True Story

by Michael Finkel

  A capital case is divided into two parts. In the first, known as the guilt phase, the jury determines the defendant’s culpability. Because Longo had already confessed to the murders of MaryJane and Madison, the guilt phase of his trial would be concerned only with Longo’s role in Zachery and Sadie’s deaths. Whenever I used the term “guilt phase” on the telephone—through most of his trial, we continued to regularly speak on phone—Longo expressed his displeasure. “Why isn’t it called the innocence phase?” he wondered.

  In the second part of the trial, the penalty phase, the jury listens to what is known as mitigating evidence—testimony, presented by the defense, about the defendant’s character that might justify a less severe sentence. The prosecution, in turn, can offer aggravating evidence that argues for a stiffer penalty. Normally, if a jury finds the defendant not guilty during the first part of a trial, there is no penalty phase. But Longo’s case was certain to have both parts; even if he was acquitted in the guilt phase, he would still face punishment for his role in MaryJane and Madison’s murders.

  For each count on which Longo was found guilty, his jury would have three choices: a life sentence with the possibility of parole after thirty years; life without the possibility of parole; or death by lethal injection. To impose death, all twelve jurors had to vote in favor. For the chance of parole, ten or more jurors had to agree. Any other configuration of votes would result in the default sentence—life in prison without any prospect of release.

  All that was needed to spare Longo’s life was one sympathetic juror. Both the defense and the prosecution teams were well aware of this, and during the selection proceedings, potential jurors were asked to precisely define their stance on capital punishment, and to complete a sixty-six-question survey that requested information as far-ranging as the types of firearms they owned, how they felt about the psychiatric profession, and the wording of any bumper stickers on their vehicles.

  Ken Hadley took the reins for the defense’s part in the jury selection. Hadley radiated calmness and civility; with him there were no courtroom theatrics, no angry outbursts, not so much as a quickly uttered sentence. During the trial, he sometimes addressed the jury while standing behind a lectern. He was silver-haired, barrelchested, and a firm supporter, he told me, of the Republican Party, except when it came to death-penalty issues. “An ole country lawyer” is how he described himself.

  Hadley was a well-known figure in Newport; his office, in a low-ceilinged annex behind an insurance agency, was an easy walk from the Lincoln County Courthouse. Before accepting Longo’s case, he’d defended twenty other people facing the death penalty. Six had gone to trial, and only one was actually sentenced to death, and that was after the defendant had ignored Hadley’s advice and turned down a plea bargain. “I think of him as a grandfather figure,” Longo said of Hadley. “But I’ve told him he’s a father figure, to not hurt his feelings.”

  Longo was present in the courtroom for jury selection, as was I. Newport had become my temporary home; I’d taken a short-term lease on a rental cottage near the ocean, and I had driven my pickup to Oregon. I spent almost every weekday in the same room with Longo and was forced to continue my romance with Jill via the telephone. “What could be healthier for our relationship,” she teased, “than for you to spend a couple of months watching a murder trial?”

  On the second day of the selection proceedings, as I sat in court, I was approached by an officer and served with two subpoenas. Kerry Taylor, it turned out, may have been bluffing when he’d attempted to convince me to speak with him before the trial began. He had said that I would not make a good witness, but now the prosecution had subpoenaed me once to testify in court, and once to hand over all of Longo’s letters and my tape-recordings of our phone calls. Oregon, however, has a strong journalists’ shield law—this may be why Taylor tried at first to cajole me out of the information—and after I hired an attorney, the two subpoenas were swiftly dropped.

  As the jury was picked, Longo wrote me a letter, commenting in his meticulous way on the people who were auditioning for the job of deciding whether he should live or die. “A couple of them sneak glances in my direction, a couple do everything possible to avoid looking my way, & a couple just stare in a bold way, seeming to try to get a read from me, to figure me out,” he noted. “It was painfully obvious who wanted to be on the jury, w/ catered answers to placate both the defenses queries & those of the prosecution…. You could see, by the way that they looked at me, that they couldn’t wait to vote yes for the DP [Death Penalty].”

  Most hurtful, Longo added, was listening to those who did not want to serve on his jury. These were the people, all of them dismissed by Judge Huckleberry, who announced that they were certain Longo had killed his whole family, that nothing could convince them otherwise, and that he therefore deserved to die, the sooner the better.

  This was the first time since Longo’s arrest in Cancún, fourteen months earlier, that he’d encountered anyone outside the criminal-justice system (myself excepted), and he was shocked to hear average citizens—he described them as “school teachers & dental hygenists & bank loan officers”—speak their minds. “The comments,” he wrote, “seered through me & hit my heart pretty hard.” He seemed incredulous to discover that people hated him. “I don’t believe that I am this horrible person, this pariah,” he wrote. “I feel like I still have something to offer.”

  In the end, Longo’s jury consisted of eight women and four men, including a nineteen-year-old who worked as a deejay and a sixty-two-year-old retiree with a silver crew cut. It was a jury, Longo said, that seemed hungry to kill him. But he insisted that he had no intention of pandering to the jurors with maudlin displays of contrition or by begging for mercy. That was beneath him. “I will live or die by the truth,” he declared. “Nothing matters more right now, in my life, than that. If it kills me to tell the truth in every matter, so be it, I’m a dead man.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  THE OPENING STATEMENT for the prosecution was delivered by Steven Briggs, one of the two lawyers representing the state. No one in Lincoln County had much experience prosecuting a capital case, so Briggs had been imported from the Oregon attorney general’s office in Portland. He was thirty-nine years old, with a courtroom reputation for even-tempered aggressiveness and meticulous preparation. He had a narrow face, an aquiline nose, and an air about him of tightly coiled intensity, as if he were set to run a hundred-meter dash. When speaking over the telephone with Longo, my code name for Briggs was “the Greyhound.”

  His co-council was Paulette Sanders, forty-three, the chief deputy district attorney of Lincoln County. In court, Sanders appeared nearly as focused and ardent as Briggs, her dusty-blond hair usually pulled into a no-nonsense ponytail, her few glances toward Longo disgust-filled and withering. Both prosecutors were unapologetically seeking the death penalty. “I’ve never seen a harder push for death,” Ken Hadley once commented to me during a courtroom recess. “It makes me sick. They’re practically drooling for it.”

  Briggs spoke for half an hour. His tone was restrained and matter-of-fact, though with a honed enunciation—the last syllable of every fifth or sixth word snapped short—that left a distinct aftertaste of fury. “December 16, 2001, was a cold night,” he began. He displayed to the jury two framed photographs, one of MaryJane, another of the three Longo children. “This is what they looked like before that night,” he said.

  Longo had worked the late shift at Fred Meyer, Briggs explained, and when he arrived at the condominium he’d rented along the Newport bayfront, his family was asleep. It was about 11 P.M. “The defendant went over to his refrigerator,” said Briggs, “poured himself a glass of wine, took a piece of New York–style sharp cheddar cheese, drank his wine and ate his cheese, and then he went to his wife for the last time. He placed his hand on her throat and he began to squeeze. In a violent struggle, she fought for her life.”

  The struggle, said Briggs, lasted three or four minutes, during
which Longo bruised his wife’s neck, bloodied her nose, and stripped off her nightgown. He then strangled all three of his children—two-year-old Madison, three-year-old Sadie, and four-year-old Zachery.

  “When he was finished,” Briggs continued, “the defendant went back to his wife, MaryJane, grabbed her naked, lifeless body, and dragged it over to a suitcase, where he pushed it into the suitcase and folded it up and squeezed it down and zipped it closed. He then reached down and picked up his two-year-old daughter, Madison, placed her in another suitcase with some clothing and diving weights, and he zipped that closed. He then picked up those suitcases and took them down to the water. Standing on the dock, he tossed the body of his wife and youngest child into Yaquina Bay, where they sank to the bottom.”

  Afterward, Briggs said, he loaded the bodies of his two older children into the family minivan and drove fifteen minutes south. He placed a large rock inside a pillowcase and tied the case to Zachery’s leg. He did the same to Sadie. He wrapped them together in a black comforter and tossed them off the Lint Slough Bridge. At four-thirty in the morning, Briggs added, a man named Dick Hoch exchanged a few words with Longo while he was parked on the bridge. Two days later, Zachery’s body bobbed to the surface. It was another three days before police divers found Sadie at the bottom of the lake.

  According to Briggs, Longo had been planning this crime for a long time. He’d had an extramarital affair a year and a half earlier, during which he told his wife that she wasn’t fun anymore, and that he no longer loved her. Six months before the murders, while his family was living in a warehouse in Ohio, Longo had downloaded from the internet a sixty-page booklet called Hit Man On-Line—“an instruction book on murder,” according to the first sentence of its preface.

  Longo also seemed to be preparing to alter his identity and possibly leave the country. Among his possessions left behind in the Ohio warehouse were a book titled The Modern Identity Changer and a Spanish phrase book. A few weeks before the murders, while living in Oregon, Longo printed from various internet news sites the obituaries of four men, all of whom were about his age. On some of the obituaries, Longo had written the deceased’s Social Security number. He also lifted a credit-card receipt from the cash register at Starbucks—the receipt he later used to purchase a plane ticket to Mexico.

  After killing his family, Briggs said, Longo stole a car, exercised at the gym, played volleyball, showed up for work, and rented movies. He tossed five garbage bags filled with his family’s belongings into a dumpster. He even attended a Starbucks Christmas party, where he gave away a bottle of MaryJane’s perfume and told several people that his wife had left him for another man and had taken their children with her. His coworkers felt so sorry for him that they wrapped up some pizza and sent it home with him.

  Once Zachery’s body appeared at the surface of Lint Slough, Longo fled Newport, drove to San Francisco, and later flew to Cancún. There, he impersonated a New York Times reporter, and ten days after killing his family, said Briggs, Longo was “drinking beer, dancing, swimming and snorkeling, and making love to a German girl in a cabana on the beach.”

  Nothing that Briggs said during the opening statement, Longo wrote, particularly concerned him. What worried him most was the presence of his family: Joe, Joy, and Dustin were all spectators in court. Joe sat stone-faced through Briggs’s statement, his arm around Joy, who clutched a sheaf of religious booklets and quietly wept. “I really don’t want them here,” Longo wrote. “I know that I’m their son & they are hopeful that my life course will change, & they feel that support is necessitated, but at what point does support become pointless? I’m going to prison for the rest of my life.”

  Also in attendance were two of MaryJane’s younger sisters, Sally Clark and Penny Dupuie, as well as her sister-in-law, Cathy Baker. They remained in Newport for almost all of the trial. One evening, I encountered the group in a local restaurant. They knew who I was—they’d worked closely with the prosecutors, who had evidently informed them of my connection with Longo. In court, they had occasionally fixed me with hostile stares.

  At the restaurant, Dupuie told me that her hatred of Longo was so all-consuming that she was scarcely able to function. “I want him to feel uncomfortable,” she said when I asked why she had come to the trial. “I want him to know we’re here.” Baker was less restrained. “I want to kill the motherfucker,” she said, her eyes wide with anger. Then they informed me that because I’d been friendly with Longo, because I’d given him so much attention, I would soon burn in hell with him. All I could do was nod, meekly; there seemed no appropriate way to reply.

  Longo knew precisely who was watching him. The courtroom’s spectator section and defense table were only a few feet apart, close enough for observers in the first row or two of benches to occasionally make out the whispered comments between Longo and his attorneys. All Longo had to do was turn his head slightly, and he could see, through the corner of his eye, everyone in attendance.

  By the start of the guilt phase of his trial, on March 10, 2003, it had been nearly two years since Longo had seen or spoken with his parents. Soon after they walked into court on the day of Briggs’s opening statement, Longo glanced at his father but felt so ashamed, he wrote, that he quickly averted his gaze when Joe looked back. He did hold eye contact with his brother, but was stung by the “direct hatred” that appeared on Dustin’s face—“I would have preferred for him to strike out physically,” he wrote, “than to be so readable in his expression.” As for his mom, the prospect of catching her eye was too daunting. “I couldn’t go there,” he wrote.

  Longo and his parents had exchanged a few letters, all of which Longo eventually sent me—the original letters from his parents and photocopies of his own, which he’d had his lawyers make before mailing them. (Because Longo’s parents were assisting the defense, he could swap mail with them via his attorneys, ensuring secure communication. Longo sent his letters to me through the standard jail-mail system, without inspection by Krasik or Hadley, much to their chagrin.) Longo’s brother, during the year Chris had been in jail, had sent only a single message, a hundred and thirty words long. “I really don’t know what to say,” Dustin wrote. “I can’t begin to imagine what you must be going through right now or what thoughts are running through your mind every day.”

  Longo’s first contact with his mom and dad came two weeks after his arrest in Cancún, when he mailed them a one-page note. His tone was rueful and apologetic. “I do want you to know that none of this has anything to do w/ how you raised me,” he wrote. “I think that you did better than most parents could ever imagine. I love you for that.” He told them not to worry about him and “not to dwell on the whys or hows.” He signed it: “Your Son, Chris.”

  In their terse reply, one handwritten page, his parents said that their contact with him would have to be limited because he was still disfellowshipped. “Hopefully some day we will understand what has happened,” they wrote. “We did want to point out to you that if you are truly repentant you can take steps to mend your relationship with Jehovah. He is a merciful God.” They signed it simply, “Mom & Dad.”

  “We have never stopped loving you,” his parents wrote in their next message, which was two paragraphs long and printed from a computer. “Hopefully you realize that being honest and forthcoming with others and especially with those trying to help you is vitally important…. Our lives have been torn apart by what hashappened.”

  Longo’s response was long, nine pages, and petulant throughout. He sensed an undertone of presumed guilt in his parents’ letters, and he felt offended, he wrote, “that you can even find me capable of such charges.” He said that he was already being completely honest and wasn’t holding anything back. “I’ve learned that nothing is worth being dishonest about. I thought that I needed to protect my family, but I protected them in the wrong way and it ended up being no protection at all.” His parents’ expression of love, he added, felt rote, given purely out of a sense of famil
ial duty. “It’s possible for you to say you love me,” he wrote, “but actually despise me.”

  “We do love you,” his parents wrote back, “and not just out of obligation. One who loves only out of obligation doesn’t hurt so much when their child is hurting or in trouble and believe me we hurt very much and all the time.” They mentioned that they’d taken some of the items Longo had left in the Toledo warehouse and held a tag sale. “We’ve saved your suits,” they added, “because we figured you would need at least one to wear to your trial.”

  “I do want to say that I’m very sorry for my last letter,” Longo replied. “While it was a dumptruck load of what I was feeling, much of it wasn’t fair.”

  “It sounds as if you have already done some soul searching,” his parents answered. “Chris, there is something we hope you will really think about. You said the reason you had wanted to go to court was to set the record straight. From our vantage point it is pretty clear that your overpowering desire to have others think well of you is at the root of your problems.” It was their last letter before the trial began. They signed it, “Love, Mom & Dad.”

  I’d met Longo’s family at the rear entrance to the courthouse, a few hours before Briggs was scheduled to give his opening remarks. It was scarcely past dawn, and the doors were still locked. The limited number of spectator seats in Courtroom 300 were to be given away first come, first served, and the Longos—Joe and Joy, along with Dustin and his wife, Precious—wanted to ensure that they’d all have spots. (A few days later, Joe and Joy, whose only three grandchildren had been murdered, would be granted victim status and given reserved seats. Dustin and Precious, however, had to wait outside with the rest of us.)