NEWPORT, Ore., Feb. 15 A man pleaded guilty on Friday to killing his wife and 2-year-old daughter and dumping their bodies into coastal waters, but he pleaded not guilty in the deaths of his two other children, offering no explanation.
The man, Christian Longo, 29, responded to questions by Judge Robert Huckleberry with short answers. When asked whether he killed his wife, Mary Jane Longo, 34, and their daughter Madison, he replied, ''That's correct.''
He did not say how or why he killed them, nor did he offer any insight into who killed his other children, Zachary, 4, and Sadie Ann, 3. A trial is to begin March 10.
The bodies of all four were found in December 2001 in the waters around Newport.
The bodies of Zachary and Sadie Ann were found on Dec. 19, and those of Mary Jane and Madison on Dec. 27.
Mr. Longo was arrested in Mexico three weeks later.
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From Esquire magazine:
How I Convinced a Death-Row Murderer Not to DieEight years ago, Christian Longo murdered his wife and three children. On the lam, he assumed the identity of the author, a man he'd never met. Now their long, twisted relationship culminates in a final, chilling bargain.
By: Michael Finkel
"When Christian Longo asked if I wanted to watch him die, I told him I did.
He asked me this over the phone, calling collect from inside his prison cell the yellow cordless passed down the line, cell to cell, hands reaching through bars on death row at the Oregon State Penitentiary. The reason he wanted to die, he said, was fairly simple. After half a decade spent sealed inside a white concrete box for more than twenty-one hours a day, with only other murderers as neighbors and with no hope of ever again seeing the outside world, he'd had enough. He was sick of prison and sick of himself, and he thought there might be a way to make his death meaningful. So he was dropping his appeals, he told me, and would likely be executed, by lethal injection, in a matter of months.
Why he was calling me and why I wanted to watch him die was not so simple. By the time I received this call, last February, as I was watching a Dora the Explorer video with my children early on a Saturday evening, I'd known Christian Longo for seven years. In all this time I'd never been able to make sense of him, to reconcile the bright and dryly funny person I knew (he calls the yellow cordless his "cell" phone), the guy I sometimes referred to as my friend, with the man who'd been convicted of the most unimaginable of crimes. In 2001 he had strangled his wife and two-year-old daughter inside their condominium on the Oregon coast, stuffed them in suitcases, and sunk them in a bay. Then he drove his four-year-old son and three-year-old daughter to a nearby bridge, tied rocks to their legs, and tossed them into frigid water, alive.
I was drawn into Longo's life through the most improbable of circumstances after the murders, while on the lam in Mexico, he took on my identity, even though we'd never met. Starting from this bizarre connection, using charm and guile and a steady stoking of my journalist's natural curiosity (he was innocent, he was framed, he had proof, he would show me), he soon became deeply enmeshed in my own life. In the first year, we exchanged more than a thousand pages of handwritten letters. I wrote a book about him.
After I started a family of my own, I didn't communicate with Longo anymore. But I was not disentangled from him. I remained haunted by Longo, by what he'd done; nearly every day, as I held my own kids, images of his crime a child locked in a suitcase, or falling from a bridge, or fighting for air would flit through my mind and I'd flinch, as if I'd brushed against a hot burner on the stove.
Then he phoned me last February, the first time in more than two years. "I'm not going to make it to my thirty-sixth birthday," he announced. A Will Smith movie, he said, had changed him. He saw it on the seven-inch flat-screen TV he keeps in his cell, a picture called Seven Pounds, about a guy who's so distraught after killing his fianc้e and six others in a car accident that he decides to commit suicide and donate his organs to people in need. The movie, Longo said, felt like a punch in the gut. It made him weep. For years, he said, he'd sat in jail wondering how he could do anything worthwhile, anything at all to help even one person, rather than just rot away on death row. The movie gave him an answer. He would carve himself up. He'd give away his heart and lungs and liver and corneas and bone marrow and whatever else could be salvaged. His "finale," he called it. Let others live; let him die. That's what he wanted.
He'd reached this conclusion, he said, after conducting a strange, self-administered psychological test. Recently, for the first time since he'd been incarcerated, he hung up a photo of his children in his cell. It was a studio shot, one I'd seen at his trial, the three kids gazing smiley and wide-eyed into the camera, heartbreakingly cute..."
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I don't have an answer. I can say confidently that Zyprexa and Seroquel aren't going to help.
But there's this: Longo killed before he was exposed. LA Fitness shooter Sodini killed because he felt the game was soon to be up. Etc. It seems that the truly dangerous time is right before, when the terror of the possibility of exposure grips them, and so all options are on the table. After exposure there is only defense and running and crying and anger, and rage and violence, too, but not the kill-anyone-who-knows kind you see the week before the pictures are to be released or the month before the girl goes off to spring break.
I can't tell you what to do about the guy you suspect is going down the wrong road, but I can tell the guy himself what to do: turn back. You know it's complicated and exhausting to keep up the appearances, to keep pretending, even if it's working, because eventually you will get fat, eventually you will get the bill, eventually she will leave you, eventually you will fail. It is inevitable..."
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