The Fugitive Murderer Who Turned Into Me

The phone rang, my Caller ID read “INMATE PHONE,” and I answered. Perhaps that was my mistake right there. Maybe I never should have spoken with Christian Longo, a man who’d recently been captured in Mexico by the FBI on charges that he’d murdered his wife and three children.

Under normal circumstances, I might have thought twice about answering. But I was not operating under normal circumstances. For all of my adult life -- until February of 2002, a few weeks before Longo called -- I’d worked as a journalist. Recently, I had been a full-time writer for the New York Times Magazine.

I was 32 when I landed the Times job, and extremely ambitious -- arrogantly ambitious. So ambitious that, when I was sent to West Africa to report on child laborers and wasn’t able to obtain the ideal interview, I combined several inadequate interviews into one and invented the perfect protagonist. Each part of my story was accurate -- every quote and detail came from my notes -- and the general premise was sound, but the whole was almost entirely untrue.

I was eventually caught for my deception, fired by the Times and branded a liar. My career as a journalist, I figured, was finished. And then I found out about Christian Longo.

Longo was accused of one of the most horrific crimes imaginable. The bodies of his wife and children were found off the Oregon coast, and Longo had fled to Mexico. After he was arrested there -- just as I was in the process of losing my identity as Michael Finkel of the New York Times -- it was discovered that, while on the run, Longo had adopted a new persona: He’d been pretending to be Michael Finkel of the New York Times.

When the bizarre story of Longo’s impersonation reached me, I wrote him a letter, asking him to contact me. I had no idea what I was in for. I’d never encountered a person like Longo -- he was almost certainly guilty of four murders, yet he sounded calm and self-confident. In fact, although it was he who had impersonated me, he was the suspicious one. “How do I know,” he asked at the outset, “that this is the real Michael Finkel?”

The role he played in Mexico, I learned, was startlingly intricate -- he chatted with tourists about “his” articles; he said he was traveling in the Cancun area on assignment; he took notes; he even teamed up with a photographer. Then the FBI found him.

Longo and I soon established regular communication, including weekly phone calls and frequent letters. During the year between his arrest and the start of his trial in Oregon, I visited him several times in jail. He was 28 with a baby face -- red hair, freckles across his nose, wideangled ears. He was polite and well spoken.

Early on, Longo asked me a favor. He said he understood that because of my dishonest Times story, I’d been stripped of my credibility. He said he was in a similar position. He asked me not to leap to conclusions, to pay attention to facts rather than yielding to assumptions. I said I would. We promised to be completely honest with one another. He also said he was innocent of the murders -- and, if I were patient, he would tell me the “whole, true story.”

And this is when I started to become sucked into his world. Longo was charming and charismatic; funny at times, introspective at others. His ability to deceive was astonishing. He never contradicted any fact I could independently verify, but he was able to manipulate me so subtly, with such skill and aplomb, that I never realized when his tale became detached from reality. Despite the damning evidence against him -- four dead bodies found in Oregon, one live man found in Mexico -- there were times when I began to believe his innocence.

I snapped out of this belief at his trial. Once the police photos of Longo’s family were displayed, the spell was broken. Longo’s testimony -- in which he tried to blame his wife for initiating the killings -- was utterly implausible. He was sentenced to death. I’d never been a supporter of capital punishment, but the trial generated in me such fury that I felt he deserved it.

Longo is now on death row, but I’m still haunted by him. He forced me to take a lengthy and uncomfortable look at what I’d done. Some parts of my own character, I confess -- the runaway egotism, the capacity to deceive -- appeared mirrored and magnified in him. In my fake Times story, I’d spun a phony tale around genuine details. This was Longo’s specialty. His ability to distort truth seemed on par with the most gifted magicians.

My year with Longo showed me how a person’s life could spiral completely out of control; how one could get lost in a haze of dishonesty; how these things can have dire consequences. I might have learned these lessons if I hadn’t met him, but not so quickly, clearly and profoundly.

It was only at the end of our relationship that I saw the truth about Longo -- that he was a liar and a murderer. This was not a simple truth to uncover. Longo was married to MaryJane for eight years. My guess is that she, perhaps like Laci Peterson, saw her husband only as a captivating, well-adjusted man. MaryJane may have had no idea who Christian Longo really was, until the moment his hands were around her neck.