The Man in the Monster

by Martha Elliott

  Of course, Michael couldn’t go out without sending his own mixed message. On his next-to-last day, he had written to Susan. “It is difficult for me to write this today, as I know this will be the last words that I write to you. I know that I should stop this. I know that this is wrong, but I can’t stop it. I can’t deal with all of this anymore; it is just easier to let it all end right now. To stop this now would lead to more craziness that will never stop. The families will hate me even more, the press would crucify me, and going back to Northern would be totally unbearable (I’d never hear the end of it from both the guards and the inmates). I’m so tired of all this. I look forward to tomorrow night—finally this 20 years of hell will be over.”

  The rest sounded almost as if he were trying to convince himself. “So many people hate me. I am not totally evil. I am capable of doing good. This will help the families; this is good. So while I am scared, I will get through this. I won’t back down. I am not a total coward. Then I can rest.”

  I had an early morning flight back to California, so I drove straight from the prison to Kennedy Airport. I cried for the first hour and then finally had no tears left. The adrenaline was gone, and I began to have trouble staying awake. I opened a window to let the cold air blow in my face and then stopped for coffee. After boarding the flight, I ordered a Bloody Mary and slept most of the way back. Five months of anxiety and ten years of telephone calls had ended. Michael was dead and I was exhausted.

  I was home before noon.

  My son greeted me at the door.

  “Mom, are you okay?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m fine.” I couldn’t tell him how I really felt.

  Two days later, Barry called. “You okay?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know. I should sit down and write, but I can’t because I just realized something.”

  “You thought the book would save him,” he said assuredly.

  “How did you know?”

  “I just knew. You weren’t writing it to describe an execution. You were writing it to save a life.”

  • • •

  A week after I got back, my sister called to say that my almost eighty-four-year-old father was not doing well. My mother had been sick from October until her death in February. He had visited her every day, and it had taken a toll on his already frail health. Until her hospitalization, his colon cancer had been under control, but the worry and stress had weakened him. Just after her death in February, an MRI revealed that his tumors had grown significantly and the prognosis was not good. He decided that he did not have the strength to go through another round of chemotherapy, and having seen that other treatments had almost killed him, we didn’t press him. I had been planning to visit him Memorial Day weekend, but my sister said he might not be alive by then, so I flew out that day.

  I knew that my father was proud of me for being a friend to someone on death row, and he was also sensitive to the fact that I had witnessed something that neither of us wanted to happen. He didn’t ask about the details but simply inquired, “Are you okay? It must have been hard.”

  “I don’t know if I’m okay. I’m still in shock.”

  “I can understand that, but if he wanted you to be there, you did the right thing.”

  “Would you have done it?”

  “I’d like to think so; I know it would have been a hard decision. Maybe for me it would have been easier because I’ve been at so many bedsides as people died.”

  “But you were holding a dying person’s hand, not watching through a window as someone was actually killed.”

  “I can’t even imagine.”

  He had been hoping to come for a visit to our cottage in Maine during the summer, an annual pilgrimage of renewal, but by early June it was clear that he wouldn’t make it. So I brought Maine to him. I cooked him a lobster the night before he died. “Just close your eyes and imagine you’re eating your lobster, listening to the loons as you sit on the porch in Maine,” I told him.

  “Oh, my, this is so delicious,” he said. “It’s paradise.” He also had a piece of his favorite strawberry rhubarb pie, baked by a close family friend. The next morning, he was very confused, so I called my sister to join me. When she saw how weak he was, she went to get our brother. The rest of the day, the three of us stayed at our father’s bedside with Michael Catlett, his minister and a close friend who was like a son to my parents. Occasionally my father would wake up, and we’d retell old family stories. Sometimes he would initiate the memory; sometimes it would be one of us. By late afternoon, his breathing became slower and he stopped waking up. We waited and watched each labored breath, wondering if it would be his last. He died around 6:00 P.M.

  I couldn’t help but compare my father’s serene death, surrounded by loved ones who could soothe him and touch him, with the one that I had witnessed less than a month before. His was peaceful and private; Michael’s had been painfully public, and he had not been able to hug us good-bye or share a last meal with his family and friends. Of course, my comparison is flawed. My father was a compassionate pacifist who had spent his life helping people. The monster in Michael had destroyed many lives, and both Michael and the monster paid the ultimate price.

  25

  SUMMER 2006

  I visited the Shelleys a year after the execution. We met in a noisy McDonald’s in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Ed, dressed in a sleeveless shirt, was sitting in a booth when I walked in. Lera was outside having a smoke. Both of them had put on a little weight; they were more relaxed, more at ease. Ed’s anger had always been palpable; Lera’s piercing blue eyes had always been filled with sadness and tears as she talked of her daughter.

  When I mentioned that they seemed more relaxed, Ed said, “I mean, it’s all over and done with. We are getting along with our life, and we’ve found peace.”

  “You seem more at peace,” I said to Lera.

  Tears welled up in her eyes, “Well, it’s easier now. Before the execution, from October to May, I was very depressed. I didn’t want to see anybody; I would cry. It was horrible going through the final thing—2004 to 2005.” Near the execution dates, TV remote trucks had camped out in front of their house, waiting for one of them to come out.

  “It was terrible. My daughter would go out and say, ‘Leave my father alone,’” Ed said. “Then they would go to the top of the hill and call the house. They were going to our neighbors’ houses. They were going to stores and everybody in town and asking, ‘What do you think?’ They asked people who didn’t even know us. It was just totally ridiculous.”

  “But now it’s no longer an issue in your life.”

  “Right,” they both answered.

  “Do you think the execution needed to happen in order for you to mourn?”

  “Oh yes, yes, oh yes. It had to be over, because he would have been in the limelight. He would have made sure of that,” Ed said.

  They said the execution hadn’t been difficult for them. If anything, they were disappointed that Michael didn’t open his eyes. Lera said she thought it was because he didn’t want to see her cry. “In Walking with Michael, who does Michael mention? He mentions my face over and over.” Lera surprised herself by calling him Michael. “I guess you must have made him seem a bit more human to me.” But she was right about Michael’s motives; her hurt, her tears had haunted him. Ed insisted that Michael was also afraid to look him in the eye. “He knew Mr. Shelley would be there front and center,” Ed said proudly. “I thought it was cowardly of him.”

  Some of their views had changed. Ed and Lera now admitted that he was sincere about accepting execution, since he had gone through with it, but Ed added that he thought he had done it for himself because he couldn’t stand to be on death row anymore. “He knew he was guilty, and it got to him.” However, Ed made it perfectly clear that he still did not believe that Michael was mentally ill. “Mentally ill? No. Evil? Yes.”


  And he was also still adamant about another thing. Ed Shelley had no intention of ever forgiving Michael Ross for killing Leslie. “Of course I’m not going to forgive him. He thought I was going to forgive him? Good grief.” Lera didn’t answer; at that point there was no reason to say more.

  • • •

  Jennifer Tabor Carcia, Robin Stavinsky’s little sister, was one of the few other family members who spoke to me. I was in Maine sitting on my porch; she was at home in Connecticut. The night of the execution, she had carried her favorite picture of her sister into the viewing area—despite the fact that they had been told not to do that. She had hidden it in her bra and held it while she watched Michael die. “I found him to be nonhuman. I had no emotion about it at the time. I didn’t cry. I wasn’t angry. I don’t remember much.”

  She was surprised that he hadn’t made a final statement and was curious why, so I explained that he “was afraid that it would be too trite. He had given a long apology at the sentencing, but what could he say in a minute other than ‘I’m sorry’? He thought that would be more hurtful. And he was not sure he could get through it without crying.”

  “Well, that makes me feel a little better.”

  She said it bothered her that he didn’t open his eyes because he didn’t acknowledge that the families were there. “Seeing him die didn’t affect me as much as when I had to put my cat down. He was a monster and so manipulative. He chose when to kill and when to die. He could have called it off. I remember the anxiety of thinking that he might call it off, but he took the easy way out. I know I sound a little callous, but his little bit of suffering was nothing compared to these girls and our families. Maybe in ten years I’ll be in a different place.”

  “So you think the death penalty was the proper penalty for what he did?”

  She took a deep breath. “A family member said, ‘Did the state do us any favor by pursuing the death penalty?’ And I said, ‘No.’ The death penalty hurts everybody. It didn’t do us any favor, but it took us a long while to understand it. There are so many different situations. I can’t say I am against the death penalty or that I am for it.” She said when there’s a death penalty, the system punishes the families. “After a trial, the families have to wait and wait, left to wait for decades as the legal process slowly plays out.”

  “Now that it’s over, do you feel you have closure?”

  “Closure? What does that mean?”

  When I told her that the Shelleys told me they had moved on, she said, “To me, closure is just a word. Robin’s death still haunts me. How can there be closure? Nothing is changed. My life has evolved around this. I am who I am because of this. If that hadn’t happened, I would be a different person. I would have a sister. I would visit her, and I would have nieces and nephews.” She said, for her, Michael Ross’s execution was just one step along the path, but it would never be over. “I have grieved my whole life, and to watch one human being die did not make that go away. I’ll never have closure because I will never get Robin back. It was just one event in a long series of events that I have had to go through,” she said, sounding as if she were about to cry. She heaved a deep sigh. “You knew him as a person and you lost that. You started this same journey at his death. Do you see how it runs so parallel to us? It all runs around together.”

  I never thought that any family member would ever think of Michael’s death as a loss to anyone other than his immediate family. “But I didn’t lose a sister or daughter. I can’t even define my relationship with Michael. It evolved into a friendship. I was totally afraid of him when I first met him—petrified—but over time that changed, and when he was able to trust me, he became a friend. He was already on medication when I met him, so I never knew the monster; he was just Michael.”

  “I feel a little better talking to you, knowing that there was a human side to Michael.” She paused for a second. “I called him Michael. Maybe he is less of a monster now to me since I talked to you. In a way, it’s good to know he had humanity.”

  “All he wanted was forgiveness—something that he knew he could never receive in life. He thought that by agreeing to die, he was proving that he was sorry,” I explained. “He didn’t know any other way to prove it.”

  “That takes me another step forward in my journey,” Jennifer said thoughtfully, “knowing that he was trying to say he was sorry.”

  • • •

  Lera called me on November 26, 2010, to tell me that Ed tragically took his own life. Wanting to spare Lera or his family the horror of finding him, he called 911 to tell them what he was about to do. His body was found in the woods just behind the Shelley house minutes later. Perhaps Ed was Michael’s tenth victim—if one counts his own death as his ninth.

  EPILOGUE

  In a sense, Michael died for the monster’s deeds. The monster never would have made that sacrifice, but Michael was ready and willing to give up his life as punishment for his crimes. In a twisted way, he saw himself as a martyr, dying so that others could get on with their lives. He wanted to make his last act proof that he was sorry for what he had done so that maybe someday even one member of his victims’ families would finally forgive him. There was also an element of control in the decision—he, not the state of Connecticut, set the timetable. He knew he was going to die in prison. All he did was move up the date. Michael was pragmatic about the role of politics in criminal justice. He didn’t think any judge or jury would ever give him a life sentence, and he didn’t think the legislature would abolish the death penalty as long as he was on death row, and I think he was right in that assessment.

  On April 4, 2012, the Connecticut State Senate passed a prospective death penalty abolition bill, and the State House of Representatives followed suit on April 12. Governor Dannel Malloy signed it into law on April 25, making Connecticut the seventeenth state to repeal its death penalty statute. The Connecticut law replaced capital punishment with life without parole, but it is a prospective abolition and does not apply to the men already on death row. Some anti–death penalty advocates believe that Michael’s execution made abolition possible in Connecticut; the reality of death had shocked people into realizing that if a state has a death penalty, ultimately it will execute someone.

  But Michael Ross was no hero or martyr. Michael murdered eight women and inflicted unbearable pain on nine families, including his own. He would want me to remind everyone of that fact. He didn’t want to be remembered as a monster, but he also didn’t want anyone to forget the monster’s deeds.

  My job has been presenting the two pictures of Michael Ross. I met a serial killer on paper and through his memories, and I saw all too clearly the incredible damage he had done. For ten years, I also got to know a man who would have done anything to have changed the course of his life and undone that damage. He was a man who believed that when it is in your power to do what you believe is right, it is your moral obligation to do it no matter what the consequences. He was convinced that he had only one moral option—to forgo appeals and accept death. Anything less would have violated his own moral code. Intertwined with his Christian beliefs were transcendentalist tenets. It didn’t matter that man’s law gave him the option to file appeals for decades; he was following both his own conscience and his higher power. The right thing to do was to die and let the families move on. In that regard, Michael did accomplish the one thing that he always said was his primary goal: Mrs. Shelley will never again cry in court.

  Michael’s case not only gives us a glimpse of the myriad factors that led to his becoming a serial killer, but also poses important questions about mental illness and the death penalty. I believe our justice system understands mental illness as well as nineteenth-century doctors understood bacteria. Justice is often wantonly and disproportionately meted out when the psychiatric bases of horrendous crimes are decided by juries and even judges.

  No doctor offered the definitive reason why Michael killed. It re
mained a question that tormented him. All the psychiatrists who examined him agreed that he was a sexual sadist, however. Dr. Borden even felt his illness went beyond sexual sadism and concluded that he had a sadistic personality disorder. Because of that diagnosis, Dr. Borden said it wasn’t the rape that was the ultimate sexual release; it was the murder. How much of his mental illness was genetic and how much of it was environmental could not be determined. Some tragic alchemy of his genetics, brain structure, and body chemistry, coupled with his childhood experiences, created a sadistic serial killer. I am certain that he did not choose to be violent, as Dr. Lonnie Athens would have us believe, nor did he have murderous intent. This is key to understanding Michael. He desperately needed people to believe that he did not want to rape and murder and that he could not control his behavior.

  He was not a sociopath devoid of emotions or remorse. He had a conscience. What made him unable to control his murderous impulses? As I told the Shelleys, I don’t think anyone could commit the horrific acts that Michael did without being mentally ill. Until we have a fuller understanding of mental illness, we’ll have to wonder whether we are executing people who could not control their behavior. They may not have been “insane” at the time of the murder, given the specifics of the legal definitions that legislatures write and judges interpret, but there are impulses that some of us can’t control. Michael Ross’s story illustrates the devastation caused by unsuccessful attempts at diagnosing and treating mental illness. At least nine lives could have been saved if he had been given early and competent help to keep him from raping and killing.

  Mental illness is often seen as an excuse used by a defendant, not a real medical condition that needs to be considered by the jury. Perhaps part of the problem is that the balancing act that jurors are asked to perform is sometimes actually a moral dilemma rather than a legal or medical one. They are told to balance the crimes and circumstances against the mitigating factors. They are put in an impossible position, playing God. Michael Ross’s case is a perfect example of the flaws in that process. The very facts that should have spared Michael’s life—like the number of bodies, proving his sexual sadism and mental illness—were at least part of the reason that caused two juries to decide on death. When there are so many victims, juries are not usually willing to believe the psychiatric evidence and spare a life—even when doctors on both sides agree that the defendant is mentally ill and give him the same diagnosis. There is no doubt in my mind that Michael should not have been put to death by the state of Connecticut.