True Story

by Michael Finkel

Their analyses were extraordinarily similar. Dixon, Franklin, and Young-Bruehl all thought that Longo exhibited many of the behaviors associated with narcissistic personality disorder. When I asked them to speculate about why the murders took place, they all arrived at comparable scenarios. It was possible, they said, that there came a point when MaryJane—a person whose approval, Longo wrote, he “was deathly afraid of losing”—had finally had enough of Longo’s behavior and threatened to leave him. An action like this may have produced what’s known as a narcissistic wound, a blow to his ego so great it generated in him a murderous fury.

  Scherr had addressed a related idea. “This is a man who couldn’t afford to let himself get embarrassed,” he observed. “He desperately needed to look good in the eyes of others.” In a letter to me, Longo admitted nearly the same thing: “I feared that if MJ percieved me as a failure on any level that that would instantaneously make it a fact, & I couldn’t bear that,” he wrote. “I needed her to continue to look at me w/ admiration & adoration.” Another time, he said that if MaryJane left him, “that would be the ultimate in embarrassment.”

  None of this, of course, proved that Longo committed the crimes. And even if I assumed his guilt, there was no way to determine what happened on the night the murders took place, or why, without Longo telling me himself. But this, too, was problematic. The psychologists I consulted also cautioned that I should be extremely wary when dealing with Longo, far more than I had been. People like Longo, Dixon wrote to me, are incapable of honesty. “Lying is their nature. Not just their second nature, but their nature. Beware of their snares.”

  Not long after I’d hired the psychologists, I received a phone call from an investigator with the Oregon Department of Justice. His name was Kerry Taylor; he was assisting the prosecution in its case against Longo. Taylor knew a little about my relationship with Longo—it seemed as if he’d been given access to the jail’s visitors’ log and inmate phone-call records. He had apparently researched my background as well, for he was familiar with my Times debacle.

  “Don’t get sucked in by this guy,” Taylor told me. “I’m not sure he has a real grasp on the difference between truth and fiction. He just twists his stories to suit his needs.”

  Taylor asked for my help. He said that even if Longo had never once spoken the truth to me, my insights could be valuable. The essence of the prosecution’s case, Taylor implied, was to portray Longo as a pathological liar. He wanted to know what Longo and I had talked about over the phone, and he wanted copies of the letters Longo had mailed me.

  I paused for a moment. Taylor’s warning, on top of the counsel I’d received from the psychologists, had rattled me. I began to fear that I’d twined myself too intricately with Longo, and had lost my sense of perspective. Still, I told Taylor I wouldn’t be able to help him. I’d promised Longo that I would not share anything he told me until his trial was over. Though I had broken this pledge by showing the letters to the psychologists, I’d convinced myself that a type of doctor-client privilege was in effect.

  Taylor said that my cooperation could be critical—it might make the difference between a murderer being found guilty or set free. I told Taylor that he’d put me in a bind. “I’m trying to make you feel bad enough or guilty enough to speak with me,” he conceded. At that moment, I did feel guilty enough, and it took a physical effort to remain silent. “The turd,” Taylor continued, “is in your pocket.”

  I tried to pass the turd back. I told Taylor that if he subpoenaed me—if I were legally compelled to appear at Longo’s trial—then I would testify, and I’d tell the truth. Longo and I had already discussed this possibility. We’d agreed that if I absolutely had to break my silence, under threat of imprisonment, then of course I would. If I talked with prosecutors or the media under any other circumstances, then in all likelihood Longo would end our correspondence. At the mention of a subpoena, though, Taylor was quiet for a few extra beats. Then he spoke.

  “Can I be blunt here?” he asked.

  “You can,” I said.

  “You would not make a very good witness,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t?”

  “No,” he said. “Because of your credibility. If I put you on the witness stand, what do you think is the first thing the defense attorney is going to bring up?”

  I felt my stomach go weak. “The New York Times incident.”

  “Of course,” he said. “Your lies are going to be rubbed in your face. It’s a cold, hard fact. If the defense can discredit a state’s witness, they will. I don’t blame them. It’s exactly what I’d do if I were on the other team.”

  I had never thought of myself as a person who’d be considered unfit to testify. To hear someone else tell me so—and for me to agree with his assessment—caught me like a sucker punch. A week after Taylor’s call, I was still in a funk.

  In essence, Taylor was asking me to pick a side: I could continue communicating with Longo, or I could support the prosecution. I hated being placed in such a position, but the decision really wasn’t that difficult. I was, deep down, a journalist, and wasn’t willing to sacrifice my story. And I had given Longo my word and did not want to betray him. So I told Taylor I’d be unable to assist him.

  There was, I supposed, a third option. I could have helped the prosecution and hidden this fact from Longo—acting as a kind of double agent. Such duplicity, I’m reluctant to admit, is something I might have been good at. The West Africa article wasn’t my first blatant deception. I’d lied many times: to bolster my credentials, to elicit sympathy, to make myself appear less ordinary.

  I was good at lying; it was difficult to catch me. Both my parents, when I questioned them, reported that they’d never considered me a deceitful person. A little manic, yes, but not a liar. “A Ritalin child without the Ritalin,” was my mom’s description of my youth. My sister, too, said that she’d always thought of me as honest. Yet from a fairly young age, I’d understood that a nudge against reality—an exaggerated moment, an imaginary encounter—could make an anecdote better, smoother, and more intriguing.

  I once told a touching story, in the process of flirting with a girl, about a brother of mine who had died as an infant. I had no such brother. I lied about losing my virginity—I even planted an empty condom wrapper beneath my college-dorm bed so that whoever spotted it would think I’d been having sex.

  I have lied about my prowess at sports, at speaking foreign languages, at playing musical instruments. Often, I’ve professed to have read a book I’ve never opened. For a while, I told people I was Canadian. I am not. There have been occasions where I’ve repeated falsehoods so often—I have finished Ulysses, I can speak French—that I nearly hypnotized myself into believing they were true. I was also slick enough so that no one ever asked me to prove my lies.

  I’ve lied to strangers simply because it was exciting to lie, or because I wanted to impress them. Perhaps people who’ve spent time on the internet pretending to be someone they’re not can understand—that sense of risk, of power, of semi-illicit thrill. I liked lying. It could, for me, equal the escapist exhilaration of a drug.

  I always thought that my journalism was immune to such impulses. I wrote creatively at times; I condensed plots and simplified complications and erased some chunks of time, but I was sure I’d always stay within the boundaries of nonfiction: Reality could be shaped and trimmed, but it could not be augmented. I had no intention of ever breaking that rule. No intention, that is, until I sat down to write my chocolate-and-slaves story.

  When I returned home from West Africa to write the article, in July of 2001, I faced a tight deadline. The three previous cover-length stories I’d published in the Times Magazine had each taken about eight weeks to complete. For the West Africa piece, I had budgeted only about half this time. I had a rigid time limit—I was going climbing in the Himalayas with my sister. We’d been planning our expedition for two years. The trip could not be rescheduled, so I had to write quickly.

  I was a
lso shackled with some unexpected restrictions. It turned out that during the very month I was in the jungles of the Ivory Coast, so too was another Times reporter. His name was Norimitsu Onishi; he worked for the news department, not the magazine, but we were both chasing the same story.

  The magazine and news sections are sometimes competitive with one another, and when they are, each uses its respective advantages to outdo the other—magazine articles have the luxury of length; the news section has the benefit of speed. A few days after I came home, Onishi’s article ran, on the front page, accompanied by a large color photograph. To his credit, Onishi had also recognized that the slavery label had been misused. He too had walked the plantations and understood that the real issue was, as he elegantly phrased it, “the bondage of poverty.” After his story was published, I thought mine would be canceled. But my editor, Ilena Silverman, felt that my piece could serve as a complement to his. “Stay away from his ideas,” she told me, “and you’ll be fine.”

  Silverman had been on maternity leave when the cocoa-plantation story was assigned, but was back in the office in time to coax me through the writing process. While she was gone, I’d teamed with another editor and had written one cover article, an investigation of the black market in human organs. I’d liked the piece, though it was, I admit, dryly written. Silverman, upon her return, informed me that she’d been somewhat disappointed: The article didn’t sing the way she liked her pieces to sing; the prose wasn’t rich enough.

  For the West Africa article, Silverman said that it might be best to write a magazine-style feature that closely examined the journey of a single boy. Her instructions were to “go literary”—that is, as I understood it, to use a creative style to capture a reader’s attention. When I realized, as I struggled through a first draft, that I wouldn’t be able to provide Silverman with what she’d requested, I found myself unable to tell her. I wanted to give my editor what she wanted to read. I thought I could figure out some way to fulfill the one-boy idea and still compose a legitimate piece of journalism.

  As the deadline approached and it became obvious that I’d either have to cheat or ignore my editor’s instructions, I grew increasingly anxious. I wanted my story to succeed in a way that wasn’t possible using the notes I’d taken. Silverman began leaving distressed messages on my voice mail—she needed to see a finished story, immediately—and I was soon in a state of panic. Eventually, as the date of my climbing trip approached, I counted the remaining hours and realized that to complete the piece, I’d have to stay awake for a long, final writing spree.

  I had just the right pills. I’d gotten them for the climbing trip. Mountaineering in the Himalayas sometimes requires sleepless nights, and it is not uncommon for climbers to swallow stimulants to remain alert. I’d filled a prescription for thirty capsules of Dexedrine, ten milligrams each, a fairly potent amphetamine. The capsules were transparent, and inside them were packed hundreds of tiny, bright-orange balls. They looked like Halloween candies.

  What I felt, at first, reminded me of an old playground ride—that miniature merry-go-round you’d sit on while your friends pushed you around until your vision distorted and blurred. It was like the acceleration of a centrifuge, and when I tried to concentrate on West Africa, a ream of facts and feelings and ideas were wrested from their moorings and lifted to the top of my mind. There was the color of the soil. The sounds of insects. The sting of an army ant. A sack of cocoa beans; a pair of basketball shoes. A swamp, a sunset, a skein of clouds. A cigarette, a machete, a bicycle, a bandanna.

  Everything flew together and created a whole. It formed a story—what felt, as I spun, like a beautiful, flawless story; a story with passion and sadness and joy; a story of one boy that explained everything I knew to be true and yet was still a simple tale of human desire. And the boy at the center of this story, the boy composed of a hundred-and-one scattered parts, seemed to me as alive and real as anyone I’d actually met. I wrote in my journal during the experience, in black pen in a shaky hand. I described what it was like to feel dizzy and creative and manic, all at once.

  “I wrote,” it says in my journal, “and toiled and worked and paced and snacked and went outside to breathe and petted the cats and paced and went up and down the stairs and read my stuff and read others’ stuff and wrote and wrote and wrote.”

  I stayed up for three days, virtually without rest, and my stomach went sour and my moods swung wildly and I puffed on marijuana when I felt out of control and popped sleeping pills to bring myself down and I never once changed my clothes and I cried without prompting and I finished the story, the entire story, and I felt it was as fine a piece of writing as I’d ever produced.

  But of course the story wasn’t true. Each individual piece, yes, but the whole, not at all. And I wasn’t crazy. I could not plead insanity. The pressure, the time crunch, the competing story, my editor’s demands, the amphetamines, the sleeping pills, and the pot are merely excuses. I knew what I was doing. I had the power to stop myself at any time, but I decided not to. It was the stupidest thing I have ever done. It’s something that causes me pain every day; it’s something for which I will never fully forgive myself. I wrote the story and I handed it in.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  WITH FINAL TOUCH booming and, at the same time, collapsing, Longo often worked eighteen or more hours per day, attempting to supervise sixty employees across two states. Building contractors, he said, owed his company more than $100,000, but Longo was still penniless, a state of affairs he did not share with his wife, who was under the impression that much of the money had already arrived. MaryJane was likewise unaware that her new minivan had been stolen by her husband. Longo expected both issues to resolve themselves shortly—the invoices honored, the minivan paid for—but in the meantime the only thing he could count on was an ever-expanding workload.

  He decided to hire an assistant. Her name was Jessica Meadows; she was the wife of another of Longo’s employees, Siebert Meadows. The Meadows and the Longos lived near one another and attended the same Kingdom Hall. Jessica planned to work out of her home, and in April of 2000 Longo brought a computer over and networked it to the one in his house. Their discussion that day, however, wasn’t strictly about business. According to Longo, Meadows confided in him that she was experiencing difficulties in her marriage. “I felt sorry for her,” Longo wrote, “& suddenly felt an emotional attachment to her.”

  Over numerous lunches in the following weeks, their relationship grew. Longo became Meadows’s confidant, a shoulder to cry on. “I enjoyed being in that position,” he wrote, “& I began to paint a picture of myself as the knight on the white horse.”

  Meadows, however, remembered the conversations a little differently. She said that most of their talks were actually about how unhappy Longo was in his marriage. Longo told her that he had his own apartment where he sometimes stayed. He said that when he did come home, he always slept on the couch.

  In either case, the two agreed that their connection soon deepened. “It became an infatuation of such a degree that we both began to interpret it as love,” Longo wrote. One afternoon, he said, when the two of them were at lunch, he began spinning his wedding band on the table. Meadows asked him to stop; it reminded her of something her husband did. At that moment, out of the blue, Longo said that he wasn’t sure if he loved his wife anymore.

  “Jessica & I seemed more alike than MJ & I would ever be,” he wrote. Jessica was outgoing; Jessica was carefree. He says that he thought about leaving MaryJane, and used words like “love” and “always” and “forever” with Meadows. “We both felt that it was the real thing,” Longo wrote.

  The relationship blew up in late May of 2000, on a day that Longo was heading to Indianapolis to organize work on a new building site. Midway through the four-hour drive from Michigan, his cell phone rang. It was Meadows. According to Longo, she was sobbing; she needed to get away for a while and she wanted to spend time with her sister in Florida, but she had no money. Lon
go said he’d take care of it.

  He turned around. Using nearly half the remaining funds in his and MaryJane’s personal account, he booked Meadows on the next available flight to Florida, early the following morning. He also stopped at an ATM to give Meadows some spending money.

  They met near the airport and sat together in Longo’s car, all night, waiting for her flight. “It was a clumsy passionate few hours,” Longo wrote. They expressed some of their pent-up desires, but he insisted—as did Meadows—that their intimacy progressed no further than kissing and caressing.

  At 5:30 A.M., Meadows entered the airport, and Longo headed to Indianapolis once more. He hadn’t yet arrived at the building site when his cell phone rang again. This time it was MaryJane. These, according to Longo, were the first words out of her mouth: “What the hell do you have going on with Jessica?”

  MaryJane, it turned out, had checked their bank balance online that morning. She noticed the recent withdrawals, some $700. Concerned, and possibly suspicious, MaryJane peeked at Chris’s recent e-mails. She discovered an exchange between her husband and Meadows.

  “No other woman shall ever hold the place in my affection, the way you have,” said one of Longo’s e-mails. “You have changed my life. It had no real meaning, no lasting laughter, and no joy. It has come back…. I love you and am deeply in love with you, andalways will be.”

  In all the years Longo had known MaryJane, she’d uttered precisely two swear words in his presence. The first came after she’d been in a car accident. The second was at the beginning of this very call, when she’d used the word “hell.” MaryJane now proceeded to make up for lost time in a single tirade. After she hung up on Longo, she promptly called Jessica’s husband and Chris’s dad and the elders at the Kingdom Hall. Then, to vent further, she drove herself and the children to Ron and Kay Leonard’s house and called all her friends.