THIRTY-FIVE
THAT WAS THE prosecution’s case. They presented seven days’ worth of testimony, then rested. All of the material was circumstantial, and there was no discussion of motive, but merely by reviewing Longo’s actions after the crimes—lying, running—and offering a believable witness who placed Longo at the spot where Zachery and Sadie’s bodies were found, the weight of the evidence, at least to me and all the spectators I spoke with, seemed damning, especially when added to the fact that Longo had already admitted to being a murderer, twice over.
Now it was the defense’s chance. There wasn’t much Hadley and Krasik could do. They called Oregon State Police detective Roy Brown to the stand, and Brown, who’d twice interrogated Longo following his arrest in Cancún, said that Longo “did not specifically” admit to killing Zachery or Sadie. They called Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office detective Patricia Miller to testify, and she confirmed that during the hunt for Longo, vehicles with KIDVAN plates were spotted all over the United States—“like Elvis sightings,” Krasik noted. She also verified that investigators had found no blood anywhere in the Longos’ condominium.
Rebecca Cohen, a librarian at the Newport Public Library, testified that the Longo kids, escorted by MaryJane, had visited the library “several times a week” to read children’s books. “They were never a problem,” she said, holding a hand to her head as if in the grips of a migraine. Three other witnesses agreed that there was a rather loud party at the condominium complex on the night Linda and Lawrence Crabb heard all the odd noises.
Essentially, though, the defense had only one person to place on the stand. “We call Chris Longo,” said Krasik, and Longo rose from the defense table and walked to the center of the room. He faced the clerk of court, Christine Bond, raised his right hand, and solemnly swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (Bond was not an adherent of the “so help you God” addendum). Longo then proceeded to the witness box and spelled his name for the record.
While he did so, I looked at the spectators. Penny Dupuie covered her eyes, as if the sight of Longo’s face was too much to bear. Joe Longo appeared outwardly calm, his fingers intertwined and his thumbs winding slowly around one another. Joy’s hands were clasped as well, though pressed so tightly together I could make out the flicker of her pulse at the base of her wrists. Dustin’s wife, Precious, was seated next to me, and she mumbled, “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” under her breath.
Longo sat in the witness box with his forearms resting on the table in front of him—his hands, by command of the courtroom officers, had to be visible at all times, so that he could not furtively detach his Band-It. He answered Krasik’s questions thoroughly and methodically, usually in complete, grammatically correct sentences, his voice a monotone, his gesticulations minimal. His eyes remained fixed on his lawyer. He never looked at the jury, not so much as a glance. About half the members of the jury—the women, it seemed, more than the men—stared at Longo unabashedly, as if at a circus sideshow. The others glanced around the courtroom, looking anywhere but at him.
Longo spoke a little about his childhood. He explained how his mom became a Jehovah’s Witness. He described how he first met MaryJane, and the way their courtship progressed, and why he moved out of his parents’ house, and where he proposed marriage. After forty-five minutes of this, Briggs grew frustrated—to him, this all seemed irrelevant to the issue at hand—and he stood and issued an objection. “I think we’ve gone on long enough,” Briggs said.
Huckleberry swiftly and firmly overruled him. “This is a capital case and every dispensation should be given,” he said, and from then on, it was clear that Longo would be able to say whatever he wanted for as long as he pleased. Briggs, chastened, was reduced to scribbling notes on his legal pad, often frantically, holding two pens in his hand at the same time, a black and a red, and switching back and forth between colors.
Meanwhile, Krasik took full advantage of the judge’s permissiveness. He leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head, and lobbed tough but friendly questions toward his client. He prodded Longo about his various lies and wrongdoings; better for the defense to do this, Krasik evidently figured, than the prosecution. It all seemed like an extended counseling session. “I want the jury to see him as much as possible, to get used to him,” Krasik told me during the courtroom recess for lunch. “The longer they see him, the less likely they are to kill him.”
And so Longo told, in elaborate detail and exceptional length—many of his phrases repeated, word for word, from his letters to me—of the camera-store theft he committed to pay for an engagement ring, of the birth of his children, and of his jobs with Publishers Circulation Fulfillment, Fireplace & Spa, and as founder of Final Touch.
Longo gradually became more relaxed on the stand, smiling a few times and occasionally chuckling, though he still didn’t engage the jury or convey even a modicum of regret. He told me, over the phone, that he felt as though he were delivering his deathbed speech—“This is a man’s dying words,” he said—and that, appearances aside, he was “really stressed” about it and needed to swallow eight hundred milligrams of ibuprofen during the day to quiet his throbbing head.
The only time Longo revealed his nervousness was when, during a brief break in the proceedings, he returned to the defense table, picked up a metal pitcher, and tried to fill a cup with water. He dropped the pitcher midpour, spilling its contents across the table and floor. Krasik, aware of all the armed guards in the room, told Longo not to make any sudden moves. As Longo dabbed at the puddle with paper towels, he thanked the officers who were watching him for not triggering his leg-zapper. One of the side effects of a fifty-thousand-volt shock, he reminded them, is an involuntary emptying of the victim’s bladder and bowels. That, he said, would be a real mess, and at this comment both Longo and the officers laughed heartily. MaryJane’s sister Sally Clark, sitting in the spectator section, heard the laughter and promptly began to cry and dashed out of the room.
Over the course of hours upon hours of testimony, filling one day, then another, then a third, Longo related the story of how he stole the minivan, and of his affair with Jessica Meadows, and of the forged checks, the disfellowshipping, the demise of Final Touch, and the move to a warehouse in Toledo. Both Krasik and Hadley told me that never in their careers had they kept a witness on the stand for this duration. “It took Lewis and Clark less time to get to Oregon,” one of the TV cameramen waiting outside the courthouse said during a recess.
Longo eventually commanded the courtroom as if performing a one-person play, with occasional cues tossed out by Krasik. His audience, spectators and jurors alike, seemed absorbed by the tale, though I noted that all but one juror—a woman with dark eyes and a piercing stare, sitting in the rear row of the jury box—soon stopped taking notes.
Longo talked about trying to sell the forklift, and how the police arrived, and the decision to try a midnight escape. Then he told of driving away from Ohio—he and Zachery and the dog in the rented moving truck, MaryJane and Sadie and Madison in the stolen minivan, the whole family on the road, their destination uncertain, hoping to leave behind their troubles and start a new life.
Most nights on their long drive west, Longo said from the witness stand, the family camped out, paying a modest fee to pitch their tent at a state park or a private campground. It was the best way to save money. For meals, fast food was the norm—McDonald’s, Taco John’s, Pizza Hut, Arby’s. They crossed Indiana and Illinois and Wisconsin and Minnesota. By the time they were approaching South Dakota, the family, according to Longo, was in good spirits. They felt as though they were on vacation, Longo said, and all of their stresses, with the exception of their financial situation, seemed to dissipate.
The only other issue was with their husky, Kyra. Longo realized that the dog was going to be difficult to travel with, so one morning, early in the trip, he woke before his children and let the dog loose on a nearby farm. When Zachery asked where Kyra had g
one, Longo told him that their dog, too, was having a holiday, only with friends of her own, other animals. Zachery seemed to find this explanation acceptable.
Their trip nearly ended at the South Dakota border. Longo pulled the rental truck over at the state-line weigh station and the trooper there asked for his driver’s license. When Longo handed it over, the officer ran it through his computer and, according to Longo, immediately seemed suspicious. The trooper asked about the items Longo was hauling, and where he was going.
At this moment, Longo testified, he felt “extreme paranoia.” He thought of all the outstanding arrest warrants that might bear his name—for parole violations, for counterfeit checks, for the stolen forklift and boat, for stealing the minivan. He was potentially facing years of jail time. There was also the missing-persons report filed by MaryJane’s family, which he didn’t know about. But nothing, apparently, was entered in South Dakota’s system. The trooper let him go.
The weigh-station experience, and the fact that the truck guzzled fuel, led Longo to reconfigure his plans. He rented a storage unit in Sioux Falls under a made-up name, John Purty, and moved into it most of the truck’s contents: furniture, clothing, a collection of framed animation cells. Anything that could be easily pawned—a DVD player, a TV, two vacuum cleaners, some scuba gear—he stuffed into the van or tied to the roof. The whole family was now together in one vehicle. Longo abandoned the moving truck in South Dakota, and Penske, the company that leased Longo the truck, soon reported it stolen.
The Longos visited Mount Rushmore and Devils Tower and Yellowstone National Park. They stopped at a prairie-dog town, and Sadie tried to name every dog that popped out of a hole, but eventually gave up and referred to them as “101 Dalmatians.” Zachery marveled at the Old Faithful geyser—“The ground is spitting,” he said—and asked his parents for permission to stand beneath it.
They ate fudge at a fudge factory and visited an Indian reservation and hiked in the mountains. They played a game in the car, to see who could come closest to guessing the population of the upcoming town. Longo kept precise tabs on their money, and was honest with MaryJane about how much they had left. They were both aware of how quickly their funds seeped away: $1,033 remaining on September 1; $639 on September 3; $492 on September 8.
On September 9, 2001, a week and a half after leaving Ohio, they arrived in Portland, Oregon, worn out from travel and in urgent need of income. Chris and MaryJane thought, for a moment, that the family would live here; they liked the urban feel and the proximity to mountains and beaches. But once they saw how high rents were and how meager the job market was for someone lacking a college diploma, they swiftly abandoned the idea. What Portland did offer, however, was a row of wholesale jewelry stores.
It was MaryJane, according to Longo, who first brought up the idea of selling her engagement ring. She did this a few days before they’d reached Portland, and Longo says he refused to even consider the notion. “That was the one thing I did not want to do,” he testified. But as their money disappeared and MaryJane pushed harder, his resolve melted. So they stopped in a few jewelry stores in Portland. The three-quarter-carat diamond—“simple, yet precious,” he noted, “like MJ”—was worth more than $3,000. Longo was hoping to sell it for at least half that. But the highest offer he received was $600.
His wife told him to take it. She said he’d just have to replace it later with a better one. Longo assured her he would. And so, while MaryJane and the kids waited in the van, Longo sold his wife’s ring. He was paid in cash, in hundred-dollar bills. “This was the symbol that I had failed everything,” Longo said.
The money did provide them with a bit of breathing room. They left Portland and drove to Seattle, but rents there were even higher and the job market more daunting, so they turned around and drove south. The best deal, they figured, would probably be an off-season vacation rental in a small town on the coast. They camped out on September 11, the day of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., and the next day rented a two-bedroom bungalow, fully furnished and cutely painted with lime-green trim, just a few hundred yards from the beach in Waldport, Oregon. “It was perfect,” Longo said from the witness stand. For the first time in months, the family had a decent place they could call home.
It didn’t last long. The rent on the Waldport cottage was $800 a month. Longo had arranged with the home-rental agency to pay by the week and had negotiated his way out of providing a deposit, but he still needed to earn money. He unpacked his computer and constructed a résumé. In the brief paragraph that mentioned Final Touch, he said he’d grown the business from “zero to over $1 million in sales in the first year” and that he had “a workforce of nearly 100.” There was no mention of the company’s demise. At the bottom of the résumé, in a section labeled INTERESTS, the first thing he listed was “Family.”
The résumé was of little help. Longo attempted to find work with a photo shop. He tried at a fireplace distributor. He searched the internet, the newspaper, and the offerings at an employment agency. The only opening he could find was at the Starbucks inside the Fred Meyer department store. Longo interviewed for it, and was offered the job. It was part time and paid $7.40 an hour. He began work on Monday, September 24, 2001.
Longo thought of coffee-making as a low-status job, and he couldn’t stand the fact that he was forced to do it. “It was driving me crazy,” he said in court. “It was not fulfilling in the least.” So he invented a new life for himself. He told his fellow Starbucks employees that his family was well off. They’d come to the Oregon coast to take a break from their hectic, big-city lives. The Starbucks job, he explained, was just a way for him to kick back and kill a little time. Also, he liked the coffee.
Longo declined, though, to wear the standard Starbucks uniform of a short-sleeve polo shirt and khaki pants, and instead usually overdressed in slacks, a business shirt, and a tie. He wore a pager, and told the other employees he used it to keep tabs on his stock options. He talked about ski trips and scuba-diving vacations and his advanced knowledge of wines. “I wanted to give the impression that the job wasn’t necessary,” he testified. “I talked about things like owning a website, being an internet mogul.”
He claimed that he earned $15,000 a month from a business called Zooweb, an online service that provided ratings and tips for most of the nation’s zoos. (There is such a site; it’s just not Longo’s.) “I’ve got over 40,000 people using zooweb as their email address everyday…the money keeps flowing in,” Longo wrote in an e-mail to Denise Thompson, a coworker with whom he’d become friendly.
It’s nearly impossible to feed and shelter a family of five on $7.40 an hour. Longo pawned whatever he could, including his digital camera, his binoculars, and his wetsuit, but this netted him less than $400. Desperate, he took two crab traps that were used as decorations in their rental home and pawned them as well, receiving $10 each. MaryJane wasn’t working; she needed to take care of the children. The Longos simply could not afford the rent, and a month after moving to Waldport they abruptly departed, leaving the last week unpaid.
The Longos relocated in Newport, close to the Fred Meyer, and stayed in a series of inexpensive motels, eventually settling into the Newport Motor Inn—the five of them living in a $20-a-night room. Their kitchen consisted of a microwave and a dorm-room fridge. They remained there for most of November. While Longo worked at the Fred Meyer Starbucks, MaryJane and the kids spent a lot of time at the McDonald’s playground and the public library. They had less than $5 a day to spend on food. Mostly, Longo said, they ate ramen noodles and bread.
Krasik asked him in court why he didn’t apply for welfare. “Public assistance is something that I would never go on,” Longo answered. “I would literally steal before I went on public assistance.” MaryJane, according to Longo, was able to withstand the food situation and the living conditions. He said that the children were also fine, though it’s impossible to know if this was true. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, one of the ps
ychologists who studied Longo’s writings, addressed this issue in her analysis of the letters. “He studiously presents them [the children] as happy and playful,” Young-Bruehl noted. “But how could they be? Being dragged all over the place, living and sleeping in strange rooms, left hungry, etc.”
What really upset MaryJane, Longo testified, was that they’d done nothing to revive their spiritual lives. There was a Kingdom Hall in Newport, but they did not attend services. Longo’s excuse was that all their decent clothing was stuck in the storage unit in South Dakota. He didn’t want any Witnesses to think he couldn’t afford to properly dress his family. Also in the storage unit was most of their winter clothing; by early November it had grown cold on the Oregon coast, and the kids scarcely had enough to wear outside.
Longo solved these problems by cashing in some of the frequent-flier miles he’d amassed during his Publishers Circulation Fulfillment days. He flew to Sioux Falls, removed from the storage unit all the clothing that would fit into his bags, and flew back the next day. Before leaving, he mailed two greeting cards written by MaryJane—one to her sister Sally, and one to her mom.
The card Sally received was shown to the jury. The postmark said November 5, 2001. By this date, it had been ten weeks since MaryJane had contacted her family. Chris had been disfellowshipped and was expected to remain distant from his mom and dad, but MaryJane, whose cell phone had been disconnected, knew that her family would worry about her and the children—and indeed, they’d already filed a missing-persons report. MaryJane may also have suspected that her sisters would visit her if they could, and she likely didn’t want anyone to know she was living in a dingy motel room. The extent to which Longo coerced his wife into writing the cards is unclear, but it seemed that MaryJane agreed, at least on some level, to present a cheerful front and disguise her family’s location.
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