The Man in the Monster (9 page)

Resentful toward Teresa and her family, he “snuck over to their house after dark and cut their clotheslines. . . . I know it don't make any sense. They didn't do anything, but in my mind, they deserved to be punished too.” At twelve years old, he didn't think what he had done was wrong, but his embarrassment about both his molestation of
Teresa and his revenge on her parents was apparent when he recounted the story.

Pat took Michael to the family doctor, who suggested that his hyperactivity was a large part of the problem. Michael had often been in trouble for “impulsively blurting out inappropriate (often angry or lewd) statements and jokes.” In elementary school, he had a reputation for being disruptive and unruly. He recalled that his fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Post, met him at the bus on the first day of school and marched him down to the classroom, where he was shown his assigned seat and told what was expected of him in terms of classroom decorum. “I was a big troublemaker in school until I started taking Ritalin. I had a short attention span and was a smart aleck, not a bad dude. . . . I got into very few fights because I'd get in trouble at home. As punishment, I split a lot of wood, and I got my bottom tanned a lot.”

The doctor assured Michael's parents that they shouldn't be concerned about the fondling, because Michael, who was at the beginning of puberty, was just going through a phase. The pediatrician prescribed Ritalin, a mild central nervous system stimulant widely used to help children with attention deficit disorder (now called attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD) or minimal brain dysfunction. His grades improved from Cs and Ds to mostly As. However, according to Dr. Cegalis, he also had “marked mood changes during that period including depressed periods.” Both can be side effects of Ritalin.

Taking Ritalin embarrassed Michael. He took a dose three times a day, at home and at school, for six years. Trying to make light of it, he would joke, “Gotta take my uppers and my downers,” as he popped one of the pills. But to Michael taking Ritalin was an admission that he was weak.

“The Ritalin was introduced at a critical point and kind of sealed things over. . . . It provided control of these underlying problems, these
impulses,” said Dr. Borden. “So you couldn't see it from the outside. You had Ritalin and you had a very controlling mother—both of those factors, strong factors—concealing what was an evolving mental illness.” Dr. Borden said that the Ritalin hid Michael's underlying impulsivity and psychological problems and allowed them to go untreated and even get worse.

The
Physicians' Desk Reference
at the time recommended that Ritalin, or methylphenidate, periodically be discontinued under a doctor's care so that the condition can be reassessed. “Drug treatment should not and need not be indefinite and usually may be discontinued after puberty.” However, for reasons he couldn't explain, Michael had taken the drug long after puberty and had neither been carefully monitored nor periodically taken off the medication.

Ritalin is a stimulant. It increases the levels of dopamine and noradrenalin, both natural chemicals in the brain, in parts of the brain that control the area of attention and behavior but are underactive. The International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology has urged the FDA to restrict the use of these drugs on children due to a bevy of problems—overprescription, addiction, and various neurological and cardiovascular side effects.

Michael's doctor was correct about the calming effect of Ritalin but wrong about its effects on Michael's sexual fantasies. He masturbated obsessively, sometimes several times a day. “My first recollection of masturbation was in seventh grade. I had a crush on my homeroom teacher, Mrs. Penny,” who taught home economics. “I used to hold my pillow between my legs, and rubbing against the bed, I would ejaculate on the pillow. After a while, my mother noticed the yellow stains on the pillowcases after the wash,” he said. She was so angry that “from then on I was only allowed to use the old set of sheets for my bed.” Pat began to try to sneak up on Michael if she suspected he might be masturbating.
“If I was upstairs in my bedroom too long, she would try to tiptoe up the stairs to catch me in the act,” he recalled. However, the old farmhouse's creaky stairs gave him fair warning.

Michael's obsessive masturbating was surpassed only by his mother's obsession to stop him because it was the one part of his life that she couldn't control. While he was at school, she found a pair of his stained underpants hidden under his bed. Michael told psychiatrists that she met him at the door with the pants in hand. “‘Found these in your room,'” she said with “a tone that meant she was going for the emotional jugular. I knew I was in trouble. She made me wear them on my head all afternoon. But it didn't bother me as much as she had hoped,” primarily because his siblings and even his father thought the stains were from his bed-wetting.

When the underpants punishment didn't work, Pat berated him. She ridiculed him in front of everyone. She made his proclivities the subject of dinnertime conversation. On his birthday, just before his senior year in high school, his sister Tina gave him a T-shirt with
OFFICIAL CHICKEN CHOKER
printed on the front. “I'm sure that she wasn't aware of the pun to masturbation, but I suspect that my mother was and helped her pick it out.” Michael pretended to like the present but quickly burned the shirt in the garbage. Yet no name-calling and no amount of humiliation could stop his fantasies and his need for sexual release. He couldn't fall asleep without masturbating, and so it continued to be his nightly ritual.

“I hated my mother in high school. I remember during the summer after my senior year, I was counting the days. I had ninety-three days, ninety-two days, and I was crossing them off the calendar. I couldn't wait to get away from her.”

Michael said “the climax of [his] mother's obsession” came after he left for college. She pulled the mattress off his bed, dragged it out of
his room and down the stairs, and threw it into the backyard. “She doused it with gasoline and burned it. I wasn't there to witness the grand event, but I understand that she made quite a show of it,” Michael told me, but he also said that his siblings may have made up the story to tease him.

Dr. Borden said that the combination of Michael's symptoms—hyperactivity, bed-wetting, sleep disturbances, and fantasies associated with compulsive masturbation—indicates “a substantial mental illness, mental disturbance in a child.”

 • • • 

B
esides doing household chores, the Ross children worked on the farm, and their hours and hourly wages increased as they got older. Every day after school, they walked to Eggs, Inc. directly from the school bus and worked until dinner. On weekends and during the summer, they worked from eight until four or five. “I worked the most hours,” Michael proclaimed proudly, “a minimum of thirty hours per week and sometimes as much as seventy hours a week in the summer.”

Eggs, Inc. consisted of four buildings, each housing twenty-five to thirty thousand chickens. The buildings were divided into four rows of cages, five birds to a cage, and designed to make egg collection fully automated. After an egg was laid, it would roll down the slanted floor of the cage onto a conveyor belt and at the end of the room to a cross belt. At the end of the conveyor belt was the egg room, where the eggs were packed, stored in a cooler, and sold.

Every day, the one hundred thousand birds at the farm ate eleven tons of grain, drank eight thousand gallons of water, and produced sixteen tons of chicken manure—two truckloads. V-shaped troughs with chains running through pulled the grain along the cages so that the birds could eat anytime. The manure was collected below the cages in
pits about a foot deep. A cable system of scrapers pushed the manure out to the end of the buildings, where it was dumped into barn cleaners and then loaded into a dump truck.

As a rule, the girls worked in the egg room, a rather pleasant place to work by agricultural standards. It was air-conditioned and clean. They helped with egg collection and did minor chores, such as replenishing supplies. The boys took more responsibility for the daily care of the birds and did the dirty work of cleaning out the coops. “We would sweep the aisles and generally keep the indoors clean,” Michael said. “You had to dust off the lightbulbs regularly because the light stimulates egg production because there are no windows in the building. We would keep the motors of the fans clean so that the air kept moving and the birds didn't suffocate. And there was always something breaking, stuff that needs to be repaired like fan belts or the feeders. If the scrapers broke in one of the manure pits, you'd have to climb in and fix it.” Michael learned carpentry and electrical wiring. “I could fix almost anything. It might not look pretty, but it would work.”

Michael laughed when he described fixing the belts. “One time I had to get into one of the manure trucks up to my waist to find a missing part,” he said boastfully. “You just do what you have to do.” Pete Wolak, a neighbor who was a plumber by trade but also farmed, told Michael that “the first thing you should do when you went into a barn was to pick up some manure and rub it on your hands. Then you won't worry about getting dirty.”

The demands of their daily work schedule left little time for anything else. “The Ross kids didn't play; they worked,” said Frances Wolak, Pete's wife. The Wolaks were the only two people in Brooklyn who would talk to me or any other reporter about Michael. They said that the Ross children's only extracurricular activity was Future Farmers of America. Michael never played any team sports because he didn't
have time for them. They rarely went to movies or other normal high school activities. Pat made sure that they did their homework and worked hard in school. It was a nonnegotiable fact of life.

“None of us was able to have friendships. We couldn't have friends over to the house and stuff like that,” said his sister Donna at Michael's first trial. Both Tina and Donna testified during the penalty phase, trying to explain Michael's home life so that he might not get the death penalty. “[Mom] made it clear that we were not allowed to have friends over. She would humiliate us in front of them, and it just became a lot easier not to have friends. . . . When I had a friend over one time when I was nine or ten, everything was going fine. We were outside [in] the front yard, and all of a sudden my mom just changed and told us that [my friend] was going home and put us in the car and brought the girl home.” Dating was a virtual impossibility. During his four years in high school, Michael went out only once or twice and never to a dance or prom. Pat made borrowing the car or meeting curfew too difficult. “I was under my mother's thumb. Dating wasn't something I could do.”

In his 1985 report for the defense, Dr. Cegalis concluded that this isolation, coupled with Michael's “incredibly poor nurturance, including extreme physical harshness, constant criticism, and rejection by parents” led to a deep-seated paranoia. Michael did not have an ally inside or outside the family and did not receive parental acceptance or reward. His internalized images of childhood were harsh, if not brutal, and “formed the basis of Michael's tortured and torturing adult personality.”

Pat has never spoken publicly about Michael since his arrest. Her need to control her children may have resulted from her desire to make sure that her children got more out of life than she had; she didn't want them to make the same mistakes. Or maybe she was simply bitter about her own life. Maybe feeling trapped on the farm drove her to imprison her children as well. We cannot know for sure.

Despite all of this, Michael thought he was happy, but that was because he had no other reference point. He didn't know what it was like to be a part of a loving family. He looked up to his father, and so, like his father, he became totally absorbed in his work at the farm. While still in high school, Michael was made a vice president of the corporation and given a 10 percent share in the business. Farming was to be his life, as it had been his father's and grandfather's. After college, his plan was to return to Brooklyn to take over Eggs, Inc., make it state of the art, and become the “main rooster,” as he called it. He reminisced. “I thought Brooklyn was a great place to raise a family. It was kind of rural. It was just a good place. I thought living on a farm was good for children; it teaches you values, like hard work. I liked the lifestyle. It's a hard life, but I think it taught me a lot of good things. Like you have to get up and feed the chickens every day. Just because you don't want to get up in the morning, you can't stay in bed. You got to get up and do what has to be done. And if a piece of equipment is broke, and it's four o'clock in the afternoon and it's quitting time, and the chickens ain't been fed, that means you're gonna miss your supper because you got to be sure the chickens get fed before you get fed.” He considered himself indispensable. “My dad knew that if he took a weekend off and was going somewhere, I would make sure that the eggs would be packed, and the chickens would be fed, and everything would get done. No matter what happened, I would be able to take care of it one way or the other. And there've been some times”—he chuckled—“when I've come up with some very creative solutions. But he knew he could count on me.”

Pete Wolak was a father figure for Michael. He kept about forty head of cattle, some on his farm on South Street in Brooklyn and some on the property adjacent to the Ross farm. In his spare time, Michael would help Pete with farm chores, from plowing, planting, and harvesting
corn and hay to butchering cattle and hogs. Pete tried to give him money—even stuck cash into his pocket or truck, but Michael would always put it back in the jar in the kitchen where the Wolaks kept cash. Pete and Frances would treat him to a roast beef dinner a couple of times a month.