True Story

by Michael Finkel

  Jury selection for State of Oregon v. Christian Michael Longo, case number 01-6441, was scheduled to begin on Tuesday, February 18,2003. Two weeks before, Longo had told me over the phone that something surprising might happen on the very first day—something that would change the nature of the entire trial. He declined to elaborate, and though I speculated wildly, Longo simply repeated, “Just wait and see; wait and see.”

  The surprise actually came early. On the afternoon of Thursday, February 13, the Lincoln County district attorney’s office announced that there would be a “plea hearing” in the Longo case the following day. The office released no other information.

  I had known for some time that Longo’s legal team, or at least Ken Hadley, was considering a plea bargain. Longo had even mailed me a copy of a letter his lawyers had sent to the district attorney’s office, requesting a meeting to try and settle the case. Longo was careful to reiterate that he was absolutely innocent of the crimes—“I still have an overwhelming desire to be vindicated,” he wrote me.

  But, he added, because everyone assumed his guilt (the case, he conceded, was “my word against the DA’s”), the trial’s outcome was preordained, and spending weeks in a courtroom would only prolong the suffering of his relatives, MaryJane’s relatives, and all their past friends. Longo’s parents, in their letter to the Lincoln County district attorney, wrote, “If this case goes to trial it will be like pouring salt in the already incredibly painful wounds.”

  Even if he did prove his innocence, Longo noted, “I don’t know that my life would ever be ‘normal’ again.” Therefore, he concluded, he’d gallantly fall on his sword and quell others’ pain by going to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. “I do feel an enormous sense of responsibility, in an indirect way, over what happened,” he wrote. “I don’t mind living my life out incarcerated if that would be easiest for everyone else.”

  There were two problems with this idea. First, the district attorney’s office had not seemed interested in bargaining. They wanted death. And second, Longo had repeatedly insisted that any agreement could not include his pleading guilty to murder—he wasn’t that noble. Presumably, though, he’d be willing to plead to a lesser charge such as manslaughter. To me, it had seemed there was no chance the two sides would ever agree on anything.

  Yet just before his trial was about to start, it appeared as if a deal had actually been made. This should not have come as a surprise; nationwide, most cases in which prosecutors seek the death penalty end in plea bargains. The threat of death is often used specifically to achieve such a result.

  I was sure that the prosecution wasn’t going to allow Longo to plead guilty to anything other than murder—the district attorney in Lincoln County is elected, and the public wouldn’t stand for any softness, especially in a case involving children. What shocked me was that Longo might finally be coming clean. After all this time, he’d be confessing to the murder of his family.

  Two scenarios seemed feasible. Longo would admit to all the crimes in exchange for life in prison, with or without the possibility of parole. Or he’d change his plea to not guilty by reason of insanity, and the trial would indeed go on, though in a much altered fashion. I had trouble imagining Longo, whose chief source of pride was his intelligence, agreeing to an insanity defense, but I also couldn’t see anything else fulfilling his oblique hint—that the trial would continue but would be utterly changed.

  As it turned out, both my ideas were wrong. Later, when I told Longo I’d thought he might plead insanity, he was insulted. “You know better than that,” he said.

  THIRTY-ONE

  THE LINCOLN COUNTY COURTHOUSE and the Lincoln County Jail stand side by side at Newport’s main intersection; two characterless structures, flanked by parking lots, that provide the town with a rather uninspiring centerpiece. From here, Newport stretches a few miles north and south, just under ten thousand people hammocked between the wide and empty Oregon beaches and the steep, green Coast Range.

  Newport seems like a decent place to hide out. It’s sixty miles to the nearest interstate and a three-hour drive to Portland, the closest major city. During the summer, tourism drives the local economy—the beaches, with their gothic rock formations and rolling dunes, are pristine and gorgeous—but mostly Newport is a commercial fishing community, politically conservative and not especially well-off. Homes tend to be low-slung and modest. In July, the roads are thick with RVs, but in February there are few tourists (except for the weekend of the Seafood & Wine Festival), and the town, inundated with rain, often feels somber and deserted.

  The third-floor walkway that connects the courthouse and jail allowed Longo to move from his cell to his trial without having to face the public. (His reputation in Newport was encapsulated by the young man I once saw drive past the court, his car windows lowered, shouting, “Kill Longo!”) For the plea hearing, Longo walked into the courtroom with his jaw set and his eyes unafraid. He wore the same sage-colored suit he’d worn at his arraignment—a finer suit than either of his lawyers wore—and his hair looked as if it had been recently barbered, with a few stray wisps spilling stylishly over his forehead. The Band-It stun device was again strapped to his right calf.

  I hadn’t made it to Newport for the Valentine’s Day plea hearing. By the time I learned of the surprise proceeding, it was too late for me to fly or drive to Oregon. Judge Huckleberry, however, had allowed a television camera into the courtroom, and I obtained a tape of the hearing and watched it several times.

  Longo himself also wrote me a detailed letter about the proceeding. He actually began the letter in the dawn hours before he was scheduled to appear in court. He described himself as “nervewrecked,” and said that he’d spent much of the night pacing his cell. He wrote about his walk, escorted by a phalanx of guards, from the jail to the court. The route took him through a busy office area behind the courtrooms, and everyone turned to stare. “It was the first time I sensed that I was feared,” he wrote. “I wanted to sit on the other side of their desks to ease their anxiety, to explain everything in detail.”

  Instead, he entered Courtroom 300. It was a compact room, cold as a cave and fluorescent-lit. The windows were covered with dark red blinds, which were never once raised during the entirety of the trial. A miniature grandfather clock hung on one wall, pendulum swinging. There were two flagpoles, one supporting the state flag of Oregon, the other a U.S. flag. The spectator section consisted of four rows of pewlike wooden benches. There were framed portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, a few shelves of thick legal books, and a calendar that read TODAY IS

  above a cube of white pages that were torn off daily.

  On a raised platform in the far corner, occupying a tidy, three-sided work area adjacent to the witness stand, sat Judge Huckleberry, fifty-four years old, short and slightly pudgy, wearing a black robe and round, gold-framed glasses. Huckleberry was strict but not humorless. He was, I soon learned, partial to down-home platitudes—“Is that over-egging the pudding?” he’d occasionally ask if a lawyer was exaggerating a point—and while listening to testimony, he would often cradle his chin in his left hand while pinching his cheek, metronomically, with his right.

  Longo sat between his attorneys. This was the second murder case for which Krasik and Hadley had partnered. The first had been a relative success—the charges were reduced to manslaughter—so they’d volunteered to collaborate again. As I watched the lawyers over the course of the trial, I realized that the dichotomy Longo had once complained about was actually an asset. In private meetings with their client, the two men tended to look at the case from different angles, which allowed for a thoughtful analysis of a range of options. In court, they presented a unified front, and their skills seemed to mesh.

  It was Krasik who did most of the talking at the plea hearing. Krasik, who had been involved in many of Oregon’s high-profile murder cases over the past decade, bore a passing resemblance to Albert Einstein, and possessed a wit and erudition tha
t only enhanced the comparison. When I spoke with him over the phone a few weeks before the hearing, he’d confounded me by making references to the Dickens character Madame Defarge, a statistical concept called the five-sigma rule, and a legal stategy known as reverse Witherspooning, all within a five-minute span.

  Before becoming a lawyer, Krasik had spent eleven years in the navy, where he specialized in landing jets on aircraft carriers—“Not as scary as it looks,” he said, “especially if your eyes are closed.” His sports jackets and slacks were often mismatched; his reading glasses were large and unhip (“They cost six dollars at Costco,” he explained). Decorating his law office, I later saw, was a periodic table of chemical elements, a phrenology skull, a naval officer’s sword, and a collection of Oscar Mayer wiener memorabilia. Of the fifteen death-penalty cases he’d previously defended, not one had resulted in a death sentence. “There’s no such thing as a hopeless case,” he once told me. “Even if the evidence is overwhelming, there’s still zero and double-zero on the roulette wheel. Anything can happen.”

  Krasik began the plea hearing by informing Judge Huckleberry that his client no longer wanted to stand mute to the charges, as he had during his October arraignment. Longo, he added, wished to answer them himself. This is when things became very odd.

  For the deaths of Zachery Longo and Sadie Longo, Krasik continued, Longo was now going to definitively plead not guilty. Judge Huckleberry nodded and confirmed that Longo had now entered his own not-guilty plea.

  Then, without fanfare, Krasik said that for the deaths of Mary-Jane Longo and Madison Longo, his client would like to plead guilty. Huckleberry asked if any sort of deal had been made with the district attorney’s office. No, Krasik said.

  Longo was pleading guilty to a death-penalty offense without the protection of a plea agreement. This was almost unheard of; it was the legal equivalent of jumping out of a plane without a parachute. Krasik handed Longo a sheet of paper on which his guilty plea was officially spelled out. Longo signed it.

  Huckleberry wanted to make sure that Longo understood what he’d just done. He addressed Longo directly. Did he realize, the judge asked, that he’d received no promises from the prosecution?

  “Yes, sir,” said Longo.

  Did he know that pleading guilty to murder meant he was guaranteed, at the very least, a sentence of life in prison, with or without the possibility of parole?

  “I do,” said Longo.

  Did he comprehend that, even if he was found not guilty of the murders of Zachery and Sadie, this plea meant that he could still be put to death?

  “Yes, sir,” Longo said. “I do understand that.” He stayed seated throughout the questioning. His face remained calm, but he swallowed hard, and his Adam’s apple bobbed.

  The judge, still uncertain if Longo recognized the consequences of his actions, asked if he had consulted fully with his lawyers about this decision.

  “I have,” Longo acknowledged, and the muscles in his face visibly tightened. He began to blink rapidly.

  “Do you have any questions?” Huckleberry asked.

  “I do not,” Longo said.

  Then Krasik stood up and formally read from the indictment. He said that his client had, in December of 2001, in Lincoln County, Oregon, caused the death of MaryJane Longo—“intentionally and therefore unlawfully.”

  Huckleberry now appeared satisfied that Longo was making an informed, sober, voluntary decision. “Mr. Longo, I’ll put it to you directly,” he said. “Is that true?”

  “That’s correct,” Longo said. His voice sounded strained, on the verge of breaking. His words came out almost in a gargle. His lower lip began to tremble. “I felt like a three year old,” he later wrote me, “wilted in between the pillars of my lawyers, trying heartily to not break down.”

  Krasik, still standing, continued reading. He said that his client had, in December of 2001, caused the death of Madison Longo. And this meant there was a further count to which Longo was pleading guilty. In Oregon, if a murder victim is a child, a defendant can be charged with two separate counts—one for murder, another for the murder of a child. So Longo was charged with seven counts: four murders plus three child murders. He was pleading guilty to two of the killings and three of the counts.

  Krasik now read from this last count. “The defendant,” he said, “did unlawfully and intentionally cause the death of another human being, to wit: Madison Longo.” He continued reading aloud. “Madison Longo,” he said, “was a person under the age of fourteen years.”

  This was the line that finally cracked him. A single tear escaped from Longo’s left eye and ran down his cheek until he swiped at it. “It was an unbearably heavy moment,” he wrote. “I could only think back to that night & the fact of how guilty I was. All of the layers of shock, horror, disbelief, & shame piled on top of me all over again, and it took all I had to not scream out or collapse into a ball under the table.”

  The judge asked Longo to stand, and he rose wobbly to his feet, pushing aside more tears. “I’ll ask the defendant this one last time,” Huckleberry said. “What is your plea to the charges?”

  Longo then spoke his final words of the hearing: “I’m guilty, your honor.”

  “Okay,” said Huckleberry. “I’ll find you guilty.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  SOON AFTER RETURNING TO JAIL, through the walkway, Longo was allowed to spend a little time in the day room, where he watched the television news reports of his guilty pleas. Then, back in his cell, he continued the letter he’d begun early that morning. “No one got it. No one understood what I was doing,” Longo wrote. “No one could conceive that I was simply taking responsibility & admitting my guilt.”

  He was correct. Here is the first line of the next morning’s Portland Oregonian story on the hearing: “In a legal maneuver that baffled observers across the region…” The Newport News-Times: “In a move that has confounded many…” The Eugene Register-Guard: “In a maneuver with no apparent legal rhyme or reason…”

  And here is what Longo told me: “I’m extremely sorry for the surprise that was thrust upon you…. But I’m ever sorrier for misleading you into believing that I felt that I was completely innocent. For lying to you. (It’s hard to write the word ‘lying.’) I have tried to be as honest as possible, in fact setting records in my level of honesty. I know that I’ve been excrutiatingly open & have not buttered anything up to make it sound better or to make it more palatable.”

  Longo had finally admitted that he was a murderer. I’d anticipated this moment for months, envisioning what it would be like for him, and for our relationship, when he was able to drop all his layers of deception and come to terms with who he really was. But now I couldn’t shake the feeling that his guilty pleas were just the beginning of another complicated game. He hadn’t come clean in the least. There’d been no breakthrough. How could Longo commit two of the murders, I wanted to know, but not the other two? If he didn’t kill Zachery and Sadie, then who did?

  When I pressed him to answer these questions, Longo was evasive. The pleas, he stated, were a “weight off my shoulders” and “a huge release.” I requested more specifics, but he said he couldn’t help me right now. He asked for my patience and promised that everything would soon be clear. “My conscience will be free,” he insisted, “even if my body is not.”

  For days, I obsessed about the meaning of his guilty pleas. I consulted lawyers (not Longo’s—they were keeping silent); I researched past death-penalty cases; I spoke with journalists who specialized in legal affairs. Nothing shed much light. It was baffling. One of the more popular hypotheses, in fact, was that the whole point of the plea hearing was not to have a point. It was staged precisely to confuse people, to increase the likelihood that an error would be made during the trial, to kink the roulette wheel in a way that would produce an unnatural harvest of zeros and double-zeros.

  But this idea, even in a case as discouraging as Longo’s, seemed absurdly risky. Its chances of hurting
him far outweighed the potential to help. Longo’s confession had eliminated what lawyers sometimes call “residual doubt,” which is the thin but distinct gap between a jury’s finding someone guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt”—the necessary standard for conviction in a criminal case—and finding someone guilty with absolute certainty. Residual doubt is often cited as the reason juries or judges find a defendant guilty but don’t impose the maximum sentence.

  By pleading guilty to two murders, Longo had removed this buffer. He’d all but invited a death penalty. Now no one would worry that an innocent person had been condemned. Longo was, without question, a murderer. It seemed certain that he would never again be a free man. If Longo had admitted to all the murders, rather than half of them, he would have exposed himself to no further punishment, beyond the purely theoretical. The state can’t put someone to death more than once; an inmate can’t serve more than one life term.

  So why didn’t Longo admit to all four? The only explanation that made sense was also, confoundingly, the least plausible: Longo had pleaded guilty to only two murders because those were the only two murders he’d committed.

  It took a couple of weeks to seat a jury. The selection process in a death-penalty case is different from that of any other criminal trial. In Oregon, as in all states, in a death-penalty case it is the jury, not the judge, that determines the sentence. Longo’s jury needed to be “death qualified”; that is, every member had to be willing, at least in principle, to administer a death sentence. Anyone who was morally opposed to capital punishment, or could not envision authorizing another’s death, was disqualified from consideration.