True Story

by Michael Finkel

  He wrote of being overwhelmed with grief after reading police reports describing his family’s remains: “I sat on the thin mattress atop the concrete slab, which formed my bed, w/ my knees tucked up to my chin, hugging my legs as though I could bring some comfort to myself.” Trying to work through the pain, he composed a letter to his youngest child, Madison. He longed, he wrote, “to hold you & hug you one more time, to tell you how much I love you & to show you how sorry I am that everything was cut so short.” He signed it, “With Bottomless Love & Sorrow, Daddy.”

  Finally, in the fall of 2002, Longo prepared to issue a formal plea to the charges, which would set in motion the countdown to his trial. We’d now been in contact for six months, and Longo marked the occasion with a letter expressing his feelings about our relationship. It was a manifesto of sorts, by turns perceptive and preachy, one that I ended up reading numerous times in the following months, as the link between us grew stranger and ever more troubling.

  “I feel like we’ve sped through the making of a good friendship,” he wrote. “Firstly, enjoying learning a little about each other & our similarities, sharing some life experiences & our strange parallels. Then going through a little cooling off due to some reticense on my part, but overcoming that w/ open & honest communication, to a point where being open, I think for both of us, comes easy & without reluctance. I still feel that it’s an odd sort of friendship due to its constraints, but not an impossible one. I don’t think I’m so dilluted to believe that if you weren’t a journalist that it would have gotten this far, or continue, but I’m not offended by that belief. We are, in a sense, using each other, but it is an amiable position, so I’m not overly concerned…. I want whatever comes out [in print] to be as honest as possible, whether it’s good or bad, no sugar coating. I’ve never had a relationship built completely, 100%, on honesty. This is a good starting point for me. It’s important to me…. I would like nothing more in my life, at this point,than to be considered as an honest & honorable person.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  TO SEAL THEIR engagement, Longo and Baker made a pact. They vowed to be honest with each other no matter the circumstances. “We were pouring the foundation for a life together,” wrote Longo, and they agreed that open, unedited communication was essential. Every evening, when they asked one another how the day went, it wasn’t acceptable to simply answer “fine.” They had to talk about the “woes & pros,” as Longo phrased it, of their lives. “We didn’t want to be an ‘I’m fine’ couple,” he wrote.

  In September of 1992, when they’d been engaged three months, Longo encountered some financial difficulties. He was earning about $9 an hour at the camera shop, and this was scarcely enough to cover the rent on his apartment and the monthly payments he owed to LeRoy’s Jewelers, where he’d purchased, on credit, Baker’s three-quarter-carat diamond ring. Over the course of a few days, one of his roommates said he couldn’t contribute to the rent, Longo’s Chevy Cavalier blew its engine, and the ring payment came due. He pawned his saxophone but was still short on funds. Baker, whose salary at the pediatric office was lower than his, had no money to spare. Longo refused, as he put it, to “crawl back to mom & dad for assistance.”

  While he was at work, every sale he made increased his frustration—all that cash passing through his hands on its way to the register. Couldn’t a little of it be his? Just a hundred dollars would make all the difference. One afternoon, a customer made a $108 down payment on a camcorder, but rather than putting the money in the register, Longo stashed it in his pocket. It was, he wrote, a “senseless act of spontanaety.” That night, when Baker asked him how his day was, he answered, “Just fine.”

  In one of his letters, Longo attempted to explain his actions—why he lifted the money; why he lied to his fiancée. “I wanted to protect her from any stresses,” he wrote. “I wanted her to believe that I was a stronghold, that everything w/ me was always more than okay. And I never wanted her to know to what extent I would go to make sure that everything seemed okay; or more accurately I didn’t want her to think negatively of me on any level.”

  The day after Longo’s theft, the camera shop’s manager noticed an error in the records. The store was short $108. He confronted the employees, but nobody said anything. Longo was consumed by guilt, he wrote, and the next morning he confessed to the crime and returned the money. (He paid for the ring instead of rent, and was soon forced to find a cheaper apartment.) He was fired from the camera shop, and charges were pressed. Longo was later convicted of misdemeanor embezzlement and sentenced to eighty hours of community service, which he served at the Humane Society.

  Worse than any punishment, Longo wrote, was telling Baker what he’d done. He sobbed his way through the story—“probably the first time I had cried in my adult life”—while Baker listened quietly. “When I was done,” he wrote, “she put both arms around me & squeezed me tighter than she’d ever squeezed me before.” She forgave him. He’d been stupid, she said, but she still loved him and wanted to marry him. Longo assured her that he would never do anything like that again—“anything that was not only illegal but immoral”—and reaffirmed his vow of honesty and candidness.

  He also agreed to inform the elders at his Kingdom Hall of his transgressions. “I was extremely repentant,” he said. The elders placed him on temporary restrictions. This seemed minor to Longo until he learned that the restrictions meant he could not marry in a Kingdom Hall. “To me,” Longo wrote, “it didn’t matter where or how we got married.” But for Baker it was vital that her wedding ceremony be sanctioned by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, with the service performed by her favorite elder, Richard Lau, who had known her since she was a child. “She could live w/ the fact that I had stolen, embezzled & lied,” wrote Longo, “but the idea of not using the Kingdom Hall & Brother Lau threatened to stop us in our tracks.”

  Longo suggested that they delay the wedding until the restrictions were lifted. After all, they hadn’t even printed invitations. Baker told Longo that she needed to be alone for a while, to think things through. Her disillusionment was palpable, and Longo was terrified. “I had blown it,” he wrote. “I didn’t deserve her in the first place & now she was realizing that too.” He fretted all night, he says, expecting a breakup call at any moment.

  The following morning, Baker drove to Longo’s apartment. She knocked on the door. Through the peephole, Longo saw the “big smile that I fell in love with.” Baker had apparently come to the realization that her man was more important than her church. The wedding, she declared, was still on. There would be no delay; it was hard enough as it was, she implied, to maintain their celibacy.

  So they planned a wedding. They funded everything themselves; Baker’s family was financially strapped, and Longo refused to ask his family for money. “I wanted to prove a point,” he said. “That I was going to survive. I was going to make it big.” For income, Longo took a job with Publishers Circulation Fulfillment, a company that handled national delivery of newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. The money was decent, about $15 per hour, but the hours were terrible—most days, Longo worked from midnight to 7 A.M. “A professional paperboy,” he called himself.

  This schedule, though, allowed him to spend a good deal of time with Baker. She was still living at her mother’s home, but Longo met her for breakfast and lunch every day, and saw her most evenings as well. Sometimes Baker stayed up half the night with Longo, helping deliver papers. They became, he said, each other’s “best friends & sole confidants.” He described himself as being in a state of bliss, and said that Baker appeared to feel similarly. “There was never a point during our engagement,” he wrote, “where I felt that she wasn’t ‘The One.’” On her desk at work, at the pediatric office, Baker kept a dried rose—the shortened one Longo had given her on their first date, at the mall.

  The only hitch was Joe and Joy Longo’s continued resistance to their son’s relationship. Around Christmastime of 1992, Longo’s paren
ts expressed this displeasure more forcefully. They mailed Chris a letter.

  It was two pages long, signed “Mom & Dad” but written in Joy’s hand. Chris called it “a rant.” Joy later said it was sent out of love, and described the tone as “pleading.” The letter reiterated her concerns that Chris was too selfish and immature to marry. It said, according to Chris, that if he followed through with the wedding, this “would inevitably cause hurt to others, namely MJ.” Joy never questioned her son’s love for Baker; she just wanted him to give the relationship more time. There’s no way, she wrote, that he was ready to start a family of his own.

  Chris was stung by the letter, but it only solidified his determination to prove his parents wrong. He was going to “smash their expectations to smithereens,” he wrote. “I couldn’t help but imagine sending my parents a letter some years down the road, consisting of one sentence—‘I told you so.’”

  Baker’s response to the letter was even stronger. She was personally insulted. By Longo’s recollection, this is how Baker expressed her feelings about Joy’s letter: “What does she think, that I’m twelve years old and can’t make a responsible, thought-out decision; that I would jump stupidly into something immaturely? Who does she think I am?”

  Chris and MaryJane concluded that the letter wasn’t worth responding to. “Neither one of us,” wrote Longo, “gave any credence to the actual words or purpose.” But from then on, according to Joy, the relationship between her and Baker was “always strained.”

  Longo, meanwhile, had few kind words to say about Baker’s family. Though he hardly knew Baker’s siblings, except for Karyn, this did not stop him from writing that they came “from the lower echelon of society.” In regard to their marriage, he wrote, they seemed utterly indifferent.

  And so, without any parental assistance, Longo and Baker worked on their wedding. For the service and reception, they rented the auditorium and cafeteria of Huron High School, Baker’s alma mater. Their theme colors, they decided, would be black and white. They hired a DJ, purchased floating-candle centerpieces, borrowed table linens, and arranged for a buffet dinner. They invited two hundred and fifty people, and all but twenty said they’d come.

  Longo’s bachelor party, held the night before the wedding, consisted of a group of guys in his apartment eating pizza and drinking soda. There was no alcohol—only one person at the party was actually of drinking age—and no loud music. One friend did bring him a box of condoms, which was as risqué as it got. The highlight of the evening, Longo wrote, was when Baker herself came over, at 3 A.M., and they decided to exchange the gifts they’d bought each other. By a happy coincidence, they’d again made matching purchases: wristwatches. Only Baker, however, had thought to engrave her gift. “You are my everything,” it said on the back.

  They were married on March 13, 1993, six weeks after Longo’s nineteenth birthday and six weeks before Baker’s twenty-sixth. Longo’s brother, Dustin, was best man; Baker’s half sister, Karyn, was maid of honor. Despite Longo’s restricted status within the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Brother Lau agreed to marry them. Afterward, the couple was introduced as Mr. and Mrs. Longo, and they performed a choreographed dance to “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You.”

  Longo’s parents even got into the spirit. Joe gave a heartfelt congratulatory speech, and toward the end of the evening he and Joy pulled the couple aside. They’d known that Chris and MaryJane had spent all their money on the wedding and did not have plans for a proper honeymoon. They handed them an envelope. Inside were plane tickets to Jamaica, a receipt for a prepaid stay at a bed and breakfast, and a note that said they loved them and wished them well. The trip would mark the first time MaryJane had ever flown on an airplane. That night, also for the first time, they slept in the same bed, and consummated the relationship.

  They were happy. Their lives progressed smoothly. They rented a loft in the hip, regentrified Depot Town section of Ypsilanti. Longo was fully reinstated by the church. They adopted a dog, a dalmatian named Pebbles. They started collecting animation celluloids and country-style antiques. Longo moved up the corporate ladder at Publishers Circulation Fulfillment, first to assistant manager, then to district manager. MaryJane, to Longo’s delight, required a total of one minute and thirty-six seconds to get herself ready to go out. (“I timed her,” he wrote.)

  The Jamaica honeymoon planted a travel bug in them, and they returned to Jamaica twice more, then went to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, then to the Bahamas, then back to Puerto Vallarta. Church activities occupied many of their weeknights, and they spent almost every weekend with an older couple named Ron and Kay Leonard, who became particularly close to MaryJane and Chris, almost surrogate parents.

  Still, there were issues. MaryJane’s shyness frequently clashed with Chris’s gregariousness. “Being around others was sometimes a struggle for MJ,” Longo wrote. He found it “grinding,” he said, that his wife was seldom willing to participate in social occasions on her own. “I was the buffer, & without me,” Longo wrote, “she would feel threatened somehow; highly uncomfortable.” New friendships were almost impossible for her to establish. Only with the Leonards and one or two others did MaryJane appear relaxed and secure.

  Her lack of self-confidence bothered him. “She would often stand back & not join in conversation,” he wrote, “because she felt herself uneducated & w/o anything to offer.” Worse, he said, was that she had no desire to change this—“no urges to better herself,” Longo noted. “Unexplored territory made her nervous & was better left untouched.”

  Chris was precisely the opposite. “I wanted to learn about art & wines & languages & history,” he wrote. But he felt reluctant to pursue any of these interests for fear of “leaving MJ behind” and “creating a space between us.” At times, he said, he felt somewhat stifled—socially, intellectually, and culturally.

  They were also in debt. Vacations sapped their income; shopping sprees sunk them. Longo bought MaryJane a dark-red Camaro and himself an SUV. He gave her Coach purses and Etienne Aigner shoes and a closetful of designer clothes. “I tried to treat her as a princess,” he wrote. Soon enough, they owed money on a dozen credit cards.

  Overall, though, Longo felt fortunate to have MaryJane as his wife. “There was never any doubt in my mind how much she loved me,” he wrote. “Her devotion was unmatchable.” The bothersome aspects of their marriage were really no more than “minor irritants”—there was nobody, he said, with whom he’d rather spend his life.

  In late July of 1996, while preparing to begin their regular game of Scrabble with the Leonards, Chris and MaryJane secretly rigged the tiles. Chris went first and played the word WEE. Then MaryJane, after a calculated pause, announced that she’d be using all seven of her tiles. She placed a P and an R above the second E, then laid down G, N, A, N, and T. “MJ & I looked deviously across the counter at each other,” wrote Longo. It took the Leonards a few moments, but once they saw Chris and MaryJane’s faces, there were shrieks of joy. The Longos were having a baby.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  ON THE FIRST OF OCTOBER, 2002, just after nine o’clock in the morning, Longo made his initial appearance in the Lincoln County Courthouse. He’d been involved in previous court hearings—to petition for state-funded attorneys; to listen as prosecutors announced their death-penalty intentions—but for these events, Longo had sat in front of a video camera in a meeting room in the jail, wearing his inmate uniform. He was seen in court only as an image on a television set, and had viewed the proceedings on the meeting room’s monitor.

  The jail and the courthouse were next to one another; in fact, they were connected by a third-floor walkway. Longo, however, was regarded by the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office as so great a security threat that merely transferring him from one building to the other would require more than a dozen guards and strain the resources of the county’s entire law-enforcement system. Longo had a legal right to appear in court every time his case was heard, but he’d waived the right for the relatively
minor hearings. Now, though, it was time for him to publicly declare his guilt or innocence, and for this he needed to appear in person.

  I traveled to Newport to watch. I joined a crowd of reporters and a handful of curious locals, and we were each sent through a metal detector in the courthouse basement, then directed up the stairs, past an assembly of armed officers. By the time the courtroom doors were opened to the public, Longo was already seated at the defense table, flanked by his lawyers.

  He was wearing a nicely tailored sage-colored suit, one that he’d saved from his Publishers Circulation Fulfillment days, along with a beige shirt and a brown checked tie. His back was to the spectators, and I observed his face mostly in profile, though from what I could tell he betrayed no signs of nervousness or stress—not a forehead wrinkle; not a tensed jaw muscle. The presence of his attorneys seemed only to emphasize his youthful looks: Longo was still a few months shy of his twenty-ninth birthday, while both Ken Hadley, to his left, and Steve Krasik, on his right, were roughly double his age. Longo, busy shuffling papers and jotting notes, looked like their eager-to-please paralegal, fresh out of college.

  Judge Robert J. Huckleberry ambled into the room, and everyone jumped up. I noticed, beneath Longo’s slacks, on his right calf, the outline of an object about the size and shape of a brick. Longo had told me about this. The device was called a Band-It. Should Longo try and escape from the room or harm someone, the Band-It, which was remotely controlled by a courtroom officer, would stun him with fifty thousand volts of electricity. This was the reason he was able to appear in court without wearing manacles.