The journalist and the murderer

The relationship between any reporter and his or her subjects is an endlessly slippery affair. New Yorker reporter Janet Malcolm, the profession's prosecuting demon (who knows something about the relationship between journalists and murderers), has described it as a "special, artificial exercise of subtle influence and counterinfluence, with an implicit antagonistic tendency." Most of the time, she writes, "both subject and interviewer give more than is necessary. They are always being seduced and distracted by the encounter's outward resemblance to an ordinary friendly meeting."

Yet doesn't that "outward resemblance" to friendship carry with it some degree of mutual responsibility? In the introduction to her influential collection "Reporting," Lillian Ross, a pioneering New Yorker reporter of an earlier day, expresses an opposing conclusion: "As soon as another human being permits you to write about him, he is opening his life to you, and you must be constantly aware that you have a responsibility in regard to that person ... Anyone who trusts you enough to talk about himself to you is giving you a form of friendship ... A friend is not to be used and abandoned; the friendship established in writing about someone usually continues to grow after what has been written is published."

This is the central dilemma of reporting, at least insofar as it involves writing about other human beings: We appear to become people's friends, and to some extent the appearance becomes reality. Michael Finkel found himself impaled on the horns of that dilemma. He befriended a pathological liar -- seeing echoes of his own falsehoods in the man -- and then professed himself horrified when the liar told him lies.

For a long time, Finkel and Longo willfully avoid the details of what happened on Dec. 17 and 18 of 2001, when Sadie and Zachery wound up in that pond and the third Longo child, Madison, along with her mother, MaryJane, were packed into suitcases and thrown in the Pacific Ocean. Finkel asks leading questions; Longo responds cryptically. Longo drops ambiguous hints, which Finkel reads as oblique admissions of guilt; Longo later claims they were meant as proclamations of innocence. Like so many murder suspects, Longo never talks about the murders directly in his letters, using passive constructions like "a tragedy that has recently taken place" or "the terribly unnecessary demise of the lives of a wife and three beautiful children."

When Longo finally testifies in his own defense at his 2003 trial, his story about how the killings happened is so incredible he later tells Finkel he didn't intend it to be believed. (You have to read the book to get the full effect.) He tells Finkel yet another story in private, a revision of his outrageous testimony, and Finkel finally understands that he has invested a prodigious amount of time, energy and emotion in a guy who can't tell the truth and who -- at least in the case of this violent, dissociated act -- may not even know what the truth is.

For Finkel, this is the last straw; he throws up his hands in self-righteous indignation and declares that he now hates Longo. The reader may be forgiven for staring in blank disbelief. Finkel doesn't hate Longo for having murdered four people, since it was obvious all along he had done that. Finkel hates him solely for the injury Longo did him -- he hates him because Longo could never tell a convincing and enlightening story that would provide a great ending for a true-crime, mea-culpa potential bestseller.

As I said at the beginning, Finkel had been warned, and didn't quite appreciate the personal significance of the warning. Like the frog ferrying the scorpion across the stream, he expected Longo to transcend his own nature. He's a literary-minded guy; he might also have reflected on Nietzsche's famous admonition that if we gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss gazes into us.

There is not the remotest moral equivalence between what Finkel and Longo did. No small children were drowned because of Finkel's bogus magazine story. But the too-strange-for-Dickens connection between them seems more like fate than randomness; they were high-functioning narcissists who reached a catastrophic breaking point. And the fact that Chris Longo could never escape his lies raises the uncomfortable question of whether Mike Finkel will forever be trapped by his. They were best friends, after all. It's easier to forgive Finkel for his bad journalism than for that.

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