Is Hooked on Heroin and Sent to Solitary

18. 10. Mental Illness in Prison
19. 11. Never Give Up, Never Give In
20. 12. No Parole for the Preppy

21. 13. College and Sex and Self-Discovery in Prison

22. 14. Getting Out, Coming Back
23. ACT IV: THE RECKONING
24. 15. Back in Sing Sing
25. 16. God and Psychosis in Prison
26. 17. A New Law, a New Chance at Freedom

27. 18. A Turbulent Mix of Hope and Desperation

28. 19. Can the Preppy Killer Ever Be More?
29. Epilogue
30. Author’s Note
31. Acknowledgments
32. Notes
33. Index
34. About the Author
35. Copyright

This is a true story, though the names and details of some peripheral characters have been changed.

THE TRAGEDY OF TRUE CRIME. Copyright © 2025 by John J. Lennon. All rights reserved. For information, address Celadon Books, a division of Macmillan Publishers, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271. EU Representative: Macmillan Publishers Ireland Ltd, 1st Floor, The Liffey Trust Centre, 117–126 Sheriff Street Upper, Dublin 1, DO1 YC43.

www.celadonbooks.com

This work sometimes incorporates versions of material previously published by John J. Lennon in The Atlantic, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Esquire, Men’s Health, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and the Washington Post Magazine.

Cover design by Henry Sene Yee

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-1-250-85824-5 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-250-85825-2 (ebook)

eISBN 9781250858252

The publisher of this book does not authorize the use or reproduction of any part of this book in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems. The publisher of this book expressly reserves this book from the Text and Data Mining exception in accordance with Article 4(3) of the European Union Digital Single Market Directive 2019/790.

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First Edition: 2025