SOON AFTER RETURNING TO JAIL, through the walkway, Longo was allowed to spend a little time in the day room, where he watched the television news reports of his guilty pleas. Then, back in his cell, he continued the letter he’d begun early that morning. “No one got it. No one understood what I was doing,” Longo wrote. “No one could conceive that I was simply taking responsibility & admitting my guilt.”
He was correct. Here is the first line of the next morning’s Portland Oregonian story on the hearing: “In a legal maneuver that baffled observers across the region…” The Newport News-Times: “In a move that has confounded many…” The Eugene Register-Guard: “In a maneuver with no apparent legal rhyme or reason…”
And here is what Longo told me: “I’m extremely sorry for the surprise that was thrust upon you…. But I’m ever sorrier for misleading you into believing that I felt that I was completely innocent. For lying to you. (It’s hard to write the word ‘lying.’) I have tried to be as honest as possible, in fact setting records in my level of honesty. I know that I’ve been excrutiatingly open & have not buttered anything up to make it sound better or to make it more palatable.”
Longo had finally admitted that he was a murderer. I’d anticipated this moment for months, envisioning what it would be like for him, and for our relationship, when he was able to drop all his layers of deception and come to terms with who he really was. But now I couldn’t shake the feeling that his guilty pleas were just the beginning of another complicated game. He hadn’t come clean in the least. There’d been no breakthrough. How could Longo commit two of the murders, I wanted to know, but not the other two? If he didn’t kill Zachery and Sadie, then who did?
When I pressed him to answer these questions, Longo was evasive. The pleas, he stated, were a “weight off my shoulders” and “a huge release.” I requested more specifics, but he said he couldn’t help me right now. He asked for my patience and promised that everything would soon be clear. “My conscience will be free,” he insisted, “even if my body is not.”
For days, I obsessed about the meaning of his guilty pleas. I consulted lawyers (not Longo’s—they were keeping silent); I researched past death-penalty cases; I spoke with journalists who specialized in legal affairs. Nothing shed much light. It was baffling. One of the more popular hypotheses, in fact, was that the whole point of the plea hearing was not to have a point. It was staged precisely to confuse people, to increase the likelihood that an error would be made during the trial, to kink the roulette wheel in a way that would produce an unnatural harvest of zeros and double-zeros.
But this idea, even in a case as discouraging as Longo’s, seemed absurdly risky. Its chances of hurting him far outweighed the potential to help. Longo’s confession had eliminated what lawyers sometimes call “residual doubt,” which is the thin but distinct gap between a jury’s finding someone guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt”—the necessary standard for conviction in a criminal case—and finding someone guilty with absolute certainty. Residual doubt is often cited as the reason juries or judges find a defendant guilty but don’t impose the maximum sentence.
By pleading guilty to two murders, Longo had removed this buffer. He’d all but invited a death penalty. Now no one would worry that an innocent person had been condemned. Longo was, without question, a murderer. It seemed certain that he would never again be a free man. If Longo had admitted to all the murders, rather than half of them, he would have exposed himself to no further punishment, beyond the purely theoretical. The state can’t put someone to death more than once; an inmate can’t serve more than one life term.
So why didn’t Longo admit to all four? The only explanation that made sense was also, confoundingly, the least plausible: Longo had pleaded guilty to only two murders because those were the only two murders he’d committed.
It took a couple of weeks to seat a jury. The selection process in a death-penalty case is different from that of any other criminal trial. In Oregon, as in all states, in a death-penalty case it is the jury, not the judge, that determines the sentence. Longo’s jury needed to be “death qualified”; that is, every member had to be willing, at least in principle, to administer a death sentence. Anyone who was morally opposed to capital punishment, or could not envision authorizing another’s death, was disqualified from consideration.
A capital case is divided into two parts. In the first, known as the guilt phase, the jury determines the defendant’s culpability. Because Longo had already confessed to the murders of MaryJane and Madison, the guilt phase of his trial would be concerned only with Longo’s role in Zachery and Sadie’s deaths. Whenever I used the term “guilt phase” on the telephone—through most of his trial, we continued to regularly speak on phone—Longo expressed his displeasure. “Why isn’t it called the innocence phase?” he wondered.
In the second part of the trial, the penalty phase, the jury listens to what is known as mitigating evidence—testimony, presented by the defense, about the defendant’s character that might justify a less severe sentence. The prosecution, in turn, can offer aggravating evidence that argues for a stiffer penalty. Normally, if a jury finds the defendant not guilty during the first part of a trial, there is no penalty phase. But Longo’s case was certain to have both parts; even if he was acquitted in the guilt phase, he would still face punishment for his role in MaryJane and Madison’s murders.
For each count on which Longo was found guilty, his jury would have three choices: a life sentence with the possibility of parole after thirty years; life without the possibility of parole; or death by lethal injection. To impose death, all twelve jurors had to vote in favor. For the chance of parole, ten or more jurors had to agree. Any other configuration of votes would result in the default sentence—life in prison without any prospect of release.
All that was needed to spare Longo’s life was one sympathetic juror. Both the defense and the prosecution teams were well aware of this, and during the selection proceedings, potential jurors were asked to precisely define their stance on capital punishment, and to complete a sixty-six-question survey that requested information as far-ranging as the types of firearms they owned, how they felt about the psychiatric profession, and the wording of any bumper stickers on their vehicles.
Ken Hadley took the reins for the defense’s part in the jury selection. Hadley radiated calmness and civility; with him there were no courtroom theatrics, no angry outbursts, not so much as a quickly uttered sentence. During the trial, he sometimes addressed the jury while standing behind a lectern. He was silver-haired, barrelchested, and a firm supporter, he told me, of the Republican Party, except when it came to death-penalty issues. “An ole country lawyer” is how he described himself.
Hadley was a well-known figure in Newport; his office, in a low-ceilinged annex behind an insurance agency, was an easy walk from the Lincoln County Courthouse. Before accepting Longo’s case, he’d defended twenty other people facing the death penalty. Six had gone to trial, and only one was actually sentenced to death, and that was after the defendant had ignored Hadley’s advice and turned down a plea bargain. “I think of him as a grandfather figure,” Longo said of Hadley. “But I’ve told him he’s a father figure, to not hurt his feelings.”
Longo was present in the courtroom for jury selection, as was I. Newport had become my temporary home; I’d taken a short-term lease on a rental cottage near the ocean, and I had driven my pickup to Oregon. I spent almost every weekday in the same room with Longo and was forced to continue my romance with Jill via the telephone. “What could be healthier for our relationship,” she teased, “than for you to spend a couple of months watching a murder trial?”
On the second day of the selection proceedings, as I sat in court, I was approached by an officer and served with two subpoenas. Kerry Taylor, it turned out, may have been bluffing when he’d attempted to convince me to speak with him before the trial began. He had said that I would not make a good witness, but now the prosecution had subpoenaed me once to testify in court, and once to hand over all of Longo’s letters and my tape-recordings of our phone calls. Oregon, however, has a strong journalists’ shield law—this may be why Taylor tried at first to cajole me out of the information—and after I hired an attorney, the two subpoenas were swiftly dropped.
As the jury was picked, Longo wrote me a letter, commenting in his meticulous way on the people who were auditioning for the job of deciding whether he should live or die. “A couple of them sneak glances in my direction, a couple do everything possible to avoid looking my way, & a couple just stare in a bold way, seeming to try to get a read from me, to figure me out,” he noted. “It was painfully obvious who wanted to be on the jury, w/ catered answers to placate both the defenses queries & those of the prosecution…. You could see, by the way that they looked at me, that they couldn’t wait to vote yes for the DP [Death Penalty].”
Most hurtful, Longo added, was listening to those who did not want to serve on his jury. These were the people, all of them dismissed by Judge Huckleberry, who announced that they were certain Longo had killed his whole family, that nothing could convince them otherwise, and that he therefore deserved to die, the sooner the better.
This was the first time since Longo’s arrest in Cancún, fourteen months earlier, that he’d encountered anyone outside the criminal-justice system (myself excepted), and he was shocked to hear average citizens—he described them as “school teachers & dental hygenists & bank loan officers”—speak their minds. “The comments,” he wrote, “seered through me & hit my heart pretty hard.” He seemed incredulous to discover that people hated him. “I don’t believe that I am this horrible person, this pariah,” he wrote. “I feel like I still have something to offer.”
In the end, Longo’s jury consisted of eight women and four men, including a nineteen-year-old who worked as a deejay and a sixty-two-year-old retiree with a silver crew cut. It was a jury, Longo said, that seemed hungry to kill him. But he insisted that he had no intention of pandering to the jurors with maudlin displays of contrition or by begging for mercy. That was beneath him. “I will live or die by the truth,” he declared. “Nothing matters more right now, in my life, than that. If it kills me to tell the truth in every matter, so be it, I’m a dead man.”