TRUE
STORY:
MURDER, MEMOIR, MEA CULPA
MICHAEL FINKEL
For Jill
What is true lies between you and the idea of you—
a friction, restless, between the fact and the fiction.
—Alastair Reid,“Where Truth Lies”
CONTENTS
PART ONE: LIES
ONE
THIS IS A true story. Sometimes—pretty much all the time—I…
TWO
THERE WERE, it turned out, four murders. The first was…
THREE
THE STORY THAT resulted in my firing from the New York Times…
FOUR
THE LONGO FAMILY murders, according to investigators, all…
FIVE
AS ADAMA MALÉ stood in the tiny room in the Ivory Coast town…
SIX
WHAT I DID was take a handful of interviews and meld them…
PART TWO: MEXICO
SEVEN
BY THE TIME the Oregonian reporter called, I had already exiled…
EIGHT
A MONTH PASSED. There was no reply. Except for his lawyers, it…
NINE
YOU CAN’T SPEAK with an inmate of the Lincoln County Jail right…
TEN
AND SO WE were free to talk. For a long moment, though, there…
ELEVEN
THE LINCOLN COUNTY JAIL is a shoebox-shaped building, made of…
TWELVE
HE DECIDED YES. The letter came in the same envelope Longo…
THIRTEEN
OVER THE CARIBBEAN came the plane, low and smooth, the…
FOURTEEN
THE REAL MR. FINKEL absorbed this letter with no small measure…
FIFTEEN
DURING HIS SECOND WEEK in Mexico, Longo finally met a…
SIXTEEN
THERE WAS A TIME, just after I’d handed in my article on the…
SEVENTEEN
THE VERY DAY that Christian Michael Longo was placed on the…
PART THREE: LOVE
EIGHTEEN
THERE WAS ONE thing I wanted to get straight between Longo…
NINETEEN
IN THE FALL of 1990, when Christian Longo was sixteen years old…
TWENTY
SOON AFTER LONGO began unfolding his life story, I mailed him…
TWENTY-ONE
A FEW MONTHS after MaryJane Baker house-sat for the Longos, a…
TWENTY-TWO
FROM APRIL OF 2002, when Longo first called me, until the start…
TWENTY-THREE
TO SEAL THEIR engagement, Longo and Baker made a pact. They…
TWENTY-FOUR
ON THE FIRST OF OCTOBER, 2002, just after nine o’clock in the…
TWENTY-FIVE
WHEN LONGO LEARNED that his wife was pregnant, he created a…
TWENTY-SIX
IN THE MONTHS leading up to his trial, Longo met several times…
TWENTY-SEVEN
WITH FINAL TOUCH booming and, at the same time, collapsing,…
TWENTY-EIGHT
I HAD PLEDGED to Longo that I would be completely honorable…
TWENTY-NINE
AT THE POLICE STATION, under interrogation, Longo confessed…
PART FOUR: DEATH
THIRTY
SO THAT WAS HIS STORY. He never wrote a word about the day…
THIRTY-ONE
THE LINCOLN COUNTY COURTHOUSE and the Lincoln County…
THIRTY-TWO
SOON AFTER RETURNING TO JAIL, through the walkway, Longo…
THIRTY-THREE
THE OPENING STATEMENT for the prosecution was delivered by…
THIRTY-FOUR
AFTER BRIGGS COMPLETED his opening statement, it was the…
THIRTY-FIVE
THAT WAS THE prosecution’s case. They presented seven days’…
THIRTY-SIX
A FEW MINUTES before Longo returned to the witness stand to…
THIRTY-SEVEN
AS I SAT in the courtroom, with a pen in my hand and my notebook…
THIRTY-EIGHT
LONGO FINISHED TESTIFYING late in the afternoon on April…
THIRTY-NINE
I REMAINED IN the courtroom as Joe and Joy filed out, and then…
FORTY
IT WASN’T. A week later, I received a thin white envelope in the…
FORTY-ONE
WHY?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
PART ONE
LIES
ONE
THIS IS A true story. Sometimes—pretty much all the time—I wish that parts of this story weren’t true, but the whole thing is. I feel the need to emphasize this truthfulness, right here at the start, for two reasons. The first is that a few of the coincidences in this account may seem beyond the bounds of probability, and I’d like to affirm that everything herein, to the best of my abilities, has been accurately reported: Every quote, every description, every detail was gathered by me either through personal observation, an interview, a letter, a police report, or evidence presented in a court of law. No names have been changed, no identifying specifics altered. Anything I did not feel certain of, I left out.
The second reason is painful for me to admit. The second reason I am making such an overt declaration of honesty is that, relatively recently, I was fired from one of the more prestigious journalism jobs in the world—writer for the New York Times Magazine—for passing off as true a story that was, instead, a deceptive blend of fact and fiction.
The firing occurred in February of 2002, soon after I was caught. The following week, on February 21, the Times made my dismissal public by publishing a six-paragraph article, on page A-3, under the headline EDITORS’ NOTE. The article’s final line announced that I would no longer work for the New York Times—a line that, I feared, represented the guillotining of my writing career.
Sure enough, within weeks of the appearance of the Editors’ Note, I was flogged by the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, New York magazine, an Associated Press report, a dozen different web sites, several European, Mexican, and South American papers, and in a four-minute report on National Public Radio. One writer described my actions as “sleazy,” “arrogant,” “offensive,” and “pernicious,” and then concluded that people like me should “burn in Journalism Hell.”
I had been informed of the contents of the Editors’ Note a few days before its publication, and I’d assumed that responses of this sort might arise. When someone in the fraternity of journalists fails, it’s important for the profession to demonstrate that it can be at least as fierce toward its own as it is toward others. So I devised a plan to shield myself. Once the note was made public, I would retreat into a kind of temporary hibernation: I would not answer my phone, or collect my mail, or check my e-mail. The Editors’ Note, I figured, would be posted on the Times’ online edition shortly before midnight on February 20, 2002. I live in Montana, where the local time is two hours behind New York, so I determined that I would commence my hibernation at 10 P.M.
Less than ninety minutes before the cutoff time, my phone rang. I answered. It was a newspaper reporter for the Portland Oregonian; his name, he said, was Matt Sabo. He asked to speak with Michael Finkel of the New York Times. I took a breath, steeled myself, and said, resignedly, “Well, congratulations. You’re the first to call.”
“I’m the first?” he said. “I’m surprised.”
“Yes,” I said. “You’re the first. I didn’t think anyone would call until tomorrow, after the story runs.”
“No,” he told me, “the story isn’t running until Sunday.”
“But I’m still writing it,” he said, “so it won’t be in until Sunday.”
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“What are you talking about?” he said.
“I’m talking about the Editors’ Note,” I said. “Isn’t that what you’re talking about?”
“No,” he said. “I’m calling about the murders.”
TWO
THERE WERE, it turned out, four murders. The first was discovered on the morning of Wednesday, December 19, 2001, near the town of Waldport, Oregon, in a muddy pond about a mile inland from the Pacific Ocean. It was the body of a young boy, floating facedown a few feet off the rocky shore. A sheriff’s lieutenant called to the scene estimated that the boy was between four and six years old. He had dusty blond hair and brownish green eyes. He was wearing only a pair of underpants, white with blue and green pinstripes. He weighed about fifty pounds. He hadn’t been dead long, a day or two at most.
There was no identification on the body, and no obvious sign of injury. No one had filed a missing-persons report with the local police. All absentees at local kindergartens and day-care centers were accounted for. No one knew the child’s name. A photograph of the dead boy, tastefully retouched—his hair tousled, his eyes shut, his lips slightly parted—was distributed to the local media, in hopes that someone could help identify him.
For a while, the police theorized that a vehicle might have run off the road. A narrow bridge, part of State Highway 34, bisects the pond, which is officially known as Lint Slough, and a city road winds about its perimeter. Maybe the rest of the boy’s family, perhaps tourists, were still entombed in a sunken car. This would explain why no one had come forward to identify the body. There were no skid marks on the road, however, and no oil slick in the water, and the bridge’s concrete railing was intact.
Even so, three days after the body was found, the local sheriff’s office dive team performed an underwater search of the pond, hoping to discover a clue to the boy’s identity. Near the cement pylons of the State Highway 34 bridge, in seven feet of water, the divers made a curious find—not a car, but a pillowcase. The pillowcase was printed with characters from the Rugrats television cartoon. Inside it was a large rock.
Later in the day, just after noon, the divers made another discovery. This time it was the body of a young girl. She had blond hair and pale blue eyes; she was younger than the boy, but had the same slightly upturned nose and the same rounded cheeks. She, too, was dressed only in a pair of underpants. As with the boy, her body displayed no signs of trauma.
Tied to the girl’s right ankle, though, was a pillowcase, this one with a floral print. Inside the pillowcase was another large rock; the weight had held the girl’s body under water. The boy, it seemed clear, had been similarly weighted, but had slipped free of his pillowcase and floated to the surface.
The discovery of a second dead child initiated the most extensive criminal investigation in the history of Lincoln County, Oregon. Every child in the two-thousand-person town of Waldport was checked on. No one was missing. Police departments throughout the West Coast were alerted about the unidentified bodies. None could provide a lead. Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation searched national databases of missing children. There were no matches.
The mood in Waldport was one of bafflement and fear. Christmas decorations were everywhere, and two children were dead, and nobody knew if a killer was living among them. A few people placed flowers and cards along the railing of the Highway 34 bridge. Once this was started, it seemed the local residents couldn’t stop, and soon the bridge was piled with bouquets of roses, handwritten notes, helium balloons, ceramic angels, and a big Barney the Dinosaur inflatable toy.
Some answers were finally provided by a woman named Denise Thompson, who had babysat the children. She had looked after the kids, Thompson told investigators, on Saturday evening, December 15, four days before the first body was found. She’d seen the photograph of the boy, which had been released to the media. Her husband contacted the sheriff’s office, and shortly after the girl’s body was located, the couple went to the morgue and made the identifications.
The boy, authorities announced, was named Zachery Michael Longo. He was a few weeks shy of his fifth birthday. The girl was his younger sister, Sadie Ann Longo, three and a half years old. Still missing from the family was another sister, two-year-old Madison Jeanne Longo, as well as the children’s parents—MaryJane Irene Longo, thirty-four years old, and Christian Michael Longo, twenty-seven. The family lived in the town of Newport, twelve miles north of Lint Slough. The Longos were new to the region; they had moved to Oregon from Ohio three months before.
The whereabouts of the other three members of the Longo family was unknown. No one knew whether they were alive or dead. The babysitter, though, had further information. Denise Thompson told investigators that she had eaten lunch with Christian Longo on the very afternoon that his son’s body was found. They’d met that Wednesday at two o’clock—a few hours after Zachery had floated to the surface of Lint Slough—at the Fred Meyer department store, where both Longo and Thompson worked. At the time, Thompson had not yet heard of the boy’s discovery, and neither, apparently, had Longo.
In fact, as Thompson informed the sheriff’s office, while at this lunch, Longo revealed that his wife had just left him for another man. MaryJane had taken their three children, Longo said, and flown to Michigan. This news came as a shock to Thompson; she and her husband had become friends with the Longos and had not sensed that anything was amiss.
Officers promptly searched the Longos’ last known residence, a rental condominium on Newport’s Yaquina Bay. It appeared as though the family had abruptly moved out. No notice had been given to the condominium’s manager; the rent was left unpaid. The condominium’s furnishings were still there, but all of the family’s possessions were gone, except for two stuffed animals—a Clifford the Dog and a Scooby-Doo—which were found in a closet. A television set and a microwave oven, both owned by the condominium, were missing. There was no sign of Christian Longo, his wife, or their youngest child.
Many of the Longos’ personal belongings, including infant clothing, family photos, women’s clothing, and a wallet containing Mary-Jane Longo’s driver’s license, were found in a nearby dumpster. In the photographs, the Longo children appeared happy and healthy.
The day after the Longos’ condominium was searched, divers investigated the waters in front of the unit. It was December 27, eight days after the first body had been found. Just below a wooden ramp leading to docks where dozens of sailboats were moored, the divers retrieved two large, dark green suitcases. One of the suitcases appeared to have a bit of human hair emerging from the zipper. Inside, bent into a fetal position, was the body of MaryJane Longo. She was nude. A mixture of blood and water was seeping from her nose and mouth; later, the medical examiner determined the cause of death to be head trauma and strangulation.
The second suitcase was also opened. Inside was a pile of clothing, a five-pound scuba-diving weight, and the body of two-year-old Madison Longo. There was no blood on her body, and no obvious injury. She was wearing a frog-patterned diaper. She’d been hit on the head and strangled, according to the medical examiner, then placed in the suitcase and dropped into the water.
THREE
THE STORY THAT resulted in my firing from the New York Times was supposed to be about child slavery and chocolate. It was assigned by the magazine’s editors, who mailed me a package of materials from a London-based humanitarian agency called Anti-Slavery International. In the package was a videotape of a documentary entitled Slavery, which had been produced by a pair of highly regarded British filmmakers, Kate Blewett and Brian Woods, and shown on British television.
The film explained that about half of the world’s cocoa beans—the primary ingredient in chocolate—are grown on plantations in the central valle
ys of the Ivory Coast, in West Africa. Many of these plantations, according to the documentary, are worked by teenage and pre-teenage boys who are trafficked in from poorer neighboring countries such as Mali, Benin, and Burkina Faso. Rather than being paid for their work, these boys are enslaved. They labor from dawn to dusk; they are scarcely fed; they are locked each night in cramped, bedless rooms; they receive no medical care and no money; they are frequently whipped.
“When you’re beaten,” one boy said in the film, according to the subtitles, “your clothes are taken off and your hands tied. You’re thrown on the floor, and then beaten—beaten really viciously—twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon.” Runaways who are captured, he added, are sometimes pummeled to death.
The documentary stated that nearly every plantation in the Ivory Coast uses slave labor. And, said the film, we who live in wealthy countries and eat chocolate bars are directly responsible. In one scene, a young boy stared blankly into the camera and, when asked what he’d like to say to people who eat chocolate, responded, “They enjoy something I suffered to make. I worked hard for them, but saw no benefit. They are eating my flesh.”
It was a powerful and haunting film, probing what was clearly an important topic. My editor told me that this was expected to be a cover article, which meant that the story would receive a considerable amount of exposure. I had recently signed an exclusive contract with the New York Times Magazine and had, in the past year, written three cover stories—one detailing the ill-fated voyage of a boat crowded with Haitian refugees; another about the lives of a group of Palestinian teenagers in the Gaza Strip; and a third describing the international black market in human organs.
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