True Lies
BOUDWAY, IRA
True Lies A failed reporter and a successful murderer join forces. BY IRA BOUDWAY In February 2002 Michael Finkel was fired from the New York Times Magazine for creating a composite character in...
...Though he confesses to being a practiced liar ("I even planted an empty condom wrapper beneath my college-dorm bed so that whoever spotted it would think I'd been having sex") and a thoroughgoing egoist whose success at the Times had made him "frenzied and rude and cocky," Finkel's self-revelations seem calculated to engender sympathy for their sincerity...
...There is, to say the least, a moral queasiness about the whole project of True Story...
...Soon he and Finkel were exchanging letters and talking on the phone once a week...
...Mary Jane, meanwhile, gave birth to a son and two daughters...
...Finkel, for his part, strains to control the damage done to his reputation...
...For those willing to slog through Longo's narcissistic version of the story, there is an especially ugly twist in the murder trial, but even this is telegraphed pages in advance...
...During the next eight years, in the course of three aborted career attempts, Longo consistently spent more money than he made...
...Finkel reports that he had gone to West Africa to do a story about child slaves but had come away convinced that, while the poverty on the plantations was dire, the slavery claim was a concoction of relief agencies—one that many journalists, eager for a ready-made story, had been lapping up...
...When his debts caught up to him, Longo forged thousands of dollars in checks and, among other swindles, stole a minivan from a dealership lot...
...He had followed Finkel's writing in Skiing magazine, National Geo^^aphic Adventure, and the Times Magazine...
...You have a writing style," he told Finkel, "that I wasn't embarrassed to call my own...
...In fact, he felt "somewhat honored," and wanted Longo to contact him...
...He did not mind, he wrote, that Longo had used his name...
...Go literary," she told him...
...The relationship formed around their mutual needs: Longo wanted someone who would tell his story...
...Longo had tied a rock to the ankle of each with bed sheets, and then dropped them from a highway overpass...
...he writes in compact sentences that move at an easy, conversational pace...
...His editor, however, was uninterested in "yet another story accusing the media of getting everything wrong...
...To shield himself from the embarrassment that would follow, Finkel retreated to his home in Boze-man, Montana, where he planned to ignore all phone calls and correspondence...
...Two repulsive personalities—one an egoist, the other a fantasist—have collaborated to tell the story that is fondest to both, the story of becoming and then ceasing to be Michael Finkel of the New York Times...
...And so he did...
...The necessarily tainted friendship that developed between them will be familiar to those who have read Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer, which chronicles the collaboration between Joe McGinniss and another infamous family slayer, Jeffrey MacDonald...
...Longo's opinion of Finkel's prose is justified...
...In 2001, about a week before Christmas, he murdered Mary Jane and their three children...
...Finkel could hardly have fabricated a more convenient character: "[F]rom the moment the Oregonian reporter had called," Finkel writes, "I'd had a vague sense that the beginnings of my redemption, both professional and personal, might somehow lie with Longo...
...In his letters, Finkel called their collaboration "the Chris and Mike Project...
...A fugitive named Christian Longo, wanted for killing his wife and three children, had been captured in Mexico where he had assumed the identity of Michael Finkel of the New York Times...
...The book weaves the history of Finkel's downfall at the Times with the story of Longo, a man whose preternat-urally ruthless dishonesty makes Finkel's lapse seem paltry...
...Yet Longo did not choose Finkel's identity haphazardly...
...As a boy of 16 in Ypsi-lanti, Michigan, he fell in love with a 23-year-old, devout Jehovah's Witness named Mary Jane Baker...
...Finkel sent Longo a letter...
...He had long fantasized about being, if not the Michael Finkel, then a Michael Finkel—a freelance adventurer and a success...
...He had, after all, fled to Mexico and taken up a false identity immediately following the death of his family...
...BY IRA BOUDWAY In February 2002 Michael Finkel was fired from the New York Times Magazine for creating a composite character in a story about child laborers on chocolate plantations in West Africa...
...He presents himself, moreover, as being reformed by his experiences, but there is little reason to trust him after watching as he carefully entices Longo and then, not wanting to be tainted by the murderer's brutality, recoils in disgust and hatred...
...Still, the Times does not come away smelling rosy...
...He put his wife and two-year-old daughter in weighted suitcases and dropped them in the bay outside their apartment...
...I'm calling," he told Finkel, "about the murders...
...Finkel realized almost immediately that this bizarre coincidence was "the journalistic equivalent of a winning lottery ticket...
...Once we have gauged the depth of Longo's depravity, he can do nothing to shock us...
...The reporter, it turned out, knew nothing of the scandal at the Times...
...Later, with the police on his trail, he fled to the coast of Oregon with his family...
...The two older children were found in a nearby pond...
...Finkel writes that his own mania and arrogance made him feel above the rules of journalism, but he also describes the Times as a place where mania and arrogance were the rule...
...As for the fabricated Times story, Finkel is more or less willing to fall on his sword...
...Two weeks after the reporter's call, Ira Boudway is a writer in New York...
...This grimy, true-crime tale is not worth the hundreds of pages Finkel devotes to it...
...The night before the Times made his dismissal public in an editor's note on page A3, Finkel received a call from a newspaper reporter in Oregon...
...She encouraged him to write a profile of a single worker that would convey the complexities he was describing...
...Longo moved away from home and, three years later, he and Mary Jane were married...
...The bulk of True Story is based upon Longo's epistolary narration of his own life...
...While the Longo that appears in the pages of True Story is not a sympathetic character, the real Longo (now on death row) will likely be gratified to meet his own image in Finkel's prose...
...Now, with the publication of his memoir, he is ready to cash in...
...Though Finkel works hard to maintain the slimmest measure of doubt, Longo's guilt is never really in question...
...His parents, also Jehovah's Witnesses, disapproved...
...Finkel, his reputation ruined, wanted exclusive access...
...A month later, Longo called from the Lincoln County Jail...
...Better for them, and for what's left of Mary Jane Baker's family, that the book had never been written...
Vol. 10 • June 2005 • No. 38
