THE LONGO FAMILY murders, according to investigators, all probably occurred shortly before dawn on Monday, December 17,2001. There was one possible witness. A man named Dick Hoch had seen someone at the spot where the two older children were dumped. That Monday morning, at about 4:30 A.M., Hoch had been heading to the coast, on his way to work—he removes beach sand that has blown onto people’s driveways—when he saw a reddish minivan stopped on the State Highway 34 bridge just outside the town of Waldport, Oregon. The van was facing east, away from the Pacific Ocean.
Hoch, who contacted the sheriff’s office after he learned of the dead children, said he was concerned that the vehicle was disabled, so he pulled his pickup truck over to assist. There appeared to be a lone white male in the van, Hoch said, though he could not see clearly because the van’s interior lights and headlights were both off. It was a cold morning, a few degrees above freezing, the streets glazed with rain. Hoch asked the man if he needed help, and the man said that he did not—his engine light had flashed on, he explained, and he was just checking it. Hoch drove off, and he watched through his rearview mirror as the van headed across the bridge and down the road.
Christian Longo’s vehicle happened to be a maroon Pontiac Montana van. That Monday afternoon, Longo drove the van to the Fred Meyer department store and worked, according to the store’s records, from 2 P.M. until 11 at night. Tuesday was his day off, and by midmorning he had driven about a hundred miles north, to the Portland outskirts.
In the months before the murders, the Longo family had lived a rather chaotic existence—they’d moved from a rental house to a hotel room to another hotel room to a condo in just the past few weeks. Before that, for a fortnight, they’d lived in a tent, and before that, in an old warehouse. The van was one of the family’s few constants, and its interior was a jumbled collage of their lives. Later, when officers enumerated every item in the vehicle on search-warrant forms, the list required twelve pages. There was a scooter, a miniature car, a stuffed animal, a sippy cup. There were videotapes—Toy Story 2; Time for Counting; Cartoon Crack-Ups—and, installed over the van’s rear seats, a pull-down video monitor. There was camping gear, sunscreen, diet pills, lipstick. There was a children’s book, Zoo Book, and an adult book, a Lisa Scottoline legal thriller entitled, curiously, Running from the Law.
Longo drove his van to the Town & Country Dodge dealership, in the Portland suburb of Wilsonville. He parked in the dealership’s outdoor lot and pulled the license plate out of the metal frame at the rear of his van. The plate, from Michigan, where Longo and his family had lived for several years, read KIDVAN. Longo also grabbed his tool kit, his cell phone, and a folder of personal documents, then entered one of Town & Country’s large indoor showrooms.
Some of the vehicles in the showroom had keys inside them. Many also had legal plates. A salesman approached, but Longo waved him away, saying that he didn’t need any help. The salesman wandered into another showroom. Earlier in his life, Longo had owned a green Dodge Durango, and here in the Town & Country showroom was another green Durango, nearly new. Longo climbed inside. The keys were already in the ignition. It was unbelievably simple. He started the car and drove it over the weight-sensitive trigger on the showroom floor, which activated the automatic garage door. The door opened, and Longo drove out. Nobody saw him.
When employees of Town & Country noticed that the Durango was missing, they figured a customer was merely taking it for a test drive. Not until the following morning—Wednesday, December 19, the same day Zachery Longo’s body was pulled from Lint Slough—did they contact the police.
After stealing the car, Longo drove back down to the waterfront condominium he was renting in Newport. That evening he went to a Christmas party. The gathering was held at an Italian restaurant across Highway 101 from the Fred Meyer department store. It was hosted by the staff of Fred Meyer’s in-store Starbucks, where Longo had worked until his promotion to the home-furnishings section three weeks before. For the party’s gift exchange, Longo brought along an unopened bottle of his wife’s perfume.
The next day, Wednesday, Longo arrived at work on time for the 5 A.M. shift. He informed the home-furnishings manager, Scott Tyler, that his wife and kids had moved away, and that he could now work whatever hours Tyler needed. This was also the day he had lunch with Denise Thompson and told her that MaryJane and the children had gone to Michigan.
Longo worked the same shift, 5 A.M. to 2 P.M., on Thursday. On Friday, he was scheduled for a late shift that started at three in the afternoon. Longo was usually punctual, so when three o’clock passed and he hadn’t come in, his manager tried to call him at home. Nobody answered, and Longo did not show up at all.
The desire to escape Newport, Longo later recounted, had come upon him after work on Thursday, while he was at the gym. He’d just arrived there when the radio station on the gym’s sound system announced that a young boy had been found dead in the water. The station gave the boy’s description and said that he had not been identified. As soon as Longo heard this, he felt nauseous and hurried to the bathroom. He splashed water on his face until he settled down. Then he played volleyball for two hours with a few friends from work.
He didn’t sleep much that night—he stayed in the condominium and drank a couple of beers and eventually dozed on the couch. Early the next morning, Longo packed the stolen Durango with most of his belongings, as well as the television and microwave that came with the condo, and drove out of town. He wasn’t sure where he was going, he later explained, except that it had to be where no one would recognize him. He drove east, toward Interstate 5, and about fifty miles from Newport he realized it was a Friday—payday at the Fred Meyer. He turned around, drove back to Newport, picked up his $230 check, cashed it at the store, and left again.
Longo returned to the interstate. He didn’t know whether to go north, toward Seattle, or south, toward San Francisco. He took the first on-ramp he came to. It was south. The farther he got from Newport, he later said, the better he felt, so he kept driving, past the Cascade Mountains and the Klamath National Forest and the Sacramento Valley. He drove six hundred miles, then exited the highway in Sacramento. He parked in a residential area and slept in the Durango.
Longo reached San Francisco around noon on Saturday, just about the time that divers found his daughter Sadie at the bottom of Lint Slough. He stopped by a bookstore and bought a guidebook to inexpensive San Francisco hotels and another on local campgrounds. He decided to take a room for two nights, at $22 a night, at the Fort Mason Youth Hostel, adjacent to the Marina District. He hadn’t eaten a full meal in two days, so he walked to a Safeway and purchased bagels, ramen noodles, cheddar cheese, and Triscuits, then ate them in the hostel’s kitchen.
He’d spent nearly half his paycheck on gasoline during the drive down, and he had nothing in the bank. In a matter of days, he’d be out of money. The next morning—Sunday, December 23—he filled out a job application at the Starbucks on Union Street. By this time, Denise Thompson had spoken with sheriff’s officers in Newport and had identified the bodies, and Longo was a murder suspect, pursued by federal authorities.
The Starbucks application he completed in San Francisco was later recovered by the FBI. On it, Longo wrote his name, accurately, as Chris M. Longo and said that his social security number was 315-02-4297, which is correct except for the last digit. He listed as a reference his manager at the Fred Meyer Starbucks. For callbacks, he left his cell-phone number. The manager of the Union Street Starbucks said he’d likely have a job for Longo in a few days.
Back at the hostel, Longo checked the news online. He pulled up the web site of the Oregonian and saw a headline about the two bodies found in Lint Slough. Longo clicked on the story, and up came a retouched photo of his son.
Longo fled the hostel, climbed into the Durango, and drove away. He parked the car and, he later said, cried as hard as he’d ever cried in his life. He decided that he couldn’t return to the hostel—he didn’t want to be around people. Instead, he drove to a beach by the Presidio, in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge. He sat in his car, gathering his nerve. His intention was to walk to the center of the bridge and jump off. He sat in the car for hours, envisioning stepping onto the bridge. But he couldn’t do it. He never even got out of the car.
That night, he parked the Durango on a San Francisco side street. He hung towels and shirts over the windows, crawled into the backseat, covered himself with his leather jacket, and tried to sleep. In the morning, he used the bathroom at Golden Gate Park, then drove to the San Francisco Zoo and sat for most of the day in a secluded spot in the Africa section. That evening, Christmas Eve, he parked for the night on a steeply sloped street. He could hear, he later said, the sounds of a Christmas party emanating from an apartment above him—people playing the piano, people singing carols.
On Christmas Day, a Tuesday, Longo left the Durango and began walking. Nearly every place was closed, except a movie theater. He bought a ticket and watched Ali. When it was over, he didn’t want to leave, so he stayed and watched it again. Then he walked some more. A Walgreens drugstore was open, so he went in and wandered aimlessly through the aisles. Then he walked again. At a Chinese restaurant, he ordered a noodle dish to go and walked back to his car and ate it there.
He drove around the city on Wednesday and eventually found himself at a park called Lands End. He followed a trail for a few miles until he reached a set of cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. He sat with his feet dangling from the edge and again wanted to end his life. He stood up, backed away a few feet, and then ran to the lip of the cliff, but he couldn’t fling himself off.
The next day—Thursday, December 27—FBI agents got the break they were hoping for. That morning, the manager of the Union Street Starbucks decided to check the reference on Longo’s employment application. The manager called the Newport Fred Meyer, and an employee there, upon hearing Longo’s name, contacted the police. The police notified the FBI. The FBI, with the assistance of Starbucks officials, swiftly devised a sting operation.
In the meantime, Longo had determined that he needed to leave the United States. Wednesday afternoon, the day before the FBI learned of his Starbucks application, he drove to a Kinko’s and used their internet service to book a flight to Cancún, Mexico, leaving late that night and returning a month later. He made the reservation under his own name and paid using a credit-card number from a receipt he’d pocketed several weeks earlier while working the cash register at Fred Meyer.
The FBI’s plan was to apprehend Longo at the Union Street Starbucks. A Starbucks manager left a message on Longo’s voice mail, requesting that he come in for a job interview on Friday, December 28. Though Longo didn’t return the call, that morning, several FBI agents were sprinkled anonymously among the usual crowd. The interview time came, then passed. There was no sign of Longo.
The FBI was too late: Longo had already left the country. After booking the flight, he’d driven to the San Francisco airport. On the way there, he pawned the microwave and TV he’d stolen from the condo in Newport, for which he received $90. At the airport he checked in, without incident, for American Airlines Flight 1048, San Francisco to Dallas. He waited in Dallas, then transferred to the early-morning nonstop to Cancún. He’d traveled to Mexico four times before, all of them with MaryJane and twice with his children. Usually, Longo later said, he was a talkative passenger. This time, he didn’t speak with anyone on either flight.
When Longo failed to show up for his Starbucks interview, the FBI switched tactics. They decided to make the hunt for Longo both a nationwide affair and a public one. Charles Mathews, the chief FBI agent in Oregon, appeared on NBC’s Today show and on CNN’s Live Today to explain the charges against Longo and ask for any information the public could provide. He said that Longo might be driving a green Dodge Durango with a KIDVAN license plate.
Hundreds of tips were phoned in, some from as far afield as Florida and Iowa, with many callers saying that they’d spotted the plate. Nothing, however, was helpful—KIDVAN plates had been registered in at least twenty-five states. Longo’s parents, Joe and Joy Longo, who live in Indiana, issued a statement to the press, pleading for Christian to turn himself in. Longo never heard his parents’ appeal.
On January 6, nine days after the futile Starbucks sting, the Dodge Durango was found. Two San Francisco police officers spotted it in a short-term parking garage at the airport. Inside the vehicle was a laptop computer, a cell phone, a box of Triscuit crackers, some cheddar cheese, two empty bottles of wine, and a KIDVAN
license plate, which he’d never attached to the car.
Over the next few days, Longo was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list and profiled on the television show America’s Most Wanted. Longo, who had never previously been accused of a violent crime, was now on the same list as Osama bin Laden. His wanted poster called him “armed and extremely dangerous” and also mentioned that he “has been known to frequent coffee houses.” John Walsh, the host of America’s Most Wanted, said this of Longo: “He’s very, very charming. He’s very, very smart. He’s very calculating. He’s really, really good at disappearing.”
A $50,000 reward was offered by the FBI for information leading to Longo’s arrest, but the bureau also announced that Longo had evidently caught a flight to Mexico, to the resort area of Cancún. Spanish-language wanted posters, said the FBI, were currently being circulated across eastern Mexico, but in truth, the agency admitted, nobody really knew where Longo was.