The Man in the Monster (7 page)

Researchers have discovered that there are differences in the brains
of a significant number of sexual sadists. In Michael's case, lesions were discovered on his brain that might help explain his loss of control—although Dr. James Merikangas, the neurologist and psychiatrist who examined him in the 1990s, could not explain how or why those lesions could actually produce murderous behavior. Someone may have lesions but not be violent. He explained that doctors don't understand how the lesions result in loss of control, but they do know that there is a connection between the two. The brain scans of sexual sadists often appear different from those of normal patients' scans.

Dr. Berlin's and Dr. Merikangas's explanations only made me more curious. What was Michael's childhood like? Had anyone else in his family been diagnosed with similar mental illnesses? How do lesions affect self-control? Some of my questions had easy answers that would just take some additional reporting, but others only led to more questions.

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O
ver the course of the next few months, I found that Michael was easy to talk to, and slowly I began to realize that the serial killer was never going to jump out and grab me. The man who emerged was soft-spoken, self-effacing, and even funny. He was sometimes articulate and sometimes slipped back into a farm-boy dialect with faulty grammar. It came out most when he was angry or when he was using humor to deflect discomfort. He had a charm that was either disarming or manipulative and cunning. I wasn't sure. Michael and his psychiatrists acknowledged that his highly developed defense of denial sometimes hid the truth from him. Yet he seemed almost incapable of lying intentionally. When asked a question that he found difficult to answer, he would deflect it with an inappropriate nervous laugh or joke. How had he managed to keep his sense of humor after so many years on death row? “I don't know. I must be crazy.”

This openness was also apparent in the months just after his arrest.
In nine hours of taped sessions with Dr. Zonana, Michael appeared to answer every question as truthfully as possible, even when his answers might not be in his best interest legally.

The first time I remember him speaking about the monster as a separate person was in a telephone conversation in which he was talking about how his medications had helped him. I was startled at first. I knew he blamed his mental illness for the killings, but I had not heard him refer to it so specifically as a separate person over which he had no control. “He was cunning. He would be satisfied and go away for a while after I stalked someone or killed someone, and then I would realize what he had done and feel like a total piece of shit. But he was always there waiting to take control. My medication changed all that. He was caged. He didn't go away completely, but he was under control.”

He saw his decision to accept death as his way of conquering the monster. He wrote, “The one great consolation is that I will get the last laugh. I may die, but I find it quite satisfying to know that the bastard of my mind will die with me. . . . And he hates that because he knows that finally, only in death, will we be separated from one another. I will go to the light and understanding, and he will go to darkness and truly be alone—forever.”

It was disturbing that on some level he didn't consider himself personally responsible for what “the monster” did. “I couldn't control him. He controlled me, and I never knew when he would reappear and take control.” Michael could live with himself by blaming his murderous behavior on an alter ego.

Dr. Merikangas and Dr. John Cegalis, who examined Michael six times and testified as one of his psychiatric witnesses at the 1987 trial, theorized that he suffered from some type of dissociative disorder. In a dissociative disorder, a person goes into a fuguelike state and adopts a different personality. Sometimes one is aware of what is going on but
feels like an observer of the action; at other times, one has no memory of what occurred. Michael Ross was totally aware of what the monster had done and, I would later find, had experienced the pleasure that the monster had experienced when he was doing the killing. But because he saw himself as a good person—or desperately wanted to believe that he was—he could not accept that he was a lustful rapist and murderer, so he named the bad part of himself the monster.

In addition to talking with Michael, Dr. Cegalis gave him a battery of psychological tests to aid in making a diagnosis. One such test, the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), consists of a number of ambiguously drawn pictures about which the test subject is asked to convey his feelings: What is the person in the picture thinking and feeling? What is happening? What will happen in the future? From Michael's responses, Dr. Cegalis concluded that he had difficulty relating to other human beings and that he had a lot of anger pent up inside. The Rorschach or inkblot test revealed he had “evident psychopathology,” meaning he was mentally ill. Cegalis said that Michael had difficulties “modulating or controlling strong emotions like aggression, like violence, like fear, like sexuality.” He said at times Michael could even have difficulty in knowing what was real and what was not.

Based on all of his testing, Dr. Cegalis found that Michael was “immature, egocentric, manipulative, driven to a kind of sexual satisfaction that fuses aggression and sexuality together in a highly abnormal way.” He said that Michael was also paranoid and unable to control his emotional impulses and that he acted out his anger in violent ways. His overall diagnosis concurred with that of Dr. Berlin's; Michael suffered from sexual sadism.

In my early conversations with Michael, I got a sense of how complex a person he really was. He was compulsive and had frequent mood swings. One call would be upbeat and positive, and by the next week,
his defeatist attitude would have taken over. “Why bother?” he would ask rhetorically. “There is no way I'll get a fair trial. Nobody wants to know the truth.”

“Be careful about making such big pronouncements,” I cautioned. “I'm not a nobody, and I did and do want to know the truth. You have to stop feeling sorry for yourself—at least if you want me to listen.”

Sometimes he would call and the first thing out of his mouth would be “Got a pencil?” The next words out of his mouth would be instructions about whom I should call or what I should look up. He would give me the names and numbers or the general instructions about where I could get the information. He'd also want to know if I had read the latest installment of documents he had sent. Often they were things that had come in the mail the day before, and I would have to tell him that I couldn't drop everything to read what he sent me. I had a job and a family.

In this initial stage of our dialogue, it became increasingly obvious that Michael wanted to forgo another trial not only because it would be too painful for the families, but also because it would be too painful for him to listen to a litany of what he had done. I had a lingering suspicion that his offer to die was a suicidal act, the result of depression from living on death row, although Michael denied that he was suicidal. For a time, I stopped pushing him on the suicide issue. In retrospect I know that he could not have been honest with me at that point, because he did not trust me yet.

1958–1966

Michael Ross's hometown of Brooklyn, Connecticut, is nothing like the borough of New York. A rural community of about six thousand, located in eastern Connecticut, Brooklyn seemed poor and provincial—much the opposite of Fairfield County, where I lived, the New York suburb in the western part of the state. When I visited in 1996 and 1997 to learn more about Michael's past, many of the farms that dotted the countryside seemed to be eroding with the landscape, victims of a changing economy. The Ross family farm was no exception. Once a thriving business, it was then dormant except for a few apartments and a trailer. Some of the coops had been torn down, and the area had the look of a makeshift junkyard. In the state it was in, I had a hard time understanding why Michael wanted to return to it after Cornell.

In 1995, Brooklyn was essentially a crossroads where three state highways—Routes 6, 169, and 208—converge. The biggest landmark in town is the county fairground that comes alive once a year and is situated on a side road off Route 208. There's a church, a nursing home, a town hall, firehouse, and even a jail scattered along the three routes, but no town center.

Brooklyn's biggest claim to fame, or infamy, was that a serial killer grew up there. Most people did not want to talk about Michael. None
of Michael's family and very few of the people who had known him growing up would speak with me. At that time, his arrest and trial had been too painful, and with the prospect of another trial, most refused interviews because they felt I was the first of many reporters who would be knocking on their doors. Over the course of a decade, I asked Michael about his childhood, interviewed psychiatrists who had talked with family and friends, and pored over trial transcripts, psychological evaluations, and police reports to try to reconstruct his early years.

 • • • 

W
hen they started going out in the fall of 1958, Pat Laine was seventeen and a senior at Killingly High School in Danielson, Connecticut; Dan Ross was a slightly older man who had already been through two years of college and a stint in the U.S. Marine Corps, serving as a guard at the brig in Pensacola, Florida. He went back to his hometown of Brooklyn unattached and began chicken farming. According to Frances Wolak, a neighbor and one of several women who served as mother figures for Michael during his teenage years, Pat made it clear to everyone that Dan Ross was going to be hers.

Within months, their romance resulted in a pregnancy. Dan Ross did the honorable thing, and the two were wed in February 1959; Michael Bruce Ross arrived on July 26 the same year, a healthy eight pounds. With his birth, Pat settled into farm life and the duties of motherhood. She worked in the egg business, picking up eggs by hand at the coops that the Ross family kept on rented property on Route 205 in Brooklyn. Little Michael accompanied her to work, his baby buggy covered with cheesecloth to keep off the flies. Dan worked for Pierce Egg Farm, the business that he and his father would soon buy with two other partners.

But Pat's infatuation faded quickly. She soon found that she actually
didn't want to be a farmer's wife, tied down with a baby. She hadn't envisioned her entire future in Brooklyn, Connecticut. Faced with the unromantic realities of being a wife and mother, Pat found a former classmate, her boyfriend from her teenage years, more appealing. She began to see him secretly.

When Michael was two, a sister—Donna—arrived, and the Ross family moved from a rental into an old farmhouse on Tatnic Road, just down from where Dan's parents and younger brother Ned lived. It was small and primitive, with no indoor bathroom, but there was plenty of room on the lot. By the fall of 1964, after nearly six years of marriage, Pat Ross, twenty-three, had given birth to another son, Kenny, and another daughter, Tina. With each child, her misery and her mental health worsened, probably the result of untreated postpartum depression, according to medical and court records. In the months after her youngest child's birth, she began talking about suicide. She severely punished her children, according to medical reports. It was common for her to threaten to leave the children, and she would occasionally storm out of the house, only to return a few hours later, acting as if nothing had happened.

As the oldest, Michael was seen by his siblings as his mother's favorite. Yet according to Dr. Walter Borden, a forensic psychiatrist who assessed him for more than a year after his arrest and testified at his first trial, Michael was the source of all of Pat's misery. Because of him, she had to marry, and because of him, she wanted to run away. She called him a bastard and told him she hated him. “Michael became the scapegoat, the person upon whom anger, disappointment, rejection, and failure in the adult relationship between mother and father were placed,” said Dr. John Cegalis in court testimony. “He lived in the netherworld of being his mother's favorite, most devoted child and also her favorite target. It was a very close, very complicated and hate-filled relationship.”
Shirley Grenier, who had worked packing eggs at the family farm when Michael was six or seven, testified that Pat “would hit him, calling him a little bastard, I hate you, I never wanted you in the first place.” Sometimes Michael's hyperactivity set her off, but sometimes she slapped him for no reason. Grenier said that Pat treated Michael worse than the other children, but that Michael never showed any emotion when his mother made the verbal attacks. Even Michael's father later observed that he took the brunt of his mother's anger. As an adult, however, Michael either couldn't or wouldn't accept that he was treated any worse than his other siblings. “Only one of us became a serial killer. I never felt more persecuted than the rest of them.”

Unable to deal with her life, Pat ran away to be with her longtime boyfriend, only to be dragged back to Brooklyn by her father. Trapped again, Pat treated her children with such hostility that Dan had to take her away from them. Scared and helpless, on October 6, 1964, he admitted her to the state psychiatric hospital at Norwich. In hospital records, Pat was described as “cooperative and slightly seductive, with a history of being emotionally upset, acting out towards her children.” Doctors at the hospital gave her a diagnosis of “personality trait disturbance,” virtually meaningless without specifying what type of personality trait she exhibited. Nevertheless, they pronounced her emotionally unstable. “Presently, we are dealing with a patient who feels tremendous hostility against her husband, stating that he is lazy and not worth a penny. Patient is not depressed, but it is felt that the patient . . . has been manipulative with many people around her including her husband, by threatening to walk out and never come back, and threatening with suicide,” wrote Dr. Michael Eligenstein, the attending physician who wrote Pat's evaluation. After a month at the hospital, Pat was released to Dan's custody with the recommendation that she and Dan receive marriage counseling, but there was no recommendation of
any therapy or counseling to help her better deal with her four small children.

“You were dealing with a woman with at minimum a mental illness occurring during a postpartum period,” said Dr. Borden of the treatment she received at Norwich. “That should have been followed up. . . . They were treating a broken arm with a Band-Aid when they talk about group therapy. There should have been a much more assertive therapeutic approach.”

For the next three years, the family limped along, coping with Pat's mood swings and volatile temper. Then in October 1967, Pat's old boyfriend made a surprise visit to Brooklyn and phoned. It was the first time they had spoken in three years, and the call immediately rekindled her dream of leaving Dan and the children. Pat ran off to North Carolina, where her former boyfriend was now living, only to be brought back again to Brooklyn by Dan. On November 5, 1967, she was readmitted to Norwich hospital as a psychiatric patient. In less than thirty days, she was discharged with nothing more than a recommendation for group therapy for married couples.

Although he was eight at the time of his mother's second hospitalization, Michael didn't remember either of her absences. “To be honest, I don't think I would have missed her really.” It's not as if she were the type of parent who tucked him into bed and kissed him good night.

Pat Ross's precarious temperament made her unpredictable. Even if she was in a good mood, she could fly into a rage without warning. There were times when she was charming and happy, when she would seem to enjoy doing simple things with her children, like ice skating or chopping wood. But there were also times when, according to elder daughter Donna's testimony during the first trial, “Something would inflame her and make her angry and you never knew where you stood.” She said Pat was never happy because she felt “she missed out on her
young adult life in her early 20's.” She said Pat blamed Michael and Dan for her misery.

Michael's sister Tina, the youngest of the Ross children, also testified at the trial. She described her mother's moods. “We used to say that she had a short fuse. She could flare up without any notice . . . I tried to behave myself as best I could . . . You had a 50/50 chance. [If you showed emotion] she would either get madder at you or she would back off you. Usually she would get madder.” And when she got mad, she got verbally abusive. “She swore . . . a lot. She tried to humiliate us a lot.” Tina said her mother was cruel and cold and verbally abusive to people and animals. Tina told of coming home from school one day and finding out that her mother had thrown the cat out a second-story window. On other occasions, she said, she vacuumed the cat because it shed too much. “She also made us declaw the cat. She said if we didn't declaw the cat, she would put a rock around its head and throw it in the lake.”

During the penalty phase of the trial, both sisters testified about their mother and their home life. They also talked about Michael. Tina said that she and her two other siblings were very close friends, but they were not close to Michael, so they shunned him from their play. Donna said that Michael didn't have many friends and that when he had tried to date, there had been a big blowup between him and Pat. She didn't want him to date.

I tried to interview Dan Ross and Michael's two sisters, but they made it clear through Michael that they did not want to be interviewed for any article or book. In fact, Michael gave me a copy of a scathing letter from Donna in response to his request; she accused him of wanting to be in the spotlight and having no concern for what his notoriety had done and would continue to do to his family. Later I did speak with Dan several times at the prison, during which I got most of Michael's
stories confirmed and some insights about the family dynamic—especially concerning Pat—but I was never able to formally interview Dan for the book. Most of what I know about the family comes from Michael, neighbors, a videotape made during Dr. Zonana's assessment of Michael, court testimony, medical reports, and Dr. Borden, who had done a thorough investigation of Michael's past.

Dr. Borden devoted a tremendous amount of time to the case because he believed that it was one of the most important of his long career; he said he never spent as much time and effort on any other. At one point he called me to tell me that “Michael Ross should be studied” to help the world better understand sexual sadism and what had caused him to kill. He said that Michael's mental illness was “off the charts”—that his sexual sadism was so extreme that it went beyond the criteria that the DSM-III and DSM-IV used to identify and classify mental disorders at the time of Michael's arrest and first trial. Dr. Borden was convinced that because Michael was articulate and intelligent, he could help professionals understand his complex mental disorder. Michael also was willing because he wanted answers.

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A
s they got older, the Ross kids learned that the best way to handle their mother was to try to avoid doing anything that might set her off. Each morning they had to wonder,
What's mom's mood like today?
Rather than risk her wrath, they developed what Michael called “mom drills.” They took turns going downstairs first and testing her reaction. The other three would listen from upstairs as they finished dressing. If things were quiet, they would follow. If she began screaming in what seemed to a child like a violent rage, they would immediately begin the drill, which they executed with precision. Each had a job—squeezing orange juice, getting wood, setting the table—designed to distract and
pacify their mother. There was almost no conversation. They just busied themselves until it was time to eat and run to the bus.

“Some days she'd be in a hell of a mood,” said Michael. “I remember one time that Tina went downstairs first. She was unloading the dishwasher so that we could set the table. Since there were six of us, she picked up the orange juice glasses, three in each hand. As she carried them to the table, the glasses made a clinking sound. ‘What the hell are you doing?' Mom started yelling. ‘Are you trying to break those damn glasses?' Then we all knew to be on guard. You did what you had to do.”

The Ross children knew that for their own peace of mind, there were certain rules to follow: Never show weakness. Never let her know what is important to you because she will take it away. What hurt you most would be used later to taunt and tease you. “She would go for the emotional jugular,” Michael explained. “One time she dumped some red dye on my sister's favorite blouse. My mother claimed she was going to dye some curtains. She said she didn't know,” he said in a tone that meant he didn't believe a word of it. “She could be very sweet,” he said. “It was like a spider luring a fly into her web. You had to be careful.”

Pat might have been the judge, but Dan Ross was the purveyor of punishment. If Michael got into trouble with his mother, he knew that Pat would instruct Dan to carry out her sentence when he returned home at dinnertime. Michael would be sent to the woodshed to pick a switch for the spanking, knowing that the switch had to be strong enough not to break. “It was of utmost importance to take your punishment like a man. The main thing was not to make any noise. If you screamed or showed any weakness like crying, you were beaten more,” Michael reported without emotion. Dr. Borden said Dan was the punisher. “But it was the mother who called the shots. . . . She ran the children, she ran the relationship—she ran the house.” Michael agreed. “I never blamed my father. I thought he was as henpecked as we were.”