Joe had the husky physique of a former football player. His silver hair was slicked back, not a strand out of place, and he had on a stylish black turtleneck. Joy wore a conservatively cut skirt and blouse, and plastic-framed reading glasses. They were both drinking McDonald’s coffees and hunching their shoulders against the chill March air.
I introduced myself. Joe said he’d heard about me through his son’s attorneys. He asked how I knew who they were, and I said that Dustin looked so much like Chris—the same boyish face and chiseled nose—that he’d given them away. Joe, in a valiant attempt at levity, said, “Well, we told him to wear the fake nose and glasses.” It was the type of wit Chris had often employed—a little humor to sandpaper a potentially uncomfortable moment—and I laughed appreciatively and we shook hands.
Joe asked where I lived, and when I said I was from Bozeman, Montana, Joy piped up and said that they were once in Bozeman. She even recalled the name of restaurant they’d eaten at: Frontier Pies. I asked how long ago that was, and she said, “Oh, Chris must have been fourteen.” They were driving across America, she said. As she mentioned this, I recalled the letter in which Chris had described the family vacation. Joe had appointed him chief navigator, and Chris had read the map as they drove through the Dakotas and Wyoming and Montana, listening repeatedly to the Out of Africa sound track, talking with his father late into the night as the rest of the family slept.
“Chris told me about that trip,” I said to Joy. “He mentioned that it was one of the highlights of his youth.” I explained a little of how my relationship with Chris had started, and how it had grown, and how I found him to be charming and polite and likable.
I’d meant that last part as a compliment, but Joy looked at me strangely, her lips thin. “Yes,” she said, “everybody likes Chris.” She said this in a flat, horrible way—not acidly, not sarcastically—but with this emotionless tone that said to me: Be careful, he’s not so benign as he appears; he’s already crushed me, and he’ll crush you too. And then her eyes glassed over, and I looked away and I was quiet. Joe was standing strong, but Joy, I saw, was a complete wreck.
“It must be hard,” I eventually said.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever get over the shock,” she said. And that was it. There was nothing more to add. We just stood there in the early-morning dampness, shuffling foot to foot, Joe and Joy sipping their McDonald’s coffees, all of us waiting for the courthouse doors to open.
THIRTY-FOUR
AFTER BRIGGS COMPLETED his opening statement, it was the defense’s turn. Krasik and Hadley, however, received permission to delay their opening statement—another unusual tactic. Neither man spoke about the crimes at all. Their plan, as Krasik expressed it to me after court that day, was to first allow the prosecution to present all their evidence. Only then would the defense attempt to challenge and rebut it. Longo’s explanation for the murders, at least for now, would remain a mystery.
The state’s case sped along quickly. The first witness was FBI agent Daniel Clegg, who confirmed, in a voice as crisp and confident as a newscaster’s, that on the flight back to the United States after he had arrested Longo in Mexico, Longo had openly confessed to all the murders and explained that he’d sent his family to “a better place.”
Denise Thompson, the babysitter who had identified Zachery and Sadie’s bodies, also testified. She said that she ate lunch with Longo a few hours after Zachery’s body had been found, although the discovery wasn’t made public until much later that day. At this lunch, according to Thompson, Longo said that he had just taken MaryJane and the kids to the Portland airport. His wife had left him, he told Thompson, for “a guy who made lots more money.” He even had a name for the man: Ron Gibson, a reporter for CNN. (The network had no such reporter.) He said that MaryJane’s affair with Gibson had been ongoing for years. The kids, Longo added, called him Uncle Ronnie, and he suspected that Madison might really be Gibson’s child. Longo did not seem upset, Thompson said—“he was very calm and rational.”
Thompson, on the other hand, felt terrible for Longo. She was concerned for his well-being, she testified, and invited him to Christmas dinner with her own family. Two days later, Thompson said, she was watching the TV news and saw a picture of the boy who’d been found in the lake. It looked a lot like Zachery, she thought. She sobbed on the stand when asked what it was like to look at the police photos and identify his body.
The day before Zachery’s body was fished out of Lint Slough, two room cleaners working at the Newport Motor Inn discovered in the motel’s dumpster several black trash bags filled with items that weren’t typically thrown away, including photo albums, scrapbooks, stuffed animals, a woman’s wallet, and brand-new clothing with the sales tags still attached. When the maids—both of whom testified—pulled the bags out of the dumpster and looked through the photos, they recognized the family as one that had stayed in the motel a few weeks earlier. They thought that perhaps the belongings had been mistakenly discarded, so they saved them. Later, when Longo became a murder suspect, the police confiscated the property.
These items were now brought into the courtroom. Everything was in Ziplock plastic bags labeled with red stickers that read STATE’S EVIDENCE. The photographs and the two scrapbooks, one detailing Madison’s infancy, the other Sadie’s, were shown to the jury. (Zachery’s baby book was never found.) Each juror opened the bags, looked at the photos and the baby books, then passed them on. It took about an hour for all twelve jurors to have a turn. The courtroom was silent during this time, save for the flipping of scrapbook pages, the scratch of a juror taking notes, or the muted sobs coming from Joy Longo and MaryJane’s sisters. By the end of the day, the area around the victims’ seating section had become a midden of balled tissues.
Chris Longo sat in his chair with his nice suit and his neat hair and his wide-angled ears, the top of the left one oddly squared off, as if cut with a straight razor. He fiddled with one of Krasik’s pens and affected a pose of unconcerned serenity. “I’d never felt more like I was in a fish bowl,” he wrote about the hour of silence. He didn’t know how to act. Or, rather, he was resolutely determined not to act. “I want this whole process to be honest & w/o additional drama or facades or put-ons,” he wrote. The result, however, was that he appeared entirely impassive. This was not at all what he wanted to convey, but he felt uncomfortable, he wrote, expressing anything other than “the rigidity that I feel trapped in.”
I usually sat directly behind Longo, in the second row of spectator seating (the first was reserved), and I spent many hours staring at the back of his head, observing every bob and nod while we both listened to the proceedings. We never spoke to each other in the courtroom, but each morning, as he was marched into court, and each afternoon, as he was escorted out, he’d glance over to me and briefly furrow his forehead and purse his lips to convey a look, he told me over the telephone, that was intended to say, “Can you believe this?” The expression I typically returned, as Longo described it, was that I smiled without smiling—I acknowledged him using only my eyes.
Longo occasionally called while the local news was on, and when he did, we’d watch the trial reports together—Longo viewing it on the TV in the jail’s day room, which is also where the phone is located, and me watching it from my Newport rental house. Inevitably, the reports would contain video clips of Longo sitting in court, interspersed with still shots of his family, and Longo usually provided a running commentary as we watched.
“I don’t know if I’ve got a good shave or not,” he said, as his face appeared during a report on Briggs’s opening statement.
“It’s one of our wedding pictures,” he noted, as a photo of MaryJane and him was shown. “It’s not one of my favorites, that’s for sure.”
“You’re right behind my dad, aren’t you?” he said, as the camera panned across the courtroom spectator section.
“That’s my balding forehead,” I chimed in.
When a commercial came on, with a
n attractive woman demonstrating a hair-care product, Longo kept up his review. “I like this much better,” he said.
The photographs and the baby books that the jury passed around were in all ways unexceptional. The snapshots were of moments almost any family could’ve captured. Zachery hiding inside a hollow tree stump. Sadie with chocolate on her face. Madison being held by Zachery. Chris riding a jet ski. MaryJane, pregnant, standing in a hayfield. Zachery and Sadie sitting together in a laundry basket. Chris and MaryJane playing Scrabble. Zachery blowing on a dandelion.
The prosecution seemed to be hoping that, through these photos, members of the jury would form a familiar connection with the Longos. Perhaps some jurors would see in them shades of their own lives. It was the ideal setup for the next group of photographs. These pictures were not passed around. Instead, they were projected onto a screen. The courtroom lights were dimmed, and then, one after another, enlarged to life-size, the police photos were displayed.
There was Zachery’s body, moments after he’d been lifted from Lint Slough. He was lying on a grassy bank, his right leg bent beneath him. His skin was the color of plaster. Foam spilled thickly from his nostrils—typical, the jury was told, with a body that has spent time in water. There were reddish cuts around his lips and ears. According to the autopsy report, these were due to “marine life postmortem feeding activity.”
One photo of Sadie was taken with an underwater camera. The image was slightly fuzzy, and it took a while for the elements in the picture to sort themselves out. There was a leg, a skinny white leg, practically glowing against the gray waters. Something was tied to it. A sort of cloth, swirling with colors—a pillowcase, cinched tight, bulging with a hidden weight. Sadie’s body neither rested on the bottom of the pond nor floated skyward. She was hovering in between; “neutrally buoyant,” as Briggs described it.
Madison was shown inside her suitcase. The case had just been unzipped when the photo was snapped. Piled in the center of the suitcase was a mass of clothing, sixty items in all, including bathing suits, T-shirts, diaper covers, and socks. There was also a five-pound diving weight. Practically lost in a corner, curled into a semicircle, was the two-year-old’s body. She appeared uninjured—marine life had yet to penetrate the suitcase and begin feeding—and seemed to be resting peacefully, as if settled into a nap.
Longo never looked at these photos. He made something of a show of this, averting his eyes, turning his head, wrinkling his nose as though repulsed by a smell. Krasik, he wrote, wanted him to look at them—“if for nothing else than to get a natural reaction from me that would undoubtedly display emotion.” But he refused. “My own nightmares,” he explained, “need no suplementing.”
Indeed, in recent months he’d been having disturbing dreams. I asked him to write a few down, and he did, eventually recording fourteen of them. These were strange jottings, the handwriting messier than usual, as if he’d scrawled his impressions immediately upon waking.
In one dream, his family all fell over the side of a boat and began to sink. Longo dove into the water to attempt a rescue, but ran out of breath before he could reach them. In another, his family tumbled into a deep hole in the living-room floor. “I couldn’t find the kids or MJ again,” Longo wrote. He had a recurrent dream in which his tongue had grown so thick he could no longer talk. He witnessed a fatal car crash. He saw a boy drowning at the beach. “I went out & got him,” Longo wrote, “but everyone came running, grabbing him from me, saying that I was trying to drown him like my family. They went to get the police & I ran.”
The final photos the prosecution displayed in court were of MaryJane. Until this moment, the picture of MaryJane that I’d kept in my mind was one that her sister Sally had distributed to the media. The photograph had been taken by Zachery, from the rear seat of the Montana minivan. MaryJane, in the front passenger seat, had turned around to face her son. The grin on her face was wide and joyous. She was wearing fashionable sunglasses; her hair was windswept, blown about by the van’s open windows.
Now, projected on the screen, was a picture of a green, soft-sided suitcase placed atop a medical table inside an autopsy room. The suitcase was open. In it was MaryJane’s body. Her head was shoved into one corner; her body was bent, folded, flattened. She’d been transformed into a rectangle of flesh. Her eyes were hidden beneath a forearm. A foot had popped out and hung over the suitcase’s side. “She was found in such a way,” the medical examiner noted, “that she couldn’t have put herself into that position.”
The next picture was a close-up of her face. There were purple bruises on her neck and cheeks and just below her left ear. All of the bruises were the size of fingertips. There was a deep wound on the bridge of her nose. Around her eyes were dark, weblike contusions called petechial hemorrhages—a result of the force and ferocity of the strangulation, which had caused dozens of facial capillaries to burst as MaryJane struggled for air.
Both of these photos hung in the darkened courtroom for a few extra moments. What had been done to MaryJane, it was obvious, was unforgivable—as terrible as the kids’ pictures had been, it was the graphic images of MaryJane that eliminated any notion I’d had that the killings were somehow motivated by love or compassion. MaryJane’s murder was clearly a violent and frenzied act. And Longo had pleaded guilty to it.
After the photos were taken away and the courtroom lights switched on, I stared at Longo’s hands, emerging pink and freckled from the sleeves of his suit. His fingers were thinner and longer than I’d remembered. His nails looked manicured. I could see a lattice of veins pumping blue beneath his skin. I visualized those hands encircling MaryJane’s throat. I pictured them stuffing her into a suitcase. These images were so indelible, and so horrifying, that they seemed to have thrown a switch in my head. This was the beginning of the end of my friendship with Longo.
Briggs called each of the police divers to the witness stand, one after another, to describe what it was like to discover the bodies. Then the two suitcases were brought into the courtroom. Briggs pointed out that in MaryJane’s there was still the outline of her body, formed by silt and sediment that had worked its way through the zipper. He displayed the rocks that had held Zachery and Sadie underwater. They were bowling-ball sized, black with yellow and white lichen. He showed the jury the comforter the two children were wrapped in before they were thrown off the bridge.
Dick Hoch arrived in court in blue jeans and a mechanic’s shirt, with the sleeves rolled up and a pen in the pocket. He was clearly uncomfortable on the witness stand, and at times a bit grouchy, but in a way that lent veracity to his testimony—he wasn’t grandstanding in the least, and seemed to want to say his piece as quickly as possible, then return to work. He explained that he was driving his pickup truck toward the coast at about four-thirty in the morning on December 17, 2001, on his way to clearing sand from his customers’ driveways. Approaching the Lint Slough Bridge, he noticed a red minivan stopped atop it. Hoch pulled alongside and asked if he could help. A youngish man who resembled Longo was in the driver’s seat. He said that everything was fine, so Hoch continued on to work. Days later, when he heard that two bodies were found beneath the bridge, he called the sheriff’s office.
Linda and Lawrence Crabb, an elderly husband and wife who were staying in the condominium directly above the one occupied by the Longos, both testified that on the day the prosecution said the murders occurred, they heard loud noises in the middle of the night. The noises, which woke them both up, lasted for about ten minutes and came from either the condo below or the one next door. “It sounded like someone was moving the furniture around,” Lawrence Crabb said. With this statement, the twelve jurors, rocking quietly in the office-style swivel chairs that crowded the jury box, all scribbled in their notepads.
To help establish the date of the crimes, Larry Hammons, the harbormaster of the marina adjacent to the condominiums, was brought into court. He testified that when he reported for work at 8 A.M. on December 17, he immediately
noticed that a pipe running alongside the docks had been broken. Water was spraying all over—“like a fountain,” Hammons said, waving his hands in circles. Ten days later, when the sheriff’s office dive team searched the marina, the two suitcases were found in the water directly below the spot where the pipes had been damaged.
When the deputy state medical examiner, Dr. Cliff Nelson, was called to testify, he stood in the jury box with a wooden pointer. While photos were displayed on the nearby screen, Nelson indicated areas of note and discussed the particulars of the autopsies. There was green Play-Doh, the jury was informed, under both Zachery and Sadie’s fingernails. Sadie’s toenails were decorated with “pearlescent polish,” the same polish MaryJane wore on her toes, as if the two of them had painted their nails together. Mary-Jane had fifty-five grams of partially digested food in her stomach, including popcorn. Lactation was evident in her breasts. She weighed one hundred and ten pounds.
Nelson explained that the children’s bodies did not display any evidence of their having struggled against an attacker, indicating that the victims may have known and trusted the person who killed them. Except for the fact that Zachery was dead, he was found, according to Nelson, “in amazing condition.” He exhibited no signs of mistreatment; there were no external injuries. His hair looked professionally styled. “He appeared to be perfect,” said Nelson, and this comment seemed to strike everyone in the courtroom like a blow to the chest. Joy Longo pushed her way past the other spectators in her row and rushed out of the room. Chris clenched his jaw and trembled, and then two streams of tears flowed down his cheeks, unchecked.
When Judge Huckleberry asked the defense if they’d like to cross-examine the witness, Krasik apparently concluded that there was only one proper response. He said, “No questions, Your Honor.”
True Story Page 23
