True Story

by Michael Finkel

  In June of 1992, five months after Longo moved out of his parents’ house, he and Baker and Karyn joined a large group on a bus trip to the Jehovah’s Witness headquarters in Brooklyn, New York. They stayed at a Holiday Inn in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey. A few nights into the trip, as the group was milling around the lobby discussing where to head for dinner, Longo gave a friend twenty dollars to take Karyn along with the group and pay for her meal. He discreetly suggested to Baker that they sneak off to the hotel’s restaurant. Baker agreed.

  They went in and sat down. When the maître d’ walked by, Longo gave him a furtive nod. A moment later, a bread basket was delivered to the table. Baker chose a roll and began buttering it. Longo looked at her, slightly dismayed. She took a bite, and then something registered in her mind. Something about the bread basket. She dropped the roll on her plate and grabbed at the basket with both hands. She brought out a small, clear box. Almost instantly, she began to cry. She opened it and took out the diamond ring, but before she could try it on, Longo grasped her hands.

  “Would you dare to be my wife?” he asked.

  “You know I do,” she answered, and Longo slipped the ring on her finger.

  TWENTY-TWO

  FROM APRIL OF 2002, when Longo first called me, until the start of his trial, almost a year later, we spoke on the telephone nearly every Wednesday. Longo’s calls usually arrived early in the evening, around seven my time, and we always spoke for the full hour, until we were involuntarily disconnected. It soon became habit for me to keep to myself on Wednesday nights; I’d cook an early dinner, then brew a pot of tea and retreat to my home office, upstairs.

  I would ready my telephone recording device, settle into my chair, and sip my tea and wait. When Longo’s call came, I’d always feel a spike of adrenaline, and as the collect-call-from-jail message played, I tried to relax my breathing before I pressed the one key on the phone to open the line.

  Our conversations usually felt unforced and chatty. Longo, it seemed, was simply letting his mind wander, pleased to have a distraction from the Lincoln County Jail. We debated about our favorite American cities (New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, Longo said, were his top three); our preferred cuts of beef (prime rib for him, tenderloin for me); and the best thing about being bumped into first class on a plane flight (“The ice cream,” he said). Longo revealed his feelings about the death penalty (“No one has the right to take anybody else’s life”), jailhouse shaving cream (“Soap and water work a lot better”), and the particulars of his vasectomy (“It was four lady doctors. Four young, university lady doctors. I’m like, ‘Wait, whoa, this is a joke, right?’”).

  I asked him if he kept a picture of his family hanging in his cell. “No,” he said, “I’m not quite prepared for that.” We discussed, at great length, the design flaws of a jailhouse commode. One time, I shook a martini as we talked, then loudly sipped on it. “I’m pretty giddy just listening to you,” he said.

  Longo informed me that he could do two hundred push-ups without resting, that he has always refused to eat canned fruit, and that he would order a gin gimlet or a Manhattan if there were an inmate pub. He said that one of his life’s biggest regrets was not attending college. He conceded that, despite all the hours he’d put in with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, he was not particularly religious. His piety, he said, “was more strong in show. It wasn’t strong internally. It was a real strong devotion to putting up appearances.” When I asked him what he yearned for most in jail, he said, “Besides family?” and I said, “Yeah,” and he said, “I really miss being able to just go out and get a cup of coffee.”

  One Wednesday, early on, we worked out the official ground rules of our relationship. Mutual honesty in all matters was the chief tenet. I promised, as well, that everything we spoke or wrote about would be kept private until his trial was over. After that, we agreed, I could publish whatever I wished; nothing would ever be off the record. I made no guarantees about waiting for appeals or other legal proceedings. Longo gave me his word that he would not speak with other members of the press, and I, upon his prompting, swore that if anybody contacted me regarding his case—investigators, the media, members of MaryJane’s family—I would inform Longo as swiftly as possible.

  I eventually hired a typist to transcribe all our conversations. The dialogue stretches for one thousand nine hundred and forty-nine pages, across seven Kinko’s-bound volumes—a mountain of prattle strewn with sporadic rivulets of unpredictable oddness. “I don’t think I could talk this much to my mom,” Longo told me. “I know I couldn’t talk this much to my mom,” I replied. In fact, over the period during which we regularly spoke, Longo never called anyone else, including his parents. The one time he dialed his home number, he said, he heard his father’s voice, was overcome with anxiety, and hung up.

  “Do you know that famous book Tuesdays with Morrie?” I once asked him.

  “By Mitch Albom?” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I had two copies of it,” he told me.

  “I was going to call my book Wednesdays with Longo,” I said.

  He gave me a charitable chuckle. “Actually,” he said, “I’ve spoken with Mitch Albom.” Albom is from the Detroit area, Longo added, not far from where he once lived. Longo’s management jobs in the newspaper-distribution business sometimes brought him into contact with local writers.

  “You should have been Mitch Albom in Mexico,” I suggested.

  “I guess,” he said. “But I wanted somebody that nobody would—uh, I don’t want to say.”

  “Just say it.”

  “Somebody that nobody would recognize. If I said I was soand-so, I didn’t want anyone to say, ‘Oh, give me a break.’”

  “Like Stephen King?”

  “Yeah, exactly.”

  “It doesn’t bother me,” I said. “Come on, I’m full of myself but not over-full.”

  “Well,” he said, “I’d heard of you.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “I’m not the most well-read person in the world, so that’s pretty good testimony,” he said. “I mean, I could have called myself Dr. Seuss.”

  “Theodor Geisel?” I said, attempting to one-up him. A subtext to our relationship, one we never overtly acknowledged, was this long-running intellectual skirmish. Though Longo and I sometimes downplayed it by feigning humility (“I’m not the most well-read person in the world”), each of us, I believe, felt smarter than the other, and frequently tried to prove it. “That’s Dr. Seuss’s real name,” I explained.

  “Yeah,” Longo said, “I know that.”

  “You do?”

  “I’ve studied a little bit about Dr. Seuss.”

  “Damn,” I said. It was my turn to act the naïf. “I don’t want to play Trivial Pursuit against you.”

  “He’s from Wisconsin, I believe.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You’re over my head now.” (I looked it up later. Geisel was from Massachusetts.)

  “There’s this whole park,” he continued, “that’s got statues of all the Dr. Seuss characters in bronze.”

  “You’ve out-Seussed me.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I thought I’d scored a point with Theodor Geisel. Obviously not.”

  “Well, I had kids,” he said. He fell silent for a few moments, as if his use of the past tense had stunned him. “We’ve been to Seuss-land,” he added, though in a more subdued manner.

  “Okay, touché,” I said, towing the conversation back toward jocularity. “I give.”

  And on and on and on.

  It all amounted to something. Gradually, over the course of weeks and months, the nature of our interactions changed. From one call to the next, it was scarcely noticeable. But if you read the entire seven-volume transcription in a single sitting (I’ve done it twice), you would see it’s like one of those time-lapse films—a tree sprouting in the forest; a high-rise tower going up—in which a metamorphosis occurs at a pace difficult to discern from day
to day.

  I started to recognize what was happening on a Wednesday in early September that Longo did not call. He’d been reprimanded for communicating with other inmates, I later found out, and had lost telephone privileges for the week. That night, as I waited by the phone, a curious feeling crept over me. I’d always thought that the calls were mostly a favor to him; he had often told me that they were the highlight of his week. “I don’t think I’d be as sane if it hadn’t been for you,” he’d said.

  But when seven o’clock passed and the phone remained silent, I felt sharply disappointed. I had things I wanted to say—about my state of mind, about the status of my romance—that I wouldn’t feel comfortable mentioning to anyone else. When I’d realized, for example, that I was falling in love with Jill, I had discussed this sensation with Longo first, before I’d even told Jill. “It’s good to hear,” Longo had said, “but scary I’m sure.”

  Why did I tell Longo first? For the same reasons my letters were so candid. Longo was the only person in my life I felt morally superior to, and something about this situation produced in me an unexpected openness. When it came to my Times debacle, I was too humiliated to talk intimately about the subject with any of my friends. Even with my parents and sister, I scarcely spoke directly of the firing; the few times it was mentioned, the conversation swiftly descended into silence until we focused on easier, ancillary subjects, like how I was going to earn a living.

  Jill was a great source of solace; when I wasn’t occupied with Longo, I was spending most of my time with her. But with Jill, as well, shame usually overrode any desire I had to explore the causes of my trouble at the magazine. With Longo, though, I could talk freely and candidly. Compared with the crimes he was accused of, my transgressions seemed so petty that I found myself gabbing away, poking at the roots of my behavior without hesitation or embarrassment.

  Longo seemed to fully comprehend why I so badly wanted to please my Times editor, and why I was incapable of admitting to her that I hadn’t conducted the proper interviews. He said he liked listening to my chatter. “I enjoy hearing about it because it’s real-world drama,” he said. “Not the worries of the criminal element that I get in here, but normal life.” He was never judgmental about what I’d done, never patronizing. Frankly, he made me feel better about myself. What I’m trying to say is that when Longo didn’t call, I missed him. Without our conversation, my week seemed incomplete.

  I wasn’t the only one captivated by Longo. As the months passed, he began including extra materials in his packages to me. Usually they were documents like FBI reports, police interviews, and legal briefs prepared by his attorneys. He also sent much of the mail he received. There were dozens of formal letters from TV stations and newspapers requesting interviews, but also a peculiar selection of correspondence from people who seemed entranced by Longo.

  “Hi Christian,” one of these opened. “My name is Debi. I’ve wanted to write you for several months now. I honestly can’t tell you why I feel so compelled to do so. All I know is something is drawing me to you and I felt I should let you know…. I have verystrong feelings about it, so I’m following up those feelings. Please don’t think I’m a total freak. I’m not. I’ve never done ANYTHING like this before.” Men, too, sent Longo tender notes. “You may be across the miles,” one card read, from a gentleman in California named Joseph, “but you’re close in heart.”

  Longo’s charm even affected Jill. In a onetime exception to my Wednesday night ritual, I had her over for dinner when Longo called. Jill had never tried to dissuade me from speaking with Longo, but she wasn’t fully comfortable, either, with the amount of time I was devoting to an accused murderer. “Couldn’t you make friends with someone else?” she’d asked me. Soon after Longo rang, in a moment of spontaneity, I handed her the phone. They spoke for only a couple of seconds—“Nice to meet your voice,” Longo told her—but a few weeks later she received a two-page letter from him.

  The letter was primarily a critique of my relationship with Jill. “He’s got a lot of good emotion tied up in you even if he doesn’t seem to want to let it out,” Longo wrote about me. “He seems to be pretty cement-stiff in some ways.” He then accused me of being self-centered and a mediocre listener. He made a few blandly approving remarks—I’m apparently “an interesting guy with a lot to offer”—before concluding with this: “You two seem a very complementary match. We just need to splash him w/ a bucket of ice water—wake him up a little.”

  Jill was impressed by Longo’s apparent forthrightness. It was fascinating, she said, to see that he wasn’t trying to win her favor by saying syrupy things about me. Also, she pointed out, he’d nailed my personality precisely.

  Longo’s letter to Jill disturbed me. It made me fear that I’d gone too far, that I’d allowed Longo to become too involved in my life. What would happen, I wondered, if he was actually acquitted of the murders? “Come on over, when you get a chance,” I’d written in a letter, playing off his assurances that he’d be found innocent. “I’ll cook you up a bison roast.” But did I actually want him over for dinner?

  No, I realized, I did not. I didn’t tell him this—my openness with him, as it turned out, had a limit. I had no idea how well, or how poorly, my relationship with Longo might end. If he were guilty, Longo clearly had hidden within him a terrifying violent streak. To have him rooting around in Jill’s life was too much for me. I had a few vivid, panicked visions of Jill being stuffed into a suitcase, and I suddenly wished that I hadn’t told Longo her real name or mentioned her actual job. And even if Longo were locked up for life, a clever inmate, I knew, could extend his reach well beyond a prison’s walls. I asked Jill to not respond to the letter, and she agreed without protest.

  But just a single personal note from Longo, a small sample of his ability to sound sincere and intelligent and kind, had altered Jill’s perceptions. Before she’d read his letter, I was her only source of information about Longo—we’d spent hours discussing the nuances of his personality—and she’d believed, as I did, that he was almost certainly guilty of the murders, though we were both determined to withhold final judgment until after his trial.

  Now, however, Jill said she’d begun to feel that Longo may indeed have been away from home when his family’s murders occurred. She told me she wasn’t able to conceive how the writer of such a considerate and funny letter could also have killed his family. Not only that, she took to quoting from his letter—“You need to be splashed with a bucket of ice water, Mr. Cement-Stiff”—in the midst of our tiffs.

  Longo’s most uninhibited fan club, it seemed, was the women’s wing of the Lincoln County Jail. This section happened to be adjacent to the maximum-security ward, so the female inmates could sometimes see Longo through the tall, narrow window in his cell’s door, and hear his voice through the vents. He received fantasizing letters, covertly delivered to his cell, on a regular basis. Longo mailed me several of them.

  “Hey Chris,” began one, from a woman calling herself Cotton Candy. “I lay relaxing in my hot, scented bubble bath & I smile as thoughts of you enter my mind.” A page later, after a discussion of Longo’s “tight, gorgeous chest,” and “deep, seductive voice,” the prose swiftly escalated: “I guide your hard cock deeply into my throbbing hot wet pussy.” (In this same mailing, Longo mentioned an item called a “Fi-Fi”—a rubber glove wrapped in a tightly rolled towel; “the jailhouse version,” he explained, “of an inflatable doll.”)

  Longo’s response to Ms. Candy was eventually turned over to the district attorney. Never one to use blue language—“bonehead” is his most abrasive epithet—Longo wrote of “champaigne & chocolate” and “tasting each other the way it was meant to be done” and, later, “orgasmic fulfillment.”

  In a second letter to Cotton Candy, also acquired by prosecutors, Longo actually impersonated me again. Throughout an eleven-page note, he sprinkled sentences and paragraphs he’d lifted from the travel articles I’d mailed him. Only he pretended it was he
who’d embarked on the adventures. “I am one to take risks & chances,” he crowed. He added that he dreamed of continuing his explorations as soon as he was released. He’d again roam the world and express his creativity; he’d hop trains and hitch rides, unburdened of all of life’s anchors.

  To another female inmate, an eighteen-year-old named Brandy Fenton with whom he traded letters by stashing them in books in the law library, Longo displayed his sensitive side. “Put your sweatshirt over your pillow,” he wrote, “wrap the arms over your shoulders, squeeze the pillow as tight as you can & cry as long as you want. That sweatshirt & pillow is me.”

  Letters also arrived from a convicted serial killer in the Oregon State Penitentiary, named Keith Jesperson. “Every letter that he sends me,” said Longo, “he talks about another person that he killed.” He received very little hate mail, he said, though one of MaryJane’s relatives repeatedly sent him copies of the memorial program from his family’s funeral.

  Sometimes, Longo seemed to like jail. Being incarcerated, he wrote, “has given me [the] greatest opportunity for introspection in my life.” His bail was set at $2.5 million, and he insisted that if someone were to offer him the money, he’d refuse it. “I’m grateful for the holding pattern that my life is in now,” he wrote. “If I weren’t in here, there’d be much more to stress about.”

  Other moments were not so benign. “There’s tough times every day,” he admitted. The words “monotony” and “loneliness” and “depression” appeared in his letters with increasing frequency. “My existence is wasted,” he wrote. Nighttimes were difficult—he averaged, he wrote, no more than three hours of disjointed sleep. He had nightmares, but those he described as “easy.” To end them, you just woke up. “Reality,” he said, “is what’s horrible.” He craved human contact; he said he’d invented illnesses simply to spend time with the jailhouse nurse.