There was no one in his family to whom he felt he could turn for advice. He certainly wasn’t going to tell his mother. So he went to Pete Wolak. As usual, at Christmas Michael offered to give Pete a hand with some of his chores. He desperately wanted to tell Pete about his problem, but he was too embarrassed and ashamed to explain the situation. What would Pete and Frances think of him if they knew that he had gotten a girl pregnant?
As the two crossed the parking lot at the Ross farm on their way to the fields where Pete kept some of his cattle, Michael couldn’t hold it in anymore. “I’m thinking of dropping out of college,” he blurted out.
Pete stopped and looked at him. “Turn sideways,” he said, motioning to Michael to show him his profile. Michael thought it an odd request but shrugged and obliged his friend.
“No. I don’t see a hole in your head,” Wolak said.
Michael laughed. “I knew then that I had to go back, but it was never the same with Rachel.”
In January when they returned from break, Rachel announced that she had had an abortion. They had agreed it was the only alternative, but he had not expected her to do it over break. On one level, he was relieved. The problem had been solved; there were no more choices to make. But on another level, he was ashamed because he had run away from the situation and left Rachel to fend for herself. “I should have been there for her. I should have helped her financially. But she never asked, and I never offered,” he told me. He felt he had not done the honorable thing, as his father had.
It was more than the two nineteen-year-olds could handle. Although he loved Rachel, he felt awkward around her and started to avoid her. “I can only imagine what she thought of me. Our relationship was never the same after that. She was the best woman I ever had, and I screwed it up big time.”
Rachel and Michael didn’t officially break up until the beginning of their junior year, but he soon was seeing other women on the side. “She wanted to join the Air Force and had to sign her four-year commitment papers,” he said. “I told her that I didn’t want to wait four years for a wife.” It was just an excuse, because soon Michael was dating three or four different women at once but not telling Rachel. He suspected she was seeing other men as well, but neither of them confessed to the other. “I always have to wonder what would have happened if I had married Rachel. She was good for me.” But he rationalized the outcome: “My only consolation is that because we didn’t get married, she didn’t know anything about my sickness.”
In the nine months between the abortion and the breakup, Michael’s sexual fantasies had taken a darker turn. They became more and more aggressive and coercive. “Although I wouldn’t hurt anyone, the theme was basically the same,” he told me. “I would get a woman into a situation where I was in control, convince her—sometimes using aggressive behavior—to have sex with me. She would struggle at first, but I would win her over in the end, and she would give herself willingly to me because of my sexual prowess.” Eventually, degrading the women became more important than winning them over. These were probably his earliest true rape fantasies. Michael wondered whether the unwanted pregnancy and the tension it created in his relationship with Rachel might have been enough to induce his aberrant fantasies.
During the next two years, his noxious fantasies increased, and by the second semester of senior year, he couldn’t get them out of his head. They filled his mind when he was awake, and they became his ugly dreams when he slept. The urges grew even stronger and more frequent. Even masturbation provided only a minor relief to the turmoil in his mind and his constant need for sexual release.
SUMMER 1978
When summer came, Michael headed back to Brooklyn to work on the farm. His relationship with his mother had improved while he was away; he no longer hated her as he had in high school. But their relationship quickly deteriorated to what it had been as soon as he moved back into the house.
Other than Pete and Frances Wolak, Michael actually felt closest to Charlie Brown, the family dog. She had been Michael’s best friend since Ned had died when Michael was eight. Charlie Brown was technically Kenny’s dog, but each of the Ross men claimed the dog as his own. Kenny, the sibling to whom Michael was least close, had named the female dog after the cartoon character because, as Michael remembers, Kenny was obsessed with him. Dan Ross felt the dog was his because when the kids were in school, she followed him around the farm. But Michael was sure that he was the dog’s best friend. When there was a thunderstorm, she would go into his room. “I was the only one who would comfort her. The rest of them would kick her out of their rooms.”
Whoever the rightful master was, when Michael was around, he and Charlie Brown were inseparable. She would even help him with his work, herding escaping chickens, gently catching them in her mouth, and dropping them at Michael’s feet. When Michael had a free moment, he and the dog would walk in the woods or go to his grandfather’s pond to hunt frogs. She didn’t eat them; she just caught them and then let them go. As she got older and started going blind, he would point out the frogs, and she’d catch them when they jumped out.
By the time Michael went to Cornell, Charlie Brown was also going deaf, and when he returned home the next summer, he was shocked to see how much she had aged. So when his mother told him that the dog was very ill, couldn’t keep food down, and needed to be put out of her misery, Michael believed her. There was actually nothing wrong with Charlie Brown except old age, but Michael later believed that his mother must have decided to punish him for some unknown transgression. Perhaps it was simply a reminder of who ran the house or that she was just tired of the poor old dog. Thinking back, he couldn’t come up with a reason why she wanted to be rid of the dog, but “I can’t figure out the reasons why my mother did a lot of things.” Whatever her motivation, Pat ordered Michael to take Charlie Brown up to his grandfather’s house, get his shotgun, and shoot her. Dutifully, Michael trudged up the familiar hill on Tatnic Road, but his grandfather had more sense and refused to turn over the gun. He told Michael he was a fool for ever considering such a thing. “I don’t think I could have done it anyway,” Michael admitted.
Not to be defeated in her mission, Pat had another solution. “Take the dog up to Dr. Sherman’s and have him put her to sleep.” Michael could see that she was rapidly losing patience. Again, he complied, believing he was doing the right thing. He didn’t want the dog to suffer. It wasn’t what he wanted, but like culling the chicks, it was his job. It also was an eerie foreshadowing of the future.
Occasionally while in high school, Michael had worked at the vet’s, and so he was allowed to hold the dog as Dr. Sherman gave her the fatal injection. “She died in my arms,” he remembered sadly. When he arrived home, he found his father and siblings furious. “You idiot,” they screamed accusingly. “There was nothing wrong with Charlie Brown. You killed the dog for no reason.” Instinctively, he knew they were right. His mother had duped him into killing the pet he loved.
Devastated, Michael wanted to bury his friend in the backyard, but his mother would not allow it. She told him to throw the dog in the pits where dead chicken carcasses were thrown. Not wanting to incur his mother’s wrath, he obeyed, but returned every day for weeks to be with the dead dog and watch as her body decomposed. It would become his ritual of penitence.
FALL 1979
Within days of his final breakup with Rachel, Michael had found someone else. It happened the following Thursday night at a Future Farmers of America meeting. As he sat on a bench, working on a farm appraisal assignment, Betsy (her name has been changed), a petite brunette wearing glasses, came in and sat down next to him. “I was immediately attracted to her beauty. I don’t know if I truly believe in love at first sight, but I felt a strong attraction to Betsy from the first time I saw her. I had just broken up with Rachel, so I was open to the idea of a new relationship.” As he sat next to her, he tried to look busy working with the written formulas that he had lear
ned only a few hours earlier. “I had no idea what I was doing, but I pretended to know exactly what I was doing.” He told her he was estimating the value of a farm. She lived on a dairy farm and immediately became curious. “Betsy asked me some questions about my calculations, and I answered with confidence, though I suspect now that my answers, while sounding good, were complete rubbish. It didn’t matter, because it gave us something to talk about.”
At nine o’clock, when the meeting ended, Michael asked if she would like him to walk her home to her dorm on the east side of the campus. After realizing that she was a freshman, he also offered to give her a tour of the huge campus. Taking advantage of the clear late-summer night, he took her over to Beebe Lake. On the far side of the lake is a stone footbridge where they paused to watch a group of divers snorkeling beneath them.
It was dark, but they could easily see with the aid of the full moon. Because Betsy was in no hurry to get back to her dorm, Michael took her down Thurston Avenue to the Alpha Zeta fraternity house, but they didn’t go inside. Instead they turned left and walked to the suspension bridge high above the fabled gorge with its waterfalls flowing into Cayuga Lake. Halfway across, he paused to tell her the famous myth of that bridge, one of several that spans the famous gorge. As the story goes, the bridge was designed as a class project by a Cornell engineering student whose professor failed him, claiming the bridge was of such poor design that it would never stand. The student eventually graduated and became a successful engineer, never forgetting the sting of the failing grade. Eventually he came back to Cornell with the original design and built the bridge on his own. The mystery professor allegedly swore that the bridge was unsound and refused to set foot on it. Cornellians have created the tradition that any man and woman who cross the bridge together must kiss in the center, lest the professor be right and the bridge collapse.
“Betsy, completely understanding of the importance of tradition, granted me our first kiss—and several more throughout the course of the evening,” Michael remembered. The next night they went out to dinner and dancing. Around 1:00 or 2:00 A.M., they went back to Michael’s room in the fraternity house. “She seemed nervous, and I asked what was wrong. It took a little prodding, but finally she told me. The previous year she had worked in Washington, D.C., as an intern for a representative from her home district. One night, on her way home to her apartment, she cut through a dark parking lot where she was attacked by a man. He made her perform oral sex on him. I didn’t press for any more details because she was quite upset. She felt that she was damaged goods and that no man would want her once he found out what had happened to her. She thought that I wouldn’t want her. I felt so sorry for her, and I just held her and talked to her. I told her that it didn’t matter and that as far as I was concerned, she was still completely a virgin and would remain a virgin until she decided to give herself to a man. Shortly thereafter, she chose to give herself to me.”
The relationship moved quickly. “My junior year with Betsy was, I believe, the best year of my life. I loved her completely without reservation, and she loved me the same way,” Michael told me. In a matter of days, he had forgotten Rachel and had fallen in love with another woman.
Just before Thanksgiving, Michael had to be hospitalized to remove a cyst in his saliva gland. “The doctor messed up, and I was bleeding into my cheek, which swelled up like a grapefruit. I was in tremendous pain and vomited blood. I had to go back into the operating room to stop the bleeding. I don’t remember much of the day besides the pain, and when I woke up later that night, I was in the intensive-care ward.” Although his pain was gone, the nurses told him that he would have to spend the night in intensive care because he had been operated on twice in one day, and they needed to keep a careful watch over him. Because she wasn’t a relative, Betsy couldn’t visit him, but she was upset and frightened. She wanted him to know how she felt, so she wrote a note and asked the nurse to deliver it. “I wish that I had the actual note now. I carried it in my wallet until 1984 when I was arrested—long after we had broken up and there was no chance of us ever getting back together. It was a love letter, actually. In it she told me how much she loved me and how we would get married, have children, and have our own little farm. It was a blueprint of what our life was supposed to be. I cherished it greatly.”
Touched by the letter, Michael wanted to reciprocate in some way. While he was home for Christmas break, he went to a jewelry store in neighboring Danielson and bought a pre-engagement ring for about $150. After some protracted negotiation with his parents, he was allowed to drive the pick-up truck from the farm to Vermont to visit Betsy. “I gave the ring to Betsy as a Christmas gift. We didn’t actually get engaged or anything. It was just assumed that we would be married.”
That visit to Betsy’s home was the first time that Michael realized how dysfunctional his own family was. “My family wasn’t close at all. In fact, the only person I was close to was my sister Donna. I didn’t understand what a family was until I visited Betsy’s.” He said in his own family, Christmas lasted about an hour. “We opened presents and then it was all over. At Betsy’s it was an all-day thing.” They would open a few presents, do chores, and come back and open some more. It took the entire day. They didn’t give one another big presents. In fact, he remembered that one of Betsy’s mother’s presents was a year’s supply of deodorant. Before Christmas, he had gone down to the Agway store with her mother. “I picked up a little cowbell and said, ‘What’s this?’ and then was laughing and ringing it. Her mother snuck back and bought it for me.” He choked up. “That little bell was given with more love and meant more than anything my family ever gave me.” He put it on a chain and hung it from his rearview mirror.
Michael and Betsy spent more and more time together. Because Betsy had a roommate, the only place they could sleep together was in the fraternity house. Before long they began spending three or four nights a week there, which soon caused a confrontation between Michael and a few of his more conservative brothers. No sanctions were taken against him, but the incident convinced Michael that it was time to move out. In February he and Betsy began looking for an apartment. Off-campus housing was tight in Ithaca, but in March they found an apartment at 109 Wyckoff Avenue and signed a lease for a fall rental.
Sometime in that second year, Betsy changed. Michael later suggested that perhaps both of them began to become more secure—or entrenched—in their personalities. “I think she outgrew me,” he admitted. No longer was Betsy the impressionable freshman who had written the love letter describing their shared dream of life on the farm in Brooklyn. Marriage, kids, and the farm were not enough. She began to think of their future in terms of her own career. She constantly complained about the prospect of being “stuck in Hicksville,” her sardonic term for Brooklyn. The more they talked of marriage, the more she felt that Michael was tying her down. And Michael was no longer the teenage boy infatuated with love. His goal was less about pleasing Betsy and more about protecting what he saw as his vision of a perfect future.
Betsy pushed Michael to agree that after she graduated, they would choose where to live based on who made the highest salary. Half joking, half serious, she’d refer to him as her future “house hubby.” Michael would laugh and shrug it off, but the thought of being forced to follow her career infuriated him. He didn’t want to give in to her competitiveness; he wanted to go back to Brooklyn and take over the farm, while Betsy wanted to become an executive in agribusiness. “If she had said, go with me or we go our separate ways, I would have gone. But I was afraid if I told her, I would have given her the upper hand. That’s what I was afraid of. I didn’t want her to know how much power she had over me, how much I cared. I was madly in love—or I thought I was. Now I think it was infatuation, sexual attraction, and nothing else,” Michael decided. “The problem was that she was too much like my mother. She was too controlling, too competitive.
“I had always dreamed of returning to
the farm. It’s all that I had ever wanted. I had no big dreams. I was going to be the next generation. I was going to build new buildings and make the farm state of the art, as it had been when we started building in the sixties.” But to satisfy Betsy, Michael began interviewing during the fall semester.
Adding to Michael’s turmoil was news that his parents had decided to separate and were in the process of divorce. Michael never knew exactly what prompted the decision but assumed that they just couldn’t stand each other anymore. Both Pat and Dan were telling Michael not to come back to Brooklyn to work at Eggs, Inc. after graduation. “My Dad was pressing me to interview. He said he wanted something better for me, maybe because he was proud of me. I don’t think he understood that I didn’t want anything more than to go back to Brooklyn and settle down and raise a family like he had done.” By Christmas Michael had landed a job with Cargill, Incorporated, one of the largest agricultural conglomerates in the country, in the poultry products division in North Carolina. Betsy was happy. Pat and Dan were pleased. Only Michael was miserable about his success.
Police reports from the time of Michael’s arrest in 1984 reveal that a relative of Pat’s and a few neighbors saw a change in Michael after the divorce. They said he appeared even more hostile toward Pat and blamed her for the divorce, but later he claimed to have no memory of an abrupt shift in his feelings toward her. He simply felt he was twenty-one years old and didn’t have to answer to her anymore. However, the divorce proceedings later became even more upsetting. Pat wanted 50 percent of the farm even if that meant selling it. The prospect of losing what he saw as his future added to the strain on his relationship with Betsy. Now both Betsy and his mother were destroying his dreams.
The Man in the Monster Page 11