Dead Men Talking

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  At Cornell, Ross enrolled as an Animal-Science major, and he started a course of study that would well suit his ambition to become the third generation to run the family poultry business. This was an obsession with Michael and, for a short time, his fraternity brothers even called him ‘The Egg King’.

  Michael joined the Agricultural Student Union Council (AgPAC), and attended the Collegiate Future Farmers of America (FFA). He became a student teacher, counsellor, researcher, teaching assistant, and a study group leader around this time. Alpha Zeta, one of the two campus fraternities dedicated to agricultural activity, recruited Ross, and he pledged to them. He lived in the fraternity house throughout his sophomore and junior years with his ‘brothers’, who were mostly young men with small town farming backgrounds. He rarely cut class, and was known as an ‘all-nighter’ because often he swotted all night.

  Since his incarceration for multiple murders, however, a number of Michael’s former Cornell friends said that while he enjoyed the house, its social life, and the chance to share common interests, they also recall that he could be a loner, aloof and somewhat arrogant at times.

  The student body of Cornell (today it stands at around 20,000) was almost three times larger than the entire population of his hometown of Brooklyn, subsequently, the campus became an expansive playground for Michael Ross. Now free from his mother’s unpredictable influence, he could do whatever he wanted, without fear of reprisal. He literally went crazy with all the fun he was having, plunging headlong into the party life to the extent that he started taking Ritalin three times a day to control his hyperactivity. He would continue to use this drug for a further six years. He now drank heavily and he started to experiment with sex, often sleeping with different girls four nights a week (which Keith Hunter Jesperson suggests is ‘normal college behaviour’).

  During his first junior year at Cornell, Mike met his first true love, the pretty Connie Young. They always say that ‘love is blind’ and ‘beauty is in the eyes of the beholder’, and if Ross was somewhat of an unattractive, lanky, thin and bespectacled youth, he must have considered Connie a ‘real catch’ when they met at a party. She was window-display CoCo Chanel, while he was Fred Myer. He walked her home through the moonlight, and according to Michael, they ‘kissed as we watched a team of divers swimming in the shimmering silver water of Beebe Lake’.

  According to campus lore, if a couple walks the entire mile-long footpath around Beebe Lake holding hands, they are destined for marriage. They strolled to the statues of the college’s founding fathers, and he explained how they were supposed to move together and shake hands when a virgin passed between them. On this occasion, the statues apparently did not move, for ‘Connie was hotter than a kitchen stove’, Michael recalled.

  Connie remembers Michael as a ‘go-getter’, and a guy who always liked to be ‘the centre of attention’. At first she accommodated this behaviour because he seemed a worthwhile prospect for a permanent relationship, even marriage, if the legend surround Beebe Lake had anything to do with it. She certainly overlooked his arrogance and constant boasting about his father’s egg farm. In Connie’s eyes, he was handsome, if just a little nerdy. He was articulate, took her dancing and dined her out. She recalls that he always had money when he needed it and, for his part, he enjoyed taking her places to show her off. To everyone who knew them, they seemed the perfect couple, and most were thrilled when they became engaged to be married. Maybe the legend of Beebe Lake wasn’t hogwash after all?

  For a short period Connie shared Mike’s bed… then the arguments started. His fraternity brothers threw him out of the house because he was breaking the rules by sharing his room with a female. As a result of this, the couple rented a small apartment where Michael withdrew into himself. The schooling pressure and the demands made by the close relationship with Connie had started to take their effect. Added to this were his parents’ escalating marital problems, and these were clouding his judgement over the future, as home issues were never far from his mind.

  Connie’s distress over her lover’s change of attitude came to a head when he started to miss classes. She was a dedicated student, trying to cram four years of education into three, but Michael Ross seemed to have lost interest, and he started to hang around their apartment all day, watching television and reading pornographic magazines. He changed his major, to Agricultural Economics, and his grades plummeted. He became bone idle, expecting Connie to do all the housework and cooking and, despite the fact that she was exhausted after studying, he demanded sex with her at least four times a day.

  Initially, Connie complied with Michael’s priapic demands, for fear of rejection. She loved him deeply, and even allowed him to have rough sex with her, although it was very painful and hurt her badly. Then, as the day-to-day events became even more unpleasant, she now started to wonder if marrying Mike was such a good idea after all. He was, she now believed, sex mad and getting worse. With his graduation approaching in the spring of 1981, Michael could not face the prospect of leaving Connie behind at Cornell, and he became even more restless and agitated, withdrawing for much longer period into a fantasy dream world of his own.

  Michael has admitted to me, in correspondence, that even as a pre-teen, he had experienced constant fantasies about women when he would take them to what he called ‘a special underground place’, where he hid them, and kept them so that they could fall in love with him. From juvenile records, it is known that, at the age of fifteen, he molested several neighbourhood girls. Now an adult, his fantasies grew even more sexually extreme and progressively more violent. During these fantasies, he says that he was always the assailant and, by the time of his graduation, Connie had joined his faceless dream victims. He terrorised his fantasy girls and humiliated them by forcing them to undress and drop to their knees in front of him. He said that he gained enormous sexual pleasure and relief from raping his fantasy victims. He savoured the sense of domination that accompanied their fear, and he reasoned that he had control over real women, too, even though these bizarre thoughts were still locked away inside his mind.

  Whatever dreadful though patterns were developing inside Michael’s head during that period in his life, it seemed that there was a meeting between his distorted subconscious thinking and the bland reality of everyday life. He had now reached a crossroads, where two roads met, for not only did Ross overlay the beautiful face, and body, of Connie onto his fantasy victims, his demands for kinkier sex from her began to spiral out of all control. And, despite sex with her four times a day, he masturbated himself raw. Although he did not know it, he was suffering from satyriasis, an abnormally intense and persistent desire in a man for sexual intercourse. In women, the compulsion is called nymphomania.

  More and more, Michael found himself wandering aimlessly around the campus. He became titillated by stalking female co-eds, staying just far enough behind them to remain undetected. He explained, ‘This turned me on so much I always had a hard-on.’ To release this almost uncontrollable compulsion, he had to masturbate ever more frequently, or else tip right over the edge, and act out his fantasies in reality.

  Aged 20, Ross crossed that threshold in April 1981, when he found himself running up behind a co-ed, grabbing her and dragging her into a small copse where he forced her to act out his fantasy of stripping naked before him and giving him oral sex. After he ejaculated, he said that he ran off into the night, swearing to himself that he would never do such a terrible thing again.

  Just three nights later, he was revisited by the same uncontrollable demon and, overcome with sexual compulsion, and now unsatisfied by masturbation, he attacked a second co-ed. During this assault, for which he was better prepared, he slipped a rope around the student’s neck, enjoying the heightened power this form of restraint bestowed on him. The terrified girl was an animal he could control with a quick tug of his hand. Fortunately, someone approached the scene before he raped her and he fled into the shadows, his sexual frustrations still boiling inside
him.

  Michael has said that he firmly believed that these outrageous acts would cease after he left Cornell, and that he prayed that he could last out the final month without attacking anyone else. At the same time, he says he also felt, ‘cheated of the ultimate sexual satisfaction’, which had been denied him. Weighing up all the pros and cons of his distorted mental balance sheet, he said he was ‘compelled’ to satisfy himself ‘fully’, at least once before he graduated, but he promised himself that would have to be the final attack, after which he would never hurt a woman again.

  But there is an important factor to be considered here, and it is this. The observation raised by serial killer Keith Hunter Jesperson is, basically: ‘Did Mr Ross tell you that he really promised himself that he would never attack a woman again, or is he saying this to blow smoke in your yard, Chris? Ross was now hooked on rape and control over women. The guy was a fuckin’ control freak, so this is all bullshit from him. It’s BULLSHIT!’

  Maybe this is not exactly a professional appraisal, but it does kind of make sense.

  * * *

  On Tuesday, 12 May 1981, Ross stalked a pretty 25-year-old student called Dzung Ngoc Tu. He followed the young woman from her class. She was petite, slim, even tiny, with perfect white porcelain features and long, glossy back hair cascading down to her waist. As she walked through a secluded area of the campus, he approached her, and then raped her. However, during the attack, she recognised him and, when she told him this, she effectively signed her own death warrant. To avoid arrest, Ross had no option other than to kill her, so he put his hands around her neck and strangled her before throwing her body over a stone-arch bridge and into Beebe Lake.

  A chilling fact of this homicide was that, during the autopsy, the medical examiner determined that the cause of death was by drowning, indicating that Dzung had been alive when she plunged into the water. Although Ross had always been suspected of committing this murder, he never allowed himself to be interviewed by police. The case was finally cleared up when he admitted the crime to the author during a filmed interview for a TV documentary in Somers Prison, Monday, 26 September 1994.

  Michael believed that his parents attended his graduation ceremony only for appearance’s sake and he decided, from that moment, not to return to the family farm. However, when I put it to him that his parents had financially supported him at Cornell, he failed to comment! Nevertheless, by a stroke of good fortune, despite his poor grades, he managed to land an enviable job, in June 1981, with Cargill Inc.

  According to the company’s web site, Cargill, whose byword is ‘Nourishing Ideas, Nourishing People’, is an, ‘International provider of food, agriculture and risk management products’. They are ‘committed’ to using their ‘knowledge and experience to collaborate with customers to help them succeed’. The firm is best known for grain sales, and Ross found himself employed at one of the company’s more modest operations, in Louisburg, a country town about thirty miles north-east of Raleigh, North Carolina. As a production-management trainee in the poultry products division, Michael was taught how to supervise the ‘care and management’ of a quarter of a million laying hens. It was a plumb job, well-suited to him, his career prospects with Cargill were excellent. But he soon managed to ruin it.

  During the transitional period between graduation and full-time employment with Cargill, Michael tried to convince Connie to transfer to the North Carolina University, where, he suggested, she could complete her studies. Over the preceding months, their relationship had so deteriorated that he was now paranoid about the looming separation and feared that she would soon be gone for good. Nevertheless, he was secretly hopeful they would marry one day. But Connie had ideas of her own, and marriage was no longer one of them; besides, unbeknown to Michael, she was now dating someone else.

  Then a thermonuclear bomb dropped on Michael’s world when he learned over the phone that his mother and father had separated for the third time, with Mr Ross leaving the family home, and business, to its own devices. The mentally unstable Patricia flew to Louisburg, and Michael was pleased, if not surprised, to see his mother so quickly after learning the bad news. Mistakenly, he thought this visit was a belated sign that his relationship with his mother might improve. At the very least, he wanted to believe that she would keep Eggs Inc going until he returned home to take charge, if only for his father’s sake. This thought, however, was the furthest thing from Mrs Ross’s devious mind, for she had, in fact, come to visit her son for one reason only. She needed Michael to sign over his shares in Eggs Inc so that she could dispose of the company, while becoming rich into the bargain.

  Michael was suckered. He was duped into signing the share transfer, and soon after learning of the true reason behind his mother’s impromptu visit, he felt he had betrayed not only his father but himself; added to which were his dreams of becoming the third generation of Ross’s to run the family egg farm – something he had dreamt, and boasted about for years – now lay in ruin. Mike was mad, and justifiably so.

  That wasn’t the end of it by a long chalk.

  Life for Michael was made even worse when Connie flew to North Carolina with more bad news. Of course she never could, in her wildest nightmares, have known that Mike was now a serial rapist and killer; a young man whose life’s dreams about running Eggs Inc lay in shattered fragments. For her, the trip was to be short and not so sweet. She explained that she didn’t like his parents one bit, and even if he did end up running the family egg business, this wasn’t exactly her idea of a future. The finality of the relationship hit home on Tuesday, 25 August 1981 when, at Raleigh Durham Airport, the couple fell into each other’s arms, sobbing their farewells. Mike could not bring himself to believe that his relationship with Connie was finished, so he was understandably distraught as he drove back along Highway 410 to Louisburg.

  * * *

  Location: Rolesville, a small town with a bright future in Wake County, North Carolina. Population: circa 900, in 1981. It is a place where decent people live and are very proud of their close-knit community. It is a place which is simply proud to be Rolesville. That is the ‘American way’. And it is a community where serious crime does not exist: that was until around 6.30pm, when Ross passed through Rolesville where he spotted a young woman pushing her seven-month-old child in a buggy along Main Street, which sits on Highway 401.

  Within milliseconds of spotting the woman – whose name has been withheld for obvious reasons – the demon inside Ross’s head surfaced again and, after parking his car, he ran up to the woman and offered to carry her groceries. The young mother, used to such a secure environment, did not hesitate when this helpful and seemingly decent chap approached her. She thanked him for his offer and passed over her heavy carrier bags. They walked to her home several blocks away and, as they entered the backyard, and out of sight or prying eyes, Ross suddenly metamorphosed from helper into monster. He dropped the groceries…whipped off his leather belt…threw it over the woman’s head…dragged her into a nearby soya bean field, while threatening to smash the baby’s head against a tree if it didn’t stop crying.

  The woman now became an innocent depository for the months of Ross’s pent-up anger and sexual frustration. He smashed his fists into her face…he choked her with his belt, forcing her to her knees to beg for mercy. Then with his hands tightly grasped around her neck, he ejaculated.

  After regaining his breath, Ross sat back on the ground with his victim squirming around in front of him. Somehow he felt cheated again, for he had wanted to satisfy his perversions by ejaculating as she died…just like he had played out in his previous fantasy moments back in his teens and at Cornell. Enraged, acting like a wild animal, he ripped off this young mother’s clothes, beating her again and again before reapplying his grip around her throat while the baby screamed close by.

  And, as suddenly as he had appeared, Michael Ross vanished.

  It was over an hour before his victim regained consciousness. Painfully, she crawled acro
ss the dirt to a street, where a neighbour summoned the local police chief, Nelson S Ross. Officers arrived almost immediately and roadblocks were set up to the Wake County lines. But Ross was long gone. He was not charged with this offence until he was arrested in Connecticut, three years later.

  When asked by the author if he recalled the Rolesville attack, Michael said:

  I don’t really remember her, or any of my victims for that matter. It’s like an old black and white movie; a collage of strange faces, that’s all. Nope, I couldn’t remember this woman if you had showed me her photograph the next day. There was nothing she, or any of them, could have done when I zeroed in on them. They were dead. All over. This one that lived [the Rolesville victim] ain’t got nothing to do with me. That she lived? Well, that was purely an act of God.

  When I asked Ross if the Rolesville woman fought back, and tried to escape, he replied:

  Nothing. She could have got away or something, but it never happened. I can’t remember. I can’t remember any kind of struggling with her or anything like that. I can’t remember, uh, any kind of fighting at all. I do recall, with the Rolesville victim, saying that I would smash the baby’s head into a tree or a wall. So, I would imagine I probably said things equally horrible to, uh, the other ones that would make them stop and think not to do anything.

  Ross simply carried on with his daily existence as if nothing untoward had happened in Rolesville. Then, on Tuesday, 17 September 1981, his parents filed divorce papers at Windham County Superior Court. A week later, Michael’s employer, Cargill, sent him on a field trip to Illinois, where he would visit the Chicago Commodities Exchange. Before this trip was over, Ross would be arrested for the first time.

  He decided on Monday, 28 September, to look over the Cargill operation in La Salle, which is about eleven miles south-west of Chicago. He rented a car at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, and headed west across the flat, central Illinois farm country.