Ballard claimed it wasn’t Denise or the others he was killing in that dream, but rather one of Denise’s neighbors. It wasn’t Steven Zernhelt, either, he said, but someone else who lived on that block that he didn’t know very well. Ballard insisted he didn’t have nightmares about his actual murder victims, although with prodding he admitted their deaths were in his waking thoughts every single day.
“All I do in life is destroy things,” he said.
Ballard told Rushing he had low levels of energy and concentration, which again conflicted with prison records indicating he had been active and even hyper during his incarceration. Ballard acknowledged that his thoughts moved very quickly and that it felt like his mind was always racing, and sometimes he wrote furiously for hours on end just to get those thoughts out of his head.
Despite all of this, Ballard unwaveringly insisted he was not suicidal. Rushing brought up his attempted suicide from September 2008, after his arrest for parole violations, when Ballard was discovered in his cell with a bedsheet tied around his neck. Ballard shrugged it off, insisting that hadn’t been a suicide attempt at all.
But, he admitted, he probably had been suicidal in the past, and had always tended to live his life a bit recklessly. Growing up, Ballard said, he would take unnecessary risks and do stunts by himself just for the thrill of it, like the time he drove an all-terrain vehicle off a bluff and fell fifty feet before landing in the water below. He used to ride his motorcycle and slide underneath eighteen-wheel tractor-trailers just to see if he could do it.
Ballard never feared getting hurt, he told Rushing. In fact, most of his life, he felt invincible.
Returning to the day of the murders, Ballard claimed he felt justified in killing Denise because she had betrayed him. While his voice had been calm and relatively quiet for most of the interview, Rushing noticed that Ballard’s speech was becoming louder and more emotionally charged once they reached this topic.
Ballard angrily recalled what he claimed were repeated adulteries Denise had committed, both when he was back in prison for his parole violation and afterward.
“She was sneaking out in the middle of the night and driving two hours to Philadelphia to give it to some stranger, sometimes literally on the side of the road!” Ballard later said. “This was my house. This was my wife. This was my family she brought this filth into.”
Ballard said that after speaking with Marilyn Rivera on the phone and learning that Denise had gone to a baseball game with another man, he removed the wedding ring Denise had given him and instead started wearing it on a chain around his neck.
Ballard claimed he deliberately wore that chain when he went to Denise’s house to kill her. He also purposely wore the Superman T-shirt that authorities later discovered neatly folded on a chair next to Dennis Marsh’s body. Ballard explained that he was wearing it when he stabbed Denise to death, a sickly ironic reminder that she had nicknamed him Superman in reference to his sexual prowess.
Rushing noted that even now, with Denise gone, Ballard’s anger over her cheating had not appeared to diminish. Ballard told Rushing that after he had killed Denise, he grabbed what he believed was her purse—it had in fact belonged to Debbie Hawkey, who’d left it behind after fleeing the house—and tried to check the calls on her cell phone to confirm her infidelity.
Rushing asked what purpose confirming such a thing would serve, considering that Ballard had already killed Denise and members of her family. Ballard didn’t seem to comprehend the question, and could offer no explanation.
What about the others he’d killed that day? Rushing asked. Dennis and Alvin Marsh, and Steven Zernhelt? Even if Denise did betray Ballard, weren’t those three men innocent?
But Ballard didn’t see it that way. He did regret that Steve ever came to the house that day, but Ballard insisted the man shouldn’t have interfered with what was going on, and that he’d still be alive if he hadn’t.
“It’s like the quote on the first US penny,” Ballard said. “‘Mind your business.’”
Indeed, the first design for the penny, designed by Benjamin Franklin and known as the Fugio cent, did include the inscription MIND YOUR BUSINESS along the bottom. But Ballard seemed to mistake the quotation as a message from the Founding Fathers that you should, in present-day parlance, “Mind your own business.” Rushing knew that in fact, most historians believe it to be a more literal reference to business as an enterprise. She did not bother to correct Ballard’s misinterpretation.
But while Ballard considered Steve Zernhelt an innocent bystander, he refused to regard Dennis and Alvin Marsh as blameless victims. Instead, Rushing noted, he exhibited a similar rage toward them as he had toward Denise, although on a lesser scale. This was especially the case for Denise’s father, Dennis, whom Ballard said lived in Denise’s basement and did nothing, living basically a worthless existence. While Ballard at times wished Alvin hadn’t been home the day of the murders, he felt no such wish for Dennis.
Ballard claimed both men were father figures in Denise’s life, so he believed they were responsible for controlling her behavior, and that therefore, in a way, they allowed her to cheat on him.
“They are the males of the house; they allowed her to do that shit,” Ballard said. “They had ultimate control over Denise’s actions. They were culpable for her sins.”
Ballard insisted he wasn’t alone in feeling this way, and that anybody would agree with his views about an adult woman’s subordination to the men in her household. His voice rising louder and louder by the second, he asserted, “You are still your father’s daughter. He still has an influence in your life.”
Rushing countered this, arguing that most American women in their thirties lead lives fully independent from their fathers. But Ballard shook his head and remained adamant, claiming that his views on the sexes were governed by God’s law. He paraphrased the story of Adam and Eve from the Bible, pointing out that man was created first and that woman was created from man to be his helper.
“Religion guides the male–female interaction,” he said. “The male is the head of the household.”
Ballard repeatedly returned to the issue of God and religion throughout the interview, so much so that Rushing believed him to be suffering from delusions of grandeur. She found it fascinating, especially because his thought content and cognitive abilities were quite remarkable for someone suffering such delusions. His upcoming neurological tests would shed more light on this, but Rushing was well aware that these kind of delusions can arise from traumatic brain injuries.
Ballard insisted he had been killed at the scene of the car accident shortly after his murders, and had later been brought back to life by the emergency responders. Rushing knew this was a claim Ballard had repeated before, and she also knew it to be false: Medical records clearly dispelled it. But Ballard insisted he had been saved because a higher power had some reason for wanting him to remain alive.
“I should have died, but God didn’t want me to,” he said.
Rushing also knew that many of Ballard’s manic writings from prison were filled with religious quotes and explorations of the mythical and magical, as were some of his letters to Danielle Kaufman. The disturbing sketch Ballard drew of himself holding a knife over Denise’s body at the crime scene—the one smeared with his own blood—was titled “The Dead Are Free from Sin.”
In another of his letters to Danielle, Ballard wrote that he killed Denise because he had to “cleanse that house (our home) of the sin she brought into it.” He claimed he “spoke to each victim in turn and gave them respite and absolution” before their deaths, although Ballard would later deny having done this.
He wrote that he had judged Denise to “God’s standards” and that “God’s laws are infallible and eternal.” Now, Ballard wrote, Denise was awaiting God’s final judgment because, in murdering her, he had released her from sin.
He also quoted Romans 7:6, “But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the
law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.”
While staying at Northampton County Prison, Ballard also drew a picture depicting himself as Jesus hanging on the cross at the Crucifixion. At the base of the cross were five skulls, one for each of his victims, as well as the caption “Golgotha,” the hill upon which Christ was crucified to ensure sinners would reunite with God in heaven.
“Mr. Ballard believes that he has been chosen to act as a warrior of God,” Rushing wrote in her notes. “He believes that God has allowed him to purge the world of sin; so that the sinner’s souls can face God’s judgment in heaven. He also seems to think that he has the Christ-like power to bring a wayward sinner back into God’s graces.”
Beyond his religious delusions, Rushing found it interesting that Ballard continued to refer to Denise’s house as “my home,” and to her kids as “my family,” even now after everything that had transpired. He spoke in detail about conversations and interactions with Denise, Dennis, and Alvin from three years ago as if they were recent events that somehow still held relevance.
Ballard said he believed that, upon dating Denise in 2006, he replaced Dennis as the leading male of the household. But he did not seem to understand that his two-year incarceration for a parole violation would have changed his role in that relationship; nor did he comprehend that Denise’s family members, like Dennis and Alvin, might have perceived him differently than they had before his return to prison.
“This was my house,” Ballard insisted. “My house.”
CHAPTER 18
In late January, John Morganelli received a phone call from Jim Martin, the district attorney in Lehigh County, which was Northampton County’s neighbor to the west. Martin had some interesting news, to say the least: He had received letters from two different inmates serving time in SCI–Frackville with Michael Ballard.
In those letters, they claimed that Ballard had described in detail for them not only the Northampton murders, but also other murders he had committed that authorities were not even aware of.
The letters came from Wilfredo Riddick and John Patrick McClellan. Riddick had previously served time for drug-related charges and was now back in prison on a technical parole violation. McClellan had been convicted in 2004 of theft and impersonating a public servant. Authorities said he claimed to be an undercover police officer and demanded the wallets of his victims, then pocketed their cash.
Morganelli was a bit skeptical of the letters—after all, they had been written by two convicted felons—but felt they were worth investigating, especially because the letters were consistent with each other. There was also the fact that both men wrote that Ballard killed Dennis and Alvin Marsh because they were witnesses to Denise’s murder, and killing a witness was another aggravating factor for the death penalty that Morganelli could pursue.
The district attorney immediately reached out to Raymond Judge, who on January 25 took the ninety-minute drive over to SCI–Frackville, along with Corporal Paul Romanic, to meet with the inmates.
Located in the low-populated Ryan Township, SCI–Frackville was one of two state prisons located in Schuylkill County. The other, SCI–Mahanoy, was a medium-security facility located just a few miles northwest. As a maximum-security prison, the thirty-five-acre Frackville was smaller than Mahanoy and much more imposing. A population of about eleven hundred inmates lived behind its uninviting walls of thick concrete brick of a drab tan color.
Upon arrival, Judge and Romanic spoke with Timothy Clark, a captain with the prison’s security office who was personally familiar with Ballard, Riddick, and McClellan. Clark told Judge that Riddick was probably a credible source and might be honest with them, but McClellan was another story. The forty-one-year-old man was a delusional paranoid schizophrenic. Nothing he would say could be trusted as accurate, and he would probably report anything the troopers told him immediately back to Ballard anyway.
Judge took the captain’s advice and decided against interviewing McClellan, but Wilfredo “Dro” Riddick was brought into the prison’s security office to speak with him. The thirty-four-year-old light-skinned black man had short-cropped black hair and stood about five feet ten inches tall. He had two teardrop tattoos under his right eye—a symbol often associated with the number of victims killed by a gang member—as well as tattoos of Japanese symbols on both sides of his neck.
Riddick told Judge that he had been placed in Frackville’s restricted housing unit along with Ballard from November 16 until December 30. During that time, the two inmates communicated via a method called flicking, where they used toothpaste to attach notes on the ends of threads taken from their jumpsuits and literally flicked the letters from cell to cell.
Riddick didn’t have physical copies of the notes Ballard supposedly sent him, which Judge knew would hurt the credibility of his claims in the eyes of a jury.
Riddick claimed that Ballard told him he had killed his girlfriend, and that she had “deserved it.” Ballard also told him, according to Riddick, that he killed Denise’s father and his grandfather—“the old man”—because he didn’t want to leave any witnesses, and then he subsequently killed Steve Zernhelt because he was “being nosy” when he ran into the house to investigate their screams.
Riddick also said Ballard repeatedly spoke ill of Denise, and that he claimed she would still be alive if she had just been honest with him. Ballard also claimed that he deliberately stabbed himself in the leg and severed his artery in an attempt to commit suicide after the attack, Riddick said. Ballard had told Riddick that he had, in fact, died shortly after the murders, but was brought back to life by the doctors.
Riddick said that Ballard bragged about the people he killed, claiming he was “good at what he does.” According to Riddick, he claimed responsibility for seven total killings: the four in Northampton, Donald Richard back in 1991, and two other people in the Poconos—a mountainous region in northeastern Pennsylvania—when he was paroled for the first time. The police didn’t even know about those two, Ballard had allegedly boasted to Riddick.
Ballard told Riddick that he always used a knife when he killed somebody, not a gun, because, “I’m not a pussy,” the inmate told Judge. He said that Ballard also claimed he liked to write on the walls using his victims’ blood. In some of his letters, Riddick said, Ballard wrote that he “hates faggots” and “kills faggots and rats.”
Once the interview was finished, Judge took a written statement from Riddick, and then retrieved all of Ballard’s medical, psychological, and psychiatric records from the prison. Upon his return to Northampton County, he immediately shared all of Riddick’s statements with Morganelli.
It would be several weeks before Ballard himself learned of Riddick’s and McClellan’s letters. According to him, there was no truth to them whatsoever.
McClellan—or “delusional boy,” as Ballard called him—was considered something of a joke around SCI–Frackville. Many of the inmates enjoyed mocking him, including Ballard. McClellan was always mumbling incoherently to himself and constantly believed others were out to get him.
After he was placed in the prison’s restricted housing unit wing near Ballard’s cell, McClellan became convinced that the guards were giving Ballard information about him. He started writing letters to people all over the state that Ballard was going to tell all his “motorcycle buddies” on the outside to burn down McClellan’s house and rape his mother. McClellan even started asking the other inmates to sign an affidavit—or a “fadvit,” as McClellan misspelled it—claiming Ballard had repeatedly threatened him.
According to Ballard those claims were all nonsense, but he still used them as an opportunity to give McClellan a little hell. After one of the other inmates slipped McClellan’s affidavit to Ballard, he mailed it to Danielle Kaufman and had asked her to make copies of it for him. He also asked her to look up any information on McClellan that he could use against him.
“Dig up whatever you can get on
this piece of shit and mail it to me,” Ballard said.
Danielle dutifully responded to Ballard with information she had found on the Internet, as well as half a dozen copies of the affidavit. On each copy, Ballard placed a stamp he had gotten from his father of Mother Teresa—because McClellan’s mother was named Teresa—and started passing the copies around to the other inmates so they could laugh at McClellan.
That stunt got him into a bit of trouble with the prison staff, who, unbeknownst to Ballard, were monitoring his mail in response to McClellan’s claims that Ballard wanted to kill him. Ballard was called down to Captain Clark’s office to discuss the matter, but according to Ballard, Clark took one look at McClellan’s “fadvit” and released Ballard, realizing there was nothing credible in McClellan’s rantings.
McClellan committed suicide just over a year later, hanging himself inside his cell at SCI–Cresson near Altoona, Pennsylvania, in May 2011. Ballard had little sympathy for the man. Just deserts, in my opinion, he thought.
As far as Wilfredo Riddick was concerned, Ballard knew of him, but claimed he had never even seen his face, let alone confided details about the murders to him.
“I wouldn’t know him from a can of paint,” Ballard later said.
Ballard first came to know “Dro” after he was placed into the restricted housing unit for a prison misconduct. Riddick was placed a few cells down from Ballard and directly across from McClellan. Riddick and McClellan exchanged letters from time to time, which Ballard believed explained why McClellan wrote nearly the same exact letter to Lehigh County District Attorney Jim Martin as Riddick did.
According to Ballard, Riddick learned some details about Ballard’s crimes because he received some of Ballard’s mail by mistake. After reading it, Riddick—unaware that Ballard himself was only a few cells away—started talking to the other inmates about how Ballard had killed a bunch of people while he was living in a halfway house on parole, and how that was going to make it harder for anybody else to get parole.
Fatal Jealousy: The True Story of a Doomed Romance, a Singular Obsession, and a Quadruple Murder Page 17