The Man in the Monster (3 page)

1994

At the
Law Tribune
, we held weekly editorial meetings in a conference room that overlooked a salt marsh. During a Monday morning meeting in early August 1994, I was staring out the window watching a blue heron lying in wait, standing motionless trying to be invisible to unsuspecting fish, as Joe Calve, the editor of the paper, gave a summary of the Connecticut Supreme Court's opinion that upheld Michael Ross's conviction of guilt but overturned his death sentences.

Michael had been arrested in Connecticut in June 1984 after a three-year killing spree that began just before his graduation from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in May 1981. After his Connecticut arrest, he was charged with the rape and murder of six women. Tammy Williams, seventeen, and Debra Smith Taylor, twenty-three, were murdered in Windham County, Connecticut. Robin Stavinsky, nineteen, Leslie Shelley, fourteen, April Brunais, fourteen, and Wendy Baribeault, seventeen, were murdered in adjacent New London County. Later Michael admitted to raping and killing Dzung Ngoc Tu, twenty-five, and Paula Perrera, sixteen, in New York in 1981 and 1982. All of his murders were random. They were vulnerable women who happened to be walking alone along deserted paths or roads.

The Windham County prosecutor did not seek the death penalty.
After consulting with his own psychiatric experts, he concluded that Michael was mentally ill and ineligible for a death sentence under the law. In a plea bargain, Michael was sentenced to two consecutive eighty-year prison terms. However, New London's chief state's attorney C. Robert Satti Sr. did not offer a plea bargain, and after a lengthy trial in 1987, Michael was convicted of the four murders in New London County and given six death sentences—a technicality of the law that allows someone to be charged more than once with the same murder.

Before any death sentence could be carried out, the Connecticut Supreme Court had to review the case. The 1972 U.S. Supreme Court decision in
Furman
v
.
Georgia
required every state to rewrite its death penalty statute because the law was being applied in an arbitrary and capricious manner and thus was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection of the laws. Some of the justices also said it was a violation of the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The decision required that an appellate court in each state review any death sentence to make sure that the Constitution has not been violated, that the application of the death penalty was not arbitrary, and that the trial court did not commit any procedural errors. For twelve years, from 1965 until 1977, there were no executions in the United States while states rewrote their laws to conform to
Furman
. At the time of Michael's sentencing, fewer than one hundred men had been executed—most in the South or West.

It had taken seven years for the Connecticut Supreme Court to reach a decision in Michael's case. The justices upheld his conviction but overturned the death sentences. The court ruled that the prosecutor and trial judge had erred when they kept vital evidence from the jury. In addition, Justice Robert Berdon wrote a scathing criticism of the original prosecutor, Bob Satti, in his concurring opinion. The jury
never knew that the state's own expert psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Miller, agreed with the defense expert psychiatrists that Michael was mentally ill—a sexual sadist—and that his mental illness should preclude a death sentence. Dr. Miller had written the letter explaining his position to Satti on February 15, 1987, just two weeks prior to the start of jury selection in Michael's trial. But Satti kept Miller's letter out of the original trial.

In his letter, Dr. Miller said that after ruminating about the case for a long time, he had changed his original analysis of the significance of Michael's mental illness, which he admitted had been based on emotion rather than reason. Dr. Miller wrote that he believed Michael's mental illness played a significant role in the murders and that he could not recommend a death sentence. “If it had been only one or two [murders] I could have held up, but the repetitive nature of the acts as well as past history of assaultive behavior make my (our) position untenable.” Michael had attacked, raped, and murdered too many victims for Dr. Miller to deny that his mental illness was linked to his crimes. In Connecticut, under the death penalty statute as it existed in 1987, mental illness was an automatic mitigating factor. A death sentence could not be imposed if there was even one mitigating factor. Yet in part because it never heard Dr. Miller's findings, the jury rejected the psychiatric evidence put on by the defense and imposed six death sentences.

I had recently moved to Connecticut when Michael was first arrested in 1984. I remember being relieved to hear that a suspected serial killer had been apprehended. But I had a sense of dread three years later when I read the headlines announcing that he had been sentenced to die in the electric chair—the first successful capital prosecution since Connecticut had reinstated the death penalty in 1973. I'm not even sure if I knew that Connecticut had a death penalty statute. In New
York, where I had been living, Governor Mario Cuomo had firmly planted himself in front of the executioner's door, vetoing any death penalty statute passed by the legislature. It seemed odd that suburban Connecticut would have tougher penalties than New York. The state I lived in was the first New England state in three decades to sentence a man to death. Even though I knew there would be years and years of appeals, the verdict was unsettling. No one had been executed in Connecticut since 1960. I believed all killing was wrong—not just what Michael had done but also what the state of Connecticut wanted to do to him. Yet on the other hand, as a parent, I couldn't even fathom the pain and suffering of the families of the young women and could sympathize with their need for justice for their daughters.

When the decision was handed down in 1994, I'd been out of the country adopting twins from Paraguay and then was coping with the twenty-four-hour-a-day job of caring for two premature babies, so I missed the newspaper reports. The decision meant that a new jury would determine whether Michael would be sentenced to death or to as long as 480 years in prison—in addition to the 160 years he was already serving. In Connecticut, as in most states, capital murder cases are conducted in two parts. If the jury finds the defendant guilty of a capital crime during the first phase, a second phase with the same jury follows to determine the penalty.

 • • • 

A
s we walked out of the meeting that day, Joe recounted Michael's personal history. “When he was just a kid, like eight years old or something, his job at the family chicken farm was to weed out the sick chickens and wring their necks. When you read about Ross's life, it's no wonder he was crazy. His sixteen-year-old uncle blew his brains out with a shotgun and left a long suicide note that was written in a spiral,
in which he confessed that he was a homosexual and that he couldn't stand to live anymore.”

I stopped in the middle of the corridor. “He killed chickens when he was only eight?” I asked.

“He killed the women in the same way—strangling them with his bare hands—after he raped them.” Joe had covered parts of the original trial and began to describe the murders in detail. “Ross would be out driving and see some random young girl, pull over, and grab her. He raped them, but he made each of them perform oral sex on him before the actual rape. Then he would strangle her. Sometimes it would take several minutes because his hands would cramp, and he'd have to stop for a moment before finishing them off.”

I couldn't take any more. “Okay. I get it.”

“But Ross is intelligent. He has a high IQ and graduated from Cornell. He's always sending us articles on why the death penalty should be abolished. And guess what? He used to be for capital punishment, but I guess being sentenced to death prejudices one's worldview on such issues,” he chuckled.

“I can see why he might have a change of heart.”

“He's not only changed but become a missionary. He is a prolific writer. There's not that much to do on death row, and with all that time on his hands, he cranks out article after article. His pieces are usually pretty good. We'll see what his next move is, but I bet you anything that we'll get a letter from him analyzing the court's decision in a few weeks. Like a lot of people in his position, he's learned a lot about the law.”

“Let me know if you hear from him,” I added, never really expecting to hear more.

Michael Ross's case could have ended with a life sentence after the Connecticut Supreme Court decision—handed down on his thirty-fifth
birthday in 1994. The New London state's attorney now had a second chance to acknowledge that Michael suffered from a mental illness and offer him the equivalent of several life sentences without parole, saving the state the cost of another trial, decades of appeals, and perhaps inevitably an execution. But the prosecutor—“Bulldog” Satti to those who had battled him in court—did not give up so easily.

Satti was barely five feet four inches, but he cut an enormous figure. Michael, at least ten inches taller, feared him. The veteran prosecutor had taken on the case of
State v. Ross
with all the aggression and tenacity his nickname suggested. This had been no ordinary case for the chief state's attorney. When the Ross case came to trial in 1987, Satti had recently failed to secure a death sentence in the Terry Daniels case, involving not only a rape-murder, but also the throat slashing of the victim's two-year-old daughter. Michael Ross's prosecution provided Satti with a second opportunity to be the first Connecticut prosecutor to get a capital conviction under the new statute.

The snowy-haired prosecutor was about to retire after nineteen years of heading the New London State's Attorney's Office and forty-three years of practicing law, but his devotion to this case fueled his effort to stay on part-time as a special assistant state's attorney. There was no question in Satti's mind that Michael Ross was a cunning, manipulative rapist who knew exactly what he was doing when he killed those eight women. He believed that Ross had murdered to ensure that his victims could never identify him and that his mental illness was a sham concocted by Michael to avoid a death sentence. In Satti's mind, Michael should face death because he had committed heinous crimes.

However, the inmate on death row in 1994 was not the same man who had been incarcerated in 1987. Once he was placed on death row, Michael received medication, first Depo-Provera and then Depo Lupron, two drugs that suppressed his production of testosterone. Administered
by injection, both were developed as contraceptives for women and contain progesterone, a hormone that prevents egg release. Eventually the medications were used by psychiatrists with considerable success to suppress the production of testosterone in male patients with sexual disorders. It was their belief that overproduction of testosterone might be a root cause of some aberrant sexual behavior. Studies have determined that recidivism rates drop dramatically when the medications are administered in conjunction with psychotherapy for convicted sex offenders who suffer from some paraphiliac disorders, such as pedophilia, exhibitionism, and sexual aggression. Michael was the perfect candidate because he was in a controlled environment where he had mental health personnel checking his medications and state of mind on a regular basis.

When Michael's testosterone production had virtually been eliminated, he said he no longer suffered from the violent sexual fantasies that had constantly played and replayed in his thoughts for more than a decade. He wrote that he had been freed from “the monster within,” and returned to being “Michael.” Seven years on death row had given him plenty of time to think about what he had done and what he would do when the court finally decided his fate. It also gave him a lot of time to begin a letter-writing campaign to newspaper editors and to write op-ed articles about the flaws in the criminal justice system and why the death penalty should be abolished. His writings also expressed remorse for what he had done.

But Michael had come to a dramatically different conclusion about how his own case should play out. After years in prison and in treatment for his disease, he decided that the only way he could prove to the families of his victims that he was repentant for what he had done was to accept a death sentence. In September 1994, Michael requested that his public defenders hand-deliver a letter to Bob Satti, offering a
deal—stop the penalty hearing from going forward, and he would accept a death sentence. He explained that there was “no need and no purpose served in inflicting additional emotional harm or distress on the families of my victims. I do not wish to hurt these people further—it's time for healing. . . . I am willing to hand you the death penalty ‘on a silver platter,' on the condition that you will work with me to get this over with as quickly and as painlessly as possible.” He asked to be allowed to go into court to admit his guilt and take responsibility for his crimes by accepting the death penalty.

Michael said he would sign a stipulation, a legal declaration, that said his crimes were “especially cruel, heinous, and depraved” (a requirement in a capital case) and that there were no mitigating factors that would preclude a death sentence. In exchange for this deal, Satti had to agree that the state would offer no evidence of any kind to prove its case—no autopsy reports, no gruesome crime scene photos, and no emotional testimony from the victims' families.

However, Michael could not resist editorializing. He said he didn't expect Satti to accept the offer because “I know that you want your circus trial, and that you couldn't care less about how it affects the families of my victims. You want your day in the sun, your day of glory. You want to be the man who sends Connecticut's most hated and despised criminal to the electric chair. And you will probably want to pull the switch yourself. And even though that is exactly what I am offering you with this deal, if you agree there will be no circus trial with you as master of ceremonies. That kind of takes the wind out of your sails, and doesn't make it so much fun, now does it?” He offered to meet with Satti at the prison to work out the details. He said he understood that a meeting would be unpleasant, but that it was necessary to ensure that they were “playing from the same sheet of music.”