The Man in the Monster (16 page)

Michael graduated at the beginning of June 1981. He couldn't tell me what day of the week it was or who spoke at the graduation ceremony or even which members of his family attended. Those were insignificant details compared with the guilt and horror that were consuming his mind, but even what he described as all-consuming guilt was not enough to stop him. In the next three years, seven more innocent women would die before he was caught. He said the murders were more important than the raping. As Dr. Borden explained, “he really got off on the killing. That's what gave him a sense of absolute control. That's what gave him his release.” Up until then he had been struggling not to act out on his inner torment. Even the fantasies were a subconscious attempt to keep his rage under control, but by graduation, he could no longer hold it in. Ironically, he needed a woman to keep him under control. “His mother was a rudder, a very strong rudder,” said Dr. Borden. He resents it, but he needs it. When he is about to lose her, he's “like a barge full of nitroglycerin adrift without a rudder.”

“This is a rare bird,” explained Dr. Borden. “We are dealing with a homicidal
maniac.”

WINTER 1997

Many of Michael's descriptions of the murders were devoid of the kind of detail that would help explain his obsession. There was no emotion or rage in his descriptions. I finally mustered the courage to ask him to try to describe his violent sexual fantasies. What made him get in the car and go out looking for prey? After he started stalking, raping, and murdering, his fantasies were primarily memories of his crimes, horrific scenes forged together. For the first several years, he could not or would not describe any of this on the phone or in person, but just before Christmas 1997, he sent me six chilling handwritten pages. They may or may not represent what was going on in his head at the time he raped and murdered or afterward, but at least they represent the sexual fantasies and urges that he had after he was incarcerated.

The fantasy is not easy to read. Even though I had known Michael for more than two years and had gotten past the serial killer label, it revolted me. But not revealing the monster would distort the story. After reading it, one can understand why he wanted to keep “the monster” separate from “Michael,” why he had to keep him chained up deep inside his psyche. In his discussions with me, he had described the murders with clinical detachment and very little detail. That was the only way he allowed himself to remember them. The fantasy is filled
with the rage that put him on death row. This is a glimpse of the torturous and abhorrent images that went through his mind as he committed his crimes.

I am outside. It is a beautiful day. It is mid-afternoon and the sun is out. It is not too warm—the air is very comfortable.

I see her. She is still 100 yards away, walking along the road. We are in some sort of a park. The area is wooded; the road is more of a trail than a street. We are alone. There are no houses, no people, no civilization in sight.

I am getting closer to her. She's small, a dirty-blond, young. She hasn't seen me yet. She has no idea of the danger she is in. I feel a sense of contempt because of this. I have locked on to her; she is my target, yet she is oblivious to this. This seems to anger me and I feel her arrogance. She thinks that she is strong, independent, and can handle herself. She is so foolish. She is not even aware that I am there, that she's going to die. She has no idea of the danger yet. My contempt for her ignorance continues to grow as I draw nearer.

I'm 100 feet from her now. She senses my presence for the first time, a strange ominous feeling that she can't explain. She looks over her shoulder and sees me. I see fear briefly flicker in her eyes. Then she makes her fatal mistake. She dismisses the fear. If she listened to her instinct, she would run and would probably survive. But she considers herself a rational, intelligent woman and dismisses the feeling as paranoia.

I know what she is thinking and it angers me further, feeding my ever-growing contempt for her. She has dismissed me. She has turned her back to me because I am of no consequence to her. She felt the fear for a second, but she rationalized it away. It's broad daylight, and I look harmless to her; I am of no consequence.

I'm getting much closer now. She looks over her shoulder again. Fear flickers again in her eyes, stronger this time. She tells herself that it is nothing, that she is being foolish—she can't see me as a possible threat. But she is feeling increasingly nervous and she doesn't understand why.

“You stupid, arrogant bitch,” I'm thinking. With every step my anger and contempt for her grows. She is so stupid to not see the danger. Why doesn't she see that I'm going to kill her? Why has she dismissed me as no danger? I want to hurt her now. I want to show her that I'm not some impotent fool to be so lightly dismissed.

I'm within a few feet of her now and she looks at me once again. She doesn't know why, but she is afraid now. I can see it in her eyes. I can see her trying to fight it. She's still trying to rationalize the fear away. She's still trying to tell herself that she is being foolish. Her instincts are trying to warn her of the danger. But she's too arrogant to heed her instincts. She's too intelligent to allow herself to be ruled by fear. But the fear is there. She's just trying to deny it, to control it like she controls everything else in her life.

But she has no control. I want to show her that she has absolutely no control. I am full of anger, contempt, and rage. She is nothing but a foolish, petty, ignorant bitch. She must be taught to see the truth. I want to hurt her, but not too quickly. I want her to see and experience my control. I want her to regret her arrogance and acknowledge me. She's going to die. I know this, but I want her to understand why first.

I'm only a couple of feet away now and she's very nervous. I smile at her. That's all it takes to disarm her fear. A little smile and she feels relieved, and I am all the more enraged because of her stupidity. I do not understand how she could dismiss me so. She's dead and she doesn't even know it.

I reach out and grab her around the neck. My thumbs crisscross the back of her neck. My fingers sink into her soft neck. I feel her windpipe as I squeeze my fingers tighter.

Her eyes grow wide. My God they are so huge. It's like I can see into her soul. They are like huge saucers. Finally the danger is sinking in. Finally she acknowledges the fear. Finally she respects my power.

She tries to scream. A deep primal scream from a place she never knew existed but no sound comes forth, no sound can escape my grip.

I am dragging her toward a wooded area now. She stumbles along aside [
sic
] me. She can't breathe and she is in panic. She can't even think as I drag her along.

I see a small opening in the trees, a grassy area where the sun shines through the trees. And I throw her roughly to the ground. She gasps for air. She is lightheaded, dizzy, disoriented. She is confused. She doesn't understand. Her mind is racing, full of disjointed thoughts. Fear fills her body.

I stand over her, looking down at her, waiting impatiently for her to come to her senses. Strangely I know that she still doesn't understand. She looks at me and whimpers, begs me not to hurt her. I ask her if she wants to live. She does and she will do anything that I ask.

I tell her to take off her pants. She is afraid and hesitates as she realizes that I am going to rape her. I lean down and angrily grab her by the neck. She quickly complies to my demand. Strangely she feels a little better and tries to tell herself that it won't be that bad. I don't know how, but my contempt for her continues to grow. I pull her to her knees and unzip my pants, pulling out my penis. I see the disgust in her face as she realizes what I want. She tries to turn away and I slap her. She sees the rage, the anger and the hatred on my face and she complies taking my penis into her mouth. I grab her by the back
of her head and force myself deep into her mouth. She struggles and gags but this just pleases me more, and I continue to drive myself into her mouth again and again.

I am growing more and more excited. Her disgust and revulsion feeds me. I'm afraid that I'm going to have an orgasm too soon. I'm not ready for it to end yet, so I pull myself out of her mouth.

I push her to the ground and vaginally rape her. She just lies there allowing me to penetrate her. She thinks that it will be over soon and that I will let her go. I hate her ignorance. I hate her lack of total incapacitating fear. I want to hurt her more. I roll her over and enter her anally. I drive myself into her hard and deep doing everything possible to hurt her. Her cries of pain feed me. Her feelings of humiliation and helplessness please me to no end. The more she is degraded, the more pleasure I feel.

Still it is not enough. She must know her complete and utter defeat. She is allowing me to degrade her because she thinks she will live. She must know the truth that she has allowed all this for nothing.

I reach up and wrap my hands around the soft flesh of her neck and begin to squeeze. I am very excited now, fighting off the urge to complete my orgasm. I want it to last. I want to enjoy every last possible second. She begins to struggle now. I drive my penis deeper, harder into her and I squeeze my fingers harder around her neck. She finally understands. She finally knows that she is going to die. It is the ultimate degradation. She is mine completely, undeniable, and irrevocably. My victory is complete.

My orgasm begins. The feeling is indescribable, the power undeniable. I want it to last forever. Time stops; nothing matters. It has a narcotic quality. There is no feeling more powerful more pleasurable in the world. I try to hang on to it.

I slowly come back to the reality of my cell. I close my eyes and try to sleep, trying to savor the feelings while they last. I want to sleep now, before I start to think about the fantasy that I have just lived. If I can sleep now I won't feel the disgust until later. The disgust and self-hatred will come. It always does, but for right now I am content.

At the end of the pages, Michael wrote, “I have just re-read what I have written. It seems empty, hollow. I am unable to convey the power of the feelings and emotions. I may try again, but not for a while yet.”

He never did try again—or at least he never told me that he did, and I certainly never requested that he try. I realized that I had asked him to temporarily unleash the monster. He couldn't describe it without experiencing his nightmare.

As Dr. Borden had explained to me, he felt emasculated by his mother and other women, and the violence was his way of lashing back. The fantasy illuminates the integral link between the stalking, raping, and murdering. It also shows his need for control and his need to assert his manhood.

I still find it hard to believe that the man I knew could have such noxious thoughts. More than anything else, reading those pages made me understand the difference between Michael and the monster. I was now convinced that he experienced two separate realities, because I didn't know the man who had written those six pages.

JUNE 1981–JANUARY 1982

The day after graduation from Cornell, Michael headed for his new job in Louisburg, North Carolina. He started work at Cargill as a production management trainee the following Monday in the egg-processing plant. On the weekend, he looked for a place to live and rented a small trailer about ten minutes outside of town on the road to Raleigh. The move did nothing to calm his obsessions. He was in an unknown environment, feeling cut off from his family and fiancée. If anything, his frustration fueled his urges. “I began stalking the day I got to Louisburg—even before moving into my trailer—and soon I began to make regular trips to Raleigh on stalking excursions.”

Michael's job was similar to his job on the family farm in Connecticut; he oversaw the management of chicken farms. The eggs that came into the processing plant were from contract farmers who cared for the birds and collected the eggs, but Cargill owned the birds. The eggs were sent to the plant in Louisburg to be washed, graded, packed, and sold to customers. Each of the farms had about fifty thousand birds, and Michael was responsible for overseeing ten farms.

Lonely, he bought Betsy a round-trip ticket to come visit him one weekend in August 1981. Because she was able to finish Cornell in three years, she was a senior and starting to think about her upcoming
job search. The weekend went badly. Michael felt emasculated by her career ambitions and still clung to the hope that Betsy's priorities might shift in his favor. “We had a big-time fight. . . . I thought that if she was to be my wife, my career came first, and she would go wherever I was assigned.”

Unprompted, Michael interrupted his telling of the story to tell me, “Don't say it, Martha. I know what you're thinking. I know that it's sexist.”

Betsy's attitude made Michael feel worthless. He didn't want to admit to her that he knew she could make more money than he. “We fought, and we both felt terrible at the airport when she left.” Nothing had been settled, and he cried as she boarded the plane. “I knew that I was losing her, and I didn't know how to deal with it,” Michael admitted. Dr. Borden told me he could not deal with rejection and separation. He testified that Michael “couldn't be alone. . . . He would get restless and have to go out and he would drive. In his car driving, he got into fantasies. . . . He was a James Bond character and he was driving along and there was a kind of cat and mouse with the enemy.” Betsy's visit had upset him, so he went out stalking after he dropped her off at the airport.

“
Martha, I know this is going to make you angry,” Michael cautioned when he told me about this attack. I had two toddlers at the time. By the time he was telling me this story, I could predict Michael's reaction to things I said, and he could predict mine as well. He knew that I would tell him his attitude toward Betsy was sexist and that I'd be horrified at his trying to kill a woman in front of her child. His awareness of my inner thoughts made me uncomfortable, but I had to come to grips with the fact that he was getting to know me as well as some of my friends knew me. Whether I liked it or not, he could also predict my reactions.

On his way home from the airport in Rolesville on August 25, 1981, Michael attacked another woman. He was prowling around when he spotted Carol (not her real name) leaving the local post office, pushing her seven-month-old baby in a stroller. As she did almost every day, she walked the quarter mile back to her house, unaware that she was being followed. When she got home, she noticed a man watching her from across the street but assumed it was just a new neighbor.

Her porch needed sweeping, so she went inside to get a broom. Then she picked up her baby and went around to the backyard, but before she got there a man, whom she identified as Michael Ross more than three years later, came up behind her and wrapped a belt around her neck. In the struggle, they knocked over the baby stroller and the baby started screaming. Angry, Michael started punching Carol and threw her on the ground.

She said he told her, “If you don't do what I want, I'll smash the baby's head against the house,” which was made of brick. Carol pleaded with him to leave the baby alone and tried to cooperate. She said he made her lie on the ground and pulled her skirt up over her head, then went to get the baby and said, “If you look up, I'll kill the baby.” He dragged her into a field using the belt around her neck and carried the baby.

Desperate, she cried, “If you believe in Jesus, you wouldn't do this.”

“I don't want to hear that shit,” he snarled.

She doesn't remember much about what happened next, because she was repeatedly punched until she was nearly unconscious. She was nude but couldn't remember if he took off her clothes or if he made her do it. All she knew was that he made her perform oral sex on him and kept saying, “Do it hard.” She made no mention of a rape in her statement.

Michael admitted that the baby kept trying to crawl to her mother,
but Michael kept ordering Carol to “Get the baby away.” He ejaculated into her mouth and told her to swallow it. She remembered that he made her lie on her stomach and then strangled her from behind with the belt. Two hours later, she came to and crawled to a neighbor's house for help.

Michael's version was much less graphic than the victim's report, perhaps because his denial allowed him to forget a lot of things or because he just couldn't admit the brutality of what he did. In his version, there was vaginal rape instead of oral sex. “I raped and strangled her and left the mother for dead, with the baby at her side. The baby was trying to suckle—what I thought to be—her mother's dead breast.” Michael was never prosecuted for this crime, in part because the woman didn't want to go through a trial or participate in his murder trial, but after his arrest, she did identify him from a photo.

It is impossible to be sure how many times Michael stalked women or how many he raped. He couldn't even estimate the number of times he stalked—although he claimed to remember all the rapes. He insisted that there were no other murders than the eight to which he confessed.

 • • • 

A
few weeks after Betsy's visit, Michael was required to attend a monthlong management seminar, mostly at the corporate office in Minneapolis but including a week in Illinois visiting various Cargill companies. The first night in Illinois, his coworkers planted themselves in the motel, eager to drink beer and watch a football game. But Michael was restless. He told everyone that he was going to find a local bar. “But I was on the prowl,” he admitted to me.

It didn't take long before he saw a fifteen-year-old girl walking along the road. About seven o'clock, Priscilla (not her real name) says she decided to walk three blocks to a nearby motel to buy a pack of cigarettes. On
her way to the motel, she became suspicious when a car passed her three or four times. While she was inside the motel, she noticed that the same car was parked outside, and the driver was staring at her through the window. She left the motel and went home along the same well-lit path. Michael said he “parked the car on a side road and grabbed her near a wooded area and dragged her into the woods.”

Priscilla gave the police much more detail about what had happened than Michael gave me. Her statement reveals what Michael's ritualized killings might actually have been like—as opposed to what he could or could not remember. She saw Michael coming toward her, trying to hide behind telephone poles as he wove back and forth. As he passed her, he grabbed her from behind and put both arms around her throat and told her not to say anything. “I'm not going to hurt you; just give me your money.” She screamed, but he put his hand over her mouth, put a knife to her throat, and pulled her into the woods. Initially, he threw her on the ground, but then he stood her up. Thinking that he wanted the money, she gave him the two dollars she had in her pocket, but instead of taking it and leaving, he walked her deeper into the woods—all the time seeming nervous. Finally he threw her down to the ground again and stuffed his handkerchief into her mouth as she lay on her stomach. He took her coat off and made her put it on backward; then he took his belt off and made it into a loop, putting it around her neck to keep control of her. She says he began to rub her ankles, an odd detail that no one else reported and he didn't remember. After a while, he rolled her over onto her back and sat on her, keeping the belt tight around her neck.

She began to worry that he was about to hurt her or rape her, but then she heard police searching in the woods, responding to a neighbor who reported her initial screams. Scared, Michael jumped up and ran. “I could have raped her but just kept her quiet while I tried to make sense
of what was going on. When I saw the police car, I ran off, but I don't think I would have hurt her even if the police didn't come.” He claimed that was all he could remember—or at least allowed himself to remember.

When the police were driving Priscilla home, she spotted his rental car parked along the road. The police waited for him and arrested him when he returned on foot to pick it up. The attack lasted less than fifteen minutes, but it traumatized Priscilla so much that she quit high school and went into seclusion. That was the last report of her in the police record.

This was the first time that Michael had been caught and arrested. He was not only scared of what would happen to him legally, but also ashamed when he had to call his parents to get them to bail him out of jail. He was also terrified that someone would connect him to the murder and rapes at Cornell. On the advice of a lawyer, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years' probation for unlawful restraint. After resigning from Cargill, he returned to Connecticut to try to put his life together, again convincing himself that he could stop. He was in so much denial that he actually thought that Betsy would never find out about the arrest. He never told her, but he later discovered that his mother made sure she knew. He believed Pat wanted his relationship to fall apart because her own marriage was a failure. Or maybe, as Betsy had tried to tell him over and over again, Pat was jealous of Betsy and wanted her out of Michael's life because of the control she had over him.

His parents were in the midst of the divorce, and he lived with his mother and worked for his father. All day he listened to his father rant about his mother, and all night his mother bad-mouthed his father. He was miserable, but he had no other option at the time. Michael and his mother were on bad terms because earlier that year she had tried to trick him into signing over his 10 percent of the farm to her in order to
gain leverage in her divorce. She had flown down to North Carolina “to visit” for twenty-four hours and told Michael that she was offering to take his shares because the farm was losing money, and she didn't want him to be left with debt now that he was about to get married. He considered going along with her request until he went home and his grandfather told him that the business was not in danger and was still profitable. Pat was angry because Michael didn't sign over the shares, and Dan was upset because Pat had told him that Michael had given her his 10 percent. The future of the farm added even more pressure and uncertainty to Michael's precarious mental state. He later told psychiatrists that his mother's threatening the farm was unforgivable.

He told Dr. Zonana during the 1985 psychiatric evaluation, done at the request of Michael's lawyers, that what upset him most was that his mother was going out with other men when he lived with her. He admitted that Dan was also seeing other women, but somehow in his mind there was a difference. Pat would not come home for a couple of days, and he immediately judged her and assumed she was “sleeping around.” He couldn't explain why he thought it was wrong if his mother was having sexual relationships with other men, but that he wasn't upset with his father's dating. He never asked either of them about their relationships with other people. “It don't make sense. I was for equal rights and all that, but it just seemed wrong to me.”

Michael and Betsy's relationship became even more strained when Betsy came to visit him in Brooklyn between Christmas and New Year's 1981–1982. Betsy knew about the arrest but said nothing. Instead she told him that she wanted to postpone their June wedding indefinitely. That was more than he could take. Everything that had kept him together was now gone. Even if he didn't want to admit it, he knew that he and Betsy would never marry, and the rage inside him grew until once again he could no longer hold it
in.