http://www.registerguard.com/web/newslocalnews/26475598-57/longo-wilson-family-organs-death.html.cspThe crusade of Christian Longo
The convicted killer wants to donate his organs, but is it just another selfish plea for attention?
BY WINSTON ROSS
Christian Longo joined Oregon’s Death Row without remorse.
Even with his sentence passed down in April 2003, the convicted killer still was clinging to the web of lies he’d cooked up to explain the deaths of his wife and three young children. Longo still insisted to his own family and friends that he strangled his wife, MaryJane, in a fit of rage, after discovering that she had killed two of the couple’s children, not long after the family moved to the Oregon Coast from Michigan in 2001. Then, he maintained, he put the last child breathing, 2-year-old Madison, out of her misery.
The fabrication enraged the family of his victims. Not only was Longo still denying his horrific crimes, he was blaming them on his murdered wife.
Now, from the white walls of a 6-foot-by-8-foot cell at the Oregon State Penitentiary, Longo wants the world to believe he has changed. That he’s come to grips with the “monster” that he is. That he accepts full responsibility for strangling his wife and youngest daughter, Madison, and dumping his two other children, 4-year-old Zachery and 3-year-old Sadie, off a bridge and into a frigid bay along the Oregon Coast while they were still alive, rock-filled pillowcases tied to their legs to ensure they sank to the bottom and drowned.
Now, he says, he wants to make amends.
Longo said he wants his organs donated once he’s executed, and he’s created a Facebook page, a nonprofit organization — and a headache for prison officials who said they have no interest in negotiating with inmates who want to change the rules or the drugs used to put inmates to death. (The current cocktail of drugs makes it impossible to preserve organs.)
Longo claims he’s willing to waive his appeals if the state will grant what would ultimately be his last wish, potentially shortening the time before his execution.
Family members of Longo’s victims said what the narcissistic killer really wants is attention.
In April, editors at the New York Times gave Longo a virtual megaphone, publishing an opinion piece by the inmate, allowing him to launch a nationwide campaign to convince not just Oregon but all states to change the rules for capital inmates, to let them donate their organs after they’re executed.
“I look at the death penalty as a lemon of an automobile,” Longo wrote in a 65-page letter to the Department of Corrections on June 4, 2010. “No matter what is done in an attempt to fix it, it will always be broken.
“But as long as we are stuck with it, we might as well deliver meals-on-wheels.”
Longo’s proposal comes with a host of practical and ethical complications that leave the organ donation community and prison officials in steadfast opposition to the idea.
It’s also a painful reminder to the victims’ families that Longo is still alive. That he writes letters, has a Facebook page, spends 90 minutes a day working out, eats cinnamon rolls, watches movies and develops relationships with people on the outside. That he gets to have a cause, a purpose, while their loved ones do not. Christian Longo may have changed, they said, but he never really can make amends for what he did.
“If he was truly sorry for what he has done, he would shut up and accept his punishment,” said Penny Baker-Dupuie, MaryJane Longo’s sister. “If it was truly important to him, he would fight for the cause privately.”
Added Cathy Shukait, a close friend of Jennifer Kegley, another of MaryJane Longo’s sisters: “He wants to give up his organs? Take them out without anesthetic.
“That’s how I feel.”
The boy who cried wolf
Longo said he knows this quest is offensive to many people on many levels. Nonetheless, he’s committed to seeing it through, he said. And he insists it’s not an attempt to soften his image, to blunt the impact of what he’s done, to alter his legacy as a killer.
But the problem with Christian Longo is that he’s told so many lies to so many people, the same stack of mistruths and kited checks and identity theft that got him “disfellowshipped” from the Jehovah’s Witness church in Michigan. The same lies that finally collapsed on him in 2001, after he murdered his family and disappeared to Mexico, posing as a disgraced former New York Times reporter.
Psychologists have labeled him a borderline psychopath, a narcissist. His IQ is in the 98th percentile, according to experts who testified at his trial. Longo is smart, guileful and charming enough to convince just about anyone of anything. Knowing his true motives, what really makes him tick, is nearly impossible, Baker-Dupuie said. And that includes the story of how he came up with the organ donation idea in the first place.
Longo tells it this way: When he first got to Death Row, people who’d been following the case started writing him letters, which he learned is commonplace. He sorted through the mail and decided whose letters he’d respond to.
One correspondent was a young woman from Salem named Shawna Wilson, who had grown up in Springfield and followed the Longo case. She wrote to Longo because she was curious, she said. She wanted to know how a man could kill his own wife and children.
“I just thought, ‘What is this man thinking? Do you remember what color clothes (your children) were wearing?’ ” said Wilson, 36, now a student at Chemeketa Community College, in a recent interview.
Her first letter was generic, Wilson said, feigning empathy, even. She told Longo she knew he didn’t have family in Oregon and that he could write to her if he wanted to
“In a situation like this,” Longo said in a recent interview with The Register-Guard in the prison’s visiting area, with a wave at his surroundings, “a pen pal is a great thing to have.”
The correspondents
Over the next several years, the two developed an odd friendship, with romantic undertones, at least for the death row inmate — although not one he could ever hope to consummate. Their attachment became an emotional one, both said.
And for the first several years, it was a correspondence based on a series of Longo’s lies.
The killer insisted, as he had with everyone else who remained in contact with him, that the story he told in court was true, that he murdered two of his family members and not four. That MaryJane was a bad mother, to boot.
Wilson knew to whom she was writing, his documented history of manipulation and deceit. Ultimately, she came to believe that maybe Christian Longo would be straight with her, she said, if she gave him a clean slate. To this day, Wilson has no idea what in the letters was truth and what was fiction. But she was completely sucked in, if for no other reason than to find out what he’d say next.
“If I gave him a little bit about me, he would write back a little bit about his life,” she said. “It was fascinating.”
After some time, Wilson revealed to Longo that she has a condition known as systemic scleroderma, an autoimmune disease that ultimately can cause the kidney and other organs to fail. Longo, who said he signed up to be an organ donor when he first got his driver’s license, said he wanted to help her, and he began to lobby the prison to allow him to donate a kidney to his pen pal.
But the state only allows living organ donations to relatives, Jeanine Hohn, a Department of Corrections spokeswoman, told The Register-Guard. A new kidney wouldn’t do Wilson any good anyway, because her condition would cause her body to reject it and make the surgery itself a life-threatening one.
The final deal-breaker: Longo and Wilson are not of the same blood type.
The deadbeat’s dilemma
But this small quest had unlocked something inside of Longo, he said.
Years after brutally killing his family, Christian Longo said he was developing a kind of conscience — a notion at which his victims’ families scoff. He said he has had eight years on Death Row to think about why he killed his family.
There’s a “flaw” in him, and he’s not sure labels like “psychopath” or “narcissist” accurately describe it.
“It’s a point of selfishness,” Longo said. “It allows you to do anything to maintain the image you want to project.”
Christian Longo finally realized it was time to come clean about what he had done, he said. He said he started with Wilson, in a 50-page letter, the all-caps handwriting so precise it looks almost computer generated.
Longo spilled his life story onto those pages, spending most of his time on the two years before the murders, when he slid deeper and deeper into debt and was facing criminal charges for theft.
Longo decided he wanted out, he said. If he took the path most deadbeat dads choose, everyone would know what he’d done, that he’d abandoned his family, he said. So he decided that he would make them vanish, himself included.
“It was a pride issue. Leaving would represent to everybody that I had failed,” Longo said. “If they disappear, if I disappear, no one knows for sure. It’s a mystery.”
He finally told the woman he now describes as his best friend: He was guilty of the murders.
For several months, Wilson did not respond to the opus. When she did write back, she said she knew all along that Longo was truly guilty, but that she was still furious that he’d lied to her — and not just about the murders. He had been lying the whole time, in letter after letter, about detail after detail.
The relationship had to end, she said, which left Longo without an outlet for his newfound altruism. He decided to shift his focus to a broader cause, convincing prison officials to change the rules not just for him but systemwide, allowing inmates to donate their organs after being executed, he said.
Meeting the imposter
But this part of the story is muddied as well by another relationship Longo developed in prison, with the man whose identity he stole in order to pass himself off as a globe-trotting journalist when he fled to Mexico after killing his family.
The writer’s name was Michael Finkel, who was fired from The New York Times for fabricating a character in a story.
Finkel, like Wilson, also found himself fascinated with Longo, and over the next several years the two exchanged a thousand pages of letters. Finkel visited Longo 10 times.
In a 2009 article about Longo in Esquire magazine, Finkel wrote that it wasn’t a dying woman who inspired Longo’s quest but a Will Smith film, “Seven Pounds,” about a man who kills his fiance and six others in a car accident and then kills himself so he can donate his organs to people in need.
“The movie, Longo said, felt like a punch in the gut,” Finkel wrote. “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.”
There was no mention of Shawna Wilson. It was the movie that made Longo rethink everything, Finkel wrote.
Finkel didn’t return phone calls from The Register-Guard.
Another failure
Prison officials flatly refused to consider Longo’s request to change the rules and let him donate his organs after the execution. So Longo concocted a new plan: He’d find a way to kill himself, quietly stockpiling enough of just the right drugs to induce a coma from which he’d never awake but which would not ruin his organs for transplant.
Last January, Longo did try to kill himself with his stockpiled drugs. He also tried to make it clear to the prison through advanced directives delivered both by his attorneys and by Wilson that he did not want to be resuscitated.
But prison officials ignored the inmate’s wishes and saved his life.
“I woke up to a Department of Corrections officer over my head, saying ‘You failed.’ ” Longo said.
That left him with no choice, he said, but to pursue broader, institution-wide change.
“Organ donation just makes sense,” he said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with me redeeming myself.”
He began by trying to change the system from within, writing letters to prison officials, he said, but quickly decided it would take a more public campaign to get the rules changed. He was surprised The New York Times ran his essay, he said, but has since been bathing in publicity, from Oregon television stations to MSNBC to inquiries from documentary film producers in the United States and abroad.
Longo’s message in these interviews has been that there are nearly 112,000 people in the United States on waiting lists for organ transplants. There are nearly 2 million prisoners incarcerated throughout the country. If 1 percent of them became living donors, that would double the number of organ donations in the United States, Longo wrote in The New York Times.
“If I donated all of my organs today, I could clear nearly 1 percent of my state’s organ waiting list,” Longo wrote. “I am 37 years old and healthy; throwing my organs away after I am executed is nothing but a waste.”
Longo has found an unlikely supporter — Shawna Wilson.
When Christian Longo tried to take his own life, in a way that would leave his organs fit for transplant, it was the one authentic, irrefutable thing he had ever tried to do, she said.
“That was the light switch for me,” she said.
She’s now considering becoming the spokeswoman for Longo’s organization, GAVE, which stands for Gifts of Anatomical Value for Everyone. She is the one who posts messages on behalf of Longo and the organization, on both the killer’s personal Facebook page and GAVE’s, after he calls or writes her a letter and tells her what to say.
“My fiance’s niece just died; she needed a double lung transplant,” Wilson said. “(My fiance) said ‘I don’t care who, if it was Hitler’s lungs, I would have taken them.’ ”
Plan has its supporters
Wilson calls Longo’s efforts his “hobby,” something to occupy all that time alone in cell No. 313. To her, it’s perfectly plausible that this effort is sincere, despite all the other lies Longo has told. And she’s not the only one who believes Longo’s idea is a good one. GAVE’s Facebook page has 857 fans, and many of them are rooting for Longo’s plan.
“To condemn this man’s desire to give the gift of life to others, whether his intentions are truly noble or not, is despicable,” Brennan Kaye wrote in a recent post. “He, just as well as everyone else, knows that this will not right his wrongs. It will not bring back his family, it will not make him any less selfish or any more forgiven. ... These units of flesh are universal; they are what enable us to be who we are, and not everyone is blessed with working units.
“To condemn the donation of perfectly good organs from another because of who they came from is essentially you agreeing that the people on donor waiting lists do not deserve a chance at life because of one man’s choices.”
But while Wilson may be converted, the friends and family of Longo’s victims are not.
“I think he just craves the attention, and if he isn’t in the media for a long period of time he wants to make sure he’s in the media again,” said Lincoln County Detective Trish Miller, who investigated the Longo murders. “I don’t think he’s going to change the system, but he’s done a good job at damaging that family. What this does is every time they think they can let it go and maybe start to heal, he rips the Band-Aid off the wound again. I just find that unforgivable.”
Added Baker-Dupuie:
“Chris is not a hero; he is a murderer of his family. As a family, we have never had the chance to completely heal because we are constantly dealing (with) and battling a man who shouldn’t even be living on this earth any longer. He has taken a group of people that are so desperate to save the lives of themselves or their loved ones that they will praise and support a convicted murderer.”
Longo remains undaunted, however.
“I’m going to keep trying,” he said, “until I’m blue in the face.”
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