The Man in the Monster (17 page)

JANUARY 1982–JUNE 1984

Seventeen-year-old Tammy Williams was a high-school dropout, a “street kid,” according to the missing person report that was filed after her disappearance. Originally from the area, she had lived with her mother, Norma Deems, in Honolulu, Hawaii, but moved back to live with her father and stepmother in Brooklyn when she was thirteen. According to the police report, “her father did not take any steps to control her and let her do as she pleased; if she did not attend school, he didn't force her; at times she remained away from home for long periods of time, but would notify her parents of her well-being.” She didn't have a criminal record other than an arrest for disturbing the peace when she was fighting with another girl. She stayed out of trouble but did what she wanted.

During the holidays in the fall of 1981, Tammy had been hired by King's Department Store in Danville to work part-time in the camera department. Apparently she had finally found something that she enjoyed; she “showed promise,” according to her supervisor. To her friends, she seemed happy that she had found a job that she liked.

Tammy spent the night on a friend's couch and then stopped to see her boyfriend, Andy Willett, at his house on Dyer Street in Danielson, Connecticut, at about 9:00
A.M
. on January 5, 1982. He was twenty
years old, and they had been dating for a year. According to Willett, they chatted for about an hour, and then Tammy left to walk to her apartment on Prince Hill Road. Several people saw her on the way home, including two friends who talked to her when she dropped in at the Brooklyn Bowling Alley. They told police that “she was in a good mood” and told them she had to work that evening and left.

Sometime around 11:00
A.M
., as Tammy was walking along Route 6 in Brooklyn, Michael Ross spotted her. He was driving to the satellite farm to prepare it for a batch of baby chicks that were to arrive soon. When he saw Tammy—whom he said he didn't know even though they lived about a mile apart—Ross pulled off the road behind her. A school bus driver who knew her reported that she saw Tammy walking west on Route 6 and that a white male was following her. Michael also recognized the school bus driver and later worried that she would identify him. Another witness said she saw a white male running through the fields toward Tammy. A third witness driving by a little later reported to police that he had seen Tammy “tussling with a white male, with dark hair, wearing a hip-length coat, dark in color.” The man had his arm around Tammy's neck, “as if they were playfully wrestling.” But there was nothing playful in the grasp, and Tammy's five feet two inches and 100 pounds were no match for Michael's six feet one inch and 165 pounds.

Michael's report of what happened next is sketchy. “I grabbed her from behind and dragged her into the woods. I brought her to my car, bound her hands and drove her about a mile away to a deserted area of South Street where I could pull my car off the road and not be seen.” Once he was sure he was out of sight, he took her out of the car and dragged her even deeper into the woods, making sure that no passersby could see them. Then he began what had become his ritual. He forced her to undress, made her perform oral sex on him while on her knees, and raped her. Then he turned her over on her stomach and straddled her as he strangled her.

He stuffed Tammy's body into the trunk of his car and drove around looking for a place to dispose of the corpse. Although Michael's descriptions of all the killings sound like those of an observer, suggesting a dissociative state, once the killing was over, he became aware of what he had done and always panicked that he would be caught. He thought that moving and then hiding or burying the bodies would protect him from being caught because no one would know if they were alive or dead.

Finally he settled on an area east of Church Street in Brooklyn and buried her body in a swampy area under mud, grass, and sticks, according to his confession and confirmed in what he told me. He claimed he didn't remember much more about the incident.

Before noon, Charles Sherrill of Danielson spotted Tammy's purse lying by the side of the road as he was driving by and turned it in to the police. For the next several days, firemen, policemen, dogs, and two helicopters searched all over Brooklyn but failed to turn up a trace of Tammy Williams. At times there were hundreds of volunteers looking for her. With no motive or suspect, the search was called off, and the case went cold. Although foul play was suspected, no one knew her fate until Michael led investigators to her grave site on June 29, 1984, the day after he was arrested and confessed to her killing.

Michael had been scared and stayed away from the area for a week or two. After the search had been called off, however, he couldn't resist the urge to return to the burial site. As he had with Charlie Brown, he periodically stopped by to stare at the slight mound of the grave, which searchers had walked right by. “I could pull my car off the road where it couldn't be seen by people driving by,” he wrote to me. “I would feel comfortable enough to stay for a while—an hour or so usually or longer. I didn't do anything weird like masturbate. I just sat there on the stone wall where I could see the mound. I never actually went right up to her, but I had to get close enough to actually see where she was. I don't
know why I went back. It was stupid. It doesn't make sense. I just had this need to go to her, to be with her, and I would feel terrible the whole time. I wouldn't relive the event. I would do that at home when I would masturbate to a fantasy reenactment of what I did. I just sat there and felt bad.”

 • • • 

O
nce he was off probation, Michael needed a job, and his mother used her “connections” to get him an interview with Croton Egg Farms in Croton, Ohio. A week before he was to start his new job, he drove unannounced to Cornell to visit Betsy. He was waiting for her at her apartment when she came home with another man, a fraternity brother of Michael's. “It was awkward,” Michael remembered. “He left at her request. I thought something was odd, but she told me I was being foolish, and he was just a friend. I reluctantly believed her because I
wanted
to believe her.” Betsy remained irritated the whole weekend that he hadn't called in advance. “We had a rather tense weekend together, and I was upset when I left.”

He still held on to the hope that they would work things out and get married. “I don't know. It was crazy. I was in denial that it was over between us. Thinking back on it, it seems ridiculous that I would go there unannounced.” Even years later, he was embarrassed by his naïveté.

Monday morning, Michael started the drive back to Connecticut but was still upset about the other man. Instead of calming down during the long drive, his anxiety increased. He saw a girl hitchhiking along the road in front of a high school.

According to local newspaper reports about her death, Paula Perrera was a good student and loved to read. Her high-school friends described her as “spunky” and said that “everybody loved her.” The family
had moved from New Jersey when she was in elementary school. Paula lived with her single mother and siblings in a trailer at the Valley View Mobile Home Park in Middletown, New York. All her friends knew that her dysfunctional family life was strained, so she spent as much time as possible at her friends' homes. Her friends said that when she visited their happy, two-parent homes, she would say, “I never knew people had lives like this.” She never complained, but apparently the stress of an unhappy home became too much for her; she tried to commit suicide by swallowing pills in October 1981 and was nicknamed “Tylenol” by teasing classmates.

Paula liked to ride her bike along Route 211 or hitchhike into town or to one of her friends' houses. Her friends begged her not to hitchhike, but she kept telling them that only nice people picked her up. On March 1, 1982, she left school early because she didn't feel well. Her intention was to go to her boyfriend's house a few miles from school—but she never made it.

Of all the murders, Michael said he was “fuzziest” about this one, perhaps because it was so far from where he lived that he didn't see reports of it in the newspapers. Reading the news stories may have helped him remember what had happened during the other murders. At the time of his arrest, Michael admitted to all the Connecticut murders but denied for twenty years that he had killed anyone else.

He said that once he had “denied there were more bodies,” he was embarrassed to admit that he had lied. However, once he made the decision to forgo another trial and accept death, he felt he should make a full confession.

“I was in denial for a long time about this murder. I remember that I saw her hitchhiking,” he told me. “I drove past her, turned around, and then picked her up. She gave me directions, which I followed until I got to pull off in a deserted area. I dragged her out of the car, forced
her to undress, perform oral sex on me, raped her and strangled her and got back in the car and drove home.”

About a week later, on his way to his new job, he drove past the site where he had killed Paula—although he didn't know her name and wouldn't until nearly two decades later when he officially confessed to the crime to New York police. “I did not go back to the actual site like I did with the others. I wanted to but was afraid of being seen in the area.” He kept driving to his new job at Croton Egg Farms as an assistant complex manager in charge of forty workers and 1.2 million egg layers. Donald Harvey, a truck driver at Croton, told police that Michael was “belligerent and a know-it-all at work.” He also kept odd hours, sometimes coming and going late at night. Harvey said, “Ross had no friends.”

It was during his time in Ohio that Betsy told him that she didn't wear the engagement ring anymore because if she did, no one would ask her to dance at parties. He knew his relationship with her was over, but he still couldn't admit it to himself. His obsessive, sadistic behaviors became more frequent. He began driving around almost every night, looking for women. On April 26, 1982, Michael spotted a woman leaving a Laundromat in Johnstown, Ohio, at about 10:30
P.M
. and followed her home. Sharon (not her real name) was a police officer with the Columbus police department. She was driving her car and said she “thought she saw a small red car following her” but was not positive. She arrived home at about eleven thirty to an empty house because her husband was working.

Instead of trying to grab her when she got out of her car or to break into her house, Michael went through an elaborate charade of knocking on her front door and pretending that he had car trouble. He even told her his real name when he asked to use her phone, pretending to call someone but actually dialing his own apartment. He told her that there was no answer and asked to borrow a flashlight to “look under
the hood.” According to Michael, she was in the kitchen cutting up vegetables when he came back. She says he asked for a phone book and to use the phone again. When she returned with the phone book, he had put a glove on his right hand. He grabbed her around the neck and threw her to the floor, dazing her when her head hit. The police report says that he “pinned her arms back and had his leg over her as they wrestled on the floor.” He punched her in the face over and over, perhaps as many as ten times. She said that “the first two punches hurt considerably and then it went numb.” He was choking her with one hand and punching her with another. She felt herself about to pass out but pulled one arm free and reached up and yanked his hair as hard as she could, and with that he let her go. Sharon got up, but he lunged at her, and they fell on a stone fireplace with Michael on top of her, knocking the wind out of her. Surprisingly, he got up and ran, and she ran after him. When she reached the road, they stared at each other for a moment before she ran back to the house to get her gun, but by that time he had driven off in his car.

Michael's version was much different. He said he grabbed her, but after a brief struggle, he somehow lost the urge to rape and kill her. I wondered if this was an attack in which he had been in control the entire time, which was something he would never admit. It would contradict his sadistic compulsion. But if that was the case, it would explain his ability to stop and run. Alternatively, he may have stopped because she was one of the few women who fought him so vigorously. Either she ruined his fantasy of the woman who submits in fear, or he was afraid that she would be able to fight him off. It's a mystery to which Michael either didn't know the answer or refused to give it. “She claims to have fought me off, but
I
stopped. I became confused and not sure about what was happening and just wanted her to be quiet and stop struggling.”

A few days later, police came to Michael's office and said a woman had been attacked by someone using his name and asked if he had any idea who would do such a thing. Michael gave them a list of people who had been recently fired. A few days after that the police showed up at his apartment and asked him to step out onto the front porch. The woman was in the police car and looked to see if she could identify him. When the police left, he assumed she had not recognized him, but he was arrested at work the next morning. After his sister Donna bailed him out, he returned to Connecticut to await trial.

The Ross family didn't talk about things, so Michael just went back to work and quietly waited for his day in court. This time Michael got an apartment on South Street in Brooklyn. As a condition of his release on bail, he had to go into therapy, so he began to work with Dr. Raymond W. DuCharme, PhD, head of the Learning Clinic in town. His relationship with Betsy was all but over, but when she came down to visit, she went to see Dr. DuCharme as well. “I'm not sure what the purpose was. Our relationship was over, but maybe I couldn't admit it to myself then.” However, Dr. DuCharme's report reveals that in March 1982, Betsy had seen a counselor “in a state near suicide.” Michael not only was unable to admit that the relationship was over, but also was unable to see what it was doing to Betsy.