True Story

by Michael Finkel

  Longo left Indianapolis and rushed home—“angered,” he wrote, “that so many people had been made aware of my transgression.” During the trip, he made a pact with himself. He resolved to tell MaryJane the absolute truth about his affair. “She deserved honesty,” he wrote. “She deserved to know where she stood & what she could expect.”

  He picked up MaryJane at the Leonards’, where a large support group had assembled. Upon entering the house, he wrote, he felt a “hot wave of distrust that came at me from everyone in the room.” He asked the Leonards to look after his kids, then drove home with MaryJane. They sat in the living room, facing one another, and talked.

  Chris began, he wrote, by apologizing.

  “For what?” MaryJane asked.

  “Everything,” he answered.

  MaryJane asked if he was in love with Meadows.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Are you still in love with me?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said again.

  “Then what are you going to do?” MaryJane asked.

  Chris said that they could try to work through the problem, if she were willing.

  MaryJane said she wasn’t sure. She needed to know how far he’d taken the relationship.

  He recounted the complete story of the affair, and assured her that it had not been consummated. “I told her,” he wrote, “that my interest in Jessica began as altruism & got carried away.”

  MaryJane, who had been relatively composed, now grew angry. She wanted to know what had changed in their marriage. Why, she asked, did he feel the need to look elsewhere?

  There was no passion left in their relationship, Chris answered. There was no spark. They didn’t have true love—they had friendship.

  MaryJane began to weep. Chris tried to console her. He moved beside her and took her in his arms. He hugged her tightly, but she did not hug back.

  He thought, as he grasped her, of leaving—of just escaping from his family. At that moment, he wrote, he felt as though he didn’t love MaryJane, and might never love her again. He felt that maybe, for once in his life, he should do exactly what he wanted rather than what others expected. “My life,” he wrote, “was always centered around pleasing and doing for someone else.”

  But he chose to persist. He kept holding on to MaryJane. And eventually she melted. She squeezed him back. She told him that they had to be in love, or else they’d never have made it this far—seven years of marriage, three children. She said she still loved him, even now, and couldn’t bear the thought of his ever loving someone else.

  Chris softened too. He told her that he could never be with another woman. He said that the affair with Meadows was over. It was, he told her, “a misperceived love.” He apologized to her once more—for hurting her, for lying to her, for embarrassing her, for not living up to her expectations. He promised her complete honesty, from now on.

  “She didn’t forgive me in that instant,” wrote Longo, “but w/in a few weeks, after seeing my attempts to correct matters, she expressed that she still believed in me & would continue to stand by me in the devotion that she had been giving me all along.”

  The Jehovah’s Witnesses distribute a thin book, one hundred and ninety-one pages long, that many Witness couples are encouraged to read before marrying. It’s called The Secret of Family Happiness. Longo said that he and MaryJane had both studied it, under the tutelage of a congregational elder. In chapter 3 of this book, beneath the heading “Wifely Subjugation,” is an analysis of how God envisioned the proper roles of a husband and wife, as interpreted by the Witnesses.

  “Marriage was not to be like a ship with two competing captains,” says the book. “The husband was to exercise loving headship, and the wife was to manifest love, respect, and willing submission.” A good wife, the book continues, should be “quiet and mild” in front of her husband, and should “express appreciation for his efforts in taking the lead, instead of criticizing him.”

  One of the people whom the prosecutorial investigator Kerry Taylor would interview in preparation for Longo’s trial was a Final Touch employee named Angie McIver. Soon after Longo’s relationship with Meadows ended, McIver and several other Final Touch workers ate lunch together. At this lunch, according to Taylor’s report, McIver heard Longo say that he “could screw around as much as he wanted and [MaryJane] would stick around no matter what.” He added that he never had to worry about her divorcing him.

  Denise Thompson, the Oregon babysitter who eventually identified Zachery and Sadie’s bodies, noted to another investigator that Longo never seemed to call MaryJane by her proper name. “He always referred to her as ‘the wife,’” she said. Dustin Longo, Chris’s brother, observed that MaryJane “would obey and follow [Chris] in whatever he wanted.” Longo himself wrote that, in his family, “I was king.” His wife, he added, “was loyal & tolerant to a fault.”

  A few days after Chris and MaryJane’s living-room confrontation, Longo met with the elders at his Kingdom Hall. He was barred, provisionally, from some church activities. This, he said, actually made him feel relieved. It “left more time to be a family,” he wrote. Longo also spoke with Jessica’s husband, Siebert, and expressed his contrition. Siebert forgave him—the Meadows, too, had resolved to mend their relationship—and Siebert even continued working for Final Touch, though Jessica did not.

  Longo drove back to Indianapolis and visited his parents. He assured them that he was correcting what he called his “temporary wayward steering.” He spoke with Ron and Kay Leonard and thanked them for their support. He contacted everyone who’d come to the Leonards’ house and guaranteed them all that he was now on a righteous path.

  No quantity of apologies, however, could solve Final Touch’s financial mess. The company had grown too big too fast. Longo had already jettisoned his partner, Joel Foster, but this did little to relieve the $15,000 payroll due every two weeks. The housing market in the Midwest had soured, and the builders were strapped, which meant subcontractors like Final Touch were paid even more sluggishly than usual. Longo wasn’t able to secure a business loan, despite trying at several banks. His father had invested all he could afford. Longo’s personal money had been used to fix his Dodge Durango and to purchase a twenty-five-foot boat.

  Inevitably, Final Touch’s paychecks began to bounce—a handful one week, more the next. The situation was dire. There appeared to be no choice except to declare bankruptcy. But Longo couldn’t bring himself to do this. “At the time,” he wrote, “it didn’t seem like honesty was a viable option.”

  According to Longo, one of Final Touch’s bigger builders owed him several thousand dollars. Longo had received some checks from the company, he said, but the builder was severely delinquent on many other invoices. Longo needed money immediately; there wasn’t even enough time to sue the builder for the missing funds. So Longo devised another plan. He had been using the computer program QuickBooks Pro to create checks for Final Touch. He searched the program and found a template that matched the checks used by the builder. He added the company’s address and account number. He scanned in their bank insignia and the signature from an original. “Other than alignment problems,” Longo wrote, “it was an easy process.”

  On Monday, June 26, 2000, Longo walked into the National City Bank of Michigan and deposited three counterfeit checks into his account. Each check, which matched an amount on one of Final Touch’s invoices, was for more than $2,500. The scam seemed to work flawlessly, so the next day Longo returned to the bank and deposited a few more. In total, he added more than $17,000 to his account. “Come Friday,” Longo wrote, “I had the paychecks in hand & a smile on my face as though it were business as usual.”

  He wasn’t worried, he wrote, that he might get caught. “All I could think of right now was that today’s problem was solved.” And, indeed, in the bank he’d used his real ID, made no attempt to disguise himself, and left fingerprints on the checks. “A piece of reality seemed to be missing from him,
” a Michigan police detective assigned to the check-fraud case later noted.

  In the event that the builder discovered what he’d done, Longo had a plan. He was only taking money that was legitimately owed to him, he reasoned, and if he were confronted by the company’s owners, he would simply subtract the amount of his fake checks from their tab. “I could plead w/ the builder to not press charges,” he wrote, “since they were out nothing anyway.”

  Two weeks passed, and Longo did not hear from the company. Payroll was again due, and invoices were still not being paid, so he printed more forged checks. Then Chris and MaryJane left town for a vacation—they needed some time off, Longo said, to help recover from the Meadows affair. They took the children, camped at a lakeside park in central Michigan, and spent several days cruising on their motorboat.

  Longo had purchased the boat, along with two jet skis, two forklifts, and two cargo trailers, from an acquaintance he referred to in his letters only as Travis. The equipment was so cheap—the price was a half to a tenth of retail—that Longo had suspected it might have been stolen. As it happened, everything was, but at the time Longo never questioned Travis. “I didn’t want to know,” he wrote. The deals were too good to pass up.

  The forklifts and the trailers were important for Final Touch’s operations, but the boat and the jet skis were items that Longo simply coveted. “I always had an urge to have,” he admitted. He was, he conceded, both brand-aware and status-conscious in the extreme. (“I had no interest in Rolexes,” he once noted. “I like TAG Heuers.”) Even though both his family and his business were nearly insolvent, he couldn’t resist buying luxury water toys. He told MaryJane that he’d won the jet skis in a raffle from OfficeMax, which she seemed to believe, even though the machines were from two different manufacturers.

  The weeklong camping trip, Longo said, healed his marriage. His love for MaryJane returned full force. “I became aware of just how close I came to ruining the parts of life that meant the most to me,” he wrote. “That week corrected everything in my mind…. Iwould be the husband that she deserved.” They were even able to joke a little about the affair. The seven-year itch, they called it.

  But by the time the vacation was over, the Longos were nearly out of money. They could scarcely afford to fill the car with gas. All of their credit cards were charged to the limit. During the drive home, Longo felt desperate. So he stopped at a branch of the National City Bank. He had a few counterfeit checks with him in the minivan, ones he’d created during his original scam but had never cashed.

  He left his family in the vehicle, entered the bank, and presented a check for $3,998 to a teller, along with his driver’s license (his real one). The teller, Longo said, immediately appeared skeptical. She said she’d be right back, and she took his license and the check and disappeared into the rear of the bank. As Longo waited, he became increasingly paranoid. He saw employees making phone calls, people looking at him. After a few minutes, he was so nervous that he left the building, leaving behind his check and his license.

  He told MaryJane that the bank was too crowded, and that he’d try again later. They played with the kids for a while, and Longo began to think that he’d overreacted, so they drove back to the bank. As soon as he walked in, though, he could sense that he was being eyed. He approached the same teller and told her that he might have accidentally left his driver’s license there. He said that he was in a hurry; if she couldn’t cash the check right now, he said, it was no problem. He’d do it another time. The teller said she needed to speak with a supervisor, and she disappeared again. Now Longo was certain that something had gone wrong, and for the second time that day he fled the bank. He was panicked; his address, he realized, was printed on his driver’s license.

  Still, he climbed into the minivan and headed toward home. He told MaryJane nothing. As they were approaching their house, a state trooper’s car that had clearly been waiting for them flipped on its lights and pulled them over. Longo was driving a stolen car and hauling a stolen boat on a stolen trailer. A police officer approached Longo’s window and asked for his license, which he could not provide. The officer then asked Longo to step out of the car and place his hands behind his head.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I HAD PLEDGED to Longo that I would be completely honorable in all my dealings with him. But I failed. After the investigator Kerry Taylor phoned me, for example, I made no mention of this call to Longo, even though I’d specifically agreed to tell him of everyone who contacted me regarding his case.

  I’m not exactly sure why I didn’t reveal the call. After all, when Taylor had forced me to pick a side, I’d chosen Longo’s. But Taylor’s insistence that Longo was repeatedly lying to me had tapped a nerve, and I knew it could be risky to discuss the details of our chat. Longo might sense that I agreed with Taylor—he was expert at perceiving things like that. Longo and I had established a comfortable link, and as he neared the climax of his tale, I felt it was foolish to do anything that might jeopardize the flow of information. So I left Taylor’s call unmentioned.

  Not long after Taylor and I spoke, I received a phone call from a man named Carlton Smith. Smith is a writer, based in California, who specializes in true-crime books. Though Longo had refused to communicate with him, Smith was nevertheless working on a book about the Longo family murders, and also contributing articles about the case to the Willamette Week newspaper. (His book has since been published, under the title Love, Daddy.)

  I’d once phoned the Willamette Week offices to request an issue of the paper—the printed version wasn’t available in Montana, and many of the photos didn’t run in the online edition. During this call I let it slip that I, too, was writing a book about Longo. Smith was immediately informed of my existence, and later contacted me.

  Our conversation was fairly innocuous. We mostly chatted about the culture of Jehovah’s Witnesses. I didn’t share a single important tidbit of information with Smith, and he didn’t impart anything to me. We did, however, briefly discuss the possibility of assisting each other sometime in the future. I’d feed Smith a bit of insider knowledge to help spice up his book, and he’d pass on some of the results of his extensive research into Longo’s background. This never happened, however. Smith and I wrote our manuscripts wholly independently.

  Still, I decided not to inform Longo of Smith’s call. I felt guilty over the offer of information-swapping. I didn’t want Longo to have the impression that I was willing to use his letters as a bargaining chip, especially after he himself, by going along with my rules for the book project, had sacrificed the opportunity to profit from his story.

  When Longo phoned me the following Wednesday, he actually mentioned Smith’s name early in our conversation. He said he’d received a copy of Smith’s latest Willamette Week story. This was an ideal opening for me to reveal the chat I’d had with Smith, but I did not take it.

  Fifteen minutes later, Longo again brought up Smith. He spoke about the letters Smith had written him, begging for an interview. “You should not talk to this guy,” I told Longo, but I still didn’t disclose Smith’s call.

  It was now obvious to Longo that I would never voluntarily mention it. So he raised the subject himself. “He says that you two have spoken,” Longo told me. I knew, immediately, that I’d made a big mistake. His tone of voice was erased of all friendliness.

  “Briefly,” I responded, attempting to minimize the damage, though already I felt the prickly sweat of shame gathering on my forehead.

  “I was waiting to see if you’d bring it up,” he said. Shortly after Smith had spoken with me, I soon learned, he’d phoned Longo’s lawyers and mentioned that he had been in contact with me. The lawyers informed Longo. And Longo, with this information in hand, devised a test of my trustworthiness. He wanted to see if I’d uphold my promise and tell him of Smith’s call. It was a test I didn’t come close to passing, even after Longo had given me two deliberate nudges.

  Longo asked me what Smith and I had spok
en about. I gave him a brief synopsis, but in the process I only dug myself deeper: I omitted the part about sharing our materials.

  This made Longo even more upset. “He said that there was an offer for swapping of information,” he added.

  I felt like an idiot. I sensed I’d just blown every bit of trust that Longo had invested in me. “It’s possible that he got the idea that we were going to swap something,” I conceded, still trying to underplay the problem. I insisted, though, that my offer was only in jest. “There’s no way in hell I would tell him a damn thing,” I said, hoping that my pointed language would underscore some sincerity.

  But I knew Longo well enough to realize that he would retaliate in the most effective way he could, by distancing himself from me. Possibly he’d cut off our association altogether. I wouldn’t blame him. I clutched the phone, desperate, and tried to talk my way out of it, but I ended up tongue-tied and sputtering. Finally, I said the only thing I could: “I’m sorry, Chris.” I wasn’t sure what to add, so I apologized again.

  His testiness persisted. He indicated that he might speak with someone else. “We’re still getting bugged on a biweekly basis by the Today show,” he said. “And all the national newspapers.” Like that, Longo was in control again.

  I was reduced to begging him for forgiveness. I told Longo that he’d been an inspiration to me, that he’d helped me scrutinize my penchant for deception, but that I clearly hadn’t yet conquered it. I asked for a second chance.

  Longo said he understood what I was experiencing. “That’s the same kind of loop that I went through,” he said. “Both of us can say all that we want, and believability is suspect.”

  He wasn’t ready to pardon me, though. Instead he chose this moment to tell me about his cartoon. Steve Krasik had brought an old copy of the New Yorker to a jailhouse meeting, and Longo had flipped through it. He’d liked a certain cartoon so much that when he returned to his cell, he drew it from memory and posted it on his wall.