View full sizeChristian Longo killed his wife and three children, Zachery, Sadie and Madison."We're not allowed to heal. It's over and over and over," Dupuie said. "And it's been almost 10 years. It feels as fresh as when it happened.
"I've never had an opinion about the death penalty. I have an opinion now. We will never rest until Chris is gone. We're not allowed to."
For a guy on Oregon's Death Row, Christian Longo is living the life. Sixteen months after a lengthy piece in Esquire described a daily prison routine spiked with porn, R-rated movies and the Wall Street Journal, Longo is back on stage with his sustained campaign to "donate his organs to people in need."
That campaign has garnered Longo -- sentenced to death in 2003 for the murders of his wife, MaryJane, and their three small children, Zachery, Sadie and Madison -- face time in The New York Times, msnbc.com and this column. ABC, I'm told, will join the media parade next week.
"It's disgusting. That's the best word for it," Dupuie, one of MaryJane's five siblings, said Tuesday from her Michigan home. "People are feeding a monster."
Longo's quest to end his legal appeals and donate his organs -- "a profound benefit to society," he told the Times -- has been largely embraced by the media, even as it was rejected by Oregon state prison officials.
"I have nothing for or against organ donation," Dupuie said. "But if this was truly important, there's a way to do it without going public on Facebook pages. If he wants to do something, do it quietly. He killed his own family ... and he's talking about saving lives? I can't be the only person who sees this.
"We're a very private family, and we're as raw as we were when this first happened. He can tell the world everything, and we don't even have a date of death on my sister's headstone."
Back in the late summer of 2001, Dupuie and her siblings didn't know Longo had spirited MaryJane and the children out of Ohio until three weeks after they headed west in a U-Haul truck and a stolen mini-van.
Looking for MaryJane over the next several months, Dupuie said, was unbelievably painful. Like Lincoln County Detective Trish Miller, Dupuie believes Longo was planning the murders of his family long before he reached the Lint Slough Bridge in Waldport in December.
View full sizeChristian Longo listens to testimony before he was sentenced to Oregon's Death Row.Longo had tired of his wife and the family way. He wanted to move on.
"He thought he could get away with murder," Dupuie said. "He didn't think anyone would notice. He actually said that on the (witness) stand."
Dupuie spent so much time in Oregon after the murders that she eventually lost her Michigan job. In 2008, she discovered that a volunteer with the Lincoln County district attorney's victim advocate program had stolen her identity information to open three cell phones and a satellite TV service account.
"This poor family," Miller said. "She (Dupuie) has been victimized through all of this."
And the emotional beating continues each time Longo hosts another press seance about his "wish to make amends."
"Every time the family is healing, he draws attention to this case again," Miller said. "Until he's no longer here, to draw attention to himself, until he passes away, we're going to be on this roller coaster."
But everyone knows Longo isn't going to pass away, at least not by lethal injection. This state hasn't sustained a death penalty in 14 years. There are no dead men walking in Oregon, just condemned men (and women) lounging with their memories on Death Row and mocking their victims'.
"You have pictures, and that's all you have," Dupuie said. "To this day, if I find a piece of paper my sister had written on, do you know how much I cherish that?
"There is not a day that goes by that my family does not grieve for my sister and for Zachery and Sadie and Madison. I hope and pray someday, someday, there will be some sort of peace.
"Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of control over that."
