The Man in the Monster (30 page)

The viewing area is separated from the execution chamber by a large window with a blue drape that is opened after the stage is set and the witnesses are in place and is drawn when it's all over. In a weird way, as the drape inside the chamber opens and closes, the stage looks like a life-size puppet show. The victims' families had been given a tour of the area earlier and had been told that the press would go in first, then a purple curtain would be pulled to separate them from the press, and then they would be escorted in. Another curtain would be pulled, and Michael's witnesses would be brought in. We were last because we would be directly in front of Michael's head so he could look directly at us. “He'll be able to see a friendly face at the end,” Brian Garnett, the DOC press spokesman, had explained to me over the phone. A guard was posted with each group to make sure there was no interference or indignity.

The staff and officials had rehearsed and rehearsed the procedures, but no amount of rehearsal made it easy. One official described the scene as “surreal. We just don't have it in us to kill people—at least I don't. But if you are going to have a death penalty, you are going to have executions. It's going to happen. We'll see what happens when the next one comes up. It might not be as easy as killing a Michael Ross.”

Ironically, late in the afternoon, Garnett briefed the press, telling
them that Michael had gotten up early, eaten oatmeal and juice, and had not asked for a last meal but had settled on the same fare that the other prisoners were eating—turkey à la king with rice, mixed vegetables, bread and butter, and coffee. Michael didn't hear Garnett talking about what he had eaten—and of course, Garnett didn't know the truth and had it all wrong. Lieutenant King had gotten him what he wanted. I've omitted it here out of respect for his wishes. In the end, Michael would have chuckled at Garnett's gaffe. I did.

It was just after 2:00
A.M
. when Michael's witnesses were finally escorted into the viewing area on the side of the tier opposite the death cell. Instead of turning left after the hallway door was opened, we went to the right and walked all the way down the tier. We were on the mirror side of death row, except this side had a death chamber instead of a death cell. I looked at the draped window leading to the execution chamber. I could see Ed Shelley's reflection front and center—almost like a ghost. We waited for several minutes, wondering what was causing the delay. Had Michael changed his mind? No. The truth was that they had trouble finding his veins, one of the things he feared most.

Finally the curtain was drawn, revealing Michael lying on the gurney. His arms were stretched out on either side of him, tied down with four strips of black Velcro and connected to tubes. His fingers were tied together with what looked like ace bandages. I was surprised that his eyes were shut, but I knew why. He didn't want to look at the anger in Ed Shelley's eyes or the tears in Lera's. That was even more frightening than death.

Warden David Strange took a microphone and stood next to Michael. “Inmate Ross, do you have a final statement?”

“No, thank you,” Michael said, not opening his eyes. I felt cheated that he didn't at least look over to say good-bye.

“He doesn't have the balls to say anything,” whispered one victim's family member.

The warden then went to the red phone on the wall that was connected to Commissioner Theresa Lantz's red phone. She picked it up and reiterated the well-practiced script. “Chief State's Attorney Morano, are there any legal impediments to carrying out this execution?”

Having just checked with his office, he took a deep breath, knowing that this would be as close as he would ever come to ordering an execution. “No, Commissioner, there are no legal impediments.”

Lantz told the warden to proceed with the execution. The warden then went to the end of the room, where he crossed his arms in front of him, signaling to the executioner—who was behind a one-way mirror—to proceed at 2:13. Seconds later, Michael shuddered. It's impossible to know whether it was a reflex triggered by the sedative or whether he was reacting to feeling the first solution enter his veins. He also could have been scared.

“Feeling some pain?” whispered a female voice. Ed and Lera later told me it was Debbie, Robin Stavinsky's sister.

Then a few minutes later, Detective Frank Griffin, one of the arresting officers, whispered, “It's too peaceful.”

I watched his chest heave up and down, wondering which breath would be his last. It didn't take long for his face to turn gray and his arms to be mottled with purple. At 2:21, nine minutes after it had begun, the curtain was drawn. We all stood there silently waiting for the official word. At 2:25 the warden's announcement came over the loudspeaker.

Michael Bruce Ross was dead.

I didn't cry when the warden made his announcement because I felt as though I was going to be sick. I had been holding everything in all day, and I finally let go. I was numb. I didn't know what to feel. I just knew I wanted to get out of the prison as soon as possible. The last thing I wanted to do was break down in front of any of the prison officials or staff.

We were the first to be taken out and led back to the office, where we were to wait until the media and the families had left the prison. Father Bruno was standing outside the viewing area in the hallway. “I don't know how you did it,” he said. “I don't know how you got through it.”

I lost control. Tears welled up in my eyes. I didn't know how I had gotten through it, but I made it. It was over. I remembered what a lawyer friend told me about how she reacted after witnessing an execution. “I walk around with a hole in me.” Now I knew what she meant. I had watched the state of Connecticut kill a person, deprive someone of his life with a deadly mix of three chemicals. My friend was dead, and I would never be the same.

We weren't allowed to leave the prison until after 3:00
A.M
. While we waited, Father Bruno said almost apologetically, “You know, I was talking to the commissioner today, and she said, ‘I never thought it would come to this.' None of us did, and I hope we never have to do it again.”

“If you have a death penalty, you have executions. What did you think would happen?” I asked incredulously. He had no answer.

Of course, Michael couldn't go out without sending his own mixed message. On his next-to-last day, he had written to Susan. “It is difficult for me to write this today, as I know this will be the last words that I write to you. I know that I should stop this. I know that this is wrong, but I can't stop it. I can't deal with all of this anymore; it is just easier to let it all end right now. To stop this now would lead to more craziness that will never stop. The families will hate me even more, the press would crucify me, and going back to Northern would be totally unbearable (I'd never hear the end of it from both the guards and the inmates). I'm so tired of all this. I look forward to tomorrow night—finally this 20 years of hell will be over.”

The rest sounded almost as if he were trying to convince himself. “So many people hate me. I am not totally evil. I am capable of doing good. This
will
help the families; this is good. So while I
am
scared, I
will
get through this. I won't back down. I am not a total coward. Then I can rest.”

I had an early morning flight back to California, so I drove straight from the prison to Kennedy Airport. I cried for the first hour and then finally had no tears left. The adrenaline was gone, and I began to have trouble staying awake. I opened a window to let the cold air blow in my face and then stopped for coffee. After boarding the flight, I ordered a Bloody Mary and slept most of the way back. Five months of anxiety and ten years of telephone calls had ended. Michael was dead and I was exhausted.

I was home before noon.

My son greeted me at the door.

“Mom, are you okay?”

“Yes,” I said. “I'm fine.” I couldn't tell him how I really felt.

Two days later, Barry called. “You okay?”

“Yes. No. I don't know. I should sit down and write, but I can't because I just realized something.”

“You thought the book would save him,” he said assuredly.

“How did you know?”

“I just knew. You weren't writing it to describe an execution. You were writing it to save a life.”

 • • • 

A
week after I got back, my sister called to say that my almost eighty-four-year-old father was not doing well. My mother had been sick from October until her death in February. He had visited her every day, and it had taken a toll on his already frail health. Until her
hospitalization, his colon cancer had been under control, but the worry and stress had weakened him. Just after her death in February, an MRI revealed that his tumors had grown significantly and the prognosis was not good. He decided that he did not have the strength to go through another round of chemotherapy, and having seen that other treatments had almost killed him, we didn't press him. I had been planning to visit him Memorial Day weekend, but my sister said he might not be alive by then, so I flew out that day.

I knew that my father was proud of me for being a friend to someone on death row, and he was also sensitive to the fact that I had witnessed something that neither of us wanted to happen. He didn't ask about the details but simply inquired, “Are you okay? It must have been hard.”

“I don't know if I'm okay. I'm still in shock.”

“I can understand that, but if he wanted you to be there, you did the right thing.”

“Would you have done it?”

“I'd like to think so; I know it would have been a hard decision. Maybe for me it would have been easier because I've been at so many bedsides as people died.”

“But you were holding a dying person's hand, not watching through a window as someone was actually killed.”

“I can't even imagine.”

He had been hoping to come for a visit to our cottage in Maine during the summer, an annual pilgrimage of renewal, but by early June it was clear that he wouldn't make it. So I brought Maine to him. I cooked him a lobster the night before he died. “Just close your eyes and imagine you're eating your lobster, listening to the loons as you sit on the porch in Maine,” I told him.

“Oh, my, this is so delicious,” he said. “It's paradise.” He also had a
piece of his favorite strawberry rhubarb pie, baked by a close family friend. The next morning, he was very confused, so I called my sister to join me. When she saw how weak he was, she went to get our brother. The rest of the day, the three of us stayed at our father's bedside with Michael Catlett, his minister and a close friend who was like a son to my parents. Occasionally my father would wake up, and we'd retell old family stories. Sometimes he would initiate the memory; sometimes it would be one of us. By late afternoon, his breathing became slower and he stopped waking up. We waited and watched each labored breath, wondering if it would be his last. He died around 6:00
P.M
.

I couldn't help but compare my father's serene death, surrounded by loved ones who could soothe him and touch him, with the one that I had witnessed less than a month before. His was peaceful and private; Michael's had been painfully public, and he had not been able to hug us good-bye or share a last meal with his family and friends. Of course, my comparison is flawed. My father was a compassionate pacifist who had spent his life helping people. The monster in Michael had destroyed many lives, and both Michael and the monster paid the ultimate
price.

I visited the Shelleys a year after the execution. We met in a noisy McDonald's in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Ed, dressed in a sleeveless shirt, was sitting in a booth when I walked in. Lera was outside having a smoke. Both of them had put on a little weight; they were more relaxed, more at ease. Ed's anger had always been palpable; Lera's piercing blue eyes had always been filled with sadness and tears as she talked of her daughter.

When I mentioned that they seemed more relaxed, Ed said, “I mean, it's all over and done with. We are getting along with our life, and we've found peace.”

“You seem more at peace,” I said to Lera.

Tears welled up in her eyes, “Well, it's easier now. Before the execution, from October to May, I was very depressed. I didn't want to see anybody; I would cry. It was horrible going through the final thing—2004 to 2005.” Near the execution dates, TV remote trucks had camped out in front of their house, waiting for one of them to come out.

“It was terrible. My daughter would go out and say, ‘Leave my father alone,'” Ed said. “Then they would go to the top of the hill and call the house. They were going to our neighbors' houses. They were going to stores and everybody in town and asking, ‘What do you think?'
They asked people who didn't even know us. It was just totally ridiculous.”

“But now it's no longer an issue in your life.”

“Right,” they both answered.

“Do you think the execution needed to happen in order for you to mourn?”

“Oh yes, yes, oh yes. It had to be over, because he would have been in the limelight. He would have made sure of that,” Ed said.

They said the execution hadn't been difficult for them. If anything, they were disappointed that Michael didn't open his eyes. Lera said she thought it was because he didn't want to see her cry. “In
Walking with Michael
, who does Michael mention? He mentions my face over and over.” Lera surprised herself by calling him Michael. “I guess you must have made him seem a bit more human to me.” But she was right about Michael's motives; her hurt, her tears had haunted him. Ed insisted that Michael was also afraid to look him in the eye. “He knew Mr. Shelley would be there front and center,” Ed said proudly. “I thought it was cowardly of him.”

Some of their views had changed. Ed and Lera now admitted that he was sincere about accepting execution, since he had gone through with it, but Ed added that he thought he had done it for himself because he couldn't stand to be on death row anymore. “He knew he was guilty, and it got to him.” However, Ed made it perfectly clear that he still did not believe that Michael was mentally ill. “Mentally ill? No. Evil? Yes.”

And he was also still adamant about another thing. Ed Shelley had no intention of ever forgiving Michael Ross for killing Leslie. “Of course I'm not going to forgive him. He thought I was going to forgive him? Good grief.” Lera didn't answer; at that point there was no reason to say more.

 • • • 

J
ennifer Tabor Carcia, Robin Stavinsky's little sister, was one of the few other family members who spoke to me. I was in Maine sitting on my porch; she was at home in Connecticut. The night of the execution, she had carried her favorite picture of her sister into the viewing area—despite the fact that they had been told not to do that. She had hidden it in her bra and held it while she watched Michael die. “I found him to be nonhuman. I had no emotion about it at the time. I didn't cry. I wasn't angry. I don't remember much.”

She was surprised that he hadn't made a final statement and was curious why, so I explained that he “was afraid that it would be too trite. He had given a long apology at the sentencing, but what could he say in a minute other than ‘I'm sorry'? He thought that would be more hurtful. And he was not sure he could get through it without crying.”

“Well, that makes me feel a little better.”

She said it bothered her that he didn't open his eyes because he didn't acknowledge that the families were there. “Seeing him die didn't affect me as much as when I had to put my cat down. He was a monster and so manipulative. He chose when to kill and when to die. He could have called it off. I remember the anxiety of thinking that he might call it off, but he took the easy way out. I know I sound a little callous, but his little bit of suffering was nothing compared to these girls and our families. Maybe in ten years I'll be in a different place.”

“So you think the death penalty was the proper penalty for what he did?”

She took a deep breath. “A family member said, ‘Did the state do us any favor by pursuing the death penalty?' And I said, ‘No.' The death penalty hurts everybody. It didn't do us any favor, but it took us a long while to understand it. There are so many different situations. I can't
say I am against the death penalty or that I am for it.” She said when there's a death penalty, the system punishes the families. “After a trial, the families have to wait and wait, left to wait for decades as the legal process slowly plays out.”

“Now that it's over, do you feel you have closure?”

“Closure? What does that mean?”

When I told her that the Shelleys told me they had moved on, she said, “To me,
closure
is just a word. Robin's death still haunts me. How can there be closure? Nothing is changed. My life has evolved around this. I am who I am because of this. If that hadn't happened, I would be a different person. I would have a sister. I would visit her, and I would have nieces and nephews.” She said, for her, Michael Ross's execution was just one step along the path, but it would never be over. “I have grieved my whole life, and to watch one human being die did not make that go away. I'll never have closure because I will never get Robin back. It was just one event in a long series of events that I have had to go through,” she said, sounding as if she were about to cry. She heaved a deep sigh. “You knew him as a person and you lost that. You started this same journey at his death. Do you see how it runs so parallel to us? It all runs around together.”

I never thought that any family member would ever think of Michael's death as a loss to anyone other than his immediate family. “But I didn't lose a sister or daughter. I can't even define my relationship with Michael. It evolved into a friendship. I was totally afraid of him when I first met him—petrified—but over time that changed, and when he was able to trust me, he became a friend. He was already on medication when I met him, so I never knew the monster; he was just Michael.”

“I feel a little better talking to you, knowing that there was a human side to Michael.” She paused for a second. “I called him Michael. Maybe
he is less of a monster now to me since I talked to you. In a way, it's good to know he had humanity.”

“All he wanted was forgiveness—something that he knew he could never receive in life. He thought that by agreeing to die, he was proving that he was sorry,” I explained. “He didn't know any other way to prove it.”

“That takes me another step forward in my journey,” Jennifer said thoughtfully, “knowing that he was trying to say he was sorry.”

 • • • 

L
era called me on November 26, 2010, to tell me that Ed tragically took his own life. Wanting to spare Lera or his family the horror of finding him, he called 911 to tell them what he was about to do. His body was found in the woods just behind the Shelley house minutes later. Perhaps Ed was Michael's tenth victim—if one counts his own death as his
ninth.