Black Bird Subject James Keene’s Book Helped With His “Redemption”

Based on James Keene’s 2010 memoir, Apple TV+’s Black Bird tells the story of a former high school football star who’s given a high-stakes opportunity for redemption. After James “Jimmy” Keene had led his Kankakee Eastridge High School football team in the early ‘90s, the star athlete chose not to accept the out-of-state scholarships he received. He stayed in Chicago, where he attended a nationally ranked junior college and continued football and wrestling as he became a prolific drug dealer. The son of a decorated Chicago-area police chief, Keene, played by Taron Egerton in Black Bird, was arrested in 1996 and sentenced to 10 years in prison for his part in a large-scale drug operation.

Just a few months into Keene’s sentence, the federal prosecutor who put him behind bars approached him with an offer. He can either serve his complete minimum-security prison sentence (without the possibility of parole) or go undercover for the FBI in a maximum-security prison to get suspected serial killer Larry Hall (Paul Walter Hauser) to confess to several murders and reveal the locations of the victims’ bodies. In return for his cooperation, Keene would be rewarded with an early prison release.

Despite the potential dangers, Keene took the deal and transferred to the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri to befriend Hall as an undercover operative. Once there, Keene slowly but successfully gained Hall’s trust and said his fellow inmate eventually admitted to killing 19-year-old Tricia Lynn Reitler in 1993. Still, he wouldn’t reveal the location of her body. Later, Keene approached Hall in the prison workshop, where he says the suspected killer was carving wooden falcons and placing them on a map with red dots over Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin to “watch over the dead.”

Believing he’d uncovered sufficient evidence to fulfill his end of the deal and secure his release, Keene blew his cover and stopped pretending to be Hall’s friend. “I told him he was a ... sicko. I told him that he was insane. I said that ‘You are one of the most despicable forms of human life on this planet,’” Keene recounted to CNN in 2011. The altercation landed Keene in solitary confinement, and by the time he got out, the map and falcons had disappeared.

Regardless, prosecutors believed Keene had done enough to earn his freedom, and he was released from prison in 1999 after serving a total sentence of about 17 months. Once out of prison, he spent the next five years with his father, James “Big Jim” Keene (Ray Liotta), who died in November 2004 at age 67. To this day, Keene still pays tribute to his late father, whom he’s long idolized. In one public Facebook post from June 2022, for example, he called his dad both his “hero” and the “greatest man [he’s] ever known.”

Keene capitalized on his time in prison by releasing his book, In With The Devil: A Fallen Hero, A Serial Killer, And A Dangerous Bargain For Redemption, with journalist Hillel Levin in 2010. (He re-released an expanded version of the memoir on July 5 with a new title: Black Bird: One Man's Freedom Hides in Another Man's Darkness.) Not only did the book inspire the Apple TV+ series, but Keene is also an executive producer on the show and attended the Los Angeles premiere on June 29.

During a 2012 appearance on NBC’s Dateline, Keene told host Lester Holt that he’s especially proud that his book and expertise have led to the reopening of more cold case investigations, several of which involve Hall. The NBC broadcast also noted that Keene is involved in the real estate industry, and he even had conversations with Brad Pitt about adapting his story at one time. “I did a good deed, and I did a lot of good things,” Keene, who now splits his time between Chicago and Los Angeles, added on Dateline. “And that's where I feel the redemption comes in. I’ve done something good for the things that I did wrong.”

Correction: A previous version of this story misreported a detail about James Keene’s college recruitment. It has been updated to accurately reflect Keene’s post-high school activity.