He thought for a moment and then continued to try to make me understand. “They were laughing in the jury room. I heard them. I knew they were coming out. I could hear them laughing in there when they brought me back up. You know, it was a joke to them,” he said, his voice cracking. “And it didn’t take them very long to convict me—eighty-seven minutes. And it took them less than a day to give me the death penalty. It was all a big joke.” I was beginning to understand why he thought the criminal justice system was stacked against him.
“But this time Dr. Miller’s letter will come in as evidence,” I said, referring to the evidence that had been withheld from the jury in the first trial—the fact that even the state’s own psychiatric witness confirmed Michael’s mental illness and agreed that he should not be given a death sentence.
“It’s not important. You know what’s not important? Justice is not important. Perceived justice is important. If I got sent down to Whiting, it would be in all the newspapers about how I beat the system and how this murderer should have gotten the death penalty,” he said, sounding defeated. He was also pouting by this point, feeling sorry for himself that he would be condemned no matter how his case came out—either condemned to death or condemned as a fraud.
“You truly don’t care whether you live or die?”
“If they came to me and said, we’ll give you a life sentence, no more hearings or anything, then great, that would be fine. I can live with that.” He mused that he might be able to get a teaching job in the prison school as a tutor because of his college degree—if he ever got off death row into general population. “I could make something out of my life, but I’m not going to fight for that if I know I’m going to hurt other people” he said, referring to the victims’ families.
“Do you know what it’s like to wake up in the morning and be sad that God didn’t take you during the night? That’s how I feel every day.” I couldn’t imagine.
As I delved deeper into his case, Michael Ross made even less sense to me. He wanted to expose the flaws in the criminal justice system that led to his being put on death row, but he didn’t want to do it to get off death row. He didn’t care if he was executed. He just wanted people to believe that he was mentally ill, a sexual sadist, and that he couldn’t control his impulses to rape and murder.
• • •
Sexual sadism was not a psychological disorder with which I was familiar, so I needed a medical expert who had studied Michael to explain the mental illness. At least five psychiatrists had evaluated Michael before his first trial, one for the prosecution and four for the defense. All had agreed that he was a sexual sadist.
I contacted Dr. Fred Berlin, who was the chief defense witness for Michael Ross during the penalty phase of the trial. He heads the National Institute for the Study, Prevention and Treatment of Sexual Trauma at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and is a widely renowned expert on paraphiliac disorders that include sexual sadism. He is also the doctor who prescribed Michael’s medication after he was on death row. Dr. Berlin became my guide to understanding Michael’s mental illness and his medication.
He was adamant from the very beginning that the diagnosis of sexual sadism was correct. He explained that a sexual sadist is someone whose sex drive is attached to the wrong type of behavior—in this case inflicting pain and injury on someone else. Having a paraphiliac disorder means that there is something different about a person’s sexual makeup. It can be either the kinds of partners that one is attracted to sexually—children, corpses, animals—or it can be the sexual behaviors one craves, for example, exhibitionism. In Michael’s case, it was “recurrent erotic urges and fantasies that drive [the sadism],” Dr. Berlin explained. “[The urges] are driven by a powerful biological drive.” His ultimate climax resulted from degrading and killing a woman.
I asked Dr. Berlin how a person can become a sexual sadist. “The question is really how do any of us develop the sexual desires that we have.” Dr. Berlin said. “How is it that some people are recurrently attracted to children, a diagnosis of pedophilia? Why is it that some men are aroused by dressing up in female clothing?” He said there are three reasons that are sometimes intertwined. The first is that none of these desires are voluntary. “No one as a little kid sits down and weighs their options of what kind of sexual desires they are going to experience as they grow older. People discover the nature of their own sexual makeup, and in the case of Michael Ross, he discovered that he was afflicted with intense recurrent sexual fantasies and urges about causing others to suffer and even causing their death.” There’s also nature versus nurture. In some cases, children have been warped in their sexual development because of traumatic sexual experiences during childhood. A significant number of pedophiles were sexually abused as children. But recent research data has also shown in some cases that abnormal sexual cravings may have resulted because something went wrong at a biological level. “No one is interested in having sex because we read a book and decide it makes sense. Those feelings well up inside because of our biology, because of chromosomes and hormones and areas of the brain that are clearly relevant to sexuality.” Dr. Berlin helped me understand the possible explanations for Michael’s condition, but he could offer no easy answers.
Researchers have discovered that there are differences in the brains of a significant number of sexual sadists. In Michael’s case, lesions were discovered on his brain that might help explain his loss of control—although Dr. James Merikangas, the neurologist and psychiatrist who examined him in the 1990s, could not explain how or why those lesions could actually produce murderous behavior. Someone may have lesions but not be violent. He explained that doctors don’t understand how the lesions result in loss of control, but they do know that there is a connection between the two. The brain scans of sexual sadists often appear different from those of normal patients’ scans.
Dr. Berlin’s and Dr. Merikangas’s explanations only made me more curious. What was Michael’s childhood like? Had anyone else in his family been diagnosed with similar mental illnesses? How do lesions affect self-control? Some of my questions had easy answers that would just take some additional reporting, but others only led to more questions.
• • •
Over the course of the next few months, I found that Michael was easy to talk to, and slowly I began to realize that the serial killer was never going to jump out and grab me. The man who emerged was soft-spoken, self-effacing, and even funny. He was sometimes articulate and sometimes slipped back into a farm-boy dialect with faulty grammar. It came out most when he was angry or when he was using humor to deflect discomfort. He had a charm that was either disarming or manipulative and cunning. I wasn’t sure. Michael and his psychiatrists acknowledged that his highly developed defense of denial sometimes hid the truth from him. Yet he seemed almost incapable of lying intentionally. When asked a question that he found difficult to answer, he would deflect it with an inappropriate nervous laugh or joke. How had he managed to keep his sense of humor after so many years on death row? “I don’t know. I must be crazy.”
This openness was also apparent in the months just after his arrest. In nine hours of taped sessions with Dr. Zonana, Michael appeared to answer every question as truthfully as possible, even when his answers might not be in his best interest legally.
The first time I remember him speaking about the monster as a separate person was in a telephone conversation in which he was talking about how his medications had helped him. I was startled at first. I knew he blamed his mental illness for the killings, but I had not heard him refer to it so specifically as a separate person over which he had no control. “He was cunning. He would be satisfied and go away for a while after I stalked someone or killed someone, and then I would realize what he had done and feel like a total piece of shit. But he was always there waiting to take control. My medication changed all that. He was caged. He didn’t go away completely, but he was under control.�
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He saw his decision to accept death as his way of conquering the monster. He wrote, “The one great consolation is that I will get the last laugh. I may die, but I find it quite satisfying to know that the bastard of my mind will die with me. . . . And he hates that because he knows that finally, only in death, will we be separated from one another. I will go to the light and understanding, and he will go to darkness and truly be alone—forever.”
It was disturbing that on some level he didn’t consider himself personally responsible for what “the monster” did. “I couldn’t control him. He controlled me, and I never knew when he would reappear and take control.” Michael could live with himself by blaming his murderous behavior on an alter ego.
Dr. Merikangas and Dr. John Cegalis, who examined Michael six times and testified as one of his psychiatric witnesses at the 1987 trial, theorized that he suffered from some type of dissociative disorder. In a dissociative disorder, a person goes into a fuguelike state and adopts a different personality. Sometimes one is aware of what is going on but feels like an observer of the action; at other times, one has no memory of what occurred. Michael Ross was totally aware of what the monster had done and, I would later find, had experienced the pleasure that the monster had experienced when he was doing the killing. But because he saw himself as a good person—or desperately wanted to believe that he was—he could not accept that he was a lustful rapist and murderer, so he named the bad part of himself the monster.
In addition to talking with Michael, Dr. Cegalis gave him a battery of psychological tests to aid in making a diagnosis. One such test, the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), consists of a number of ambiguously drawn pictures about which the test subject is asked to convey his feelings: What is the person in the picture thinking and feeling? What is happening? What will happen in the future? From Michael’s responses, Dr. Cegalis concluded that he had difficulty relating to other human beings and that he had a lot of anger pent up inside. The Rorschach or inkblot test revealed he had “evident psychopathology,” meaning he was mentally ill. Cegalis said that Michael had difficulties “modulating or controlling strong emotions like aggression, like violence, like fear, like sexuality.” He said at times Michael could even have difficulty in knowing what was real and what was not.
Based on all of his testing, Dr. Cegalis found that Michael was “immature, egocentric, manipulative, driven to a kind of sexual satisfaction that fuses aggression and sexuality together in a highly abnormal way.” He said that Michael was also paranoid and unable to control his emotional impulses and that he acted out his anger in violent ways. His overall diagnosis concurred with that of Dr. Berlin’s; Michael suffered from sexual sadism.
In my early conversations with Michael, I got a sense of how complex a person he really was. He was compulsive and had frequent mood swings. One call would be upbeat and positive, and by the next week, his defeatist attitude would have taken over. “Why bother?” he would ask rhetorically. “There is no way I’ll get a fair trial. Nobody wants to know the truth.”
“Be careful about making such big pronouncements,” I cautioned. “I’m not a nobody, and I did and do want to know the truth. You have to stop feeling sorry for yourself—at least if you want me to listen.”
Sometimes he would call and the first thing out of his mouth would be “Got a pencil?” The next words out of his mouth would be instructions about whom I should call or what I should look up. He would give me the names and numbers or the general instructions about where I could get the information. He’d also want to know if I had read the latest installment of documents he had sent. Often they were things that had come in the mail the day before, and I would have to tell him that I couldn’t drop everything to read what he sent me. I had a job and a family.
In this initial stage of our dialogue, it became increasingly obvious that Michael wanted to forgo another trial not only because it would be too painful for the families, but also because it would be too painful for him to listen to a litany of what he had done. I had a lingering suspicion that his offer to die was a suicidal act, the result of depression from living on death row, although Michael denied that he was suicidal. For a time, I stopped pushing him on the suicide issue. In retrospect I know that he could not have been honest with me at that point, because he did not trust me yet.
6
BROOKLYN, CONNECTICUT
1958–1966
Michael Ross’s hometown of Brooklyn, Connecticut, is nothing like the borough of New York. A rural community of about six thousand, located in eastern Connecticut, Brooklyn seemed poor and provincial—much the opposite of Fairfield County, where I lived, the New York suburb in the western part of the state. When I visited in 1996 and 1997 to learn more about Michael’s past, many of the farms that dotted the countryside seemed to be eroding with the landscape, victims of a changing economy. The Ross family farm was no exception. Once a thriving business, it was then dormant except for a few apartments and a trailer. Some of the coops had been torn down, and the area had the look of a makeshift junkyard. In the state it was in, I had a hard time understanding why Michael wanted to return to it after Cornell.
In 1995, Brooklyn was essentially a crossroads where three state highways—Routes 6, 169, and 208—converge. The biggest landmark in town is the county fairground that comes alive once a year and is situated on a side road off Route 208. There’s a church, a nursing home, a town hall, firehouse, and even a jail scattered along the three routes, but no town center.
Brooklyn’s biggest claim to fame, or infamy, was that a serial killer grew up there. Most people did not want to talk about Michael. None of Michael’s family and very few of the people who had known him growing up would speak with me. At that time, his arrest and trial had been too painful, and with the prospect of another trial, most refused interviews because they felt I was the first of many reporters who would be knocking on their doors. Over the course of a decade, I asked Michael about his childhood, interviewed psychiatrists who had talked with family and friends, and pored over trial transcripts, psychological evaluations, and police reports to try to reconstruct his early years.
• • •
When they started going out in the fall of 1958, Pat Laine was seventeen and a senior at Killingly High School in Danielson, Connecticut; Dan Ross was a slightly older man who had already been through two years of college and a stint in the U.S. Marine Corps, serving as a guard at the brig in Pensacola, Florida. He went back to his hometown of Brooklyn unattached and began chicken farming. According to Frances Wolak, a neighbor and one of several women who served as mother figures for Michael during his teenage years, Pat made it clear to everyone that Dan Ross was going to be hers.
Within months, their romance resulted in a pregnancy. Dan Ross did the honorable thing, and the two were wed in February 1959; Michael Bruce Ross arrived on July 26 the same year, a healthy eight pounds. With his birth, Pat settled into farm life and the duties of motherhood. She worked in the egg business, picking up eggs by hand at the coops that the Ross family kept on rented property on Route 205 in Brooklyn. Little Michael accompanied her to work, his baby buggy covered with cheesecloth to keep off the flies. Dan worked for Pierce Egg Farm, the business that he and his father would soon buy with two other partners.
But Pat’s infatuation faded quickly. She soon found that she actually didn’t want to be a farmer’s wife, tied down with a baby. She hadn’t envisioned her entire future in Brooklyn, Connecticut. Faced with the unromantic realities of being a wife and mother, Pat found a former classmate, her boyfriend from her teenage years, more appealing. She began to see him secretly.
When Michael was two, a sister—Donna—arrived, and the Ross family moved from a rental into an old farmhouse on Tatnic Road, just down from where Dan’s parents and younger brother Ned lived. It was small and primitive, with no indoor bathroom, but there was plenty of room on the lot. By the fall of 1964, after nearly six
years of marriage, Pat Ross, twenty-three, had given birth to another son, Kenny, and another daughter, Tina. With each child, her misery and her mental health worsened, probably the result of untreated postpartum depression, according to medical and court records. In the months after her youngest child’s birth, she began talking about suicide. She severely punished her children, according to medical reports. It was common for her to threaten to leave the children, and she would occasionally storm out of the house, only to return a few hours later, acting as if nothing had happened.
As the oldest, Michael was seen by his siblings as his mother’s favorite. Yet according to Dr. Walter Borden, a forensic psychiatrist who assessed him for more than a year after his arrest and testified at his first trial, Michael was the source of all of Pat’s misery. Because of him, she had to marry, and because of him, she wanted to run away. She called him a bastard and told him she hated him. “Michael became the scapegoat, the person upon whom anger, disappointment, rejection, and failure in the adult relationship between mother and father were placed,” said Dr. John Cegalis in court testimony. “He lived in the netherworld of being his mother’s favorite, most devoted child and also her favorite target. It was a very close, very complicated and hate-filled relationship.” Shirley Grenier, who had worked packing eggs at the family farm when Michael was six or seven, testified that Pat “would hit him, calling him a little bastard, I hate you, I never wanted you in the first place.” Sometimes Michael’s hyperactivity set her off, but sometimes she slapped him for no reason. Grenier said that Pat treated Michael worse than the other children, but that Michael never showed any emotion when his mother made the verbal attacks. Even Michael’s father later observed that he took the brunt of his mother’s anger. As an adult, however, Michael either couldn’t or wouldn’t accept that he was treated any worse than his other siblings. “Only one of us became a serial killer. I never felt more persecuted than the rest of them.”
The Man in the Monster Page 6