Identity Lost, Stolen, And Found

In his new book, "True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa," journalist Michael Finkel chronicles the story of Christian Longo, who drowned his wife, MaryJane and their three young children in December 2001, in Waldport, Ore.

Longo fled to Mexico where he was eventually arrested and returned to the United States. A jury found him guilty and sentenced him to death. Click here to read an excerpt.

True crime stories aren't all that unusual, but Finkel had more than a casual interest in this case, which seemingly fell into his lap.

"I received the most confounding phone call of my life," Finkel tells The Early Show co-anchor Julie Chen. "A reporter in Oregon called me up, and he told me that a man who had been on the FBI's 10-most wanted list had just been arrested in Mexico, where he had taken on my name and my identity."

Just days earlier, Finkel had been fired by The New York Times.

Finkel recalls, "At the exact same time I was basically having my identity stolen, I lost my own identity. I had made a terrible mistake. I had lied in an article that I wrote for The New York Times magazine. I'd done what's called a composite character. I combined a lot of interviews together to make one character and was caught for this and fired."
Finkel blames his own ambition for ending his career as a journalist. "I didn't have a perfect interview, and it was a complicated story," he explains, "I made a really terrible judgment error and I lied to my editors. It was a one-time act, for which I've not forgiven myself. I handed in a falsified story."

But just as he was at the lowest point of his life, "The most confounding, interesting material I've ever had fell in my lap," Finkel says. The result is his book, which Finkel says is almost entirily about his relationship with Longo.

"It was the most complicated, intricate, bizarre relationship of my life," Finkel says. "It was not journalist subject in any typical way. He took on my identity first, which is not the way usually a journalist and subject meet. We wrote each other more than 1,000 pages of hand written letters; spoke on the phone 51 times. I visited with him in jail. It was a confounding relationship."

After the trial, Longo confessed he had murdered all four members of his family in a letter to Finkel.

Longo blamed his wife for initiating the crime, which Finkel says he does not believe at all.

Finkel says, "I had psychologists read some of his letters, and they diagnosed him as what's called narcissistic personality disorder, an extremely inflated sense of self. He thought he was very important, that his family's fortunes were dividing, and that if he wasn't going to be around to take care of his family, they wouldn't be able to survive without him."

Once it was obvious that Longo was guilty, Finkel says their relationship fell apart.

"For one year, while I was writing the book, we had no contact," Finkel says. "In the recent months, there has been very superficial contact between us, just a little bit."

Asked how much of writing the book was to tell Longo's story, and how much of it was to make a living and to restore his name, Finkel says, "I wrote what I felt. I couldn't leave out what happened with the New York Times. It's all sort of intertwined into one. The last few years of my life have been the most extraordinary, every single emotion you can think of."

Longo first came on Finkel's writing in Skiing Magazine. "In a nutshell, he was a fan," Finkell says. "He said he always wanted to be a globetrotting journalist. When he was in Mexico, he assumed what he called his dream job."

Today, Finkel says he misses being a journalist for a news organization.

"I wanted almost all my life to work for The New York Times," he says. "At times, I really miss that adrenaline buzz of chasing a story."

For closer look at the story of Christian Longo, his brutal crimes, and strange relationship with Michael Finkel, tune into "48 hours" - "The Pretender," next Tuesday at 10:00 p.m./ET.