True Story

by Michael Finkel

  Longo called me that evening. He said that he was about to be locked down for the night, and had only a short time, but he felt the need to talk. He was relieved, he told me, that I’d picked up the phone—he thought the guilty verdicts may have permanently ended our conversations. “I didn’t know if there was going to be any more,” he said.

  I asked how he was feeling. “I’m definitely not in a good mood,” he replied. While he was waiting for the verdict, he said, he’d remained hopeful. But when the officers came to bring him back to court, he knew the decision was likely to be against him. It had been reached too quickly. The one person who’d tried to encourage him, he said, was the officer walking directly behind him, escorting him into court. “He was just like, ‘Well, you never know what’s going to happen. You know juries go one way or another and you can never tell.’”

  I didn’t have much to say. I had tried to decipher Longo’s system of reasoning, but had ended up completely disoriented. I told him that it might be better if we didn’t speak on the phone for a while. “Let’s communicate by letters,” I suggested. I explained that witnessing his trial had been an unsettling experience for me—“I’ve just been having a real tough time with it, Chris,” I said.

  “I understand,” he said. He added that the trial was almost over; all that was left was the penalty phase. “It should be quick and painful,” he told me.

  The penalty phase lasted four days, during which Joe, Joy, and Dustin all testified. “I hate what he did,” his father said, “but I still love him.” Dustin expressed similar sentiments. He added that he’d spent much of his life in awe of his older brother.

  When Joy sat in the witness box, she appeared to focus on some empty place in the center of the courtroom. She shook her head slowly back and forth as she mentioned the note she’d written to Chris, pleading with him not to get married. Then, when she spoke of Longo’s disfellowshipment—“It was a form of discipline,” she said, “that was necessary for Chris”—she finally glanced over to her son, and Longo gazed back at her, and for a few seconds everything in the courtroom seemed to halt. Neither Chris nor Joy’s face really changed. They just looked at each other, motionless and stoic, as if the helplessness of the situation had overwhelmed any reaction.

  Ken Hadley, in a speech to the jury, appealed for compassion. “We’re going to ask you to believe that there is justice without killing someone,” he said. “We’ve had enough killing.” He pointed out that before the murders, Longo had never displayed any violent behavior. “Whatever caused this horrible thing to happen,” he said, “is not a pattern in his life.”

  Briggs delivered a brief rebuttal. “Four innocent people are dead and one guilty man is alive,” he said, chopping at the air with his hands. “There’s an injustice as we sit here in this courtroom, but you have the power to correct it.” Zachery, Sadie, and Madison, he added, were robbed of their entire lives. A parent’s greatest fear, Briggs concluded, was having a child die, yet this was something Longo actively sought: “He wanted his children dead.”

  Judge Huckleberry briefly addressed the jury. “There’s a lot on the line,” he cautioned. “Any one of you has the power to choose life in prison as the sentence.” Then he sent them off to deliberate once more. The next day—Wednesday, April 16, 2003—they informed Huckleberry that they’d reached a decision.

  Everyone reassembled in the courtroom. Upon the judge’s command, Longo stood. If he was nervous, he didn’t show it; as usual, he managed to appear wholly unconcerned. His fingertips rested lightly on the defense table. Hadley’s arms were crossed on his chest. Krasik’s hung by his sides. Joy closed her eyes, though this did not prevent a couple of tears from leaking out. Joe looked down at his lap, as if in prayer. The jurors were dry-eyed and passive; a couple of them were chewing gum.

  The judge read the sentence. He began with the first count, the killing of MaryJane. “Should the defendant receive a death sentence?” Huckleberry asked. He paused and glanced at Longo. “To this question, the jury has answered, ‘Yes.’”

  Longo bowed his head and grimaced slightly. Joy exhaled, but didn’t cry anymore. It was as if all the energy had finally gone out of her. Hadley covered his face as Huckleberry continued reading. For the murder of Zachery—death. For the murder of Sadie—death. For the murder of Madison—death.

  Afterward, Huckleberry addressed Longo. “The facts of this case reach a level of perfidy beyond anything I’ve experienced in my life,” he said, speaking in the sort of scarcely restrained whisper that feels more intimidating than a shout. It was a tone he hadn’t previously used during the trial. “The sheer breadth of harm truly makes it impossible, in my judgment, for you as a person to either atone for these crimes or expect absolution,” he continued. “I do not know how the scales could ever, ever be leveled.”

  He placed Longo in the custody of the Oregon Department of Corrections, for transport to death row at the state penitentiary. An officer then cuffed him, behind his back. It was the first time he’d been manacled in court, and Longo, now a condemned man, was marched away.

  THIRTY-NINE

  I REMAINED IN the courtroom as Joe and Joy filed out, and then Penny and Sally. It was clear, glancing at their faces—shocked, uncomprehending—that this wasn’t the sort of trial whose verdict would ease anyone’s emotions. No one was celebrating. The crime had been too enormous. Police photos of their loved ones had been publicly displayed; details from the autopsy reports had been read aloud. I felt terrible for them. “Many people talk of closure,” wrote Penny Dupuie in a statement that she later distributed to the press. “There is no closure. MaryJane, Zachery, Sadie, and Madison are gone.”

  After the spectators and lawyers and officers had all left, I still didn’t move. Soon I was alone, except for a television cameraman who was gathering a length of cable. I felt pinned to my seat, exhausted and head-heavy. It seemed as if my relationship with Longo—from the Oregonian call, to the Wednesday talks, to the flood of letters, to the final verdict—had happened so rapidly, one event atop the other, that it was as though a coil had been compressed in my mind, and now, with the end of the trial, everything had sprung loose. And as I sat there, on the wooden bench inside the courtroom, no longer anxious to learn the whole of Longo’s saga, no longer consumed by the quest for a story, I realized at last exactly how I felt about him.

  I hated him. I hated him in the intense way that you can only hate someone you’d once truly cared about. What Longo had done to his family, and how he had acted in court, and the ways in which he’d toyed with me, and the fact that he had never expressed any genuine remorse or even seemed to grasp the magnitude of his crimes—I saw all that and I hated him more. I was thankful for the jurors’ decision. I agreed with them. Longo, I thought, deserved to die.

  He had come to me as a liar and con man and possible killer, and during our time together I had given him every benefit of the doubt. I had accepted him as at least a partially kind and empathetic man; I had believed that he was striving to become more honest and trustworthy. But when it came to the ultimate test of his essential decency—in court, under oath, in front of his and MaryJane’s families—he told the biggest and worst lies of his life.

  I had been fascinated by Longo. I’d also been fooled by him. As he was led out of court for the final time, he seemed to me not much different than the day he’d first called. He left as a liar and con man and definite killer. He was gone, condemned to die, and I had this sense of having survived something—a storm of sorts, and here I was on the back end, alive and intact, though in many ways not the same person at all.

  It was a twelve-hundred-mile drive back to Montana. I spoke to Jill on my cell phone for hours, but even she couldn’t unjumble my head. I was furious with Longo, and I couldn’t stop thinking about him. Jill said that this was understandable. The time I’d spent with him, she said, had been too intense to simply come to a clean and sudden close.

  She was right; there was unfinished busine
ss between Longo and me. Toward the end of the trial I had backed off from him, but I had never let him know exactly how I felt about his performance on the witness stand and his continued insistence that he was not the only killer. I thought that telling him this, whether he cared to hear it or not, would settle my own mind.

  When I returned home, I wrote him a letter. It was ten pages long, badly rambling in parts, but I tried to express some of my feelings:

  Chris, when I sat there in the courtroom on the day you told the story…I felt this strong and horrible feeling in my chest…. I felt sick, physically…. Your story did notfeel real to me. It felt awfully wrong…. I know that youdon’t want MaryJane thought of as a crazy and evil murderer, but I also know that you just weren’t ready, at your trial, to speak the deep, dark truth. You gave a whole speech at your trial about coming clean, but you did not. And that makes me more furious than I’ve ever been at anyone my whole life…. To blame it on your dead wife isquite evil…. If something feels false, tastes false, smellsfalse, sounds false, and if there was a guy on a bridge at 4:30 in the morning who saw a red minivan, and if there are all the reasons in the world for you to tell a false story (so people don’t think you were capable of such a heinous crime without proper provocation) and if there is not a single bit of evidence to back up your story…then Chris, come on, what are we all supposed to think?

  I mailed the letter to the Oregon State Penitentiary. It seemed like a fair epitaph to our relationship—or at least it felt good to write it. I didn’t care if Longo responded. In fact, I hoped he wouldn’t. I hoped it was the end.

  FORTY

  IT WASN’T. A week later, I received a thin white envelope in the mail, different from the brown envelopes Longo had used in county jail. The return address identified him as inmate number 145-09-855 of the Oregon State Penitentiary. Inside was an eight-page letter, written in blue ballpoint pen. Apparently, he was no longer forced to use golf pencils.

  “I feel horrible that you are going through all of this w/in yourself,” he wrote. “I’m truly sorry.” This response was predictable; Longo was good at expressing generalized contrition. What surprised me was the next part of his letter.

  A month earlier, during one of the last phone conversations I’d had with Longo—this was toward the end of his trial, just after he had finished with his testimony—we’d had a rather blunt exchange. “I have a feeling,” I’d said, “that if you’re strapped to a gurney and they’re about to inject you—sorry to be graphic—and I say to you, ‘Well, you’re about to die, do you want to change anything that you said in court?’ I have a feeling you will say no. Is that a true feeling?”

  “That is absolutely true,” Longo had said, and I was convinced that he would never budge from this position.

  But now, in the first letter he’d sent me from death row, Longo completely altered his story. “What I said on the stand was false,” he wrote. “I am absolutely guilty of killing my entire family.”

  Longo then proceeded to explain precisely why he’d lied in court. The whole trial, he wrote, was a sort of suicide-by-jury. He was trying to be put to death. He had it all mapped out. “I’d admit the past & monsterize myself in the eyes of the jury,” he wrote. “I would try to be emotionless, to add credibility to that monsterization. I would tell the story as planned to cement the hatred of both loved ones & the jurors, which would guarantee the guilty conviction & pave the way for a death penalty decision.”

  This was, he noted, a performance of utmost gallantry: Ensuring his own death was the best thing he could do to assuage the grief he’d brought to his and MaryJane’s families. Everything had worked out perfectly. “Mission accomplished,” he wrote.

  He even chided me for not figuring this out myself. There’d been no need, he added, for me to get so upset—clearly, I’d taken the trial way too seriously. He’d really meant it all as a grand charade. “I know that you didn’t believe me on the stand,” he wrote. “I know that nobody else believed me either. What I said in regards to what happened that night wasn’t meant to be believed. It was meant for everyone to despise me & move on.” He poked fun at Krasik and Hadley as well. “My attorneys,” he snickered, “believed it to some degree.”

  Besides, he added, he didn’t want to live in the general inmate population, anyway. “Being out of my cell for twelve hours a day & in the ‘world,’ the population, didn’t exactly fit my needs,” he noted. He desired a cell on death row. “I still have a ton of introspection to do & I don’t know that I could accomplish this from anywhere but here.”

  He concluded the letter with an expression of gratitude. “You’ve had, & are continuing to have, a tremendous impact on my own life,” he wrote. “No one has spoken to me w/ quite your level of honesty. You’re a great example for me. Go figure. Two liars to make two people turn to a path of honesty.”

  I wasn’t sure how to react to this letter. It seemed to belittle our entire relationship, to annul the twenty-four letters that came before. Longo had spent more than a year trying to convince me that he wasn’t a monster, only to inform me that what he most wanted was to be seen as one.

  His words were confounding. Did he really believe that the trial operated under his command? That he had power over all twelve jurors, both his lawyers, and Judge Huckleberry? The reasoning he displayed in this letter—“I made the decisions that I did quite consciously”—led me to think that Longo may have descended into madness.

  Then I thought that this was exactly what he wanted me to think. His trial had ended with the worst possible outcome, and now he was counting on me, the person who supposedly knew him so well, to write that he’d lost his mind. Perhaps he hoped that, after my account was published, he could use the appellate process to gain a new trial—one in which he’d plead not guilty by reason of insanity. Or was this idea itself insane?

  I had no clue. The only thing I knew was that I didn’t know enough. “If it’s important to you that you know everything that truly happened, we can talk about it,” Longo wrote toward the end of his letter. “There’s still a lot that we have to say; at least on my end.” This time, he implied, he’d tell me the real, true story.

  I couldn’t resist. I sent him another letter. “Yes, Chris,” I wrote, “I’d like to take you up on your offer: Please tell me the full story of what happened.”

  And so, once again, he described the murders. Everything he said on the witness stand was true, he claimed, until the very end. He did confess all of his lies to MaryJane; he did have an argument with her; he did go to work the following afternoon. On the final day of his family’s life, though, Longo drove himself to the Fred Meyer. Mary-Jane did not take the minivan, and therefore she did not pick him up.

  A little after 11 P.M. on Monday, December 17, 2001, Longo drove himself back from the department store. “I came home to a silent condo,” he wrote, “went directly to the bedroom to check on MJ, & found her holding a pillow over Madison, pressing it over the upper half of Maddy’s body, crying, kneeling on the bed.”

  As I read this, I felt a familiar sense of dismay. He was still insisting that MaryJane had initiated the murders. I told him, in my next letter, that it was impossible to believe that he happened to walk into the condominium at the very moment his wife was in the midst of a murderous act. “You were gone all day, Chris—if MJ wanted to harm any of the kids she had hours and hours to do it,” I wrote. “Is it possible that, in the trauma following the crimes, your mind may have substituted one image for another? Is it possible that, when you came home from work, MJ was leaning over Madison, changing her diaper?”

  “I personally don’t believe that it was sheer coincidence that MJ was in the middle of the act at the exact moment that I arrived at home,” Longo responded. “I really believe that she was doing this to spark a reaction from me. What kind of reaction she expected, I don’t know.” He was also confident that his mind wasn’t playing tricks on him; MaryJane’s actions, he insisted, were unmistakably aggressive.
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br />   “I realize that it just doesn’t make sense that MJ would ever do such a thing,” he continued. “I know that no one, including to a large degree myself, would ever think her capable. But I would never think that I was capable either; that I would ever conceive of doing such a thing, right up to that evening when I walked into the condo.”

  Once inside, Longo killed MaryJane in the manner he had described on the witness stand, except that there was not as much banging and yelling. Then he strangled the breathing but unresponsive Madison. He described the feeling that came over him as he killed his wife and youngest child as a kind of feral surge, one that short-circuited his brain’s ability to reason.

  Throughout the first two murders, Longo wrote, Zachery and Sadie remained sleeping on the sofa bed. They awoke only after Longo had thrown the suitcases containing MaryJane and Madison into the bay. He scooped up his remaining two children and carried them to the minivan. “I had no plan or idea of what I was going to do, only that I wanted us to be somewhere else,” he wrote. He drove off in the van, and Zachery and Sadie soon fell back to sleep.

  He headed south, following the coastline. Longo thought about what he would tell his children when they awoke. This notion filled him with terror. “I resolved that Zack & Sadie would suffer less if they weren’t alive,” he wrote. He stopped the minivan in a residential neighborhood and picked up two large rocks from in front of a house. Then he drove some more—“looking for a spot,” he wrote. He ended up in Waldport, on the Lint Slough Bridge. It was about 4:30 A.M. on December 18, 2001. Longo conceded that he did indeed meet Dick Hoch, at the very time Hoch testified to, only one day later.

  He couldn’t recall if he met Hoch before or after the final murders, but he did remember some of his actions. “I put a rock in Zack’s pillowcase that was on the floor of the van, tied it around his ankle while he was still asleep. He barely stirred. I picked him up, blanket & pillowcase, & threw him in on the south side of the bridge, where I pray that he never fully woke up or knew what I was doing to him. At the time I really felt like I was doing the honorable thing, the best thing that I could do.”