The Man in the Monster (5 page)

When Michael and Satti finally appeared in court that afternoon, they reported that they were making progress but that there was more work to be done. Satti outlined for the court what had and had not been agreed to in minute detail. They would report back to the court in a month.

My immediate concern was to report on the hearing. I had been there not just to write a future article, but also to report for the
Law Tribune
on each hearing I attended. From the tone of Michael's magazine article in the
Northeast
, I believed that he was so tired or depressed that he actually wanted to die, so the lead of my story about the hearing read, “Convicted serial killer Michael Ross wants to die, but in volunteering to waive a new death penalty hearing, he unwittingly may be delaying his execution.”

Within a few days of the article's publication, Michael sent a letter with a number of enclosures, including his competency report and a gentle upbraiding, saying he had sent the competency report “to show that I'm not incompetent and well aware of what I am doing, but, more importantly, to show you that I have very concrete reasons why I am doing this. When reporters write ‘Michael Ross wants to die,' they are
incorrect. I have no death wish and would much prefer to receive an effective natural life sentence.” However, he said the cost to achieve that would be too high.

Michael was becoming even more of a contradiction: He was against the death penalty but willing to accept it for himself. He wanted to live but felt that he could not fight for his own life because it would hurt the families.

Michael continued to send me more and more information about his case. He was clearly obsessed with “getting” Satti, and I sensed that there was more to the story than Michael's offer to die. Did Michael get a fair trial in 1987? Were there mistakes or acts of misconduct by officers and prosecutors? Was Michael really mentally ill, or was that a mere excuse for his murderous conduct? Did his drugs change him? Had he changed significantly since committing the murders? Answering those questions was going to require an interview not only with Michael, but also with the few people who really knew
him.

NOVEMBER 9, 1995

While I was waiting for
State v. Ross
to be called in the New London Courthouse several weeks after the first hearing I attended, a man with a clerical collar sat down a few rows behind me on the other side of the aisle. In a letter, Michael had informed me that he had a few friends who sometimes attended court and that his spiritual adviser was Monsignor John Gilmartin. He urged me to contact him. With that as my introduction, I sat down next to Father John—Michael had told him to talk to me.

Fiftyish and graying, Father John's blue eyes radiated kindness. After introductions, we exchanged information about court procedures and Michael Ross. Father John introduced his companion as a lawyer from his parish who had come to help him understand what was happening in the courtroom. I was astonished by Father John's friendliness and willingness to share his thoughts and information. Usually, journalists have to work a bit harder to gain trust.

In his work as diocesan director of Catholic Charities of Rockville Centre, Long Island, Father John did not share in responsibilities involving prison ministry. Michael had come to him. “Michael was sending out articles to every Catholic publication that existed, and he found us listed,” he explained. Catholic publications like Father John's
Passage
magazine were Michael's best outlet because they were pleased to receive thoughtful columns about capital punishment. The Roman Catholic Church is one of the few denominations that had taken a stand against the death penalty.

Michael sent a letter asking them to publish one of his articles. “I read the article, and it was very compelling,” Father John explained. “When I looked at the bottom and realized that he was on death row, I said that I have got to be careful publishing this thing. I've got to find out who this guy is and what he did.” John Gilmartin took the ferry across Long Island Sound and drove to Somers, Connecticut, to meet Michael, a convicted serial killer. Michael had not been given any formal religious training as a child and had assumed that he was a Lutheran like his Ross relatives. It wasn't until he began working with Father John that his father informed him that he had been baptized in the Roman Catholic Church. If his parents had told him, he had forgotten.

While we waited for Michael to appear, Ann Cole, Michael's former jury consultant, whom he had also mentioned I should meet, stomped into the courtroom. I suspected that Ann was suspicious of me because of her years of courtroom experience with nosy journalists. I was lucky that Father John was there, or she might not have spoken to me at all. Short and blond, Ann Cole's speech was staccato. She was direct and openly skeptical, not just about me, but also about what she perceived as the injustices in Michael's case.

If Michael Ross had not become a serial killer, he and Ann Cole would never have crossed paths. Ann committed herself to helping him as an anti–death penalty activist and joined several abolition groups devoted to the cause. Because of her reputation in the legal community, she was often sought out in hopeless cases, such as Timothy McVeigh's. Tending to Michael was not only part of her fight against capital punishment, which she regarded as barbarous, but it was also personal.

During his 1987 trial, Michael had regarded Ann as his only friend. His lawyers were too busy preparing the case, and Michael's family did not attend the trial except to give testimony during the penalty phase. Dan Ross had explained to his son that he thought he would be insulting the victims' families if he showed up. Michael confided in Ann during noontime breaks and wrote to her at night from his jail cell, pouring out his pessimism and shame. Ann and Michael lost touch for a number of years after the original trial, in part because Ann became concerned that Michael was developing romantic notions about her. She stopped answering his letters and eventually lost contact.

Father John brought them back together in 1994. During the previous winter, just as Michael was beginning the process of negotiating his death, Ann met Father John at an anti–death penalty benefit. They found they had a serial-killer friend in common. From that evening on, the Catholic priest and the Jewish psychologist joined forces to give Michael Ross emotional, spiritual, and legal support. Both would eventually have professional and personal commitments that for long periods of time took them away from supporting Michael, but they were my first guides in my long journey to understanding who he was. Without them, I don't think I would have ever been able—or would have wanted—to get to know Michael Ross.

In the weeks since the last hearing, Michael and Satti had come to terms on the agreement. While we sat there, they were going over the final details to work out before coming into court. Everyone assumed that they would sign the stipulation that day in open court, but Michael's friends were still holding out hope that he would not sign his life away.

When the case was passed over until the afternoon, I followed Ann to lunch at the Radisson Hotel, a block away from the courthouse. I wanted to find out as much as I could about Michael Ross's mental illness, his
offer to die, and what had happened at the first trial. Father John was given permission to briefly visit Michael in the jail buried downstairs beneath the courtroom. They were locked together in a small holding cell so that they could speak privately, but Michael was almost too upset to talk. As they hugged, he started to sob uncontrollably. After a brief prayer, Father John tried to persuade him not to sign the stipulation, to give it more thought. Michael was adamant. “I have to do this. I can't turn back now,” he said, choking back tears. “I owe it to the families. It's the least I can do.”

When John caught up with us at lunch, he reported on Michael's state of mind. “He was crying because he doesn't want to sign it, but he says he has to.” I would later understand that if Michael was unsure about something, he wanted to commit to it quickly—in an article, in a public statement, or by signing an agreement. Then he wouldn't have to think about it anymore. There'd be no turning back.

As we ate our tuna sandwiches, Ann made it clear that she thought Michael's first trial was a travesty. It had been her first case as a jury consultant. There was circuslike media exposure, and the judge, G. Sarsfield Ford, she said, seemed prejudiced against Michael. During testimony, she saw Judge Ford open his mail, balance his checkbook, and file his nails, acting as if the whole proceeding was a waste of his time. She remembers him rolling his eyes during psychiatric testimony, as if to mock what the doctor was saying. It took the jury only eighty-seven minutes to decide Michael's guilt on six counts of capital murder. A month later, after the penalty phase, the six death sentences arrived in four hours.

Ann appeared to feel responsible that the jury in Michael's first trial was a defendant's nightmare. In truth, she didn't have much to work with. The trial had been moved from New London because the defense had argued that it would be difficult for Michael to get a fair trial so
close to the places where the victims had lived. It was up to the chief administrative judge of the state to pick the site of the new trial, and Bridgeport was selected. A blue-collar town, it was not the kind of place where people gave much credence to mental illness in 1987.

They both explained that getting to know Michael was both easy and impossible. He was lonely, completely approachable, and brutally honest to the point that he gave you the sense that he didn't know how to lie. Yet he was also capable of incredible denial and deflection. He used jokes to cover his true feelings. In many ways he seemed like a needy child, compulsive and immature, desperately wanting affection and attention. Michael found it both satisfying and mystifying that Ann and Father John would take the time to visit him and try to help him. Almost everyone in his immediate family—with the exception of his father, who had been mildly supportive with occasional visits or calls—abandoned Michael in shame and disgust by the time he got on death row. If his family members were disgusted with or ashamed of him, why should strangers care? What did they want from him?

“Why
do
you care?”
I finally asked.

“Michael is not the person I met back in 1987,” said Ann. “He has completely changed.” She said that during the trial Michael appeared cold and unfeeling, but now he acted like an emotional human being, albeit sometimes immature or narcissistic. In pictures of Michael during the times of his arrest and trial, he is always expressionless. His eyes are empty. The Michael Ross of 1995 was different; he joked, cried, and was at times even introspective, even if he still viewed the world like an eight-year-old focused on his own needs.

Father John concurred, adding that even in the short time he had known Michael, there had been a profound change in him. They both theorized that this was in part due to his medication and in part due to his need to accept responsibility for what he had done. He had survived
the trial by shutting down emotionally and pretending that nothing bothered him, but the truth was that sitting through the trial had torn him apart and made him face a side of himself that he had long avoided. He was shamed by the evidence of what he had done. He was humiliated by the psychiatric testimony and mortified listening to the pain of the victims' families. Yet in 1987 he was incapable of accepting the pain that he had inflicted not just on the women, but also on their families. He deflected reality by joking with the people around him, a habit that made him seem callous and unrepentant to jurors and spectators. Michael would later explain to me that his behavior came from a lesson he had learned well as a child: Do not show feelings unless you want them beaten out of you.

The first time they met was in the big visiting room at Osborn Correctional Institution where other prisoners had visits. A female guard escorted Michael, and Father John thought,
This can't be Michael Ross if he's being escorted by a woman.
John remembered Michael being cautious at first, listening but saying almost nothing. “When I saw Michael the first time, he was very nervous, his hands were sweating, and I did an awful lot of the talking. After the first five minutes there, he finally said, ‘I know why you are here.' So I asked him why he thought I was there, and he said that I wanted to talk to him about forgiveness. I said that was not on my agenda, and I asked if that was on his.” Michael didn't respond, but after that visit, forgiveness became the focal point of their dialogue. It was also the one thing he wanted more than anything.

“That first time I saw him, he didn't want to touch it.” John theorized that forgiveness was what scared him most and what he struggled with as a person. “It's the whole question of the families of the victims. Will they ever forgive him?” he explained. “And I think he knows that they won't, but he desperately wants to do something to gain some kind of recognition that he is sorry. . . . That's why he's [offering to accept death].”

While Michael wanted to gain forgiveness and to avoid inflicting more pain, he also feared death. On one of Father John's early visits, he broached the subject. Michael had been moved to the supermax prison next to Osborn, so instead of a large visiting room, they met in a small room, usually reserved for lawyers and their clients. Sitting face-to-face, he hardly knew Michael at all, but he was compelled to ask what he saw as an important spiritual question. “What are you going to say to those eight women when you meet them in heaven?” To Michael it was like a sucker punch. “Don't you ever ask me that again. Don't ever ask anyone that again,” he snapped back. Yet Michael wanted and even needed Father John to come back, because he knew that he needed someone to tell him that God would forgive him.

Father John's arrival in Michael Ross's life was Michael's first close encounter with someone he regarded as a truly spiritual person. Although he had been brought up to believe that there was a God, he had not gone to any particular church or Sunday school. After his trial, he even began to question the existence of a supreme being because he felt that if there were a God, he would have prevented him from raping and killing the women. Father John opened his mind to the possibility that God would forgive him. He also began schooling Michael in Catholic theology and having him read books on the topic of forgiveness, particularly those written by Henri Nouwen. It was not long before Michael asked to receive first communion and be confirmed, and he became a devout Roman Catholic.

Ann looked out for Michael. That meant taking his phone calls each week—even when she was thousands of miles away tending to a sick family member—or making copies of his articles in her office or even counseling him to be cautious about strange women who wrote to him. Until her own family obligations became too time-consuming, Ann was his clearinghouse—for monetary support, for distribution of the newsletter
Walking with Michael
that he sent to about a hundred people
who followed his case, and for his outside purchases—as well as his supportive friend doing whatever he needed. It was a huge undertaking, but she did it willingly, even lovingly.

Their support was not just part of their fight against the death penalty, but was also for this man. They could see past the horrible things that he had done. Something about Michael Ross made him likable. Their affection gave him humanity. Until then it was much easier to stick to labels.

I was surprised to find that they shared a lot of Michael's views. In Ann and Father John's world, this serial killer had become the victim of a sinister and unpredictable prosecutor who was out to get a death sentence at any cost. I had heard many stories about Bob Satti's courtroom style, but it didn't make sense to me that someone who had devoted his life to prosecuting criminals would be willing to compromise all his principles just to be the first to secure a death sentence.