True Story

by Michael Finkel

  In addition, he was sued by his local bank for bouncing thousands of dollars in Final Touch checks. He was sued by several former employees seeking payment. He was sued by the owners of the business that had purchased his forklift—they discovered it had been stolen and demanded their $5,000 back. He was being hounded, daily, by collection agencies. Summonses were stuck to his door. Foreclosure proceedings were initiated on his house. He was ashamed to be spotted in public—everyone in Ypsilanti, it seemed, knew he’d been disfellowshipped. His wife wouldn’t even have sex with him. “Our own intimate relations,” he wrote, “dwindled to nothing.”

  Something had to give. There was no way that Longo could repay his debts, support his family, and return to some semblance of a normal life. It was time, he wrote, to “cut our losses & try again from scratch.” Though MaryJane had lived her entire life in Ypsilanti, Longo decided that they had to move.

  They thought about Europe. They considered Canada. They researched Seattle and Dallas and Cincinnati and a half-dozen places in California. But then they had second thoughts about going so far away. “If we wanted to ultimately improve our lives,” Longo wrote, “removal from our family & friends was not the best way to accomplish it.” Also, by the terms of Longo’s probation, he was not allowed to leave the state of Michigan without permission, let alone move from it. Eventually, they decided on Toledo, Ohio. It was close enough to Ypsilanti—less than an hour’s drive—for Longo to attend his parole meetings, and far enough away so that the family could restart their lives in peaceful anonymity.

  In order to find a place to live, Longo had to do some finagling. His credit was ruined—there was no way he could secure a mortgage or pass even a cursory background check by a potential landlord. A home or an apartment seemed an impossible goal. So instead, Longo rented a warehouse. It was a huge, hundred-and-fifty-year-old brick building, severely dilapidated, in an industrial district of downtown Toledo. The rent was $1,650 per month. It was not zoned for human occupancy.

  The landlord, Pamela O’Connell, was so anxious to rent the warehouse, according to Longo, that she didn’t bother with a credit check. Longo had told her that the place was going to be the headquarters for his new construction company, Urban Restoration. (The closest this idea came to fruition was the printing of a business card, on which Longo’s title was “CEO.”) More enticing to O’Connell, perhaps, was Longo’s promise that he would provide a full year’s rent as a down payment. They came to an agreement, and in May of 2001 the Longos and their dog, a husky named Kyra, left for Toledo.

  Longo truly thought he’d be able to afford the warehouse. Just before they’d moved, the Longos sold their house—a step ahead of foreclosure—for their full asking price of $105,900. After paying off his mortgage loan and other fees, Longo figured he’d end up with about $16,000. He also expected a $12,000 check from the last Final Touch client.

  He had, however, forgotten two things: sales tax, which reduced his house-sale profit to exactly $8,259.18, and the Amir Fawzy lawsuit, which reduced his Final Touch income to exactly zero. Longo headed to Toledo with less than a third of the nest egg he’d anticipated. He convinced the landlord to accept only one month’s rent as a deposit, but to ease MaryJane’s worries about the move, he told her that he’d paid rent for the whole year.

  The warehouse was in such poor shape—it didn’t have a kitchen or operable plumbing—that the family was forced to live in a hotel for five weeks while Longo renovated it. He purchased a water heater and a refrigerator; he rented a sand blaster and a dumpster; he paid for lumber, paint, tools, and a hotel room. “I was overextended physically & emotionally,” he wrote. By the time the family moved in, on June 24, 2001, there was almost no money left.

  Longo did not have a job. The family was living, illegally, in a place unfit for children—Sadie was once hit by a freefalling garage door, necessitating a trip to the emergency room. (No bones were broken.) To avoid being served with court papers, Chris and Mary-Jane told no one their street address. For mail service, they rented a box in a nearby town. They rarely turned on their cell phones; all the calls seemed to be from collection agencies. There was a Kingdom Hall not far away, but even MaryJane, whose spirituality had been a central part of her life, no longer attended services. They just needed to be by themselves for a while, Longo wrote. Funds were so tight that one afternoon he filled up the minivan with gas and drove away without paying.

  MaryJane knew that they were struggling, but, Longo wrote, “she had no idea as to the magnitude of our problems.” She was under the impression that there was some money left—at least enough to purchase food. There wasn’t, though Longo soon changed that. He set up his computer in the warehouse and printed more counterfeit checks. He cashed five of them and netted $9,000. The checks, he wrote, were “attempts to keep us alive.” This was the first time, in all the letters he’d written, that he had cast his family’s misfortunes as a life-or-death battle.

  A month and a half after they’d moved into the warehouse, the Longos had their first visitors. MaryJane’s younger sister, Sally, and her husband, Anton Clark, arrived at the building. Sally was the only one of MaryJane’s five siblings who was still a Jehovah’s Witness. She and Anton hadn’t heard from MaryJane in weeks, and had only a vague idea of where she was living. To find the place, they’d driven the streets of downtown Toledo until they spotted the Longos’ dog in a fenced enclosure and their minivan in the street. Even then, they didn’t see any entrance—the warehouse looked sealed off and deserted—but after they honked their horn and shouted, MaryJane eventually appeared.

  The Clarks demanded to speak with Chris, so MaryJane went back into the building and brought him out. Sally and Anton told Chris that several of his former employees were still seeking unpaid wages, and were pursuing judgments against him in court. Longo assured them that things were okay. He explained that he’d already hired a lawyer to handle his affairs. “I was giving anything to pacify,” Longo said, “so they wouldn’t be concerned.” It took him more than half an hour to persuade them to leave.

  Three weeks later, on September 3, 2001, the Clarks returned. This time they came with MaryJane’s mom, who was visiting from Alabama, where she lived with her husband. But when they arrived, the vehicle and the dog were gone. They managed to find the building’s landlord, who told them that Longo was delinquent with the rent. He’d made several excuses, she said—that someone had broken into the warehouse and stolen his checks; that his brother had died of cancer and he had to pay for a funeral.

  Alarmed, MaryJane’s family tried to contact her. They dialed her cell number repeatedly, but no one ever answered. They called the police in both Michigan and Ohio. They alerted Longo’s parole officer and his parents. They sent registered letters to the warehouse, but all of them came back unopened.

  On September 17, they filed a missing-persons report with the Michigan State Police. The police discovered that Longo was wanted on multiple charges, including the most recent check frauds. When investigators searched the warehouse, they found photo albums, cooking supplies, children’s toys, and MaryJane’s wedding dress. The place was a mess. Food was still in the refrigerator. The Longos appeared to have abandoned the building in a hurry, but had left no clue where they’d gone.

  What happened was this: Longo tried to sell the few valuable assets he still owned—the boat, a large-screen TV, a cargo trailer, and his one remaining forklift. He placed an advertisement in the paper and quickly sold the TV and trailer for a total of $1,000. A potential buyer contacted him about the forklift, and Longo had him come to the warehouse, where the items were stored. But when the man couldn’t locate the serial numbers, he became suspicious. He told Longo he wasn’t interested. Then, on his way home, he called the police.

  Sergeant Paul Hickey of the Toledo Police Department arrived at the warehouse. He inspected the boat and the forklift but could not determine if either had been stolen. Longo told the officer that he didn’t have the titles with him
, but he’d gladly fax them to the police station the next day. Longo, Hickey later said, didn’t appear nervous in the least. MaryJane was busy tending to the children. Hickey described the couple as “Ma and Pa America.” There was no reason to think that their minivan was also stolen. The officer apologized for the intrusion and left the building.

  MaryJane was perplexed. Longo calmed her down, he said, by insisting that the incident was some sort of misunderstanding. That afternoon, they took the children to the Toledo Zoo. On the way home, they saw two police cars and two tow trucks parked in front of the warehouse. Longo panicked. He immediately turned the car around. They went to a McDonald’s and let the kids entertain themselves in the playroom for a few hours.

  When they drove back to the warehouse, the police were gone—as were the boat and the forklift. Sergeant Hickey had done some research and discovered that the two items were in fact stolen. He returned to the building with the intention of arresting Longo, but no one was there. He confiscated the boat and forklift and figured he’d make the arrest later.

  Hickey never got the chance. Longo admitted to MaryJane that he’d purchased the equipment under dubious circumstances and that there was a chance his ownership wasn’t absolutely legal. He also said that they had to leave town right away. MaryJane didn’t know about the newest round of counterfeit checks, but she was aware of his parole violations: He hadn’t been paying restitution; he wasn’t visiting his parole officer; he never did any community service. If the police came back, she knew he’d likely go to jail.

  “MJ feared me being in jail as much as I did, for the same reasons,” he wrote. “What would happen to our family?” According to Longo, MaryJane agreed with his decision to escape.

  They rented a Penske moving truck. Longo promised the rental agency that he wouldn’t be taking the truck out of state, so he was able to drive it away for only a $100 deposit. He packed up the truck late that night—“in a state of paranoia,” he wrote, with the lights in the warehouse off, using only his flashlight to see. Mary-Jane kept the kids occupied while Longo stuffed whatever he could into the truck, leaving behind anything he deemed unimportant.

  He put Sadie and Madison into the minivan, with MaryJane at the wheel, and loaded Zachery and the dog into the truck with him. They drove out of Toledo just before midnight on August 30,2001. They’d lived there less than four months. The family, Longo calculated, had exactly $1,502 in cash. As to where they were going, Longo wrote, he knew only that he wanted to be “far enough away from everyone to just think straight.”

  At first, Longo was too nervous to drive on major thorough-fares—the police, he was certain, were pursuing him—so he charted a back-road course out of the state, the truck in the lead, MaryJane and the girls following behind. They made it across the state line, into Indiana, and checked into a Best Western for the night. Longo began to calm down. He convinced himself that the situation really wasn’t so bad. “I didn’t think of it as running away,” he wrote. “It was making a change for the better.”

  It’s hard to know if MaryJane thought the same way. She clearly understood that they were in trouble, and she knew her husband was breaking the law, but she may have believed it was her responsibility to keep her family intact. Almost certainly, she still felt protected by Chris. Three days before the Longos left the warehouse, MaryJane had met again with her sister Sally. They’d both brought their kids to the children’s science center in Toledo. Sally later recalled some of what they spoke about that afternoon. She said she asked MaryJane if she ever felt unsafe around Chris, or worried that he might harm her or the children. “No, never,” was MaryJane’s response.

  Longo himself wrote about MaryJane’s reaction to the midnight escape. “I think that on the inside MJ was just as anxiety stricken as I was, but she wore a very convincing mask of indifference…when we finally stopped she seemed exhillerated despite the late hour & I think we both felt a sense of relief from that point on.”

  The next day they drove the interstates, heading west through Chicago then north into Wisconsin. While Zachery napped, Longo contemplated their situation. “I thought a lot about the stressful last year & the demise of my best laid plans,” he wrote. “I kept playing the ‘if only’ game that never changes anything.” He was immensely frightened. He could not afford to make further mistakes; he could not entangle himself with the law in any way. One slip, he understood, and he could find himself locked up for years.

  He drove, and like a man in a foxhole listening for incoming bombs, he began cutting deals with himself, bargaining for his life. He swore he’d amend his ways. No more cons, no more counterfeit checks. Just honest, steady work. He’d repay his debts; he’d resolve his legal problems. There’d be no more lies. “I would get us back on track legitamately, get a job wherever we ended up, start from scratch w/ a solid foundation, both spiritually & secularly, & strive to lead a normal, modest life, w/o big dreams & aspirations.”

  He realized that caring for his wife and children was all that really mattered. MaryJane, he knew, was still proud of him, still supportive. She didn’t care how much money he made or what kinds of status symbols they possessed. “She was saintly,” he wrote. He loved her truly and deeply. The kids were spirited and healthy. Everything was going to turn around. He could sense it. From now on, he wrote, their lives would be one-hundred-percent improved.

  PART FOUR

  DEATH

  THIRTY

  SO THAT WAS HIS STORY. He never wrote a word about the day of the murders—my usefulness in helping shape his tale was evidently good only to a point. In any case, by the time Longo completed the “MJ & I Papers,” as he called them, his trial was set to begin, and the crimes themselves would inevitably become the focus of attention.

  It was now February of 2003. I’d been in contact with Longo for almost a year. I had written him twenty-three letters, and he had written me twenty-three letters. “I think you know more about me than my parents do,” he’d told me. Yet I knew almost nothing about why his family had been killed. His letters were detailed and poignant and long, but they formed a sort of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, always keeping me intrigued yet never quite reaching a conclusion. Nothing he wrote convinced me of his innocence. Still, I wanted to believe him. I wanted him not to be a murderer.

  Maybe that was all he needed. If he could get a jury to feel the same way, perhaps he could nudge this into a form of reasonable doubt. His plan, so far as I could tell, was to use his charm as a defensive gambit. He would demonstrate that he was a bright and sensitive person; a normal, well-adjusted man. And therefore it wasn’t logical that he could have committed crimes that were clearly the work of someone profoundly unhinged.

  Longo did confess several misdeeds to me, but every one was weirdly altruistic, at least the way he told it. He lifted money from a camera shop to pay for MaryJane’s engagement ring. He stole a minivan for his wife—rather than, say, a Ferrari for himself. He created counterfeit checks in order to pay his employees. He faked further checks to purchase building supplies that would make the warehouse safer and more comfortable for his family.

  These don’t seem the actions of a hard-hearted criminal. They were not vindictive crimes; they weren’t especially cruel. Until the murders, Longo was never accused of a violent act. He didn’t even appear to have a temper. Not once, in all our conversations, did he use a swear word. He didn’t so much as raise his voice. Two of his favorite movies, he said, were Charlotte’s Web (rated G) and The Princess Bride (rated PG). He claimed to have seen Princess Bride twenty times. He said he’d been drunk only a single time.

  One woman in his Kingdom Hall in Ypsilanti described Longo as “a thoughtful, giving, helpful person.” Another said he was “generous with his money and his time.” A third said she “trusted him completely.” A fourth said that Longo was “a model for other men” and that she’d overheard several women in the congregation say, “Why can’t my husband be more like Chris Longo?”

&n
bsp; Even after I suspected that Longo was using me to audition his testimony, I did not stop corresponding with him. I couldn’t. I was immersed in my writing project; I was captivated by his tale; I was emotionally involved in his life. I did become a little more cautious about what I said to Longo, but I didn’t blame him for testing his story on me. I faulted myself for not realizing it sooner.

  And, I have to confess, I genuinely liked Longo. Though just about every aspect of our relationship confounded me, and though I was almost sure he had murdered his family and was lying about his innocence, I couldn’t help it. As with the people in his Kingdom Hall, who still expressed their admiration for Longo even after he’d been arrested for murder, his charisma had worked on me. “I like you in a way that is beyond my control,” I admitted in the last letter I wrote him before the start of his trial.

  He may have killed, I thought, but there had to have been a plausible reason, some force that drove him beyond his snapping point. In the course of reading his letters, I came to believe that he really did love his family. “People can be partially bad and partially good,” I wrote, “and I know for a fact that you have a good side.”

  I also added, in the letter I sent just prior to his trial, that the connection I shared with Longo felt “deep and profound and important.” It was in no way a normal relationship, I noted, but it was real. “The sadnesses in your life, and the tragedies, and the troubles and difficulties ahead affect me too,” I wrote. I told him that I wished he could erase the last few years of his life and start again. I signed the letter, “Your Friend, Mike.”

  “I don’t know that I’ve ever been quite so touched—or maybe punched would be more appropo, or at least affected—by a letter,” Longo responded. Our relationship, he wrote, had transformed his own life. “I can’t imagine where I’d be right now, mentally & psycologically w/o the writing assignments, your help, & your person. Who would have thought that a phone call, over almost exactly a year ago now, could have transpired & progressed to this breathlessly high point?” He signed the letter, “Your Very Appreciative Friend, Chris.”