Then he drove his four-year-old son and three-year-old daughter to a nearby bridge, tied rocks to their legs, and tossed them into frigid water, alive. In 2001 he had strangled his wife and two-year-old daughter inside their condominium on the Oregon coast, stuffed them in suitcases, and sunk them in a bay.
In all this time I'd never been able to make sense of him, to reconcile the bright and dryly funny person I knew (he calls the yellow cordless his "cell" phone), the guy I sometimes referred to as my friend, with the man who'd been convicted of the most unimaginable of crimes. By the time I received this call, last February, as I was watching a Dora the Explorer video with my children early on a Saturday evening, I'd known Christian Longo for seven years. Why he was calling me - and why I wanted to watch him die - was not so simple. So he was dropping his appeals, he told me, and would likely be executed, by lethal injection, in a matter of months. He was sick of prison and sick of himself, and he thought there might be a way to make his death meaningful. After half a decade spent sealed inside a white concrete box for more than twenty-one hours a day, with only other murderers as neighbors and with no hope of ever again seeing the outside world, he'd had enough. The reason he wanted to die, he said, was fairly simple. He asked me this over the phone, calling collect from inside his prison cell - the yellow cordless passed down the line, cell to cell, hands reaching through bars - on death row at the Oregon State Penitentiary. When Christian Longo asked if I wanted to watch him die, I told him I did.
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