Authorities tried for days to talk with her, but she avoided contact. They called her half-sister, Carolyn Holland, whom she had regular contact, but she had not seen her. Investigators visit her home but she was not there. On the way back to the car, they spot a Kroger grocery store receipt dated the day after Doug Coker’s disappearance. Checking the surveillance cameras at the store, they see Pamela enter and begin shopping. It was when she purchased several bottles of bleach as well as plastic gloves. While these things are not unusual, they are suspicious considering the circumstances.
Police decided to surprise her with a midnight visit. What investigators found there was horrific. They immediately noticed the smell of decomposition in the air and began to inspect the premises where they found Coker’s body wrapped in a tarp under Pamela’s porch. His head had been bashed in and seemed to be deteriorating faster than the rest of his body. Lime was spread about the body, but it did not appear to be particularly well hidden. Huge bloodstains soaked the living room carpet, and paint had been poured over them in an attempt to hide the evidence. A bloody hammer was also found in the home along with blood spatter across the walls.
Pamela knew she would be found out. Police had been asking about her, and she’d been questioned already before the police showed up at her home. She’d claimed not to have seen Coker or know of his whereabouts. In a bout of panic and self-pity, she attempted suicide by pill overdose and superficial wrist-cutting, but her sister called an ambulance. When police arrived at her home and discovered Coker’s body, it wasn’t long before they located and arrested her.
The same attorney, Frank Hogue, represented her in the Coker murder as well as the murder of her mother. He had heard through the legal grapevine Pamela was wanted for questioning in the Coker murder and advised her to turn herself in. She did not. He claimed she was insane and suffered from dissociative personality disorder. Pamela claimed no memory of the murder.
Investigators believe the meeting at McDonald's convinced Coker to go to Pamela’s home later to retrieve his money but was bludgeoned to death instead. Unable to lift the heavy-set man, she stuffed him under the porch and turned on the natural gas supply. She lit matches in the kitchen sink and drove Coker’s car to Griffin and left it abandoned in hopes police would be distracted.
Once she was arrested, police began to take another look at the death of her husband, but he had been cremated and with him any incriminating evidence with him. A friend of Pamela’s surfaced to claim she’d picked her up from where she abandoned Coker’s car. Pamela had pled not guilty due to her mental condition, but the jury in her case disagreed. She was given a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
I have been writing Pam for several years. Her letters come scribbled in fat, spaced-out script that makes it seem like she writes every letter in a hurry. I often have trouble deciphering her handwriting. She stays very busy helping other inmates in prison. She has a working knowledge of the court system and book smarts that are hard to come by inside. She often asks me for different types of resource material and other things that she needs to help her prison mates. She often asks for things like lists of specialty or pro bono attorneys, pen pals, and free inmate resources. She is highly intelligent although her soft-spoken voice imparts a false sense of innocence.
Although she told me long ago that if I ever had any questions about her crimes I had just to ask, she never addresses those questions in her letters. Instead, she steers the conversation in another direction or ignores the question completely. While she does ask a few conversational questions about my life, family and work, the majority of her letters are about her activities inside prison and what she needs to make them happen. She is also an entrepreneur who makes a living drawing stationary and greeting cards for her fellow inmates. We write by regular snail mail but also online via Jpay, where we can exchange emails and schedule video visitation.
She enjoys motivational speaker John Maxwell and speaks about Christian teachings about leadership and rising above your situation to make something of yourself.
Christian Longo
The tale of Christian Longo and the horrific murders he committed is so bizarre Hollywood took a stab at it. True Story starring James Franco and Jonah Hill was released in April of 2015 to a stunned audience. Directed by Rupert Goold, it tells the story of how Longo murdered his entire family, but more so, it concentrates on the actions he took after the murders. The actions that led him to take over the identity of a shunned and disgraced New York Times newspaper reporter, Michael Finkel and how it led to his capture. Too bizarre to be true, the case was also featured on 48 Hours Investigates and other true crime television programs.
This bizarre tale begins in Michigan where Longo was born to his mom, Joy. Joy divorced Christian’s biological father when he was four and married Joe Longo, who would go on to raise Christian as his own along with one other child he had with Joy. Joe and Joy moved to the Ann Arbor area in 1990. They were Catholic but converted to Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the family was raised in their teachings and steeped in their beliefs from the time Christian was 10. Christian and his brother were taught that no one outside the faith was to be trusted, that they were all demons. This strongly conflicted with Christian’s interests in computers, photography, and dreams of success in the real world – all of which were considered worldly endeavors and unholy. Success, as Christian was taught, was only defined as truly wanting to be a Jehovah’s Witness and carry on their beliefs and standards of life.
Throughout his life, there were some classic tell-tale signs of his future personality defaults. He wet the bed until he was 10 years old. He was called easily distracted by his teachers and regularly got bad grades. In high school, Christian hacked the school’s information database and changed his grades to passing. When his nefarious deeds came to light, his parents removed him from public school and decided to home school him for the remainder of his education. He was surrounded only with other Jehovah’s Witnesses at this time in his life and dedicated himself to the well-known practice of door-to-door witnessing. As he grew older, he began to think of his family and religious life as something full of unneeded rules and needless restrictions designed only to suck the joy out of life. His educational career and church life had not prepared him adequately for the real-life stressors of the world beyond the church.
His strict upbringing included not being allowed to date. This rule stretched into his 18th year and was most likely the impetus behind him moving out on his own just a week after turning 18. He had met Mary Jane Baker, 24, another member of the church congregation, in the parking lot of the church, and the two were quickly inseparable. Christian's parents had forbidden him to date and so he hadn’t. He never attempted to date or let it be known he was interested in Mary Jane until the last minute. Mary Jane had come from a family of five children. She was known as the least confrontational and most quiet. Her reputation as a peacemaker made it harder for the other kids to pick on her. Born in 1967, she was the third of five, behind an older brother and sister. Two more girls followed Mary Jane’s birth. At the age of six, Mary Jane’s parents divorced in a uncommonly bitter battle. It has been said by family members that Mary Jane took it particularly hard. The effect of surviving a childhood of drastic divorce was such a deep and solid belief that she could not allow it to happen to her or to her children. All the children went with their mother after the divorce. She raised them in the Witness faith. As she grew older, her greatest ambition was to be married and start a family. In the meantime, she held jobs as a secretary for several pediatricians and eventually at a dental school. She made good money and was able to support herself.
While some of Mary Jane's siblings eventually renounced the faith, she did not. That meant that she could not go outside the faith to find a spouse. Her only choices were the men who shared her faith in the area. Christian was quite a bit younger than she was, but he was the best of her choices by far. He had a reputation as a lifelong member i
n good standing who had taken a major role in the administration of some of the church gatherings. He was looked at as a kind of rising star in the community and appeared to be wealthy and successful.
They married approximately a year after he’d moved out of the family home, in 1993, although his parents deeply disapproved. They so disapproved that they would not allow him to date while living with them. They thought him too immature to date, which, as they see it, is only a step toward the intent of marrying. They surely thought him too young to marry, and so dating was also out of the question. He was 19 and she was 25 when they married.
Christian Longo had not lived much of a life outside the church when he married his wife, Mary Jane. He knew only that he was smart, talented and driven, which all translated to success in his book. He saw no way around it. He was inexperienced to the ways of the rest of the world, and most of his actions were shady, underhanded and downright illegal during his marriage. His already tarnished reputation had kept the two from being married in their own church. They’d instead been married in a school auditorium by a minister. He robbed a jewelry store, stole a test car and various credit cards which he used to live and to forge false names and identities. He wrote copious amounts of bad checks to fund his existence as he went from job to job and scam to scam.
Within five years, the couple had three children, all born between 1997 and 1999: Sadie, Zachery, and Madison. Although Christian was not averse to the occasional sneaky trick to get his daily bread, he also tried hard to succeed on his own merit, and much of the money he pilfered went to support his family. Some he siphoned into accounts to fund his legitimate business ventures. One of the most successful was a construction clean-up business he started. He named it Final Touch, and it was quite successful. Longo had over 70 employees at one point. Christian was delighted with himself, and with his new-found success, he lavished his family with gifts, toys and a fine home. In fact, he thought it possible he would eventually be a millionaire. As he was busy buying and spending, the business began to falter, however. Christian’s limited real life experience offered him little help in figuring out his business foibles, and it was soon in shambles and he was hemorrhaging money.
The serious problems in Christian’s life really began at this point. As his business disintegrated, he refused to see it and bald-faced lied to everyone he knew about its future. He told everyone, including Mary Jane, that it was still the money-maker it always was, even as he closed its doors. Trouble began rolling downhill when the family car broke down. Unable or unwilling to tell Mary Jane they had no business and no money, he rented a car and, with a fake I.D., travelled to an out-of-state auto dealership. He perused the cars and asked to test drive a maroon minivan, perfect for his whole family. He test drove it all the way home and never returned. This crime was typical of Longo’s life. Nothing violent or painful to anyone. His criminal repertoire contained only fraud, lies, deception, stealing and sneak thievery. He had been in no fights or violent altercations since a scuffle in his only year of high school. He and his brother had never even fought as children. Longo had not even been known to utter curse words.
Once he was back home with the stolen van, he had to keep up the façade of successful business owner. He began to forge credit cards and make counterfeit checks, all the while knowing he could not get away with it for long. Eventually he came somewhat clean to Mary Jane that the business was failing and started to convince her their fortune waited elsewhere. There had been problem after problem in recent years, including Christian having an affair with another church member that Mary Jane found out about. She’d discovered some emails from another woman and confronted Christian. He admitted to having an affair. He told Mary Jane he didn’t love her anymore, that she was boring and spent too much time on the children.
They sold the family home to an unsuspecting couple who soon had police and creditors knocking their door down. In June of 2001, he wrote six checks to himself from a client of Final Touch account, Wexford Builders, to the tune of about $30,000. He was still cashing these checks around town when he got caught at a bank and left his I.D. behind. Police arrived and arrested him that same afternoon. He was released from jail to Mary Jane in the stolen van. She was getting really fed up with him at this point but feeling just as trapped as he was. Christian’s criminal exploits had reached new levels and his church dis-fellowshipped him and his family. They were not allowed to go to church and all followers eschewed them. He continued his criminal behavior, despite the mounting charges and penalties. He stole a forklift and two construction trailers. He didn’t pay workers, defaulted on loans and got sued when he sold the stolen forklift. Even Mary Jane’s mother foreclosed on the house she sold him in Michigan when he stopped making payments.
He made another fake I.D. and packed the family off to Toledo, Ohio, where he rented an abandoned warehouse with $8,000 of his house equity. Running from lawsuits, two warrants for his arrest, and over $60,000 worth of debt, he used part of the warehouse to house his family and the other portion as a showroom for the thousands of dollars’ worth of stolen equipment in his possession. He tried to sell the $32,000 forklift for a measly $5,000 which set off the buyer’s alarm, who called the police. Mary Jane’s sisters tried to convince her to return to their parents' home with the children but were unsuccessful. By the time police realized what was going on at the warehouse, Longo, Mary Jane, children, minivan and a rental truck were gone. When Mary Jane’s sisters arrived, they found an empty warehouse and no sign of their sister and her children. They filed a missing person’s report. Police searched the warehouse for tips to where they may have gone. Many things were left behind. The most surprising was Mary Jane’s wedding dress. The most telling was a Spanish phrasebook and another book entitled, The Modern Identity Changer.
In summer of 2001, they packed their stolen mini-van full of children and started driving west with the stolen funds Christian had accrued. In August, they arrived in Oregon and called it home. He got a job making a little over seven dollars an hour at a Starbucks inside a Fred Meyers store. It wasn’t long before he realized that wasn’t enough to raise a family of five. He needed a home, food, clothing and life’s necessities. He wasn’t making it at Starbucks. Things weren’t coming together for him, so he began once again to run petty scams, bad checks and frauds to get by, but things were only getting worse. There were open warrants for him and he knew it was a matter of time before he was found. On one of those long, minimum wage-filled nights at Starbucks, he decided to kill his family and abscond to Mexico under an assumed name, that of a disgraced New York Times writer, Mike Finkel.
He had finagled his family a rental home at Ocean Odyssey Vacation Rentals with the funds from Mary Jane’s pawned wedding rings. Then they went on to a $300-a-month rental house and then on to a $22-a-night motel room. Funds were dwindling faster than a politician’s promises on election day. Time was running out on the warrants, and there was no place else to run with a wife and three kids in tow. He wasn’t even sure he could come up with enough funds to run, much less convince Mary Jane to do it yet again with nothing but a wing and a prayer. There was no other conclusion his mind could come to but to get rid of his cumbersome family and move on. This life had run its course.
In what appears to be a long last goodbye, Christian rented a luxury condo called The Landing in Yaquina Bay in Newport for his family for the equivalent of one month's pay from Starbucks. He lied to the property manager, saying he worked for a high profile company and would pay the remaining moving costs when he received a check. He also told him that he was married and had two children, not three, and that they wouldn’t be around much because they lived out of town. Rent came due and there was no money, no food, no diapers.
In mid-November, Longo searched online obituary databases for deceased men in the area around his age. He printed off information for four of them. He researched county records and found the Social Security numbers of three of the dead men and wrote them on the
backs of the printed obituaries. At the end of the month of November, he stole a credit card number from a Starbucks customer.
Christian arranged for a babysitter on the 15 of December and took Mary Jane out to dinner. They returned at approximately 10:30 p.m. Police believe the babysitter, Denise Thompson, was the last person to see the Longo children and Mary Jane alive.
On December 17, 2001, Christian Longo killed his family in the condominium they were about to be evicted from. We don’t know exactly what happened because we only have his side of the story, which isn’t much and has varied slightly from telling to telling. Evidence shows no one else could have killed them, however. He has admitted his guilt but keeps the details to himself, changing his public story as years progress. Christian says as Mary Jane drove him home from work that fateful night, she was morose, depressed and cryptic. He claims that she made veiled references toward the fact that she'd killed the children. He says he found them dead inside and lost his temper. He couldn’t stop himself from killing Mary Jane for what she had done.
In reality, all we know is that the body of Zachery Longo, four years old, was found floating in a Lincoln County, Oregon marina on December 19, 2001. Divers began a search and found the body of Sadie Longo, three years old, three days later. She was weighted down. Two suitcases were then found when the harbor master at the Embarcadero Marina realized some pipes were broken under the marina ramp. Mary Jane was in one and the other contained the body of Madison Longo, two years old.
Court documents say Mary Jane and Madison were manually strangled. Mary Jane was then placed, nude, into a suitcase. He dumped her off the dock at the Embarcadero Marina. Madison was also placed in a suitcase and thrown from the dock. While Zachery and Sadie were found to have died of asphyxiation, there could not be a more concise description. It is believed they were thrown into the water alive. Sadie was tied to a rock and thrown from a Highway 34 bridge. Zachery was found floating in the same waters with a rock stuffed pillowcase nearby.
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