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He Told Tourists He Was a New York Times Reporter: The Christian Longo Case · Crime Incident

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: In the last two weeks of December, 2001, divers and
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: search crews on the central Oregon coast pulled four bodies
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: from the water in nine days, a 34 year old
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: woman and three children aged four, three, and two. They
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: were a family. And while the divers worked, the husband
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: and father of that family was on a beach in Mexico, snorkeling,
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: drinking with tourists and introducing himself warmly and convincingly by
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: a name that was not his own. That detail is
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: not a footnote. It is the key to the whole
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: case because the story of Christian Longo is not really
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: a story about a sudden explosion of violence in a
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: quiet coastal town. It is the story of a man
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: who spent his entire adult life, impersonating someone, a successful businessman,
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: a devoted provider, a man transferred to Oregon for a
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: new job. And finally, incredibly a real journalist from the
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: New York times. The murders sit at the center of it,
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: but the impersonation runs through everything before and after like
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: a wire. Pull on that wire and the whole life
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: comes apart in your hands. So that is how I
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: want to walk you through this. Not as a catalog
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: of horrors, but as an investigation into a counterfeit man
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: and into the real people who paid for the counterfeit.
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: Start with the real people, because they come first. And
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: because most retellings of this case get so hypnotized by
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: the killer's charm that the family becomes scenery. They were
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: not scenery. Mary Jane Baker grew up in the Ypsilanti
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: area of Michigan, in a devout Jehovah's Witness family. Hers
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: was a sheltered, deliberate upbringing. She lived with her parents
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: until the day of her wedding, and by every account
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: she wanted exactly one future, wife and mother. She worked
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: as a secretary. One detailed account places her at the
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: University of Michigan School of Dentistry, and she met Christian
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: Longo in the parking lot of their shared Kingdom Hall congregation.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: He was a teenager. She was a teenager. Mary Jane
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: quit her job and poured herself into the life she
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: had always wanted. Zachary Michael arrived in February 1997. Sadie
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: Ann came 14 months later. Madison Jean, the youngest, arrived
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: in October 1999. Everyone who encountered those children in their
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: final months described them the same way. Gentle, quiet, well-behaved, tidy,
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: clearly loved. A young co-worker of Christian's named Denise Thompson
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: babysat all three and considered the Longos friends. Whatever was
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: collapsing around them, Mary Jane kept her children fed, clean,
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: and dressed well, to the very end. Her sister Penny
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: Dupuy said the marriage looked, from outside, like something out
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: of a fairy tale, that Christian did all the things
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: a good husband is supposed to do, and made other
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: wives jealous. From outside. Keep that phrase in your pocket
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: because this entire case lives in the gap between the
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: outside and the inside. Inside, Christian Longo was drowning, and
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: he was lying about it professionally. Through the late 90s
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: he cycled through a newspaper distribution job and a construction
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: cleaning business, He called Final Touch. And as the ventures wobbled,
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: he propped them up with fraud, counterfeit checks, a stolen forklift,
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: stolen construction trailers, debt run up in his own father's name.
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: Notice the pattern already forming, because it never changes. Every
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: scheme was in service of an image, the young family
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: man succeeding faster than anyone around him. And every time
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: the image wobbled, he did not scale the image down.
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: He escalated the fraud to keep it standing. Mary Jane's
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: sister Penny had wondered from the beginning how they afforded
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: it all, the cars, the things. She suspected someone was
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: quietly financing them, or that they were sinking in debt.
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: She was right the second time. And the account of
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: the marriage that later emerged is specific about Mary Jane's
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: position in all this. She stayed home and tended the household,
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: and her husband brought home the money and the cars
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: and the things they needed, and she asked no questions,
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: or if she did, she asked the wrong ones. That
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: is not a criticism of her, that is a description
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: of what her world had trained her to be, and
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: of how completely he exploited it. In mid-2000 it caught
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: up with him. He pleaded guilty to four counts of
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: fraud and got probation, and the Jehovah's Witness congregation that
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: had been the entire architecture of Mary Jane's world formally
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: shunned him. Around the same time, Mary Jane discovered he
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: had been unfaithful. Her sister Sally Clark later recalled that
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: Mary Jane found an email between Christian and another woman,
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: and that he told his wife he had stopped loving
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: her when she started having children, that she was not
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: any fun anymore. Think about what that sentence does to
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: a woman whose whole identity, whose faith, whose family, whose
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: one imagined future was those children. She stayed. Her upbringing
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: had not built her an exit. And in June 2001,
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: weeks after the fraud conviction, Christian sold the family's Michigan
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: house and moved his wife and children into a warehouse
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: in Toledo, Ohio, which he used to sell stolen goods.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: Within two months, Toledo police came asking about stolen equipment.
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: Mary Jane's cell phone was cut off. Her sisters, unable
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: to reach her, filed a missing persons report. The family
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: drove west, and on September 12, 2001, they arrived on
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: the Oregon coast with almost nothing. Now watch the impersonation
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: work in real time, because the last three months of
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: this family's life are a masterclass in it. At a
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: vacation rental office in Yachats, Christian explained that he had
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: been transferred to Oregon for a new job, that his
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: wife and children were exhausted from traveling, that he would
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: pay cash. Confident, plausible, reassuring. He paid for that first
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: booking by pawning Mary Jane's wedding ring. Sit with that
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: for a second, the symbol of the marriage, converted into
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: a prop for the performance. From there, the family slid
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: down a staircase you can measure in dollars, a modest
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: rented house in Waldport at $ 300 a week, then a
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: $ 22 a night motel in Newport. Christian took a job
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: at the Starbucks counter inside the Newport Fred Meyer store
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: and stole from the store on the side. And then,
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: in late November, with winter coming, he did something that
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: tells you more about him than any diagnosis could. Nearly broke,
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: he moved the family up into the landing, an upscale
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: condominium on Yakina Bay in Newport, negotiating the rent to $ 1, 200
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: a month. That figure was almost exactly his entire monthly pay.
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: He later called the condo a perfect spot, everything they needed.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: There was a view of the harbor, a washer and dryer,
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: room for company. There were also weeks, by his own account,
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: to detectives, when the family was living on bread and
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: ramen noodles, a rented illusion of stability, purchased with money
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: that did not exist, by a man whose whole self
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: was rented too. In mid-December 2001, the rent came due,
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: and there was no next lie big enough. The forensic
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: reconstruction places what happened next between roughly December 16th and
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: December 18th. I'm going to give it to you plainly
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: and without decoration, because these four people deserve better than dramatization.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: In the condo, Christian Longo strangled Mary Jane and strangled
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: two-year-old Madison. He packed their bodies into suitcases, walked to
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: the dock at the Embarcadero Marina, steps from the family's apartment,
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: and dropped the suitcases into Yakina Bay. Zachary, 4, and Sadie, 3,
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: went into the water separately, in Lindslau near Waldport, weighted
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: with pillowcases filled with rocks. At trial, the state presented
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: evidence indicating the two older children may have gone into
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: that cold water still alive. Longo contested that, and it
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: was never adjudicated as settled fact. So I will not
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: assert it. I will only tell you the prosecution put
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: it in front of the jury. and let the implication
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: sit where it sits. And then, this is the part
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: that people who study this case cannot get past. He
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: went back to his life. Witnesses put him renting videos,
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: showing up at work, attending a Christmas party, telling co-workers
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: that his wife had left him and taken the kids.
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: The performance did not crack. It never cracked. When he
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: finally left town, he did it in a car stolen
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: off a dealership lot. On the morning of December 19th, 2001,
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: A man fishing near the Alsea Bay Bridge saw something
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: in the still backwater of Lenslau. It was the body
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: of a little boy, three or four years old, wearing
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: only his underwear. The investigators who recovered him did not
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: know his name, but they noticed something that will stay
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: with you. He was well-fed, healthy, and clean, with no
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: obvious injuries. Even in the family's free fall, someone had
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: been taking careful daily care of this child. That someone
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: was in a suitcase a few miles away, and nobody
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: knew it yet. Ask yourself what a detective does with
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: a body like that. There is no missing child report
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: that matches. There are no signs of violence to read.
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: There is only a healthy little boy who should be
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: home for Christmas, floating in a slough, in a town
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: of a few thousand people where nobody recognizes him, because
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: his family had only existed there for three months, and
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: had spent that time being a performance rather than neighbors.
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: But John Doe launched what became the largest criminal investigation
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: in the history of Lincoln County, Oregon. a small coastal
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: community that had no vocabulary for this. A local school
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: teacher recognized the police sketch. That was Zachary Longo. Investigators
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: traced the family to the landing and found the rent
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: unpaid and the condo abandoned. Mary Jane's Michigan identification and
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: family keepsakes had already turned up discarded in a dumpster,
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: one of those quiet clues that only becomes deafening in hindsight.
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: On December 22nd, divers recovered Sadie, and on December 27th,
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: two suitcases pulled from Yakina Bay near the Embarcadero Marina
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: gave up Mary Jane and Madison. Autopsies established that Mary
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: Jane and Madison died of manual strangulation and asphyxiation. The
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: older children's bodies carried no gunshot or stab wounds, findings
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: consistent with asphyxiation or drowning. I will not take you
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: further into those rooms than the medical examiner's conclusions require,
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: because the conclusions say everything. This was done by hand,
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: at close range, by someone the victims trusted completely. Nine Days,
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: Four Bodies, Christmas Week Think about what that did to
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: the towns themselves. Waldport and Newport are the kind of
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: places where the harbor is the town square, where the
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: marinas and the sloughs are where people fish with their
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: kids on Saturday mornings. For nine days in late December,
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: those same waters were a recovery scene, and every family
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: on that coast spent the holiday watching divers surface and
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: hoping they came up empty and learning that they had not.
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: The suitcases came out of the bay a few dozen
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: yards from the condo where the Longo family was supposed
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: to be having their first Oregon Christmas. That geographic detail
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: is not trivia. He did not drive his wife and
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: youngest daughter into the wilderness. He carried them to the
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: end of his own dock. So where was he? Here
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: is where this case stops behaving like other cases, and
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: I want you to appreciate how strange what I am
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: about to tell you actually is. While divers searched Oregon
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: bays for his children, Christian Longo drove the stolen car
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: to San Francisco and boarded a flight to Cancun. He
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: made his way down the coast to Tulum, then a cheap,
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: sleepy beach town, and moved into a cabana, He drank.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: He snorkeled. He befriended backpackers and tourists. On December 28,
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: a federal warrant issued for unlawful flight. On January 11, 2002,
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: the FBI put him on its 10 most wanted fugitives list,
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: alongside Osama bin Laden. So picture it. One of the
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: 10 most wanted men on the planet, on a Mexican beach,
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: charming strangers over drinks. And when those strangers asked his name,
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: this unemployed fugitive from a Starbucks counter told them he
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: was Michael Finkel, a writer for the New York Times.
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: Here is the spring in the trap. Michael Finkel was
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: a real person, a real working New York Times Magazine journalist, who,
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: in one of the most improbable coincidences in modern crime,
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: had just been fired in disgrace for fabricating a composite
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: character in a cover story. Longo had admired Finkel's byline
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: for years and reached for it the way he reached
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: for every identity, because it was shinier than his own.
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: He did not know about the firing, So at the
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: exact moment the real Finkel's career was collapsing, because he
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: had invented a man who did not exist. A killer
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: on a beach in Tulum was inventing himself as Michael Finkel.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: Two frauds, orbiting each other before they had ever met.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: You could not sell that as fiction. Editors would call
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: it too neat. It lasted two weeks. On January 13, 2002,
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: Mexican authorities and the FBI arrested Longo in Tulum, about
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: 80 miles south of Cancun. and by the next day
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: he was in American custody on his way back to Oregon.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: And one detail from that Mexican interlude is worth correcting,
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: because the legend has inflated it. He was not living
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: in luxury. It was a cheap cabana funded by theft.
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: The vacation was real. The wealth was another costume. Back
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: in Michigan, they buried Mary Jane in Ypsilanti. At her memorial,
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: her father told reporters that outside her family, the church
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: had always been the most important thing in her life.
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: The congregation that shunned her husband had never let go
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: of her. Now comes the chapter that made this case
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: globally famous, and I want to handle it with tongs,
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: because it is genuinely fascinating, and it is also exactly
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: the kind of thing that lets a murderer hijack his
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: own story. When the real Michael Finkel learned that a
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: quadruple murder suspect had been living under his name, he
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: did what perhaps only a disgraced journalist would do. He
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: wrote to him. Longo, who was refusing nearly all interviews, answered.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: What followed was a year's long correspondence. Dozens of letters,
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: hours of phone calls, in which Longo rehearsed and revised
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: his account of the killings for an audience of one.
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: Understand the symbiosis, because it is the honest way to
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: describe it. Finkel needed a story big enough to redeem
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: a broken career. Longo needed what he had always needed,
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: someone to perform for. Each man was the other's second chance,
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: and neither was a reliable narrator. Through prison glass and
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: on paper, Longo's account of the killings shifted like weather.
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: Total denial at first, then versions that inched him closer
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: to the death's, while always leaving the worst of it
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: on someone else. Finkel documented the shifts, and those letters
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: became part of the public record of how this man's
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: mind worked, which is their real value. Whatever else the
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: correspondence was, it preserved the manipulation in the manipulator's own handwriting.
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: Out of it came Finkel's 2005 book True Story, subtitled Murder, Memoir,
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: Mea Culpa, and a decade later the film of the
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: same name, with James Franco playing Longo and Jonah Hill
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: playing Finkel. CBS built a 48-hours episode around the two
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: of them, and called it, Correctly, the pretender. If you
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: have heard of this case at all, that is probably why.
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: Just remember, every time the culture retells it as the
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: tale of the journalist and the killer, that framing is
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: itself Longo's last successful impersonation. The murderer of a woman
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: and three children, recast as half of an intriguing intellectual duet.
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: The courtroom stripped the costume off, though not before he
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: tried one more. Indicted in Lincoln County on aggravated murder
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: for all four deaths, Longo pulled a maneuver that stunned
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: the court. He pleaded guilty to murdering Mary Jane and Madison,
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: then went to trial in March 2003 for Zachary and
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: Sadie and took the stand to testify that Mary Jane
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: had killed them. His story was that his wife, unhinged
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: by the discovery of his frauds, drowned the two older
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: children and left Madison dying, and that what he did afterward,
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: he did in despair. I want to be unambiguous with
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: you about what that was, because the record is unambiguous.
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: It was a lie, and everyone who has examined it
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: including eventually Longo himself, has called it a lie. But
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: look at its shape. A man who had borrowed his
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: father's name for debts, a dead journalist's byline for a beach,
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: a transferred executive's biography for a rental office, was now
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: trying to borrow one last identity. He tried to dress
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: his dead wife in his own crime. The woman who
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: kept those children clean and fed through every collapse he engineered,
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: recast by her killer, in front of her family as
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: their murderer. The jury did not deliberate its way into doubt.
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: They had heard the evidence of the pillowcases and the rocks,
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: They had heard about the videos rented and the Christmas
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: party attended while the suitcases sat in the bay. They
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: had watched him perform on the stand the way he
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: had performed at the rental office and on the beach
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: in Tulum. And this time the audience had the documents.
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: In April 2003, they convicted him on the remaining counts.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: And in the penalty phase, the same jury sentenced him
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: to death. The Oregon Supreme Court later upheld both the
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: convictions and the sentence. He entered death row at the
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem. You might expect the story
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: to go quiet there. It did not. because narcissism does
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: not retire. In 2011, Longo surfaced with a byline of
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: his own, an op-ed in the New York Times, the
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: very institution whose credential he had stolen, titled Giving Life
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: After Death Row. In it, he formally accepted responsibility for
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: all four murders and pitched a cause, allowing death row
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: prisoners to donate their organs. He founded an advocacy effort
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: called GAV, Gifts of Anatomical Value from Everyone. And here
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: you have to make a judgment I cannot make for you.
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: Read one way, It is a guilty man finally telling
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: the truth and trying to make his death useful. Read
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: the other way. It is the most sophisticated identity he
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: ever constructed. The redeemed monster, the thoughtful donor, the byline
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: at last legitimately his. The confession was real. The murders
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: stayed exactly as they were. Both of those sentences are
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: true at once, and the discomfort of holding them together is,
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: I think, the correct response. Then, in December 2022, the
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: state of Oregon changed the ending. Oregon had not executed
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: anyone since 1997, and had held a formal moratorium on
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: execution since 2011. On December 13, 2022, outgoing Governor Kate
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: Brown commuted the sentences of all 17 people on Oregon's
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: death row, Christian Longo among them, to life in prison
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: without the possibility of parole, and ordered the execution chamber dismantled.
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: She was explicit that this reflected her view of the
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: death penalty itself, not any rehabilitation by the men it covered.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: For Mary Jane's family it landed like a second wound.
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: Her sister Sally Clark said publicly that the family learned
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: of it with no meaningful notice and that it tore
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: the case back open. So let me leave you with
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: the status as it actually stands because older tellings of
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: this story get it wrong. Christian Longo is not on
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: death row and he is not awaiting execution. He is
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: in his 50s in the custody of the Oregon Department
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: of Corrections serving life without the possibility of parole with
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: no pending path to release. The state will house him
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: until he dies. Nothing more and nothing less. And the
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: four people he erased. Mary Jane Longo was 34. She
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: wanted one thing from her one life, gave herself to
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: it completely, and was failed by everyone whose job it
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: was not to fail her. Most of all the man
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: she met in a church parking lot. Zachary was four.
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: He liked being read to and was, in a stranger's
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: clinical notes, a healthy, cared-for little boy. Sadie was three.
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: Madison was two, young enough that her whole biography fits
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: inside other people's memories of her mother holding her. They
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: were not props in the Longo performance, and they were
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: never characters in the Finkel book. They were the only
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: real things in a counterfeit man's life. The imposter has
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: spent decades being written about, corresponded with, filmed and portrayed.
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: The four people who knew the truth about him first
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: are the ones I would ask you to carry out
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: of this episode. Next time, we leave the Pacific coast
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: for a case that inverts this one. No charming liar,
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: no performance, but a disappearance so quiet. and an investigation
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: so cold that the truth had to wait decades for
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: a stranger with a shovel and a database to go looking.
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening.