The Man in the Monster

by Martha Elliott

  At the Johns Hopkins clinic, sex offenders are carefully screened and evaluated, then given the medication in concert with extensive psychotherapy. In a study of 626 males who were treated at the clinic, only 9.7 percent repeated their crimes. According to Dr. Berlin, other studies have shown that recidivism of sex offenders without this treatment is as high as 65 percent. The effectiveness of hormone-suppressing drugs drove California, Florida, Georgia, and a growing number of other states to enact or consider mandatory chemical castration for sex offenders: no hormone treatment, no parole. However, Dr. Berlin cautions that this is a misguided public policy. Not all sex offenders are suitable for the chemical therapy—only those with paraphiliac disorders, such as certain pedophiles or sexual sadists. Research has shown that for treatment to work, the offender must acknowledge that his conduct is out of control and must want treatment. Treatment also must include psychotherapy during parole, because it helps teach clients how to control their former behaviors.

  Depo-Provera, the most commonly used drug in this type of treatment, is marketed as a female contraceptive because it blocks ovulation. When one is sexually aroused, the brain secretes endorphins, opiate-like substances that are biochemical stimulants of pleasure. Dr. Berlin speculated that in men, Depo-Provera blocks opiate receptors, thereby preventing the endorphins from having their normal, pleasure-producing effect, but no studies have been done to prove or disprove that theory. It’s interesting that hormone therapy may be more effective than surgical castration, because testosterone is produced in the adrenal glands, not only the testes. Moreover, unlike physical castration, the effect of the drugs is not permanent.

  A normal adult male has a blood testosterone level of 400 to 800 nanograms per deciliter. With Depo-Provera, those levels go below 200. Dr. Robert Prentky, who researched the connections between sex and aggression, says that elevated testosterone levels have been linked to aggressive behavior but not necessarily criminal behavior. “Corporate CEOs and professional hockey players have been shown to have abnormally high levels of testosterone,” Berlin explained. High levels of testosterone can produce constructive aggression. There is also a correlation between high levels of testosterone and paraphiliac disorders, such as sexual sadism. No study has been able to predict criminal behavior based on testosterone levels nor explain how and why some commit sexual violence but not others.

  After Michael was placed on death row, Dr. Berlin again suggested that he try Depo-Provera because of the success that he had with this treatment at his Johns Hopkins clinic. By this point, Michael was still reluctant but also desperate. “To be perfectly honest, I didn’t believe in Depo-Provera before I got my shots,” he admitted. At first, the mental health department refused to approve Dr. Berlin’s treatment, saying that it was not a medication it prescribed, nor was it FDA approved for the treatment of sex offenders. Dr. Berlin wrote a letter to the Mental Health Unit offering to prescribe the medication and go to see Michael every couple of months to monitor his progress, but he was still refused treatment. Then in 1989, Bryn Freedman from WTNH Channel 8 did an extensive investigative report on the case. One of the issues she looked into was the refusal by the Department of Correction to offer the treatment. She interviewed Dr. Berlin, and the policy was soon reversed.

  On October 16, 1989, Michael’s blood test revealed a testosterone level of 434 nanograms per deciliter, near the low end of the normal range and inexplicably significantly below his pretrial level of 645, which is also within the normal range. There was no medical reason for the drop in testosterone levels or any explanation as to why Michael appeared to be so sensitive to even levels within the normal range. His first shot was 500 mg on November 15. During the first few months, he didn’t notice any effects, so the dosage was increased twice until it got to 700 mg per week. Michael said that shortly thereafter “I noticed a decrease in my need for masturbation and less desire to engage in sexual fantasizing.” He said the changes were gradual. But at some point after receiving 700 mg per week, his incessant urges to masturbate began to subside. As his need to masturbate declined, so did the violent sexual fantasies in his head. By the time his testosterone levels dropped below 50, he masturbated only once a day. Below 35, he could abstain for a couple of weeks, and at 20 or less, he reported that he had “essentially no sexual urges at all and [did] not masturbate at all.”

  “It cleared my mind and allowed me to be quiet,” he explained. “Before the Depo-Provera, I had to always be actively doing something mentally or the obsessive sexual fantasies would pop up. What Depo-Provera did was greatly lessen the control that the monster had over me. It didn’t take so much effort to force the fantasies out of my mind. I could fight the compulsive urge, yet still be able to get to sleep. I was in control. He [the monster] was still in my mind, but banished to the back.” Michael’s whole world changed. He said for the first time in years he could watch a movie without later fantasizing about raping and murdering one of the female actresses. “I could just lie there and do nothing but let my mind wander without drifting into some sexual murder fantasy. I developed extensive nonsexual fantasy worlds where I could escape for hours on end and not have guilt to deal with afterwards.”

  Michael understood that most people would have difficulty understanding the change he had undergone. So he came up with an analogy that he often repeated to me and wrote in articles printed in several publications, “I often describe it as living with an obnoxious roommate. What the Depo-Provera did was move the roommate to his own apartment down the hall. You still had to deal with him, but it was much easier without him always being in your face. Yet he was never ever totally gone. He was always there—just over the horizon waiting for his opportunity.” He explained that he was never totally free of the problem because “he just sits there waiting for you to let down your guard and let him back in the front of your mind.”

  In 1990 and 1991, Michael began to have complications of high blood pressure and liver dysfunction and was permanently taken off Depo-Provera on October 1, 1992. Depo drugs are injected into muscle, and the medicine is slowly absorbed over time. Depo-Provera injections are given every week because of the relatively rapid release of the drug into the bloodstream. Dr. Berlin, who had been allowed to prescribe the medication in exchange for promising to monitor it for the DOC, recommended an alternate, Depo Lupron. Because it is released more slowly into the bloodstream, it has to be injected only once a month and has fewer side effects. However, the DOC rejected his recommendation. Without the medication, Michael’s violent sexual fantasies returned, and he became so depressed that he even attempted suicide by putting a plastic bag over his head. “I considered trying to castrate myself with a razor blade. And though I prepared myself on several occasions—got the razor out and sterilized it with a match and tied off the scrotum with a string to slow bleeding—I could never actually cut myself.” Scared that he would completely revert to “what I was before my medication,” he went on a hunger strike for twenty days.

  His sexual urges began to return, and he became concerned when he had urges to hurt one of the nurses. “That really scared me and bothered me because she was one of the nurses who always looked out for me. It bothered me tremendously that I wanted to rape her and hurt her,” he admitted. There was shame in his voice, but also a distance, a sense that he was telling someone else’s story.

  Finally in February 1994, eighteen months after Depo-Provera had been discontinued, the DOC relented, and Michael was given his first Depo Lupron shot. With that, he says, his mind was returned to him. “So Depo-Provera was pretty wonderful stuff. . . . Depo Lupron was even more effective than Depo-Provera. It freed my mind; it gave me control. It allowed me to be ‘Michael’ again. But there was a price. Now instead of being plagued by sexual fantasies and compulsive urges, I had the freedom to consider the effects of my past actions on others.” Without the medication, his total focus was on his own sexual pleasure. But once he had been freed of the noxio
us fantasies, he “found it increasingly difficult to not focus on what I had done. I guess that for the first time, it had really sunk in.” He mused that most of the men on death row “seem to have no conscience, and I often find myself envious of them for that.” He added sarcastically, “I’m the only guilty person here on death row. It’s really amazing how many innocent people have been sentenced to death.”

  • • •

  It was difficult for Michael to comprehend why he didn’t feel empathy toward his murder victims. He spent the anniversaries of their deaths praying for them, trying to honor them in some way, but in many ways they were never real people to him. He couldn’t properly explain this to other people. To Michael the women were not human beings, just names. “I have a lot of self-loathing of how I could commit a rape/murder as I did, but no individual sorrow for the victims themselves. They remain faceless and almost anonymous to me.” He said he regretted what he did and wished he could bring them back, even substitute his own life for theirs, but “their deaths don’t haunt me the way that I feel they should.”

  I came to believe that he could not allow the women to be real to him. When he killed them, they were objects. He did not know them as people and had to keep them as only names and ages to be able to cope with his brutal crimes. Otherwise the pain of his shame would have been too great. He could not, however, depersonalize the family members. They sat in the courtroom. They answered questions on the nightly news. Their tears accentuated their pain. He could not neatly tuck their pain away into some cubicle of his psyche.

  He wrote that his greatest fear was not being executed but that he would receive a life sentence and that “someday down the line some bean counter will decide that my monthly Depo Lupron shot is too expensive and stop my medication.” He said that a positive aspect of his execution was knowing that he would never have to live with the monster again. “My death, through execution, is not to me an unreasonable insurance policy to see that it never happens.”

  19

  CONNECTICUT

  1996–1998

  In April 1996, the Connecticut Law Tribune published my story “Why a Killer Offers to Die,” which tried to explain Michael’s determination to spare his victims’ families more anguish and his frustration with the criminal justice system. Then in July 1996, I left the paper. I needed a rest—I’d spent more than nine months investigating the Ross case. I wanted to cleanse my thoughts of rape and murder and executions. I wanted to forget everything I knew about him.

  However, Michael was not about to go away. He still called me almost every week. After the article came out, I was one of the few people whom he could trust—and among the half handful who would take his calls. But I was well aware of his loneliness and didn’t have the heart to ask him to stop calling. We didn’t talk so much about his case, but about everything from the weather to world events. Once he realized that I would answer him truthfully on almost any topic, he began to trust me as completely as he was capable of trusting anyone, not only with his story, but also with his deepest thoughts and feelings, whether I wanted to hear them or not. At first he needed me to get his story out and may to some degree have been using me, but after I had written “Why a Killer Offers to Die,” he needed me as a friend, and for the most part, the manipulation stopped.

  He was not unlike a demanding child. Sometimes he got pushy, starting our conversation with a request or order for me—something he wanted me to do or somebody he wanted me to call for him or even a request for other men on death row. The instruction or request might be his excuse for calling. At first he was embarrassed to call merely to chat, because the calls were expensive. MCI and the Department of Correction had quite a racket. The cost of accepting the call was five dollars no matter how long you chatted, and each subsequent minute was a dollar for the collect, automated call. He wanted my full attention when we talked—even though I was paying for the call and often had to multitask because I was in the middle of something when the phone rang. It drove him crazy if he could hear me typing. “Are you on your computer?” he would ask. “Yes, I’m trying to finish ordering something for Hannah and James for Christmas. Got a problem with that?” It wasn’t difficult to get him to back off.

  Like most young children, mine always became neediest when I was on the phone, whining or tugging on my pant leg for attention or getting into fights in their playroom next to my office. That also annoyed him. “Tell Hannah we’re busy,” Michael would say. I’d tell him that I would be the one to decide if my kids needed my attention.

  Although at first it made me uncomfortable when he asked about my children, they eventually became part of our conversation. Sometimes he would send them birthday cards or a book at Christmas—meaning that he would call Ann or someone else to make the purchase, and he would get the state to reimburse them through his inmate account. My favorite present that they received from him was the children’s book The Story of Ferdinand, about the bull who would rather smell the flowers than fight, but who gets sent to the bullring because he’s stung by a bee and his reaction is so violent that it is misinterpreted as aggression.

  Michael made most of the money he had from articles he wrote about the death penalty and forgiveness. The publications sent him payments that ranged from twenty-five dollars to a few hundred. Most were for Catholic publications, but he was even published in the Utne Reader. He had a lot more cash at his disposal than when he was sweeping the tier for a few cents a week, so he would get Ann or me to do his shopping for him. Later the state confiscated any money he earned from writing, so Michael had his earnings and donations from supporters sent to Ann, who served as his banker. For the most part, the money went for postage to send his newsletter, Walking with Michael, which he began in place of keeping up with the large volume of individual letters he received. He hand-printed it and sent it to more than two hundred people every month or two.

  The twins were less than two years old when I began corresponding with Michael. I had adopted them as infants just about the time that Michael adopted me. By the time they were old enough to understand that Michael was in jail, he had become a household item. At age five, the inevitable question came up. “Why is Michael in prison?” “He did some bad things,” I would say. That was enough for a while, but eventually they wanted to know more, and I had to tell them that he had killed people. They weren’t fearful or opposed to me talking to him. They wanted to know what was going to happen to him, and I had to tell them I didn’t know but that he would always be in prison. Perhaps because they had grown up in my household, they were adamant that they didn’t want him to be killed.

  We sent Michael “Christmas packages.” Prisoners could receive books only if sent directly from the publisher or bookseller, and at Christmas the DOC allowed families to buy boxes of approved assorted treats from a company that specializes in gifts for inmates. The packages included coffee, hot chocolate, cookies, crackers, cheese, and even sweatpants. He didn’t ask me when I was writing the article, but maybe a year later. “I want to ask you a favor. No pressure,” he would say sheepishly. “Want to send me a Christmas package?” I was happy to send them, although I thought they were overpriced—especially considering that most people who would be getting them came from families who didn’t have a whole lot of extra cash—about fifty to more than one hundred dollars. Sometimes he would ask me to send a package to his one friend on death row, Bob Breton, because “he has nobody. It would mean a lot.”

  I soon found out that Michael also had a series of girlfriends. I had not been aware that most high-profile murderers, especially serial killers, receive letters from women once they are sentenced to die. One psychiatrist told me that some women like the idea of a dangerous man with whom they can fall in love but who can’t ever touch them or have sex with them. Many of them have had abusive relationships with other men. Other women see themselves as angels of forgiveness whose duty it is to comfort misunderstood souls. One woman
sent half-naked sexually suggestive pictures to him. Another told him she was a witch. One time Michael spent his entire savings from writing articles on wedding bands—but was in effect jilted at the altar. I had no patience for the drama. It’s unfathomable for me to understand the attraction—but then again, I never thought I’d have a serial-killer friend.

  In some ways, I considered Michael my community service. He was going to pay for his crimes by spending the rest of his life in prison—whether the state shortened that life or not—and if calling me helped him get through the day or week, then so be it. When he was only calling once a week for fifteen minutes, he didn’t take up much time or get in the way of the rest of my life. At first he called my house only at specific times, but eventually he began calling me at my summer cottage or on holidays—basically whenever he could get to a phone and knew I would be home. By that time, neither I nor anyone in my family minded—or at least no one complained.

  Underlying all of the discussions were questions—not just the questions he had about my life and about the outside world, but also questions I had to ask about his growing up, his college years, and about his inner world. Those conversations and letters were how I slowly began to piece together how the Michael I knew had gotten to death row and also how I got to really know him.