True Story

by Michael Finkel

  Huckleberry began the proceedings by asking Longo if he was prepared to enter a plea to the murder charges. The question stilled the spectator section’s murmuring and note-taking, and we all looked up to watch Longo rise from his seat again. Longo had denied his guilt to me so often, and so emphatically, that I expected him to announce a forceful and remonstrative “Not guilty.” But he didn’t say a word. He just stood silently.

  It was Hadley who ended up speaking, in his composed and gravel-voiced manner. “Your honor,” said Hadley, “at this time, the defendant would like to stand mute to the indictment.”

  “Very well,” said Huckleberry. He typed a few words into his desktop computer. “The court will enter a plea of not guilty to each and every charge.”

  And that was that. The rest of the day was devoted to various perfunctory motions filed by the defense. I was puzzled by the unusual plea, as were all the other reporters I conferred with. After court, I tracked down Hadley and introduced myself—it was the first time we’d met—and asked him what it meant to stand mute. “It’s just a procedure,” he said, and he didn’t clarify further.

  I later spoke with a few attorneys who were unaffiliated with the case. By standing mute, I learned, Longo had inserted a degree of flexibility into his defense. In essence, he had pleaded not guilty without actually saying that he wasn’t guilty. This way, if he so chose, he could later change his plea—say, to not guilty by reason of insanity—without having to declare that he had misspoken the first time. It seemed a petty detail, but in a tightly contested trial, I was told, it could be the difference between whether or not he was given the death penalty.

  The legal maneuver also hinted that the defense team hadn’t yet decided how to proceed with the case. This was confirmed by Longo himself. I’d flown to Newport in part to witness the arraignment but chiefly to visit Longo again, which I did a couple of days after the hearing.

  “It’s sort of a bipolar situation,” Longo said of his attorneys. “Ken is trying to save my life, and Steve is trying to get me acquitted.” Hadley, he explained, was primarily concerned with avoiding the death penalty. Krasik wanted him to walk out of his trial a free man. The two strategies, Longo told me, often seemed contradictory. He knew it was ultimately up to him to decide which path to take, but the choice, he admitted, wasn’t a clear one. He said he’d even considered dismissing his lawyers and representing himself.

  As Longo looked at me through the glass wall and told me of his concerns, I sensed from him something I hadn’t felt before: He was unsure of himself. Even his gaze seemed anxious and unsteady. He kept curling and extending the fingers of his left hand, as if playing a private game of rock-paper-scissors. His life was literally on the line. He didn’t ask me a direct question, but by the way he paused and leaned forward in his booth, as if we could put down the phones and whisper to each other through the glass, I understood that he sought my advice.

  I felt as though he were coming closer to telling the truth about the murders. By not immediately rejecting Hadley’s plan to mitigate his punishment rather than try for an acquittal, he hadn’t confessed to anything. But he had acknowledged, however obliquely, that his innocence would not, as he’d once written me, “be obvious within a short period of time.” Perhaps this new outlook had been triggered by the reality of his trial. Judge Huckleberry had announced that, barring any unexpected rulings on the motions, jury selection would commence on February 18, 2003—four and a half months away.

  I wanted to help Longo, but this was an issue with potentially dire repercussions, and I knew nothing about the law. I said that he should seek an opinion from another attorney, or perhaps contact the ACLU. Longo said these were excellent ideas, though I don’t think he ever followed through.

  Longo seemed grateful just to have me around, even if only to listen to him vent his confusion. He said that when he’d noticed me in court—at the end of the day we’d made brief eye contact, during which he arched his eyebrows and I raised mine back—he badly wanted to come over and say hello. He realized, though, that the courtroom officers might have triggered the Band-It if he’d attempted such a move. “You know,” he said, from behind the glass of the visiting-room booth, “we’ve never had an opportunity to shake hands.”

  Over the next few months, Longo increased the pace of his letter-writing. Envelopes from the Lincoln County Jail began arriving at my home at least once a week—a fourteen-page letter on October twentieth; twenty-five pages on the twenty-seventh; seventeen pages on Halloween.

  He told me, during a Wednesday-night phone conversation, that it seemed as if he was finally growing into the role he’d assumed in Mexico. He felt like he was becoming a real writer. If he’d only made a couple of different decisions in his life, he added, and had been blessed with a little more luck, it’s a career that could have been his from the start. “We were just separated at birth is all it was,” he said. I laughed at this comment, we both did, but I sensed it wasn’t meant entirely as a joke.

  I encouraged Longo’s journalistic ambitions. He was an aficionado of unusual words, so I began seeding my letters with them, along with their definitions: xanthic; florilegia; recondite; shibboleth; sesquipedalian; schadenfreude. He always made sure to slip them into his following letter. “The inmates are giving each other candy bars wrapped in xanthic paper bows,” he wrote while describing the Christmas season in jail, a week after I’d told him that xanthic was a fancy way of referring to the color yellow.

  Longo, I knew, wore his vocabulary as a form of intellectual armor, a way to show others that even as a prisoner he was still in some ways superior. Once, as punishment for communicating with inmates, he was required to compose an essay for jail officials. The topic, printed at the top of the page, was “Why It’s Important to Follow the Rules.” Here’s the start of his second sentence: “Some, at the very mention of the word ‘rules,’ immediately exhibit signs of an almost intrinsic malevolence expressed with an effusive obstinacy.” When I spoke with Longo about the essay, he told me, proudly, that his chief objective had been to force the jail officials “to look up some words.”

  I also mailed him scores of articles and short stories, anything with a prose style I thought might interest him. I included writings from Lorrie Moore, Donald Barthelme, Tim O’Brien, Raymond Carver, James Thurber, Alice Munro, George Plimpton, and (Longo’s favorite) David Foster Wallace. We discussed each one—why I’d sent the piece; what was unique about it; how he could learn from it. “You’re my first victim in Finkel’s Correspondence Course of Eclectic Writing,” I told him. I photocopied so many pages that Longo bestowed upon me the nickname Copy Boy.

  Longo said that my letters stirred his “motivational juices,” and that he no longer disliked writing. “I schedule time every day to write and the time flies,” he told me. There were occasions, he insisted, when he skipped the opportunity to leave his cell in order to keep working. “My pencil right now is an inch and a half,” he wrote in one letter. “My calluses are getting out of control.” He devoted himself to his prose “whole-souled & with much pain,” and added that his writing sometimes felt “more important than even my trial.”

  He yearned to buy a dictionary, he wrote, but said that to do so, he’d have to forgo purchasing toothpaste, deodorant, and shampoo, which would turn him into “an eccentric hippie w/ a great command of the English language.” I fell for the sob story and sent him the New Oxford American Dictionary, hardcover edition, which cost me forty-five dollars and fifty cents.

  He wrote about how hard it was to write: “It’s amongst the hardest things that I’ve ever had to do in my life, because it’s so emotional. To me it’s scary to look back at my life with a detailed focus, not because it was so horrible, but because it wasn’t…. I can’t helpbut feel that I don’t deserve to be here, to be the one to be able to reflect on these golden years. I’m writing about my life. Life was my family. My family is gone. So where does that leave me?”

  He admitted tha
t he was plagued by self-doubt. “My writing—it’s horrendous,” he lamented over the phone.

  “Oh, stop it,” I said. “You use metaphors really nicely. Some of the phrases are really writerly.”

  “I appreciate it,” Longo said. “I’m not trying to be extremely literary.” He’d studied my articles, he told me, and noted where I’d used metaphors or flowery wording. “I was a little paranoid that I wouldn’t be able to do that; that my metaphors were stuck in places that you could picture anyway.”

  “It’s always easier to take stuff out than to put something in,” I said. “My advice is, if you’re in doubt, throw it in.”

  “I don’t expect for my writing to ever be novel-worthy,” he said.

  We had a dozen chats like this. As we discussed the construction of the sentences themselves rather than their larger meaning, the reality of the situation—that Longo was soon to go on trial for murdering his family—seemed to be transformed from almost unspeakable horror into a forum for artistic expression. This dynamic was absurd, but ideal. I wanted to know about Longo’s family life in the months before the murders, and I realized that he wanted to reveal this not through some formal interview but as part of the process of exploring his abilities as a writer.

  “Your writing is excellent at description and action and painting a picture, but, like a picture, it sometimes lacks that third dimension,” I wrote to him. “Try and dig just a bit deeper…. I justwant to know, Chris, what’s in your heart and in your soul. If the Chris & Mike Project is to really work—to achieve what you said you wanted—a complete, and completely honest, accounting—then this is what we’ll need.”

  And so Longo tried to tell me what was going on inside him. He wrote and he wrote. He did, indeed, dig deeper. As the date of his trial approached, he began to explore how everything in his life, slowly and inexorably, started to come apart.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  WHEN LONGO LEARNED that his wife was pregnant, he created a celebratory web site. It was called MrMom-to-Be.com. On the home page was a drawing by Longo of a redheaded man with a pregnant-looking belly. There were also a question-and-answer section for expectant couples, links to several baby-related sites, and a few ultrasound photos of MaryJane’s womb, with labels pointing out various body parts. The site became so popular, Longo said, that The Daily Show with Jon Stewart contacted them for a potential on-air interview, though the show’s producers eventually decided against it. (“It’s impossible to determine if that really happened,” said Beth Shorr, a Daily Show talent coordinator. “We have no record of everyone we’ve contacted, only those who actually appeared on the show.”)

  Chris and MaryJane hired a local artist to paint scenes from Peter Rabbit on the walls of their apartment’s baby room, formerly Longo’s office. MaryJane knitted a child-sized quilt; Longo constructed an armoire and a toy chest. They knew, well in advance, that they’d be having a boy, and Longo was so elated—he wanted “a boy to raise in the image of his father”—that he kept in his wallet an ultrasound picture of his unborn child’s foot, which he showed to all his friends.

  MaryJane chose to experience the birth naturally, without painkillers. Chris stayed beside her throughout the labor process, feeding her ice chips and placing damp towels on her forehead, though he realized there wasn’t much he could do. “Seeing MJ in this kind of pain,” he wrote, “was like watching the replay of an airplane crash, w/ the same feeling of helplessness.” Suffering aside, the delivery proceeded smoothly, and on February 28, 1997, Zachery Michael Longo was born.

  Longo filled a half-dozen pages in a letter with the story of Zachery’s birth. His prose was earnest and emotional. “As much love as I had for MJ,” he wrote, “the view of her & our baby together showed me that I could love more, & that you really can love someone so much that it hurts. While MJ held Zack, w/ tears of her own, I trailed my finger over his little palm. His hand closed for just a second around my finger, but love swelled my heart even more.”

  As Longo was composing these pages, in his jail cell, he was interrupted by a pair of corrections officers. They were conducting an impromptu contraband search—a fairly common jailhouse occurrence. One of the officers was named Jacob Accurso. According to a written report on the search, Accurso observed in Longo’s cell “a large quantity of hand written notes and letters on yellow paper.” Accurso then “visually scanned the yellow hand written documents for evidence of jail policy violations,” which include sexually explicit material, correspondence from other inmates, or anything written in code.

  Longo’s pages describing the birth of his son are primarily filled with joy, but if a person with a particular mindset happened to scan them, some of the phrases Longo used might line up like this: “Seeing MJ in this kind of pain…I now wanted it to be over with…. she passed the point of no return…. My own anguish overwhat had just unfolded…I trailed my finger over his little palm. His hand closed for just a second around my finger…. a weight inmy chest…tears in my eyes…tightness in my throat.”

  This appears to be approximately how Officer Accurso read the letter. According to the cell-search report, Accurso recalled seeing a sentence about a baby’s hand “barely being able to encircle the author’s finger” and surmised that this might be “an indication of some impending doom.” Longo’s writings, Accurso deduced, “seemed to detail the killing of Maryjane [sic] and at least one of the Longo children.”

  The cell-search report was made public and picked up by the media. LONGO NOTES APPEAR TO DETAIL KILLING was the headline of a lengthy article in the Oregonian. After Longo realized what had happened—a description of birth viewed as a confession of murder—he said he “about went through the roof.” His monsterification, he feared, was complete. No matter what he did, he’d be perceived as a killer. Any jury, Longo knew, might feel similarly: What you look for, you tend to see. “Every innocuous or positive aspect can & will be twisted for the worst,” he wrote. “My name is synonymous with dishonesty.” A death sentence, he reasoned, was all but guaranteed.

  Longo’s lawyers agreed. Krasik and Hadley felt that the cell inspection violated his constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizure, self-incrimination, biased juries, and obstruction of justice. They filed a motion asking Judge Huckle-berry to dismiss the case. The motion was denied. Longo remained in jail, and continued to write.

  A few months after Zachery’s birth, Longo accepted another promotion from Publishers Circulation Fulfillment. His new position, Midwest field manager, placed him on what Longo called “the executive fast track.” He traveled on business nearly every week, overseeing the efficiency of New York Times delivery in a region extending from Nebraska to upstate New York. “I was spending my evenings in top-notch restaurants & multi-star hotels,” Longo wrote, “all of my choosing & none of which came out of pocket.”

  His salary was excellent. He bought himself a pool table, a car, and a high-end suit for every day of the workweek. The family moved out of their apartment and into a newly purchased three-bedroom home. MaryJane left her job and devoted herself to mothering Zachery. Soon she was pregnant again. “It seemed as if our prayers were answered,” wrote Longo. “To me it was exactly how a proper family should be run…. I had followed in the footsteps ofmy Dad.” He was twenty-three years old.

  But the new job also brought unexpected changes. Over the first four years of their marriage, MaryJane and Chris had spent precisely one night away from each other, when Longo attended his great-grandmother’s funeral in Iowa. Now Longo traveled three or four days a week. This lifestyle, he wrote, quickly grew monotonous. He was away when Zachery took his first steps, away when he spoke his first words. “I really started to worry about what else I had missed or was going to miss,” he wrote. “The lack of physical contact had a distressing effect.” He compared himself to the father in Harry Chapin’s song “Cats in the Cradle,” a man who was too busy working to guide his son through the difficulties of adolescence. “I kept getting
on those flights at the outset of each week,” he wrote, “but now I just wanted to be home.”

  On April 30, 1998—a day that Longo made certain he was home—MaryJane gave birth, this time sedated, to a daughter. They named her Sadie Ann. The following morning, Longo was called away on business; a newspaper-carriers strike was looming in San Francisco, and Longo’s help was needed. There was no way out of it. So he left his wife, son, and newborn daughter and flew to California. He was away for two weeks. “It was at this point,” wrote Longo, “that I determined that I would soon quit this job.” He vowed to MaryJane that he would not miss Sadie’s first steps.

  He kept his word. He walked away, he said, from a promising career at Publishers Circulation Fulfillment. (The human resources department at PCF confirmed that Longo had been an executive of the company, but would not comment on the reason for his departure.) Longo took a new job selling fireplaces to the home-building industry for a company called Fireplace & Spa. He was promised a decent salary, though less than he was previously earning. The real benefit of his position, he wrote, was “being able to be w/ my family every night.” Now the Longos could attend midweek services at the Kingdom Hall as a complete family, which pleased MaryJane. Before long, Chris was being considered for a position as a congregational elder. “Happiness in our marriage,” Longo wrote, “had reached a new peak.”

  In the spring of 1999, Chris and MaryJane celebrated their sixth wedding anniversary with a vacation in northern Mexico. They decided to drive all the way from Michigan, and they took Zachery and Sadie with them. The long hours in the car, especially after the kids fell asleep, gave them an opportunity to reflect on their relationship. According to Chris, MaryJane said that she was “exceedingly happy in life.” She praised Chris for his devotion and honesty. Except for the camera-shop incident, which occurred when he was eighteen years old, he had fulfilled his promise of moral integrity. Now he was twenty-five and a father of two. “I was proud of myself,” he wrote. “We had succeeded.”