“I did it on my own even though I hated getting up that early in the morning,” Michael admitted. “I guess I kind of got used to it. It’s a lifestyle, farming. There’s a lot of satisfaction from raising a good flock of birds. I got a batch of baby chicks, and I got to raise them for five months before they went into the henhouse. And I knew that the birds that went into that henhouse were better birds than we could buy anywhere else. That’s farming.”
While most of his job was caring for the birds, the flock also had to be culled. Weak or sick birds don’t grow into productive hens and are an expense that needs to be eliminated as soon as possible. Michael understood that killing the birds was a necessity, even if it was unpleasant.
“Okay, now Michael, pay attention,” said his grandfather. “You’ve got to break its neck. Hold their feet in your left hand and hold their neck with your right hand. The trick is to break the neck without pulling off the head,” he instructed. “That can get pretty bloody,” Michael told me. “You pull the neck until you feel the bone break, then immediately stop pulling.”
Michael, immature and uncoordinated, tried to repeat the procedure that his grandfather had demonstrated but pulled the neck off the bird, wincing as blood spewed all over. He worried that if he didn’t do his job properly, the responsibility might be taken away. But as time went on, he got better. Soon he bragged that he could kill chicks in his sleep.
The first flock he tended was already a few months old when he took charge. Later, when the next batch of day-old chicks was delivered, Michael needed to learn other methods of culling. For the first four or five weeks, the chicks are only four to five inches long, so small that it is virtually impossible to break their necks. For these birds, his grandfather explained, there are two methods of killing—“The way I like to do it is to just squeeze the lungs until the bird suffocates.” But Michael didn’t like this method because it took too long. It was difficult for his small hands to exert enough pressure for any length of time, especially with the chick squirming, desperately fighting for its life. Sometimes it would take him two or three tries to kill a chick.
The second method is quicker, but, Michael felt, “more overtly brutal. You take the chick in your hand and smack its head against a post. If you do it right, the chick will die on the first whack and not make a bloody mess.” Learning exactly how hard to hit the bird against the post takes experience. He didn’t particularly like this method either and was always glad when the birds were big enough so that he could break their necks because “it seemed more humane.”
At times Michael would get in trouble for not killing the birds, especially the older ones. Sometimes Marek’s disease struck the birds at twelve to sixteen weeks, paralyzing one side of the bird so that it couldn’t get to food or water. Having raised them from the first day of their lives, Michael would feel sorry for the afflicted birds and individually feed and water them by hand. Some survived and gained partial use of their limbs, but they were irrevocably damaged and never would grow into productive hens. Whenever his grandfather found a bird that Michael had spared, he would scold him. “Michael, these birds are suffering and have to be put out of their misery. Besides, they will eat our feed, but they’ll never lay an egg. They’ve got to go. Period.” It was pure farm economics.
Ever obedient, Michael did what he was told—even unpleasant things. That also included learning how to turn off his feelings, how to separate himself from what he was doing. “Very early, killing became an accepted pattern,” Dr. Borden testified at Michael’s 1987 trial, “a kind of brutalized killing of animals, chickens . . . became his thing.”
“I learned how to do unpleasant things that I didn’t want to do, but had to be done,” Michael remembered. “I guess that’s when I learned how to turn off my feelings.”
Even in high school, only Michael was given the job of culling the chicks; Michael’s mother wouldn’t let the others kill the birds because they found it too upsetting. As he got older, Michael was also the butcher of young roosters in the flock. Although the day-old chicks are sexed at the hatchery, some male birds were always mixed in—as many as 2 percent when the sexing got sloppy. At about ten to twelve weeks, when the roosters’ combs would start to grow, they were singled out and killed. Michael would round them up on a weekend and bring them home to butcher for the meat. “Dad was usually at work, so I had to kill them. I’d skin them, cut off the legs and breast, and cut out the heart and liver. . . . I got pretty good at it. I could kill and butcher a rooster so fast that I could take out his heart which would still be beating in the palm of my hand,” he bragged.
“[Michael] was the designated killer of the family. No one else wanted the job. His sisters were spared; the brother avoided it,” Dr. Borden asserted. “That became so much part of his life that he didn’t make anything of it. He was beyond repulsion.”
I was haunted by the idea of an eight-year-old boy killing the chickens he had been caring for. Dr. Borden suggested that learning to kill without emotion was a skill that would later allow the young adult Michael to separate himself from the murders he was committing. It was the monster who raped and murdered, not Michael the man. Almost all of the psychiatrists I talked to brought up the chicken culling as significant, but none of them could definitively say that this early experience caused him to kill the women. Dr. Berlin noted the similarities in the way the women and the chicks were killed and ruminated, “So the question is did [killing the chickens] eroticize him? He doesn’t say that himself. Did it simply desensitize him to the idea of taking life by doing that? Again, we are left with more questions than answers.”
Like the psychiatrists who evaluated him, Michael also didn’t know the answer. “There could be a connection. I honestly don’t know.” Yet he was tempted to accept it or any other reasonable hypothesis as proof of his mental illness and theorized, “I think it came in handy later on when I killed. I turned off everything inside of me and allowed it to happen.” He wanted to understand how he became a killer. As he reminded me several times, often sobbing, “I didn’t wake up one day and decide to be a serial killer. I would have done anything for it to turn out differently.”
• • •
Michael worked on the farm while his elementary school classmates were playing Little League and building tree houses. Although it was easy for him to focus on his farmwork, he was hyperactive, impulsive, and disruptive at home and even worse at school. He wet his bed until he was twelve, walked in his sleep, and suffered from nightmares and night terrors.
This behavior, while distressing, may not connect directly with the violence of Michael’s later life. “There’s a depressive rage in children which is expressed in hyperactivity,” explained Dr. Borden. “The child feels mad and bad. The feelings, the impulses get expressed in a more disorganized way, in emotional behavior, in distractibility, in restlessness. It’s discharged in action. That’s what little kids are: they are action. They don’t think.” Many other biological differences have been identified as contributing to hyperactivity since Dr. Borden explained his diagnosis to me, and some psychological experts would now disagree with Dr. Borden’s characterization of hyperactivity as being attributed to a depressive rage.
There were aspects of his play that were possibly more relevant. By the time he was ten years old, Michael had developed an active fantasy life. In it, he was a Superman-like character, disguised as Clark Kent, who would rescue damsels in distress and then take them to his harem (a barn on the farm). There in his private lair, all the women would surrender to him and worship him. Michael said “there was nothing overtly sexual” in the fantasies he had as a young boy. “I don’t know when it changed—probably around puberty when I started to masturbate.”
Dr. Cegalis said that from this early age, Michael had an aberrant fusion of aggression and sexuality. The result was violence. He said this stemmed from his need for approval and love from his mother. Rejection by his
mother or a girlfriend “precipitated enough rage, enough anger for Mr. Ross to act out those impulses.”
At twelve, he began undressing and fondling young neighborhood girls. Teresa Cross (not her real name), who was six years younger than Michael, lived near his grandparents’ house. “I would lure her into the woods between my house and my grandparents’.” Once out of sight, he would get her to take off her clothes and “I would undress and rub my penis against her, but I never attempted to penetrate her or anything.” Teresa eventually told her mother, who confronted Pat Ross with the crime. Mortified and angry, Pat and Dan marched Michael over to the Cross house and offered him up for a beating, but Teresa’s parents didn’t want to take part in the punishment. Instead, Michael was sent to the woodpile to find a stick so that Dan could carry out the sentence. “I got the tar whipped out of me.” Perhaps more painful to Michael than the beating was that he was also forbidden to go near the Cross house or his grandfather’s coops, because his parents felt he could not be trusted anywhere near the little girl. That was the end of his job minding the flock at his grandfather’s farm; he began working on the main farm, where his father could keep an eye on him. “That job meant a lot to me, then, because I was responsible for taking care of the chickens. I was downgraded to flunky, and I had to rework my way up. I think it was taking away the responsibility that hurt the most.”
Resentful toward Teresa and her family, he “snuck over to their house after dark and cut their clotheslines. . . . I know it don’t make any sense. They didn’t do anything, but in my mind, they deserved to be punished too.” At twelve years old, he didn’t think what he had done was wrong, but his embarrassment about both his molestation of Teresa and his revenge on her parents was apparent when he recounted the story.
Pat took Michael to the family doctor, who suggested that his hyperactivity was a large part of the problem. Michael had often been in trouble for “impulsively blurting out inappropriate (often angry or lewd) statements and jokes.” In elementary school, he had a reputation for being disruptive and unruly. He recalled that his fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Post, met him at the bus on the first day of school and marched him down to the classroom, where he was shown his assigned seat and told what was expected of him in terms of classroom decorum. “I was a big troublemaker in school until I started taking Ritalin. I had a short attention span and was a smart aleck, not a bad dude. . . . I got into very few fights because I’d get in trouble at home. As punishment, I split a lot of wood, and I got my bottom tanned a lot.”
The doctor assured Michael’s parents that they shouldn’t be concerned about the fondling, because Michael, who was at the beginning of puberty, was just going through a phase. The pediatrician prescribed Ritalin, a mild central nervous system stimulant widely used to help children with attention deficit disorder (now called attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD) or minimal brain dysfunction. His grades improved from Cs and Ds to mostly As. However, according to Dr. Cegalis, he also had “marked mood changes during that period including depressed periods.” Both can be side effects of Ritalin.
Taking Ritalin embarrassed Michael. He took a dose three times a day, at home and at school, for six years. Trying to make light of it, he would joke, “Gotta take my uppers and my downers,” as he popped one of the pills. But to Michael taking Ritalin was an admission that he was weak.
“The Ritalin was introduced at a critical point and kind of sealed things over. . . . It provided control of these underlying problems, these impulses,” said Dr. Borden. “So you couldn’t see it from the outside. You had Ritalin and you had a very controlling mother—both of those factors, strong factors—concealing what was an evolving mental illness.” Dr. Borden said that the Ritalin hid Michael’s underlying impulsivity and psychological problems and allowed them to go untreated and even get worse.
The Physicians’ Desk Reference at the time recommended that Ritalin, or methylphenidate, periodically be discontinued under a doctor’s care so that the condition can be reassessed. “Drug treatment should not and need not be indefinite and usually may be discontinued after puberty.” However, for reasons he couldn’t explain, Michael had taken the drug long after puberty and had neither been carefully monitored nor periodically taken off the medication.
Ritalin is a stimulant. It increases the levels of dopamine and noradrenalin, both natural chemicals in the brain, in parts of the brain that control the area of attention and behavior but are underactive. The International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology has urged the FDA to restrict the use of these drugs on children due to a bevy of problems—overprescription, addiction, and various neurological and cardiovascular side effects.
Michael’s doctor was correct about the calming effect of Ritalin but wrong about its effects on Michael’s sexual fantasies. He masturbated obsessively, sometimes several times a day. “My first recollection of masturbation was in seventh grade. I had a crush on my homeroom teacher, Mrs. Penny,” who taught home economics. “I used to hold my pillow between my legs, and rubbing against the bed, I would ejaculate on the pillow. After a while, my mother noticed the yellow stains on the pillowcases after the wash,” he said. She was so angry that “from then on I was only allowed to use the old set of sheets for my bed.” Pat began to try to sneak up on Michael if she suspected he might be masturbating. “If I was upstairs in my bedroom too long, she would try to tiptoe up the stairs to catch me in the act,” he recalled. However, the old farmhouse’s creaky stairs gave him fair warning.
Michael’s obsessive masturbating was surpassed only by his mother’s obsession to stop him because it was the one part of his life that she couldn’t control. While he was at school, she found a pair of his stained underpants hidden under his bed. Michael told psychiatrists that she met him at the door with the pants in hand. “‘Found these in your room,’” she said with “a tone that meant she was going for the emotional jugular. I knew I was in trouble. She made me wear them on my head all afternoon. But it didn’t bother me as much as she had hoped,” primarily because his siblings and even his father thought the stains were from his bed-wetting.
When the underpants punishment didn’t work, Pat berated him. She ridiculed him in front of everyone. She made his proclivities the subject of dinnertime conversation. On his birthday, just before his senior year in high school, his sister Tina gave him a T-shirt with OFFICIAL CHICKEN CHOKER printed on the front. “I’m sure that she wasn’t aware of the pun to masturbation, but I suspect that my mother was and helped her pick it out.” Michael pretended to like the present but quickly burned the shirt in the garbage. Yet no name-calling and no amount of humiliation could stop his fantasies and his need for sexual release. He couldn’t fall asleep without masturbating, and so it continued to be his nightly ritual.
“I hated my mother in high school. I remember during the summer after my senior year, I was counting the days. I had ninety-three days, ninety-two days, and I was crossing them off the calendar. I couldn’t wait to get away from her.”
Michael said “the climax of [his] mother’s obsession” came after he left for college. She pulled the mattress off his bed, dragged it out of his room and down the stairs, and threw it into the backyard. “She doused it with gasoline and burned it. I wasn’t there to witness the grand event, but I understand that she made quite a show of it,” Michael told me, but he also said that his siblings may have made up the story to tease him.
Dr. Borden said that the combination of Michael’s symptoms—hyperactivity, bed-wetting, sleep disturbances, and fantasies associated with compulsive masturbation—indicates “a substantial mental illness, mental disturbance in a child.”
• • •
Besides doing household chores, the Ross children worked on the farm, and their hours and hourly wages increased as they got older. Every day after school, they walked to Eggs, Inc. directly from the school bus and worked until dinner. On weekends and during the s
ummer, they worked from eight until four or five. “I worked the most hours,” Michael proclaimed proudly, “a minimum of thirty hours per week and sometimes as much as seventy hours a week in the summer.”
Eggs, Inc. consisted of four buildings, each housing twenty-five to thirty thousand chickens. The buildings were divided into four rows of cages, five birds to a cage, and designed to make egg collection fully automated. After an egg was laid, it would roll down the slanted floor of the cage onto a conveyor belt and at the end of the room to a cross belt. At the end of the conveyor belt was the egg room, where the eggs were packed, stored in a cooler, and sold.
Every day, the one hundred thousand birds at the farm ate eleven tons of grain, drank eight thousand gallons of water, and produced sixteen tons of chicken manure—two truckloads. V-shaped troughs with chains running through pulled the grain along the cages so that the birds could eat anytime. The manure was collected below the cages in pits about a foot deep. A cable system of scrapers pushed the manure out to the end of the buildings, where it was dumped into barn cleaners and then loaded into a dump truck.
As a rule, the girls worked in the egg room, a rather pleasant place to work by agricultural standards. It was air-conditioned and clean. They helped with egg collection and did minor chores, such as replenishing supplies. The boys took more responsibility for the daily care of the birds and did the dirty work of cleaning out the coops. “We would sweep the aisles and generally keep the indoors clean,” Michael said. “You had to dust off the lightbulbs regularly because the light stimulates egg production because there are no windows in the building. We would keep the motors of the fans clean so that the air kept moving and the birds didn’t suffocate. And there was always something breaking, stuff that needs to be repaired like fan belts or the feeders. If the scrapers broke in one of the manure pits, you’d have to climb in and fix it.” Michael learned carpentry and electrical wiring. “I could fix almost anything. It might not look pretty, but it would work.”
The Man in the Monster Page 8