Michael became increasingly withdrawn. During his junior year, he loved going out and dancing. But more and more by his senior year, he wanted to stay home in their apartment. Betsy resented the change.
The pressure of living together was overwhelming. Soon he would graduate, and they would be separated by hundreds of miles. A sense of loneliness and abandonment haunted him. He even began to suspect that she was seeing another man on the side. “Betsy was a flirt,” he said, “and I got suspicious when she said some guy wanted to take pictures of her, but she wouldn’t let me go. She said it would be awkward. But I never did see any of those pictures.”
They fought as the relationship unraveled. On one occasion, Michael was drunk but determined to drive home to Connecticut. Trying to protect him from himself, Betsy hid the car keys. Unbearable anger welled up inside him. He wanted to hurt her, but she had too much power over him. Her love helped to define him; losing Betsy would be like death. So instead of force, he used words, trying to tear at her emotionally, going for the emotional jugular like his mother. “I fantasized forcing my penis in her mouth, making her relive her demons.” Finally, the fight over the keys became so nasty that Betsy got scared and called one of the Alpha Zeta brothers to come to the apartment to help her. It made me uncomfortable knowing about his fantasy—not because of the mention of forced oral sex, but because it was the first indication that he consciously wanted to hurt a woman who was important in his life.
During another fight, he said he actually hit her with an open-hand slap to the face, hard enough to knock off her glasses. “I remember feeling so rotten—angry at myself that I hit her, angry at her for getting me so angry—that I left the apartment and walked around campus,” he told me, ashamed of even remembering the rage. “I think that was one of the first times I stalked a woman.”
In a police interview after Michael was arrested, Betsy said that he had a “violent temper.” She told them that he got so angry on one occasion that he “violently choked her and on another occasion he struck her with his fist across the face.” Another time he got mad about something “petty” and tore their apartment apart. Michael couldn’t remember all his fights with Betsy but conceded that “if she said it happened, it happened.”
In an effort to salvage the relationship, before Christmas Michael secretly purchased an engagement ring for several hundred dollars. “We had looked at engagement rings weeks before and I purchased a ring that she liked,” he remembered. He had given her the impression that he needed more cash to be able to buy the ring. Michael said she expected a ring, but not right away. The drive from Ithaca to Brooklyn took six hours, and he knew that Betsy would often get kind of grouchy during those long drives. “So I put the ring in the glove compartment. Three or four hours into the drive, when she started to get a bit testy, I had her open the glove compartment and find the ring. Needless to say, her mood improved greatly, and we found a secluded place to pull over and make love. I suppose that doesn’t sound very romantic, no formal proposal during a candlelit dinner, but the ring was just a formality. It was my way of hanging on to our relationship. I wanted to do something to hold us together. We got engaged, but we weren’t honest with each other.”
Betsy was aware of the growing problems in their relationship, but she did not know that there was an even greater problem growing within Michael. His fantasies had become increasingly aggressive and sadistic since Rachel’s abortion. Despite his active sex life, he continued to masturbate to the growing violence in his head. “Rape became incorporated into my fantasies after I met Betsy my junior year. I knew firsthand how the rape in Washington had affected her, how she still could get frightened even months and years after the attack,” he remembered. Knowing her fears gave him both a physical and emotional power over her.
Most of the time, sex for Michael was an expression of love, but it also became a power game. He used it to control Betsy. She said he demanded sex from her twice a day. When he was angry or displeased, he would force sex on her. It was his way of punishing her, his way of gaining the upper hand in their relationship. “It was wrong and I wish now that I could tell her that I am sorry,” he lamented. “On occasion, I used sex to hurt her. In my fantasies, sex became a way to degrade a woman. And while I was never as aggressive with Betsy as I was in my fantasies, some of that spilled over into our relationship. There were times when I was angry and wanted to hurt her, more emotionally than physically, but I would only go so far.” He depended on her and needed her, yet she was making him miserable.
As Michael’s anger and frustration with Betsy increased, the fantasies and the urges became a constant torment. Now the fantasies were not only of degradation and rape, but also of murder. “The best way for someone who is not plagued with this problem to understand the obsessive and repetitive nature of these thoughts, urges, and fantasies is to remember a time when you had a song or some catchy tune stuck in your mind, playing over and over and over again, driving you crazy. Even if you like the melody, its constant repetition becomes more than merely annoying. When this happens, the harder you try to push that melody out of your mind, the louder and more persistent it becomes, driving you almost to the point of madness,” he told me. However, it wasn’t a catchy tune playing in Michael’s head, but noxious images of physically and mentally degrading women, of raping and strangling them—images that are nearly impossible for the average person to imagine.
“In my fantasies I did not have to hold back like I did with Betsy, so they continued to grow. Somehow, and I don’t really know how it happened, fantasy spilled out into reality. Stalking was the first step.” Stalking relieved the internal pressure when his relationship with Betsy was tense.
“When I was very agitated, stalking relaxed me. It started out as a game—to follow a woman without her knowing. Afterwards, the incident would feed my masturbation fantasies. Slowly, the game developed into how close I could get to the woman without her knowing. There were times when I got so close that I could have easily grabbed her. Then the game became to see how close I could get to her while thinking of what I could do to her. Then there were times that I deliberately let the woman know that I was following her, and it was such a rush to be able to feel her fear.” All these incidents would later be incorporated into fantasies that he masturbated to. He began to feel as if he were separated from the act of stalking, almost as if he were watching it all happen. This sense of separation from the actual acts might have been the first indication of what Dr. Merikangas would later describe as a fugue-like state or depersonalization disorder, in which reality testing remains intact but one feels as if one were outside oneself or watching a movie rather than participating in the action.
Michael had been in denial about the seriousness of his desire to stalk. He was convinced that it was just a harmless game and that he would never hurt anyone. He said he had no fear of being discovered or recognized. Somehow taking off his glasses and being one of six thousand students made him feel unrecognizable. “As time went on, I had to get closer to them. Like a drug, I needed more and more to gain the same release. From then on, it wasn’t enough just to follow them. I had to frighten them. When I was stalking or masturbating, I craved that feeling. It was as if I could feed on their fear.”
“Finally, I actually grabbed one,” he admitted, although he wasn’t exactly sure when it happened. “It was after dark but probably before midnight. I felt an irresistible impulse to stalk. A young woman left the Agriculture library alone and walked into the parking lot behind the building. I followed her and grabbed her from behind as she turned between two parked cars. I covered her mouth and dragged her to the ground. I remember being frightened at what I had done. I hadn’t planned on grabbing her. I was only supposed to follow her and maybe frighten her by making my presence known. So when I had her on the ground, I didn’t know what to do. I became frightened and ran off into the night.” Although Michael did not rape the woman, he had beg
un to re-create the scenario of Betsy’s attack.
In court testimony, Dr. Borden said that becoming sexually active was the initial trigger for Michael’s “core personality” to come to the surface. “There were serious problems in his . . . psychological structure that has to do with relationships.” Michael had acted out when he reached puberty at thirteen and fondled his neighbor, suggesting that there was “an underlying personality disturbance core.” Dr. Borden said that when he became sexually active, the underlying personality core took over. “It comes out in relationships. It comes out in the interaction, because that provokes and stimulates feelings. That can set the whole thing in motion.” He explained that if a woman was accommodating and “let him dominate her” in the way Rachel did, his mental illness would be controlled and pacified. She was “sexually comforting and built his ego.”
Michael’s fear of losing Betsy was important in understanding his mental illness. “We have a honeymoon period where [Betsy] serves to control him. That relationship keeps him together. Just like his mother kept him together.” He might have resented it, but his mother kept him under her thumb. “A woman can keep him together for a while. If she’s . . . basically accommodating, it can be for a longer period of time. If she’s more like his mother, that’s like a fuse or a trigger for him. It’s like a grenade and the woman is the pin. It arms him, but it controls him. When that pin is pulled, leaves, separates, he’s going to explode.” Betsy was the pin.
The “monster” was strong and powerful, capable of controlling women. Michael, on the other hand, felt weak because he was losing control of Betsy and his future life in Brooklyn. The frustration, powerlessness, and rage that he experienced as his world slipped away only fueled his need to keep the monster alive. He had the same push/pull relationship with the monster that he had with his mother.
Although Michael was becoming aware that he and Betsy were mismatched, he would later object to Dr. Borden or any psychiatrist or observer describing Betsy as any part of the problem. He said he was the problem and insisted she had nothing to do with it.
A few weeks after the first attack, Michael was again in his stalking mode when he followed a woman off campus and down Thurston Avenue toward the Alpha Zeta house. “I grabbed her from behind and dragged her into a grassy area just across the street from the fraternity. The thrill was in the pursuit and in seeing and feeling her terrors as I pulled her off the path. It all happened so quickly.” Almost immediately, he let her go, again without hurting or raping her, and ran off through some nearby woods. These attacks were reported to the Cornell police, who filed reports and did some investigation, but not until after Michael’s arrest in 1984 did they know all had been committed by the same man.
The third attack that spring was even bolder and more aggressive. It was a warm night after dark when Michael felt the urge to stalk. “I followed a woman as she walked towards the Pancake House, a campus eatery in a secluded part of the campus, towards the dorms. As she walked up a slight rise, I grabbed her around the neck, dragged her over a wooden fence, down a hill through some woods to the footpath along Beebe Lake. I walked her along the lake going towards a stone bridge on the far side of the lake, but got frightened when I heard others approaching. I pushed her down a small embankment towards the lake and ran off. If I hadn’t heard the voices, I think I would have raped her.”
10
NEW YORK CITY
WINTER 1996
A few months after I met Michael Ross face-to-face, my husband and I were having dinner with our friends Steve and Michelle at the restaurant in the Metropolitan Opera House. Steve and Michelle were familiar with my work. Hearing that I was now having telephone conversations with a serial killer, Michelle asked why I liked talking to murderers.
This was the conversation I was always trying to avoid. It wasn’t that I liked talking to murderers; it was more that I was willing to listen. “I guess once you do a story about prisons or crime, someone is always calling or writing you about some injustice. It becomes impossible to escape doing more prison stories.”
“If a murderer called me, I’d have no problem hanging up the phone,” Michelle responded.
“It’s probably also because this is a death penalty case, and I’m opposed to capital punishment. I was brought up to think that all killing is wrong.” My father, a clergyman, had been brought up with Quaker ideals and was a conscientious objector in World War II. He often repeated a quote attributed to Gandhi: “An eye for an eye and the whole world is blind.”
I suspected that Michelle was in no way opposed to the death penalty for serial killers. I might have said more before my husband interrupted.
“She’s chasing her own demons.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“You’re confronting your attack in college.”
I was dumbstruck. I hadn’t thought about the incident for nearly twenty years. I had buried the memory for years, but now he had put the attack squarely in front of me, and I had to deal with it. I also had to explain it to our friends.
“During my junior year at Williams, I was attacked by a stranger who had come looking for a friend of mine. I thought he was going to kill me. But honestly, my motivation for doing this story doesn’t have anything to do with it.”
• • •
The more I considered it, the more I began to suspect that on some level my husband was right. I hadn’t thought about the attack for more than a decade. Until that night at the opera, I’d thought I had gotten past it.
It was a Sunday. I had been working out for the crew team in the tanks in the gym and was exhausted, but there was the never-ending homework to do. I didn’t even have the energy to eat dinner; I went straight to my room, put on a nightgown, and started to work. Then the phone rang. It was my friend Katie’s mother asking me to give her daughter a message. Katie had just gotten back from a semester in India, and her phone had not yet been installed. Over Christmas break, an old high-school classmate had been hanging around Katie’s house, and there were signs that made her family believe that he was not stable. “David’s been acting strange. We think he might be on his way up to Williamstown. Please tell Katie that if he arrives call campus security. He could be dangerous.”
“Sure,” I said, thinking she might be overreacting. Because Katie lived in the next entry, all I had to do was put on enough clothes, go out into the cold, go out one door and into the next, give Katie the message, and go back to my environmental geology. I pulled on a pair of corduroy jeans, tucked in my Lanz nightgown, slipped on hiking boots and a warm sweater, and ran next door. I knocked on the door, but there was no answer. Katie, like me, lived in a two-room double. Her roommate had the larger, outer room; she had the inner one. The door was unlocked, so I let myself in and went into Katie’s room to leave her a note, not bothering to turn on the light in the inner room. As I scribbled down the warning, I heard a noise behind me and spun around. A man was standing in the doorway of Katie’s closet. Worried that Katie was in the closet, I stepped forward to see past him. In hindsight I should have run out of the room and called for help. I feared that Katie was injured, tied up, or worse, dying in the closet. My mind shot back to the note I’d just written. So I made sure I was clear of the desk.
“Hello,” I began. “You must be David. Have you seen Katie?”
“No, I came to marry her or rape her depending on what she said, but you’ll do.”
Katie obviously wasn’t there, and I saw my chance to exit. “Okay, I guess I should go back to my room to do my homework.”
“Wait,” he said, lunging toward me. I stepped back to avoid his grasp, forgetting that there was a large ottoman in the middle of the room. I lost my balance and found myself in a prone position. David, a former New Jersey state wrestling champion, now had control, but at that point, he didn’t terrify me. I thought I could handle myself because I was strong from rowing cre
w. I remembered someone saying that the best thing to do is to not resist. What turns rapists on is fear, so don’t be afraid. They get off on the resistance. Act like you aren’t the least bit upset. So I smiled and tried to talk my way out of the predicament. I argued that I had a steady boyfriend, that I was not on the pill, that I didn’t even know him—anything and everything that I could think of to persuade him to leave me alone.
Every so often I yelled, “Help!” There are dozens of guys in the dorm; one of them is bound to hear my cries for help. However, those cries made things much worse. David responded by hitting me every time I yelled. As my resistance to him became more intense, so did his physical response. He started slamming me against the walls, which made me yell louder and more frequently, but that only made him hurt me more. By that time, I was panicked, but I didn’t want him to know it. He had given up on any type of cooperation and was trying to rip off my clothes. Something changed. His eyes were angry; he no longer responded to anything I said. My heart began to pound in my ears. Oh shit. Now what are you going to do, smart one? You obviously can’t get away or fight him off. No one is hearing you or at least no one has come to your rescue. You need to come up with something—quickly. I was totally panicked. I had run out of ideas and I knew that I was running out of time.
Soon it didn’t appear that rape was his motive—he wanted to hurt me. Finally he picked me up and threw me down on Katie’s bed. He’s going to kill me. He is actually going to kill me. Why the hell didn’t I just let him rape me and be done with it? But of course that solution doesn’t come naturally to anyone in this situation. I could persuade myself not to resist for a while, but the instinct to fight back and protect myself was far too strong. I used every ounce of energy to fight back, but my strength was running out. My arms felt weighed down. No one is going to help you. But you can’t give up. Keep fighting. But by that point I was having trouble even blocking the blows, never mind fighting back. God, please don’t let me die. I haven’t even finished my homework.
The Man in the Monster Page 12