Unable to deal with her life, Pat ran away to be with her longtime boyfriend, only to be dragged back to Brooklyn by her father. Trapped again, Pat treated her children with such hostility that Dan had to take her away from them. Scared and helpless, on October 6, 1964, he admitted her to the state psychiatric hospital at Norwich. In hospital records, Pat was described as “cooperative and slightly seductive, with a history of being emotionally upset, acting out towards her children.” Doctors at the hospital gave her a diagnosis of “personality trait disturbance,” virtually meaningless without specifying what type of personality trait she exhibited. Nevertheless, they pronounced her emotionally unstable. “Presently, we are dealing with a patient who feels tremendous hostility against her husband, stating that he is lazy and not worth a penny. Patient is not depressed, but it is felt that the patient . . . has been manipulative with many people around her including her husband, by threatening to walk out and never come back, and threatening with suicide,” wrote Dr. Michael Eligenstein, the attending physician who wrote Pat’s evaluation. After a month at the hospital, Pat was released to Dan’s custody with the recommendation that she and Dan receive marriage counseling, but there was no recommendation of any therapy or counseling to help her better deal with her four small children.
“You were dealing with a woman with at minimum a mental illness occurring during a postpartum period,” said Dr. Borden of the treatment she received at Norwich. “That should have been followed up. . . . They were treating a broken arm with a Band-Aid when they talk about group therapy. There should have been a much more assertive therapeutic approach.”
For the next three years, the family limped along, coping with Pat’s mood swings and volatile temper. Then in October 1967, Pat’s old boyfriend made a surprise visit to Brooklyn and phoned. It was the first time they had spoken in three years, and the call immediately rekindled her dream of leaving Dan and the children. Pat ran off to North Carolina, where her former boyfriend was now living, only to be brought back again to Brooklyn by Dan. On November 5, 1967, she was readmitted to Norwich hospital as a psychiatric patient. In less than thirty days, she was discharged with nothing more than a recommendation for group therapy for married couples.
Although he was eight at the time of his mother’s second hospitalization, Michael didn’t remember either of her absences. “To be honest, I don’t think I would have missed her really.” It’s not as if she were the type of parent who tucked him into bed and kissed him good night.
Pat Ross’s precarious temperament made her unpredictable. Even if she was in a good mood, she could fly into a rage without warning. There were times when she was charming and happy, when she would seem to enjoy doing simple things with her children, like ice skating or chopping wood. But there were also times when, according to elder daughter Donna’s testimony during the first trial, “Something would inflame her and make her angry and you never knew where you stood.” She said Pat was never happy because she felt “she missed out on her young adult life in her early 20’s.” She said Pat blamed Michael and Dan for her misery.
Michael’s sister Tina, the youngest of the Ross children, also testified at the trial. She described her mother’s moods. “We used to say that she had a short fuse. She could flare up without any notice . . . I tried to behave myself as best I could . . . You had a 50/50 chance. [If you showed emotion] she would either get madder at you or she would back off you. Usually she would get madder.” And when she got mad, she got verbally abusive. “She swore . . . a lot. She tried to humiliate us a lot.” Tina said her mother was cruel and cold and verbally abusive to people and animals. Tina told of coming home from school one day and finding out that her mother had thrown the cat out a second-story window. On other occasions, she said, she vacuumed the cat because it shed too much. “She also made us declaw the cat. She said if we didn’t declaw the cat, she would put a rock around its head and throw it in the lake.”
During the penalty phase of the trial, both sisters testified about their mother and their home life. They also talked about Michael. Tina said that she and her two other siblings were very close friends, but they were not close to Michael, so they shunned him from their play. Donna said that Michael didn’t have many friends and that when he had tried to date, there had been a big blowup between him and Pat. She didn’t want him to date.
I tried to interview Dan Ross and Michael’s two sisters, but they made it clear through Michael that they did not want to be interviewed for any article or book. In fact, Michael gave me a copy of a scathing letter from Donna in response to his request; she accused him of wanting to be in the spotlight and having no concern for what his notoriety had done and would continue to do to his family. Later I did speak with Dan several times at the prison, during which I got most of Michael’s stories confirmed and some insights about the family dynamic—especially concerning Pat—but I was never able to formally interview Dan for the book. Most of what I know about the family comes from Michael, neighbors, a videotape made during Dr. Zonana’s assessment of Michael, court testimony, medical reports, and Dr. Borden, who had done a thorough investigation of Michael’s past.
Dr. Borden devoted a tremendous amount of time to the case because he believed that it was one of the most important of his long career; he said he never spent as much time and effort on any other. At one point he called me to tell me that “Michael Ross should be studied” to help the world better understand sexual sadism and what had caused him to kill. He said that Michael’s mental illness was “off the charts”—that his sexual sadism was so extreme that it went beyond the criteria that the DSM-III and DSM-IV used to identify and classify mental disorders at the time of Michael’s arrest and first trial. Dr. Borden was convinced that because Michael was articulate and intelligent, he could help professionals understand his complex mental disorder. Michael also was willing because he wanted answers.
• • •
As they got older, the Ross kids learned that the best way to handle their mother was to try to avoid doing anything that might set her off. Each morning they had to wonder, What’s mom’s mood like today? Rather than risk her wrath, they developed what Michael called “mom drills.” They took turns going downstairs first and testing her reaction. The other three would listen from upstairs as they finished dressing. If things were quiet, they would follow. If she began screaming in what seemed to a child like a violent rage, they would immediately begin the drill, which they executed with precision. Each had a job—squeezing orange juice, getting wood, setting the table—designed to distract and pacify their mother. There was almost no conversation. They just busied themselves until it was time to eat and run to the bus.
“Some days she’d be in a hell of a mood,” said Michael. “I remember one time that Tina went downstairs first. She was unloading the dishwasher so that we could set the table. Since there were six of us, she picked up the orange juice glasses, three in each hand. As she carried them to the table, the glasses made a clinking sound. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Mom started yelling. ‘Are you trying to break those damn glasses?’ Then we all knew to be on guard. You did what you had to do.”
The Ross children knew that for their own peace of mind, there were certain rules to follow: Never show weakness. Never let her know what is important to you because she will take it away. What hurt you most would be used later to taunt and tease you. “She would go for the emotional jugular,” Michael explained. “One time she dumped some red dye on my sister’s favorite blouse. My mother claimed she was going to dye some curtains. She said she didn’t know,” he said in a tone that meant he didn’t believe a word of it. “She could be very sweet,” he said. “It was like a spider luring a fly into her web. You had to be careful.”
Pat might have been the judge, but Dan Ross was the purveyor of punishment. If Michael got into trouble with his mother, he knew that Pat would instruct Dan to carry out her sentence when he returned home at di
nnertime. Michael would be sent to the woodshed to pick a switch for the spanking, knowing that the switch had to be strong enough not to break. “It was of utmost importance to take your punishment like a man. The main thing was not to make any noise. If you screamed or showed any weakness like crying, you were beaten more,” Michael reported without emotion. Dr. Borden said Dan was the punisher. “But it was the mother who called the shots. . . . She ran the children, she ran the relationship—she ran the house.” Michael agreed. “I never blamed my father. I thought he was as henpecked as we were.”
As Dr. Cegalis explained, Michael “had poor nurturance from his mother and his father. He had a minimal relationship with his siblings; he was treated in a brutal, violent way by both of his parents . . . verbally, psychologically as well as physically.” He added that Michael was humiliated, degraded, and continually criticized by his parents. Because of his treatment by his parents, Dr. Cegalis testified, Michael was unable to form attachments to other people. “It is important in human relationships to establish what is called ‘object consistency.’ That is seeing another human being as a human being, relating to another human being with empathy,” he explained. He said Michael could not understand “that other people have feelings.” This was certainly true of how he regarded his victims. Dr. Cegalis said this lack of empathy comes “from brutality and violence perpetrated on him and . . . from abuse in general from the family.”
Michael was not close to his father as a child and teenager. According to those who worked at Eggs, Inc., Dan was always busy, distant, and cold. Michael lamented that he could only talk about farming to his father but could not confide in him. He said he wanted to be more like his father, except he told Dr. Zonana that Dan “don’t show feeling at all. I can’t remember the last time he said, ‘I love you.’ I know he does, but he can’t show it.” He told Dr. Borden that his father was unreadable. “He was a rock . . . you might as well talk to a rock. . . . There was no way to read him.”
However, Michael later told me, “My father’s changed a lot since I’ve been in here. He used to seem so distant and unable to show emotion, but I think that was because he was married to my mother. Since he married Carol [Dan’s second wife, whom he married a few years after he and Pat divorced], he’s really changed. He’s happier and more at ease with me. Carol has been good for him.”
Another message of Pat Ross’s behavior was that her children should never stand up for themselves. At age six, Michael was the constant target of a neighborhood bully named Johnny. One day Johnny chased Michael all the way home, and in an uncharacteristically bold act, Michael picked up a stick, turned around, and started to hit Johnny. Startled at Michael’s newfound courage, Johnny turned and ran.
Hearing the commotion, Pat came to the window and observed the entire episode. “Bring me that stick,” she called to her son. Obediently—and proud that he had finally had the courage to defend himself—Michael picked up the stick and took it to his mother. It was a rare occasion when Pat carried out the beating herself. When he got inside, Pat grabbed the stick from Michael and proceeded “to beat the hell out of me,” Michael remembered. “She was so mad, and she beat me so badly that I needed a butterfly bandage for the cut on my forehead.” Confused and hurt, Michael knew that from then on he was powerless against Johnny or any other bully.
“It’s emotionally castrating, to do that to a little boy; the message is very clear: You can’t stand up for yourself,” charged Dr. Borden. “It had to do with her total control of him, that he couldn’t stand up to anybody, that he could not assert himself. And any kind of self-assertion was attacked; especially having to do with being a boy, being male.”
The result, said Dr. Cegalis, was that he was chronically maladjusted. He described Michael as “a person who is paranoid, a person who is capable of manipulativeness, distance, lack of attachment in his relationships with other people; a person who is incredibly angry; a person who is capable of acting out that anger in a rather direct way on other people.”
From his earliest years, Michael became confused about the meaning of love. His parents’ relationship was hate filled, and Dr. Cegalis suggested in his psychiatric evaluation that sometimes there was even violence between his parents—although Michael had no memory of this. Almost everyone who knew her reported that Pat was often cruel and verbally abusive but that it was Michael’s father who punished him with beatings in the woodshed. These were the people who were supposed to love him, nurture him, and love each other, and yet there was little love in the Ross household. Dr. Cegalis, who had died by the time I met Michael, testified that Michael’s lack of parental nurturing “resulted in a kind of fragile ego, a damaged ego, one in which Mr. Ross’ sense of self-esteem is extremely weak, extremely inadequate with evidence of problems of sexual potency, sexual identity, self-worth, self-competence.”
7
BROOKLYN, CONNECTICUT
1967–1977
Eight-year-old Michael Ross trudged a hundred yards up Tatnic Road, from the modest white house where he lived, through the snow, up the hill toward the chicken coop on his grandfather’s property. It is a quiet side street where a young boy could easily be distracted. But Michael didn’t dawdle on that snowy afternoon. It wasn’t the cold that kept the tall, skinny boy focused: He had an important assignment. He was on his way to get instructions from Grandfather Ross about taking over some of the former chores of his sixteen-year-old uncle Ned.
A few weeks earlier, Ned had shot himself in the head with his father’s .22-caliber rifle. His suicide note, written in an inward spiral, explained exactly why he killed himself: He was a homosexual, not an accepted sexual orientation in Brooklyn, Connecticut, in 1967. The troubled teenager saw only one possible escape. When Dr. Borden mentioned that Ned had written a suicide note in the form of an inward spiral, Michael immediately responded, “That’s me. He exploded inside and I exploded outside.”
The family’s official story to the Ross grandchildren was that Ned had died by accident when a bullet ricocheted off a stone wall during target practice. Who’d be so stupid as to have target practice on a stone wall? Michael wondered at the time, but he instinctively trusted the explanation of his parents. Michael was not allowed to attend Ned’s funeral. No one was to speak of Ned, because it would be too hard on Karl and Louise Ross, Michael’s grandparents—perhaps because Karl’s own father had committed suicide in a similar manner. Ned was gone. Talking about him wouldn’t bring him back.
The loss had been particularly great for Michael. He and Ned had been close. Ned and Michael wrestled with each other on the lawn, Ned often ending the play with a “Chinese shampoo,” otherwise known as a Dutch rub. Michael enjoyed the mixture of pain and pleasure. In private, their play might have been much different. Dr. Borden said that he suspected that Ned, the occasional family babysitter, was sexually abusing his nephew from the time Michael was four because of symptoms he exhibited. Michael’s father rejected the theory, and Michael said he had no memory of any such behavior.
At first a hired farmworker named Ray took over Ned’s responsibilities, but when a snowstorm prevented Ray from reaching the farm, Michael had to assume Ned’s chores—tending the chicks. The prospect of farmwork was not troubling to Michael. In fact, tending the chicks elevated him to a new level of adult responsibility. He would be paid fifty cents an hour for his labor. It was a chance for the eight-year-old to gain his father’s love and respect. “That was the most important thing to me,” Michael explained.
Michael idealized his father and wanted nothing more than his love and attention. He knew that there was nothing his father loved more than farming. If he became a good farmworker, Michael thought, he just might be able to please his father and win his approval. He would work twice as hard as anyone else. Having spent time with Ned while he was working, Michael already knew much of the routine, but his grandfather went over all the details of tending the coop, which housed abou
t five thousand chicks. At one day old, each flock was delivered from the hatchery and raised as floor birds for five months, and then they were moved over to be layers at Eggs, Inc., the family’s newly acquired seventy-nine-acre chicken farm situated about a mile down the road from their home.
Day-old chickens do not have feathers and must be constantly monitored and kept warm with gas stoves inside coops until their feathers grow in several weeks later. Michael learned to check the temperature by the behavior of the birds. If they were huddled close together under the stove, it was too cold; if they were spread out away from the stove, it was too hot. The first few days are the most critical because the young chicks don’t know how to find the heat. During that time, they must be checked again after dark to make sure they aren’t bunched together in the corners away from the stoves.
Three times a day, morning, noon, and late afternoon, the birds needed to be checked, watered, or fed. On school days, his grandfather would make the noon rounds. Each morning Michael was to be at the coop by dawn to turn on the birds’ drinking water. He would walk through the building, checking to make sure everything was in order and pick up any birds that had died during the night, since it was not unusual to lose 200 to 250 birds from each flock of 5,000. After school, he would feed the birds, pick up any more dead, and dump the carcasses into a pit in the field. Before dark, he would make one final check and turn off the water for the evening to prevent any chance of flooding.
The Man in the Monster Page 7