The Man in the Monster (4 page)

What he didn't know was that his public defenders, Fred DeCaprio
and Peter Scillieri, never delivered his letter to Satti. They later explained that they could not participate in his decision to give up without a legal fight. With no response from the prosecutor, Michael decided that his next best option was to make his offer public. In March 1995, he wrote an article for
Northeast
, the Sunday magazine supplement of the
Hartford Courant
, entitled “It's Time to Die.”

Michael's article began with a description of his recurring nightmare of his execution in Connecticut's electric chair. The horror in the dream comes not in the execution itself but in visualizing the crowd outside, counting down the last seconds and cheering as they hear that Michael Ross, the monster serial killer, is dead. He also wrote of life on death row and explained that his mental illness, sexual sadism, had caused him to have repetitive thoughts of rape, murder, and the degradation of women. He was sexually aroused by humiliating and raping women. He claimed that his medication, prescribed by one of his psychiatric expert witnesses, had freed him from those obsessive thoughts and enabled him finally to face what he had done. Over time, he said, he had lost the intense desire to prove his mental illness in a court of law and now wanted to forgo the penalty phase of his trial and accept death, sparing his victims' families the pain of another proceeding. One section of the
Northeast
article suggested that he might be suicidal, making me wonder if his years on death row had made him depressed. I suspected that his real motives might have been state-assisted suicide rather than a selfless act to help give the families closure.

Initially, Michael had been consumed with a desire to prove that he was mentally ill. “When I first came to death row, I was filled with anger at how the prosecution had twisted and distorted facts of my case. I was consumed with an intense desire to prove that my mental illness does in fact exist, and that the mental illness did in fact deprive me of my ability to control my actions and that my mental illness was
in fact the cause of my criminal conduct.” He said he wanted everyone to “believe that I was sick and that it was the sickness in me that did the killing. I wanted to prove that I wasn't the animal that the state portrayed me to be.” But he said he was tired and had “come to believe that any such thinking may be simply wishful thinking.” He didn't think anyone would ever believe that his mental illness was the cause of his lack of self-control, so he believed the only logical course of action was to accept death.

 • • • 

W
hy would anyone opt for death over life? Why was Michael, who was openly opposed to the death penalty and who churned out articles expressing that opinion, willing to accept execution? Was he depressed, as many death row inmates are, and just giving up? Was he actually asking the state to help him commit suicide? Was the prospect of life imprisonment so grim that death became a more palatable option? What did the victims' families think of the offer? To those who had followed Michael's case—his subsequent crusade to establish misconduct on the part of the state, his one-man campaign against the death penalty, and his desire for the world to understand his mental illness—his actions were not only baffling, but also contradictory. Only a few months earlier, in December, he had written, “Executions degrade us all. They are carried out in the middle of the night, in the dark, away from us all to hide what they really are—a barbaric punishment symbolic of our less civilized past.” How could the man who had penned that now offer to accept a death sentence for himself?

The
Northeast
article concluded, “Kill me if you must, but please don't let it end there. Learn from this horrible experience.” What could anyone possibly learn from executing Michael Ross—or anyone else, for that matter?

I paced around my office considering these questions. Michael's story was both horrifying and fascinating. Was he really mentally ill and the victim of an overzealous prosecutor?

I decided to learn all I could about the case. I gathered up all the documents and articles we had on it in the office. Together, the articles, trial transcripts, court decision, and briefs concerning Ross's case took up a large filing cabinet and three banker's boxes. The most difficult task was getting started, not because of the daunting amount of work, but because opening the boxes was like turning on a horror film. I started with articles that Michael had written, thinking that they would give me clues. Then I began reading the trial transcripts and briefs.

I read some of the documents at work and took some home in handfuls to read at night. I didn't want to bring all of it into my home because it would have been like taking Michael Ross into my house. As I began reading the material—it would take me months to get through it all—two things stood out. First, it was apparent that Michael suffered from mental illness. All five of the psychiatric experts who examined him—even the state's expert witness—agreed that he was mentally ill, a sexual sadist. The second thing I suspected was that in Michael's first trial, the judge, the prosecutor, and the state police's head investigator had, at the very least, made some errors and at the worst, trampled over Michael's rights. As editor in chief and publisher of a newspaper for lawyers, I couldn't ignore a case involving a possible violation of a defendant's Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

Woven within this legal morass was also a story of horror and suffering—of young women who were brutally raped and then literally had the life squeezed out of them and of their families, who had been waiting for some sort of closure for more than a decade, waiting to know if Michael Ross would pay the ultimate price for killing their sisters and daughters.

I wrote a letter to Michael, in the late summer of 1995, introducing myself, expressing my interest in what he was doing, and asking if he'd be willing to be interviewed. It was only a matter of days before I received his reply in a handwritten envelope with his return address clearly printed on the front. I held the envelope and hesitated before I opened it, afraid of what might be inside. I think that I feared that the serial killer, the monster, would reveal himself to me, jumping out in front of me. I stared at the hand-printed letter, thinking about the man who had written it, trying to imagine him—not in a physical sense but as a person, his soul, if he had one. What type of man would commit such brutal acts?

“I would be happy to grant you an interview but . . .” he began. Death row had been transferred into the state's maximum security prison, Northern Correctional Institution, and access to the press had been cut off. Only immediate family members were allowed to visit death row inmates. The policy seemed Draconian, as families often don't always support relatives on death row. But I could understand the state wanting to keep journalists out; they give the death row inmates a mouthpiece and threaten the state's veil of secrecy about what happens behind the prison walls
.
So I called the Connecticut Department of Correction to try to set up an interview and was told that it was not possible. I wrote a letter appealing to the commissioner and to the attorney general of the state, Richard Blumenthal, who was known in the journalistic community as accessible and open to reasonable requests. With time, Blumenthal approved my request, but it took even more time to get through the red tape. It would take almost six months just to get on Michael's phone list, to hear how he answered questions rather than see written, thought-out responses about what was making him offer to give up his life. In the meantime, I started attending the court proceedings.

A few days before the first hearing I attended, a second letter from Michael arrived. Parts of the letter were almost lawyerly, yet it was also passionate and, at times, contrite. He seemed remorseful, but there was also an underlying anger and frustration with the system. Michael accused Satti of being willing to do anything to sway the jury's emotions, including using “crime scene photos, autopsy reports, and, most important, the victims' families. He will put them on the stand and tear open old wounds. If he can get them to break down on the stand he will do it. He doesn't give a damn about them.” He also was reneging on his willingness to cooperate. He was afraid that an article by me would “piss him off.” He expected that the stipulations would be full of lies but that he would sign them anyway to stop Satti from hurting the families of his victims further. “That's what is most important at this time. Not my life, not justice, but my victims' families' well-being. . . . I owe my victims' families the world. I can never even begin to repair the damage that I have done to them. Reconciliation is impossible. I can't even ask their forgiveness. How could I?”

Repeating what would become his mantra, he insisted that it was his duty to prevent the families any harm. “How can I justify putting the families of my victims through that again? Especially for something as intangible as a principle of ‘justice.'” In order to prevent a new trial, he said he would sign anything, “including something that says I'm the biggest scumbag in the world, that I knowingly and willingly killed my victims in cold-blooded ecstasy, and that I deserve to die, I will do so. For they are only words that won't change the ultimate truth.” Michael said he didn't expect me to understand what he was trying to do, but he hoped I would understand why he couldn't grant an interview at that time unless I promised that none of it would be printed until his negotiations with Satti were completed.

I read it over and over, concluding that Michael had a motive beyond
sparing the families more pain. In some twisted way, he was attempting to shift the blame of pain from himself, the killer, to Satti, the prosecutor. Somehow in Michael's mind, the pain didn't come from his horrific acts but from the fact that Satti would revel in the gory details of his crimes in court. It was a convenient rationalization. How else is a prosecutor going to prove his case? The question remained as to whether he, depressed and feeling hopeless about his chances of receiving a life sentence at a new penalty hearing, might actually be trying to get the state to help him commit suicide, seeing it as an easy way out. It also could be an insincere move to get attention in the media.

 • • • 

T
he Ross case was not first on the docket in that courtroom the day I first saw him. I sat waiting while the judge dealt with other cases, from parole violations to petty larceny.

Upstairs in the New London court, Michael and Satti were debating the details of their unprecedented alliance between defendant and prosecutor. This was the third time they had met to negotiate Michael's death—and there would be many more meetings before they had agreed on all the details of the stipulation.

The stipulation was to say that Michael murdered Wendy Baribeault, Leslie Shelley, April Brunais, and Robin Stavinsky, that the murders had been especially cruel and heinous, that there were no mitigating factors that required mercy, and that the proper penalty was death.

“Do you know what it is like to sit at a table with a man who despises you? Who wants you dead? . . . You cannot imagine what it is like to sit across a table, and have to listen to that arrogant bastard speak of justice,” Michael wrote to me later. “He speaks of how, as the state's
attorney, he not only represents the people of Connecticut, but must protect my rights! He speaks of my rights after all the twisting, distortion, deception, and out-and-out lies that he has orchestrated over the last decade in my case! And I have to sit there, smile and be courteous, and bite my tongue because I'm scared to death that I'll say something to anger him and that he'll say, ‘The hell with this, we start picking a jury tomorrow.'”

Later, Bob Satti would confide in me that it was also difficult for him to sit in a room with Michael, negotiating his death. Satti never publicly wavered in his resolve to secure a death sentence for Ross, but privately he admitted that his negotiations with Ross had somewhat tempered his opinion of him. At the time, I did not appreciate the meaning of what Satti had said: Michael Ross the serial killer was a scary concept, but Michael Ross the man was not. Face-to-face, it is difficult to tell a man that you think he should be executed. Perhaps that's why the executioner always wears a hood to hide his identity. It may be part of the reason why those who were hanged, electrocuted, or shot were also hooded. The hood creates a barrier. No one wants to see the panic in the face of the condemned or the gruesome, distorted face of the corpse. Both the executioner and the condemned were anonymous, hiding their humanity.

While negotiations continued upstairs, I looked around the sparsely filled courtroom at that first hearing for the usual journalists or lawyers. Across the aisle from where I was sitting and a few rows back sat Ed and Lera Shelley, the parents of Leslie, the youngest of Michael's victims. At least one of them attended every court proceeding, generating ten years of missed workdays and irritated bosses. “We wanted to be there for our daughter,” they had explained to reporters over and over again. No one had to point them out, because it was obvious that Mrs. Shelley found it painful to be in court. As soon as Michael's case was called, she dabbed
her eyes with a tissue. Ed was stoic, but it was clear that he regarded Michael as pure evil. His steely-eyed expression almost cried out that he not only wanted all of this to be over, but that he also would have liked to offer to personally pull the switch at Michael's execution. Ed later told me that during the first trial, he and a father of one of the other victims sneaked a gun into the courtroom with the intention of killing Michael. In the end, neither could bring himself to do it. Neither could risk hurting someone else or getting hurt himself. Perhaps the fleeting sensation of being in control of Michael's fate as he had been in control of their daughters' lives was enough to assuage their urge to kill him.