The Man in the Monster (15 page)

1980–1981

It took many telephone conversations and letters to unravel what had happened to Michael in college and for me to have the courage to ask him about the individual murders. Over the course of three years, I was able to piece it all together.

By his senior year, Michael was a day student and a night predator. Neither of these two personalities thought about the other. In Michael's mind, the day student was Michael Ross and the night predator was the monster. “As time went on, it was less me doing the stalking and more the monster within. I believe he was slowly beginning to gain control. In the beginning, when I was in charge, I worried about being recognized, but as he took control, that was no longer a concern. I know that this sounds crazy, but because I was becoming two people with two separate identities, it didn't matter if the ‘stalker' was recognized because he wasn't me. On some level I believed that it wasn't me doing the stalking.”

As the denial became greater, the monster became more real to Michael. “[The monster] didn't have much power at first, and only controlled for brief periods of time. That's why I was so confused after the first attacks. I didn't understand what had happened. He grew out of my fantasies. He drew power out of the fantasies as they became more
and more violent. When the fantasies weren't enough to satiate his appetites, he drew off the stalking. The stalking made the fantasies more powerful and, in turn, fed him. But the big step was when the women were frightened during the stalking. Their fear fed him more than any fantasy could. I remember how delicious it felt, how it satisfied him to feel their fear when they realized that they were being followed.” Soon he needed more, and he grabbed a woman. But the act of grabbing shocked Michael back to reality, and “he [the monster] lost his momentary control over me. I became frightened and confused, not understanding what I had done. Before that, it had been just a harmless game, a harmless way to feed a part of me that hungered. God, I was so stupid. I can see how the little bastard did it. And I let him because I didn't see the danger; I didn't see the potential harm.”

Michael said that if he had faced the monster then, “I could have beaten him. But I pretended nothing was wrong. I did what I always did and pretended that if I ignored the problem, it would go away. It always comes back to my being a coward and not doing what I deep down inside knew had to be done.” Michael saw himself as an inherently good person. He could not have stalked or attacked a woman or even had the dark thoughts that accompanied the stalking. The only way to explain what was happening to him was to bifurcate his personality into Michael and the monster.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, Michael was trying to relieve the conflicts within his mind through sadistic behavior. He went out to stalk to “relieve” the frustration he was feeling with his relationship to Betsy. His compartmentalization of the monster enabled him to go on living day-to-day. If he melded the two, either the monster would be completely unleashed or he would have to kill himself because he could not accept who he had become.

Dr. Berlin, who had prescribed Depo Lupron and Depo-Provera for
Michael, suggested that the monster was a metaphor. “He's not presenting it as the devil made me do it. . . . If somehow God could have allowed him to cut off the part of his brain that drove him to do this, then it could really allow his behavior to be a reflection of what his conscience and his intellect wanted, rather than the things that are pushing him that he can't control.” In effect, Michael was describing his violent fantasies and actions as a cancer of the mind.

I wanted to ask Michael to describe one of these sexual fantasies, but at that point I did not have the courage.

 • • • 

D
uring his senior year at Cornell, Michael became a teaching assistant for Professor George Conneman's course Farm Business Management; he worked late at night, sometimes past midnight. The new title provided him with a different twist to his fantasies; in his dream world, he was the teacher of a huge group of female students who wanted to have sex with him in hopes of a higher grade.

On the evening of May 7, 1981, Michael was attempting to grade papers but found it almost impossible to concentrate. He and Betsy had been fighting again, and he'd become increasingly aware of a growing sense of anxiety about their relationship. Now finally finished with his work, he was in his red Chevy Chevette on his way home to Betsy but was distracted by the attractive young woman walking alone. As Michael drove out of the parking lot near Rice Hall, he stopped to let her pass on the crosswalk. She was not a Cornell student, but a coed from another school visiting her boyfriend. He could think of nothing other than following her. As he headed home, he should have turned right but instead drove directly across the street and parked the car. Removing his glasses, he got out of the car and began to follow the unsuspecting woman until she got near the greenhouses about a hundred
yards away. His heart pounding with the excitement and thrill of the chase, he grabbed her from behind and wrapped a shoelace around her neck. But the shoelace snapped, and he quickly shoved his hand over her mouth and dragged her through some bushes, then he threw her onto the ground. According to the woman's report to the police, he said, “Scream and I'll kill you.” He forced her along a deserted path and then told her to lie down on her stomach. She says that is when “the rope” was removed from around her neck and that her wrists were tied behind her. “I had her take off her jeans, perform oral sex on me [as she knelt at his feet], and then I raped her.” She reported to police that he exposed himself to her and said, “Now do this for me, like a good girl, and you won't be dead tomorrow. Suck.” She said he pulled out before ejaculating and then raped her, reporting that the rape lasted less than thirty-five seconds.

Michael's version was similar but without the dialogue and time frame. He concurred that “the whole thing couldn't have lasted more than a couple of minutes.” Afterward he ran back to his car and went home; the victim went for help and called the police.

After he had cleaned himself up, he “crawled into bed next to Betsy, who was already asleep.” While Betsy had been peacefully asleep and safe in her bed, Michael had acted out the rage that he felt when fighting with her—on another woman who, to Michael, was not a real person. His objectification of his victims haunted him. He'd feel shame about what he'd done, but he “couldn't feel the proper remorse for my victims.” When he talked to me about the women he killed, he continually lamented that they didn't seem real to him, that he couldn't feel any empathy toward them. He felt terrible shame for the grief he caused their families but felt nothing for them.

When he woke up the next morning, Michael was disgusted and ashamed, and he considered suicide. “From time to time, reality would
force its way through my denial and I had to face what I had done. Most of the time, my denial was strong, but on occasion, reality would emerge and I would feel enormous guilt and suicidal urges.” A few days after the rape, he went to the road bridge overlooking the gorge near Beebe Lake and considered ending it all. “I don't remember thinking of going to the bridge, just sort of finding myself there, looking into the gorge, and fighting an urge to jump.” But it never went beyond an urge. Although he hated himself and what he had done, he could not bring himself to end his life—or to turn himself in. Instead, his denial became more effective and he “forgot” about what he had done.

Dr. Borden said, “The force of the sexual aggression fusion at that point broke the first taboo . . . rape.” Up until that time, he had been a law-abiding citizen. “There was a conscience, primitive conscience based on parental harsh controls, but nevertheless, something holding him back, something keeping that rage, fused rage in check.” Now it had disappeared.

 • • • 

D
zung Ngoc Tu came to Cornell in the fall of 1980 to earn a graduate degree in agricultural economics. Vivacious and outgoing, the twenty-five-year-old was known for her spirit and her intellect. She spent her free time working as a Big Sister to local disadvantaged girls. She was pretty and petite, just four feet ten inches and ninety-five pounds. Born in Vietnam, she moved to Bethesda, Maryland, in the late 1960s. Tu took education very seriously; she graduated from Vassar College with honors in 1978 and came to Cornell after spending a year at the London School of Economics.

It was after midnight on the night of May 12, 1981, the last day of classes and only a few weeks before graduation. Tu had been working late in the Agriculture library and was going home that warm night
when Michael Ross spotted her walking toward Beebe Lake after he had finished grading papers.

Until that night, Tu and Ross had never met, although she also worked as a teaching assistant in an office down the hall from where Michael worked. He followed her down a hill to the footbridge, a dimly lit and secluded area near the Pancake House. His pace quickened as he came up behind her and grabbed her, putting his hand over her mouth and dragging her out of sight behind a nearby building. His fingers squeezing tightly around the back of her neck, he forced her to take off her skirt. Making her kneel at his feet, he shoved his penis in her mouth, thrusting it hard to degrade her but pulling out to avoid an orgasm; then he pushed her onto the ground and made her take off her underwear, and then he raped her. He told Dr. Borden that he made the women remove their own underpants as an act of control. When the sexual attack was over, he instructed her to put her skirt back on. Then he had her roll over onto her stomach. Straddling her tiny back, he strangled her, squeezing the life out of her with his calloused hands. It was over in minutes. He pushed her body into Beebe Lake, only a few yards away, and ran to his car even though he wasn't sure if she was dead or unconscious. He went straight home to the apartment and found that Betsy had already gone to bed. Still not sated, he woke her up, insisting that they have sex.

A few days later, after a thunderstorm, Tu's body was found in the gorge below, about sixty yards downstream from the Triphammer Bridge on Thurston Avenue. Police first classified the death as an accident or suicide, but friends and classmates insisted that she had not been depressed or upset. Because the body had been in the water for several days, the cause of death was first listed as either a fractured skull or drowning, and a later autopsy report was sealed by police, who began to suspect foul play. Tu's boyfriend immediately hired an attorney. There
weren't any witnesses, and due to the lack of physical evidence, no one suspected Michael Ross. Even if semen could have been collected after all that time in the water, this was long before the days of DNA testing.

Michael claims that the whole episode was surreal, as though he were watching a flickering old black-and-white movie, full of jump cuts and all spliced together with tape. He was there, and yet he was not a complete participant because of the dissociative state in which he “watched” himself rape and kill. These descriptions led Dr. Merikangas to later suggest that he suffered from depersonalization disorder, a dissociative pathology in which the sufferer feels disconnected from his own experience.

Yet even though he didn't feel like a participant in the action, he told me he felt what the monster felt, an orgasmic exhilaration from the brutal acts. It was not the oral sex or the rape per se that aroused him. It was the ritual of degrading the woman that gave him exquisite pleasure. His foreplay was the act of total domination. The ultimate climax was the murder. As Dr. Borden explained, “The sexual part, the sexual rape was pleasurable, gave him a sense of sexual release, but what really gave him a sense of his heart beating, adrenaline pumping, the sense of real power was when he was killing. And that in reality, the killing was much more powerful than the sexual part of it, and that's what was surprising to him.”

In one sense, Michael had symbolically punished Betsy for the misery in his life. The oral sex represented her attack in Washington, her degradation. She was asking him to make choices he did not want to make, to take a job he didn't really want. He wanted to move home to Brooklyn, but she wanted none of that. He feared that he would lose her, so he wanted to kill her. Michael did not understand it at the time, but Dr. Borden suggested that when he strangled Tu, he was killing
Betsy and his mother and any other woman who would hurt or abandon him. When I first brought up the possibility, Michael was quiet. Even the thought of it shamed him. “I honestly don't know, but it's probably true.”

The night after the murder, Michael went back to the bridge near the Pancake House. Although he was afraid to die, he felt he deserved to die. The only way he could stop himself from hurting anyone again was to jump. He couldn't face going to the police; admitting what he had done would have been too painful and humiliating. For more than an hour, he stood on the bridge staring into the blackness of the gorge. He convinced himself—as he had before and would do again—that he really wasn't a bad person and that he would never hurt anyone again. Up until college, Michael had lived a life in which everything was controlled. His mother ruled the roost. He had no social life because he either went to school or worked, and he took Ritalin to help him stay organized and less hyperactive. Everything had been about control. Those days were over.

The threat of losing Betsy had triggered a rage deep inside him. “He's going to lose her,” said Dr. Borden. “He can't lose anybody. If he loses somebody, no matter what the reasons are, it triggers rage . . . and that rage becomes homicidal rage. It's primitive. It's not just rage in the ordinary sense. This is a very primitive homicidal, murderous rage.” Dr. Borden explained that the rage had not gotten to this point with the first rape, but the closer he got to graduation, the more the relationship deteriorated, the worse the rage. He was about to be separated from Betsy, even lose her, and the rage inside him grew with every day. Dr. Cegalis said that Michael was “unable to contain the sexual aggressive impulses” that drove him to rape and murder. He said Michael's reactions were a kind of automatic “inexorable acting out of those impulses.” Both doctors said that Michael was unable to control his impulses to rape and kill.