The Man in the Monster (10 page)

Pete is a man of few words, but it was clear how much he loved Michael even after what he had done. “Michael was the perfect all-American farm boy. Any father would have been proud to call him son,” he said, his eyes welling up with tears.

More than a decade after Michael had been arrested, Frances still couldn't understand how Michael had raped and murdered anyone, never mind eight women. “I remember the day he was arrested,” she said. “I went out to get the paper and couldn't believe it.” She said she ran in to tell Pete. “I thought, ‘It could have been me that he killed.'”

I told her that he never killed anyone he knew and he certainly would never have hurt her, because they were so close. “I didn't think so, but you never know. Who would have ever thought that someone like Michael could have done that?” Michael wrote to them often from prison, and they wrote back when they had time.

“I still don't believe it,” Frances said. “He was such a nice boy.”

DECEMBER 1976

Pat Ross pulled her car up close to coop three at the farm. She had arrived at 4:45
P.M
., fifteen minutes before quitting time, and Michael was still inside cleaning out the coop. She hurried inside, out of the December dark and cold.

“You're here early,” Michael said trying not to make eye contact or upset her as he continued sweeping. He never knew whether to start a
conversation with his mother or to ignore her, because either was just as likely to set her off. But this time he'd decided to speak to her to make sure she knew he had a few more minutes to finish his chores.

“Got something for you,” she said, holding up an envelope with a return address from Cornell University.

He grabbed it and sighed. It was thin. It wasn't even a regular letter-size envelope, and he could feel that there was nothing but a card inside. Every high-school senior knows that a thin letter is a rejection letter, so Michael shoved the unopened letter into his overall pocket, trying not to show his disappointment. He had dreamed of going to college to study agriculture. It had been in the back of his mind at every livestock fair, at Future Farmers of America meetings, and every time he had gone to the bank to deposit his farm wages into his college fund, which then totaled more than ten thousand dollars. He had saved his first hundred dollars by the time he was eight years old and his first thousand by ten. “Everything went straight into the bank. We weren't allowed to use our wages for spending money,” Michael explained.

Applying himself just as much at school as on the farm, Michael had quietly impressed his teachers. “Ross was an exceptional student for two reasons: First of all, he was an academically gifted student; second of all, he was a hard worker. He really liked to be the number-one person in class,” said Richard Colson, the vocational agriculture teacher at Killingly High, in court testimony. “He was quiet, shy, withdrawn to some extent. But he related very well to his teachers, more so than perhaps his peers.”

During his junior year, Michael decided that Cornell, the alma mater of his uncle Quentin, was his first choice and that he would apply early to the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Given his good grades and decent board scores, he dreamed that he just might have a chance of getting accepted. Now he imagined he would have to apply
to other schools, like Penn State or, if worse came to worst, settle for the University of Connecticut at Storrs, which, in Michael's mind, was too close to home.

“Aren't you going to open it?” asked Pat impatiently.

“What's the use? It's obviously a rejection.”

“You don't know until you open it,” she insisted, not telling her son that she had already held the envelope up to the light and knew he had been accepted. “Open it and read it to me.”

Grudgingly, he opened it and soon let out a cry of joy as he read the news announcing that he had been admitted to the school of agriculture as a member of the class of 1981. Pat Ross was pleased with her son and actually allowed him to openly celebrate his acceptance to Cornell. Maybe she was sharing in his glory. She was the one who kept him home working on the farm and doing his homework rather than wasting time on dates or dances—and it had paid off.

Now that he was about to go to college, Michael wanted to rid himself of his crutch, Ritalin. Convinced that he didn't need it, he took himself off the drug during the winter of his senior year in high school—without consulting his family physician or his parents. What he didn't know was that the potential consequences of discontinuing the drug after such a long time were significant. He would have less internal control of his feelings, of his thinking, of his ability to concentrate and study, of his organizational ability, and of the overall maintenance of his life. Without the Ritalin, the areas of the brain that control attention and behavior would be underactive because there would be lower levels of dopamine and noradrenalin produced. Michael should have been weaned off the medication and monitored, because he had been taking it for six years. He had no idea how he would feel without it. On the eve of attending college, he released himself from both Ritalin and his mother's dominance.

After interviewing Dr. Borden and Dr. Berlin several times, watching hours of psychological evaluation by Dr. Zonana, reading the psychological reports of several doctors and the trial testimony, there was little doubt in my mind that Michael was mentally ill. In all of the psychiatric testimony that had been introduced at innumerable hearings, the prosecution had never put on any witness or introduced one report refuting Michael's diagnoses. Prosecutors had tried to challenge defense witnesses, but there was not one expert who had ever disagreed that Michael was a sexual sadist with other personality disorders. The question that remained was whether his mental illness alone was enough to cause him to murder eight women. It took several years of piecing together all the information for me to decide. The answer did not lie solely in his
childhood.

MARCH 1996

On March 21, 1996, I met Michael Ross face-to-face for the first time. By then I had talked to him many dozens of times on the phone, and he had recounted details about his arrest and trial and was beginning to open up about his upbringing and his time at Cornell. Although I had become comfortable talking with Michael on the phone, I was wary of meeting him in person. Originally I had been told that I would have a contact visit, which meant that he and I would be locked in a room together. It's one thing to be told that someone is taking medication that prevents him from having violent sexual fantasies and suppresses his urge to rape and murder. It is another thing to be absolutely sure that the medicine works when you are about to be locked in a room with him. I was nervous but tried to quell the anxiety with the knowledge that Michael had never killed anyone he knew, only strangers. And when I got to the prison, I learned that we would be talking on phones and be separated by a wall of glass and concrete.

Death row is in a cement fortress known as northern Connecticut's maximum security prison in the town of Somers—the prison capital of the state, where six other correctional facilities of medium or minimum security levels are located. Until 1995, condemned men were housed across the parking lot in the facility originally named Somers but now
known as Osborn. Northern is nicknamed “the birthday cake” because the structure looks as if it is stacked in several layers. Standing in the parking lot on the corner between Osborn and Northern, you might mistakenly judge Osborn as the higher-security prison. It is surrounded by a high fence and double rows of barbed wire. But that impression changes when you enter Northern. The sound—or rather lack of it—is ominous. When you enter an older prison, what strikes you immediately is the noise. It's deafening. Your ears ring with the slamming of barred gates and cell doors. Voices echo not only up and down the tiers, but also throughout the building. At Northern there is no sound. The cells have no bars but metal doors with small, thick-paned windows that are sealed shut by remote control, burying the sound with the men behind them.

A visitor enters through a door controlled from a command center inside. After passing through metal detectors, you approach a guard station whose officers are invisible behind impenetrable darkened glass. You pass your photo ID through a metal drawer. If your name is on the visitor list, a visitor's badge is pushed out in the drawer. After a few minutes, an officer opens another steel door by remote control, allowing you to enter a large, austere waiting room that consists of several cold cement benches. Eventually—and sometimes this can be a half hour or more—a guard appears to escort you to your visit. You must first take an elevator—again controlled by the command center—to the second floor. Then you walk down a long windowless corridor, divided in the middle by a riot gate. To pass through, the guard must call on his walkie-talkie and wait for someone to respond. Northern is divided into six pods, three to a side. Each pod contains separate rings of cells that surround a bubbled command center.

It was so clean that the hall floors sparkled. The silence was deceptively peaceful. As an outsider, it may be easy to think it isn't so bad.
They have three square meals a day. It's probably better than where many of these guys lived before they got here. But these inmates are sealed in their cells twenty-three hours of the day, seven days a week. The lucky ones have jobs mopping the floors of the tier. Even after an hour or so inside, I began to feel trapped.

At that time, death row was located in 1E at the far end of the corridor. However, the location of death row changed several times during the years I visited Michael. For you to enter the visiting area off the row, an officer in the bubble inside the tier must open the door electronically. Once you're inside, the door is sealed shut, and you have to wait in a cubicle that consists of a cold cement cylinder to sit on, a cement slab connected to the wall that serves as a sort of desk, and a two-way phone. The inmate is escorted into a similar booth on the other side of a virtually soundproof glass window. You are unable to leave the less than four-by-four-foot hermetically sealed cubicle without the permission of the command center.

Yet despite the setting and his yellow prison jumpsuit, the man across from me did not look like a serial killer. Michael looked like the type of person who would offer to carry my groceries. New London
Day
reporter Karen Clarke had commented to me at the trial, “If I were walking down a dark alley and I heard footsteps behind me and turned around and saw Michael Ross, I'd be relieved.”

Once more he made sure to remind me of his murders. “I have a mental illness, and I couldn't control myself. But whenever you look at me, I want you to remember that I killed eight women.”

I'm buried in a cold prison. How could I forget?
I thought but didn't say. “I told you before, if you killed one of my children, I would want to kill you with my bare hands. I have a teenage daughter.”

“That was my target age,” he said in an almost statistical way that made me shudder.

“But I would hope that I wouldn't want the state to kill you or anyone else,” I said. “Even though I might personally have the desire to go and get a gun and shoot the person who hurt my child, I can't imagine getting to the point where I would kill or want the killer to be executed. Two wrongs don't make a right.” I was being honest, but the conversation unnerved me.

Michael had come to the visit with a stack of folders. Periodically he held up a couple of documents to the glass for me to read. I asked a few questions, filling in details on topics raised in earlier conversations. The purpose of the visit was more for fact-checking than it was for an interview. I wasn't allowed to tape-record the conversation because recorders are not allowed in the facility, and talking on the wall phone made writing difficult. But I watched him closely as we spoke.

When he took out the papers from the collapsible folder, his hands shook. He was nervous, but I don't think it was because he was worried about what I would write about him. It was apparent that he desperately wanted me to like him. He was paranoid about having our conversations taped by the prison, so he had me write some questions on a piece of paper so he could see and answer. He tried to lighten the conversation whenever it got serious; he continually joked—usually gallows humor—trying to make me laugh, trying to put me at ease. “So how do you like my place here?”

The concrete cylinder that I was sitting on was not only hard, but also cold. “Your decorator seems to be trying to discourage guests. This is the most uncomfortable thing I ever sat on.”

“My room's a little homier, but I doubt that they'd let us visit in there,” he joked.

He wanted to chat about my life, deflecting attention away from his own. “How are the twins?” “How was the drive?” “Did they give you any trouble getting in here?”

“They aren't a very friendly lot downstairs. Hardly anyone speaks to you with more than a syllable or two. I felt like I was being fitted for a cell.”

“Tell me about it. I live with this 24/7.”

I knew I would have only a short time, so I finally had to steer the subject back to his reasons for accepting a death sentence. The mood suddenly changed, and he began to cry. He repeated the reasons. “I have to do it. There's no other way. I owe it to the families of my victims.”

“What about your family?” I asked. Other than reading court documents and letters he wrote me, we'd never really discussed his relationship with his family. I knew they didn't visit him or call, but he hadn't told me much about his relationship with his parents and siblings.

“For the most part, I don't think they'll miss me.”

“Won't your father and your aunt miss you? They visit.”

“I see my father maybe once a year at the most, and my aunt only comes once in a while, but it's not like they are here all the time. I don't even talk much. It would probably be a relief to them to not have me around.” I thought about all the years that virtually no one called or visited. He'd been in jail for twelve years and on death row for nine. His sisters had come to visit at first, but they had stopped after the trial. He had only one real friend on the row, Bob Breton, who had been convicted of killing family members. Bob was not well educated, but he was friendly and depended on Michael, whose loneliness was painful to witness.

Having visited a few supermax prisons, I could understand his feelings about the oppressiveness of Northern. The first time I visited a supermax was in Waynesville, Pennsylvania. I was startled by the sense of being inside a tomb. The few windows don't open. It made me think of Edgar Allan Poe's story “The Premature Burial,” in which the narrator finds that he has been buried alive by mistake.

At Northern, Michael was locked up for twenty-three hours a day in an eight-by-ten-foot cell. He was allowed out to shower two or three times a week and for a few hours of recreation in what he referred to as a cage or dog run. At Somers, death row inmates had been allowed to be together for meals and recreation. Although death row was deep inside Somers, multiple riot doors from the entrance, it was not a hermetically sealed tomb like at Northern. There were bars on the cells rather than solid doors with small windows, so prisoners could talk to one another and—if no one noticed—pass things to one another. The tier of death row cells at Somers faced large windows to the outside, bringing in lots of light—as well as cold in the winter and heat in the summer. Probably the most notable difference was the staff. Even to the visitor, the guards at Northern were intimidating and surly; the guards at Somers were much friendlier and, according to Michael, treated the inmates like human beings. I was beginning to understand why death would be a relief.

On another visit to Northern, I arrived late in the day, near the end of a shift, and after the visit, I was left locked in a concrete and glass visiting room for a couple of hours beyond the time I was scheduled to leave. My only communication was a buzzer to signal that I wanted to leave, but it was ignored for one long, excruciating hour while the guards fed the prisoners and conducted a prisoner count, as they did every day at shift change. I didn't know why they were ignoring me. I began to experience total claustrophobia.

As I stood waiting by the sealed door, I began to panic. I waited, beginning to think that the guards were ignoring me on purpose. In my mind, they were sitting in the command center laughing at me. I imagined being trapped in that visiting area for hours, days. The air-conditioning made it uncomfortably cold, yet I was sweating. Finally the door swished open and a guard led me out.

Michael later explained to me what had actually happened. There had been a shift change, which meant a prisoner count, followed by dinner, so they didn't have anyone to escort me out. He told me the daily schedule, and I made sure I never again made the mistake of visiting when I might get trapped inside. I never forgot the feeling of freedom that I experienced when I was outside the prison and in my car.

In the hour we spent together that first day, Michael and I began to develop a rapport. I had a sense of what John Gilmartin and Ann Cole saw in him. Michael did not seem like the beast that Satti had described at trial. He did not seem evil. He showed empathy when he sensed that I felt awkward. He often asked about my family. I had told him about them because there was no way I could talk on the phone at home without him knowing I had toddlers—even when I tried to shut the door to my little office, because it was right off the playroom.

“What's all that racket?” he had asked.

“That's Hannah and James playing.”

“They make a lot of noise. I don't think I ever made that much noise.”

“You weren't a twin.”

He laughed, he cried, he was friendly. There was no sign of the “monster.” The serial killer would never be revealed to me in person—only on paper. The Depo-Provera had caged the monster somewhere deep inside the
man.