The Man in the Monster

by Martha Elliott

  “Do you ever fantasize about what life could have been?” I asked.

  There was a deep sigh on the other end of the phone. “Of course. Remember Rachel, my first girlfriend in college—not the one I was engaged to—the one I got pregnant? I let her down. I was scared and didn’t offer to be there for her, so she had an abortion. We were good together and I often fantasize about what would have happened if she had the baby. In my fantasy it was a girl, Ashley. I picture us on a picnic, all of us sitting on a blanket playing with her. It would have been nice—one happy family.”

  “You’d get up at night and change diapers and all that?”

  “I cleaned up chicken coops. Diapers are nothing. Of course I would. I would have been a good dad.” I wondered whether he was deluding himself to think that he would have been capable of caring for a child, but I didn’t want to destroy the small comfort he got from that fantasy. Before I had the chance to react, he attempted to change the subject.

  “But it don’t make sense wasting time talking about what could have been.”

  “Doesn’t that take you away from your current predicament for a few minutes?”

  “Yeah, sometimes I lie on my bed with my headphones on, listening to classical music, and I just close my eyes and I am gone for a while. I leave this place.” When he was extradited to New York to stand trial for one of the two murders he committed in New York, he was able to pick up the Cornell radio station. “That was the best.” He told me about a concert he had heard that began with chimes from some tower on campus. “I was back in college before this all happened. I wish it were that easy to go back.” Another time he wrote about drifting back to college as he listened to A Prairie Home Companion being broadcast from Cornell. “Two hours of leaving this place. It was heaven.”

  • • •

  Michael kept a journal from May 1997 until October 1998; the entries were daily reflections of how he felt, sometimes in the form of prayers. I had been trying to get him to do it, but it was Father John who actually got him started by giving him a notebook. He used the journals as a tool for the spiritual growth he was undergoing as they worked together. When Michael found that he had been baptized a Roman Catholic, he began catechism with Father John, made his first communion, and was confirmed.

  At first, writing down his thoughts was cathartic. He could get things off his chest, let go of fears and emotions. It was also another way for him to communicate with God, a type of prayer. After he filled each notebook, he mailed it to me. When he sent me the first full notebook, I hesitated to read it; to do so felt voyeuristic. After a few weeks, however, I slowly did begin reading. In his first entry, Michael said that Father John had just visited him, and he had done his first formal confession and received absolution. “I wish I could say it changed my life—that a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders—but it hasn’t. I know that God has forgiven me, but I can’t seem to let go of my past.” The page-long passage implied that intellectually he could accept that God forgave him, but emotionally he didn’t feel it. He wanted to feel “cured.” He had his first communion and confirmation three months later, on August 28, 1997, but he wrote nothing about them. I wondered if the reason was that they were also a letdown, that nothing magical had happened.

  He talked about wanting to reunite with family members and about his occasional contact with his father. In one entry, he says he “chickened out” of calling his dad because they no longer had anything in common. While on death row, Michael had transformed from a conservative like his father to, as he described it, “a bleeding-heart liberal.” He said that every time he talked to his father, he could sense “that I disappoint him. And often he makes me feel hurt and angry.” Michael was proud when two of his essays were included in a book of essays on capital punishment and sent his father a copy of the book. But his father was critical. “You are suspect. . . . You have to remember who you are and where you are and that the public doesn’t want you to have anything.” He was stung by the comment not just because his father did not show pride in his accomplishment, but also because of the harsh truth it represented. He shrugged it off, though, lamenting that he didn’t know his father better, but thought it might be best to leave things as they were “and try not to hurt each other.”

  Some entries made me realize the importance of things we take for granted, like human touch. “In prison you can’t touch anyone. . . . That’s why when Christoph Arnold [an elder in the Bruderhof Community] gave me a hug during our first visit, it felt so strange that I broke down and cried. I’ve wanted to ask Father John for a hug at the last couple of visits, but I felt awkward and didn’t say anything.” At Osborn in the visiting area, he could see others getting hugged by their families, “but not me. The best that I could hope for was a brief handshake. Closeness to others is an important part of living. I don’t know why it has taken me thirty-seven years to figure that out.”

  In a few of the diary entries, he wrote about his feelings about me and some of the others who called or visited. He thanked God for his friends—especially Father John and Ann. I found some of those entries the hardest to read because I could see the repercussions of some of our phone conversations and the impact I could have on him. It made me want to have a seven-second delay before I spoke. In May 1997 he wrote, “‘Be careful what you wish for.’ Martha told me that when I talked to her on Tuesday night.” Presumably I had said something about accepting a death sentence. “I was a bit taken aback by those words. Martha is a close friend, one of the very few who really know and understand me. Yet those words sounded like maybe she thought that I’m playing some sort of game. I get accused of that all the time here. I don’t need my friends accusing me also. I know that’s not what she meant but for a second that’s what it felt like.” He wrote the line “Be careful what you wish for” over and over, and then, “I know what I am doing and I know that, in the end, I will be executed. This is not a game, for I will die. And while I can’t deny that a part of me looks forward to that day, the greater part of me dreads it.” Besides the fear of dying, he knew that with his death, all hope of proving his mental illness would die with him.

  He was also concerned about how he would be remembered. “I will forever be known as the biggest piece of shit that ever walked in Connecticut—a deliberate, cold-blooded, murdering, raping son of a bitch.” That bothered him more than dying. He had to believe he was not evil, that in his core he was a good person. “I want to prove to the world that I’m Michael Ross and distinct from that ‘monster within.’ I don’t want people cheering my death—visions of that bother me greatly. I want to prove that I’m not a monster; that I am a good person, that I couldn’t help it; that I was sick.” He wished for a miracle. He wished for a way for people to be able to see into his mind and understand the truth, but he also wanted another way out. “The truth is I wish I didn’t have to do this. I wish there were another option, in which no one (including myself) would get hurt.”

  On May 30, 1997, he wrote, “If God loves me why does he allow me to suffer so?” He quoted Archbishop Fulton Sheen that life is a struggle: “Unless there is a cross in our lives, there will never be the empty tomb. . . .” The message was clear: You have to have pain and sacrifice to find joy and salvation. He said his problem was that he could never trust anyone but himself and that he had to let go of himself to trust in God. “I must sacrifice my very being to make room for God. It’s sort of a suicide—but we know my track record on suicide.” He suggested that just as he couldn’t jump off the bridge at Cornell, he would be unable to do what was necessary to give himself fully to God.

  Almost a year later, on March 12, 1998, he wrote, “I don’t know why I have been chosen to travel down this path. But I do know that this is the path that I have been guided to, directed towards my whole life. Please, my Lord, please don’t let this be for nothing. You have the power to make goodness out of this evil mess. Please do not fail in this. . . .
Your Will Be Done.” He ended many entries with a prayer asking God to help him through his doubts, often concluding with “May Your will be done, not my will.” I wondered if he really meant those words. Because no matter what God wanted for Michael, Michael had already made up his mind. He was determined to be executed. How did he know what God wanted? In truth, I think that Michael made up his mind and then decided that it was God’s will because he knew—or thought he knew—that what he was doing was right, so it must be God’s will.

  Sometime after I read Michael’s journals, we began discussing theology. It could be about what he had read in Henri Nouwen or anything that occurred to either of us. The longer I knew him, the bolder I got in what I was willing to discuss with him.

  “Did I ever tell you that I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement?” I asked.

  “You don’t think Christ died to save us?”

  “I don’t believe that God sent his son here to die. I don’t want to believe in a God who demanded human sacrifice to save the sins of the world. I also don’t believe that one person dying saves another—unless they push the other aside and take a bullet for him.”

  “How can you not believe in that?” Michael asked.

  “I believe that Jesus had it right. Love God and love your neighbor. That would make it a better world and it’s all that really matters.”

  Michael was silent for a moment. I knew I was treading on areas that would upset him, but I also wanted to know what he believed. “So you think that I’m not going to heaven?”

  “Michael, I never said anything like that. I said I don’t think that someone dying two thousand years ago saves you. What saves you is you. You are sorry for what you did. You want forgiveness. That’s what matters. Dying did nothing and will do nothing,” I said, hoping that he understood that I was referring not just to Jesus’s death, but also to his own death.

  “So you don’t believe there is a heaven?”

  “I was trying to figure out what you believe in.”

  “You started it.”

  “Okay, I started it. Do I believe in heaven? I want to. I wish I had no doubts.”

  Again there was a silence. “I have to [believe],” he said softly. “I have to.” I knew that if there was ever a time when he was telling me the truth, this was it. I knew that this was a difficult subject for him because he always felt he wasn’t making enough spiritual progress. I let it go.

  • • •

  There were also passages in the journals that worried me. For the first years that I knew him, Michael had adamantly denied that he was suicidal and insisted that what he was doing was not state-assisted suicide. I had lingering doubts. He had not convinced me when we first discussed it in 1996, and when I read through the journals, I saw hints of a death wish. “There are days when I pray to God just before I go to sleep to ‘please, take me in my sleep.’ I see no purpose in my life. . . . Get this over with. . . . Let me go quietly.” He said if he had the courage, he’d kill himself, but that he was a coward. “At my funeral they should put a sign above me: ‘Here lies a coward—too afraid to be a man—may he not rest in peace.’” He wrote that “there are days when I wake up and say, ‘Damn it, God. Why I am still here?’” It would have been easier for Michael to die in his sleep—to let God take his life and ease his pain. Instead, he was asking the state to do it.

  I brought up state-assisted suicide again during a phone conversation, asking him to convince me that he wasn’t suicidal. He didn’t answer me on the phone when I challenged him. But a few days later, I received his answer in the mail. It was a very long letter, and at the end, he finally answered me. “Now for the issue of ‘state assisted suicide.’ Publically I have always maintained that I am NOT suicidal and that I do not wish to die. However, the truth is probably not quite that clear-cut. And while I feel uncomfortable admitting it publically, I have to admit to you that part of (perhaps much of) my initial desire to drop my appeals was due to a suicidal ideation. . . . Suicide was nothing new to me (as you know), so here I will discuss only suicide in the form of dropping my appeals.” He wrote that Depo-Provera was a miracle that allowed him to feel human again. “But . . . even with God, there is no such thing as a free lunch. And that price is guilt—a painful, gnawing guilt that never really goes away. . . . You know, I’ve often been asked, ‘How can you look at yourself in the mirror?’ For many years I literally could not look at myself in a mirror without feelings of deep loathing. Did you know that I can shave without a mirror? And that one of the reasons I began to cut my hair short is so I wouldn’t have to look in a mirror to comb it?” He made it clear that it was unbearable to be judged every day by the worst thing he’d ever done. “It’s a living hell. It’s my life.”

  He said he wanted to leave the world for a noble cause, sparing the families more pain. He admitted that was, in part, selfish. He said not to think of him as a total fraud because he was committed to sparing them more anguish. “But it is true, that in the beginning, it was more ‘State-assisted suicide’ than altruistic feelings for the families of my victims. I’m sorry. I wish I were a better man.”

  The letter confirmed my suspicion but added other questions. Was this the writing of someone in emotional pain or of a narcissist who thought only about himself? Or both? And if his mental illness included suicidal ideation, how could his decision to offer to die be reasonable or even sane?

  I reread Michael’s letter from April 20, 1996. He wrote that he didn’t care how others perceived him and that the only important thing was how he viewed himself. He insisted that he had to be true to himself. After rereading it several times one afternoon in 1997, I went out for my two-mile afternoon walk on the winding roads near my house in Connecticut. It was early fall and the air was crisp, the leaves just starting to turn. It was obvious that the opinions of others were incredibly important to Michael Ross. I stopped walking, feeling stupid that I hadn’t seen it before, and sat down on a stone wall to think.

  Michael Ross desperately wanted to be liked, to be loved, and to be known as he knew himself, as the core person he called Michael. He had never had many friends growing up. His only real friends in college had been his two girlfriends. When he was arrested, he wanted Michael Malchik to like him, so he tried to help him solve the case, somehow thinking that Malchik would be grateful and see him as a friend—not some evil serial killer. Michael confessed to Malchik for three reasons: He wanted the killing to be over, he wanted to give something to Malchik so that Malchik would be his friend, and he thought Malchik could help him understand why he had committed all those unimaginable crimes. He didn’t have a clue why, and Michael desperately wanted an explanation for his horrendous behavior. He thought that Malchik wanted to help him understand—not to make sure that he got the death penalty. It was no wonder he felt betrayed.

  Seeing Michael from this perspective, I could understand why it was so important for him to prove that he suffered from mental illness and why he called it his monster. Paradoxically, it seemed to explain why he wanted to take responsibility for his crimes and offer to die. He wanted the families to forgive him instead of hate him for all of eternity. He desperately wanted to change the way he was judged by the world. He could not bear the thought of being known for the worst things he had ever done, so he wanted to do something that he deemed selfless to overshadow those deeds. He was willing to give up his life to prove that he was sorry and make amends with the hope that maybe someday he would be forgiven.

  He didn’t care about death. He cared about labels—of being known as a serial killer instead of the “good Michael” that he saw as his core identity. He also feared eternal loneliness. In escaping execution, he was afraid he might lose what few friends he had because the death penalty issue would be moot. They would move on to the next death row crusade; he would be alone.

  I got up and started walking again, trying to put all this in perspective. I finally unde
rstood an important aspect of why he was willing to die. He would exchange the label of serial killer for “repentant martyr,” a modern-day Sydney Carton, the unscrupulous lawyer from A Tale of Two Cities, going to his death to save another from the guillotine. I could almost imagine the execution scene and his last words, “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done . . . ” Fade to black.

  I kept my thoughts to myself but, after a week or two, got up my courage and decided to see if he agreed with me. “Michael, I want to tell you a conclusion I’ve come to,” I began.

  He sighed. “Oh, I can tell this is going to be good,” he said sarcastically. “Should I be worried?” He was laughing, but of course, deflecting anxiety by joking was his form of self-defense.

  “No, it’s not bad,” I assured him. “I’ve decided that the reason you’re determined to accept death is because you can’t stand the fact that you will be remembered as a serial killer. You want your last act to be what you consider to be a noble one. You can separate Michael from the monster, and you want everyone else to be able to do that as well. You hope that someday, somehow, the families will forgive you. You hate your life but can’t find a way to kill yourself, so you are making the state do it for you.”

  He didn’t argue with me at all. He thought about it and said that I was right about both things. “Is it so bad to not want to be remembered for your worst deed? Is it so bad to want to be forgiven? Is it so bad to want to rid myself of the guilt? The families want me dead. What they don’t understand is that death will bring me peace.”

  Most of us cherish life. We want to hold on to it, live every moment to the fullest. The idea that waking up every day could be the worst thing that happens to you is hard to comprehend, but that was Michael’s so-called life. He was a man who never had a childhood, went to college with no interpersonal skills, felt no love from his family, felt emasculated by his mother and his only serious girlfriend, became obsessed with sex and death, killed eight women and raped more, and went to jail in 1984 at the age of twenty-five.