And then Clegg told Longo his theory. “You were perhaps sexually molesting your children,” Clegg said. “Your wife caught you. That led to a fight. Your wife or one of the children got injured, and you decided to kill them.” Clegg stopped there. Then he asked, “Why did you kill your wife and three small children?”
Longo, by Clegg’s recollection, answered like this: “The scenario that you just told me could not be further from the truth.”
“Tell me why, then,” said Clegg.
According to Clegg, Longo responded with this: “I sent them to a better place.”
This conversation was not tape-recorded. No notes were written; no other witnesses were present. Even though FBI policy states that fugitives must be accompanied by two officers, Clegg had chosen to escort Longo without backup. By the time he flew to the United States, Clegg had been awake for thirty-six consecutive hours. He did not write his report about what took place on the airplane until four days after the flight.
When they landed, Clegg and Longo waited for all the passengers to exit. Then they were transported to the Houston FBI field office. There, in a basement room, Longo was questioned again. This time, Clegg was joined by two officers who’d flown in from Oregon—Sergeant Ralph Turre of the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office and Detective Roy Brown of the Oregon State Police. They spoke for four hours. “The atmosphere was pretty relaxed,” Turre later recalled. “It was a good discussion.” Again, though, there was no tape recording, and no notes taken. When Longo was asked, in Houston, “Did you kill your family?” his answer, according to Turre, was, “I don’t want to talk about that right now.”
“Longo does not admit outright that he had killed his wife and children,” Turre wrote in his report about the Houston interview.
“Mr. Longo openly admitted that he killed his wife and three small children,” Clegg wrote in his report about the airplane interview.
“There was never any confession or even discussion of that night,” Longo wrote in a letter, referring to both interviews.
Longo stayed overnight in Houston, at the Harris County Jail. He was kept on suicide watch, and once again he did not sleep. In the morning he flew to Oregon, escorted by Turre and Brown. On the plane, they chatted about photography and scuba diving.
They landed in Portland about 8 P.M. on Tuesday, January 15. An unmarked police car was waiting for them on the tarmac, and they were driven two and a half hours to Newport, to the Lincoln County Jail. Late that evening, shortly before midnight, Longo joined Turre and Brown in a conference room at the jail and submitted to his third interview. They sat at a round table. Longo was wearing a navy blue jail uniform; Turre and Brown wore suits but had to take off their ties, which are considered risks to jailhouse security. Neither officer was armed, and Longo was not cuffed. There was a pitcher of water on the table, but no one drank from it. This interview, like the one in Houston, lasted four hours, including a bathroom break. Unlike the others, this one was tape-recorded. The tapes were entered into evidence and later made public.
For more than an hour, Turre and Brown questioned Longo about his actions after the crimes—his drive to San Francisco, his escape to Mexico, his impersonation of a New York Times reporter, his liaison with Janina Franke, and finally his capture, which Longo described as “a big weight off my shoulders.” Turre spoke softly, constantly inquiring about Longo’s feelings. Brown was the bad cop, interested only in the facts. Together, their goal was to get Longo to confess to the murders, on tape.
When it came time to talk about the crimes themselves, Turre took control of the conversation. He was aware of Clegg’s contention that Longo had sent his family to “a better place” and thought, therefore, that the murders might have religious undertones. His feeling was that Longo may have killed his family out of some desperately misplaced love.
“Would you,” asked Turre, “ever allow anyone to intentionally hurt your family?”
“No,” said Longo. “My family is everything.”
“And if you knew that your family had been hurt, intentionally, by someone else,” continued Turre, “would you report that to the police and expect them to do something about it?”
“Most definitely,” said Longo.
“Okay,” said Turre. “Would you ever ask someone else to hurt a family member for you?”
“Never,” said Longo.
“Okay,” said Turre, using this word, a favorite of his, as a sort of verbal balm. He was preparing his trap, and wanted to be as gentle as possible. “You know I’ve looked at all your family. Okay. And I know that the manner they left this world in was not a brutal manner. Okay. It wasn’t a bloody scene, it wasn’t a brutal act. I think it was the act of a desperate man who didn’t know which way to turn, and thought that he was doing the best he could.”
Turre then spoke for a minute about what he called “classic familicide”—a form of murder in which a father kills his family members not out of hatred, but because he feels unable to adequately care for them and doesn’t want to see them suffer. Turre said that everything he’d heard from Longo seemed to support this idea.
“I believe that you truly loved your family,” Turre continued. “I believe that you truly still love your family. And I believe that the only reason that you took their lives is because you felt like the life that you were providing them here on Earth was not what they deserved. And that you knew in the next life they would be in a better place. Now in a lot of respects, that is something that a loving father would want them to see—a better life than the one that he is providing them with. The reason I asked you, ‘Would you ever allow someone else to intentionally hurt your family,’ is I know you wouldn’t. Because I believe you truly loved your family. Am I wrong in my assessment? I told you what I think happened. Am I wrong?”
On the tape, Longo’s sobs—gasping, sniffling sobs—are all that can be heard. Turre allowed them to continue for some time. Then he spoke again, not much louder than a whisper. “Or am I close?” Turre said. “Or am I right on?”
Longo continued to weep. Then, after a while, he composed himself. “I don’t know,” he said, “if I can safely comment on that right now.”
Turre pushed harder. He shed a little of his tenderness. “I mean,” he said, “you can withhold the, ‘Yes, I did it,’ feeling that there is safety in withholding that. But Chris, I think it’s beyond that now. It was beyond it before we even went down to talk to you. Because there is no one else on this earth who would have done that to them. Okay. And left them where you left them. The main thing we needed to know, when we talked to you, was why. And how. It’s not so much, ‘Yeah, I did it.’ I know you did it. Roy [Brown] knows you did it. You know you did it.”
But of course, both officers understood that without a clear confession, they could not be certain Longo did it. So Turre kept going. “You can withhold how you did it,” he said. “The fact remains you did it. And we talked about ownership. Taking responsibility. And Chris, there eventually has to come a time that you do that. I think now is the time. And it is only two little, three little words. They can be quickly spoken.”
Longo, still sobbing, did not take the bait. “I’m going to wait,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Turre wasn’t ready to give up. He tried a slightly different approach. “Okay,” Turre said. “Let me ask you this. Could anyone else have killed your family?”
Longo paused. He sniffled. “That’s a loaded question,” he said. “I’m going to wait.”
With this, the officers surrendered. Longo was obviously not going to be cajoled into confessing, and so the interview was concluded. It was the last time Longo spoke with police investigators. A week later, on January 23, 2002—Longo’s twenty-eighth birthday—the Lincoln County district attorney, Bernice Barnett, announced that, due to the heinousness of the crimes Christian Longo had been accused of, she would be seeking the death penalty.
PART THREE
LOVE
EIGHTEEN
&n
bsp; THERE WAS ONE thing I wanted to get straight between Longo and me. We both knew, from the first minutes of our first phone talk, that we were spiraling around the central topic, and that it was only a matter of time before I’d have to ask him about the murders. I forced myself to remain patient during our initial phone call, and then, when I traveled to Oregon and saw him in the Lincoln County Jail, I held off through the majority of our visit. But as I sat at the booth, studying his face, the urge to broach the subject itched at me with every conversational pause.
Finally, as the visit drew to a close—this was just before Longo displayed the letter and said he’d decide whether to mail it to me—I gathered my nerve. I looked him squarely in the eyes. I spoke clearly and assertively. “Chris,” I said, “did you do what you are accused of doing?”
His face remained composed. It was as though he’d been waiting for me to ask this. He was silent for a moment, and I felt he was selecting his words carefully. “I can’t answer that right now,” he said. “But I think you know.” And then he winked at me, winked his left eye, slowly and obviously, as if to say, Hey, our conversation might be monitored so I can’t say anything directly, but there’s your answer.
I thought it was an effective one. He’d avoided incriminating himself, and at the same time, he hadn’t lied. He easily could have said, “No, of course not,” but instead he said, “I think you know.” And by this point, I did know. I’d read every word about Longo that had been made public—police reports, search warrants, media dispatches, court rulings. I’d spoken with Longo himself. I knew. He was guilty. The evidence against him was overwhelming.
As I sat there, on the visitor’s side of the glass, with the afterimage of the wink sharp in my mind, I felt tugged in opposing directions. Here, in front of me, was a person who deserved nothing but contempt: a man, apparently sane, who’d murdered his own family. And here, as well, was a perceptive prisoner who seemed willing to explore the roots of his crime—and, quite possibly, help me restart my life. Part of me wanted to run, but more of me wanted to stay.
In his letter about his experiences in Mexico, Longo had mentioned the crime a few times, but on each occasion, his writing abruptly shifted from an emotional, first-person account to an odd, detached third-person voice. He wrote of “the terribly unnecessary demise of the lives of a wife and three beautiful children” and noted that “a much loved family was suddenly no more.” He talked about “the disaster” and “this catastrophe” and “that night.” He mentioned “a tragedy that has recently taken place.” But never once did he use the word “murder” or “killing” or “homicide.”
Then, in June of 2002, a month after he’d mailed me his Mexico tale, Longo sent me another letter. This one was also exceptionally long—fifty-seven pages. He gave it a title: “Wrong Turns.” The letter contained an intricate, at times obsessive, accounting of every mistake Longo felt he had made in his youth, starting with an incident in ninth grade in which he stole a roll of quarters from his dad’s dresser.
He wrote about paying for a PG movie but sneaking into an R (Tango & Cash); removing a jarful of vodka from his parents’ liquor cabinet; getting into a brief fistfight in the high-school cafeteria; using his dad’s credit card to order a bouquet of roses for a girl; and, after receiving a D in biology, leaving a message on his home answering machine in which he pretended to be the biology teacher calling to correct a mistaken grade—an early impersonation that failed entirely.
This was, of course, Longo’s personal selection of his misdeeds. Throughout our correspondence, I attempted to verify as much of what he told me as possible. As with the letter describing his time in Mexico, virtually everything that could be checked turned out to be accurate, though this still left a large amount of unconfirmed information. I also didn’t know which events Longo had omitted from his life story. If he wasn’t lying, it was likely, I realized, that he was at least skewing his narration to showcase himself in the most sympathetic possible way.
On the final page of “Wrong Turns,” almost as an afterthought, Longo brought up the death of his family. Here, for the first time, he set aside the passive syntax and issued a direct statement. “I didn’t commit the act,” he wrote. He did, however, feel guilty—“this whole incident is my fault”—but only “for not being home to ultimately protect.”
By the time this letter arrived, Longo and I had established a regular weekly telephone conversation. On Wednesday evenings, most of the inmates in Longo’s section of the jail attended church services. Longo’s segregation status prevented him from joining, but this was an ideal time for him to use the phone. I always made sure to be home, awaiting his call, with a fresh cassette tape in my telephone recording device.
Longo’s declaration of innocence necessitated further discussion, but I had to be careful. Neither of us knew who might be eavesdropping on our talks, and Longo tended toward circumlocution when anything sensitive was brought up on the telephone. So when inquiring about his “not being home” statement, I began generally.
“In all your letters,” I asked, “have you been honest with me the whole time?”
“I have been painfully so,” he said. “More so than I probably should have.”
“Everything you’ve written to me is true?” I asked again, just to make sure.
“It’s all one hundred percent factual,” Longo said.
“There’s nothing that you want to take back?” I prodded.
“No,” he said. “I’ve been honest about everything.”
Before he’d mailed me “Wrong Turns,” I had told Longo that I felt comfortable maintaining the legal assumption of innocence. “I’m keeping an open mind,” is how I phrased it. This was easy to do so long as the murders were not discussed. Now, I told him, I felt as though I were “doing some crazy yoga move, bending over backwards to believe you.”
“I understand that, and I hate to have you do that,” Longo replied. He informed me that for the time being, with his trial still ahead, there was nothing further he could say about the matter.
“Assuming that you’re telling me the truth,” I added, attempting in as kind a way as possible to imply that an innocent man whose family had just been murdered would not likely flee to Mexico instead of calling the police, “you did some really stupid things.”
“Yup,” is all Longo said. A minute later we were disconnected.
The conversation must have struck him, for he wrote me a brief letter, only seven pages, a few days after this talk. “You had inquired over the phone about my being honest in everything thusfar,” he wrote. “If you have specific concerns, as you seemed to imply, please forward those to me. I don’t want there to be any cause for misunderstanding, much less suspicion of dishonesty, between us.”
In all his letters, this was Longo’s one unvarying theme—the need for complete and unambiguous truthfulness on both our parts. He repeated this so often it became a sort of mantra. The fact that Longo himself was a skilled liar seemed to engender in him an ancillary condition in which he was distrustful of everyone else’s honesty.
“I hear stories about journalists taking people under their wings,” Longo said during one of our talks. It’s a common tactic, he pointed out, for a reporter to insincerely befriend the people he’s interviewing, only to “thrash them in a story, which was his whole point to start with.”
And yet, just after he shared this opinion, Longo admitted that he felt an immense need to speak with a trustworthy journalist. Nothing that was written about him in the press, he said, reflected his side of the story. When a local newspaper, Willamette Week, ran a two-part article on him, it was headlined “The Making of a Murderer.” Though his trial was still many months away, the paper didn’t bother to add an “accused” or an “alleged” to the title. A photo accompanying the story had been digitally manipulated so that Longo’s head appeared warped and twisted.
“I just read something that said I was a monster,” Longo lamented to me on the phone. “P
eople think I’m inhuman,” he said another time. He referred to what was happening to him as his “monsterification,” and he needed someone to help counteract this process. “I feel like I can’t be normalized,” he said, “until people understand a little bit about who I am.”
This was where I fit in. Longo knew that my firing allowed me to dedicate virtually unlimited time and energy to his story. He realized, too, that I’d also just experienced what it was like to be steamrolled by the press, to be branded a liar, and to have your credibility shot. I was in a perfect position, he implied, to listen to him without leaping to conclusions, to pay attention to facts rather than yielding to assumptions.
Longo had asked me in his letter if I had a “suspicion of dishonesty” about his insistence that he was innocent. Well, I did have such a suspicion. So I promptly wrote back. I even offered him an easy way out of his “not being home” proclamation.
“As I told you on the phone,” I wrote, “I have decided to believe everything you’ve told me until or unless proven not true. This includes the statements you made in your final pages of ‘Wrong Turns.’ As you are well aware, this requires quite a large leap of faith on my part, and I have decided, with no hesitations, to take that leap. I just want you to tell me, once more, in writing, if there is anything you want to take back, or ammend, or tell me that you were speaking figuratively instead of literally (e.g. ‘not at home’ can also mean not in your right mind).”
Longo’s response arrived within a week. “There is nothing that I wish to retract,” he wrote. “If something sounds confusing or contradictory I would rely on you to mention it, for clarification. Regarding ‘not at home,’ that was literal. (Please be careful what you send, it is read by guards).”
Over the next few calls and letters, Longo expounded further. There were many things I did not understand, he said. If I only knew about the pressure he’d been under, and the bad luck he’d endured, and the sacrifices he’d made to provide for his family, then I would realize that harming his family was something he “could not even conceivably do.” He said he’d winked at me during the visit because he thought I knew that he was not guilty.
True Story Page 10
