True Story

by Michael Finkel

  As for Sadie, his recollections were vague but horrifying. “I have dreams of Sadie screaming,” he revealed. She’s falling away, dropping into the water, crying out. “I can’t tell you,” he wrote, “how much I hope & try to convince myself that that’s not what happened.”

  Longo had finally admitted to me, in June of 2003, eighteen months after the crimes and fourteen months after our first conversation, that he’d murdered his entire family. He still claimed that MaryJane had instigated the killings, but by now I realized that all I had to do was write him a few pointed letters and he might very well recant this part of his story as well.

  I didn’t write those letters. I didn’t because of an idea I was unable to push out of my mind: Just because a liar says something you want to hear doesn’t mean it’s true. I could not ignore the possibility that his confession to all four murders was also a lie. Longo, I knew, would lie about almost anything if he thought he had something to gain.

  What could he gain by admitting to two more murders? He may have thought that by doing so he could reestablish our friendship. In the letter Longo had written after his testimony—the one I’d read while waiting for the verdict in the guilt phase—he had described his feelings about my decreasing presence in his life. “You’ve given me a support that I never expected & it has meant more to me than the tacit support of my parents & brother,” he wrote. “But now I’m afraid that you are beginning to draw that line. I don’t mean to sound as though I don’t deserve to be an outcast, I just don’t want to lose so much.”

  Keeping me as a friend, he continued, would allow him to “save a little piece” of his life and give him “something to hold on to.” “The possibility of total loss is overwhelming,” he added. “It’s making me wreckless.” When he wrote this, Longo was still insisting that MaryJane had killed Zachery and Sadie. But he hinted that he’d be willing to change this story. He was thinking, he said, of issuing a fuller confession, even if he had to admit to things he didn’t do. “I wonder,” he added, “if that news would bring you back to a greater level of trust in me.”

  Now, a few weeks after he’d been incarcerated on Oregon’s death row, he had made such a confession. But I didn’t move to a greater level of trust. I only wondered why Longo had suddenly admitted to all four murders. Were we inching toward honesty, or was he simply saying whatever he thought necessary at this point to placate me? The question was more or less rhetorical, for even if I’d posed it to Longo, his answer wouldn’t matter—any response might be another lie. It would have been just as good to flip a coin: heads, he’s telling the truth; tails, he’s placating.

  I realized, then, that I couldn’t be certain of almost any aspect of the murders. I was planning to write a book about the crimes, but the truth is, despite all I’d seen and heard and read, I wouldn’t feel comfortable definitively answering any of the five basic questions that should be addressed in the opening paragraphs of a half-decent newspaper article.

  Who killed them? Longo has never changed his contention that MaryJane was involved in at least one of the murders, and there are no living witnesses or forensic evidence to prove him wrong.

  What was the manner of death? The prosecution maintained that all four victims were strangled; they said the autopsy reports supported this presumption. Longo insisted that MaryJane and Madison were strangled and Zachery and Sadie were drowned, and his lawyers argued that the autopsies were inconclusive.

  Where were they killed? All of the murders, according to the prosecution, occurred in the condominium—Zachery and Sadie were already dead when they were dropped from the bridge. Longo maintains that two were killed in the condo and two died in Lint Slough.

  When were they killed? The scenarios presented by the prosecution and the defense differed by twenty-four hours, and neither side has budged. Longo wrote that he was “certain” the murders occurred on December 18, and suggested that both Dick Hoch and the harbormaster may have been pushed by the prosecution to remember the previous day. “So many questions we will never have answers to because he is incapable of the truth,” MaryJane’s sister Penny said at the trial. The four bodies, she said, are buried at Bethlehem Cemetery in Ann Arbor beneath a gravestone that does not bear a day of death.

  FORTY-ONE

  WHY ?

  The day after the trial ended, before I began the drive back to Montana, I visited Judge Huckleberry in his chambers. He’d heard murder cases before—he’d been a judge for more than twenty years—and I thought he might have some insight into why the Longo killings occurred.

  I asked him for his opinion on the motive, and Huckleberry took in a long, gradual breath and wrinkled up his face. He said that in his career, he’d listened to the details of many horrific crimes, and all of them had a rationale, no matter how misguided or debased. But this one, he told me, was the first he’d ever experienced that seemed wholly inexplicable. The murders appeared to have happened for no reason at all.

  “No behavior I’ve witnessed in my life fits the pattern of this case,” Huckleberry said. “There’s no cause and effect, no provocation, no A to B.” He was fiddling with a Rubik’s Cube as he spoke, twisting the parts with practiced precision—one time, during a break in the trial, he’d entertained the jury by solving the puzzle in a matter of minutes. But then he put down the cube and looked at me, clearly distressed, and held up his hands as if in surrender. He shrugged. “It’s a mystery,” he said.

  Paulette Sanders had argued for the prosecution that Longo had killed his wife and children because they’d become “inconvenient”—they sapped his money and his energy; they prevented him from traveling the world and achieving the glamorous, footloose existence of his dreams. “He couldn’t have the life he wanted to have,” Sanders said. So he killed his family in order to be free.

  Stephen Scherr, Longo’s psychologist, felt that Longo adored his family and wanted them to live in comfort and privilege. But when he turned them into hoboes, bouncing from place to place, evading the authorities, his pride—always a volatile and delicate element in a narcissist—was crushed. “I believe,” Scherr wrote in his report, “his inability to get away from the pain and distress that he caused his wife and children led to his ridding himself of them.”

  I asked Longo himself, in one of the letters I wrote after his trial, to explain the motive. “It’s senseless,” he answered. “It should never have happened & I’m fighting every day to not continually try to figure that out. I don’t think that I’ll ever know.”

  My theory is that Longo became so entangled in his lies that he concluded murder was the only escape. He had admitted in court that he would rather steal than accept welfare. To this I would add that he’d rather kill his family than have them discover what a fraud he really was. I agree with the prosecution that the murders took place on the night Longo ate his cheese and drank his wine—that was when he realized he’d reached the limit of his deceptive abilities.

  I don’t think Longo ever confessed his sins to MaryJane. The all-night conversation with her that he claims to have had is, I feel, no more than wishful thinking. I believe that Longo never considered abandoning his family or allowing MaryJane and the kids to peacefully leave him. He might see them again one day, and that would be too humiliating to bear. So he had to kill them. I don’t think he ever came close to committing suicide instead of murder. He believed, I feel, that if he weren’t around, his family would be even worse off.

  I support the defense’s contention that MaryJane and Madison were killed in the condo, and Zachery and Sadie were dropped alive from the bridge. (Zachery’s autopsy report indicated that the cause of death was “consistent with drowning”—a phrase the prosecution never read aloud and the defense didn’t call attention to.) I do not for an instant accept that MaryJane played any role in the crimes.

  If Longo had tied a sturdier knot around Zachery’s leg, he might still be a free man. In an early letter, while he was maintaining his complete innocence, he said that if
he were acquitted of the charges, he’d “restart on life.” And if his son had remained submerged, that’s what I think he would’ve done—restart. He would have followed through on his identity change, adopted someone else’s name and Social Security number, moved to another town, taken a job, and undoubtedly found no shortage of women who were willing to settle down with him. Maybe he’d have begun a family.

  I believe that Longo is a genuinely personable guy, and if I’d bumped into him at a bar, I bet we could have shot a few games of pool and had a laugh. I also believe that Longo is the most dangerous kind of man—a man who can fool even his own wife into thinking he’s not dangerous at all.

  Despite his death sentence, it’s likely that Longo has plenty of life ahead of him. Oregon is sparing in its enforcement of capital punishment; only two prisoners have been executed since the state legalized the death penalty in 1984, and both had voluntarily abandoned their appeals. In the course of the appeals process, Longo will have the opportunity to overturn his conviction seven times. There are twenty-six people currently on “the row,” as he calls it, who were sentenced to death before him.

  Longo claims that he’s settling into his new life as a condemned man. He exercises a lot, watches TV, and reads whatever he can get his hands on—the first book he finished after moving to the penitentiary, he said, was The Green Mile, Stephen King’s multivolume novel about death row. He’s confined to his six-foot-by-ten-foot cell for twenty-one hours a day, and when he is allowed out, he’s sometimes handcuffed and attached to a tether, like a dog on a leash. He works as a janitor on the row, for a salary of about $1 per day, which he uses to pay for snacks and writing supplies. As always, he has no shortage of admirers and pen pals. In the three months following his death sentence, he received two marriage proposals. He corresponded with his parents and brother, and said that his bond with them was stronger than it has been in years.

  “I think a lot about MJ and the kids,” he wrote in a letter to me. He’s dwelled endlessly, he added, on the little things he could have done differently, and wonders which of them may have prevented the downward spiral that led to murder. He wants to fix what he’s done wrong, to help those he’s hurt, but he knows that both of these goals are impossible. “I feel stripped bare & don’t know what to do to cover myself up w/ a better version of me, w/o the lies & the need to feel important,” he wrote. “I guess that I feel a little lost & directionless.”

  He said he thinks about me, too—“pretty much every day.” Even so, we scarcely communicate. He phoned me one time from death row, a few days after he arrived there. We spoke for fifteen minutes, and agreed that our contact would continue only through the mail. Over the next six months, he sent me a couple of short letters, and I responded with brief notes of my own. Then the letters stopped, too. Still, I’ll admit that Longo is on my mind most days as well. I can’t help but wonder which version of himself he’s presenting to his fellow convicts, and how he plans to cope with the rest of his life, and what thoughts are floating through his head.

  The last time I saw Longo in private was when I visited him in the Lincoln County Jail toward the end of his trial, on a Friday morning when court was not in session. He knew that the trial wasn’t going well, and he was in a dour mood. Almost as a reflex, I reverted to my lifeline role and tried to provide him with a diversion. Rather than analyzing the events of the past few days in court, I instead told him about an idea that had occurred to me while I’d been running along the Newport beach.

  It had been a beautiful, cloudless day, and I’d kicked off my shoes and socks so I could feel the sand between my toes as I ran. My mind drifted into a peaceful reverie, and this vision came to me—a vision so wonderful and right-feeling that I kept running, far longer than I’d planned to, unsure if the notion would persist. But it only intensified, and the next day it was stronger still.

  The vision, I told Longo, was about Jill. I’d imagined that the two of us were in Alaska—I had been there on assignment several times, though never with her—and it was near the summer solstice, when the sun is visible almost around the clock. There was snow on the high peaks, and the valleys were that brilliant, electric green that’s a hallmark of the northern summer, and we were walking arm in arm along the water, and I had a ring with me, and I dipped to a knee. This is what I told Longo—I told him before I’d told anyone else—and he grinned and said it sounded superb.

  On June 19, 2003, nine weeks after Longo’s trial had ended, I took Jill on a surprise trip to Alaska. At midnight, on a rocky shoreline, with the sky just fading to pink, I proposed marriage. She said yes. I had fallen in love—I was getting married—in spite of Chris Longo, in spite of having spent more than a year in constant contact with a man who’d murdered his wife and children. But also, I have to admit, partially because of him, too. Working on the Chris and Mike Project had kept me at home for a long enough stretch to nurture a genuine love affair, and to become at least somewhat comfortable with the idea of settling down.

  I don’t know if Longo and I really grew to be friends, but to me, the bond we forged, despite the manipulation on both our parts, felt genuine. And as much as I’d like to deny it, the truth is that I saw some of myself in Longo. The flawed parts of my own character—the runaway egotism, the capacity to deceive—were mirrored and magnified in him. All the time I spent with Longo forced me to take a lengthy and uncomfortable look at what I’d done and who I had become.

  My year with Longo made me see how a person’s life could spiral completely out of control; how one could get lost in a haze of dishonesty; and how these things could have dire consequences. I believe that if I had not met Longo—if I’d tried another way to revive my life after the Times disaster—I may have learned similar lessons, but not so quickly and clearly and profoundly.

  From the first week I was fired, I knew that I owed an apology to my editors, to the fact-checkers, to the photo department, to my colleagues, and to everyone who had read the West Africa article. But I didn’t feel that an apology from me would be accepted as genuine. Now, I hope, it will. And so the last thing I want to say about my Times article is this: I’m sorry.

  In one of the letters Longo wrote me from death row, he asked if I’d followed through on my Alaska idea. I responded that I had. He wrote back, and said that the news made him feel “warm & fuzzy inside, happy; a feeling that I haven’t felt in a while.” He assumed it was only a matter of time before babies were on the way, and he gently teased me, visualizing me walking around town “wearing one of those backpack kid carriers.” He also congratulated me on finally becoming an adult, at age thirty-four.

  Soon after my engagement, I began assembling all the pieces I’d gathered for the Chris and Mike Project, organizing them into a book-length manuscript. To put myself in the proper frame of mind, I reread all of Longo’s letters one more time, in chronological order.

  Something in the opening section of his very first letter—the one detailing his time in Mexico—made me laugh. Longo was aware, right from the start, it seemed, that I would never figure out what really happened in Lincoln County in the early hours of December 17 or 18 of 2001. By the time his trial ended, the amount of information on Longo that I’d examined, including legal materials, transcribed conversations, and media clippings, had exceeded five thousand pages. But in his first letter, on page 13, he noted that “no matter how many thousands of pages” I eventually compiled, “they would never provide an accurate enough description, or explanation, of the entire story.”

  Twenty-nine letters later, after Longo was imprisoned on death row, he counseled me on another issue. In the whole of my book, he stated, “any inaccuracies, regardless of how innocuous” would drive him “nuts.” This was written on the one-thousand-one-hundred-forty-third page he’d mailed me. Those pages included three different versions of the murders—one in which Longo was responsible for none of the killings, another in which he was guilty of two, and a third in which he admitted to all four. Yet he
insisted that the story I tell must be a model of precision. He won’t be pleased, he said, unless everything in this book is absolutely, unassailably true.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  OVER THE THREE years that I’ve worked on this project, my agent, Stuart Krichevsky, has been an inexhaustible source of sage advice and absolute support. To him I give my thanks, knowing full well that no measure of thank-yous could suffice.

  David Hirshey and Mark Bryant, my editors at HarperCollins, were the ideal tag team, by turns patient and demanding, gentle and not so, and at all times devoted and visionary. I am deeply grateful for the seemingly limitless energy they expended on this book.

  Paul Prince, who has served as a mentor throughout my career, offered astute and judicious guidance throughout the manuscript’s construction. Nick Trautwein’s extraordinary attention to the vagaries of pacing and style have saved this project from many a false note. All the remaining ones are in spots where I’ve likely ignored his advice.

  Kevin McDonnell, who accepted the daunting task of checking the facts, performed beyond the call of duty. Now, Kevin, will you please get some sleep? Rachel Elson was an ideal reader and editor—ruthless and consistently right, dammit. Adam Cohen, another ace reader, was a bloodhound for foul-smelling prose. Both made the book better.

  Matt Sabo and Bryan Denson of the Oregonian generously shared their research with me. Karen Franklin, Joe Dixon, and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl provided insightful analyses of Longo’s letters. Steven Krasik and Ken Hadley helped me grasp the dynamics of the trial. Gloria Thiede earned my nomination for patron saint of tape transcription. Dorothy Dacar offered cranial cleaning. Richard Robitaille, Bill Bishop, Andrew Kramer, Alberta Bryant, Charles Hinkle, and Lisa Harmening selflessly assisted with my reporting in Oregon.