Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (27 page)

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Later in the taped interview, White lost his cool. Like Scott

Peterson, he seemed to think the police were pursuing him out

of personal jealousy. ‘‘Is this because I found her and you guys

couldn’t?’’ he screamed at the detective. At another point—perhaps

revealing his true feelings for his wife—White railed about being

charged with the ‘‘friggin’ murder of my goddamn wife.’’

As damning as the ‘‘circumstantial’’ evidence was in this case, the

defense still tried to cast it as a specious form of proof.

‘‘Michael White is going to stand right there and take that Bible

and take that oath and what he tells us will not be circumstantial,’’

cocounsel Robert Shaigec announced in his opening statement. He

wanted the jury to believe that the word of the accused was direct

evidence, beyond reproach, but that circumstantial evidence—even

when it came in the form of hard scientific evidence—could not be

trusted.

On the stand, White blamed some of the inconsistencies in his

various statements and testimony on the shock of finding his wife’s

body, and simply refused to account for others. The entire case

against him amounted to much ado about nothing, or as he put it,

‘‘It all has to do with a nosebleed.’’

As the prosecutor led him through each element of the crime and

its cover-up in a series of leading questions—You killed your wife,

didn’t you? You dumped her vehicle, staged the robbery?— White

responded with roughly the same polite but unequivocal response:

‘‘No sir, I did not.’’

The jury did not believe him, finding White guilty and recom-mending that he serve at least fifteen years in prison before being

considered for parole. The minimum penalty for second-degree

murder is ten years.

He was not prosecuted for killing his unborn child because in

Canada, unlike in California at the time of the Peterson murder, a

fetus is not considered a life.

The day after the verdict was delivered, an even more horrific fact

was revealed, evidence the jury had not been allowed to hear. Ashley,

who was home with her parents at the time of the murder, may have

witnessed some portion of the crime or its aftermath.

According to testimony delivered during closed-door hearings,

the girl, just five at the time of the trial, told her grandmother and a

few family friends that she was awakened by a noise and found her

mother lying on the floor. She also described seeing blood on her

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mother’s neck and her father cleaning up blood on the floor with

towels. The judge excluded any testimony about the girl’s statements

as hearsay and a threat to White’s receiving a fair trial.

Michael White was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole

in seventeen years. That means he could be freed before his fiftieth

birthday.

Q

If the fact of an approaching pregnancy and the accompanying

responsibility and perceived loss of freedom are an impetus for some

men to kill, what exactly is the narcissistic dream for which they are

willing to execute their wife and unborn child? For eraser killers who

have been caught, we often don’t know, because they haven’t begun

to live out their ultimate fantasy. The best clue to this question may

be found in the case of the eraser killer who killed not an unborn

child but three young children and his wife, then proceeded to live

out what to him was an exotic dream existence.

A little more than a year before Scott Peterson committed

his pregnant wife to the murky depths of San Francisco Bay, a

twenty-seven-year-old Oregon man fashioned a similar fate for his

wife and three small children. Christian Longo, a once-devout Jeho-vah’s Witness, strangled each member of his family one by one. Then

he stuffed the bodies of his wife, MaryJane, thirty-four, and their

two-year-old daughter, Madison, inside suitcases and threw them

into Yaquina Bay off the coast of Newport, Oregon, near the pricey

condominium he was renting. In an apparent attempt to further

cover his tracks by not disposing of all his victims in the same place,

Longo tied rock-filled pillowcases to the ankles of his other two

children, Sadie, age three, and Zachery, four, and dumped them from

a bridge into an inlet a few miles up the coast.

Familicide, or family annihilation, is a crime almost exclusively

perpetrated by men. (There have been a few notorious cases of

women, such as Susan Smith and Andrea Yates, murdering all of

their children but
not
their spouse.) In case histories, men who kill

their entire families are invariably described by those who knew

them as loving husbands and devoted dads right up until the day of

slaughter.

Behind that well-honed fac¸ade, however, is usually a long history

of secrets and lies: mounting debts, clandestine affairs, and legal or

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other personal problems that they have managed to keep hidden

from almost everyone they know. In fact, it is often the discovery or

imminent discovery of their secrets and the unraveling of their lies

that precipitate a fatal explosion of violence.

Because family annihilators often take their own lives as well,

however, many psychologists and criminologists have tended to

view their crimes through a surprisingly sympathetic prism: as the

desperate deeds of broken men who believe they are delivering their

families from a greater suffering. Whether or not one believes there is

ever any truth to such a viewpoint, there is no question that Christian

Longo fully intended to get away with murder and enjoy the fruits of

his crimes even as he cast his murderous actions in just such altruistic

terms.

On the day he was arrested for erasing his wife and children, Longo

told police, ‘‘I sent them to a better place.’’ However, unlike some

men who kill their whole families, he did not then take his own life

in order to join his family in this ‘‘better place.’’ Instead, he skipped

out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and pending theft

and forgery charges, assumed the identity of a real
New York Times

reporter, and fled to a Mexican beach resort—where he promptly

took up with a pretty German photographer.

A better place, indeed.

The young German woman, Janina Franke, had no idea that the

guy romancing her in the Yucatán was a married man who had just

wiped out his entire family. Longo claimed that he was divorced

and had no children, that he had no time for relationships because

he was on the road so much chasing stories. After Franke told him

she had come to Mexico to photograph the Mayan ruins, hoping to

jump-start her career as a photojournalist, Longo said he had come

to write about the same thing. For her, it was a perfect opportunity,

as the man who convincingly presented himself as a well-traveled and

well-connected journalist could open doors and advance her career.

They spent several days collaborating on a project that he assured

her he could get published in the
Times
or
National Geographic
, in

addition to snorkeling and hitting the disco— until the FBI burst

into their cabana and arrested him.

Apparently the Hemingwayesque life of a foreign correspondent

appealed to Christian Longo more than the daily drudgery he expe-rienced as a maxed-out dad and coffee barista (a job he was forced to

take after losing his business cleaning construction sites).

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‘‘I could live out a dream,’’ he later explained to the actual reporter

whose identity he had stolen: that of the professional adventurer he

used to fantasize being while reading the
Times
travel pages at the

Starbucks where he worked.

Q

While he was living out his fantasies in Mexico, the body of little

Zachery floated to the surface. Divers found his sister, Sadie, with the

pillowcase of rocks still weighting her down. A woman who babysat

for the Longos a few days before the murders saw the children’s

pictures in the media and identified them. When police went to the

condo, they found it empty except for two stuffed animals. A massive

search was mounted. Divers searching the water near the condo

discovered the two suitcases with Madison and MaryJane inside.

Longo was placed on the FBI’s ‘‘Ten Most Wanted’’ fugitives list. A

Canadian tourist informed the FBI that she had seen him in Canc ún;

he was traced to the hostel where he was staying and captured a little

more than two weeks into his ‘‘new’’ life.

Curiously, he pleaded guilty to killing his wife and Madison, but

mounted a strange and patently ludicrous defense regarding the

other two children. He claimed that when he finally came clean with

MaryJane about his secrets, she became distraught, strangled their

two older children, and tried to kill the third. In a rage at her actions,

he insisted, he finished the job, killing his wife and toddler.

Neither judge nor jury bought his story, convicting him of

first-degree murder and sentencing him to death by lethal injec-tion. In fact, there was considerable evidence that Longo had been

planning for some time to kill his family and start over with a new

identity. Police found information on Longo’s computer from ‘‘Hit-man On-Line,’’ a how-to guide to murder available only in pirated

Internet versions because its publisher was sued by the family of a

woman whose ex-husband used the guide to hire a hit man to kill her

and their quadriplegic son. They also found clippings of obituaries

with notations in Longo’s handwriting that seemed to indicate that

he was compiling data to create a new persona.

Deceit and fantasy were nothing new to Longo. He had lied to his

wife for years, hiding the truth from her about his affairs, his failed

business, his lavish spending, the checks he forged to keep creditors

at bay, the property he stole to keep up appearances. When the family

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car broke down and he couldn’t afford to fix it, he swiped a new one

from a dealer’s lot. He once stole a powerboat, telling his wife he

won it in a contest. He even stole to pay for the ring he had given

MaryJane when he asked her to marry him.

The telltale signs of the pathological narcissist emerge with the

details that a year before the murders, when MaryJane confronted

him about e-mails he had written to another woman, Longo told his

wife that he didn’t love her anymore because she hadn’t been any

‘‘fun’’ since having children. In Longo’s view, it was his wife who had

broken faith with him by bringing kids and the responsibilities and

obligations of parenthood into their lives.

In a chilling twist on the eraser killer pattern of getting rid of

the belongings and mementos that represent their dead victims,

Longo actually started the ‘‘divestment’’ process before the killing.

For months leading up to the murders, Longo had quietly disposed

of baby clothes, family photos, and other personal items—the last of

which he threw into a dumpster just before fleeing to Mexico.

Even by his own self-serving account of events— that his wife

had started the killings—Longo did not attempt to resuscitate his

children, get help, or call police. Instead, he finished the job, got rid

of the bodies, then went for coffee and returned some rented videos.

It was as if he were just checking another errand off his list on his way

to bachelor paradise, the lives of his wife and children of no more

consequence than returning a delinquent video.

P A R T

T H R E E

A Psychological Autopsy

of a Classic Eraser

Killing

C H A P T E R

E I G H T

A Watery Grave

Q SomuchhasbeenwrittenandsaidaboutthePeterson

case that we may be tempted to think there is nothing more we can

learn from it. Yet for most people it remains a crime without context,

something so seemingly diabolical and inexplicable that they cannot

imagine that anything like it has ever happened before or since.

Even the jurors who convicted Peterson did not seem to grasp what

the case was really about. In finding a lesser degree of culpability for

the murder of Conner than for Laci, they treated Conner’s death as

collateral damage in the killing of his mother, as if he were just along

for an unfortunate ride. Although medically speaking that may be

true—Conner suffocated after his mother stopped breathing— there

is ample reason to believe that Scott Peterson wanted to get rid of the

baby as much as he wanted to get rid of his wife, if not more.

In a book published by seven of the jurors after the trial, they said

they based their second-degree verdict in the killing of Conner on a

lack of evidence of premeditation and malice, such as the absence of

tool marks on Laci’s uterus. To think that Scott would have needed

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