He told her that, in Toledo, he’d lied to the landlord in order to rent the warehouse, and that he hadn’t really paid a year in advance, and that the building wasn’t zoned for residential occupation. He told her that while they were living in Ohio, he’d once driven off after a fill-up, without paying for the gas. He told her that the last two credit cards they’d owned had been illegally acquired by forging his father’s signature.
As the revelations mounted, MaryJane became increasingly anguished. She began to cry. “She just said quietly that she could no longer trust me,” Longo testified. This was the first time she’d ever said such a thing—after the camera-shop theft, after the counterfeit-check conviction, even after the affair with Jessica Meadows, she’d always affirmed her belief in Chris’s underlying integrity.
He told her more things. He couldn’t stop; it was as if he’d reached a threshold and needed to absolve himself by releasing all he held inside. He told her the actual amount they’d received for the sale of their home. He told her how he had purchased the forklifts from a shady acquaintance, and that he’d suspected all along they were stolen. MaryJane asked about the boat, and he confessed that it, too, had likely been stolen. Then he told her that, while they were living in Toledo, he’d cashed another round of counterfeit checks.
With this, the confrontation turned physical. “She slapped me at one point, which she had never even come close to doing,”
Longo testified. He spoke this line the same way he’d delivered all the others—calmly, his eyes untroubled, as if he were relating an anecdote about someone else. But in the spectator section, at least, I felt a subtle change. We all seemed to shift our sitting positions at once, as though bracing ourselves for an impact, and I could hear the clunk of a courtroom officer’s gun as his holster knocked against the wooden bench.
Longo kept on. “We’d never had an all-out argument,” he said. “We’d never raised voices with each other. But she was raising her voice at me now.” He said that he did not strike back. Madison, lying on a comforter on the bedroom floor, began to cry. MaryJane picked her up and held her.
She asked more questions. What about the jet skis? Longo told her that they, too, were stolen goods—that he hadn’t won them in a raffle. What about the affair with Meadows? Longo insisted he’d been fully honest about that. What about other affairs? Longo said that one night, years before, when he was traveling for Publishers Circulation Fulfillment, he’d shared a romantic dinner with a woman in a Chicago hotel; afterward, when they had arrived at his room, he considered taking it further, but had decided not to.
MaryJane, according to Longo, was “borderline irate,” but not yet finished. She demanded that he tell her everything. If he made a full confession, she implied, perhaps their relationship could be salvaged. “She actually started to act as though we could get to a point of reparation, that we could get beyond this,” he testified.
So Longo told her the final thing: He said that he’d stolen the minivan. “That was it,” Longo testified. “She lost any self-control that she had at that point. She just started crying heavily and told me to get out. I didn’t want to get out at that point. I wanted to console her and I reached over to console and she went to hit me again.” The look on her face, Longo said, was daunting. “I had never seen her look like that, like I was somebody completely different than she ever thought I was.”
Longo then left the bedroom and went into the living room, where Zachery and Sadie were sleeping on the sofa bed. He lay down with them. He could hear the sea lions honking in the bay, he said, so he knew that dawn was approaching.
It was early in the morning on Monday, December 17, 2001. Probably it wasn’t too much past 4:30 A.M.—the same day and time that Dick Hoch said he spotted what looked like a maroon Pontiac Montana minivan stopped on the Lint Slough Bridge.
“Where were you,” asked Steve Krasik, “at 4:30 on Monday the 17th?”
“I was in the apartment,” Longo answered.
“Weren’t driving the Montana on a bridge?”
“No.”
“Did you ever park the Montana on the bridge?”
“No.”
He also insisted that he did not disturb any pipes in the marina around that time, despite the harbormaster’s testimony that someone or something had broken them that very morning.
What he did do, he said, was sleep with his children. He wasn’t scheduled to work that day until two o’clock. He woke around nine, when Zachery leaped onto his chest. His son wanted to know what he was doing in bed. “I just told him that this was my night to sleep out here,” he said. “Madison was going to sleep with Mommy tonight and I was going to sleep with them.”
He prepared breakfast for Zachery and Sadie, then he went to the bedroom to check on MaryJane. She’d locked the door, but it was an easy lock to pick—it could be done with a straightened paper clip—and after knocking a few times Longo let himself in. Both MaryJane and Madison appeared to be asleep. There was a foul smell in the room; MaryJane had vomited on the bed. He gently touched his wife, to see if she was okay. “She winced away from me pretty violently,” Longo testified. “She was awake evidently when I walked in and she didn’t want me touching her. She didn’t want anything to do with me.”
Longo carried Madison into the living room to sit with the other children and watch cartoons. She didn’t want to eat cereal, Longo recalled—she was a fussy eater—so he gave her a piece of leftover pizza from the refrigerator. Then he returned to the bedroom to clean up the vomit, and MaryJane immediately went into the bathroom. He talked to her through the door. He told her that he wasn’t going to work. He was staying home, he said, to make sure everything was okay, so they could talk and maybe come to a reasonable solution.
“She yelled through the door that I most certainly was going to work, that she didn’t want to see me,” Longo testified. He spent the remaining hours before work playing with the kids. They built a house out of Legos and created sculptures with green Play-Doh. MaryJane, he said, remained out of sight.
When it was time to leave for work, he told MaryJane, who was back in the bedroom, that he was departing. She said that she wanted to take the children out. She didn’t say where, but Longo supposed it was to the library. She said she needed the car, which surprised him, as she was now aware it was stolen property. Longo didn’t try to dissuade her, though; he wanted to be as accommodating as possible, to do whatever she wished to calm her down and attempt to mend their rift.
The whole family piled into the minivan, and MaryJane drove Longo to the Fred Meyer. She didn’t speak a word to him during the ten-minute trip. She stopped in the parking lot, and Longo got out of the front seat and opened the minivan’s sliding door and kissed each of his children. “Madison reached up with her Scooby toy to give me a kiss good-bye and I left them in the parking lot and went to work,” he said. According to Fred Meyer’s records, he punched in at 1:56 P.M.
It was a normal day at work, Longo testified. At five o’clock he had a dinner break. He called the condominium from a pay phone, but nobody answered. He worked until eleven and punched out. MaryJane knew his schedule, and when he exited the store she was already there, waiting to pick him up.
Rather than driving to the front of the store, though, she’d parked in the middle of the empty lot. Longo walked to the minivan. Mary-Jane had already shifted over to the passenger seat; she was crunched up against the door, as if trying to stay as far from Longo as possible. Her legs were curled beneath her. She was wearing a white terrycloth robe but no other clothing he could see, not even shoes, though a pair of her hiking boots were in the footwell. “Everything was kind of out of the ordinary,” Longo said. When he greeted her, she did not respond. He settled in behind the wheel and began to drive.
Normally, when MaryJane would pick up Longo, no matter how late, she’d bring the children with her. There was no alternative but to leave them alone, which she would not do. Often, they’d all be asleep in the back of
the van, so the fact that Longo did not hear his kids was of no concern. It was only when he glanced in the rearview mirror and noticed that all of the car seats were empty that he became mildly puzzled. He assumed, he said, that MaryJane finally wanted to discuss things with him and had asked Denise Thompson to look after the children.
Longo attempted to initiate a conversation. He asked if Denise was babysitting; he asked if she wanted to drive somewhere and talk. She said nothing. “I was actually starting to get a little bit irritated,” Longo said. He continued driving, back to the condominium complex and into the basement parking garage. He tried talking to her one more time, but MaryJane remained silent. Longo stepped out of the car and walked to the garage’s elevator. Mary-Jane stayed in the passenger seat.
He returned to the minivan and opened her door to help her out, but MaryJane lurched the other way, toward the driver’s side. When he reached for her, she slapped his arm out of the way, pushed past him out the door, and walked to the elevator. She was still barefoot. Longo grabbed her hiking boots and caught up with her.
They rode the elevator to the second floor and walked the hallway to Unit 211. As Longo was preparing to unlock the door, he noticed that it was ajar—the door was difficult to properly close, and MaryJane had left it that way before. He’d asked her to be mindful of this, and was exasperated that she’d done it again. He pushed the door open and entered the condo. MaryJane stood in the hallway, refusing to come inside. She’d begun to weep, Longo said, and was mumbling incoherently. “That’s when I started to get alarmed,” he testified. “I knew something was wrong.”
She started moving back down the hallway, toward the elevator, and Longo grasped her around the waist, carried her into the condo, and shut the door. Her hysteria immediately heightened. Longo let go of her, and she slumped to the floor. “I’d never seen emotion like this,” Longo said. MaryJane, he pointed out, had always been a quiet and rational person.
He was concerned that something had happened inside the condo, so he made a quick tour, running from room to room. Nothing appeared out of place. He didn’t see the kids, but he figured that MaryJane had simply brought them over to Denise Thompson’s house. “The only thing I noticed,” he testified, “was the kids’ stuffed animals were sitting on the couch, which alarmed me somewhat, because if they went over to Denise’s they would take their stuffed animals with them. These were things that they would carry with them all the time.”
By now, Longo had lost his temper. He began to yell. “What’s wrong?” he shouted, but there was no articulate response from MaryJane. “She was literally on the floor, curled up in a ball, bouncing back and forth, hitting her back against the wall, crying, wailing, moaning—sounds I’ve never heard come out of MaryJane, or actually anybody else,” he testified.
Longo continued yelling, but she wouldn’t answer, so he raced through the house once more, this time in a state of panic, switching on all the lights. He looked in the bedroom, and there, on the unmade bed, nearly hidden between the pillows, he saw his youngest child.
At first, he felt a wave of relief—at least one of my kids is okay, he thought. But when he bent over Madison, he noticed that her skin looked purple. She wasn’t moving. He jostled her. “She was extremely cold to the touch,” Longo said. “I feared for the worst.” MaryJane was still at the condo’s entryway, still in hysterics. He thought she might have done something to Madison, and his anger surged. “That was the first time I had any sense of wanting to use physical force,” he said.
By this point in his testimony, everyone in the courtroom was motionless. Even Briggs, who’d seemed perpetually caffeinated, had ceased rocking in his chair. The jurors sat with their backs angled forward; Judge Huckleberry kept a hand curled over his mouth. Longo delivered his testimony in an unwavering voice. Only his posture, which for the duration of his time on the stand had assumed a soldier’s alignment, finally began to deflate.
In the condominium, his panic escalating, Longo left Madison on the bed and returned to MaryJane. His wife, he testified, remained unresponsive, tucked into herself, lying on the floor. “I’m asking her, ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong with Madison? What happened?’” Again there was no reply, and when Longo knelt beside her, she lunged at him with her fists, pounding on him, swinging wildly. “I finally ended up grabbing onto her robe and just lifting her up against the wall and just said, ‘You have to control yourself.’”
She struggled to break free, but Longo dragged her into the bedroom. When he released her, she again collapsed to the floor, shrieking. Madison was on the bed. There was no sign of Zachery or Sadie. He asked her where the other children were, but she did not answer. Longo lifted her off the floor and pinned her against the wall. “I shook her against the wall pretty violently trying to snap her out of it,” Longo testified. “I ended up hitting her head probably a few times against the wall until she finally came to some sort of sense. She calmed down a little bit.”
He tried to speak with her. “You’ve got to tell me what’s going on,” he said, moderating his tone, trying to pacify her. “Where are Zachery and Sadie? What’s wrong? You need to tell me.”
At this moment, Longo testified, she seemed fairly lucid. She even looked at him. Longo let her go, and she remained standing. She started to speak. “You did this,” she told him. “This was your fault.” Longo replied that he didn’t understand what she was talking about. “You did this,” she said again. “You killed us.”
Her use of the word “killed,” Longo said, caused him to lose all restraint. He was terrified that all three of his children were dead. He grabbed MaryJane again and banged her head against the wall. She kept repeating, “You did this. You killed us.”
“She wouldn’t stop saying that,” Longo testified. “And I couldn’t stop her from saying that.” He pushed her against the wall once more, and she fell to the floor. “After that she was just on the ground. She wasn’t mumbling, she wasn’t crying. She wasn’t really doing much of anything. She was trying to cover her eyes. I was yelling as loud as I’ve ever yelled before at her. I was yelling, ‘Where are they? I want to know where they are. I need to find them.’ That’s when she said something about they’re by the house. ‘They’re in the water. They’re by the house.’ That’s when I lost it.”
With one hand, he grabbed the lapels of MaryJane’s robe and hauled her to her feet. The other hand he placed around her neck. “And then I just started squeezing,” he said. She grabbed him by the forearm, he said, but he kept choking her. “I lost her at one point, started to drop her. I grabbed her with both hands and continued to squeeze. And I didn’t stop for a long time. I didn’t stop until I couldn’t hold her up anymore. I let her drop to the ground.”
He ran out of the bedroom and into the living room. There, he says, he collapsed onto the floor. He lay on the carpet for some time, he’s not sure how long. The house was silent. He thought of calling the police, he said, and even picked up the telephone, but never dialed. Instead, he had a momentary delusion—he believed that all he’d done could be corrected. MaryJane, he felt, couldn’t have been too badly injured. “I thought that I could fix it, that everything would be okay,” he testified. He returned to the bedroom. MaryJane was still there, in the same spot. “That’s when I knew that she was not getting up,” he said.
Longo’s voice, for the first time during his testimony, cracked with emotion. It rose an octave; it was punctuated with rapid breaths. He wiped his forehead, twice, with the back of his hand. “That’s when I knew,” he said, “that she was dead.”
His first idea, he testified, was to hide her. He didn’t know where. He looked around the bedroom. The closet door was open; inside it were several suitcases. He brought one out and opened it on the bed. He lifted MaryJane off the floor and carried her to the suitcase. Her bathrobe slipped off as he moved her. He bent her limbs so they’d fit inside, and he zipped it closed.
He opened a second suitcase and prepared to do the same with
Madison. But the suitcase was large and his daughter was tiny. “I didn’t want to put Madison in a suitcase like that,” he said. “I ended up trying to make it more comfortable.” He pulled out the bottom drawer of the bedroom dresser, the one with all of Madison’s clothes, and dumped the contents into the suitcase. Then he went over to pick up Madison, and he saw something that startled him.
Her chest rose up and sunk down. He was stunned. He’d been certain she was dead. But as he watched her, he saw her chest rise and fall, rise and fall. He shook her, but she did not stir. “I didn’t know what to do,” Longo said. “Even though she was breathing I thought of her as dead at that point. There was nothing I thought that I could do to make her responsive. I couldn’t put her in a suitcase like that, though, as she was still alive to some extent, but she wasn’t alive.”
Longo spoke these lines quietly but clearly. He appeared calm. He rubbed the right side of his face a few times, as if expecting to wipe away tears, but his cheeks remained dry. I later asked him, over the phone, how he was able to keep his emotions in check at such a moment. “I’ve been through it so many times in my mind,” he told me. “I just try to separate myself from it.”
Throughout the courtroom—in the spectator section, at the lawyers’ tables, in the jury box, and with Judge Huckleberry himself—jaws were clenched; eyes were either pinched shut or held wide open; palms were pressed against cheeks. Even Steve Krasik wasn’t speaking anymore. When Longo had launched into the description of the final moments of his family’s life, Krasik had asked the judge if Longo could simply continue his account, without the need for questions, and Huckleberry had allowed it. So Longo kept talking, uninterrupted, to a stunned and silent room.
“I ended up putting my hand on her throat,” he said. “To cut off her air supply. She seemed to not breathe instantly. I let go. I saw her breathe again. I put my hand on her throat and squeezed, until I knew she couldn’t breathe anymore. I put her in the suitcase.”
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