True Story

by Michael Finkel

  He carried both suitcases out of the condominium, into the elevator, and across the parking garage to a set of stairs. The stairs led up to the boardwalk. It was still before dawn on Tuesday, December 18, 2001. Nobody was around. He turned left on the boardwalk and then right down a gangway that led to the docks. He continued past a set of fish-cleaning tables and reached the edge of the water. He dropped the two suitcases into the bay. He didn’t learn the details of what happened to Zachery and Sadie, he said, until after he was arrested in Mexico three and a half weeks later.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  AS I SAT in the courtroom, with a pen in my hand and my notebook open on my lap, listening with almost trancelike intensity to the culmination of Longo’s story, I was able to conjure only a single word. I scribbled it in my pad, in giant letters, in the center of the page. I circled it. I added an exclamation point. I wrote: BULLSHIT.

  He’d lied. I was sure of it. But it wasn’t so much the lie that repulsed me. I’d known, all along, that Longo was an able and willing liar. What shocked me was the nature of the lie. It was an ugly lie; an evil lie. Longo had just announced, out loud, in public, that MaryJane was the real killer—an irrational, uncontrollable, cold-blooded killer. She was initiator of the crimes. She had either murdered or tried to murder all of her children. Longo had said this even though, in all his testimony, he’d never provided a moment of insight into what might cause his wife to act this way.

  Longo had told his story in front of two of MaryJane’s sisters and her sister-in-law. I saw only Penny’s face, etched with rage, before the three of them darted from the courtroom. I was mortified that I’d affiliated myself with Longo—that I had actually cared about him, had wished for him the most humane possible punishment, away from death row.

  What could possibly be the point, I wondered, of such a lie? Maybe he wanted to show that he was nothing more than a gentle, loving man who had been driven to murder by overwhelming circumstances—that he was as much a victim of these crimes as he was the perpetrator. Perhaps he hoped to foster reasonable doubt in at least one juror, and thereby save his own life. But no one, I thought, could possibly accept his testimony as truth.

  Steven Briggs, of course, didn’t accept it. After a short break, he launched into his cross-examination of Longo. It was a riveting performance. Briggs sat on the edge of his chair, palms flat on the armrests, elbows out, the muscles in his forearms visibly twitching, as though he were on the verge of leaping from his seat. His tone was sneering, sarcastic, belittling.

  Longo managed to maintain his self-confidence, though, it seemed to me, just barely. In any case, almost everyone in the courtroom was watching Briggs—the look on his face was of a boxer one blow from a knockout. More than once, until he was reprimanded by Huckleberry, Briggs asked a new question before Longo had finished with the previous one, as if Longo’s answers weren’t worth listening to. What was important was the sheer breadth of questions raised by his testimony.

  “Mr. Longo,” Briggs began, “you’ve been on the witness stand now over the course of about four days. Is there anything else you’d like to tell us?”

  “Not that I can recall,” Longo said. “But there’s a lot of stuff that happened in the course of a couple of years that I would want to air if we think of it.”

  “MaryJane’s not here to tell us about your past conduct, is she?”

  “No, she’s not.”

  “She’s not here to tell us how you really treated her and the kids?”

  “No, she’s not.”

  “She’s not here to tell us what happened that night, is she?”

  “No, she’s not.”

  “She’s not here because you killed her.”

  “That’s true.”

  “All we have is your word, right?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “At some point,” Briggs continued, starting to deconstruct Longo’s story, “you decide that you’re going to tell MaryJane about all your past crimes?”

  “Yes,” Longo answered.

  “You continue to reveal thing after thing after thing?”

  “Extremely reluctantly. It took several hours for this to take place.”

  “At some point you revealed too much. She got upset with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Essentially kicks you out of the bedroom?”

  “Yes.”

  “You go to work later in the day?”

  “Yes.”

  “MaryJane, the next thing you know, she has come back to pick you up?”

  “Yes.”

  “In her state, her mental state,” Briggs said, “she still remembers to come to Fred Meyer at eleven o’clock to pick you up?”

  “Yes,” said Longo. “I actually wondered if she would. I was concerned about that.”

  “Then you arrive back home at your condominium, and you see Madison. You think Madison might be dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you don’t do anything for Madison. You shake her?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t call for help?”

  “I was hysterical at that point.”

  “You were hysterical?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t call nine-one-one?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t call the police?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t call the fire department?”

  “No.”

  “MaryJane says to you, ‘You did this. This was your fault. You killed us.’ Things along that line?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your response is to strangle her?”

  “Yes,” said Longo. “This was a good forty-five minutes after we’d been home.”

  “Put her naked body into the suitcase and zipped it closed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you went to Madison?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you go to pick her up and you see her chest move. She’s still alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you don’t call nine-one-one? And you don’t call the fire department? And you don’t do anything?”

  “No.”

  “You strangle her. And you strangled MaryJane based upon her hysterical statements and the appearance of one child who turned out to be alive, according to you. And then you pack up all the clothing to dispose of, everything that was in the condo?”

  “Eventually, yes.”

  “So you spend time going to at least one dumpster location, maybe two dumpster locations. But you don’t go out and look for your other two children?”

  “Actually, I did,” said Longo. “I drove all around the Newport area, all around the bay. I went halfway to Waldport and decided that if they were in the water somewhere, as MaryJane had said, then it’s too late. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “You don’t ask anybody to help you in your search?”

  “I considered, actually, calling Denise to find out if the kids were over there.”

  “You didn’t call Denise?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “You didn’t call anybody?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You waited,” said Briggs, “until Starbucks opened and you went and got some coffee?”

  “Yes,” said Longo.

  “You didn’t know what had happened to Zachery and Sadie?”

  “I did not know for a fact what had happened, no.”

  “You didn’t know that there were any rocks tied around someone’s ankle?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t know whether they were alive when they went in or dead?”

  “I still don’t know.”

  “You dispose of MaryJane’s body and Madison’s body?”

  “Yes.”

  “Steal a car?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go to work?”

  “Yes.”

  “You begin to tell everybody that your wife is an adulterer?”

  “Actually, I thought I h
ad said it before this point.”

  “That she left you for a guy who made more money?”

  “Yes.”

  “You get off work and you go to the video store?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you rent a movie called Blow?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s a movie about a guy who deals drugs. Johnny Depp, I think, is the star of it, right?”

  “Actually, you know more than I do. I never ended up watching it.”

  “All you saw was how it was marketed?”

  “Yes.”

  “So that’s the movie you decide to rent to keep your mind off the murder of your family. Is that right?”

  “Yes, actually it is. I can’t argue with that.”

  “You go to the gym to work out?”

  “Yes.”

  “You go in and get your paycheck on that Friday. Drive to San Francisco, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “Ultimately you fly to Cancún?”

  “Yes.”

  “Adopted the identity of a New York Times writer?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Went dancing?”

  “Once, yes.”

  “Bought dinner for Janina?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shared a cabana with her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Planned to travel south to Guatemala?”

  “Yes. I had one week and a half left of my stay. That’s what the plans were.”

  “You’re telling us that your plan was to come back within the next week and a half so you could fly back to San Francisco?”

  “That’s correct,” said Longo.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  LONGO FINISHED TESTIFYING late in the afternoon on April Fools’ Day, 2003. The next morning, the defense rested, and on the following day, both sides presented closing arguments. Paulette Sanders recounted Longo’s history of lies and deceit and questioned why, with his life on the line, he would now suddenly start telling the truth. “What did he have to lose?” she said. “He’s going to tell one more story.”

  Steve Krasik pointed out that the bodies were found in two different places, twelve miles apart, and that this indicated there were two different killers. If Longo really wanted to lie, Krasik added, he would not have admitted to any murders. He’d have proclaimed his complete innocence. “This is not the story we would be telling if we were working on a story,” Krasik said.

  The court then recessed for a three-day weekend. On Monday, April 7, Judge Huckleberry issued a brief set of instructions to the jury and sent them off to deliberate. The twelve jurors filed into a private room; Longo was escorted back to jail; and I waited, along with a few other members of the press, in the hallway outside the courtroom. I didn’t want to risk missing the verdict. So I sat there and fed myself junk food from the vending machines and read and reread Longo’s newest letter, the first he’d sent me since his trial had begun.

  He had mailed it to my rental house in Newport the day after he’d completed his testimony. It was a strange and tortured letter, by far the most convoluted he’d ever sent me. I had to read it three times, while taking notes on a separate sheet of paper, in order to grasp the letter’s internal logic. Over the course of thirty-seven pages, Longo attempted to explain all of his actions from the day of the murders, in December of 2001, to the final moments of his testimony, sixteen months later.

  First, though, he expressed his hopes that we could salvage our relationship. He was acutely aware that I was retreating from him. When Longo was leaving court after being cross-examined by Briggs, we’d briefly made eye contact, but I had felt so disgusted with him that my instinctive response was to quickly turn away. Longo referred to this reaction on his letter’s opening page. “I do hope that I haven’t lost you as a friend,” he added.

  Then he began his explanation. What he’d said on the stand, he insisted, was entirely true: MaryJane really did kill Zachery and Sadie, and attempted to kill Madison. Her objective, Longo wrote, was to hurt him as badly as she could. That’s why she killed the kids—to punish Chris. “I’m sure most people don’t see that,” he said.

  He told me that he was infuriated with MaryJane, and that was why he killed her and then slandered her by concocting the story of her adultery. After Zachery’s body was found, he fled Newport because he, like MaryJane, was a murderer, and he did not want to spend time in jail before he had a chance to properly grieve.

  During the drive to San Francisco, he wrote, he had an epiphany. “I rapidly came to the realization that I truly was to blame. I sent her over the edge. Without me & my lies, none of this would have happened. This was all my fault.” These insights, he added, allowed him to forgive MaryJane.

  He traveled to Mexico, he wrote, because it was inexpensive there, and his remaining money could last several weeks. “I had intended for it to be a period of clarity & a time to deal w/ the grief of the situation, before returning to deal w/ the legal end.” Once he arrived in Mexico, though, he “wanted to think of nothing,” he wrote. “I had fun.”

  After he was arrested and jailed, he at first insisted he was innocent of all the crimes. He told his lawyers and me that he “wasn’t at home” when his family was killed. His lawyers, of course, needed more than this to work with, so he provided them with a detailed story.

  What he said was that, on the night he came home late from work and drank his wine and ate his cheese, he did not lie down next to his wife. He went for a drive. He parked the minivan at an oceanside overlook and dozed for several hours. When he arrived back at the condominium, an intruder was in the living room. “The guy,” wrote Longo, “looked crazed & out of it.” No one else seemed to be in the condo, and Longo became alarmed.

  “Where the hell is my family?” he yelled.

  “The bitch wouldn’t listen and now she’s gone,” the intruder said. “They’re crab bait, in the bottom of the bay.”

  The man then attacked him, and Longo grabbed a clothes iron and struck him in the head with it, killing him. Longo dumped the intruder’s body in the water and, knowing that he couldn’t go to the police without facing arrest himself—he’d just killed a man—he stole a car and soon flew to Mexico.

  Longo described this as “a plausible story.” Later, I asked Krasik what he thought. “It would have been more believable,” Krasik told me, “if he’d said a UFO came down and abducted his family.”

  Over the course of the year Longo spent in the Lincoln County Jail, he resolved to transform his life. He decided that, when it came to his trial, he would be “completely & utterly honest in every aspect.” So he confessed to the two murders he committed, then took the witness stand and told the truth about the rest.

  Within the framework of Longo’s letter, “the truth” meant that MaryJane was a murderer. But after he told this truth on the stand and saw my reaction, and then heard from his lawyers that his story did not seem to go over very well, he realized that he may have made a mistake. He had long ago forgiven MaryJane for her role in the crimes, and he understood, too late, that it may have been more honorable for him to accept responsibility for all the murders and ensure that his wife was remembered as a kind and gentle woman.

  “Maybe this is the one time that I should have lied,” he wrote. “Maybe in some way I took the cowardly course by not taking all of the blame. Maybe for the second time in the last year & a half, I’ve made a horrendous & devastating decision in telling the absolute truth—the first ending in the deaths of my entire family.”

  If he hadn’t told the truth to MaryJane that night, he reasoned, then she and the children would probably still be alive. “My road to honesty,” he wrote, “may be proving more treachorous & debilitating than the egregious course of lies & dishonesty.”

  At the end of his letter, he repeated once again that he did tell the truth on the witness stand—“I did not take the lives of Zack & Sadie”—but he added that he now felt ashamed of himself for being honest in court. Hi
s final conclusion was this: “I’m confused even more now, to the point of whiplash.”

  Well, the jury was not confused. Four hours after Judge Huckleberry had dismissed them to deliberate, they returned a note stating that a decision had been reached. I was still sitting in the hallway. The first indication that something had happened was the command, crackling over a court officer’s radio, to “clear the halls.” The halls were promptly emptied of people, and a minute later Longo emerged, blank-faced, swinging his left arm, leading a small procession of officers. My heart rate quickened and my stomach knotted, and I ducked away before he could see me.

  I entered the courtroom behind most of the other spectators and ended up taking a seat in the back. Up front, where MaryJane’s sisters and Joe and Joy Longo sat—the two families, so far as I could tell, were not on speaking terms—a box of tissues was passed along the row, and everyone took a few. Huckleberry entered and said, “Well, it looks like we have a verdict,” and he remained standing as the jury filed in. Then the judge turned to face the spectator section and asked us to please maintain decorum and refrain from any outbursts while the verdict was read.

  Huckleberry asked the defendant to stand, and Longo rose, along with Krasik and Hadley. Longo kept his hands clasped behind his back as the judge read from the jury’s verdict form. Huckleberry began with the findings in Zachery’s murder. “We, the jury,” he read, “being duly sworn and impaneled, find the above named defendant guilty of the charge of aggravated murder.”

  I stared at Longo’s back but detected only the slightest movement, just a quick curl of his fingers. Penny and Sally clutched at each other, arms interlaced, and had already begun to weep by the time Huckleberry revealed that the jury had also found the defendant guilty of murdering Sadie. The jury foreman later said that reaching a unanimous decision had not been difficult. Though the jurors had remained in the deliberation room for four hours, nearly everyone, the foreman said, had agreed on Longo’s guilt within minutes.