Love, Daddy by Carlton Smith

Author:Carlton Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2003-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The next sequence of events was likewise shrouded in imprecision by those who later investigated the tragedy. It appears that Chris, MaryJane and the kids packed up the red van once more and headed north to Newport, fifteen miles up the coast. There they took a $22-a-night room at one of the motels on Pacific Highway, and Chris set about trying to find some money. Eventually he found a job at the Starbucks at the Fred Meyer supermarket just up and across the highway from the motel.

At this point, Chris appeared to be keeping his bargain with MaryJane—with one exception. Although he was desperate for cash, he made no attempt to forge any more checks. Of course, that may have been because Chris simply didn’t have the models he needed—payroll checks from Oregon companies—to pull off the scam one more time. But feeding the family was growing increasingly difficult. Later, Chris would say how hard it was, trying to feed five people on five dollars. The Longos ate a lot of hydrated noodles, he would later recall.

Because of their faith—or rather, at that point, MaryJane’s faith—it never occurred to the Longos to seek assistance from any of the welfare agencies. That sort of help was supposed to come from the other Witnesses, but Chris had cut them off from all that by his plan to remove them from the embrace of the Organization.

Still, at some point between September 12 and early October—before losing the Waldport house—Chris stole two crab rings—each just a pair of metal hoops covered with wire nets intended to trap unwary crustaceans—from the rental house and hocked them in Newport. He got $20 for them. He probably thought that no one would miss the simple pieces of fishing equipment, but he was wrong. At some point after the Longos left, one of the people at Ocean Odyssey looked over the rental house, and realized that the crab rings were missing. They reported the theft to the police—in this case, the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department.

Meanwhile, the job at the Starbucks finally began, and at last Chris was bringing in some money. It wasn’t much, partly because the job was part-time. Chris tried to raise more cash by looking for window-washing jobs in Newport. But the rainy season isn’t a very good time to wash windows in Oregon. Still, by the middle of October, he had earned enough money to move the family to another motel, this one with a weekly rate: the Newport Motor Inn.

Although he was later to describe this period as arduous in the extreme—constant worries about money, reduced to eating noodles, having no real hope or prospects—other stories later circulated that things were not quite so bleak as Chris wanted everyone to believe. At least for himself.

Some at the Starbucks later recalled Chris as being sort of snooty: while the workers at the coffee outlet were supposed to wear Dockers, for instance, Chris insisted he would only wear Abercrombie & Fitch. And he seemed to have a fetish for imported cheeses and expensive wines.

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