He wanted to chat about my life, deflecting attention away from his own. “How are the twins?” “How was the drive?” “Did they give you any trouble getting in here?”
“They aren’t a very friendly lot downstairs. Hardly anyone speaks to you with more than a syllable or two. I felt like I was being fitted for a cell.”
“Tell me about it. I live with this 24/7.”
I knew I would have only a short time, so I finally had to steer the subject back to his reasons for accepting a death sentence. The mood suddenly changed, and he began to cry. He repeated the reasons. “I have to do it. There’s no other way. I owe it to the families of my victims.”
“What about your family?” I asked. Other than reading court documents and letters he wrote me, we’d never really discussed his relationship with his family. I knew they didn’t visit him or call, but he hadn’t told me much about his relationship with his parents and siblings.
“For the most part, I don’t think they’ll miss me.”
“Won’t your father and your aunt miss you? They visit.”
“I see my father maybe once a year at the most, and my aunt only comes once in a while, but it’s not like they are here all the time. I don’t even talk much. It would probably be a relief to them to not have me around.” I thought about all the years that virtually no one called or visited. He’d been in jail for twelve years and on death row for nine. His sisters had come to visit at first, but they had stopped after the trial. He had only one real friend on the row, Bob Breton, who had been convicted of killing family members. Bob was not well educated, but he was friendly and depended on Michael, whose loneliness was painful to witness.
Having visited a few supermax prisons, I could understand his feelings about the oppressiveness of Northern. The first time I visited a supermax was in Waynesville, Pennsylvania. I was startled by the sense of being inside a tomb. The few windows don’t open. It made me think of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Premature Burial,” in which the narrator finds that he has been buried alive by mistake.
At Northern, Michael was locked up for twenty-three hours a day in an eight-by-ten-foot cell. He was allowed out to shower two or three times a week and for a few hours of recreation in what he referred to as a cage or dog run. At Somers, death row inmates had been allowed to be together for meals and recreation. Although death row was deep inside Somers, multiple riot doors from the entrance, it was not a hermetically sealed tomb like at Northern. There were bars on the cells rather than solid doors with small windows, so prisoners could talk to one another and—if no one noticed—pass things to one another. The tier of death row cells at Somers faced large windows to the outside, bringing in lots of light—as well as cold in the winter and heat in the summer. Probably the most notable difference was the staff. Even to the visitor, the guards at Northern were intimidating and surly; the guards at Somers were much friendlier and, according to Michael, treated the inmates like human beings. I was beginning to understand why death would be a relief.
On another visit to Northern, I arrived late in the day, near the end of a shift, and after the visit, I was left locked in a concrete and glass visiting room for a couple of hours beyond the time I was scheduled to leave. My only communication was a buzzer to signal that I wanted to leave, but it was ignored for one long, excruciating hour while the guards fed the prisoners and conducted a prisoner count, as they did every day at shift change. I didn’t know why they were ignoring me. I began to experience total claustrophobia.
As I stood waiting by the sealed door, I began to panic. I waited, beginning to think that the guards were ignoring me on purpose. In my mind, they were sitting in the command center laughing at me. I imagined being trapped in that visiting area for hours, days. The air-conditioning made it uncomfortably cold, yet I was sweating. Finally the door swished open and a guard led me out.
Michael later explained to me what had actually happened. There had been a shift change, which meant a prisoner count, followed by dinner, so they didn’t have anyone to escort me out. He told me the daily schedule, and I made sure I never again made the mistake of visiting when I might get trapped inside. I never forgot the feeling of freedom that I experienced when I was outside the prison and in my car.
In the hour we spent together that first day, Michael and I began to develop a rapport. I had a sense of what John Gilmartin and Ann Cole saw in him. Michael did not seem like the beast that Satti had described at trial. He did not seem evil. He showed empathy when he sensed that I felt awkward. He often asked about my family. I had told him about them because there was no way I could talk on the phone at home without him knowing I had toddlers—even when I tried to shut the door to my little office, because it was right off the playroom.
“What’s all that racket?” he had asked.
“That’s Hannah and James playing.”
“They make a lot of noise. I don’t think I ever made that much noise.”
“You weren’t a twin.”
He laughed, he cried, he was friendly. There was no sign of the “monster.” The serial killer would never be revealed to me in person—only on paper. The Depo-Provera had caged the monster somewhere deep inside the man.
9
CORNELL UNIVERSITY
EARLY SEPTEMBER 1977
The Ross family—Michael, his mother, and grandfather—arrived in Ithaca, New York, the night before Cornell’s freshman orientation after a five-hour drive from Brooklyn. They stayed in a motel on the outskirts of the city until Michael could move into his dorm.
University Hall number four was the cheapest dorm, located down the hill from the agriculture school on the southern edge of the campus. Michael’s saved farm wages were paying his college tuition and his room and board, so he took extra care to pinch his pennies. U-Hall-4 was a four-story building with alternating floors of men and women. The two top floors were designated study floors with strict rules about noise. Michael had always been a dedicated student and requested the third floor, the men’s study floor.
After he had unloaded all his luggage, he started to look through all the piles of papers that he had been given when he checked in. “I guess that I got tied up with the papers, because later I looked up and noticed that everyone was gone. My grandfather would later say that I couldn’t wait for them to go, and I totally ignored them. The truth was that I was excited and was reading about registration, classes, books, and a million other details of campus life.” For the first time in his life, he was free. Free of farm chores. Free of rules and restrictions. Free of his mother.
Yet another part of Michael found it difficult to separate from the people who were important to him—especially his mother. Without her iron-fisted rule, he sometimes felt lost. If he found himself lonely or faced with a problem, he would call home, and she invariably would be the one who answered the phone. He feared, even hated her at times, but he also loved and needed her. As much as he wanted to get away from her when he was home, he got closer to her while he was in college. “It don’t make sense, but especially at the beginning of freshman year, I felt like she was the only one I could talk to.” Because of the control she had exerted over him, she had forged the boundaries of his whole world. In many ways, he felt he owed her because she was the one who was responsible for demanding that he do well in school. She could be cruel, but he needed her to be good and loving because she was his mother, and on some level, according to Dr. Borden, he worshipped her.
Tall and lanky at six one and 150 pounds, Michael looked the part of the farm boy. He had an affable manner and a conservative outlook on life. Gun control was un-American. Only lazy people were on welfare. Death should be the penalty for murder. Drugs were for losers, and criminals should not get off on legal technicalities like the exclusionary rule or the insanity plea.
His conservative views, however, were in no way going to impede his social life. He was eager to finall
y get the chance to have fun and date, something he had never been able to do at home. High on Michael’s list of activities was meeting women. A few days after arriving, he took a grocery bag and sneaked around campus snipping flowers from the various gardens, ignoring the prominent signs prohibiting picking. He brought the full bag back to the dorm and passed the flowers out on the women’s floors. In the space of a few hours, he was able to meet most of the women in his dorm and received many grateful pecks on the cheek.
He particularly liked a woman named April, whom he dated on and off during the first semester. She lived in a single on the second floor, and he could see her room from his third-floor window.
After their first meeting, Michael asked April to meet him the next day, at the annual Fun in the Sun festival held on the arts quad. He also had a placement math exam scheduled that afternoon but didn’t realize that the exam was supposed to take three hours until he arrived at the test site. Worried that he would blow his very first college date, he rushed through the exam and finished it in an hour, not even attempting to answer the more difficult questions. He was on time for his date with April but misjudged the importance of the exam. He was placed in a noncredit remedial math class.
Michael worked at dating as compulsively as he did everything else. Excited about the possibility of having a real girlfriend, he would watch from his window and wait for April to return to her room. As soon as he saw her light go on, he would be on the phone, wanting to plan an activity or just talk. April soon tired of Michael’s obsessive calling and even stopped turning on her light when she entered her room in order to avoid his phone calls. Finally he took the hint and moved on to other dates. To his delight, he found that it wasn’t difficult to find someone to accompany him to go dancing or to a movie, and there were weeks when he would see as many as four different women. But none of these first dates ever developed into anything serious.
One of the biggest challenges for Michael in developing relationships was his total lack of social skills and empathy. The Ross household had left him clueless in the realm of interpersonal relationships. He never had anyone he was close to or in whom he could confide. Growing up, he was friends with the Wolaks and to some extent his sister Donna, but he never really shared any intimate thoughts with any of them.
I tried to imagine the eighteen-year-old Michael arriving at Cornell, unsure of how to make friends. That person had come from a home full of people who functioned as a farm business but not as a family. They worked together and ate meals together but not much more. That boy was nothing like the person I had met, who was remorseful, funny, and had spent more than a decade trying to sort out how he had ended up on death row. The Cornell freshman from Brooklyn would never have poured out his shame and allowed himself to show his vulnerability—especially not to a woman.
Michael also felt that everyone at Cornell was wealthy, and he was extremely insecure about his working-class farm background. “I felt like I was deprived, and I didn’t want to be the country bumpkin.” Although he had been known at home as a shy and unassuming boy who didn’t take on airs, he compensated for his insecurity at Cornell by bragging about Eggs, Inc., the family farm. Some people began to avoid him to be spared of his boasting. He would spend money ostentatiously and binge-drink on the weekends. A few times, he woke up lying in a snowbank where he had collapsed on the way home from a fraternity party. “I went a little wild when I wasn’t under my mother’s scrutiny,” he admitted.
For Michael, living with a roommate was especially difficult. He masturbated at least once a day. He had promised himself that he would stop when he got to college, but he couldn’t resist the sexual cravings.
At eighteen, he no longer dreamed about his seventh-grade homeroom teacher, Mrs. Penny, but of young women who could be love slaves in his imaginary harem. Michael’s fantasies were becoming more sexual, but not yet violent. In his fantasies, he told me, he would forcibly abduct women—ostensibly to protect them from some evil—and whisk them back to his lair. The frightened women might be uncooperative at first, but they would soon relax, eternally grateful that he had saved them, and fall madly in love with him. Waiting each night until he was sure his roommate was asleep, Michael would masturbate to his fantasies of sexual domination while in constant fear that he would be caught and humiliated as he had been at home.
College board was expensive, and the food left a lot to be desired, so at the start of the second semester, when one of Michael’s friends asked him if he would like to join a cooking group, he quickly agreed and changed his meal plan. Five or six of his dorm mates got together for Saturday and Sunday dinners, sharing the cost and chores. Michael didn’t cook, but he was an old hand at cleaning up. From the very first dinner, he was drawn to a freshman named Rachel (her name has been changed), an attractive, diminutive engineering student from New York. Just talking to her excited him. After a few meals together, he gathered up enough courage to ask her out.
“I still remember our first date. We met at eight P.M. and went to Ithaca to go dancing—disco was big then. The dancing stopped at one or two A.M., and we spent the rest of the night walking all around Ithaca and talking. We walked by the gorge in the middle of the night, coming up in Collegetown. It was crazy.” After eating breakfast at a diner, he got back to his room at noon the next day and went to sleep after a sixteen-hour first date.
For the next few weeks, they continued seeing each other frequently. In February, Michael’s roommate went home for the weekend. Michael and Rachel began a date at the disco, but this time, rather than walking the streets of Ithaca, they returned to his dorm room.
“I didn’t know at the time—because I didn’t ask—but Rachel was sexually experienced,” Michael said. “I, on the other hand, was about as inexperienced as they come. I was a virgin. I was nervous and apprehensive. I rushed things a bit, which didn’t lend itself to a romantic lovemaking session. I got frustrated and lost my erection. As you might imagine, it was very embarrassing. And though I didn’t say anything to Rachel, I began questioning my manhood.”
Embarrassed, Michael got out of bed, pulled on a pair of cutoff jeans, and left the room. At the end of the hall, he stopped, opened a window, and gasped for air. “Though it seemed like an eternity, I don’t think it was more than a minute or so before Rachel came out of the room. She stood in the doorway, naked except for a sheet she had wrapped around her,” he remembered. “I will never forget how she looked as she held out her hand to me and beckoned me to come back to her.” She took his hand and led him back into his room. It was clear to Rachel by then that Michael was not only a virgin, but also a scared virgin. He didn’t remember what she said, but she gave him confidence, and he said he wasn’t afraid or nervous anymore. “And the rest of the night and throughout the rest of the weekend, we made love several times. She totally owned my heart then, and she was the first woman whom I was truly in love with, and one of only two that I seriously considered asking to marry me.”
Michael had never felt as good about himself. Just as new and exciting as sex was the communication he had with Rachel. For all of his eighteen years, he had never had a friend or family member with whom he could talk. Rachel knew how to put him at ease, whether at the library or taking a walk by Beebe Lake or in bed. She loved him for who he was, not for how much work he could do. He could trust her with his dreams; she never went for his emotional jugular as his mother always did. Rachel had a ready-to-please nature that put Michael in total control.
For sophomore year, Michael moved into the Alpha Zeta fraternity house, and Rachel moved to a one-bedroom off-campus apartment with a roommate. Michael and his friend Bob Davenport had rushed two agriculture fraternities in the fall of their freshman year and received invitations from both. Alpha Zeta is an honors fraternity on most campuses, although not at Cornell at that time. Michael was a member of the local chapter, but not a member of the honors fraternity. About forty men lived in the hous
e, just off campus on Thurston Avenue. “They had to take me,” he chuckled. “My uncle had been in the same fraternity at Cornell, and I was a legacy.”
Every Wednesday was date night at the fraternity house. The brothers dressed in jackets and ties, and dates ate for free at a sit-down dinner. Rachel was always there, and although it was against fire-code regulations to sleep in the main fraternity house (the brothers were supposed to sleep in the dorm attached to the house), the two would routinely spend the night in Michael’s study room. During his sophomore year, they spent three or four nights a week together. “We would normally make love before going to sleep and once again when we woke up in the morning. Rachel also had a habit of waking me up in the middle of the night to make love to her—the only woman I’d ever been with on a regular basis who actually woke me up to make love to her!” Michael wrote me.
That December he was dealt two blows. First, he was put on academic probation because his grade point average had slipped to 1.7. His active love life had dramatically cut into the amount of time he devoted to schoolwork. Just before Christmas break, Rachel had asked him to come over. As he left the house, a fraternity brother who was on the phone and standing near the front door teased him, “What’d ya do? Go and get her pregnant?”
Michael laughed. But when he got to Rachel’s apartment, he realized that there was nothing funny about it. Rachel’s roommate hurried out the door and gave him an accusatory leer. But even then, he was too naive to suspect what was wrong until Rachel sat him down in the living room.
“I’m pregnant,” she announced.
“Are you sure? I don’t get it. We used condoms. How could this happen?” She reminded him of a weekend they had shared when her roommate was away; they hadn’t used contraceptives as religiously as usual. “I handled the entire situation very badly. I guess I was scared. I don’t really know.” He was concerned and told her they would work it out, but “like I did with all of my problems, I ignored it and pretended that it would go away.” The news came just as they were about to go home for the holidays, Rachel to her family, in New York, and Michael to Brooklyn. In the back of his head, he had the notion that he might drop out of school. “I had prepared myself all my life for not dealing with things, locking things out, pretending they didn’t exist.”
The Man in the Monster Page 10