The Man in the Monster

by Martha Elliott

  Father John’s arrival in Michael Ross’s life was Michael’s first close encounter with someone he regarded as a truly spiritual person. Although he had been brought up to believe that there was a God, he had not gone to any particular church or Sunday school. After his trial, he even began to question the existence of a supreme being because he felt that if there were a God, he would have prevented him from raping and killing the women. Father John opened his mind to the possibility that God would forgive him. He also began schooling Michael in Catholic theology and having him read books on the topic of forgiveness, particularly those written by Henri Nouwen. It was not long before Michael asked to receive first communion and be confirmed, and he became a devout Roman Catholic.

  Ann looked out for Michael. That meant taking his phone calls each week—even when she was thousands of miles away tending to a sick family member—or making copies of his articles in her office or even counseling him to be cautious about strange women who wrote to him. Until her own family obligations became too time-consuming, Ann was his clearinghouse—for monetary support, for distribution of the newsletter Walking with Michael that he sent to about a hundred people who followed his case, and for his outside purchases—as well as his supportive friend doing whatever he needed. It was a huge undertaking, but she did it willingly, even lovingly.

  Their support was not just part of their fight against the death penalty, but was also for this man. They could see past the horrible things that he had done. Something about Michael Ross made him likable. Their affection gave him humanity. Until then it was much easier to stick to labels.

  I was surprised to find that they shared a lot of Michael’s views. In Ann and Father John’s world, this serial killer had become the victim of a sinister and unpredictable prosecutor who was out to get a death sentence at any cost. I had heard many stories about Bob Satti’s courtroom style, but it didn’t make sense to me that someone who had devoted his life to prosecuting criminals would be willing to compromise all his principles just to be the first to secure a death sentence.

  Michael was brought into court promptly at 2:00 P.M. It was as if we were about to witness an execution. Satti presented the nine-page document to the court, reading it aloud. Michael sat at the opposite table, listening to Satti go through the same legal language that he had heard in the upstairs conference room. Satti said he was ready to sign the stipulation but that he could not speak for Michael, who might want to delay his decision. Michael snapped back that he would sign it right there and then. He was not going to be the one who caused any delay. Satti and Michael penned their names to the agreement, and Judge Joseph Purtill, who was the judge hearing the pretrial motions on the stipulation, formally accepted the stipulation and agreed to send it to the state high court to answer “reserved questions” to clarify the law. It happened so quickly and efficiently, it was surreal. Michael had signed what could become his own death warrant—if the high court agreed to answer and the trial court accepted it.

  • • •

  At this point, I still hadn’t interviewed Michael in person, and it was not clear whether the Department of Correction would ever allow me to visit him. The next best option was a telephone interview. However, securing a spot on a prisoner’s phone list also takes time. Michael explained the process in a letter. First, the prisoner has to request that your name be added to his list. To make this happen, you have to write to the prisoner. Letters in prison are not delivered in a timely manner—those incoming are censored, and sometimes so are the prisoners’ responses. On Connecticut death row, prisoners could add or subtract only one name once a month, and the request had to be submitted just before the first of the month or it wouldn’t be considered until the next month. Then it would take a few more weeks for the name to be cleared and placed on the list. The DOC has to make sure that prisoners are not calling convicted felons or conducting any illegal business from prison. It took more than six months from our initial correspondence before Michael was able to call me.

  At that time, death row inmates made calls in the evening, and all calls had to be made to a residence, not a cell phone. That meant that I’d have to give him my home phone number. He said he’d understand if I didn’t want to give it out. I hesitated because I had a teenage daughter and twins who were not yet two years old, so I was extremely anxious about what I felt was the same as inviting a serial killer into my home. I rationalized that it would be okay because I gave him the fax line number to avoid the possibility of my children answering the phone by mistake. Yet I remained terrified that my children might somehow be compromised by being only one beep of the fax machine away from a serial rapist and murderer.

  I wanted to speed up the process, so I asked Ann Cole if I could talk to Michael when he called her. She agreed, and we made a date for January 30, 1996. Ann Cole Opinion Research was at the time on the eighth floor of an old prewar building just off Times Square in New York City. It’s one of those buildings with long, winding hallways that house hundreds of little businesses in small offices behind stenciled doors. I arrived well ahead of the scheduled 6:00 P.M. call.

  As we waited for the phone to ring, my anxiety level rose. It was the same bogeyman fear that his letters had provoked—I worried that he would say something bizarre or threaten me. I had just watched a parole hearing for Charles Manson on Court TV, so I was convinced that Michael Ross was more likely to reveal his sadistic mind over the phone than in a letter. It didn’t matter that Ann and I could easily hang up. It didn’t matter that we were literally hundreds of miles away. I was petrified.

  “Hello. This is the MCI operator. You have a collect call from”—Michael’s recorded voice briefly stated his first name, and the male operator continued—“who is an inmate in a Connecticut correctional institution. The state has recorded this call and may have recorded your telephone number. To deny charges hang up now, or to accept charges press 5 now or say yes after the tone.” Ann said yes.

  “Hello,” announced the upbeat voice on speakerphone.

  “Hi, Mike. It’s Ann.”

  “This is Martha,” I said.

  I did not want to talk about the murders yet and wasn’t sure I ever could. I immediately steered the conversation toward why he thought his trial was unfair.

  He reiterated his position that he didn’t want his complaints about Satti and Michael Malchik, the state trooper who arrested him, to come out until the judge had accepted his deal to forgo another trial. He believed that Malchik had deliberately distorted evidence to secure a death sentence. “For example, they testified that when I was strangling one of the victims, my hands cramped and I stopped and I had to massage my hands and then the victim started moving and I strangled her again. That never happened,” he insisted. He said his proof was that Malchik and Satti had invented a crime scene in Connecticut so that the Leslie Shelley and April Brunais murders would not appear to have been perpetrated in another state—especially one without a death penalty. Michael wanted to get Malchik on the stand; Michael Malchik was the liar, not Michael Ross. He would not rest until Malchik and Satti had been “exposed.” Getting “the truth out” was more important to him than living. I could not comprehend why sparing his life wasn’t more important than what appeared to be his need for revenge.

  When we hung up, my hands and arms were shaking. I was soaked in perspiration, although I was sitting in a drafty building in the dead of winter. As Ann began to talk more about Michael’s family history, I started to calm down. Putting him in the context of a family made him more human.

  Ann told me that Dan Ross visited or called Michael on his birthday and at Christmas. “His father seemed to care about him during his first trial—buy clothes for him. His mother, Pat, had nothing to do with him. She changed her name—disavows that she’s his mother.” At the first trial, evidence had been introduced to show that Pat had been psychologically abusive, but she couldn’t stand the fact that everyone was tr
ying to blame her for Michael’s problems. As Michael would later tell me, she said she “didn’t want to be the goat” at the trial. Ann said that during the penalty phase Pat even helped the prosecution refute testimony of the other family members about her.

  After such a close encounter with Michael, I was soothed by the cold winter air as I left Ann’s office. I wasn’t sure whether I felt sorry for Michael or thought he was just a prisoner trying to manipulate me. Throughout my career, I had encountered many self-proclaimed innocents who wanted to tell me how they had been framed by the system. I knew from experience that one had to be cautious about whom and what to believe. Yet two distinct pictures of Michael Ross were emerging. One was a ruthless killer, and the other was a very sick but sorry man. It was my job as a journalist to try to reconcile the two. It’s a process that has always reminded me of the story about the blind men and the elephant. Each of the blind men describes a different part of the elephant—the trunk, the tail, the leg, etc. All of the descriptions are accurate, and yet all are also wrong because no one has the big picture.

  5

  NEW CANAAN AND SOMERS, CONNECTICUT

  WINTER–SPRING 1996

  Two weeks after the first phone call with Ann, I was placed on Michael’s phone list and received word from the Department of Correction that I would be allowed two visits and an extended phone call from a phone that was not tape-recorded by the state. It had taken more than six months to secure. Beginning on February 15, 1996—oddly enough, my birthday—Michael and I began what would become weekly and, by the end, daily phone conversations. Before the first call, I was even more fearful. Now I was alone. No Ann to protect me.

  Michael’s openness was eerie. He talked of the murders with detachment, almost as if someone else had committed them. But he sounded on the verge of tears when talking about issues he deemed important, such as his remorse, his concern for the victims’ families, the unfairness of his first trial, or proving his mental illness. Yet he never allowed me to forget his crimes. In one of our first telephone conversations, he said, “I don’t want you to start to feel sorry for Michael Ross. Think about how you would feel if one of your daughters had been one of my victims.” I had thought of that, and I knew my instinct would have been to wring his neck myself. “Whenever you look at me, you have to remember that there are eight bodies behind me. I killed those women, and I did nothing to stop myself for three years. And because of that, I’m guilty. When you write your story, I want you to have pictures of all of them on your desk.”

  The only topic off-limits was his religious views. He explained that he had discussed his religious feelings once with a reporter, and the conversation had been distorted. “He said that I said, ‘God made me do it,’ which is totally not true.”

  “I’d never say that God made you do it. Hell, no,” I said. “I’d say the devil made you do it.” Michael laughed. It was my first successful stab at tearing down his wall of defenses. It would take years before he would ever talk about his faith with me—other than reports about his visits with Father John—and he did so first through a journal he started keeping. Some of those discussions would not come until we were literally sitting a few feet from the execution chamber. I eventually realized how desperately he wanted to believe that God forgave him for what he had done, in the same childlike way that he wanted some tangible proof that he was mentally ill.

  In our first phone call, I did not press him about the details of the crimes because he still scared me. But there were a few questions I had to ask about his mental state when he killed. Michael had written me that when a killing was over, it was like walking through a door, so in an early telephone conversation I asked him if he could explain what he meant. “After they were dead, it was a very distinct feeling that all of a sudden I realized what had happened. I mean I knew what was going on when I was killing them. I never blacked out or anything like that. It was on a different level. It’s hard to explain.” He told me that the door analogy wasn’t accurate but that it explained how quickly he would become aware of what he’d done. He’d realize “my heart was pounding, really bad, really beating in my chest. And the next thing I remember was my hands were cramped, and they actually hurt. And the next thing I remember is that I felt fear because I was realizing there was another body.”

  It didn’t make sense to me that a man of his intelligence—an IQ of 122—hadn’t realized that what he had done was wrong and that he needed professional help after he had killed someone.

  “At some point when you were having these urges and then raping and killing women, didn’t some part of you say, ‘This isn’t normal’? Why didn’t you get psychiatric help?” I asked.

  “I kept telling myself that it would end, that I could control myself. Plus, you don’t understand how I was brought up. People didn’t go to shrinks. That showed weakness. Psychiatric problems were just an excuse. You just sucked it up and went on—and I was too ashamed to tell anyone what was going on inside my head. It disgusted me. What would anyone else think?”

  “Didn’t you know what you were doing was wrong?”

  “Yes, but I kept telling myself it would never happen again. I was in denial.”

  This was not the whole truth. I later learned that Michael told Dr. Howard Zonana, the psychiatrist who evaluated him for the defense in 1985 but who was never called by the defense, that he actually forgot about some of the killings. It wasn’t that he forgot about them because he could remember them if prompted, but that they were completely gone from his conscious memory. As Michael later told me, “I don’t know how, but I really forgot about some of them. I know it doesn’t make sense, but it’s true.”

  Soon Michael began calling me on an almost daily basis. He regarded reporters as a lifeline. The courts had rejected his mental illness, and the only way he was going to get his story out was to tell it to people who could write about it. I was not the first reporter to whom he had told his story, but I was his current hope. He was powerless without help, and to get help, he had to surrender his mistrust. I understood this vulnerability, but I also didn’t want to be manipulated by him.

  Most of our telephone conversations began with his current legal issues and what happened at his first trial, but after a while I’d steer him in other directions. “If this were a perfect world, what would happen to you?” I thought he’d say he would want to be released. Instead he said he thought he should be at Whiting, the state hospital for the criminally insane, for the rest of his life. “I can never be set free, but I should be in a mental hospital setting rather than a prison setting.”

  I had never thought of a place like Whiting as better than a prison, because institutions for the criminally insane are often fraught with problems. “Why do you want to go to Whiting? Is it because you think that you’d get therapy?”

  “Well, actually, I don’t even need that.” I rolled my eyes at the suggestion that he didn’t need therapy, that his medication, Depo Lupron, was all he needed. He said it stopped the violent sexual fantasies that had caused his criminal behavior. “The thing is that I don’t think I should be locked up in a prison and treated like a criminal when I had no control over what I did. I am dangerous and can never be released, but I should be locked up in an institution.” Michael explained that the staff at the mental health units understood he was ill and didn’t treat him like a killer. However, he felt the staff at Northern, the maximum security prison where he was incarcerated, was cold and unsympathetic. “In here I’m the biggest piece of shit there is. You know? And I get guards coming by all the time, just making little comments.” He said that none of the guards believed he was mentally ill. A few months after he had been put on death row, he had been stabbed by a prisoner with a makeshift knife, but that physical attack didn’t bother him as much as the judgmental snipes of the guards. “They treat me like I woke up in the morning and went out and raped and killed because I didn’t have anything better to do
.” In Whiting, he said he would be just another sick man who had committed a crime.

  Invariably our telephone conversations would cover his offer to forgo another trial. It didn’t make sense to me that he didn’t want to fight for his life under almost any circumstances. “I don’t think I’d fight even [if I thought I would win] because beating the death penalty is not what I care about,” he tried to explain. “I already lost. My issue is that my mental illness drove me to do what I did. That’s not the issue I’m going to court for now. The issue I’m going to court for now is whether I’m going to live or die.”

  “But that is partially the function of—”

  “No it’s not—” he interrupted, apparently knowing what I was going to say.

  “—whether or not your mental illness caused you to do what you did.”

  “No, because I’m going to be locked in a prison for the rest of my life. I’ll be Michael Ross, that scumbag who should have gotten the death sentence but got life through a loophole.”

  His explanation made me even more confused. “What’s the difference? If you got life, they’d be saying, in effect, we recognize you didn’t have control because you were mentally ill.”

  “It ain’t worth fighting for that.”

  “I don’t understand the difference between being found mentally ill in the trial and the penalty phase.”

  “Because I’m not winning anything.”

  “You’re winning your life!”

  “But that’s not important to me. You know, I really don’t care about that.” It was shocking that when he spoke about whether he would be executed, he seemed to be devoid of affect. “That’s never been an issue. All I was interested in was proving my case. I didn’t care about the penalty phase. . . . I wanted to prove to people that I didn’t have control over what I did and that maybe I needed to be locked up, but I’m not a criminal. And that’s all I cared about. So, now I’m a criminal, and all we’re deciding is what punishment I’m going to have. See what I’m saying? To me there’s not a hell of a lot of difference.” He said he would have been happy with a verdict of “insane, but fry him anyway.” Living wasn’t the issue. Making people understand was all he cared about.