He insisted that if I were patient it would only be a matter of time before his innocence was obvious. In the coverage of his case, Longo wrote, the press “has chosen to publish statements that are in no way based in reality.” He told me that his actions—fleeing to Mexico; telling people his wife had left him—were all explainable. “There is much more to this case,” he wrote, “than meets the eye.”
But the way almost everyone else saw it, there was no chance that Longo could be anything other than guilty. When Longo’s defense team hired a polling service to gauge local opinions about the murders, not a single person out of the four hundred who were interviewed said that Longo was “definitely not” or even “probably not” guilty. Longo told me that no relative or former friend had sent him a letter of support. Even his parents, in a letter to the district attorney’s office, wrote that they realized “the one who may be responsible for murdering half of our family is our own son.”
Longo begged me to ignore all this and listen to him. “I always wondered how people could be convicted of a crime & put on death row, despite being innocent,” he wrote. He said that if I only knew “the whole, true story,” then I’d clearly see that he was not the person who’d killed his family.
Okay, I said to him. Tell me the true story.
NINETEEN
IN THE FALL of 1990, when Christian Longo was sixteen years old and his brother, Dustin, was fifteen, their parents, Joe and Joy Longo, took a one-week vacation to Arizona. Though the boys would be staying with friends, Joe and Joy felt they needed a house sitter, primarily to care for the family dog. They asked around—the Longos had recently moved to Ypsilanti, Michigan, from Louisville, Kentucky—and hired a young woman named MaryJane Baker.
While his parents were away, Chris bicycled home several times. First it was to play with the dog, but then, soon enough, it was to spend time with the house sitter. Whenever he saw Baker, he felt this woozy, head-to-toe prickle he described as “teen-boy-in-love energy.” Baker was twenty-three years old. She had curly brown hair, glacier-blue eyes, and, when she released it, a smile that seemed both girlish and profound, and hinted at something mysterious within. She was slender and petite. Her skin had a natural glow; she almost never wore makeup.
Every part of her that Longo saw turned him on—her lips, her teeth, her ankles. (“Her ankles,” he wrote, “were perfect.”) Even the trace of shyness Longo sensed in her was alluring. During one visit home, he helped her wash dishes. He was overjoyed simply to stand beside her at the kitchen sink, drinking in the scent of her perfume, feeling her hair brush against his arm when she passed him a plate. He realized, though, that this was only a fantasy. Baker was seven years older than him, and in a serious relationship. “She was unattainably beautiful,” he wrote.
Baker had endured a somewhat difficult youth. Her father had left the family when MaryJane, the third of what would become six siblings, was in elementary school. For a while, the Bakers were dependent on public assistance. Two of her sisters moved out when they were in their mid-teens, leaving MaryJane behind to help care for her half sister, Karyn, the youngest in the family. She’d had no opportunity to attend college. At the time MaryJane was house-sitting for the Longos, she was employed as an assistant in a pediatric office, lived at home, and provided financial assistance to her mother.
She found solace, according to Chris, and a sense of family in religion: MaryJane was a devout and enthusiastic Jehovah’s Witness. Before she was able to afford a car, she often walked several miles to attend meetings at her congregation’s Kingdom Hall. (Her mom had once been a Witness, but was expelled from the organization for what the church deemed moral lapses, including an out-of-wedlock affair.) MaryJane’s work schedule at the pediatric office allowed for one day off during the week, and she spent this day driving the neighborhoods of Ypsilanti, knocking on doors and attempting to share the Witness doctrine—that Armageddon will soon arrive, and only the righteous will live forever in the ensuing kingdom of God.
The Longos were also Jehovah’s Witnesses. Neither Joe nor Joy was born into the faith—both were raised Catholic. Both grew up in Iowa, too, though Joe Longo is not the birth father of either Chris or Dustin. Their biological father is a man named Steven Steward, whom Joy married after she became pregnant during her senior year of high school. The marriage was not a good one. Steward was a heavy drinker and, according to Joy, physically abusive. Still, out of a sense of duty, she remained married to him, even after the first pregnancy ended in miscarriage. She became pregnant again, but Steward, who was driving drunk, according to Joy, rolled a car with the two of them in it, and her second pregnancy also ended prematurely.
Finally, on January 23, 1974, in Burlington, Iowa, Joy gave birth to a child, a son she named Christian Michael. The delivery was troublesome; forceps were needed, and the infant was born with his head cut and bleeding. Fifteen months later, Dustin Anthony was born. But, said Joy, the violence from Steward did not stop. Joy recalled that one time, when Chris was three years old and making a mess of his food, Steward hit him in the face, blackening an eye.
This was Joy’s limit. She separated from Steward, filed a restraining order against him, and was later divorced. Chris never saw Steward again, and said he has no recollections at all of his birth father and did not have any desire to look for him. (Steward joined the army and later returned to Iowa; he now works as an electrician, has been married to his second wife for twenty-five years, and has had no trouble with the law. He was unaware of the Longo murders—he didn’t even know Chris’s last name—until contacted by the media. He claimed that Joy’s recollection of their marriage was embellished, and insisted that he never once struck Joy, Dustin, or Chris.)
Joy moved with her two infant sons to Des Moines, where her parents lived. She took a job at the customer service desk of a Target department store and was introduced to an assistant manager named Joe Longo. Joe was gregarious and popular; he’d been a high-school homecoming king and a star football player, a wide receiver, at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. He had a gentle demeanor and a reputation for honesty. He didn’t smoke or swear, and hardly ever drank. They went to a company Christmas party, danced, and fell in love.
At their wedding, the four of them—Joe, Joy, Chris, and Dustin—all walked down the aisle together. Soon after, Joe became the boys’ legal guardian. Chris loved him. The earliest memory of his life is of Joe dressed as Santa Claus, delivering gifts to his new family. “My dad was my idol and hero,” he wrote. They had football catches; they played basketball. The whole family took trips to Florida, New York, Toronto, and St. Louis. They once drove across America. Chris can’t recall his father raising his voice, not ever. There was no spanking or hitting. Joe and Joy were so intent on rearing the boys in a nonviolent setting that they did not allow squirt guns in the house. “I couldn’t ask for a more loving family,” Longo wrote.
In 1980, Joe was promoted by Target to a store-manager position, which took the Longos to Indianapolis. They bought a ranch-style house in the suburbs, with an apple tree in the yard, a basketball court in the driveway, and the boys’ elementary school next door. Joy worked as a housecleaner for a while, then became a full-time mom. She was contacted by the Witnesses in the usual style—a knock on the door—and found herself intrigued by their beliefs. She began attending meetings at the local Kingdom Hall, and often brought her sons with her. Eventually she decided to join. Chris, who was ten at the time, and Dustin, a year younger, joined with her.
Joe Longo did not approve. His father was a deacon in the Catholic church; Joe himself had been an altar boy. But he didn’t want to cause a rift in his family. He noted the positive influences the Witnesses had on his wife—as soon as she joined, Joy ended a two-pack-a-day smoking habit—and so, cautiously and gradually, he started reading the organization’s materials. Three years after his wife’s conversion, Joe also became a Witness. He ultimately became so involved in the church that he ended a twenty-year career at
Target to devote himself more fully to spiritual goals.
Jehovah’s Witnesses are Bible literalists. The scriptures, they believe, were channeled directly from God, and Witnesses do not observe any custom not specifically mentioned in the Bible. This includes celebrations of Christmas and Easter. They sometimes interpret 1 Corinthians 15:33—“Bad associations spoil useful habits” is the phrasing found in the Bible translation preferred by Witnesses—as a directive to minimize social contact with those who believe differently (so-called worldly people). Thus, a community of Witnesses can become extremely insular. Not long after the Longos joined, Chris wrote, “all of our friends were Witnesses.” He said he didn’t miss Christmas because his mom promised to give him gifts throughout the year, not just on one particular day.
By the time he was a teenager, though, some of the strictures had started to wear on him. Longo was a natural athlete, and school coaches in basketball, football, and track wanted to recruit him. But Witnesses often frown on team sports—competitiveness, they believe, can be spiritually unhealthy, as can extended associations with worldly people. So Longo was forbidden to participate. He couldn’t even join the Boy Scouts. “On the scale of strictness,” Longo wrote, “my parents were at the top.” He once tried to sneak a Guns n’ Roses cassette into the house, but his mom found it in his sock drawer and threw it away.
The prohibitions on school activities made Longo feel unpopular. He was teased, he said, for being a “goody-goody” and a “square.” He was unquestionably bright—his full-scale IQ would later be measured at 130, which is in the “very superior” range, above the ninety-eighth percentile—but his grades were poor. “I lost all motivation towards school in general & quickly grew to hate it,” he wrote. In the first semester of ninth grade at North Central High in Indianapolis, Longo received no As. His only Bs were in nonacademic subjects: woodworking, phys ed, and band (Chris played the alto sax). He was given a C in English and Ds in algebra and biology. The biology mark was the one Longo tried to improve by leaving a fake message on his family’s answering machine.
Those were some of the last grades Longo earned in a classroom setting. In 1989, when Chris was still in ninth grade, Joe accepted another promotion from Target, and the family moved to a small town outside Louisville, Kentucky. Shortly after, Chris was removed from school by his parents. (Dustin stayed in. “I always thought that he was perceived as the good son,” Longo wrote.) Chris continued his education through correspondence courses and home-schooling. After the family moved again, to Ypsilanti, he received his high-school diploma. He did not go on to college; Jehovah’s Witnesses tend to discourage the pursuit of higher education.
Joy Longo said that Chris, as a young man, never displayed any predisposition toward violence; he didn’t even fight with Dustin. His main problem was a tendency to lie. “We tried very hard to get that out of his character,” she said. The incident in which he pretended to be his biology teacher greatly disturbed her. “He wouldn’t admit it,” she said, “and we knew that it was him.”
Girls were another issue. Longo, it seems, was always able to attract them. “I got my first kisses in grade school,” Longo wrote, “my first ‘tongue’ & ‘feel’ in seventh grade & my first real make-outs w/petting in my freshman year.”
It was for this freshman-year girlfriend, Georgina, that Longo stole his father’s credit card in order to purchase flowers. When he was caught for this, his parents were upset about the sexual indiscretion as well as the thievery. Witness youths are not permitted to touch one another, not even to hug. Joe and Joy, quoting from 1 Corinthians 7:36, explained that Chris would not be able to date until he was “past the bloom of youth” and ready to marry. “That was my last girlfriend,” wrote Longo, “until MJ.”
TWENTY
SOON AFTER LONGO began unfolding his life story, I mailed him a letter, dated July 12, 2002, that included six pages of detailed questions. I was still bothered by his “not at home” claim, and felt the need to test him further on it. If he wasn’t home, I wondered, then where was he? Did he have proof? If he didn’t commit the crime, had he any idea who did?
He wrote back, though the reply was terse by Longo’s standards, just three and a half pages, and the tone distinctly cooler. “I can assume that it’s the reporter in you,” he wrote, responding to my avalanche of questions, “but relaying that much info to anyone, at this point, would not be an exercise in wisdom.”
Longo had apparently arrived at a realization: Though we’d become acquainted through extraordinary circumstances, I was, in the end, just another member of the press, greedy for the salacious details of his life. “Despite your appealing nature, I’m forced to keep your profession at the forefront of my mind,” he wrote. “I do realize that you are a journalist first.”
Therefore, Longo concluded, I should be treated like any other journalist—if he was going to speak with me, I should pay him for the honor. He hadn’t actually talked with anyone else, but other media outlets, he claimed, had offered him “an amazing amount of money” for an interview, in some cases more than ten thousand dollars. (Precisely who made these offers, he didn’t say.)
He was aware, by now, that I’d begun to see his story as something more substantial than a magazine article, and was thinking of trying to write it as a book. Longo insisted that, if and when I received money for the book, I hand over a cut to him. He was not interested in keeping any funds for himself. Rather, he wrote, he wished to donate all profits to his parents and a few friends with whom he had debts.
As for my pledge to listen to Longo’s story with an open mind—that, it appeared, was no longer valid. “A verbal promise between an accomplished journalist & the closed-lipped subject of a sought-after story is borderline ludicrousness,” he wrote. Longo added that he wouldn’t continue our discourse unless we’d worked out a financial arrangement. Until then, he wrote, “I’m forced to clam up.”
Paying Longo for the story was out of the question. The moment money changed hands, my work would be compromised; it would mean, in effect, that Longo and I were partners. When speaking with him over the phone, I sometimes referred to the piece of writing I envisioned as “our story,” or as “the Chris and Mike Project,” but it was in fact my project, and Longo knew it. He would have no authority over the prose, no opportunity to view anything in advance, no chance to make editorial alterations. On the other hand, he was aware that if he halted communication with me, there would be no Chris and Mike Project.
I did remunerate Longo for the postage he needed to mail me letters (some contained more than a hundred pages of material), as well as for envelopes, pencils, paper, and a few snacks from the jail-house commissary. In total, over the course of our communication, I deposited $180 into his jail account. He never asked me to do this, but I knew he had almost no money of his own. Later, I funded a subscription to the New Yorker magazine.
Longo had determined, however, that he should receive a share of the project’s earnings, and he seemed fixed on this idea. I decided, at this point, to take a chance and phone one of Longo’s lawyers. He had two: His lead counsel was Kenneth Hadley, sixty-four, a local Newport attorney; his co-counsel was Steven Krasik, fifty-six, whose office was a hundred miles from Newport, in Oregon’s capital city, Salem. Longo had told me that both lawyers were aware we’d been in contact. Neither man, Longo said, was pleased with our association, but to his surprise they hadn’t asked him to halt it, either. I grasped at this small opening and gambled that speaking with a member of the defense team, and formally introducing myself, might somehow help resuscitate my relationship with Longo.
This fantasy was swiftly quashed. I called Krasik first, and he told me that he “hated” my communication with Longo—that’s the word he used—and said that neither he nor Hadley would do anything to assist me. He did, however, explain why he hadn’t advised his client to break off contact with me.
Krasik said that he’d spent a lot of time with people who were facing either a li
fetime in jail or a death sentence. He knew that such a prospect was terrifying. The feeling that can overcome an inmate, he said, is that of tumbling down a bottomless ravine. In a situation like this, a connection with the outside world—a way to divert one’s thoughts from his imprisonment—is crucial for maintaining sanity. Longo was virtually alone, Krasik pointed out, abandoned by everyone who knew him. Even his parents hadn’t visited. They’d just written a couple of letters.
“Except for his attorneys, who aren’t in the comfort business,” Krasik said, “there’s only you.” The circumstances that brought Longo and me together were so implausible, it was difficult for Krasik to dismiss them as mere chance. “The two of you were linked before you even knew each other,” he said. “And now, from everything I understand, you’re his connection. You’re his lifeline.”
The next letter I wrote to Longo was scrubbed almost completely of inquisitiveness. As was the following one, and the one after that. Instead, I devoted paragraphs to describing my home, including my twelve-acre hayfield—“I have this sort of Jewish-boy-from-the-East-Coast idea that I’ll put a few cows on it”—and my chicken coop. “I’d mail you some eggs one day,” I wrote, “but I think the result (mailing you eggs) has the potential to be messy. Perhaps hard-boiled eggs.” I shared stories of my travels, and explained how I acquired my favorite souvenirs. “I bought my first carpet in Iran; I smuggled it out of the country, illegally, in my ski bag.”
I filled him in on the minutiae of my existence: ski trips, hockey games, ideas that came to mind as I jogged. I wrote about the weather. I asked him to vote on a name for my new cat. (He chose Otto.) I shared anecdotes about my Grandpa Manny; I taught him some Yiddish: schmutz, schmuck, schmatte, putz, mensch, meshuga.
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