The first time John J. Lennon set eyes on Robert Chambers — the man notoriously branded the “Preppy Killer” by the media — he was slouched in an oversized prison-issue green shirt and dirty Skechers, just another convict at New York’s now-shuttered Sullivan Correctional Facility.

Lennon was struck by the contrast.

“He was hardly the symbol of privilege I’d seen on TV,” he writes in “ The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us ” (Celadon Books), out Tuesday. Then 54, Chambers was, Lennon says, still tall and broad-shouldered, his jawline sharp, but his thick hair was gray and thinning.

What Lennon saw was not the Upper East Side prepster immortalized by tabloids, but a man finishing a 19-year sentence for drugs, a conviction that had followed the 15 years

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