AND SO WE were free to talk. For a long moment, though, there was only silence. Longo was clearly waiting for me to say something, but I was unsure how to begin. He’d made no public statements since his arrest three months before, and I felt it was important that his first impressions of me put him at least somewhat at ease. But what do you say to a man who has likely murdered his family, then fled the country and stolen your identity?
“Call me Mike,” I said.
“Call me Chris,” he said.
I asked him why he decided to phone me. He said he’d read my letter several times, and had debated making contact. My letter, he told me, was the first he had heard of my firing, and he’d asked his lawyers to verify its truth. The lawyers brought him a copy of the Editors’ Note, the child-slave story, and my Afghanistan articles, which was how he’d been able to quiz me so thoroughly.
“In your letter,” Chris said, “you wrote that you weren’t upset with me for using your name. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt responsible for you losing your job. It just seemed too much of a coincidence, and I wanted to know if I was in any way to blame.”
He was concerned, he explained, that his actions in Mexico or the publicity surrounding his arrest had somehow exacerbated my troubles. He said this worry was so great that he felt compelled to call. He added that I was the only person he’d phoned since he had been incarcerated—he hadn’t spoken with friends or family, not even his parents, and certainly not with members of the media. His lawyers, he added, did not know about this call, and if they found out, they’d likely throw a fit.
It seemed clear, from the way Longo had made me submit to his quiz, that he was a cautious man. I found it odd, therefore, that he would ignore the counsel of his legal team merely to learn if he had damaged my writing career. But if there was another reason he’d contacted me, this didn’t seem the right moment to pry.
I assured Longo that he had nothing to do with the Times disaster. I’d written my fake story, I pointed out, long before anything happened to his family. That’s actually the way I phrased it: “before anything happened to your family.” I was careful not to say “before you murdered your family” or something similar. There was no need for bluntness. Longo had yet to enter a plea to the charges; therefore, at this moment, he was legally innocent. And though the facts of the case did not look good—four dead bodies found in Oregon, one live man found in Mexico—I had to concede it was possible that Longo was actually innocent. So rather than speak to him as a person who had committed a terrible crime, I addressed him as a person to whom something terrible had occurred.
“Why,” I asked, keeping the conversation on safe ground, “did you decide to impersonate me, of all people?” I had actually developed a theory about this. I had assumed that while Longo was escaping from Oregon, he’d somehow come across a Sunday New York Times. Many people keep sections of the Sunday paper lying around all week. I’d had an article in the Times Magazine on December 16, 2001, the day before the murders were thought to have occurred. My byline, Michael Finkel, was printed on the magazine’s cover. It’s a rhymy and rather funny name, and therefore perhaps easy to remember. (When I was young, kids would tease me by playing “Michael Finkel” instead of “Marco Polo” in the local swimming pool.) Longo, I figured, had spotted my name and borrowed it as his own—a random act.
My theory was wrong. Longo told me that he’d long been familiar with my work, and not just from the Times. He’d read my stories in Skiing, and Sports Illustrated, and National Geographic Adventure. He said my articles appealed to him. He’d always thought, he said, that if he were to become a journalist, he’d want to write the same sort of stories that I wrote. He knew so much about my articles, he added, that he’d been able to speak about them, confidently and convincingly, while in Mexico. He explained all this in a droll, relaxed manner. “You have a writing style,” he said, “that I wasn’t embarrassed to call my own.”
In other words, Longo was a fan. And there is perhaps nothing more dangerous to a writer’s common sense than encountering an enthusiastic reader of his work, even if he’s calling collect from county jail. During our conversation, I jotted quotes and impressions in a notebook, and as Longo continued to praise my work, my objectivity began to soften. “A v. nice guy,” I wrote down.
I sustained the patter by asking the most basic, blind-date sort of questions, then exclaiming eagerly about any similarity I uncovered. For example: We both had January birthdays! Longo had recently turned twenty-eight, two weeks after I’d turned thirty-three. Neither of us was a native of the West—he’d grown up in suburban Indianapolis; I was from suburban Connecticut. He’d been a Jehovah’s Witness but had been kicked out of the organization. I was a lapsed Jew.
He told me that he felt battered by the media’s coverage of his case. “There’s no way you can know me from reading the papers,” he said. I told him I understood exactly what he meant. He said he had never written anything for publication but had once worked for a company that handled home delivery of the New York Times. “I was always proud to say I worked for the Times,” he told me. I was always proud of that too, I said.
It was clear that Longo wanted to keep the conversation light—he chuckled at even the slightest trace of humor, releasing a quick, staccato “heh-heh-heh-heh.” Of course, I wanted to ask about the murders. But it wasn’t the appropriate time. So instead of murder we spoke about travel, and skiing, and the flavoring we preferred in our lattes (me: vanilla; him: Irish Cream). His voice was as controlled and steady as his laugh; no shouts, no whispers, scarcely any inflection. It was a voice that could be transcribed into text without ever needing an exclamation point. He was partial to repeating the word “gotcha” as a conversational space-filler.
The discussion flowed with no uncomfortable silences, though the whole thing—a casual, bantering chat with a man who’d recently been a Most Wanted fugitive—felt more than a little surreal. Once it was over, I was wildly energized, as if I’d been freed from some confinement, and I had to put on my running shoes and go for a jog to settle myself down. When I returned to my truck I sat in the driver’s seat, panting, and spoke my thoughts into my pocket-sized tape recorder.
Everything Longo said had seemed honest, until late in our talk, when he mentioned his time in Mexico. “If I hadn’t been caught down there,” he told me, “I was going to fly home anyway, and turn myself in.” This may or may not have been true—there’s no way to know—but to me it sounded like a lie. Who would swap a beach resort in Mexico for a jail cell in Oregon?
Our conversation had ended abruptly. When we’d spoken on the phone for nearly an hour, there was a loud beep on the line. Longo told me that this was the jail’s indication that we had only a few seconds remaining before the line was cut. I took this moment to ask him if I could come for a visit.
“Let me just check my schedule,” Longo responded, dryly. “Well, yes, I think I might be able to find the time.”