Two recent stories, both from the Detroit Free Press, follow.
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Monday January 28 10:39 PM EST
FBI Searches For Runaway Sisters
The FBI in Portland said Monday that agents are looking for two missing teenage girls from Ypsilanti, Mich.
Kala Lynne Haller, 13, and Elizabeth "Liz" June Haller, 16, were reported missing from their home on Sept. 26, said Beth Anne Steele, an FBI spokeswoman in Portland.
Police said Monday they are searching for two missing teen-age sisters from Ypsilanti, Mich., who may be traveling in Oregon. Investigators are considering the girls runaways.
Steele said that the girls might have "some information about an investigation we are working on."Kala Haller is described as 5-foot-3 and 130 pounds, with brown hair and hazel eyes. Elizabeth Haller is
about 5-foot-4, weighs 125 pounds and has brown hair and hazel eyes. Both girls wear glasses on occasion, authorities said.
The FBI said that the Hallers could be traveling in Portland, Bend or Baker City or in southwest Washington.
The sisters have been missing from their Michigan home since late September. They are considered "endangered runaways who may have a connection to an on-going FBI investigation," the bureau said in a statement Monday.
Steele would not confirm whether the teens had any connection to the investigation of Christian Longo, a former Ypsilanti Township man accused of killing his wife and three children in Oregon and dumping their bodies.
Mary Jane Longo, 35, and her 2-year-old daughter, Madison, were found dead in a bay near Newport on Dec. 27. Her other two children, 4-year-old Zachary and 3-year-old Sadie Ann, were found a week earlier in an
inlet about 14 miles away.
Longo was arrested earlier this month following an international manhunt. A prosecutor said last week that the state will seek the death penalty against Longo.
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January 26, 2002
Charmer becomes murder defendant
Everyone liked Longo, for a time; now wife, 3 kids lie dead
BY AMY KLEIN, FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
NEWPORT, Ore. -- Dragged from the sea in the shadow of the Yaquina Bay Bridge, the last of the four bodies lay strangled and puffed with water.
There, at the edge of the land -- at the end of the road for Christian Longo -- the Oregon air smells of fish and fog. There, in a trash bin near the marina, photo albums and clothing were left behind.
In the distance, the half-moons of the bridge head south to the inlet where the first two small bodies washed up.
And in a cell one mile away, the 28-year-old Ypsilanti man whose worst crime had been forging checks, stands accused of killing his wife and three young children.
The murder charges leveled against Longo shattered the picture held by his former in-laws, the Jehovah's Witness congregants at the family's Ypsilanti church and the everyday people who crossed Longo's path.
If it's true, he must have snapped, they say.
But experts in criminal psychology who talked in general about such crimes said Longo fits a profile of one of the most imperceptible types of killers: those who derive power from petty crime and then, as the law and desperation close in, graduate to murder. Shedding
a family can be seen as a way to start over.
If it's true, he is a calculating killer, they say.
Either way, interviews and court records shed light on why the family fled to Oregon and reveal details about how four of the five Longos died. And the information helps explain how Christian Longo went from charming teenager to death-penalty candidate.
In early 1993, Christian Longo paid a visit to James Baker in Traverse City. Longo, who had just turned 19, had met Baker's daughter, MaryJane, through his Jehovah's Witness congregation and was interested in marriage.
The men talked about the responsibilities of marriage and the difficulties of raising children. "He was clean cut, good looking. His language was very elegant -- he didn't talk like a teenager, a kid or a punk," Baker remembered. "Now I know he could convince
you of anything. He bluffed his way through life."
The newlyweds
On March 13, 1993, in Ann Arbor's Huron High School auditorium, a minister married Christian Longo and MaryJane Baker. She was just shy of 26, but had a sheltered upbringing, living with her mother until her wedding day.
Renting an apartment in Ypsilanti, MaryJane Longo worked as an office assistant and her husband bounced from job to job, relatives said. She remained active in the Golfside Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses, knocking on doors to spread their message and attending
frequent meetings.
Zachary was born in February 1997 and two more children quickly followed -- Sadie Ann in 1998 and Madison in late 2000. MaryJane was a mother with few outside interests -- she focused on her kids, dressed them impeccably and did not believe in spankings, her father
said.
But by the time Madison was born, the family's financial problems were spiraling out of control.
In October 2000, Christian Longo was convicted of forging $30,000 in checks through his company, Final Touch Construction Cleaning Inc. He defaulted on his car lease, allegedly used a bad check to buy a
construction trailer and was sued six times. The plaintiffs wanted their money, which topped $60,000.
The church told Longo he could no longer be a Jehovah's Witness since he had stopped living within the tenets of the faith. But Longo continued to show up for meetings, despite his disfellowship, said Chad Onufer, a member of the Golfside congregation.
In May, the Longos were running. They sold their home, Longo jumped probation in Washtenaw County, and the family moved into a warehouse next to a meat wholesaler in downtown Toledo.
"We think she was either scared or she didn't know what was going on, because MaryJane loved those kids. She wouldn't put them in danger," Onufer said. "But, you know, we would have said the same thing about Chris."
Several criminal psychologists, who have investigated and interviewed hundreds of murderers, point to the move as a possible warning sign of desperation.
Although none of these experts met or analyzed Longo, they talked in general about such crimes and offered insight on the people who commit them.
Former FBI profiler Robert Ressler said that in cases in which a man kills his family, several stress factors build up to the murders.
"It's not an act of waking up one morning and thinking, 'I think I'll kill my wife and kids,' " said Ressler, who has helped capture serial murderers. "These people are out-and-out psychopaths."
Ressler, now a consultant in Virginia, noted, however, that such crimes are often committed by men in their 40s who feel they've failed so many times that murder becomes an act of desperation. Longo, 27 at the time of the slayings, would be young for such a crime.
In Toledo, problems were mounting for the Longos, Baker remembers. Word filtered back to him that Christian Longo had maxed out his parents' credit card. And the stress seemed to be getting to the kids, Baker said.
Worried, MaryJane Longo's siblings in Michigan decided in September to visit. But the warehouse was empty, and MaryJane's sister, Penny Dupuie, filed a missing person report with the Toledo police.
"When we began looking for MaryJane, every one of us felt this thing in the pit of our stomachs," Dupuie said.
On the run
Abruptly last summer, the family left Toledo. Ohio police had issued a warrant for Christian Longo for alleged theft, and this time the family didn't stop until reaching the coast of Oregon.
First in Waldport, then 30 miles north in Newport, the Longos seemed to rebuild their lives. He got a job at a Starbucks and rented apartments in Newport -- one at the Landing, a tony condo complex on Yaquina Bay.
But he was soon in trouble again. In Waldport, he stole a $50 crab trap, according to an affidavit. Richard Walter, a prison psychologist who retired from the Michigan Department of Corrections after 22 years, said Christian Longo's alleged return to petty theft
could mean he was using crime -- and the subsequent escape from being caught -- as a way to boost his ego and feel in control again. "There is a certain amount of machismo and bravado that comes out in terms of being able to usurp other people," Walter said. "But as things become more tenuous and as reality begins to push through, the
demand to feel superior becomes bigger."
Police told Baker that the last time his daughter and baby Madison were seen was on a day in December. The parents left Zachary and Sadie Ann with a neighbor and went out with Madison.
On Dec. 19, Zachary's body was pulled from Alsea Bay, near Waldport. Searching for clues to the boy's death, divers found Sadie Ann three days later. The children drowned, police told Baker. Christian Longo was last spotted in Newport during those days, before the bodies were identified. A week later, divers discovered MaryJane Longo and baby
Madison in Yaquina Bay. The two had been strangled before they were thrown into the sea, police told Baker.
Baker said police found family photos and clothes in a nearby trash can.
Autopsy results have not been released, and police have not discussed details of the deaths, other than to say they were homicides.
Christian Longo ran again -- first to San Francisco in a stolen car and then to Mexico by late December, police said. He surfaced at a youth hostel in Cancun, Mexico, and is suspected of stealing $500 before bolting again, said Charles Mathews, special agent in charge of the Oregon FBI.
Longo spent about three days on the FBI's Most Wanted list before a Canadian woman who had been at the hostel recognized his picture and called police. The FBI caught up with Longo in a grass hut in Tulum,
about 50 miles south of Cancun. He was drinking beer and smoking pot with a bunch of British men in Cabana 41 when police burst in, said Tom Taff, a Minneapolis man who had befriended Longo on vacation.
Once again, Longo had oozed charm, a good-looking, seemingly all-American guy.
Longo claimed to be living in San Francisco, Taff said, and was staying in the beach hut with his pretty German girlfriend. Longo said he graduated from the University of Michigan and was a travel writer for the New York Times. He scrawled notes on Mayan mysticism, Taff said. "This guy is very smart," Taff said. "This is a high-IQ
individual who could have been a millionaire if he had taken a different path."
Those who commit family murders often show no remorse, said Walter, who has consulted with U.S. and foreign police agencies.
In a Newport courtroom Wednesday, Longo did not enter a plea to seven charges of murder. In Oregon, the slaying of a child under 10 is a two-count murder charge.
Longo's parents in Indianapolis have spoken publicly just once -- on an "America's Most Wanted" broadcast to help find their son.
"It would be difficult for anyone to imagine their son or brother committing such acts. No family should ever have to face such a dilemma," Longo's family wrote in a statement Wednesday.
Back in Ann Arbor, where Christian and MaryJane Longo were married nearly nine years ago, a fresh grave was filled at the back of the Bethlehem United Church of Christ Cemetery.
Under the mound of dirt and the piles of dying yellow roses, MaryJane Longo and her three children have come home.
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