Is True Crime Keeping Me in Prison?

In September 2018, I published a story in New York about the mental-illness crisis in prison. On a lark, I reached out to a producer I knew at CNN, Loen Kelley, and asked if she could help get me a segment to talk about the crisis. I knew Loen through her website, PrisonWriters.

com. In 2001, when I was 24, I shot and killed a man on a Brooklyn street. I was sentenced to 25 years to life, on top of the three years I was already serving for selling drugs.



Eventually, I ended up at Attica. I joined a writing workshop and took to journalism. Loen and I had talked shop a few times.

I thought she had my best interests at heart. Loen wrote me a letter introducing me to two producers at HLN, a sister channel that primarily runs true-crime shows. Her colleagues came to visit me and told me their program was about redemption, and that the host, Chris Cuomo, wanted to talk to me about becoming a journalist in prison.

When I was on trial, there were a couple of cheeky tabloid articles — “DA Seeks Instant Karma in Drug Killing” read one New York Daily News headline — because of the name I share with the slain Beatle, but the media wasn’t particularly interested in my case. That, plus the fact that I had already served 18 years — the median time that a person serves for murder in America — made it easy for me to believe that Cuomo wanted to focus on my comeback. Before the visit, I had asked my brother to search the docuseries that Cuomo hosted besides his nightly CNN show.

One came up: Inside Evil . “You guys aren’t looking to put me on that show, right?” I asked the two producers in the visiting room. The first season was called Inside With Chris Cuomo , one producer told me, and for the second season, it was renamed Inside Evil .

The third season, she said, would feature stories of redemption. (When I previously reached out to CNN for comment, the network told me that one of the producers I met with had been “in conversations” about the series title. The other producer also emailed me that there had been a “good faith effort” to change the name.

But a CNN spokesperson now says that “there was no meaningful discussion” about changing it.) When Cuomo came to interview me weeks later, he was honest with me: The show was called Inside Evil . I felt like an idiot, but what do you do when you’re talking to a TV journalist whose brother is the governor, the one elected official with the power to commute your sentence and set you free? You proceed.

I watched my episode in late 2019. Months before, it had aired on HLN, but we didn’t get that channel in the prison cable package. We did get CNN, though, and it was airing the whole third season of Inside Evil that night.

The two-hour premiere was about a serial killer who, according to the show’s promotional copy, murdered more women than Jack the Ripper. At the end of the episode, it was revealed that the man hanged himself in his San Quentin cell. My episode, the season finale, was called “Killer Writing.

” For the bulk of the episode, I sit across from Cuomo, walking him through my old criminal lifestyle, trying to explain why I looked up to gangsters. As I recount the details — the tone of my voice wavering from exasperation to arrogance — the viewer sees footage of the sister of the man I killed crying. Photos of my various mug shots, zoomed in on my bloodshot eyes, flash on the screen.

The shadowy, faceless reenactments of the murder are the hardest parts to watch. I’m represented by a dark figure in all black who moves in slow motion to grab the AR15 from the trunk. When he (I) pulls the trigger, shots fire from the barrel and the shell casings scatter on the pavement.

This scene — the lowest moment of my life, killing someone — replays several times throughout the 45-minute episode. I can no longer separate these images from my actual memories of what I did that night. In my mind, they’re all mixed up.

When Cuomo and I turned to my writing, he pointed out that we’d worked with the same editor at Men’s Health . “You and I do the same job,” Cuomo said, “literally with the same person, with the same outlet, in two totally different universes. How do you reconcile?” I didn’t, I told him, I just did the work.

Today, it’s hard to hear myself say that. I was too proud of who I’d become and not insightful enough about what I’d done. I said things that I regret.

But some of my answers were edited to fit the theme of the show: evil. And now those clips will remain online forever. While I have a writing career to push back on the show’s nasty narrative, so many other incarcerated people have no recourse when true crime makes a spectacle of their worst deeds.

Victims’ families have complained over the years about the insensitive and unethical ways producers have approached them. But the collateral damage of this popular form of entertainment doesn’t end there. These shows reveal intimate details and family histories of victims and offenders.

When seen by other prisoners and guards, these shows can put incarcerated subjects in danger. They can also adversely affect prisoners’ families and loved ones, who have to contend with public scrutiny when the crimes are republicized. Often, producers don’t ask people in prison to participate or weigh in on episodes about their cases, leaving them blindsided when someone in a neighboring cell yells that they are on TV.

When producers do approach us, they tend to offer disingenuous descriptions of the show’s purpose, or misrepresent the title, or make promises they can’t keep. If we do participate, our answers are almost always spliced and edited to highlight our worst responses, like a fumbled expression of remorse or an overly glib comment about our crimes. The final cuts almost always obscure the layers of trauma that lead people to commit violent crimes in the first place, like rotten upbringings and domestic violence.

And if we appear on these shows, it can even affect our prospects for release. I know this firsthand. Over the years, I’ve watched countless true-crime shows about men in prison with me.

Sometimes, when I transfer to another facility, I’ll see a familiar face and wonder if I was with him in another prison or if I saw him on TV. This has been happening more and more recently, as the years and the shows have piled up. When you learn about the crime before you meet the person, it makes you recoil; it colors everything about them.

It was like this when I met Mulumba Kazigo in Sing Sing, in 2017. Thin with effeminate mannerisms, Mulumba, who is Ugandan American, grew up in a yellow house in Westchester with six siblings; their mother; and their father, Dr. Joseph Kazigo, a surgeon.

In 2005, after years of enduring horrific abuse, Mulumba broke into the apartment his father rented near the hospital where he worked on Long Island. He beat the 67-year-old with a baseball bat and slit his throat. His sister, then a doctor in the U.

S. Army, told the prosecutor that her brother was on antidepressants and suicidal, and that their father had kicked him out and told him to get his meds from the hospital emergency room. She explained the “sick way we were all beaten as we grew up.

” Mulumba received 20 years. About halfway through Mulumba’s sentence, a producer from Investigation Discovery reached out and asked for an interview. He was wary, but, he says, after the producer promised him $1,000, he agreed to participate.

It’s an enticing proposition for a prisoner who would have to work thousands of hours to make that much. After the film crew interviewed him in Sing Sing, Mulumba never heard from the producer or received the money. (A representative for Mike Mathis Productions, the company that filmed the program for the network, said it does not pay people to come on the show or promise payment.

) In 2013, Investigation Discovery aired Mulumba’s episode as part of the Blood Relatives series. It was called “Paging Doctor Death.” The show itself is a caricature of true crime — the corny narrator, cringe-worthy B-roll, exoticism, and cheesy music.

It sets 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. The writing is terrible. After mentioning one of Mulumba’s siblings had already committed suicide, the narrator adds, “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 he and his family endured at the hands of his abusive father. “Yes, Joseph can be tough as nails,” the narration continues, “but what’s wrong with running a tight ship?” Mulumba felt misled and exploited.

He told me he regretted his participation because it hurt his family even more. It was an added shame for him, I imagine, to know that a lurid production was out there about such an intimate tragedy: Mulumba’s siblings and mother are family of both the victim and the offender. When my episode aired, I was paranoid that guys were gossiping about the show.

The man I killed had his own encounters with the law, and his mug shot would be broadcast throughout the prison. I had already run into a few of his friends over the years. One, who knew me from the neighborhood, shanked me six times in the chest, puncturing my lung.

But it’s the enemies you don’t know you have who can be the most dangerous. Before I met a guy I’ll call Kyle, I felt like I knew him. I had watched a true-crime show about his case years before.

He stabbed and beat someone and received ten years for the crime. I knew that Kyle, a little fella with bulging blue eyes and a manic personality, would be prey in prison. When he moved onto my tier in Sing Sing, where I’d been transferred in 2017, that’s exactly what I witnessed.

Others had found out from the show that Kyle’s family had money. When the dealers inside learned that he liked to get high, they gave the privileged kid heroin and K2 for the next decade. I was with Kyle in two different prisons, and both times he landed on my tier.

On countless occasions, I saw him catatonic from K2, or would see him overdose on opiates and then get revived with Narcan. It got so bad that — to prevent him from buying drugs from other prisoners — the superintendent quarantined Kyle in the prison infirmary ward for the last months of his sentence, until he was released last year. But the most preyed-upon subjects for true crime may not be men like Kyle and me.

Nationally, women’s prisons are a glut of trauma, and their population has grown at twice the rate of men since 1980. Today, there are about 200,000 women behind bars, amounting to nearly the total U.S.

prison population of the early ’70s. While activists and scholars have been trying to change the narrative about the role trauma plays in domestic killings, true-crime content featuring women has proliferated. I recently called Kwaneta Harris, a prison journalist in Texas serving 50 years for the 2006 murder of her lover.

Over the years, I’ve encouraged Kwaneta’s writing, calling her mother from my prison at the same time she’d call her from hers, so we could talk shop about reporting from the inside. We often discuss true crime. She had her own experience with the genre.

Years ago, Snapped , the popular show about female killers, did an episode about Kwaneta without her participation. When it aired in 2016, kids who had seen it started to bully her daughter, who was in high school at the time. She had to switch schools twice, and Kwaneta told her to say that her mother was dead.

“I’d rather her lie and get sympathy than tell the truth and get judged,” Kwaneta said. Just like the men in New York prisons, true-crime producers are constantly reaching out to the women in Kwaneta’s cellblock. One time, I called during dayroom rec, and Kwaneta passed her tablet phone to Shaina Sepulvado.

In 2005, when Shaina was 16, she participated in the murder of her stepfather with two friends. Shaina, her friends, and her mother, who was convicted of putting them up to it, all got life. Shaina has always denied her mother’s involvement.

In 2011, she appeared on Snapped . Her episode doesn’t dedicate much time to the fact that she was a minor with a learning disability at the time of her crime. Today, at 35, Shaina still has difficulty reading and writing.

It’s why she shares the solicitations she receives from true-crime producers with Kwaneta. When a producer from I Am a Killer recently invited Shaina on the show, she declined. “I realized that the other shows had edited my words and made me look like a horrible person,” she told me.

Although Shaina takes responsibility for the part she played in her stepfather’s murder, she did not pull the trigger: “The show I Am a Killer suggests that I believe I am the very thing I am not.” In 2019, New York lawmakers passed the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act, which empowered sentencing judges to reconsider whether the abuse that defendants suffered was a “significant contributing factor” to their crime and warranted a time cut. The new law was mostly freeing women.

One study of jailed women in five states found that 86 percent had experienced sexual violence and 77 percent had suffered serious abuse by a partner, but, in August 2020, Mulumba was the first male prisoner freed under the new law. “I am not claiming that what I did was right,” Mulumba wrote in an op-ed for Tulsa World after his release, advocating for a similar law to be passed in Oklahoma. “But I am claiming that sentencing practices should take into account the context in which the crime is committed.

” Some producers might argue that their shows acknowledge these mitigating circumstances — a dysfunctional and traumatic upbringing, severe mental illness, a learning disability — but I doubt the sensationalist titles and macabre tones leave any audience seriously grappling with them. Detectives, medical examiners, and court psychiatrists investigate these crimes and lawyers craft opposing narratives that get refereed by a judge and decided on by a jury. But after the defendant goes to prison, there is another group of people who take it upon themselves to rehash it all again for the sole purpose of entertainment.

I sometimes wonder if the producers, journalists, and podcasters who make careers out of personal tragedies, with or without our permission, ever ask themselves why they’re retelling and, worse, sensationalizing stories of violence. Many people watch these shows, I imagine, as voyeurs of our worst deeds. To hear about infidelity and murder and the lengths to which so many of us went to cover our tracks — it’s shameful.

My episode revealed something that never came out at trial: After I killed the man who I once called my friend and disposed of his body, I called his mother asking for him, looking to cover my tracks. When watching in my cell years later, I was disgusted with myself. Others were, too.

In recent years, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, under the progressive leadership of Eric Gonzalez, set up a unit to review clemency petitions. Getting support from the office that put you away could help convince the governor to commute your sentence, but prosecutors were split on my petition. They would neither oppose nor support.

According to one of his deputies, Gonzalez was “really spooked” by “Killer Writing.” When my legal team met with Governor Kathy Hochul’s clemency staff about my application last year, one of her deputies asked detailed questions about “Killer Writing.” Did I really call his mother asking for my friend after I killed him? Why did I use an AR15? I can understand why they had questions.

Clemency is all about optics, and they don’t want to look like they are too merciful toward someone who doesn’t deserve it. But their fixation on Inside Evil devastated me. Just as I had hoped the show would focus on who I was at the time, I was hoping the governor and DA would focus on who I am today: a working journalist, a mentor, someone who is sober.

Journalism has helped me feel empathy and come to terms with my crime. The consideration to commute my sentence has been shaped by TV producers just as much — maybe more — than by who I’ve become in prison over the past 24 years. I now have to wonder if true crime is keeping me in prison.

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