Michael laughed when he described fixing the belts. “One time I had to get into one of the manure trucks up to my waist to find a missing part,” he said boastfully. “You just do what you have to do.” Pete Wolak, a neighbor who was a plumber by trade but also farmed, told Michael that “the first thing you should do when you went into a barn was to pick up some manure and rub it on your hands. Then you won’t worry about getting dirty.”
The demands of their daily work schedule left little time for anything else. “The Ross kids didn’t play; they worked,” said Frances Wolak, Pete’s wife. The Wolaks were the only two people in Brooklyn who would talk to me or any other reporter about Michael. They said that the Ross children’s only extracurricular activity was Future Farmers of America. Michael never played any team sports because he didn’t have time for them. They rarely went to movies or other normal high school activities. Pat made sure that they did their homework and worked hard in school. It was a nonnegotiable fact of life.
“None of us was able to have friendships. We couldn’t have friends over to the house and stuff like that,” said his sister Donna at Michael’s first trial. Both Tina and Donna testified during the penalty phase, trying to explain Michael’s home life so that he might not get the death penalty. “[Mom] made it clear that we were not allowed to have friends over. She would humiliate us in front of them, and it just became a lot easier not to have friends. . . . When I had a friend over one time when I was nine or ten, everything was going fine. We were outside [in] the front yard, and all of a sudden my mom just changed and told us that [my friend] was going home and put us in the car and brought the girl home.” Dating was a virtual impossibility. During his four years in high school, Michael went out only once or twice and never to a dance or prom. Pat made borrowing the car or meeting curfew too difficult. “I was under my mother’s thumb. Dating wasn’t something I could do.”
In his 1985 report for the defense, Dr. Cegalis concluded that this isolation, coupled with Michael’s “incredibly poor nurturance, including extreme physical harshness, constant criticism, and rejection by parents” led to a deep-seated paranoia. Michael did not have an ally inside or outside the family and did not receive parental acceptance or reward. His internalized images of childhood were harsh, if not brutal, and “formed the basis of Michael’s tortured and torturing adult personality.”
Pat has never spoken publicly about Michael since his arrest. Her need to control her children may have resulted from her desire to make sure that her children got more out of life than she had; she didn’t want them to make the same mistakes. Or maybe she was simply bitter about her own life. Maybe feeling trapped on the farm drove her to imprison her children as well. We cannot know for sure.
Despite all of this, Michael thought he was happy, but that was because he had no other reference point. He didn’t know what it was like to be a part of a loving family. He looked up to his father, and so, like his father, he became totally absorbed in his work at the farm. While still in high school, Michael was made a vice president of the corporation and given a 10 percent share in the business. Farming was to be his life, as it had been his father’s and grandfather’s. After college, his plan was to return to Brooklyn to take over Eggs, Inc., make it state of the art, and become the “main rooster,” as he called it. He reminisced. “I thought Brooklyn was a great place to raise a family. It was kind of rural. It was just a good place. I thought living on a farm was good for children; it teaches you values, like hard work. I liked the lifestyle. It’s a hard life, but I think it taught me a lot of good things. Like you have to get up and feed the chickens every day. Just because you don’t want to get up in the morning, you can’t stay in bed. You got to get up and do what has to be done. And if a piece of equipment is broke, and it’s four o’clock in the afternoon and it’s quitting time, and the chickens ain’t been fed, that means you’re gonna miss your supper because you got to be sure the chickens get fed before you get fed.” He considered himself indispensable. “My dad knew that if he took a weekend off and was going somewhere, I would make sure that the eggs would be packed, and the chickens would be fed, and everything would get done. No matter what happened, I would be able to take care of it one way or the other. And there’ve been some times”—he chuckled—“when I’ve come up with some very creative solutions. But he knew he could count on me.”
Pete Wolak was a father figure for Michael. He kept about forty head of cattle, some on his farm on South Street in Brooklyn and some on the property adjacent to the Ross farm. In his spare time, Michael would help Pete with farm chores, from plowing, planting, and harvesting corn and hay to butchering cattle and hogs. Pete tried to give him money—even stuck cash into his pocket or truck, but Michael would always put it back in the jar in the kitchen where the Wolaks kept cash. Pete and Frances would treat him to a roast beef dinner a couple of times a month.
Pete is a man of few words, but it was clear how much he loved Michael even after what he had done. “Michael was the perfect all-American farm boy. Any father would have been proud to call him son,” he said, his eyes welling up with tears.
More than a decade after Michael had been arrested, Frances still couldn’t understand how Michael had raped and murdered anyone, never mind eight women. “I remember the day he was arrested,” she said. “I went out to get the paper and couldn’t believe it.” She said she ran in to tell Pete. “I thought, ‘It could have been me that he killed.’”
I told her that he never killed anyone he knew and he certainly would never have hurt her, because they were so close. “I didn’t think so, but you never know. Who would have ever thought that someone like Michael could have done that?” Michael wrote to them often from prison, and they wrote back when they had time.
“I still don’t believe it,” Frances said. “He was such a nice boy.”
DECEMBER 1976
Pat Ross pulled her car up close to coop three at the farm. She had arrived at 4:45 P.M., fifteen minutes before quitting time, and Michael was still inside cleaning out the coop. She hurried inside, out of the December dark and cold.
“You’re here early,” Michael said trying not to make eye contact or upset her as he continued sweeping. He never knew whether to start a conversation with his mother or to ignore her, because either was just as likely to set her off. But this time he’d decided to speak to her to make sure she knew he had a few more minutes to finish his chores.
“Got something for you,” she said, holding up an envelope with a return address from Cornell University.
He grabbed it and sighed. It was thin. It wasn’t even a regular letter-size envelope, and he could feel that there was nothing but a card inside. Every high-school senior knows that a thin letter is a rejection letter, so Michael shoved the unopened letter into his overall pocket, trying not to show his disappointment. He had dreamed of going to college to study agriculture. It had been in the back of his mind at every livestock fair, at Future Farmers of America meetings, and every time he had gone to the bank to deposit his farm wages into his college fund, which then totaled more than ten thousand dollars. He had saved his first hundred dollars by the time he was eight years old and his first thousand by ten. “Everything went straight into the bank. We weren’t allowed to use our wages for spending money,” Michael explained.
Applying himself just as much at school as on the farm, Michael had quietly impressed his teachers. “Ross was an exceptional student for two reasons: First of all, he was an academically gifted student; second of all, he was a hard worker. He really liked to be the number-one person in class,” said Richard Colson, the vocational agriculture teacher at Killingly High, in court testimony. “He was quiet, shy, withdrawn to some extent. But he related very well to his teachers, more so than perhaps his peers.”
During his junior year, Michael decided that Cornell, the alma mater of his uncle Quentin, was his first choice and that he would apply early to t
he College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Given his good grades and decent board scores, he dreamed that he just might have a chance of getting accepted. Now he imagined he would have to apply to other schools, like Penn State or, if worse came to worst, settle for the University of Connecticut at Storrs, which, in Michael’s mind, was too close to home.
“Aren’t you going to open it?” asked Pat impatiently.
“What’s the use? It’s obviously a rejection.”
“You don’t know until you open it,” she insisted, not telling her son that she had already held the envelope up to the light and knew he had been accepted. “Open it and read it to me.”
Grudgingly, he opened it and soon let out a cry of joy as he read the news announcing that he had been admitted to the school of agriculture as a member of the class of 1981. Pat Ross was pleased with her son and actually allowed him to openly celebrate his acceptance to Cornell. Maybe she was sharing in his glory. She was the one who kept him home working on the farm and doing his homework rather than wasting time on dates or dances—and it had paid off.
Now that he was about to go to college, Michael wanted to rid himself of his crutch, Ritalin. Convinced that he didn’t need it, he took himself off the drug during the winter of his senior year in high school—without consulting his family physician or his parents. What he didn’t know was that the potential consequences of discontinuing the drug after such a long time were significant. He would have less internal control of his feelings, of his thinking, of his ability to concentrate and study, of his organizational ability, and of the overall maintenance of his life. Without the Ritalin, the areas of the brain that control attention and behavior would be underactive because there would be lower levels of dopamine and noradrenalin produced. Michael should have been weaned off the medication and monitored, because he had been taking it for six years. He had no idea how he would feel without it. On the eve of attending college, he released himself from both Ritalin and his mother’s dominance.
After interviewing Dr. Borden and Dr. Berlin several times, watching hours of psychological evaluation by Dr. Zonana, reading the psychological reports of several doctors and the trial testimony, there was little doubt in my mind that Michael was mentally ill. In all of the psychiatric testimony that had been introduced at innumerable hearings, the prosecution had never put on any witness or introduced one report refuting Michael’s diagnoses. Prosecutors had tried to challenge defense witnesses, but there was not one expert who had ever disagreed that Michael was a sexual sadist with other personality disorders. The question that remained was whether his mental illness alone was enough to cause him to murder eight women. It took several years of piecing together all the information for me to decide. The answer did not lie solely in his childhood.
8
NORTHERN CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION
MARCH 1996
On March 21, 1996, I met Michael Ross face-to-face for the first time. By then I had talked to him many dozens of times on the phone, and he had recounted details about his arrest and trial and was beginning to open up about his upbringing and his time at Cornell. Although I had become comfortable talking with Michael on the phone, I was wary of meeting him in person. Originally I had been told that I would have a contact visit, which meant that he and I would be locked in a room together. It’s one thing to be told that someone is taking medication that prevents him from having violent sexual fantasies and suppresses his urge to rape and murder. It is another thing to be absolutely sure that the medicine works when you are about to be locked in a room with him. I was nervous but tried to quell the anxiety with the knowledge that Michael had never killed anyone he knew, only strangers. And when I got to the prison, I learned that we would be talking on phones and be separated by a wall of glass and concrete.
Death row is in a cement fortress known as northern Connecticut’s maximum security prison in the town of Somers—the prison capital of the state, where six other correctional facilities of medium or minimum security levels are located. Until 1995, condemned men were housed across the parking lot in the facility originally named Somers but now known as Osborn. Northern is nicknamed “the birthday cake” because the structure looks as if it is stacked in several layers. Standing in the parking lot on the corner between Osborn and Northern, you might mistakenly judge Osborn as the higher-security prison. It is surrounded by a high fence and double rows of barbed wire. But that impression changes when you enter Northern. The sound—or rather lack of it—is ominous. When you enter an older prison, what strikes you immediately is the noise. It’s deafening. Your ears ring with the slamming of barred gates and cell doors. Voices echo not only up and down the tiers, but also throughout the building. At Northern there is no sound. The cells have no bars but metal doors with small, thick-paned windows that are sealed shut by remote control, burying the sound with the men behind them.
A visitor enters through a door controlled from a command center inside. After passing through metal detectors, you approach a guard station whose officers are invisible behind impenetrable darkened glass. You pass your photo ID through a metal drawer. If your name is on the visitor list, a visitor’s badge is pushed out in the drawer. After a few minutes, an officer opens another steel door by remote control, allowing you to enter a large, austere waiting room that consists of several cold cement benches. Eventually—and sometimes this can be a half hour or more—a guard appears to escort you to your visit. You must first take an elevator—again controlled by the command center—to the second floor. Then you walk down a long windowless corridor, divided in the middle by a riot gate. To pass through, the guard must call on his walkie-talkie and wait for someone to respond. Northern is divided into six pods, three to a side. Each pod contains separate rings of cells that surround a bubbled command center.
It was so clean that the hall floors sparkled. The silence was deceptively peaceful. As an outsider, it may be easy to think it isn’t so bad. They have three square meals a day. It’s probably better than where many of these guys lived before they got here. But these inmates are sealed in their cells twenty-three hours of the day, seven days a week. The lucky ones have jobs mopping the floors of the tier. Even after an hour or so inside, I began to feel trapped.
At that time, death row was located in 1E at the far end of the corridor. However, the location of death row changed several times during the years I visited Michael. For you to enter the visiting area off the row, an officer in the bubble inside the tier must open the door electronically. Once you’re inside, the door is sealed shut, and you have to wait in a cubicle that consists of a cold cement cylinder to sit on, a cement slab connected to the wall that serves as a sort of desk, and a two-way phone. The inmate is escorted into a similar booth on the other side of a virtually soundproof glass window. You are unable to leave the less than four-by-four-foot hermetically sealed cubicle without the permission of the command center.
Yet despite the setting and his yellow prison jumpsuit, the man across from me did not look like a serial killer. Michael looked like the type of person who would offer to carry my groceries. New London Day reporter Karen Clarke had commented to me at the trial, “If I were walking down a dark alley and I heard footsteps behind me and turned around and saw Michael Ross, I’d be relieved.”
Once more he made sure to remind me of his murders. “I have a mental illness, and I couldn’t control myself. But whenever you look at me, I want you to remember that I killed eight women.”
I’m buried in a cold prison. How could I forget? I thought but didn’t say. “I told you before, if you killed one of my children, I would want to kill you with my bare hands. I have a teenage daughter.”
“That was my target age,” he said in an almost statistical way that made me shudder.
“But I would hope that I wouldn’t want the state to kill you or anyone else,” I said. “Even though I might personally have the desire to go and get a gun and shoot the per
son who hurt my child, I can’t imagine getting to the point where I would kill or want the killer to be executed. Two wrongs don’t make a right.” I was being honest, but the conversation unnerved me.
Michael had come to the visit with a stack of folders. Periodically he held up a couple of documents to the glass for me to read. I asked a few questions, filling in details on topics raised in earlier conversations. The purpose of the visit was more for fact-checking than it was for an interview. I wasn’t allowed to tape-record the conversation because recorders are not allowed in the facility, and talking on the wall phone made writing difficult. But I watched him closely as we spoke.
When he took out the papers from the collapsible folder, his hands shook. He was nervous, but I don’t think it was because he was worried about what I would write about him. It was apparent that he desperately wanted me to like him. He was paranoid about having our conversations taped by the prison, so he had me write some questions on a piece of paper so he could see and answer. He tried to lighten the conversation whenever it got serious; he continually joked—usually gallows humor—trying to make me laugh, trying to put me at ease. “So how do you like my place here?”
The concrete cylinder that I was sitting on was not only hard, but also cold. “Your decorator seems to be trying to discourage guests. This is the most uncomfortable thing I ever sat on.”
“My room’s a little homier, but I doubt that they’d let us visit in there,” he joked.
The Man in the Monster Page 9