Parents Who Kill--Shocking True Stories of the World's Most Evil Parents (20 page)

The prosecution understandably had a field day. Why hadn’t he phoned for an ambulance for Madison when he realised that she was still breathing? Why had he driven to a dumpster with the family’s possessions rather than search for his other two children? Why had he stolen a car and gone to a party rather than spend time mourning for his offspring and why had he fled to Mexico when the first of the bodies was found? Longo gave vapid answers to every question and it didn’t escape the spectators’ notice that he finished giving his evidence on April Fools’ Day.

The jury, comprising four men and eight women, took a mere four hours to find him guilty of murdering Zachery and Sadie. He had already admitted to murdering MaryJane and Madison.

The penalty phase included a plea from the defence to let Longo live. They noted that he’d never previously been violent and could serve a useful life in prison – but the image of the four dead bodies and the element of premeditation must have been uppermost in the jury’s mind. On 16 April 2003, after four days deliberation, they returned a death sentence.

Afterwards Chris wrote to Michael Finkel admitting that he’d murdered his entire family. He said that he’d deliberately blackened MaryJane’s name on the stand because he knew that no one would believe him and that the jury would sentence him to death, bringing justice for her family.

In his latest version of events, he said that he’d come home to find his wife suffocating Madison, that he’d strangled both
of them and thrown them into the bay, then put his two remaining children in his vehicle, where they’d soon gone to sleep. He’d found that he couldn’t bear to tell them what had happened to their mother and little sister, so had parked on the Lint Slough Bridge, weighed them down with rocks and dropped them into the water. Zachery had remained asleep but Sadie had opened her eyes and screamed.

It’s possible that both children were indeed still alive when they entered the river: Zachery’s autopsy report stated that the cause of death was consistent with drowning as silt from the river had been found in his airway. But it was equally possible that the silt had washed into his airway as he lay, dead, on the river bed.

Currently on Oregon’s Death Row, Chris Longo spends his days exercising, watching television and reading. He also does janitorial duties for the prison. He has many female penpals, several of whom have proposed marriage, as well as various male penpals who apparently felt a bond with him after watching televised excerpts from his trial. As Oregon executes few of its condemned prisoners, he may well die of old age in jail.

Jean-Claude was born in 1954 to Anne-Marie and Aime Romand, a housewife and forester respectively, in Clairvaux, France. His mother suffered from ill-health and subsequently had two ectopic pregnancies where the foetus develops outside the uterus. The couple were deeply religious and didn’t want to talk about pregnancy in front of their young son, so he feared the worst when his mother was hospitalised and believed that she was going to die. When she returned home he promised himself that he would be the perfect son who would never give her any cause for alarm.

And for the rest of his childhood he succeeded, being
unfailingly polite and always smiling. Deep down, though, he was desperately lonely but only told his boyhood fears to his dog.

Sent to boarding school, he was bullied and pretended to be ill in order to be sent home. He spent the rest of the year living with his introverted parents and rarely saw anyone else. Though he had a high IQ and was a voracious reader, he wanted to be a forester like his father because he loved the woods.

But when he went to university at Lyon he saw that forestry wasn’t a respected career so he switched to medicine. Psychologists later wondered if he did so to understand his mother’s illness. He was also attracted to his distant cousin, Florence, who was studying medicine at Lyon.

Jean-Claude’s parents thought that Florence was ideal. She, too, was a Catholic, an old fashioned girl who liked baking cakes for church fetes. Though she wasn’t particularly enamoured of him, he joined her social circle and courted her until their first act of lovemaking when he was 21.

Immediately afterwards, Florence said that she only wanted to be friends and broke off the relationship. Jean-Claude hid his feelings as usual, but the strain took its toll and he slept in and missed one of his second year exams. Shortly after this, he left his friends at a nightclub and returned, blood spattered and bruised, telling them that he’d been abducted by several men and beaten up. In truth, he’d inflicted the injuries on himself to get attention, to feel more alive.

But, failing at his studies, he could no longer pretend that all was well and spiralled into a deep depression where he shut himself away in the apartment that his parents had rented for him. He no longer went to university or cleaned the flat or socialised, and he lived exclusively off tinned food. Eventually
one of his friends visited, whereupon Jean-Claude lied and said that he had cancer. In retrospect, both this and the previous lie about being beaten up were a form of Munchausen’s syndrome, where sufferers invent or cause symptoms in order to receive attention and care. The syndrome is more common in men, though Munchausen’s By Proxy, where the sufferer harms their own child or another person in their care, is behaviour that’s much more common in women.

Jean-Claude’s friend tidied up the flat and cooked for him and the young man’s cancer apparently went into remission. He soon returned to his studies at university.

But, unknown to his friend, Jean-Claude never again sat an end of term exam. He went to lectures and read books in the library, even helping Florence (who sympathised with his various illnesses) with her studying. And he lived off the money that his parents gladly gave their student son. Yet each year, when the exams came round, he sent in fake medical certificates explaining that he was ill and must remain at home for the duration of the exam period. He then re-enrolled the following year.

Florence failed her exams and switched to pharmacology, making it easier for him to lie about his ostensibly excellent qualifications. She wasn’t surprised when he told her that he’d landed a good job as a research scientist at the World Health Organisation in Geneva and was trying to find a cure for heart disease. Impressed by his dedication to his career, she married him and they relocated to Ferney-Voltaire in France, a manageable drive away from Jean-Claude’s supposed workplace just over the border in Switzerland.

On 14 May 1985, the Romands had their first child, Caroline. And almost two years later, on 2 February 1987, they had Antoine, a son.

Jean-Claude adored his young family and played with them endlessly, also taking numerous photographs. They loved him too. As they matured, he drove them to school every day, and at weekends he took them skiing or to
child-friendly
restaurants.

In turn, the children wrote proudly in their essays that daddy was a doctor – but this remained a lie. For every day, after taking the children to school, the bogus medic would drive to a service station and sit there reading magazines and scientific journals and drinking tea. Several times a month he drove to the World Health Organisation, his ostensible workplace, and went in on a visitor’s pass. There he would use the bank, post office and facilities so that he came home with WHO stamps. He also brought home the organisation’s free literature and left it lying around the house. When Florence wanted to call him, she simply used his answering service and it beeped him, whereupon he’d call her right back.

Bizarrely, he funded himself and his family by continuing to draw on his parents’ bank account (and by spending money which he and Florence had banked from the sale of an apartment) just as he had as a student in Lyon. Even more bizarrely, they never questioned why a high-earning WHO scientist had to drain their financial resources month after month. Jean-Claude must have been incredibly selfish – after all, he could have taken a job in a nearby town, so providing for his wife and children whilst still maintaining his doctor myth.

Eventually, of course, his parents’ money ran out – but luckily this coincided with a relative asking him to help invest a sizeable sum of money. Jean-Claude took the money and began to live off it. He told other relatives about the
connections he had to high finance and they too gladly invested in his lucrative-sounding schemes.

Bored and increasingly dissatisfied with his life, Jean-Claude began to court the ex-wife of one of his friends. She soon asked him to invest her life savings. After all, he seemed plausible, taking her to upmarket restaurants and buying her expensive gifts. He quickly became besotted with her – just as he had initially been with Florence – and would phone her several times a day. At first the attraction was mutual, but Jean-Claude must have been an indifferent or peculiar lover, for, after they had sex for the first time, she told him that they could only be friends. She had no idea that she was echoing Florence’s words of many years before.

Lonely and longing for something new, the unemployed family man continued to see her in a platonic capacity, but the deception was getting too much for him and one day he phoned a doctor friend and said that he was having a coronary. The doctor examined him, diagnosed a panic attack and prepared to leave. Desperate for attention, Jean-Claude admitted the affair (though he possibly kept quiet about its brevity) and lied that he had cancer, a story which had won him sympathy in the past.

By now his life was becoming increasingly fraught. His investors had begun to ask for their money back, but, of course, he’d spent it. And one of the mothers at the Romand children’s school asked Florence why her family had never attended the lavish World Health Organisation Christmas party, one of the highlights of the year. She explained that Jean-Claude didn’t like to spoil the children, but the excuse must
have sounded lame even to her. Then the school reported that they’d tried to contact Jean-Claude at the WHO but couldn’t find him listed in the international registrar.

Florence questioned her husband about these inconsistencies in his life and he made excuses then said that he again had cancer. He ‘withdrew’ from work and lay at home in a deep depression but revived slightly when asked to sit on the
parent-teacher
committee: suddenly he had status again. He voted to demote an adulterous teacher, a majority viewpoint, then did an abrupt U-turn and campaigned for the teacher’s reinstatement, saying that the man’s sex life should be a private affair. Some of the other parents were visibly angry at Jean-Claude Romand’s newfound liberalism and he shrank from them, apparently fearing physical violence.

Ironically, those who most fear violence are often the ones who inflict it as they project their own aggression onto others. Now the bogus doctor hatched a plan to rid himself of his entire family and his one-time lover, so that he could start again.

At dawn on Saturday 9 January 1993, he battered in his wife’s skull as she lay sleeping. Later, he got the children up for breakfast as usual and fed them, telling them not to wake mummy. After they’d eaten, he took his five-year-old daughter upstairs and shot her as she lay on her stomach on the bed. Moments later he called to his seven-year-old son, and shot him too.

Jean-Claude Romand drove to his parents’ house and had lunch before promising his father than he’d fix a defective heating valve in the bedroom. As they examined the valve, he shot the old man twice in the back. Returning to the lounge, he shot his mother in the front. He also shot their pet Labrador,
despite being an animal lover, as he believed that his parents would want it with them in an afterlife.

The five-time killer went on to keep a pre-arranged date to take mass in church with his mistress, after which he drove her to a quiet location and sprayed her with tear gas before using a stun gun on her. She pleaded for her life and he relented, sobbing and telling her that he was terminally ill. Unaware that he’d already killed his extended family, she told him that, if he sought psychiatric help, she wouldn’t go to the police.

Jean-Claude returned to the house where his dead wife and children lay, and passed the time recording programmes on the video. At 3am, he prepared to fake his own near-death experience, doubtless hoping that he could plead insanity and serve a short period in a psychiatric facility. He took 20 barbiturates which were 10 years past their sell by date and set the attic on fire, knowing that the street cleaners were nearby at this time and would see the flames from far away.

When the smoke began to get dense, he opened the window of the room he was in. Unfortunately for him, he then lost consciousness, fell back into the room and was badly burned.

Jean-Claude Romand spent the next few days in a coma, with his religious friends praying that he would die rather than revive to find that his wife and children had died in this awful accident. But when his murdered parents were found, the authorities began to realise that Dr Romand was not what he seemed.

When the family man regained consciousness, he told the police that a shadowy figure had attacked him and must have set the fire. The stranger must also have killed his parents. ‘You don’t kill your mother and father. It’s God’s second commandment,’ he said. But the police were able to prove that
he’d bought the gun which fired the lethal shots at his mother, father, their dog and his children. And Florence had apparently been bludgeoned to death with the household’s rolling pin. Realising that the evidence was stacked against him, he admitted the murders, saying that he believed his wife and children were in heaven and had forgiven him.

Jean-Claude Romand was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a recommendation that he serve at least 22 years. He will be eligible for parole in 2015 when he is aged 61.