The Man in the Monster (8 page)

As Dr. Cegalis explained, Michael “had poor nurturance from his mother and his father. He had a minimal relationship with his siblings; he was treated in a brutal, violent way by both of his parents . . . verbally, psychologically as well as physically.” He added that Michael was humiliated, degraded, and continually criticized by his parents. Because of his treatment by his parents, Dr. Cegalis testified, Michael was unable to form attachments to other people. “It is important in human relationships to establish what is called ‘object consistency.' That is seeing another human being as a human being, relating to another human being with empathy,” he explained. He said Michael could not understand “that other people have feelings.” This was certainly true of how he regarded his victims. Dr. Cegalis said this lack of empathy comes “from brutality and violence perpetrated on him and . . . from abuse in general from the family.”

Michael was not close to his father as a child and teenager. According to those who worked at Eggs, Inc., Dan was always busy, distant, and cold. Michael lamented that he could only talk about farming to his father but could not confide in him. He said he wanted to be more like his father, except he told Dr. Zonana that Dan “don't show feeling at all. I can't remember the last time he said, ‘I love you.' I know he does, but he can't show it.” He told Dr. Borden that his father was unreadable. “He was a rock . . . you might as well talk to a rock. . . . There was no way to read him.”

However, Michael later told me, “My father's changed a lot since I've been in here. He used to seem so distant and unable to show emotion, but I think that was because he was married to my mother. Since he married Carol [Dan's second wife, whom he married a few years after he and Pat divorced], he's really changed. He's happier and more at ease with me. Carol has been good for him.”

Another message of Pat Ross's behavior was that her children should never stand up for themselves. At age six, Michael was the constant target
of a neighborhood bully named Johnny. One day Johnny chased Michael all the way home, and in an uncharacteristically bold act, Michael picked up a stick, turned around, and started to hit Johnny. Startled at Michael's newfound courage, Johnny turned and ran.

Hearing the commotion, Pat came to the window and observed the entire episode. “Bring me that stick,” she called to her son. Obediently—and proud that he had finally had the courage to defend himself—Michael picked up the stick and took it to his mother. It was a rare occasion when Pat carried out the beating herself. When he got inside, Pat grabbed the stick from Michael and proceeded “to beat the hell out of me,” Michael remembered. “She was so mad, and she beat me so badly that I needed a butterfly bandage for the cut on my forehead.” Confused and hurt, Michael knew that from then on he was powerless against Johnny or any other bully.

“It's emotionally castrating, to do that to a little boy; the message is very clear: You can't stand up for yourself,” charged Dr. Borden. “It had to do with her total control of him, that he couldn't stand up to anybody, that he could not assert himself. And any kind of self-assertion was attacked; especially having to do with being a boy, being male.”

The result, said Dr. Cegalis, was that he was chronically maladjusted. He described Michael as “a person who is paranoid, a person who is capable of manipulativeness, distance, lack of attachment in his relationships with other people; a person who is incredibly angry; a person who is capable of acting out that anger in a rather direct way on other people.”

From his earliest years, Michael became confused about the meaning of love. His parents' relationship was hate filled, and Dr. Cegalis suggested in his psychiatric evaluation that sometimes there was even violence between his parents—although Michael had no memory of this. Almost everyone who knew her reported that Pat was often cruel
and verbally abusive but that it was Michael's father who punished him with beatings in the woodshed. These were the people who were supposed to love him, nurture him, and love each other, and yet there was little love in the Ross household. Dr. Cegalis, who had died by the time I met Michael, testified that Michael's lack of parental nurturing “resulted in a kind of fragile ego, a damaged ego, one in which Mr. Ross' sense of self-esteem is extremely weak, extremely inadequate with evidence of problems of sexual potency, sexual identity, self-worth, self-
competence.”

1967–1977

Eight-year-old Michael Ross trudged a hundred yards up Tatnic Road, from the modest white house where he lived, through the snow, up the hill toward the chicken coop on his grandfather's property. It is a quiet side street where a young boy could easily be distracted. But Michael didn't dawdle on that snowy afternoon. It wasn't the cold that kept the tall, skinny boy focused: He had an important assignment. He was on his way to get instructions from Grandfather Ross about taking over some of the former chores of his sixteen-year-old uncle Ned.

A few weeks earlier, Ned had shot himself in the head with his father's .22-caliber rifle. His suicide note, written in an inward spiral, explained exactly why he killed himself: He was a homosexual, not an accepted sexual orientation in Brooklyn, Connecticut, in 1967. The troubled teenager saw only one possible escape. When Dr. Borden mentioned that Ned had written a suicide note in the form of an inward spiral, Michael immediately responded, “That's me. He exploded inside and I exploded outside.”

The family's official story to the Ross grandchildren was that Ned had died by accident when a bullet ricocheted off a stone wall during target practice.
Who'd be so stupid as to have target practice on a stone wall?
Michael wondered at the time, but he instinctively trusted the explanation of
his parents. Michael was not allowed to attend Ned's funeral. No one was to speak of Ned, because it would be too hard on Karl and Louise Ross, Michael's grandparents—perhaps because Karl's own father had committed suicide in a similar manner. Ned was gone. Talking about him wouldn't bring him back.

The loss had been particularly great for Michael. He and Ned had been close. Ned and Michael wrestled with each other on the lawn, Ned often ending the play with a “Chinese shampoo,” otherwise known as a Dutch rub. Michael enjoyed the mixture of pain and pleasure. In private, their play might have been much different. Dr. Borden said that he suspected that Ned, the occasional family babysitter, was sexually abusing his nephew from the time Michael was four because of symptoms he exhibited. Michael's father rejected the theory, and Michael said he had no memory of any such behavior.

At first a hired farmworker named Ray took over Ned's responsibilities, but when a snowstorm prevented Ray from reaching the farm, Michael had to assume Ned's chores—tending the chicks. The prospect of farmwork was not troubling to Michael. In fact, tending the chicks elevated him to a new level of adult responsibility. He would be paid fifty cents an hour for his labor. It was a chance for the eight-year-old to gain his father's love and respect. “That was the most important thing to me,” Michael explained.

Michael idealized his father and wanted nothing more than his love and attention. He knew that there was nothing his father loved more than farming. If he became a good farmworker, Michael thought, he just might be able to please his father and win his approval. He would work twice as hard as anyone else. Having spent time with Ned while he was working, Michael already knew much of the routine, but his grandfather went over all the details of tending the coop, which housed about five thousand chicks. At one day old, each flock was delivered
from the hatchery and raised as floor birds for five months, and then they were moved over to be layers at Eggs, Inc., the family's newly acquired seventy-nine-acre chicken farm situated about a mile down the road from their home.

Day-old chickens do not have feathers and must be constantly monitored and kept warm with gas stoves inside coops until their feathers grow in several weeks later. Michael learned to check the temperature by the behavior of the birds. If they were huddled close together under the stove, it was too cold; if they were spread out away from the stove, it was too hot. The first few days are the most critical because the young chicks don't know how to find the heat. During that time, they must be checked again after dark to make sure they aren't bunched together in the corners away from the stoves.

Three times a day, morning, noon, and late afternoon, the birds needed to be checked, watered, or fed. On school days, his grandfather would make the noon rounds. Each morning Michael was to be at the coop by dawn to turn on the birds' drinking water. He would walk through the building, checking to make sure everything was in order and pick up any birds that had died during the night, since it was not unusual to lose 200 to 250 birds from each flock of 5,000. After school, he would feed the birds, pick up any more dead, and dump the carcasses into a pit in the field. Before dark, he would make one final check and turn off the water for the evening to prevent any chance of flooding.

“I did it on my own even though I hated getting up that early in the morning,” Michael admitted. “I guess I kind of got used to it. It's a lifestyle, farming. There's a lot of satisfaction from raising a good flock of birds. I got a batch of baby chicks, and I got to raise them for five months before they went into the henhouse. And I knew that the birds that went into that henhouse were better birds than we could buy anywhere else. That's farming.”

While most of his job was caring for the birds, the flock also had to be culled. Weak or sick birds don't grow into productive hens and are an expense that needs to be eliminated as soon as possible. Michael understood that killing the birds was a necessity, even if it was unpleasant.

“Okay, now Michael, pay attention,” said his grandfather. “You've got to break its neck. Hold their feet in your left hand and hold their neck with your right hand. The trick is to break the neck without pulling off the head,” he instructed. “That can get pretty bloody,” Michael told me. “You pull the neck until you feel the bone break, then immediately stop pulling.”

Michael, immature and uncoordinated, tried to repeat the procedure that his grandfather had demonstrated but pulled the neck off the bird, wincing as blood spewed all over. He worried that if he didn't do his job properly, the responsibility might be taken away. But as time went on, he got better. Soon he bragged that he could kill chicks in his sleep.

The first flock he tended was already a few months old when he took charge. Later, when the next batch of day-old chicks was delivered, Michael needed to learn other methods of culling. For the first four or five weeks, the chicks are only four to five inches long, so small that it is virtually impossible to break their necks. For these birds, his grandfather explained, there are two methods of killing—“The way I like to do it is to just squeeze the lungs until the bird suffocates.” But Michael didn't like this method because it took too long. It was difficult for his small hands to exert enough pressure for any length of time, especially with the chick squirming, desperately fighting for its life. Sometimes it would take him two or three tries to kill a chick.

The second method is quicker, but, Michael felt, “more overtly brutal. You take the chick in your hand and smack its head against a post. If you do it right, the chick will die on the first whack and not make a
bloody mess.” Learning exactly how hard to hit the bird against the post takes experience. He didn't particularly like this method either and was always glad when the birds were big enough so that he could break their necks because “it seemed more humane.”

At times Michael would get in trouble for not killing the birds, especially the older ones. Sometimes Marek's disease struck the birds at twelve to sixteen weeks, paralyzing one side of the bird so that it couldn't get to food or water. Having raised them from the first day of their lives, Michael would feel sorry for the afflicted birds and individually feed and water them by hand. Some survived and gained partial use of their limbs, but they were irrevocably damaged and never would grow into productive hens. Whenever his grandfather found a bird that Michael had spared, he would scold him. “Michael, these birds are suffering and have to be put out of their misery. Besides, they will eat our feed, but they'll never lay an egg. They've got to go. Period.” It was pure farm economics.

Ever obedient, Michael did what he was told—even unpleasant things. That also included learning how to turn off his feelings, how to separate himself from what he was doing. “Very early, killing became an accepted pattern,” Dr. Borden testified at Michael's 1987 trial, “a kind of brutalized killing of animals, chickens . . . became his thing.”

“I learned how to do unpleasant things that I didn't want to do, but had to be done,” Michael remembered. “I guess that's when I learned how to turn off my feelings.”

Even in high school, only Michael was given the job of culling the chicks; Michael's mother wouldn't let the others kill the birds because they found it too upsetting. As he got older, Michael was also the butcher of young roosters in the flock. Although the day-old chicks are sexed at the hatchery, some male birds were always mixed in—as many as 2 percent when the sexing got sloppy. At about ten to twelve weeks, when
the roosters' combs would start to grow, they were singled out and killed. Michael would round them up on a weekend and bring them home to butcher for the meat. “Dad was usually at work, so I had to kill them. I'd skin them, cut off the legs and breast, and cut out the heart and liver. . . . I got pretty good at it. I could kill and butcher a rooster so fast that I could take out his heart which would still be beating in the palm of my hand,” he bragged.

“[Michael] was the designated killer of the family. No one else wanted the job. His sisters were spared; the brother avoided it,” Dr. Borden asserted. “That became so much part of his life that he didn't make anything of it. He was beyond repulsion.”

I was haunted by the idea of an eight-year-old boy killing the chickens he had been caring for. Dr. Borden suggested that learning to kill without emotion was a skill that would later allow the young adult Michael to separate himself from the murders he was committing. It was the monster who raped and murdered, not Michael the man. Almost all of the psychiatrists I talked to brought up the chicken culling as significant, but none of them could definitively say that this early experience caused him to kill the women. Dr. Berlin noted the similarities in the way the women and the chicks were killed and ruminated, “So the question is did [killing the chickens] eroticize him? He doesn't say that himself. Did it simply desensitize him to the idea of taking life by doing that? Again, we are left with more questions than answers.”

Like the psychiatrists who evaluated him, Michael also didn't know the answer. “There could be a connection. I honestly don't know.” Yet he was tempted to accept it or any other reasonable hypothesis as proof of his mental illness and theorized, “I think it came in handy later on when I killed. I turned off everything inside of me and allowed it to happen.” He wanted to understand how he became a killer. As he
reminded me several times, often sobbing, “I didn't wake up one day and decide to be a serial killer. I would have done anything for it to turn out differently.”

 • • • 

M
ichael worked on the farm while his elementary school classmates were playing Little League and building tree houses. Although it was easy for him to focus on his farmwork, he was hyperactive, impulsive, and disruptive at home and even worse at school. He wet his bed until he was twelve, walked in his sleep, and suffered from nightmares and night terrors.

This behavior, while distressing, may not connect directly with the violence of Michael's later life. “There's a depressive rage in children which is expressed in hyperactivity,” explained Dr. Borden. “The child feels mad and bad. The feelings, the impulses get expressed in a more disorganized way, in emotional behavior, in distractibility, in restlessness. It's discharged in action. That's what little kids are: they are action. They don't think.” Many other biological differences have been identified as contributing to hyperactivity since Dr. Borden explained his diagnosis to me, and some psychological experts would now disagree with Dr. Borden's characterization of hyperactivity as being attributed to a depressive rage.

There were aspects of his play that were possibly more relevant. By the time he was ten years old, Michael had developed an active fantasy life. In it, he was a Superman-like character, disguised as Clark Kent, who would rescue damsels in distress and then take them to his harem (a barn on the farm). There in his private lair, all the women would surrender to him and worship him. Michael said “there was nothing overtly sexual” in the fantasies he had as a young boy. “I don't know when it changed—probably around puberty when I started to masturbate.”

Dr. Cegalis said that from this early age, Michael had an aberrant fusion of aggression and sexuality. The result was violence. He said this stemmed from his need for approval and love from his mother. Rejection by his mother or a girlfriend “precipitated enough rage, enough anger for Mr. Ross to act out those impulses.”

At twelve, he began undressing and fondling young neighborhood girls. Teresa Cross (not her real name), who was six years younger than Michael, lived near his grandparents' house. “I would lure her into the woods between my house and my grandparents'.” Once out of sight, he would get her to take off her clothes and “I would undress and rub my penis against her, but I never attempted to penetrate her or anything.” Teresa eventually told her mother, who confronted Pat Ross with the crime. Mortified and angry, Pat and Dan marched Michael over to the Cross house and offered him up for a beating, but Teresa's parents didn't want to take part in the punishment. Instead, Michael was sent to the woodpile to find a stick so that Dan could carry out the sentence. “I got the tar whipped out of me.” Perhaps more painful to Michael than the beating was that he was also forbidden to go near the Cross house or his grandfather's coops, because his parents felt he could not be trusted anywhere near the little girl. That was the end of his job minding the flock at his grandfather's farm; he began working on the main farm, where his father could keep an eye on him. “That job meant a lot to me, then, because I was responsible for taking care of the chickens. I was downgraded to flunky, and I had to rework my way up. I think it was taking away the responsibility that hurt the most.”