You don’t often find a true crime journalist who lives on the other side of the bars, but, then, John J. Lennon isn’t your typical crime writer. Which is why Michael Shane Hale — Shane, for short — trusted him with his story for Lennon’s debut book, The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories that Define Us, out Sept. 23. via Celadon Books. Lennon is currently serving out the 24th year of his 28-to life sentence at New York’s Sing Sing Correctional Facility.
“Trusting your story to another convict goes against the prison code,” Hale writes via Securus, a prison email platform. “There are serious consequences for violating this rule — political maneuvering, snitching, gossiping. But John J. Lennon was not the average convict. During the process of deliberately sharing the truth, we forged a friendship. In doing that, we changed ourselves and got closer to answering the question: ‘How can we become fully accountable while experiencing genuine remorse when we are trapped in a system that doesn’t provide tools to process and learn from our poor choices?’”
Hale is one of the men Lennon profiles in his book, which digs into the ethics of the true crime industry and who gets to tell a person’s story. The others include Robert Chambers — a.k.a. the Preppy Killer, who killed friend Jennifer Levin in the 1980s — and Milton E. Jones, who, as a teen, alleges he was roped into a pair of robberies that turned deadly. None of the men — including Lennon, who details the murder that led to his incarceration — attempt to convince us of their innocence. Instead, they bare their souls to Lennon, fighting through unimaginably complicated feelings of remorse, coupled with a hope for a redemption, and an urge to tell their stories without being turned into tabloid monsters.
In this exclusive excerpt, Lennon delves into Hale’s rough background, what led him to, in his telling, kill his older, allegedly abusive boyfriend — and the law that could one day set him free.
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“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 true crime shows loved: sex, murder, dismemberment.
I first met Michael Shane Hale at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, where I landed in 2017. 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. At 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.
“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. Rumors swirl when you hang out with a gay guy, and when you’re 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.
Eventually I landed on the same tier as Shane. On weekend evenings, when he wasn’t busy with college, Shane and I 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.
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Shane was raised in Baldrock, Kentucky, a small community in rural Appalachia. Loretta, his mother, was a housewife. His 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.
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.
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 stuffed his 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.
In 1990, after Shane graduated high school, he joined the Army — an attempt to please his father. He did basic training in Fort Benning, Georgia, was named an expert marksman, and transferred to the honor guard. When Shane called home to tell his father, he got no reaction.
Soon, Shane’s sexuality became a problem for him. His Army 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.
After a short stint working in a coal mine, Shane realized he wasn’t cut out for it. And he didn’t want to hide his identity any longer. Leaving behind a childhood marked by abuse, neglect, and homophobia, Shane set out for New York City. It was June 1992, a few weeks before his twentieth birthday. He longed for the city and the glitter of its gay culture. Shane had to find his people.
It didn’t take long for Shane to settle into New York City life. He landed a spot on MTV’s The Grind and, 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, 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.
In 1992, Shane was doing sex work and received a call from a sixty-year-old man named Stefan Tanner. 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.
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.
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. His friend Dale told me that Shane would often call and tell him that Stefan was controlling and their relationship was toxic. After Stefan sexually assaulted Shane for the first time, Shane attempted suicide, cutting his wrists. Stefan wrapped them to stop the bleeding. Shane didn’t go to the hospital. It was like for that for a few years.
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, that an ex-lover of his was a drug lord in South America.
“I do not know what was true about Stefan,” Shane told me. “I only know that he controlled everything about my life.”
One day, tired of the lies, 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 he knew Stefan had a secret compartment, there was no gold. That night, Shane couldn’t sleep.
On October 14, 1995, the next day, he confronted Stefan — was he lying to him about all these stories? Stefan became angry. Shane told him that he was going back to Kentucky and started collecting his clothes, items Stefan had recently bought. Stefan called 911 and told the dispatcher he was being attacked by someone with a knife.
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. 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 paced up and down Ocean Avenue after leaving Stefan’s apartment. Here he was again, being discarded. He walked back by Stefan’s apartment building and saw the basement garage door open as a Volvo drove out. As the door rolled shut, Shane slid in. With his back against the wall of the dark garage, he slid down and sat on the concrete floor. 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 shove 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. 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. 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. 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. But when he saw Stefan in the trunk, he wasn’t moving. 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 an ex-lover in Kentucky and told him what happened. He told Shane to drive. He’d help.
Shane hung up, drove back to Stefan’s apartment, grabbed the rest of his belongings, including the suitcase in the stairway, then jumped in the car and drove. He had once yearned to be in this city, and now all he wanted was to leave it. 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.
When he finally arrived in Lexington, Kentucky, Shane hadn’t slept in three days. He and his ex sat in the front seat of the ex’s car and analyzed the situation. Shane would dismember Stefan. 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. Shane followed his ex in the Lincoln to the parking lot of their friend Wayne’s apartment complex. It was in the middle of Lexington. Not exactly discreet. His ex sat in a car parked nearby as Shane cut up Stefan’s body 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.
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, where detainees with high-profile cases are housed. He received a towel, sheets, a green plastic cup, toothpaste, and a bar of soap. Shane didn’t have anyone sending him money for commissary. His friend Dale was working more, and he couldn’t talk to his ex because he was a witness for the prosecution. He didn’t call his parents or grandparents all that much. Too much shame.
On September 24, 1996, with a detailed confession in hand, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles 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 apparently alive in the trunk). When a reporter asked Hynes why he chose Shane’s as the first death case after capital punishment was reinstated the year earlier, he said, “It will become clear during the trial why I chose this case.”
Many thought the choice was based, at least in part, on Shane’s sexuality. In the June 1997 issue of Out Magazine, a Hynes staffer told reporter Donna Minkowitz, “Probably the defendant being gay is one of the reasons Hynes chose him.”
Shane’s lawyers from the Capital Defender Office, an agency that represented defendants who were eligible for the death penalty and could not afford legal representation, thought it was inappropriate to seek death. His lawyers expected it to be used for the “worst of the worst” — not in “a tragic domestic dispute.”
To build his defense, 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.”
Over the next few years, Shane’s case would bounce from court to court, which is typical when someone is facing execution. 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.
Kyle Reeves, who would be the supervising prosecutor in my case a few years later, stood up and addressed the court: “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 turned to the Tanner family and spoke.
“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 Albert 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.
In 1999, Shane landed in Gladiator School, better known as Comstock, or Great Meadow Correctional Facility. With fifty years to life, he became inmate #99A1389. Guys had heard bits and pieces about Shane’s case: gay lover, chopped-up body. The “in crowd” of white boys wasn’t welcoming, but Shane 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 2004, when I was making my way upstate to prison for killing a friend turned rival in Brooklyn, Shane had already been locked up for several years. While working as a clerk in the law library, he learned New York’s Court of Appeals had struck down the death penalty. 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. 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 Shane 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.” Laisure’s response to Shane was prophetic.
“The odds of being granted [early release] in a murder case are probably one-in-a-million,” Laisure wrote. “You, my friend, are that one-in-a-million… 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.”
Shane, present day
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It was around 2015 that Shane had a revelation. When he 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 side-barred 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. 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.
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 created trauma in people who went on to commit violent crimes.
In the mid-aughts, the New York Coalition for Women Prisoners began lobbying for legislation that would require judges to consider the abuse that many defendants had suffered and weigh how it related to the violent crimes they committed. This bill, called the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act, or DVSJA, was getting a lot of momentum. Even though the law’s language was “gender-neutral,” it was not yet on Shane’s radar.
It was another prisoner, Mulumba Kazigo, who expressed hope that the new bill would help him get out, that a judge would recognize the effects of the abuse that set his actions in motion. He and I had these conversations about the DVSJA 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.
By August 2019, 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.
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 law. It would be a video conference because of the Covid pandemic. Mulumba wore his state greens, walked to the end of the long tier and down the narrow staircase, left A Block, and walked through the dark corridors. He cleared a metal detector. 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. 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 bill, especially after it 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 the statute, however, he felt like it 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.
Shane soon recognized the political climate was changing, just like his former lawyer Paul Laisure had hoped. Shane typed up a letter to Steve Zeidman, a professor at CUNY’s School of Law, asking for suggestions for an expert witness. Zeidman thought Shane was a good candidate for clemency but quickly realized he was an even better candidate for resentencing under the new domestic violence law.
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. 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.
“He has served nearly 29 years of incarceration, longer than the time he has lived at liberty,” a draft of Shane’s motion read. “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.”
A draft of Shane’s motion, which was shared with 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.
In September of that year, I was bused to Sing Sing. I had transferred out a few years before, leaving Shane behind, and now I was back. 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 and I met on Tuesday evenings in the general library. Not as journalist and subject, but as friends. 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.
At this point, I felt exasperated with prison, the violence, the politics, the indifference of administrators. After 24 years, I wanted out. After 30, so did Shane.
By January 2025, Shane had met with the Brooklyn prosecutors who had received a draft of his resentencing motion in the hope — a rare commodity in here — that they would consent. For the first time, Shane believed he would soon be free.
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Now, he’s not so sure. His legal team is preparing to file his DVSJA motion without the District Attorney’s support. Instead of a quick resolution, Shane now faces months or years of contentious and emotionally taxing litigation in court.
We’re all looking to get out, us criminals in here who’ve changed and become more. But even more than I do, Michael Shane Hale deserves mercy.
