True Story

by Michael Finkel

  He smiled at me briefly, just the top teeth showing, and we each picked up our phone. We swapped hellos and how-are-yous, and in the midst of our greetings, while maintaining eye contact, I flipped open my steno book and scribbled a few notes. I couldn’t help myself. I’d lost my job, not my instincts. Longo’s story—one that combined murder, identity theft, and a bizarre personal connection—was the journalistic equivalent of a winning lottery ticket.

  Pursuing such a story was irresistible to me. In fact, from the moment the Oregonian reporter had called, I’d had a vague sense that the beginnings of my redemption, both professional and personal, might somehow lie with Longo. His tale could provide me with a chance to return to journalism. And I thought that if I were able to be truthful with Longo—an accused murderer and a possible con man; a person who might easily forgive deceit—then I’d demonstrate, at least to myself, that I had moved beyond the dishonest behavior that had cost me my job. On top of all this was a morbid but undeniable curiosity: If Longo was indeed guilty, I wanted to know what could possibly drive a man to murder his own family.

  So I’d brought along a pen and notebook to the Lincoln County Jail, and I began taking notes. My pen’s movement caught Longo’s attention, and he looked through the glass wall between us, down at my hand, and said, “What are you writing?” He had a concerned expression on his face.

  I may have decided that working on a story about Longo was an ideal way to begin repairing my life, but it dawned on me, just then, that Longo himself might not be willing to cooperate. I’d thought he would. During our initial phone call, shortly before this visit, Longo had said that he was distressed by the media’s coverage of his case; though he hadn’t spoken with any reporters, he’d repeatedly been portrayed as a conniving, psychopathic killer. Longo had also revealed, over the phone, that he admired my writing. I had responded that maybe I should be the one to tell his story, perhaps in a magazine article. Longo had seemed receptive to the idea. “There’s a lot of things that haven’t been said,” he’d told me, in an agreeable tone of voice. This was a chief reason I’d made the trip to Newport—so that Longo could begin saying what hadn’t been said.

  But now, sitting in the visitor’s booth and sensing his displeasure, I wondered if he had changed his mind. Perhaps he’d realized that, in light of my firing, my usefulness as a mouthpiece was minimal. Possibly, he had understood or been warned that speaking with a journalist, even a defrocked one, could only hurt him when it came time for his trial, which at this time, early May of 2002, was at least six months away. Maybe he’d agreed to meet me for no other reason than to break up the monotony of jail and see what the person he’d masqueraded as really looked like.

  While I paused to consider whether I wanted to tell Longo what I’d written in my notebook—not that “young-looking, ears stick out” is such a revelation, but I was caught off guard and didn’t want to make a blunder—he spoke up and answered his own question. “You’re probably writing your first impressions,” he said. I confessed I was. “I’d be doing that, too,” he added knowingly, as if he were also a journalist, swapping tricks of the trade with a colleague.

  I displayed my notebook so that he could see what I’d jotted down, and for the remainder of the thirty-minute visit I took few notes. Immediately after, I would hurry to my hotel room and record every detail I could remember.

  Our conversation had a peculiar momentum. We’d be discussing the blandest of subjects—which local restaurants I’d eaten at, what hotel I was staying in—when some word or phrase seemed to generate in Longo an intense emotion, and he’d appear on the verge of revealing an intimate thought before he would regain his composure, hurriedly change the subject, and settle back into blandness. When I mentioned, for example, that I’d taken a walk along Newport’s bayfront, it was the word “bay” that sparked a reaction.

  “I’ll never look at the bay again,” Longo told me. At first I thought he was lamenting the fact that he might spend the rest of his life locked in prison. But that’s not what he’d implied. Longo added that he was thankful his cell’s window was frosted over. “That way,” he explained, “I can’t see the water.”

  I grasped his meaning. “Those were the waters,” I said, carefully maintaining a nonaccusatory tone, “in which your family was found.”

  He nodded yes, and I looked at Longo. I stared for a couple of beats too long. But his eyes revealed nothing. He returned the stare and said, “I just wanted to do the best I could for my family,” and his eyes moistened and he glanced away and I thought he might weep. But when he looked back, he seemed fine. “You know,” he said, “I was born in a town on the Mississippi River.”

  That’s how it went: Longo speaking through a scratchy phone, bouncing his pencil with one hand, holding the receiver with the other (his fingernails unbitten and dirtless), telling me about his birthplace of Burlington, Iowa, and his great-grandparents’ pig farm (his Adam’s apple, small and sharp, floating up and down like a buoy), then mentioning a song that played while he was alone in the jail’s rec yard—“Hero” by Enrique Iglesias—and how it made him ache for his family (“It reminded me of how I should have been”), and me nodding sympathetically and saying, “I understand, I understand,” but all the while thinking to myself, “Let’s get on with this, let’s talk about the murders.”

  It seemed as if he just wanted to chat as normally as possible, face-to-face—or, as he said, “face-to-glass-to-face.” Longo, I felt, had no interest in answering interview-style questions. He didn’t want to play the part of Chris Longo, accused family killer. He wanted to be Chris Longo, above-average Joe.

  He had even come up with a mathematical technique that demonstrated precisely how ordinary he was. Longo did not explain the computations to me, but during our visit he did share the results: He had been a decent, regular guy for 92.88 percent of his life. That’s what he said. The specifics of the remaining 7 percent and change were left undiscussed.

  When our thirty minutes were nearly over, Longo held up the brown envelope he’d carried into the visiting room. My name was penciled on the front. “I’ve written you a letter,” he explained. And then, as if all of this—the call, the visit—had been some sort of entrance exam, an odd type of tryout, he said, “I’m going to decide whether to mail this to you or not.”

  TWELVE

  HE DECIDED YES. The letter came in the same envelope Longo had shown me. It had surprising heft. Inside was a stack of yellow paper with faded blue lines; every page was covered, top to bottom, left to right, in immaculate penciled print, the letters grammar-school tidy, each line a calm string of boxcars. There were no signs of erasure, almost no scratch-outs—it was as though his thoughts had flowed from head to hand in a boulderless stream. And a hell of a stream it was: He had written seventy-eight pages, all with a golf pencil, the only writing instrument he was permitted to use. It was the longest letter I had ever received.

  “Dear Mike,” he began, and then, after a brief preamble, he opened into a rant: “I sometimes feel like a caged animal. I know that I can speak, I do have a voice, but the guards look at me as though I’m speaking with the language of an ape; the words hit their faces & fall to the floor, w/out expression. They’re so officious; any vestige of free will is lost.”

  Longo clearly had a lot to say and badly needed someone to listen. It was obvious, too, that he felt far more comfortable writing than talking—he hadn’t previously uttered a single ill word about the guards or his treatment. This made sense. Phone calls and visits were likely to be monitored. My letters to Longo, as with all letters sent to the Lincoln County Jail, were opened and inspected before delivery. But Longo’s letter to me, if the jail followed its customary procedures, should have been sent untouched.

  There was no law requiring inmates’ letters to be mailed unopened, but according to Longo, unless there was a suspicion of contraband being sent, the jail rarely examined outgoing mail. Longo had devised a plan to test whether the jail was fol
lowing its usual routine with him. Soon after I received the letter, Longo phoned me again. He’d carefully sealed the envelope himself, he said, and instructed me to inspect the flap for signs of tampering or regluing. I saw none. He asked that I examine the writing on the front to make sure it was his. I said it appeared to be. Finally, he told me to rip the envelope in half and check the inside. He wanted to know if there was something written in there. I looked closely and saw, in minute print, the word “fire.”

  “Good,” Longo said. Before he’d licked the envelope, he had reached his hand inside and penciled the word. He was now convinced that jail personnel had not opened the letter and then resealed it, nor looked at the letter and then mailed it in a new envelope. We at least had a one-way line of secure communication.

  I hadn’t finished the first page of Longo’s letter before I saw more clearly why he’d impersonated a journalist. After all, he could have pretended to be anyone—a stunt man, a soldier, an emergency-room physician. But his selection, I saw, was at least in some ways logical. In his letter, he wasn’t merely imparting information: He was trying to write. His sentences were often rhythmic and complex; he experimented with metaphors; he was willing to dip into his stockpile of vocabulary words (“officious,” “vestige”).

  One thing Longo did have trouble with was spelling. As I read his letter, I came across the words “definately” and “rediculous” and “abnoxious,” along with a spate of incorrectly placed or erroneously omitted apostrophes. When quoting from his letters, and mine as well, I’ve preserved the content exactly as composed, incorrect spelling and grammar included.

  The fourth page of his letter opened with a headline that read “First Impressions.” This section was obviously inserted after our visit, for it mimicked the moment in our meeting when I’d recorded my initial thoughts about him. “Stereotypical journalist” was his opening entry. Then: “Rectangular glasses, thinning hair, intense stare looking deeper into my own eyes trying to see if truth is at the surface or somewhere deeper. Slight man. Mix of tall jockey meets chess club.” Longo, it seemed, was trying to demonstrate that he was not in the least intimidated by me. His description also made me feel unnervingly exposed, as if he had the ability to peek into my thoughts.

  The letter’s next paragraph, under the heading “Biggest Fear,” began with this: “You are a typical journalist out to get a story by whatever seedy means possible.” He continued by reminding me that there was no shortage of reporters who wished to interview him, and that if he so desired he could, as he put it, “leap higher” than me. Both ABC News and NBC News, he claimed, had offered him a chance to appear on prime-time television; Time magazine, he said, wanted to put him on the cover. Why should he tell his story to a disgraced journalist, he seemed to be implying, when plenty of respectable ones were willing to listen?

  I suppose this was his method of asserting who had the real authority in our relationship. Longo had dozens of reporters pursuing him, while I currently had no meaningful story to tell except his. The way I read it, if Longo spoke with me, it would be an act of charity; a form of pity, even. And the person with the power, of course, establishes the rules. Which Longo did. “You’re going to have to be completely open & honest w/me,” he wrote. No games, no bull. “If you want the scoop,” he continued, “tell me.”

  Though it seemed he didn’t need to be told. The request was rhetorical; it appeared on the fourth page of his letter, right after his “Biggest Fear” section. He was well aware that I was interested in writing about him, and apparently he just needed to make sure I understood our power structure.

  This accomplished, he proceeded to launch into the heart of the letter—the story of his time on the lam, in Mexico, during the weeks after his family was murdered. He titled this section the “Michael Finkel Affair.” It opened with a description of an airplane ride on the morning of December 27, 2001, as Longo was preparing to touch down at the Mexican beach resort of Cancún. The writing continued for more than seventy pages, his paragraphs swollen with memories and details and tidbits of conversation. It was, beyond all expectations, an opening to the story I was seeking.

  THIRTEEN

  OVER THE CARIBBEAN came the plane, low and smooth, the tourists at the windows craning their necks, viewing what Longo described as “the gem-like blues of the sea.” Longo was sitting on the aisle, alone in his row, and the vacant seat next to him triggered the thought that his wife, MaryJane, should be with him. “A mountain of guilt avalanched on top of me,” he wrote. “I couldn’t stop thinking how she would like nothing more than to be seated there, in that empty seat, w/ that giddy smile on her face.”

  The plane landed. Longo retrieved his small brown backpack from the overhead compartment and stood in line at Immigration Control. When he reached the booth, Longo wrote, he flashed the officer his most self-effacing smile. The officer looked at his birth certificate—Longo didn’t have a passport—and then, without asking a single question or typing one word into his computer, stamped a tourist card and admitted him into Mexico.

  Outside the airport, he boarded a minivan bound for Cancún-area lodgings. He had less than $200 with him, so he was going to have to live cheaply, and perhaps find a job once his money ran out. When he’d booked his ticket to Mexico, over the internet, using a stolen credit-card number, he’d also read up on local hostels, so he had a general idea of where he wanted to stay.

  Eight other tourists, chatty and friendly, boarded the minivan. Longo hadn’t spoken with a single person since leaving San Francisco, but now, in the minivan, he realized he couldn’t maintain his silence much longer. As the van departed the airport, he was bombarded with questions. What’s your name? Where are you from? How long are you staying? One elderly woman, noticing his wedding band, said, “Oh, you’re married? Do you have any kids? Are they here, too?”

  Longo felt obliged to answer. “No,” he responded to the elderly woman. “They’ve left me for now, so I’m on my own for a bit of a vacation.” Tears began to well, and the woman winced and apologized to him, and he was able to avoid divulging anything further for the remainder of the ride. But he realized he couldn’t go around weeping every time someone asked him a question. “I decided at that moment,” he wrote, “that nothing in my past could be a reality here.” He switched his wedding band from his left hand to his right.

  He stayed downtown, away from the beachfront resorts, at a basic place with a generic name: Mexico Hostel. Four to a room, bathroom down the hall, ten bucks a night. He stashed his luggage in a locker at the hostel and walked to a grocery store and purchased bread, milk, eggs, an English-language newspaper, and a six-pack of Dos Equis. He cooked an omelet in the hostel’s communal kitchen, then caught a city bus headed to the beach.

  Stretched out in a lounge chair on the beach, he thought for the first time about constructing a plausible alias. Little came to mind. Instead, he read the newspaper he’d purchased. He scanned the classifieds for a possible employment opportunity. Nothing seemed promising. Then he turned to the travel pages. Skimming these articles, he wrote, reminded him of his favorite Sunday-morning ritual, when he would go to the local Starbucks with his family and order coffee for him, tea for MaryJane, and hot chocolate for the kids, and read the New York Times. His favorite parts were the travel section and the magazine.

  And there, on the beach, an idea came to mind: “A perfect facade,” as he put it. For years, it had been a fantasy of his to become a professional adventurer. Now, it occurred to him, was the ideal opportunity. “I could live out a dream,” he wrote. And why not adopt the guise of a writer he’d often admired—the one with the rhyming name, the one whose trips often struck what he called his “jealosy bone”? Longo’s middle name is Michael. Was it really such a big leap to become Michael Finkel? No, he thought, it wasn’t.

  So that part was settled: the outer part, the Michael Finkel layer. What wasn’t settled was everything beneath—the Christian Longo part. That night, his first in Mexico, h
e found himself unable to sleep. The hostel was filled with vacationers, most of them young and sociable, and the atmosphere of endless revelry, he wrote, clashed horribly with his remorse about the decisions he’d made in the past few months. He realized that his relatives and friends were likely frantic with grief over the news of his family. Lying in his bunk, more than two thousand miles from Oregon, he felt an intense loneliness, and the familiar burn of tears.

  This tug-of-war—between the frivolity of Cancún and the weight of his distress—continued for the whole of his trip. “Every day seemed the same,” he wrote. “When I was by myself, either trying to rest, or wandering around mindless through the city streets, I’d find myself feeling very odd. It was as if my head were disconnected from my body. My arms & legs would function, propelling me forward, going through the motions, while my mind was running a continuous film of every day, every hour of the life of us as a family.”

  When he was around other people, he wrote, the film would pause. He could drink beer, and go dancing, and banter with his companions from the hostel. “I would deeply invest myself into the conversations and enjoy the outings that I was invited on, as if nothing had happened. To everyone else, I was an overtly satisfied person, a travel writer using the occasion for an extended vacation, possibly a story.”

  Longo assumed, he wrote, that no law-enforcement authorities were searching for him in Mexico. He wrote that he didn’t even consider the possibility of capture, which is why he remained in Cancún rather than traveling to a more secluded locale, and did not disguise his appearance in any way. The New York Times alias was his only safeguard, and that was used less to evade the law, he said, than to avoid speaking about his own life.