The FBI is the most sophisticated law enforcement agency in the world, pursuing the most dangerous criminals when a family disappears on the coast of Oregon.
“You’re just in a panic of, ‘Oh my god, there’s no way this could have happened to us. There’s just no way.'”
The bureau mobilizes.
“We had nothing. We knocked on every door in that city, asking people and showing the photographs. We had no history on these people. We didn’t know who they were; they had no ties to this community.”
“I could not comprehend the violence and the horror.”
It’s a chilly morning in the small coastal town of Waldport, Oregon. A man is walking by himself along the beach when he sees something suspicious floating in the water. He calls 911 and reaches the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office, 18 miles up the coast in Newport. Detectives Dennis Bossi and Trish Miller are the first on the scene.
“I responded down to the Waldport area and it was down at the Alsea Bay, and I met Detective Miller there.”
The detectives are stunned to find the body of a young boy, clothed in just his underwear.
“We weren’t quite sure of his age because he was kind of small. We thought he was three or four. He was perfectly groomed, um, even his nails and toenails were groomed—a well-kept child.”
“I called you guys.”
The police have no reason to believe there’s foul play involved.
“You couldn’t see like that he had been hurt in any way. The cause of death was not apparent. We were assuming it was drowning.”
“Spell it for me.”
“We were thinking that within an hour or two, maybe some frantic parent would come down to us and say that their child is missing.”
But no parents show up, and no one reports a missing child.
“It was a mystery. We started to think that maybe we had something more than a child that had accidentally drowned.”
The unexplained death is enough to activate the local major crime team, which includes investigators from local, state, and federal agencies. That also includes the experts at solving difficult murders: the FBI.
“We’re very sensitive to the missing children. I contacted the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office to offer our assistance.”
Special Agent Mike Homan is a 17-year veteran of the bureau. Experience tells him the child’s death could have been an accident or something worse.
“We had potentially a child abduction, and as the FBI does, we get involved in these cases from the beginning until the end.”
Agent Homan and the team mobilize to identify the little boy without a name. They have little hope of understanding how or why he died.
“We had nothing. We set up a command post and we began to investigate the case. We knocked on every door in that community to find out if anybody had family there with a male child in that age range, asking people and showing the photographs. ‘What do you know about this? Did you see anything? Did—was there anything unusual that occurred on the past evening?'”
The investigators hypothesize about every possible scenario, including that the child was part of a freak car accident.
“We had the Coast Guard fly up the Yaquina Bay and the Forest Service roads to see if there had been a car accident where a car had driven off the road and a car had rolled into the water. We didn’t know if we had a family that was dead or drowned in one of the waterways.”
But their efforts lead nowhere. Police take the story public in hopes that someone will call in with a tip.
“What we did is we released a photo to the media. We put it in the newspaper.”
The photograph quickly makes the local TV news. Denise Thompson is at her parents’ house when the report comes up.
“Hey Mom, come look at this.”
“There was a drawing of a boy on the TV. I was kind of shocked ’cause it looked just like Zachary.”
“I know that boy.”
Denise recognizes the child as a boy she babysits.
“I work with… his name is Zachary Longo.”
And Denise took care of the four-year-old and his two younger siblings just days before.
“I think I need to call… our neighbor at the time was the local sheriff. So I called him up and I said, ‘You know that case that’s going on now, that little boy that was found in the bay? I—I think I know who that is.'”
Denise tells investigators that she works with Zachary’s father, Christian Longo, at a local coffee shop. She also tells investigators that Christian and his family—wife Mary Jane and children Zachary, Sadie, and Madison—have only lived in Newport for around six weeks. Police rush to the Longo family’s condo, a posh apartment on Newport’s coastline.
“We went to the landing where they were living and there was nobody home.”
The house looks as though the family might return any moment.
“As I recall, it was really clean. It didn’t look like anybody had left rapidly; there’s no signs of any kind of a disturbance. Essentially, we were looking for anything, uh, to identify their location or their whereabouts.”
Investigators are desperate to notify the family of Zachary’s death, but there’s one major problem: no one knows them.
“How you find people is you talk to their closest friends and relatives, and we soon found out that they didn’t really have any in Lincoln County. They hadn’t been here that long.”
The FBI begins a nationwide search for anyone who knows more about the young family.
“I set out and tasked our offices around the country to immediately contact friends and relatives, find out where they are, uh, do they have cell phones? Are they—is anybody in contact with them?”
With the Longo family missing, Denise Thompson is the only person who can identify Zachary’s body. Investigators ask her to come in early the next day. In the meantime, they send a police dive team into the water where Zachary was found, searching for clues about his death. They have no idea what they are about to discover.
“What you got?”
“So the dive team went down looking for information about Zachary Longo, and I’m sure they were surprised when they found the body.”
Divers find a sleeping bag in the water with another child’s body in it.
“It’s a body. It’s a body.”
“It’s a little…”
This one, a toddler girl, is also clothed only in her underwear.
“There was a pillowcase around her ankle with a rock in the pillowcase and she was weighted down, and that’s when we knew definitely that it was a homicide.”
Investigators suspect the girl is Zachary Longo’s younger sister, three-year-old Sadie.
“You know, surely we felt it was a sibling because they look similar, um, and they were a few years apart.”
The dive team keeps searching and finds a second sleeping bag and pillowcase, also filled with rocks. The items provide terrible clues about how Zachary likely died.
“Once we discovered the second pillowcase, we were assuming that Zachary had been weighted down with a rock and drowned in the same manner.”
The gruesome homicides overwhelm the seasoned investigators.
“It was just, you know, it was a horrific thing for me that I never want to see again.”
“In all my years as an investigator, I’ve had the ability to detach myself from what I’m doing, um… it was the first time I broke down and started crying.”
It’s clear the Longo children were murdered, but why, and by whom?
“Who would kill children? Who would do that?”
“The judge… how or why he killed them.”
And maintains that he didn’t kill Zachary and Sadie.
“I don’t know if it was an attempt to avoid the death penalty, or if it was some legal ploy, but it was, you know, to us, it was just white noise. It was just more bullshit.”
The highly publicized trial begins on March 10th, 2003. Mary Jane’s family isn’t sure what to expect.
“There was never a 100% feeling that he was going to get convicted. We were always worried that he might walk away, and not because of the evidence, but because Chris is such a good con artist.”
When Christian takes the stand, he tells the jury that he came home to find Zachary and Sadie dead at the hands of Mary Jane.
“He said that Mary Jane had come home in a rage and that she had killed, uh, Zachary and Sadie, and that she put them somewhere in the water.”
Longo claims he then strangled his wife out of anger. He says baby Madison was struggling for her last breath, so he finished the job.
“He dragged Mary Jane through the mud and said she killed the two older kids. He couldn’t just let her rest in peace; he had to drag her name through the mud again and say she was the one that murdered her two older children, right there in front of all the whole world.”
“A little over a two-hour flight, close to three hours… he’s arrogant, without a doubt, and he was going to convince that jury that they had it all wrong, and the prosecution had it all wrong.”
The jury doesn’t buy Christian’s story and convicts him on four counts of aggravated murder.
“Mary Jane and the children got the justice they deserved.”
“Yes, yeah, he didn’t walk away. That was the relief.”
One week later, Christian is given the death penalty.
“He stood up to make a comment to the court and he said—I’ll never forget the words he said—’This is a wake-up call for me.’ And I felt that sums up the mentality of this man… Lincoln, you know? He’s just—just a liar and a conniver, just out for number one.”
Christian later admits in a jailhouse interview that he deliberately killed his whole family because he was financially ruined and didn’t want them to witness his failure. He tells the journalist that he had decided to kill Mary Jane just hours before the two of them made love.
“He realized it was the perfect opportunity and strangled her. He kills Mary Jane, he puts her in a suitcase. He kills Madison, he puts her in a suitcase. Her suitcase had clothing and a diving weight in it.”
“He takes those suitcases and he takes them down to the docks. He puts them in the water.”
“He goes back up to his condo, he takes those children and he puts them in the car and he drives them to Waldport. He gets to the Lint Slough Bridge and he stops his van on the side of the bridge.”
After he throws the children off, he is contacted by a good Samaritan, thinking that he is having car trouble.
“Everything all right, man?”
“Moments after drowning his children, Christian once again cons his way out of trouble.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
“Chris says some sort of light came on in his car, and he is, like, waiting it out, and then he heads eastbound, comes back home, and goes to a Christmas party.”
Christian Longo now awaits execution on death row. In early 2011, he attempted to become an organ donor, claiming it would be penance for his hateful acts.
“He’s saying that he’s willing to waive his appeals, accept the death penalty on the condition that he can, uh, donate his organs to science.”
“Now he’s still trying to be in the limelight and still trying to justify it. There isn’t, and he shouldn’t even be able to talk to the public. He shouldn’t be able to go on the internet, he shouldn’t… nothing. He shouldn’t even be around anymore.”
Oregon officials denied Christian Longo’s request.
