The Pretender

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3:07There was nothing that was important to her as much as those kids. Those kids were her world. but the last time we got together I noticed she wasn't the sister I knew. You thought she was in danger?

3:29I knew she was. It started on December 19, 2001. We got a report of a child in the bay. My name is Trish Miller and I'm the lead investigator. We did a neighborhood canvas of that area and we knocked on every door. Every child in the 2 ,000 person town of Waldport was checked upon. No one was found missing. It was a complete mystery. We thought that maybe there was a car accident and that a vehicle had gone in the water.

4:08and we would find the rest of the family. A sheriff's office dive team was sent to investigate the waters where the body was found. And they discovered a second child. This was a little girl, and she was weighted down in the water with a rock. The feeling in town was of confusion, grief, and a fear. Nobody knew if a killer was living amongst them. Identifications were made.

4:43The boy was named Zachary Michael Longo. He was a few months shy of his fifth birthday. The young girl was named Sadie Ann Longo. She was three and a half years old. about a week after the first body was found the bodies of mary jane longo and madison longo were found at the bottom of the bay once we found mary jane and madison we knew that our focal suspect was going to be chris longo the whole family's dead and he's nowhere to be found it was discovered that christian longo had caught a plane to cancun mexico My name is Michael Finkel. I was a writer for the New York Times Magazine. I had a personal connection because I learned that while Christian Longo was in Mexico, he was pretending to be a writer for the New York Times.

5:36In fact, he was pretending to be me.

5:44Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Longo. Call me Chris. So why me? I followed your whole career. I guess I felt like I knew you. I want to tell you my side of this. Only you. Maybe at this point it doesn't matter. The truth always matters. It always seems to matter to you.

6:04I just looked him straight in the eye and I said, you know, Chris, did you do what you're accused of doing? And he was, as always, completely unruffled, never betrayed a moment of micro panic, nothing. and looked at me and said, I think you know, and just, like, gave me a little wink.

6:32What was the first thought that went through your mind when you hear there's a man who's about to stand trial for murder who was impersonating you? I think it was complete confusion into sort of this disbelief, a wrinkle of like sort of creepiness and also extraordinary curiosity. Like, I would like to know more. Michael Finkel's curiosity had already taken him to the far corners of the globe. It was myself and a Korean climber on Chiluyu, the fifth highest mountain in the world. Now it was about to take him into the heart of darkness. That changed your life? Every minute of it. Four years ago, Finkel was a prize-winning feature writer for the New York Times.

7:23This is from Afghanistan, the Gaza Strip. This is from my story on Haitian refugees. This is pretty heady stuff. Absolutely. Every story was extremely thrilling to me. He had a gorgeous home in Bozeman, Montana, and a beautiful, intelligent girlfriend, Jill Barker. We had this magnetic chemistry between us, so it seemed like we should give this a chance. But Finkel's ambition had a darker side. He had built his self-esteem around being Mike Finkel at the New York Times. And he was starting to get really intoxicated with all this attention. It was hard to date him and pretty soon I realized that I had to walk away from this relationship.

8:03And in his drive to outdo his competition and himself... I wanted to write a really good story. Finkel fabricated a portion of a story on child slavery in West Africa. You lied. Yes. His bosses found out. I was caught for the deception and promptly fired. It was something I wish I could take back really badly. In an instant, he lost the career he'd been building his entire adult life. He killed it all. He lied. That was the worst day of your life. By far. Scorned by his colleagues, the shattered shell of Michael Finkel retreated to Montana, awaiting the merciless media inquiries which were sure to come.

8:49The first call came sooner than expected. I asked him, you know, you're calling about the editor's note, right? But the reporter wasn't interested in Finkel's fall from grace. He's like, no, I'm calling about the murders. Astonished, Finkel learned about Christian Longo, a man now under arrest in Oregon for the murders of his wife and three children. He says to me, you don't know about Christian Longo? And that's the first time I've ever heard that name in my life. When he also learned that Longo had been posing as Michael Finkel of the New York Times, his journalistic instincts went into overdrive.

9:29I was like, I'm going to write him a brief letter. He had to find out exactly who had been playing him. And I basically said, I know that you're facing a trial and there's things you don't want to talk about, but I'm really curious about why you chose to become me. Several weeks later... The phone rang. I have a collect call from the Lincoln County Jail. To accept this call, dial 5 now. It seemed Longo was also curious. He agreed to meet Finkel in person. I didn't know whether he was a murderer. He was accused of it. He wasn't convicted. After that meeting, It was the first letter Longo wrote to me.

10:03Longo began sending a series of meticulously handwritten letters. It was written in this jail cell and it goes on and on. The two also scheduled weekly phone calls. Chris? Hello? Hey. Hey, how you doing? Calls that Finkel recorded. Have you seen like some obvious paths that you could have taken that you missed? I did. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah, I can see all the rough turns. I thought I didn't know why I took her, but she saw many better ways that they could have gone. And it would have changed everything, everything, especially why I'm here. And so began a journey into the mind of an accused murderer, which would eventually become a book.

10:47It seemed obvious that this was a great story. Whether or not it actually saw the light of print, it was a great story. From Mike Finkel and the Oregon investigators, the story centered around one baffling question. How could a seemingly devoted family man turn into a cold-blooded killer? That mystery began under this bridge, here in the quiet coastal community, where Chris Longo's wife and three children were last seen alive.

11:28It was a little boy. We weren't quite sure how old he was. He was, we assumed, between three and six years old. Detective Trish Miller caught the call when the first victim was found floating near the bridge. He was perfectly groomed. He had a really good haircut. The Lincoln County Sheriff released this picture to the local news, hoping to identify the dead boy. I thought, oh, God, that can't be, you know, that can't be Zachary. Denise Thompson had babysat Zachary Longo and his two little sisters, Sadie and Madison. She knew their father, Chris Longo, from the local Starbucks where they both worked.

12:13I thought, well, you know, this can't be happening. By the time Denise got to the police station, The second body had been found. A little girl weighted down with a rock. Denise identified them both. Zachary and Sadie. You never want to be in that position to see a little child. Investigators have determined that these deaths are not accidental. As police hunted for Chris, his wife Mary Jane and their baby... We're actually trying to locate them. They may well be victims. Denise remembered a strange conversation she'd had with Longo, the very day Zach's body had been found. He made it a point to come up to me while I was working and said, you won't be seeing the rest of the family.

13:15My wife and I are getting a divorce. Were you shocked? Oh, yeah. That just surprised the heck out of me. I did not expect that. Did they seem like a pretty happy couple? Oh, yeah. He was just, you know, look at us. We're perfect, you know. It was just like that. A surveillance tape taken just days before shows the Longos shopping like any normal family. They had just recently moved into an upscale housing complex. He was real polite to everyone, seemed real smart, and real willing to just talk to you, you know, just, he just, he was real normal. Eight days into the investigation, divers dredged up two suitcases from the harbor just outside the Longo's apartment.

14:02One suitcase contained the body of Mary Jane Longo. The second suitcase contained the body of Madison Longo. It meant that somebody killed those two human beings and stuffed them in suitcases like garbage and put them in the water to hide their bodies.

14:25With all signs pointing in one direction, either he was dead and a victim or he was a suspect. And chances were he was a suspect. The biggest manhunt in Lincoln County history was underway. The big question, where is Christian Longo? But Longo had a healthy head start. One month before the murders, he'd casually written down the credit card number of a Starbucks customer. Now Longo was on the run. He was last seen in the San Francisco area. And before police could catch up with him, he would leave the country and his old identity far behind to start a new life as Michael Finkel.

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16:58Wanted for killing his wife Mary Jane and their three children in December 2001, Christian Longo made the FBI's 10 most wanted list, right alongside Osama Bin Laden. We're looking for somebody who does not want to be found. It was an unlikely place for someone so apparently devoted to his family.

17:26The Longos came from Ypsilanti, Michigan, where Chris was raised in a stable, middle-class home. He and Mary Jane Baker were part of the same congregation. They married when Chris was only 19 and Mary Jane was 25. Her dress was beautiful, and you could tell she was just happy. Mary Jane's sister, Penny Doobie, says Chris was a real-life Prince Charming. He made other wives jealous, because Chris did all of those things that a husband is supposed to do. Buy you roses, take you on trips. Most of all, Mary Jane wanted children, so she was thrilled to become a full-time mom when Zachary, Sadie, and Madison came along.

18:13Hi, Mandy! Hi! So nice! Each arrived little more than a year after the baby before. Oh, look at the cute little family. What was Chris like as a father? I always thought he was a great father. At age 22, Chris Longo took a job with a company that distributes the New York Times here in Ypsilanti. Driven to succeed, he worked his way up to manager and eventually developed a fondness for reading the Times, especially articles written by a reporter named Mike Finkel. He was somewhat of a fan. Longo would later tell Finkel that he envied the writer's worldwide adventures. He told me that if he was a writer, he'd like to write the same sort of stories that I wrote.

18:59He was like, okay, I'm holding it. You did it! Longo's own life was far less exotic. At age 25, he quit his job to start up Final Touch, a cleaning company for contractors. I thought everything he was doing, he was doing for his family, and he wanted good things for them. And Penny says the Longos had a lot of good things. I was wondering about the vacations that they took. They were always driving brand new cars. Either somebody's helping them, thanking Chris's parents. for they are majorly in debt. Penny's suspicions were right. Chris Longa was in debt, although he bragged to Mary Jane and everyone else that his business was booming.

19:47I think honestly and truly the most important thing to Chris was his image and money. But neither Mary Jane nor anyone else knew that to keep up appearances, Chris had turned to crime. He took a minivan for a test drive and never brought it back. Then he wrote himself nearly$30 ,000 worth of counterfeit checks from a client and got caught. There was no attempts to cover up anything in this particular investigation. Detective Fred Farkas of the Michigan State Police had the goods. We had seven counterfeit checks, which were each 14-year felonies. Longo confessed. presenting himself as a financially strapped family man.

20:35He just believed in his own mind that he'd talk or walk his way out of the charges. And in fact, he did get off easy with only probation and restitution. Mary Jane believed Chris's promises that his life of crime was over. But then she discovered a crime of the heart. I've never heard my sister ever sound that just heartbroken and awful. And she confided it to her younger sister, Sally Clark. She had found an email between Chris and this other woman. He told her he didn't love her anymore and that he had stopped loving her when she started having children and that she wasn't any fun anymore and she was spending too much time and attention towards the kids instead of him.

21:20So she tries to make herself look better, spoils him, draws him bubble baths. She didn't want her kids to grow up without their father. She loved Chris so deeply that she wanted it to work out.

21:38Chris told Mary Jane he needed a fresh start. So in June 2001, just seven weeks after his fraud conviction, he packed up the family and skipped town. Their new home was a warehouse in Toledo, Ohio. Of course, this whole time Chris is telling her that he's going to make things right, he's going to pay everyone. Two months later, with an arrest warrant out for Chris in Michigan for violating his probation and new reports of stolen property at the Ohio warehouse, the Longos disappeared. Do you think he was keeping her away from her family? Mm-hmm. I do. Mary Jane's sisters went looking for her at the warehouse.

22:28It was awful, and I just knew that something was wrong. It looked like someone was trying to get out of there in a hurry. Mary Jane's wedding dress was there, things that I knew she wouldn't just leave behind. And when Mary Jane's cell phone was cut off... There was a feeling in the pit of my stomach that never went away. I don't know what it was, just a feeling that we had to find her. Desperate, they filed missing persons reports. I don't think people took us seriously. Then, in early November... Hi, sorry I waited so long to write. As I'm sure you guessed, we moved. Sally got a card from Mary Jane.

23:10I still don't have an address or number. It was mailed from South Dakota. Love you guys. We'll keep in touch. Love, Mary Jane. The police closed the missing person's case. One month later, Mary Jane and her children would turn up dead in Oregon, where their cross-country journey had ended. And Chris Longo was now long gone.

23:45Chris Longo's life on the run finally brought him here, to Cancun, Mexico. While Mary Jane's family was still reeling from the shock of the murders, Chris Longo was partying in paradise. He was always smiling, laughing. Tom Taff was on vacation when he met Longo. Everyone seemed to like him around there. He had quite a few friends. He was having a ball. While police were hunting him, Longo was beginning a new life, as the globe-trotting journalist he had always wanted to be. He said his name was Michael Finkel and that he worked for the New York Times travel section. Little did Longo know that the real Michael Finkel would soon find him.

24:45Suspected of killing his wife and three children in Oregon, Christian Longo had made it to Mexico where he assumed the identity of a New York Times reporter. He would soon come in contact with the real Mike Finkel. Longo considered himself a pretty good storyteller, but he would tell his most twisted tale to a jury.

25:18As a fugitive in Mexico, Chris Longo did more than just tell people he was reporter Mike Finkel.

25:28He was so good at it that he could speak about my stories, his stories, eloquently and convincingly. Longo, as Finkel, told tourist Tom Taff that he was actually on assignment. He was working on Mayan mysticism. So he was going to ruins throughout the area, which there's a lot of them down in that area of Mexico. He came up with actually not a bad topic. Like any professional print journalist, Longo needed a photographer. Fortunately for him, amateur photographer Yanita Franca was staying at the same Cancun youth hostel. Since when you guys were here, what was he doing that was reporter-like, taking notes all the time?