The Man in the Monster Read online

  PENGUIN PRESS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2015 by Martha Elliott

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  ISBN 978-1-101-59599-2

  Names of several people were changed by the author to protect the identities of those who were romantically involved with Michael or the survivors of his attacks.

  Cover design by Cardon Webb

  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  PREFACE

  CHAPTER 1. NEW LONDON, CONNECTICUT

  CHAPTER 2. EASTER SUNDAY 1984

  CHAPTER 3. CONNECTICUT

  CHAPTER 4. NEW LONDON COURTHOUSE

  CHAPTER 5. NEW CANAAN AND SOMERS, CONNECTICUT

  CHAPTER 6. BROOKLYN, CONNECTICUT

  CHAPTER 7. BROOKLYN, CONNECTICUT

  CHAPTER 8. NORTHERN CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION

  CHAPTER 9. CORNELL UNIVERSITY

  CHAPTER 10. NEW YORK CITY

  CHAPTER 11. CLERK’S OFFICE, NEW LONDON, CONNECTICUT

  CHAPTER 12. CORNELL

  CHAPTER 13. SOMERS, CONNECTICUT

  CHAPTER 14. RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA

  CHAPTER 15. CONNECTICUT

  CHAPTER 16. CONNECTICUT

  CHAPTER 17. BRIDGEPORT, CONNECTICUT

  CHAPTER 18. DEATH ROW, SOMERS, CONNECTICUT

  CHAPTER 19. CONNECTICUT

  CHAPTER 20. NEW LONDON, CONNECTICUT

  CHAPTER 21. THE SHELLEYS’ HOME

  CHAPTER 22. SOMERS, CONNECTICUT

  CHAPTER 23. SOMERS, CONNECTICUT

  CHAPTER 24. SOMERS, CONNECTICUT

  CHAPTER 25. SUMMER 2006

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  For my children, Hadley, Hannah, and James

  And for the eight women whose lives were so tragically cut short

  PREFACE

  No one in her right mind invites a serial killer into her life. Who would want to know that kind of evil? For more than a decade, this is exactly what I did. I never imagined that I would consider someone like Michael Ross, a convicted serial rapist and murderer, a close friend. But from 1995 until his death by lethal injection in 2005, that is exactly what I did and what he became to me.

  I deplore violence, and I do not wish to mitigate what Michael Ross did before his 1984 arrest. He took eight lives, and he ruined many more. Over the course of my investigation into this case, I got to know many of the people whose lives he forever altered. Some of the families of his victims became friends of mine as well. I wrote this book as much for them—and for the daughters they lost—as I did for myself.

  The courts and the state of Connecticut have rendered justice in the case of Michael Ross. But until we see the man in the monster, we cannot begin to comprehend why he did what he did or to make a personal judgment as to whether sentencing Michael to death was a just punishment. Many books have been written on the topic of how someone can become a serial killer. This book grapples with the question of why this man, Michael Ross, turned to violence so many times. I hope that what I learned will help identify others like him before they turn down the same murderous path.

  Michael Ross was my partner in this investigation. He opened up his life to me so that together we might tell his story. I believe he worked with me for so many years as a kind of atonement for what he had done. His life was full of contradictions. He was a moral man who committed heinously immoral acts, a man capable of great bravery who was also cowardly, an intelligent man whose stubbornness defied reason. All of these facets dwelled within this man.

  To the best of my ability, I have told his story.

  • • •

  I became intrigued by Michael Ross’s case in the summer of 1995 during my tenure as the editor in chief and publisher of the Connecticut Law Tribune. When the Connecticut Supreme Court overturned the six death sentences that he had been given in 1987, he began lobbying to accept a death sentence to spare the families of his victims the pain of going through another trial. I was puzzled by his unusual offer, and I was intrigued by the complexities of mental illness and the death penalty, which I have always strongly opposed. I wrote asking for an interview for an article for the Tribune, even though the thought of him petrified me.

  The man I met was nothing like what I had expected. He wasn’t insane according to the legal definition—someone who lacks the capacity to understand the wrongfulness of an act because of mental disease or defect. Quite the contrary, this sensitive, articulate Cornell graduate was also a devout Roman Catholic who would profusely express his remorse for his crimes to anyone who would listen.

  His crimes were horrific. Michael had raped and murdered eight women, and there were other victims of sexual assault as well. To report his story I had to read thousands of pages of court testimony and police reports and interview lawyers, psychiatrists, family members, friends, and the victims’ families. I also consulted experts who had evaluated him and cited behavioral, chemical, and psychological origins of Michael’s murderous behaviors.

  At various times, experts had argued that Michael suffered from a variety of afflictions that might explain his criminal behavior, including sexual sadism, brain lesions, and childhood trauma. I found that his was a case without simple answers—as are so many that involve mental illness. I have no doubt that all of the factors cited by the experts involved in his case contributed to Michael’s actions, but I don’t believe they tell the whole story. It took a decade with Michael for me to even begin to do so.

  My reasons for taking on the assignment were complicated and personal. I was distressed that my home state of Connecticut might be the first New England state to execute someone in four decades. I had been brought up to be strongly opposed to capital punishment, yet even for me, Michael Ross’s crimes raised the question of the death penalty. I saw all too vividly the pain and suffering of the parents and loved ones of the young women he had murdered. As a parent, I sympathized with their need to get justice for their daughters. After I met some of these parents and siblings, those feelings became even stronger. Michael’s case was not just a daunting task to report on as a journalist, but also to deal with as a human being.

  When I filed my article in 1996, I didn’t intend to think about Michael Ross ever again. But after it was published, he kept calling, desperate for human contact. I’d been talking to him at least once a week during the nine-month research process, and it seemed cruel to stop taking his calls. I decided that continuing to talk with him was a small effort compared with what it meant to this lonely, haunted man. Over time, we became friends, something that was very hard for me to admit for many years—even to myself.

  Our conversations encompassed much more than the details of his crimes and the legal aftermath; we talked about his childhood, his regrets, his lonely life on death row, and, at times, about my life. Our decade-long relationship had two faces. Sometimes we were focused on the serial killer. We talked about Michael’s past, about the murders, about his first trial, about the demons that had invaded his
mind. He told me in conversations and letters about the possible origins of his mental illness, “the monster,” which began and progressed in college, about the violent fantasies that plagued his mind, and about the murders. After he was convicted and put on death row, he had received medication, hormone therapy, that he said quieted his violent sexual fantasies. Yet the relief also had its costs; it freed his mind so that he had to face his horrific acts. That was the man I got to know. I never actually met the serial killer, even though I met Michael face-to-face more times than I can count.

  As I became friends with Michael, our conversations became more personal. We joked, talked about the weather or politics. One journalist listening to a tape of a phone conversation between Michael and me commented, “It’s too normal. You sound like you’re talking to your next-door neighbor.” We were talking about an impending snowstorm and whether I’d be able to fly from California to Connecticut to visit him. Michael was worried that the snow would delay my flight and was concerned about my safety. “Promise me you’ll drive safely. Don’t rush up here from the airport.”

  Often over the years, I would be at a party when someone would ask what I was working on. “A book.” I’d hesitate. As soon as I’d say it was about a serial killer, the questions would ping in rapid fire. Everyone wanted to know who, what, and why. “Why?” was a question I could not answer for many years.

  • • •

  Prior to 1995, I knew nothing about serial killers. But when I began to look into this case, I had to find out where Michael might stand within the context of the history of the serial-killer phenomenon. I began by reading Ann Rule’s book on her relationship with Ted Bundy, The Stranger Beside Me, published in 1980. Like me, Rule struggled to square the man she knew with the notorious murderer. It’s interesting that nowhere in the book does Rule use the term “serial killer,” as it didn’t become part of the common parlance until about the time that Michael Ross was in the midst of his murder spree in the early 1980s.

  Throughout all of my research, I failed to find a striking similarity between Michael Ross and any other murderer. He seemed to stand alone in the annals of serial killers, so I probed deeper into his story.

  After his arrest in 1984, Michael was diagnosed as having the mental illness called sexual sadism, a paraphiliac disorder. All of his subsequent doctors concurred with this original diagnosis. According to the edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for that time (DSM-III), sexual sadism required one of the following criteria: “(1) On a nonconsenting partner, the individual has repeatedly and intentionally inflicted psychological or physical suffering in order to achieve sexual excitement. (2) With a consenting partner a repeatedly preferred or exclusive mode of achieving sexual excitement combines humiliation with simulated or mildly injurious bodily suffering. (3) On a consenting partner bodily injury that is extensive, permanent, or possibly mortal is inflicted in order to achieve sexual excitement.” As it was written, this diagnosis focuses on the acts and not on the underlying urges or causes of sexual sadism. Although the criteria for the diagnosis have evolved over subsequent revisions of the DSM, based on his crimes, Michael would still meet criteria of the official diagnosis today.

  The cause of the disease is not entirely understood; both biological and behavioral factors may be involved. Likewise, there is no universal treatment for the diagnosis. Behavioral therapies may work, and some patients respond to female hormone treatments, as Michael ultimately did. Some of the most renowned experts in the field believe that hormone therapy must be accompanied by psychotherapy.

  Much controversy surrounds the diagnosis of sexual sadism and whether it should even be considered a mental illness. Some experts believe that sexual sadism, as well as sexual masochism, are sexual preferences and should not be considered abnormal behavior when the behaviors involve consenting adults. In Michael’s mind, at least, his acts of violence were integrally connected to his compulsions; we spoke at length about the connection. He believed, or at least he desperately wanted to believe, that the disease drove him to kill. Part of my investigation was to question whether those who inflict pain or kill are driven by an uncontrollable compulsion or whether it is a choice of sexual preference. In Michael’s case, his positive response to Depo-Provera and Depo Lupron drug treatments suggested that his compulsion could be controlled with medication.

  Richard Rhodes’s 1999 book, Why They Kill, is centered on the work of Dr. Lonnie Athens, a criminologist who teaches at Seton Hall University. Athens refutes the classic view that violent killers are mentally ill and do not consciously commit their crimes. From his observation of several hundred convicts, he postulates that after going through four stages (only one of which, possible brutalization and trauma as a child, I could connect with Michael), people actually choose violence as a course of action. During the last stage, he says, the violent person kills because he has come to believe that it is the right way to handle a situation. By the time I read Rhodes’s book, I had known Michael for some time, and the idea that he actually chose to be a violent killer seemed impossible to believe. He was consumed with guilt. He insisted that it was shame about his crimes that had kept him from turning himself in, not fear of punishment.

  Dr. James Merikangas, a psychiatrist and neurologist who has written about these types of behaviors and who analyzed Michael when he was practicing at Yale–New Haven Hospital, was adamant that each case must be examined individually and that any theory that says that all murderers make a conscious decision to kill is wrong. “Any of the [killers] I have seen are all different. The brain lesions [which Michael also had] are all different. I have not found a unifying thing,” he told me. In “The Neurology of Violence,” a chapter he wrote for Brain-Behavior Relationships, which he also edited, Dr. Merikangas notes, “Violence is not a diagnosis.” He points out that “outbursts of rage or verbal or physical aggressiveness” are different from normal behavior and that—like Michael Ross—many people regret their violent acts.

  Katherine Ramsland’s extensive body of work on the subject supports the caveat against a one-size-fits-all theory of recidivist violent behavior. In Inside the Minds of Serial Killers: Why They Kill, she cites more than a dozen reasons for the murderousness of serial killers. She asserts that “when analyzed case by case, serial killers often do not fit into neat categories.” In her introduction, she cites former FBI profiler Robert K. Ressler as saying that “too many people . . . try to oversimplify the psychology of these killers, but for every attempt to state a ‘truth,’ one can find counterexamples that undermine it. . . . Generalizations, Ressler indicated, do a disservice to the subject.”

  Michael’s case did not fit into any stereotype about sexual killers—he didn’t dismember his victims or exhibit other antisocial behaviors. After his arrest, he openly admitted his guilt, and he expressed what appeared to be true remorse for his actions and the pain he had caused.

  Almost more than anyone else, Michael wanted to understand why he had committed such brutal crimes. That’s why he spent thousands and thousands of hours talking to me—and why I listened. It’s also why he was willing to speak with almost any psychiatric expert—an opportunity he unfortunately didn’t have until it was too late to stop his murderous behavior—and to give me permission to interview them as well. As he told me over and over again, often sobbing, “I didn’t wake up one day and decide to be a serial killer. I would have done anything for it to turn out differently.”

  The more I read, the more I realized that what we knew about other serial killers was based on their crimes, not on a thorough analysis of the person who committed them. It was impossible to draw conclusions about any one of them without a fuller portrait. I spent ten years of my life getting to know a serial killer, Michael Ross, through his eyes as well as those who knew him best.

  When I began reporting this story, I was interested in the legal questions r
aised by the case—whether one could accept a death sentence without a trial and whether those with mental illness should be executed. There were also important constitutional questions involving the right of due process and the definition of cruel and unusual punishment. I hoped the story would start a dialogue about how our justice system deals with a mentally ill person who has committed horrendous crimes. The articles I wrote and this book were always intended to create a “little picture,” the term my mentor, Fred Friendly—the iconic journalist and former head of CBS News, who was my professor at Columbia University as well as my colleague—used to describe personal stories that tell an important tale about society.

  The little picture I found contradicted all of my own prejudices and fears about serial killers. Although I set out to tell the story as objectively as possible, when I began this process, in my mind, Michael Ross was a monster. Ultimately, writing about this story changed me. Michael Ross was a brutal rapist and killer, but I also met another side of him—a caring, thoughtful person who exhibited true remorse, perhaps in part because of the Christian faith he had developed from a decade-long relationship with Father John Gilmartin, a Roman Catholic priest who was Michael’s spiritual adviser. Father John was the first one to convince Michael that God would forgive him even if no one else would. It wasn’t a personal journey, but Michael’s faith helped him be firm in his belief that giving up his appeals was the right thing to do.

  We are told that the ultimate punishment is reserved for the worst of the worst—those who commit horrendous acts that are cruel and heinous. Yet how do we as a society factor in mental illness when punishments are meted out? Do we show mercy and spare a life? Do monstrous acts make the person who commits them a monster?

  I am the only journalist Michael Ross trusted to tell the whole truth, not only to my readers, but also to him. On some level, he wasn’t sure what the truth was, and he hoped I would set him straight—even if the truth was something he didn’t want to hear. To the best of his ability, he honestly answered and described his experiences—all of them. I learned about the dark side of man, what all of us may be capable of but none of us wants to face. In a sense, it’s easier if such violent criminals appear to be subhuman monsters. But that logic protects no one by excusing everyone. To better understand the darkness, we have to see it clearly.