No ordinary Joe

I can’t decide whom I distrust more in True Story: the author, a humane and thoughtful man, or his subject, Joe Longo, who butchered his wife and youngest son, then drowned his other children by tying them up in a sack and dropping them into a lake like unwanted kittens.

True Story is written by a penitent. Three years ago Michael Finkel, a rising star of investigative and travel journalism, was caught making up a story about poverty in Africa. It was not a very terrible crime; he only invented bits of the piece (it was still ‘writerly’ truth, even if not ‘journalistic’, he insists), but the result hit him badly. He was sacked from the New York Times, humiliated in the gossip columns, shunned by all and, only 33, retired to his ranch in the Montana mountains to nurse his blushes. Almost immediately a little local paper put him onto the biggest story of his life. The FBI had arrested the suspected murderer Joe Longo on the run in Mexico. Bizarrely, Longo had been passing himself off as a well-known New York Times journalist on vacation. He had been pretending to be Michael Finkel.

True Story is a thrilling, unforgettable book, but not always for the reasons Finkel hopes. Finkel writes to Longo in prison; they develop a cloying friendship. Longo, a Jehovah’s Witness, decides to confess to Finkel — not to the crimes (not at first) but to his life of pretence before the murders were committed. It is a Shakespearean story of greed and decline, and a life that Longo felt a disgraced liar like Finkel would appreciate. Handsome, respected, intelligent, in a moment of breathtaking stupidity, Longo forged a $30,000 cheque. His house-cleaning company was going through a bad patch; he wanted to preserve his standing in his community and at his ghastly sounding local church.