The Man in the Monster (25 page)

Lera joked. “With all the people at Norwich Hospital, I had five hundred pats on the back. I had enough. They can keep their pats to themselves.” She chuckled for the first time since we had begun to talk.

Even Ed's own mother showed no sensitivity. “She was a wench,” said Ed. “She says to me, ‘Well, it's better than being in white slavery.' And I said, ‘But then at least she'd be alive. I could get her back, but this is eternal.'” He shook his head as he considered the comment.

Because the girls' bodies had been so badly decomposed, both families had decided to cremate the remains. “There was no reason to spend thousands of dollars on a casket,” Ed explained. “There wasn't much there.”
The Shelleys also wanted to get the funeral over as soon as possible because they knew it would be a painful ritual. The funeral was not a bonding experience for the two families; in fact, it was the beginning of a rift between them that would result in the next-door neighbors barely speaking. Ed said that Ray and Ellen Roode wanted to have a big funeral with Channel 3, Channel 8, and Channel 30 allowed to come to the grave site, but Ed and Lera wanted no media attention. “My thought at the time was, Let's get it over with and make it as easy as possible on everybody,” Ed explained. “I didn't want to go through shaking people's hands and having them tell me how sorry they were.” The Shelleys told the Roodes that they didn't have to bury April when they buried Leslie. They could do what whatever they wanted to do.

Reverend Lou Harper of the First Congregational Church in Griswold, where Leslie and April attended the youth group, conducted a brief service by the mausoleum near the gate to the tree-lined cemetery on Route 38 in Griswold. The girls' urns had been placed side by side—friends forever. After the service, Ed picked up Leslie's urn and Ray picked up April's. “Ray did his thing with April's remains, and I got up and I was really nervous. I said something.” Although the formal services were short and without fanfare, Ed and Lera have carefully tended to the grave site, planting flowers every year. One Easter, Lera even hung Easter eggs on a tree that Ed had planted.

Eventually, the conversation circled back to Michael Ross. Lera and Ed were convinced that Michael had no remorse for what he did. They also didn't buy his mental illness. “Do you think he is mentally ill?” I asked.

Lera answered immediately with a resounding “No!”

Ed extrapolated. “I look at it this way. Evil? Yes. I think he could control himself when he was in homes selling insurance.” He pointed to one case in Moosup, Connecticut, where Michael forced a girl to perform
oral sex but let her go. “Well, like the girl said, ‘I can run faster than him with my pants up than he can with his pants down,' and that's exactly how she got away. It wasn't that he let her go. He admitted to having stalked women. So there wasn't a question of, Is there a mental illness?—because he could control himself when he was stalking. He wanted what he wanted regardless of what damage or harm it caused.”

Michael never could explain why he had let the Moosup woman go or why he had stalked many women but did not rape or murder all of them. “Raping and murdering isn't a logical thing. I didn't just go out and think I'll rape this one and murder that one. I don't know why any of this happened.”

Ed was certain that the sexual sadism was all faked. “All it had to take was one person to put the idea of sexual sadism in his mind. It wouldn't take him long to digest a book on what sexual sadism consists of—voices in his head. Things like that. And if it could keep me from the death penalty, you could shoot me with Depo-Provera all day long. . . .” Ed explained, “I honestly feel that if a person is truly mentally ill and I didn't feel that he could control his actions, it would have a bearing on my feelings towards him.” Not wanting to leave any doubt about how he felt about Michael Ross, he added, “But knowing that Ross could control himself when he felt like controlling himself, that was the deciding factor in my feeling toward wanting the death penalty.”

“Do you think he's mentally ill?” Lera asked, turning the tables on me. “Because you talk to him a lot.”

I thought for a moment. “I think that anybody who kills anybody is sick,” I began slowly. “I don't think a normal person can kill another—except defending oneself or in a fit of rage—and even that shows that there is something wrong if he can't control his anger. So I start with that point of view. I don't see how anybody could do what he did and not be mentally ill.”

“I don't think Ross has remorse, though. I really don't think he does.” Lera was adamant.

“You really don't? So you didn't buy the apology he gave in his statement at the sentencing?”

“No, I'll tell you like I told Barry. . . . I could have predicted every time Ross took off his glasses and wiped his eyes, tears, looked down at the floor when someone was on the stand that was testifying when he didn't like what they were saying. If someone was on the stand that he liked, he looked right at them, smiled,” she observed. “No, I don't think he is sorry. I think the only thing he's sorry about is that he got caught and he's in jail. I don't think he's remorseful.”

She was right on one level. He didn't like to see the pain and destruction he had caused. The question was whether he felt remorse about it or just sorry for himself or a combination of both. Only Michael Ross could know what he felt, and I wasn't even sure he was capable of separating the two emotions. Even the psychiatrists disagreed about whether he felt remorse or empathy. I tried to explain. “I think the thing that drives him crazier than anything is that he will always be known as Michael Ross, the serial killer. In fact, I think that is where the stipulation came from. He was trying to do something that would take the onus off what he had done.”

Ed felt that the fact that Michael had changed his story about how Leslie died was telling. “He was his own worst enemy saying that he had raped Leslie anally.”

“You should know. That part is just not true,” I told them. “I made him admit it to me. He didn't rape Leslie.”

“We knew that. We knew that,” Ed said. “That's when he hung himself, when he killed Leslie. That's when the jury lost all credibility in his statements.”

Lera got up and came back with a scrapbook. “I kept every newspaper article since they found the girls—ten scrapbooks full.” She
put the first one on the table and opened it. It began with pictures of Leslie.

Tears filled Lera's eyes as she turned the pages. “If you read it, you'll see the difference between the first trial and the second.”

We flipped through the pages of several of the books as I scribbled down notes. “Would you mind if sometime I made copies of some of the scrapbooks?” I asked.

Lera hesitated. “You can have them,” she said. “I'm done clipping newspapers. I've got to move on. I just want to take out the pictures of Leslie.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “These must be very important to you.”

“Yes, I'm sure,” she said. “I need to move on.”

It was almost 7:00
P.M
., and we had come to a place where we didn't have more to say or ask without some time and reflection. I was hoping that I could look for the location where the girls' bodies had been found, but I didn't want to ask directly, not wanting to seem too morbid. “How far was it from here where the girls' bodies were found?” I asked Ed.

He offered. “You got a minute? Let's take a ride.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” he said confidently. Then turning to Lera, he said, “Put that out,” pointing toward a scented candle.

“No, I'm staying here,” she said adamantly. The day had already been too much for her.

It was still raining steadily as we got into his car and headed toward Route 38. The constant beat of the windshield wipers clicking back and forth added suspense and tension. Finally we arrived at the culvert where Michael had dropped the two girls' bodies—on a lonely stretch of road in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. “I'd never have found this on my own,” I admitted.

“That's what I thought,” he chuckled. “No use in you getting yourself lost out here.”

“Right over there,” he said as we got out of the car. It had been sixteen years. Some areas had become overgrown, some had been cleared, but it was not difficult to see the spot where the bodies had been thrown into an irrigation ditch on the side of the road.

I just stood there staring for a minute, trying not to visualize the gruesome crime scene photos of the girls' partially decomposed bodies. He said that some of the other family members had not realized what happens to a body after being exposed to the elements for more than two months. “I've been out hunting enough to know that they would be in no condition for anyone to see. That's why we decided to have them cremated.”

“Do you come by here much?”

“No, you can't. You have to move on. You have to move on,” Ed said and then paused. “Okay, now let's get macabre.” I looked at him, wondering what could be more macabre than what we were doing. Reading my puzzled expression, he said, “I'll show you where the girls are buried, only a few hundred feet from each other—Love Ya Always Like a Sister.” As we drove into the small cemetery, Ed pointed to a large gravestone partway down one of the first rows, “That's where Debra Smith Taylor is buried, right over there.”

“That seems so improbable that three of the victims would all be buried in the same cemetery,” I said.

“Not if you start to look at how small an area it is. You know, that's why I wanted to start a civil suit against Ross's father. He should have known. His son had already been convicted of two attacks, and then women start being murdered. He should have known. We went to a lawyer at the time of the first trial, but you know what he said? ‘Got thirty thousand dollars?' And of course, I don't have anywhere near that.
So the suit didn't go anywhere. I was hoping that he'd sue me for defamation in court, and then I could have countered with a wrongful death suit.”

We drove near the back of the cemetery and stopped by the two girls' graves. I got out despite the rain because I wanted to see the headstones. A large rose-colored stone that says
SHELLEY
marks Leslie's grave. There is also a plaque on the ground that says
LESLIE ANN
. The grave is decorated with little brass angels, two lying down on the top of the headstone and two sitting by the front of the stone. Flowers are planted around the stone. At first they planted a tree, but the roots got too big. “I had a heck of a time getting that tree out.”

A mystery surrounds Leslie's grave: A few times a year someone leaves flowers. Ed and Lera have tried to figure out who the mystery person is, to no avail. “It's strange. I have no idea who's been doing it. It's almost eerie,” Lera had explained.

Ed showed me April's grave. Like Debra Smith Taylor's, her grave was marked only by the family stone—Roode. It was as if both young women had been swallowed up without a trace.

Instead of heading back to the house, Ed drove in the opposite direction, into Jewett City, a down-at-the-heels town of about three thousand people. He slowed down as we rounded the corner where the girls had called home to say they were running late. “They must have hung up, crossed the street, and within a few minutes, Ross picked them up,” he said, “because in his confession he said it was right around here. There used to be a telephone booth on the corner here, but it's gone now.”

He drove on a few more blocks. “That's the house,” he told me. “That's where he lived.” It was nothing like what I had imagined. I had thought of it more like an apartment complex, but it was a large boxy house that had been divided into apartments. Ed turned his car around and started back toward Griswold.

“So he picked them up in Jewett City, and they asked to be taken to a gas station in Voluntown, but he just drove past the gas station . . . and then ended up in the Exeter woods in Rhode Island?” I asked.

“Well, that's the question, isn't it?” he answered in a tone that implied he didn't believe Michael's version of the story.

“You don't think the murder scene was in Rhode Island?”

“Actually, I think the place they claimed it happened was the Arcadia woods, not Exeter. From where the girls were picked up, I believe it's twenty-three miles, and he brought the girls back and dropped them over here with a dead girl in the front seat? I don't think it happened [in Rhode Island], because when the detectives went up there, they scoured the woods because of April's shoes and the pants missing, and they couldn't find them.” Ed's theory was that the two girls were killed somewhere near where their bodies were found.

Ed said he had been to the murder scene, but I wasn't sure if he was talking about the location where Michael claimed he committed the murders or the one Malchik had described in his directions. “Well, let's go see if we're talking about the same place,” Ed suggested. When we passed Beach Pond and crossed into Rhode Island, I was sure that he was going to the place that Michael had described. Within a few minutes, he pulled into the exact location that I had found when I followed Michael's directions, and we got out of the car. “No way did it happen here. Somebody would have seen them,” he said, pointing out that the area was too open and that someone might have seen from the road. “And it's just too suspicious that they'd come out here two years later and find pieces of cloth,” he said, referring to the strips of slipcover that the defense claimed to have found.

“No more suspicious than Malchik writing down directions two years later,” I reminded him.

“Maybe not. We'll probably never really know.”

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