True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa
by Michael Finkel
(HarperCollins) $25.95

In 2002, Michael Finkel, a talented rising star at the New York Times, was fired for fabricating a character in a story for the Times's magazine about child laborers on chocolate plantations in Africa. Around the same time, a man named Christian Longo was arrested outside CancĂşn for allegedly murdering his wife and three small children and dumping their bodies into a muddy pond just outside the small seaside town of Waldport, Oregon. For three and a half weeks, Longo had been hiding out in Mexico under an assumed identity: Michael Finkel of the New York Times.

When Finkel found out, he sensed a story—and an opportunity for redemption. "Now that I am out of a job, I am sort of seeking to find out who I really am, and I would be grateful and honored if you would consider speaking with me," Finkel wrote in his first rambling letter to Longo. Over the next year, Finkel forged a friendship with Longo that lasted through Longo's trial, conviction, and sentencing for his family's murder.

Both men viewed their friendship as an opportunity: For Longo, talking to Finkel gave him a chance to tell his (fabricated, dishonest, endlessly rationalized) side of the story. There was no crime, from petty theft to murder, that Longo could not justify by arguing that it was "for the greater good." And for Finkel, Longo became a kind of therapist-confessor, a literally captive audience in whom he could confide about "my struggles with women, egotism, and honesty." Writing to Longo, Finkel says, was "strangely freeing... if it was on my mind, I usually put it in a letter."

Eventually, as the pretense of Longo's innocence collapsed under the weight of the evidence against him, so did the friendship between the two men—though not, importantly, before Finkel was fairly certain that this man he called a "very nice" person had in fact strangled his wife and oldest child, and stuffed his two youngest children, still alive, into weighted pillowcases and thrown them into an estuary.

True Story is an absorbing, frustrating, deeply flawed book. Finkel's aim is to seamlessly weave together two (loosely) related but dissimilar tales—and, in the process, to exorcise some of the demons that torment him. But those very demons—egotism, dishonesty, a pathological desire to please—ultimately render True Story a self-serving, unconvincing mea culpa.

The first is the story of Finkel's journalistic deceits, which consists largely of Finkel's own tortured rationalizations for piling lies on top of lies as his career at the Times rapidly unraveled. (Finkel's justification for inventing a character and lying about it: He didn't want to write a "second-rate article" that would "damage my standing at the magazine.") The second is that of Longo's far more spectacular undoing, which culminates in Longo's conviction for four senseless and gruesome murders.

Among True Story's many flaws is that Finkel fails, at least initially, to ask one of the most basic journalistic questions: Why is Longo, an accused murderer and admitted pathological liar, so interested in getting to know a journalist in the first place? The answer, Finkel belatedly acknowledges, is that Longo used Finkel to try out strategies for his own defense; for Longo, Finkel was a willing jury of one. And while Finkel belatedly professes horror at the thought that he could have been tricked into trusting a man guilty of killing his wife and three children—"A disturbing feeling swept over me, an angry shock, like the moment you realize your wallet's been lifted"—it's easy to see why Finkel was duped. The truth is, he enjoyed Longo's admiration. Even more, he enjoyed feeling morally superior—even if that meant overlooking an unforgivable crime.

Ultimately, like all narcissists, Finkel reads Longo's story as an allegory about himself. Why else would anyone with critical faculties trust an alleged murderer with his most personal thoughts (in one letter, Finkel writes about "the body-heavy weariness that overcame me when I dwelled on my firing" and describes himself as "somewhat of a failure when it comes to women")? This is another question Finkel fails to ask, except obliquely. In a rare moment of self-reflection, Finkel notes that Longo was "a fan. And there is perhaps nothing more dangerous to a writer's common sense than encountering an enthusiastic reader of his work, even if he's calling collect from the county jail." â– 

barnett@thestranger.com