Carol Levin emailed me the other day to tell me that Corey Arthur is up for parole yet again and ask me to write another letter to the New York State Parole Board in opposition. That prompted me to do a search about Corey and Jon’s murder. That search was pretty enlightening.

I learned that true crime bloggers who weren’t even alive when Jon was murdered are interested in the “mysteries and intricacies” of the case. I saw that Corey has moved well beyond his initial foray into better public relations (with a Newsweek magazine spread) to a gallery showing of his paintings, a blog, and a public rapprochement with the mother who abused him because he looked too much like his father. According to all of this publicity, Corey is a changed man: He is “an artist and a published writer, a feminist, and a Quaker.” (https://www.friendsjournal.org/she-told-me-save-the-flower/). He’s on Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and Facebook. He “publishes” his meditations on the art of friendship and the responsibility of being the prisoners’ representative to the incarceration committee on Medium and on an inmate blogger page on Facebook (http://inmateblogger.com/2020/08/15/introduction-blog-by-corey-devon-arthur/)

You know what Corey doesn’t say in all of his musings about earning his legal research certification and “learn[ing] how to shape out the contours of my spirit using the sources of my truth” (https://www.mygallerynyc.com/corey-devon-arthur) and bemoaning having been “arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life for the robbery and murder of my High School English Teacher?” (Facebook). He doesn’t admit to having committed the crime. He never once says, “I did it. I slit my teacher’s throat for money. I killed another sentient being for $800 and bought sneakers with the proceeds.”  Instead he prattles about smoking crack cocaine and unidentified assailants breaking into Jon’s apartment and forcing him to duct tape Jon to a chair. (How else to explain that fingerprint?)

Painter. Poet. Blogger. Feminist. Researcher. Seeker of truth. Model prisoner. Cold-blooded killer. Con artist. 

Corey is no different from Jack Henry Abbott, another “enlightened” prisoner wrongly held “in the belly of the beast” and championed by the naïveté of the “cognoscenti,” people like Norman Mailer. Remember what happened with him: In June, 1981, six weeks after obtaining parole, Abbott fatally stabbed a waiter on Second Avenue after being refused permission to use the restroom. 

If Corey Arthur is released before he admits to what he did and apologizes with extreme contrition to Gerald and Carol Levin, Lee and Laura Levin, me, and every single other friend and family member who loved Jon and was robbed of Jon, then the NYSPB and untold others will have fallen for the act. The twenty-first century Renaissance Man, simulacrum of Jack Henry Abbott, will have fooled everyone. He wins.