Marc Holcomb

When Christian Longo asked if I wanted to watch him die, I told him I did.

He asked me this over the phone, calling collect from inside his prison cell — the yellow cordless passed down the line, cell to cell, hands reaching through bars — on death row at the Oregon State Penitentiary. The reason he wanted to die, he said, was fairly simple. After half a decade spent sealed inside a white concrete box for more than twenty-one hours a day, with only other murderers as neighbors and with no hope of ever again seeing the outside world, he'd had enough. He was sick of prison and sick of himself, and he thought there might be a way to make his death meaningful. So he was dropping his appeals, he told me, and would likely be executed, by lethal injection, in a matter of months.

Why he was calling me — and why I wanted to watch him die — was not so simple. By the time I received this call, last February, as I was watching a Dora the Explorer video with my children early on a Saturday evening, I'd known Christian Longo for seven years. In all this time I'd never been able to make sense of him, to reconcile the bright and dryly funny person I knew (he calls the yellow cordless his "cell" phone), the guy I sometimes referred to as my friend, with the man who'd been convicted of the most unimaginable of crimes. In 2001 he had strangled his wife and two-year-old daughter inside their condominium on the Oregon coast, stuffed them in suitcases, and sunk them in a bay. Then he drove his four-year-old son and three-year-old daughter to a nearby bridge, tied rocks to their legs, and tossed them into frigid water, alive.

I was drawn into Longo's life through the most improbable of circumstances — after the murders, while on the lam in Mexico, he took on my identity, even though we'd never met. Starting from this bizarre connection, using charm and guile and a steady stoking of my journalist's natural curiosity (he was innocent, he was framed, he had proof, he would show me), he soon became deeply enmeshed in my own life. In the first year, we exchanged more than a thousand pages of handwritten letters. I wrote a book about him.

After I started a family of my own, I didn't communicate with Longo anymore. But I was not disentangled from him. I remained haunted by Longo, by what he'd done; nearly every day, as I held my own kids, images of his crime — a child locked in a suitcase, or falling from a bridge, or fighting for air — would flit through my mind and I'd flinch, as if I'd brushed against a hot burner on the stove.

Then he phoned me last February, the first time in more than two years. "I'm not going to make it to my thirty-sixth birthday," he announced. A Will Smith movie, he said, had changed him. He saw it on the seven-inch flat-screen TV he keeps in his cell, a picture called Seven Pounds, about a guy who's so distraught after killing his fiancée and six others in a car accident that he decides to commit suicide and donate his organs to people in need. The movie, Longo said, felt like a punch in the gut. It made him weep. For years, he said, he'd sat in jail wondering how he could do anything worthwhile, anything at all to help even one person, rather than just rot away on death row. The movie gave him an answer. He would carve himself up. He'd give away his heart and lungs and liver and corneas and bone marrow and whatever else could be salvaged. His "finale," he called it. Let others live; let him die. That's what he wanted.

He'd reached this conclusion, he said, after conducting a strange, self-administered psychological test. Recently, for the first time since he'd been incarcerated, he hung up a photo of his children in his cell. It was a studio shot, one I'd seen at his trial, the three kids gazing smiley and wide-eyed into the camera, heartbreakingly cute.

"Every time I turned around or rolled over, there they were staring at me," Longo wrote in a letter he mailed me on May 8, 2009, nine weeks after the call. He had vivid recollections of the moment the picture was taken. "The only way that we could get them all to look at the camera at the same time was to have me behind it playacting a Barney phrase, 'Super-dee-duper!' " But his reaction to the photo disturbed him. "I'm not really feeling what everyone else feel's," he wrote, tossing in, as he often does, an extra apostrophe. "What should be most difficult to stomach is what I've done, yet somehow that part is still palatable." Lately, he added, when he looked in the mirror, he was "beginning to see a monster." He'd determined that the best solution was to give away his organs and "end on a good note."

First, he needed a favor. That's why he was calling. He asked if I'd be willing to help him formulate a plan to donate his body parts. I said, once I wrapped my mind around the idea, that it was something I could do, but first I needed to clear my conscience. If I was going to help him die, I had to hear the full story of the night his family was killed. Even though he was convicted of the four murders, he had never fully confessed nor provided some essential details about his motivation and what actually happened. I needed to know he was completely guilty. Longo asked that I come to the penitentiary, where we could meet in person. He'd tell me everything, he promised, if I helped with his plan. Here was a chance, I believed, to extinguish Longo from my life forever. I admit I felt some relief. So I said yes.

The first time I heard the name Christian Longo was in February 2002, when a reporter from the Portland Oregonian called and asked what I knew of the Longo-family murders. I had no idea what he was talking about. I soon learned that two months previous, the body of Zachery Longo had been found floating facedown in a muddy pond near the coastal village of Waldport, Oregon. When police divers searched for clues, they found, beneath a low bridge, his sister, Sadie. Tied to her right ankle was a flower-patterned pillowcase. Inside it was a large rock. Also in the water was a second pillowcase containing another rock — Zachery's body had slipped free and risen to the surface.

Police searched the Longo family's last known residence, a rented condo in the nearby town of Newport, where it appeared someone had left in a hurry. Divers explored the marina outside the unit and discovered a pair of large, dark-green suitcases. Inside one was the naked body of Longo's thirty-four-year-old wife, MaryJane. A chain of fingerprint-sized hemorrhages encircled her neck — she'd evidently been strangled before she was stuffed in the suitcase. In the second suitcase was the youngest member of Longo's family, his two-year-old daughter, Madison. Only Longo himself was missing.

He was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. Eventually, his car was found in the short-term-parking garage at the San Francisco airport. By deftly exploiting flaws in an online travel site, he'd purchased a plane ticket to Cancún, Mexico, using a stolen credit-card number.

The FBI distributed wanted posters around Cancún, and a tour guide who'd led Longo on a snorkeling trip spotted one. Longo was arrested at a beachfront cabana, where he'd been drinking beer, smoking dope, and sleeping with a young woman who had aspirations of becoming a professional photographer. The woman thought she was sleeping with a fellow journalist — a writer who just happened to need a photographer for an article about Mayan ruins. Longo had always dreamed of becoming a roving journalist, and while in Mexico he attempted to fulfill that fantasy. He called himself Michael Finkel. Which happens to be my name. And he told everyone he met that he was a writer for The New York Times. Which happened to be my job.

Actually, it wasn't my job anymore. Christian Longo entered my life at a moment of extreme weakness for me. At the same time I learned that Longo had become Michael Finkel of The New York Times — I mean the exact day — I was officially no longer Michael Finkel of The New York Times. I'd been fired by the paper because I fabricated an article I wrote about child labor in West Africa, combining quotations from several individual laborers into one fictitious composite character. A local aid agency uncovered my lie, and after it was reported to my editors, my career there was finished. At this instant of panic and vulnerability and shame, along came Longo.

I became obsessed, past any point of healthy distance, with understanding Longo. Over the following year, as he awaited trial in county jail, we exchanged letters nearly every week. We spoke on the phone for a total of more than fifty hours. I visited him in jail ten times. I rented a cottage in Newport, Oregon, and moved from my home in Montana so I could attend every minute of his murder trial.

What did I learn? Everything and nothing. At first, Longo had blamed a drug-addled intruder for killing his family. Then he accused MaryJane of initiating the murders. Then he said he wasn't really sure of the details. He testified for four days but never convincingly explained what happened that night — or fully confessed what he seemed to have plainly done.

I can tell you with certainty, however, Longo's favorite coffee drink (hazelnut latte) and the first R-rated movie he ever saw (Tango & Cash) and the name of the first girl he kissed (Georgina) and his favorite cut of beef (prime rib) and his jail nickname (Short Stop, the opposite of Long Go). I know that his IQ has been measured at 130, which is above the ninety-eighth percentile. His letters, written on thin yellow jailhouse paper, sometimes topped sixty pages, line after precisely printed line, detailed and poignant and horrifying and droll, almost completely without cross-outs or erasures, an epic stream-of-consciousness unspooling of his life story. He once told me that I knew him better than his own parents do.

Longo grew up in the Midwest, where his father worked as a manager for Target department stores. He has one sibling, a younger brother, Dustin. He met his wife, MaryJane Baker, soon after the family moved to Ypsilanti, Michigan, and began dating her when he was eighteen years old. MaryJane was seven years older — a petite, pretty, quietly pious woman who, despite concerns about their age difference, told Longo she found him exceptionally mature, and agreed to go out with him.

They were married five months later, over his parents' deep disapproval, and by the time Longo was twenty-five, he had three children. He started a construction-cleanup business called Final Touch, and when it grew swiftly — at one point Longo had seventy-two employees — he believed he would become a millionaire.

This is when the break with reality happened. Longo so badly craved success — to prove his parents wrong, to make his wife proud, to be viewed as a big shot — that when his company began struggling, he claimed to everyone, including his wife, that it was rolling in profits.

Then the family car broke down. Such a small thing. MaryJane assumed they could afford a new one, and Longo assured her they could. So he booked a one-way rental car and drove to an out-of-state auto dealer. He asked to test-drive a maroon minivan. He'd created a fake license that was photocopied as proof of identification. Longo drove off the lot and never returned.

This was not a violent crime. In fact, I could not unearth a single violent incident in Longo's life before the murders, apart from a minor scuffle his freshman year of high school. I looked everywhere; I spoke with everyone I could. I didn't even find an occasion when he lost his temper, when he so much as raised his voice. He hardly swore; he never fought with his brother. A woman who attended his church said she used to tell her friends, "I wish my husband could be more like Chris Longo." But the one thing he could never do was admit to his wife that he was anything less than a success.

To maintain the facade, he began counterfeiting checks, then forging credit cards. These are not scams you can get away with forever. Soon enough, arrest warrants were issued and creditors were hounding him. Longo, sensing doom, convinced MaryJane — who was aware her husband was overstating the family's financial stability, though she seemed to have no idea how greatly — that they needed to leave Michigan and seek even greater fortune out west.

They drove, in the stolen minivan, until in the autumn of 2001 they ran out of road on the Oregon coast. The best job Longo could find was making $7.40 an hour at a Starbucks inside a Fred Meyer department store. He needed to rent a home and support a family of five. There was no way he could afford it, and he was too proud to ask his parents for help or accept welfare or confess to MaryJane that she'd been duped. He resorted to petty crime and realized, once again, that the family would have to flee.

But you can't keep running when you have three children. You can't keep writing fake checks. You can't earn any real income when there are outstanding warrants for your arrest and you're unable to pass a background check or even give out your Social Security number. And you can't admit that you've been deceiving your wife for years, that in reality she's married a loser and a liar and a thief. That you can't afford a tank of gas, let alone housing and diapers and clothing and food. You're trapped.

At work one evening, at the Fred Meyer, he reached his breaking point. When he got home late that night, he killed his family. It was a week before Christmas, 2001. He fled Oregon and later flew to Mexico. On January 13, 2002, he was arrested in Cancún, where he was posing as me. His trial began in March 2003 and ran for a month. The jury took less than a day to find Longo guilty and sentence him to death.

Longo's existence, like that of the other thirty-one men on Oregon's death row, is largely confined to a six-foot-by-eight-foot cell, with three walls of pale white concrete and one wall of steel bars interrupted only by a tray slot through which meals are pushed. Inside is a narrow bunk, a porcelain sink and toilet, a stackable plastic chair, and a tiny metal desk. The floor is unpainted gray concrete. A small bulletin board is the one spot where photos or decorations are permitted to hang. The sole splash of color is on the fourteen bars — down the three long hallways of death row the cells' bars alternate pastel hues: "canary yellow bars, powder blue ones, & seafoam green," in Longo's precise description. His cell, which he always refers to as his "house," is number 313, with blue bars. There are no windows.

Except for two brief daily walks, during which an inmate can pace the hallway outside the cells, and a ninety-minute break in an encaged outdoor weight room or rec yard, the day is passed alone — no one has a cellmate on death row. "All of the in-cell time is horrible," Longo wrote me. He's jealous that another wife murderer, Scott Peterson, is incarcerated in California and "only stuck in his place for 19 hours/day."

Longo keeps his cell spotless and meticulously ordered — every spice bottle, every jar of lotion and shampoo, every book (Bible, dictionary, encyclopedia, a couple of Vonneguts, Infinite Jest) has a particular spot. Other cells, he writes, are littered with "remnants of the previous meal, salt & pepper flakes everywhere, a half dozen roll's of partially used toilet paper, a pile of plastic items in the sink, an unmade bed at 4 pm & and nothing but a menu on the bulletin board." Still, there are general rules of etiquette. It's polite, for example, to mask particularly audible flatulence by simultaneously flushing your toilet.

An odor repellent is also essential. Inmates tear out scent strips from magazines, or spread deodorant on their bars, or hang popsicle sticks dipped in frankincense. Frankincense oil is purchased ($4.99 an ounce) from the prison commissary; it's on the order sheet under Religious Items, alphabetically categorized between Elder Futhark Runes ($19.97) and Haindl Rune Oracle Cards ($12). A tallith is $35.99. He also bought his television at the commissary, for $216; deliveries to death row are every Wednesday. Funds are transferred from a prison account, in which outsiders can deposit money.

Some inmates, whom Longo in his death-row taxonomy calls "slugs," essentially do nothing all day. They eat, watch TV, sleep. The "kids," on the other hand, are generally "argumentative, disrespectful of everyone, short tempered, dirty." The "matures" — Longo considers himself somewhere between the kids and the matures — obey the rules, pursue prison-appropriate hobbies like learning the guitar, playing chess, and creating elaborate pen-and-ink drawings, and have sensible workout routines. (The kids just try to lift the heaviest possible weight. Longo says he spends so many hours in his cell doing sit-ups, push-ups, and toilet-seat step-ups that his resting heart rate is as low as forty-six beats per minute; at times he also avoids "breads, desserts, butter, gravy.") The remainder of the inmates are "sailboats." They "go with the prevailing wind, not really fitting in anywhere."

Everyone, though, seems to agree on the importance of porn. On Oregon's death row, there are no contact visits — you're sealed behind a pane of bulletproof Plexiglas — so for the rest of your life you can't so much as hold a woman's hand. Longo's porn stash, he writes, is relatively tame: "Where I might be content with the Playboy-esque spreads, somebody else needs something involving fists." The inmates sell it to one another; the going rate is between fifty cents and a dollar per page.

Also, Longo says, you get to claim your favorite actress or two, and once you do, it's understood that no one else on death row can have her. Longo has dibs on Jennifer Connelly and Alyssa Milano. "Every time a movie comes on with one of our actresses," Longo writes of the prison film channels, "it's common courtesy here to yell it down to the one who's claimed her. 'Hey Chris, A Beautiful Mind just came on 3!' " If there's a nude scene in a movie, the men will count down the seconds out loud.

The second-most-prevalent obsession is food. Longo says he actually has two photo collections: nude women and gourmet cuisine. His letters to me are filled with food cravings: "a salt bagel with a full plain cream cheese schmeer from Einstein or Brueggers — toasted, of course"; "a cinnabon with a good cup of coffee"; "a pizza"; "honey-dripping baklava." To make the institutional meals more palatable, the men sometimes hold death-row dinner parties. Several inmates will pass their trays down the row to one cell — frequently, to Longo's. He'll combine all the food together, add commissary-bought items like hot sauce, peppers, and shredded cheese, then rebuild the plates "Cadillac style," as it's called, and send the trays back.

A few guys will sometimes watch a television show together — each in their own cells but at the same time. This season, Survivor was popular (they bet Little Debbies on who'd be eliminated), and for the show Longo would often concoct a group snack. Caramel popcorn was a favorite, prepared by unwrapping a bunch of caramels (fifty-seven cents each at the commissary) and melting them in what passes for an oven on death-row: a plastic pencil box ($1.99) placed in the sink and bathed in the penitentiary's surprisingly scalding hot water.

Real death-row parties, however, require a batch of pruno, the prison hooch: Take the grapefruit that comes with Saturday breakfast, peel, crush, and place in an empty milk carton. Enzymes remaining inside the carton, combined with natural yeast from the air, trigger fermentation within a few days. Dump into a garbage bag and add a pound of sugar and a pound of canteen-bought prunes per person. Let sit for a week, occasionally (and when no guards are around) burping out excess gas. Strain pulp through a sock. The alcohol content, Longo says, is as much as 12 percent, and the taste is about what you'd expect from something filtered through a sock. Still, if you can stomach a couple of twenty-ounce cups, pruno provides "a good escape."

Generally, Longo says, everyone on death row gets along, at least on the surface. "There's a weird pseudo-cordiality thing here," he writes. "But you know that given the opportunity to get away with it a few here would have no compunction about stabbing someone where they sleep." In truth, he writes, nobody trusts anyone. Several men were transferred to death row from the general prison population after murdering other inmates. A few are serial killers. "I'm surrounded," Longo writes, "by so much degeneracy and perversion." The death-row barber, Dayton Rogers, was convicted of killing six women (though he may have murdered more) and liked to cut off the feet of his victims with a hacksaw while they were still alive. I once asked Longo if he thought anyone on Oregon's death row was innocent. "No," he replied.

In some ways, Longo says, you get to know the other people on death row extraordinarily well — their favorite fishing hole, the name of their childhood pets — but it can be challenging to separate their real lives from the fantasy version. One inmate told Longo, in intricate detail, how he'd scuba dived in Lake Michigan to see the shipwreck Griffin. But Longo knew this person "never got out of the state of Nevada until they were 18, where they were promptly arrested for murder & have lived here since." He'd also just watched the same show about the Griffin, on the Science Channel, from which the inmate had cribbed every fact. The reality, Longo writes, is that on death row "nobody is what they seem."

This includes Longo himself. Money is an important asset in prison — not only to purchase snacks and supply your cell with the best possible television and guitar and Game Boy and headphones but also to garner status and respect. Longo's facade in prison is the same as it was in the outside world: a successful businessman. On death row, people think he's a stock-market whiz. And on the surface he seems to be. He subscribes to The Wall Street Journal and Barron's (using frequent-flier miles left over from his former life) and often keeps his TV tuned all day to CNBC. He supposedly calls his broker with picks and earns big profits. It's actually an elaborate ruse. "All of that pretend stock market playing is believed to be real," Longo writes. "I've never told anyone that it's not. And I use the phone for sufficient amount's of time to all for that thought to seem legit."

Longo is, indeed, making money on death row. But not on the market. He's really providing titillating letters and phone sex to a couple of gay men. This is a rather common fetish, it turns out; whenever a new inmate arrives on death row, according to Longo, he'll be inundated by letters from men (who've followed the case through the media) seeking a prison lover, perhaps turned on by the thought of an amorous murderer. Such men — known as "ATMs" — will return the favor with generous deposits in a prison account.

Longo said he has two ATMs. One is an accountant in San Francisco: "He saw me as the chick in the relationship and constantly tried to force the wife title on me." The other is a schoolteacher (and grandfather of three) in New York City: "His fantasy was to have me crucified, Christ style, so that he could pull me down and tend to my wounds." He's had these two "on the hook" for more than five years, and in return they've given him thousands of dollars, though he says he recently ended the relationships.

Maintaining the stock-market lie, Longo writes, is getting "exhausting." But he can't be honest, he explains, because of "extreme embarrassment." It's a similar combination, I believe — too tired to keep lying, too ashamed to reveal the truth — that led him to murder his family. Only this time, he wants to kill himself.

"I'm in a place," he writes, "where you're surrounded by similarly messed up people with only one mission. To do time. Something I'm more than worn out on already." There's really no point in continuing, he says. He's ready to carve himself up. "After looking at my neighbors who have been here for a dozen years or 30, it's all an exercise in futility. So you can play the guitar well enough to be in a band & entertain millions. Or you've studied magic as a hobby & now you can dazzle the group... . Five, ten, fifty years later you're still living in a box amongst a bunch of other boxes within a bigger box."

As the months passed from the time Longo told me he was planning to die, he explored, over the course of a dozen dense letters — his handwriting a sort of small-caps style, neat as a font — the peculiar environment of death row and, more intimately, the complicated landscape between his ears. The only time he'd been thoroughly examined by a psychologist, shortly before his trial, the ensuing report labeled him a borderline psychopath.

Longo did not disagree with the assessment. But he did debate precisely which side of the line he was on. After hanging up the photo of his children and hardly reacting, he called himself "dead inside" and "more cold-hearted than I could ever imagine a human could be." Other times, he was convinced he was just as capable of emotion as anyone else: "If I am a monster how could I have ever loved them as I felt I did?" he wrote about his family. "It didn't equate. When thinking back about times in life where my heart was squeezed in my throat, nothing hurt more than when Sadie fell off the swing that I was pushing her on. To see tears fall from your child's face that you are the direct cause of was more painful than anything that I could remember. It's still painful. How could I be so horrible & still have that sort of pain?" Also, he noted, as further refutation of his psychopathy, "I got choked up during E.T. & Titanic."

The longer he thought about all this, the more confused he became. He said he felt "nearly constant guilt over not feeling guilty enough for what I did" and that his attempts to understand his behavior seem "like trying to unscramble really rotten eggs." Eventually, he gave up. His letters turned darker and more fatalistic. "It does feel very much," he wrote, "like the day's are ticking by time-bomb fashion." Longo agreed to put me on the witness list for his execution and said he'd be willing to meet with me in the week leading up to his death. I found myself wondering what he'd order for his last meal, or say in his final statement, while strapped to the gurney.

Then my wife stepped in. Jill has known about Longo from the start; we were dating when he first came into my life. She's always been sickened by his crimes, but now her revulsion was even more acute. Less than a month after Longo called me anew, she gave birth to our third child, a girl. The fact that I, a man who now has a wife and three young kids, was speaking with a man who killed his wife and three young kids greatly disturbed her. She was particularly upset whenever Longo bantered about my fatherly duties — "I'm sure there's a diaper that needs changing, or a car seat to clean out. I know," he once wrote. He occasionally referred to my home life as "Finkelwood."

And yet my apparent enthusiasm for — and ancillary participation in — his execution also troubled her. She felt, in essence, that I was helping kill a person with whom I'd had a profoundly intricate relationship, and that this would weigh on my conscience. She said what I first needed to do, before I agreed to witness Longo's death, was try my hardest to talk him out of it.

I realized she was right. So I wrote Longo a letter. I knew, innately, that any emotion-based argument would accomplish nothing. But I did have an idea. Longo, I believed, really wanted to "enhance someone else's life," as he wrote, by sacrificing his own, a real-life version of the Will Smith movie. However, I'd spoken with a transplant surgeon and learned that the execution procedure — sodium pentothal then pancuronium bromide then potassium chloride poured into the veins — rendered all organs useless. Some skin tissue could be saved. Maybe the heart valves. Then his body could be donated to a medical school.

It wasn't much — it didn't seem to fulfill his goal — and I told him so in my letter. The problem, I wrote, was that the state-administered death cocktail produced heart failure. If you were able to change the procedure (the law isn't specific about the precise drugs used) so that it induced brain death instead, the organs could be transplanted. And then, I continued, if you signed up other inmates and the idea went national, you might save the lives of dozens of people who would've died on organ waiting lists. "Sounds like 10 years work to me, minimum," I wrote, though I also noted that he could quit, any time, and resume his current plan. "What's your reaction?"

Longo was astounded. When he read my letter, he told me, something inside of him clicked. A switch was thrown. He felt an enthusiasm he hadn't experienced in years. He felt inspired. It's "giving me goose bumps," he wrote.

And so, in his single-minded way, Longo promptly dedicated himself to making the idea a reality. He came up with a name: GAVE. Gifts of Anatomical Value from the Executed. With the help of his brother, he set up a Web site — GaveLife.org. A photo on the first version of the home page showed a family riding a merry-go-round: Mom, Dad, two grinning kids. "I am a death row inmate who wants to save lives," Longo wrote on his site. "Not to set right my wrongs — as this is unfortunately impossible — but to make a positive out of an otherwise horrible situation." Instead of needing my help to distribute his body parts, Longo now wanted me to devote time to his new project.

First, though, we had some unfinished business. Longo had vowed, in return for my assistance with his Seven Pounds plan, to tell me the truth about the murders —a truth he had never revealed. And though my side of the bargain may have changed, his had not. So I traveled to Salem, Oregon, to the cement-walled penitentiary. I walked beneath the klieg lights and guard towers and loops of razor wire ("killer Slinky," in prison parlance) and placed my belt, car keys, and cell phone in a dented metal locker near the officers' desk. I passed through a metal detector and walked down a ramp toward the underground visiting area. Escorted by a guard, who set in motion enormous steel doors, sliding on tracks —the slam and the boom, the big skeleton keys, all the prison clichés that happen to be true —I moved through a cinder-block hallway and into an area of cubiclelike visiting booths.

I was assigned booth number 9, but before going there, I stopped at a small wooden table at the visiting-room entrance. There, beneath a hand-lettered sign that said LIFERS CLUB PHOTO'S —again with the apostrophes —was a potbellied man wearing a standard blue prison uniform and holding a digital camera. His name, he said, was Marc Holcomb. Through good behavior, he had earned permission to work as a kind of house photographer on the visitors' side of the booths, and I hired him to take four photos of Longo and me for two dollars each. (One appears on pages 120 and 121.) Later, I looked up his crime. In 1999, Holcomb shot and killed a man during a home break-in; he was serving a sixty-nine-and-a-half-year sentence but wasn't on death row.

I sat in a red-cushioned chair parked in front of a Plexiglas window, an old black telephone receiver mounted on the right-hand wall, and looked into an empty booth, where another receiver hung, waiting for Longo to arrive. My heart was racing and I felt a prickle of sweat on my forehead. I wiped my palms on my pants. Then the light-green door opened up on the inmate side of the booth and Longo walked in, his hands cuffed behind his back, and the door closed, sealing him into the booth, and he backed up a step and bent his knees a little and stuck his wrists through a slot in the door and an officer uncuffed him, and he sat on the stool across from me and smiled and picked up his receiver.

It had been five years since we'd seen each other. He was wearing a light-blue button-down shirt that said INMATE in orange letters over the left pocket and faded blue jeans and shiny white Nikes and had a tiny soul patch of pale red hair centered just below his lower lip. He was thirty-five years old but still possessed a youthful, slightly freckled, frat-boy look, with wide-set ears and a sharp, prominent Adam's apple. The photographer quickly snapped his shots and left us alone. We started casually, jocularly —always the easiest mode to slip into when speaking with Longo.

"So, do I look older?" I asked.

"No," he said. "You look as old as you've always looked."

He put down the receiver and ran his hands through his hair, to show me that it had started to thin, and I feigned horror and then leaned over to show him my far-more-advanced bald spot.

"I blame my children for my hairline," I said. The last time I'd seen him I didn't have any. "Three kids in thirty-seven months will do this to you."

Longo said he'd had three kids in thirty-one months, and it was the sort of opening I was looking for. I said I knew how quickly he'd built up a family, and how young he was, and that I had personal insight into all the work, and the energy, and the money a trio of young children requires. I told him I now intimately understood the pressures and the exhaustion, the desire to be a great father but also, just out of your grasp, the desire to every once in a while be free again, just go to a bar and get drunk and flirt with girls rather than come home at five o'clock to help cook a dinner you'll soon end up, on hands and knees, scrubbing off the floor.

Then, with that play at empathy, I swiftly reviewed the last few months of his family's life —the fake checks, the drive west, his job at a Starbucks, the realization that there was no way he could support his family. That he'd reached the end of the line.

"How long before that final night did you know you were going to kill your family?" I asked.

He said it was only a few hours before, while at work, that he came to a decision. He said he couldn't see any other solution. He couldn't call his father and ask for money —he was too ashamed. He couldn't kill himself —he was too weak. He was a failure, he told me, "and I didn't want to leave any witnesses to my failure." He said he didn't know how, exactly, he was going to do it, but that he'd made up his mind. "I knew before I came home that night I was going to kill my family. I was locked on that thought." Maybe I knew this already, but the words still surprised me. Never before —not at his trial, not in our long correspondence —had Longo admitted this.

When he came home from work, though it was quite late, MaryJane initiated lovemaking, he said, and soon he was naked and she was naked and they were in the small one-bedroom condo —a nice place overlooking Yaquina Bay, on the Oregon coast, with his two older kids asleep in the living room on a pullout couch and little Madison in their bedroom, on a sleeping bag on the floor. It was past midnight. He was making love to his wife. She was on top. He told me this in a clear, steady voice, but he would not make eye contact. He was staring at the visiting-booth floor, at the worn industrial carpeting.

And it hit him, he said, it dawned on him right then, that this was the opportunity. This was the time. As they were having sex. And he reached up and took her throat. Longo said that he didn't see any surprise in her face. He grasped his wife by the throat, grabbed with both hands. He said she didn't resist at all. It's possible, he said, that she thought it was a little sudden, sexual kinkiness.

But he never let go. He squeezed and didn't stop squeezing. Longo told me that if he'd had a gun, he would've used it, but then immediately he changed his mind. Too messy, he said. He didn't want to make a mess. He said MJ —that's how he always refers to his wife —didn't really struggle, didn't kick or claw at his hands or make any noise at all. He said it was silent. "She seemed to relax into it. She never looked at me. Her eyes were closed. She didn't fight me, she didn't seem terrorized." The TV was on, softly. Longo couldn't recall what was playing, but he remembered the flickering blueness across the room, across his naked body and hers; he was still on the bottom, he was reaching up, grabbing his wife's neck with both hands, grabbing so hard his fingers dug deep, forming the scars that would be found when the divers opened the suitcase.

It takes quite a long time to kill someone by strangulation. Like five minutes. Longo said it was long enough for him to think, during the act, that maybe he ought to stop. But then he figured he'd already begun, and if he stopped and MJ survived —then what? His wife would leave him and he'd still be in trouble.

When she was dead, he got up, put on some clothes, and strangled their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Madison, who was sleeping on the floor. He strangled her with one hand. This was how Longo described the feeling of strangling a two-year-old, her neck so soft and thin: "To hold on to a little girl's neck is the most weird, uncomfortable, disgusting thing in the world. It tore me up to put my hands around something that small." It was so difficult, he said, that he could not strangle the two older children. And in fact, he said he didn't finish the job on Madison. He said he remembered hearing her gasp and cry through the suitcase as he carried it out of the condo and dropped it in the December-cold water, where police divers found it nine days later.

Longo insisted he loved his family, that he never wanted harm to come to them. To this day, he said, seeing violence toward children on TV makes him angry —"and then I remember, Oh, yeah that's what I did." Even on the night he'd decided to murder his family, if he had come home from work and an intruder was there, trying to hurt his family, he said he would've tried to kill that intruder.

Longo was clearly uncomfortable telling me this story —he kept switching the phone receiver from ear to ear —but he remained composed. He talked about returning to the condo after dumping the bodies of his wife and baby, in suitcases, off a dock and into the bay. He had no stomach for strangling anyone else, so he lifted Zachery and Sadie gingerly from their sleep, one at a time, and nested them in their car seats in the stolen minivan, which had the license plate KIDVAN. He knew he was going to kill them, he said, but still he made sure they were properly buckled in. That was just the procedure. The kids never woke up.

It was a chilly and wet December night, just a few degrees above freezing. As he started driving, he began to think that maybe he didn't have to conclude this. "Okay," he remembered thinking, "the worst is over and we've survived." Maybe just the three of them could go on. He recalled wondering if they'd wake up and ask for Mommy. How would he explain it? How would he get away with it? He couldn't answer those questions and so decided it was too late, he'd started it and now he had to finish. "I was committed to this thing," he said. "I wanted a clean do-over."

He pulled over on a residential street and picked up a couple of bowling-ball-sized rocks. Then he drove to the bridge over a coastal inlet called Lint Slough, stopped halfway across, slid open the minivan doors as quietly as he could, and turned off the dome light so that his children wouldn't wake up. He placed each rock into a pillowcase. And then, with the weighted pillowcase tied in a quick overhand knot to an ankle, he threw one child off the railing of the bridge, walked around the van to the second car seat, again tied on a pillowcase, and dropped the other child off the opposite side.

Here Longo stopped his story. He put down the phone and rubbed his forehead with both hands. He picked it up again but didn't talk. He looked confused. Then he told me that he couldn't recall which child he dropped in the water first, Zachery or Sadie. He moved the receiver away from his ear again and was silent for a long couple of beats.

"I can't remember," he said.

His eyes grew glassy. He was quiet again.

"I can't remember who I threw in first."

He stared ahead, not looking at anything, it seemed. In a daze, hardly blinking.

"I can see the kids so clearly in my mind now," he said. "You know when you catch a whiff of somebody's scent and how vividly it brings back so many images? That's how I feel about my kids now, I can feel them, smell them, touch them in my mind. I can hear their voices. See their faces. But I can't remember who I killed first."

A tear escaped from his left eye. Just one. He wiped it away quickly.

"I can't remember who I killed first."

Probably a full minute passed. His jaw trembled. He was pressing the phone so tightly to his head that his right ear turned scarlet. His knuckles, as he gripped the receiver, were white. I watched him struggle and squirm and try to recall which child he murdered first. I didn't say anything. He just couldn't remember.

And that was how we left it. When I walked away from the visiting room, out of the prison, I felt sickened; I was mentally and physically exhausted. I couldn't even start my rental car, my hands were shaking. There was a leftover half sandwich in the passenger seat and the smell made me nauseous. The crime still made no sense. Why didn't he just abandon his family? Kill himself? Call his parents? Call his wife's family? Call a help line? These are the same questions I had seven years ago, soon after I first heard Christian Longo's name from the reporter at the Oregonian. They were the same questions I wondered about five years ago, at the conclusion of his trial. And the exact ones I had last winter, too, when I set out to get his final answers.

It's never been easy to say how I feel about Longo. I've been tugged, from the start, between revulsion and fascination, between hoping to know the truth and wanting to imagine that Longo couldn't actually murder his own family. But after hearing this story, there was no doubt. Hate seems too flat a word, too glib, but that is what I felt. I hated the crime, I hated hearing about it, thinking about it, imagining it, and I hated the person who did it. And it was the worst kind of hate, too, because it really didn't matter. There was nothing anyone could do to bring back MaryJane or the children, or make the man who killed them, with his porn stash and his caramel popcorn, ever face adequate punishment, even if he is executed and carved into pieces.

His days, he says, are now a flurry of letter writing and research, poring through law journals, gathering statistical data. He's contacting law schools, hospitals, legislators, attorneys, organ-donation groups, transplant officials, anesthesiologists. He's seeking a support staff, hoping a law student or two is willing to take on Gifts of Anatomical Value from the Executed as a pro-bono project. He constructed and mailed me an intricate eight-page outline of things he had to accomplish to make GAVE a success — by my count, there are 311 separate bullet points and 85 questions that need answers, covering everything from inmate transportation to hospital security to the cost of follow-up care. (Under "Organ Donation — Road Blocks — Scientific:" "Any research org's currently testing for brain death applications?" From "Organ Donation — Road Blocks — Perception:" "Will there be any industry squeamishness surrounding the donor being a convicted murderer?")

Longo's hope is that inmates, and not just those on death row, will be allowed both to make living anatomical donations — kidney and liver lobes and bone marrow — and then, for those who are executed, to give away all the major organs. More than a hundred thousand Americans are on organ-transplant waiting lists. The median time to receive a kidney, the organ most in demand, is 1,219 days. About fourteen thousand people donate organs every year. There are 2.4 million people incarcerated in the United States. Longo's goal is to inspire 1 percent of them to participate in the living-donation program each year. That's nearly twenty-four thousand people. If he even came close to achieving that, it would more than double the nation's supply of available organs.

But is this possible? I asked a couple of veteran Oregon attorneys. Yes, it is technically possible. But highly improbable. As one lawyer said, summing up the consensus, Longo's endeavor is "harmless" — unlikely to get anywhere, but won't cause any damage.

Longo works on the project every day, from breakfast (served at 5:00 A.M.) to midnight, with notes left on his desk reminding him where to start in the morning. "Yard was cancelled today & I'm actually grateful for the extra 90 minutes," he wrote in one letter. I have never, in all the years I've known him, seen him so driven, so excited about something.

And yes: so happy. He has a mission, a focus, a purpose. In a way, the project has transported him beyond the prison walls. He decided not to drop his appeals after all; rather he's aggressively pursuing them full force, likely putting off his execution date by at least a decade. He needs the time, he says, to work on GAVE. He wants to live. It's odd. He was the one person on earth I wanted to die, and instead I've helped to save his goddamn life.

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