John J. Lennon was 24 years old in December of 2001 when he shot his former friend Alex Lawson with an M-16 assault rifle, then transferred Lawson’s body to a laundry bag with a cinder block inside and hurled it into the Atlantic Ocean. The bag washed ashore on a Brooklyn beach in February of the following year. Lennon is now serving his 24th year of a 28-year sentence at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York, where he has become a prolific and celebrated writer on matters of criminal justice.
There is considerable demand for content related to true crime; streaming services are awash with episodic shows delving into crime and criminal investigations; podcasts in the same category number in the tens of thousands. Much of the output that falls within that category is true—fact-checke