The Man in the Monster

by Martha Elliott

  By that point I was beyond being scared. It’s hard to explain, but I didn’t have the strength to be scared. I don’t know why, but the panic subsided. Maybe it’s a natural grace that allows us to live our final moments without excruciating fear.

  Then came my miracle. Katie’s roommate, who was much larger than I in height and weight, arrived. I managed one last weak “Help!” and she rushed into Katie’s room. What happened next was surreal. David regressed, acting like a small child who had been scolded by his mother. He released me, grabbed his raincoat, and ran out the door half dressed. I was in a state of shock. I couldn’t feel anything. I got up and pulled my clothes back on. I was paralyzed. Karen must have called campus security, because they arrived almost instantly, catching him as he tried to escape. Williamstown police also arrived within minutes and questioned me about what had happened. Thank you, God. Now this is over. Just let me go back to my room and get away from all of this.

  David was indicted by a grand jury, but before the case went to trial, he was killed in a car accident. For years afterward, I couldn’t walk into a dark room without feeling a sense of panic. I couldn’t go to bed without checking underneath it and in the closet. When I finally lived alone in my first apartment, I got triple locks on the door. But after I was married, I was able to bury it deep enough that I never thought about that night.

  My husband’s assertion unnerved me. Was I unconsciously going through some cathartic exercise, trying to understand why a man would rape and possibly murder? Was I looking for some sort of closure in my own past, some sort of inner peace or sense of forgiveness? Had the college attack really had that much of a long-term effect on me?

  I began to feel vulnerable again. I had nightmares. When I was alone in the house, I went through the bedrooms checking the closets. I was reliving the ordeal all over again—except this time it was worse, and I didn’t know why.

  I was not sure whether to tell Michael about the attack. I didn’t want him to find out later and think that I had misled him. On the other hand, I was terrified to tell him. It would turn me into a victim. It would give him power.

  The next time Michael called, I gathered up my courage and said, “When I was in college I was the victim of an assault and attempted rape. I don’t think that has anything to do with why I am writing this story, but you should know. I don’t want you to think that I have some ulterior motive.”

  There was an agonizing silence, but his reaction was considerate. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You know that getting this story out is important to me, but if writing about this is too painful, you should stop. I’ve caused too much pain already. I don’t want to be the cause of any more pain.”

  I assured him that he was not causing me any psychic pain (a lie), and that was the last time we ever spoke about it. I think knowing Michael actually helped me to get over the trauma once and for all. I realized that David had not hurt me; I was just a convenient object, something I later learned from talking to Michael. I didn’t have to take it personally. David probably wouldn’t have even recognized me if he ever saw me again. Perhaps more important, after the first six months, I wasn’t afraid of Michael. If I could be comfortable talking with a serial killer and believe his remorse, I could stop being afraid.

  11

  CLERK’S OFFICE, NEW LONDON, CONNECTICUT

  1996

  I knew I might never meet the monster, but I had to face the horror he had caused, and it was important to do it by looking at evidence that had been presented in open court, to see what Michael feared having to sit through again.

  To read the transcripts of the taped confessions and to look at the evidence in Michael’s case, I went to the New London Judicial Department clerk’s office and carefully sifted through the box of documents and photographs that survived the first trial. I knew that the crime scene photos were grisly—photographs of partially decomposed bodies, autopsy pictures, ligatures used by Michael to strangle the girls—but I needed to see the reality of the damage that he had done. I wasn’t prepared for the impact that the evidence would have on me. I was overwhelmed by the sheer gruesomeness of seeing corpses and autopsy pictures. I thought of how a mother and father would have felt looking at these photos of their dead daughter, and I wondered if Michael had ever really looked at the pictures. I knew I had to look at them.

  I was almost done with my article and I knew I could no longer avoid some of the hard questions I had to ask him. When he called a few nights later, Michael knew that I had carefully examined the evidence, and he asked if I had looked at the autopsy photos. “Did it look like they had been beaten up?”

  “Yes. There were bruises.” I couldn’t tell what had caused all the bruises, but Wendy Baribeault had two black eyes. There were bruises on the face that looked like they were the result of punches.

  “I don’t remember hitting anybody. I can’t believe I did that, but if it’s in the pictures, I must have,” he conceded reluctantly.

  I realized that he was more upset about hitting the women than raping and killing them. He was whining. And in some odd way, he wanted sympathy. He wanted me to say, “Don’t worry about it, Michael. You didn’t know what you were doing. It was the monster, not you, hitting those women.” He had struck a raw nerve. I exploded. “I really don’t get you. You murdered them. What the hell could be worse than that? Believe me; I’ll take a good punch any day over death.” It was the first time I had actually screamed at him, and it startled me as much as it did Michael.

  “I know it doesn’t make sense,” he admitted.

  “You’re being kind to yourself. It’s totally insane.”

  “I know. I know; it’s just, I was brought up to think that hitting a woman was wrong.”

  “And you were brought up to think that raping and killing was right?” I stopped because I was afraid he’d hang up on me—and because I realized that by dwelling on the hitting, Michael was avoiding the killing. Or maybe he couldn’t tuck the act of hitting a woman neatly into his mental illness. He couldn’t control the raping and killing, but on some level he thought he should be able to stop himself from hitting a woman.

  I changed the subject to the taped confessions he made on the day of his arrest. Michael had always insisted that when he was making his confessions, Detective Michael Malchik, one of the arresting officers, had suggested to him that he might have killed the girls because he didn’t want to go to jail. “They kept asking me this all day. It was mostly after the tape. I was with them for another twelve hours,” he said. Michael insisted he never said he was trying to avoid jail time but that they talked about that motive only hypothetically.

  “The problem with that,” I said, “is that some of the things that you say aren’t true are things that you actually said on the tape. In a lot of places you say, ‘I raped them and got scared and tried to kill them.’”

  Michael was surprised. “I haven’t seen them in so long that I can’t tell you what I said. The last time I heard the tape was eight years ago. So I don’t remember, and I don’t understand it. I was trying to understand why I did it back then. . . . I know that before those taped statements, they fed me some of that stuff. Why did I kill? I think if you listen to the tapes, it sounds more like that.”

  I told him that he had said it himself without any prompting.

  “I don’t know. Maybe that’s what I thought back then. I don’t believe it to be true, but you know, maybe that’s what I said. They didn’t believe me whatever I said. I don’t know why I did it. That’s why I said this other stuff.” He was still trying to convince himself that the tapes were doctored in some way.

  I read him one section: “I took her in the back and I raped her. She didn’t really struggle or anything. I didn’t know what to do because I had got in trouble before, and I killed her and I strangled her.”

  “Oh. . . . Well, if I said it, I’m not going to dispute it now. That�
�s what I said. It’s not true but . . .” Everything was a “yes, but.” Yes he said it, but it wasn’t true. I had questions about contradictions from statements of girlfriends as well as contradictions on the tapes. He had confessed that he and Tammy Williams had been making out, and then she wanted to stop. He said he got angry, lost control, raped, and murdered her. Why did he say that if it wasn’t true?

  “Because before when [Malchik and I] were discussing it, it made it sound better that they were doing something. In a way I was sort of blaming it on the victims. . . . That came four hours before the tape was ever turned on. . . . He just had to play me until I fuckin’ said it. All right?” I could hear the fury in his voice, but we had a lot more to cover.

  The bigger question for Michael to answer was why he killed Leslie Shelley. This murder couldn’t be attributed to his mental illness. As Dr. Borden had explained, for all the others the murders had been the sexual climax of the rape. However, after he had achieved that when killing April Brunais, his sexual sadism should have been satisfied. He killed Leslie after he had killed April and even apologized to her before he killed her. This issue could not be avoided. I began gently. “I think there’s only one of the murders which is really an issue, and that is Leslie Shelley. That’s the hardest to explain. . . . On the tape you said you didn’t rape her.”

  “Yeah, well there’s some things about that that you don’t know. I can’t tell you. Well, actually, I can. Satti knows. She was sodomized.”

  “Why didn’t you mention that before?”

  “Because I had a problem with that. I had a problem with her being so small so I said all I did was kill her. It made me feel better and then afterwards, I didn’t want it to come out because I didn’t want the parents to know, and I didn’t think Satti knew until I found out during our conferences. He asked me point blank at one of the conferences,” Michael said. “See, I felt bad about that because she was the only one I sodomized. All the others were vaginal rapes. She was so small, and I just . . . I’ll tell you some other time. I don’t want to talk about it on the phone. She always bothered me. I don’t know if it was because she was so small or the other.” He seemed embarrassed to say “sodomized” again.

  “You somehow think that sodomizing her is worse than vaginally raping her?” I was trying not to sound too incredulous, but controlling my reactions was getting more difficult.

  “Yeah. I tried to rape her vaginally.”

  “But you’re talking as if sodomy is worse than killing. How could that be worse than killing?” I asked.

  “Huh? I don’t know. I guess that’s just the way I feel. I tried to do it vaginally and I couldn’t penetrate her, and I raped her anally.”

  He had confounded me again, but now I was also angry. “In the grand scheme of things, compared to killing, this is nothing.”

  The phone cut off. I thought he had hung up on me until it rang again. “I thought you hung up on me. I was afraid it was because of what I said,” I admitted.

  “I won’t get another fifteen minutes, just another eight minutes,” he said curtly.

  “Rape, whether vaginal or anal, is rape,” I argued.

  “It don’t make any sense,” he admitted, regressing into his farm-boy dialect. “I don’t particularly want the parents to know. They think that she wasn’t raped, and I’d prefer to keep it that way.” He heaved a big sigh, apparently hoping that the conversation would end.

  “You keep saying how important it is for you to prove your mental illness, but you pleaded guilty in Windham County to two murders. Why wasn’t it important then?”

  “Fred and Peter [his attorneys] wanted me to plead guilty. They were telling me back then I didn’t have a defense anyway.” It wasn’t until after the trial that he became determined to prove that he wasn’t faking a mental illness.

  “They made me out to be such a big liar,” he began. He said if he had pleaded guilty, he wouldn’t have felt the need to prove he was mentally ill. “I thought the truth was going to come out at the trial, but it was just a big circus. All right? I gotta go.”

  We’d been corresponding and talking for more than six months at the time, but he had never been so mad, and I wasn’t sure if he would ever call back again. When he made his weekly call to Ann a few days later, he told her he was “tired of talking to Martha.” He knew Ann better than I did; he had trusted her for a decade. Perhaps he wanted to see if she would counsel him to stop contacting me, but she didn’t. In fact, she told me what he had said.

  He did, however, write me a long letter a few days later. He said he owed Malchik an apology because, “If I did in fact say that I killed the girls so that I wouldn’t go back to prison—if that’s on tape, then I can’t deny it. I don’t remember saying it that way. All this time I thought that Malchik had made it up and was lying, and now I find out that it was I who was lying to myself. I am sorry that I misled you and I’m sorry that I falsely accused Malchik.”

  He said he truly did not believe that he killed to avoid detection. But he admitted, “If I could make myself believe that I wouldn’t kill again, then I can make myself believe anything. I know that I want to believe that the mental illness did the killing, not me. But maybe I’m just using that as an excuse. Maybe I’m hiding behind it because I’m afraid to face what I might truly be. Maybe I am the monster that Satti says I am. How am I supposed to know when I can’t believe myself?” He told me to send Ann and Father John copies of the confessions and apologized for taking up my time.

  The next time he called, he confounded me again. “Well, it hasn’t been easy. These interviews seem to be getting harder and harder, and you ain’t asked me no tough questions, neither.” I thought he had hung up on me because I had pressed him too hard.

  “So what should I have asked you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, whining like a little boy. “But you really haven’t confronted me on anything. You ain’t challenging me, accusing me of lying. . . . I think that’s why the confessions bothered me so much. It’s because I try to be open and honest, and then I find that I’ve been saying stuff that ain’t what happened.”

  “In the last two weeks, I have called into question almost everything you have told me. I have been asking hard questions.”

  “I don’t know. It just seems like you aren’t calling me a liar.”

  Perhaps I wasn’t yelling and screaming, but I had pressed him on a lot of tough subjects and shown him where there were contradictions in his story.

  The next day, April 20, he wrote to me trying to explain his position. “The real issue boils down to just two simple facts. One, I raped and murdered eight women. Two, I am responsible for those actions and the consequences of those actions on the families of my victims.” He said he often got so caught up in proving his mental illness that he forgot his responsibilities. He said he got so excited when I read the transcripts, interviewed his doctors, and acknowledged the lies and distortions in his case because he wanted the truth to be known that he was not evil but merely sick. “I don’t want to be hated and despised—I don’t want people cheering at my execution. I get concerned with how others perceive me. It is self-centeredness. But I have to fight the urge to protect how others perceive me because in my case it carries a dreadful cost. And in the end, which is more important: how others perceive you or how you perceive yourself?”

  If he continued to try to prove his mental illness, he would run the risk of hurting the victims’ families. “If I allowed [them to be hurt], it would affect how I perceive myself, for in my mind it would take me one step closer to being exactly the person Satti portrays me as being. Right now I have nothing left except who I am, and I can’t let anyone take that away from me—even if it costs me in how I am perceived by others. I have to do what I believe is the right thing to do—even if it is misinterpreted, misunderstood, and/or unappreciated by others—to do anything less would be to betray w
ho ‘Michael Ross’ really is (to betray myself). Ultimately, I guess that’s what this whole thing is about—being true to one’s self and beliefs.” In other words, trying to change how others perceived him wasn’t worth the chance of doing more harm. “And ultimately how I perceive myself is far more important than how others perceive me. Am I making any sense?”

  It remained hard for me to understand why anyone wouldn’t want to fight for his life or fight to prove he was mentally ill. Perhaps there comes a point for all death row inmates when they give up because letting go of hope actually sets them free.

  12

  CORNELL

  1980–1981

  It took many telephone conversations and letters to unravel what had happened to Michael in college and for me to have the courage to ask him about the individual murders. Over the course of three years, I was able to piece it all together.

  By his senior year, Michael was a day student and a night predator. Neither of these two personalities thought about the other. In Michael’s mind, the day student was Michael Ross and the night predator was the monster. “As time went on, it was less me doing the stalking and more the monster within. I believe he was slowly beginning to gain control. In the beginning, when I was in charge, I worried about being recognized, but as he took control, that was no longer a concern. I know that this sounds crazy, but because I was becoming two people with two separate identities, it didn’t matter if the ‘stalker’ was recognized because he wasn’t me. On some level I believed that it wasn’t me doing the stalking.”