The Man in the Monster (18 page)

According to Dr. DuCharme's report, “Michael's purpose as he perceived his reason for calling me was to understand and unroll the motivation of his behavior, associated with the assault on a young woman in Illinois and the assault on the woman related to his pending case in Ohio.” His conclusion, after working with Michael for several months, was that Michael “did not appear mentally ill.” Dr. DuCharme attributed the attacks to Michael's poor coping skills and the pressures of work, the disintegration of his relationship with his fiancée, and his parents' pending divorce. He noted Michael's anger toward his mother for trying
to manipulate him to give her his stock and control the family business. He also noted that Michael could not accept his mother's relationship with other men. DuCharme suggested counseling, community service, college courses, and physical exercise. “In my judgment, if Michael had been involved in counseling after the first incident, there would have been a substantially lessened probability of a second incident,” he concluded. “Michael's prognosis of benefiting from counseling is within a positive range of expected outcome.”

Michael was very critical of the treatment. “I went to DuCharme because my family had a relationship with him, but he was a learning specialist. The first time I went to see him, he said something like, ‘I can't deal with anything violent or sexual.'” Maybe Dr. DuCharme was warning Michael that he had no expertise in that area, but to Michael it meant that violent sexual fantasies were so revolting that even a psychologist could not talk about them because he was “the scum of the earth.” Michael continually tried to blame Dr. DuCharme for not stopping him from more killing. However, after he was arrested, Michael told another psychiatrist that he enjoyed his sessions with Dr. DuCharme at first and that he attributed the break in his killing spree to his work with him. He felt the one-on-one therapy sessions were helping him but soured on the treatment when Dr. DuCharme wanted him to use biofeedback machines to relieve his stress.

Biofeedback became very popular in the 1960s to treat conditions like migraines, stress, high blood pressure, and even paralysis. The machines monitor heart rate or temperature or brain waves. Patients learn relaxation exercises that help to control things that trigger their conditions. The procedure became less popular by the 1990s because there was no empirical evidence that some types of feedback were effective, but biofeedback is still successfully used today. Michael later told Dr. Cegalis, a defense psychologist, that he gave up his treatment
with Dr. DuCharme because he felt his doctor was “more interested in biofeedback and in his machines than in hearing about and treating his personal difficulties.”

I tried to interview Dr. DuCharme in 1996 and again in 2012 to let him respond to Michael's criticisms. Michael even wrote him in 1996, giving permission for him to talk to me. However, when his office finally responded to my requests via telephone and e-mail, I was told he could not speak to me “in regards to Michael Ross because of confidentiality.” No other doctor refused to speak with me. My assumption was that DuCharme did not want to have to defend his treatment of Michael or his misdiagnosis.

Betsy graduated from Cornell in late May 1982 and specifically asked Michael
not
to come to the graduation. They had once planned to get married the weekend after her graduation. Instead, she was traveling cross-country with another man on a motorcycle. It infuriated Michael. What also infuriated him, according to a family member's statement to police, was that his mother refused to go with him to Ohio for the trial and suggested that Dan go instead. It was one of the few indications that Michael was still dependent on his mother. But his anger toward her was growing. He wrote her a ten-page “nasty” letter. “It was all the things I wanted to tell her. I really told her off, but at the end I said ‘that's how I feel now, but maybe I'll feel differently in a couple of years.'” Just before he was to return to Ohio for the trial, he killed his fourth victim.

 • • • 

D
ebra Smith Taylor was living with her parents in June 1982. Her marriage of a year and a half had been stormy. Her husband, James, was possessive and suspicious that she was seeing other men, so when they were together, they were often quarreling—and often
drinking. She was very petite at four feet eleven inches. According to what James told police, she had a serious operation in April and in June weighed less than eighty-six pounds.

On June 15, 1982, Debbie told her mother that she was going out for a drive, not mentioning that James would be with her, because she knew her mother might object. According to what James told the police, they drove around all day, drinking beer and talking. At one point they went into Rhode Island, took a walk on the beach, and then returned to Connecticut to continue to bar-hop. They ran out of gas in a remote area of Danielson, Connecticut. A trooper picked them up and took them to a gas station, but he couldn't take them back to the car because he had been summoned on a police matter.

Debbie began quarrelling with her husband. Angry and drunk, James hit her, threw the gas can into a ditch, and then began hitchhiking in the opposite direction. James later told police that he didn't think she would hitchhike, “but that if she was offered a ride and a drink, she would accept, especially if she had been drinking.”

Debbie kept walking but never made it to her car because Michael Ross stopped, agreeing to give her a ride to Jewett City. He had been out on the prowl, unable to control his urges to go “on a hunt.” He picked up Debbie and took her to a remote cornfield in Canterbury. “In my statement to the police, I said we started to make out but she stopped and I got angry—that is not true.” He explained that after his arrest, he had taken Malchik's suggestion that there must be a reason for his killing. Somehow in his mind, if Debbie had rebuffed his advances, raping and killing her was more justified. He told me later that when he stopped and told her to get out of the car, she was very cooperative and did whatever she was told. He drove to an area he knew well, near the satellite farm where chicks were raised, far from anywhere that a passing motorist would notice them. He ordered her to take off her clothes,
and perform oral sex on him, and then he raped her. It was the same rundown he gave of all the murders. “Her only concern was that she get home in time to wake up her younger brother for school. She never made it because I strangled her instead. I put the body in the car and drove to a more remote location on the farm and put the body in a shallow streambed under some brush.” Again, he visited this location several times after the murder. He had hidden the body far enough off the main road that he felt secure in visiting the site and staying as long as he could while he stared at her remains.

Debra was reported missing two days later. James Taylor, her husband, immediately became a suspect because of their troubled marriage. Debra's brother, James Smith, told police he was sure that his brother-in-law had killed his sister. Debra's friends also suspected James. Although he insisted he was innocent, he didn't help his case with comments he made around town. When asked if his wife had been found, he said, “No, it will take a bulldozer to find her.” Finally James offered to take a polygraph test. According to police reports, the tests confirmed that he was telling the truth about not knowing what happened to his wife.

Eventually hunters found Debra's remains on October 30, 1982. The location of the remains brought suspicion on some of the employees of Eggs, Inc. and should have made authorities wonder if Michael, who now had a record as a sex offender, was involved. The site was very close to an area known as Gluck's fields where Eggs, Inc. dumped two loads of chicken manure every day. A neighbor told police that the only people who frequented the area on a regular basis were from the Ross farm. On November 3, officers interviewed Dan Ross about whether he ever was in the area and saw anything suspicious. Dan responded that two of his employees went up every day to dump the chicken manure, so the officers interviewed the two workers, who both said they often saw people
in the area, but usually they were either hunters or people who didn't arouse any suspicion by their behavior. Neighbors said that the only other people whom they noticed were kids having keg parties or hippies. Michael was worried that the police or his family would “put two and two together and suspect me.” But no one did—or at least admitted to it. No one connected the dots, Michael believed, because he wasn't in town when the body was found; he was serving time in Ohio for the attack against Sharon.

 • • • 

T
he more he told me about his crimes, the more I saw patterns. Eventually I had to question him about the similarities.

“Did you have a ritual way of killing your victims?”

“I don't know. It was sort of automatic. I wasn't thinking ‘do this or do that.'”

“Why did you flip them on their stomach and straddle them?”

“Maybe to get a better grip on them and make the killing go faster. I told you I didn't think about it. It just happened.”

“But you could have straddled them from the front after you raped them.”

“Then they could fight me,” he said.

“So you were thinking about that?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Do you think it was because you didn't want to see their faces as you killed them?”

He hesitated. “I really don't remember, and what difference does it make now? I killed them. Okay?” By this time I could tell he was angry at me for pressing him. “I guess that may have been part of it, but I don't really know. I don't remember thinking about it. It don't matter now. Okay? Can we drop it?”

“After one more question. Do you think you were symbolically killing Betsy when you killed the girls?

After a few minutes of silence, I asked, “Well, do I get an answer or not?”

“Not. I don't know. Okay?”

It was odd, because when he described his stalking and the oral sex, he admitted that he was acting out Betsy's nightmare. I could only guess that he had experienced the urge to strangle her and was ashamed of admitting it when he was talking to me. He later admitted to me that he had felt violent urges to hurt Betsy, but that he had actually hurt her only once or twice when he had been drinking.

 • • • 

B
etsy showed up in Brooklyn for Michael's birthday on July 26, but not to celebrate with him. She only wanted to return the engagement ring, making their breakup official. “I think she thought she was being kind by doing it in person, but seeing her only made me feel worse,” he told me. A few days later, he was sentenced to six months in prison for the Ohio attack, but he was released for good behavior after four months and returned to Brooklyn in time for Christmas. He lived with his father briefly until he found an apartment.

Perhaps jail had sobered him—at least for a while. But on May 23, 1983, after taking a date home, he raped another woman in Moosup. Margaret (not her real name) said she pulled out “a buck knife” that she carried and threatened him with it when he grabbed her. She told police that he spread out his arms and pushed his chest up against the knife, daring her to stick it into his chest, but that she couldn't do it. “I just started bawling my eyes out,” she said. “I looked up and he just smiled at me and grabbed me by the throat and started strangling me.” Michael never told police about the knife. When he tried to explain why he didn't
kill her, he said, “I don't know why I let her go. After I raped her, I felt confused and not sure what was going on. She got up and ran off, and I didn't try to stop her.”

Margaret did not want to testify at Ross's trial because she didn't believe in the death penalty, but after his execution, she said that she felt responsible for the four women who died after she had had a chance to thrust the knife in his chest. When interviewed in 2005, she said she wished he had killed her like the other women because she's had to live with the nightmare ever since.

The fact that he raped her but didn't kill her was used against Michael at his trials. The prosecutor's theory was that the rape proved that he didn't always feel the compulsion to kill his victims and that he didn't have to kill Margaret because it was dark and she wouldn't be able to identify him. Michael later told me, “I don't know why I didn't kill her any more than I know why I killed the others.”

In the fall of 1983, Michael began to date a woman named Diane (not her real name) who soon moved in with him in Jewett City. When Dan invited him to Thanksgiving dinner, Michael asked if he could bring Diane, but his father said there wasn't enough room. That launched Michael into another rage. “I had to tell Diane that we weren't going to my dad's. That really upset me,” he said, trying to explain what led to his fifth murder. He didn't seem to understand that I couldn't comprehend his rage over a dinner invitation.

 • • • 

R
obin Stavinsky, nineteen, had been trying to pull her life together. A natural athlete and former state discus champion, Robin had moved out after a fight with her parents during her senior year in high school. At first she stayed with a friend and later with her older sister, Debbie. Robin had been with Ron and Joan Stavinsky, her father and
stepmother, for ten years. She had come to them when she was starting the fifth grade, after being taken away from her mother and put into foster care. Ron and Joan had also taken Robin's half sister, Debbie, who was thirteen—even though Debbie was not Ron's daughter. They didn't want to split the girls up because they had always been together. The Stavinskys also had two small children from Joan's previous marriage, David, four, and Jennifer, one.

For Joan, it wasn't easy to instantly become the mother of two teenage girls. She was an at-home mother and alone with them most of the time because Ron worked for a drilling company and was out of town at least half of the year. It was a challenge because she didn't have any experience with teenagers. “Robin came from a place that was not happy,” explained her younger sister, Jennifer Carcia. “Foster care in the sixties and seventies—the stories she'd tell me about it were awful, so she knew how to self-preserve. She had seen a lot, but what she had lived through made her stronger.”