The Man in the Monster Page 2
This is not just Michael Ross’s story. I hope it also honors the memories of the women he murdered and honestly shows the suffering that Michael caused their families. I am particularly grateful to the Shelley family for all the hours that they spent with me, helping me to understand the tragic human cost of Michael’s crimes. I have tried to reflect their honesty and pain in these pages.
This is the story of how I set out to write a story about a monster and met a man.
1
NEW LONDON, CONNECTICUT
SEPTEMBER 28, 1995
It was almost noon when Michael Bruce Ross, convicted serial killer, walked into the crowded courtroom—all 240 pounds of him, the man who had brutally raped and strangled eight young women. He no longer resembled the lanky, bespectacled, nervous-looking young man who had originally gone to trial more than a decade before; sedentary prison life, prison food, and female hormones (Depo-Provera and Depo Lupron to treat his sexual sadism) changed all that. His six-foot frame carried the weight that he jokingly claimed to have gained so that he wouldn’t fit into the electric chair, Connecticut’s method of execution at the time of his first trial. Oversize prison-issue glasses, a doughy face, and a crew cut gave him a geeky look. He wore the NCI (Northern Correctional Institution) prisoner’s jumpsuit and white laceless slip-on sneakers. He was restrained by handcuffs and ankle shackles. As the guards removed the handcuffs at the judge’s orders, visible indentations were left by the black box that holds the two shackles together during transport to ensure that there is no escape. The box is standard operating procedure for all death row inmates going to court. They say it hurts like hell.
Ross appeared calm, considering that he was trying to negotiate his own death, and he came armed with a folder full of documents and court decisions. He wanted the court to allow him to accept the death penalty without a new trial, because, he said, he wanted to spare the families of the young women he’d killed from having to go through the pain of another trial.
For the first time since we had started corresponding a few months earlier, we were in the same room, and he was actually able to see me. The reality of being less than twenty feet from a man who had raped and murdered eight young women was terrifying. Michael turned around, smiled at me, and mouthed, “Are you Martha?”
I nodded yes. As a reporter, I was excited. But he knew who I was. A serial killer had identified me. Half of me wished that I could become invisible or crawl under the courtroom bench, though he had four guards surrounding him and leg shackles on. The man couldn’t hurt me. Why did you let yourself get involved in this story?
Michael had been on death row for almost a decade, but his legal proceedings were starting up again because the Connecticut Supreme Court had overturned his six death sentences and had ordered a new penalty phase because psychiatric evidence had been kept from the jury. As the editor in chief and publisher of the Connecticut Law Tribune, a weekly newspaper for lawyers, I could have sat in my office behind a desk, reviewing financials and reading reporters’ stories, but I was looking for a powerful story that would demonstrate the problems inherent in the death penalty. What I got instead was a decade of Michael Ross.
2
EASTER SUNDAY 1984
Physically, they were as different as night and day. Leslie Shelley was blond and, as her father described her, “a bean pole” at four feet eleven inches and 85 pounds. April Brunais had brown hair and was chunky at five feet five inches and 160 pounds. No stranger would have suspected that they were less than seven months apart in age. Yet Leslie Shelley and April Brunais were inseparable fourteen-year-olds who had been the best of friends for nearly six years—ever since April had moved into a house two doors away in Griswold, Connecticut. Mimicking the Cabbage Patch Doll craze, they had adopted each other as sisters, even filling out “adoption” papers. Their notes to each other were signed “LYALAS” (“love you always, like a sister”).
Typical teenage girls: their world consisted of clothes, makeup, a few select boys, and making sure they never missed a school dance. The parameters of their universe were set by school and their parents. When they hung out at the Shelleys’, they’d go down to the basement, where there was a bed and a collection of heavy-metal albums, owned by Leslie’s older brother Edwin. They’d play them so loud that it would drive Leslie’s father crazy.
April, less than a month shy of her fifteenth birthday, was already a freshman at Griswold High School. Leslie was nearly finished with the eighth grade at Griswold Elementary School, where she had successfully worked her way through the remedial-reading program. Despite being extremely shy, Leslie was excited about moving on to high school and joining her best friend there and had filled out the paperwork during the first week of April.
Although she had been baptized a Roman Catholic, Leslie had gravitated to a local Protestant church, where she rarely missed Sunday school. On Easter Sunday, April 22, 1984, Leslie had attended church services before spending the afternoon with April. That afternoon, they were looking for something to do—something that did not involve grown-ups. This time they were plotting to go to Jewett City, a town a little more than three miles away. The trick was getting their parents to let them go. Ed Shelley was sitting in his living room watching television when April and Leslie came into the house. April stayed on the landing, a half story lower, as Leslie went up to woo her father. “Can I go to the movies with April?” she asked.
“Give me a kiss,” Ed teased, pointing to his unshaven face. Leslie leaned over and gave him a peck on the cheek. The girls told Ed that the Roodes, April’s mother and stepfather, were driving them. As they went to leave, Jennifer, then eight, asked if she could go along, but sensing that Leslie didn’t really want her baby sister tagging along, Ed decided that Jennifer would stay home.
Ellen Roode was told that the pair was going to meet friends for pizza and that the Shelleys were giving them a ride. In all likelihood, the girls cut across a neighbor’s yard and hiked over the golf course, knocking a few miles off the trip and keeping out of sight. Only April and Leslie know the truth of what they did that afternoon—that is until they decided to hitch a ride home. When they realized that they were in danger of missing their 8:30 curfew, they called their families from the phone booth near a gas station in Jewett City to say they were running late. There wasn’t time to walk home, so they decided to hitchhike. The first car to stop to pick them up was driven by Michael Ross.
At the end of the first quarter of 1984, Michael had been warned by his superiors at the insurance agency about poor job performance. His boss had suggested that he take a vacation to sort things out, and Michael decided to drive to Disney World in Florida with his live-in girlfriend, Diane (not her real name). But Diane’s father died unexpectedly while they were in Florida, and they had to cut the trip short by a day—despite Michael’s narcissistic pout and complete lack of understanding. The drive home was a 1,500-mile-long battlefield. “It was a very bad drive to say the least,” Michael would admit. “I wasn’t being very sympathetic or understanding.”
Diane’s father’s wake was Easter Sunday, and Michael assumed that he was not invited because he had been fighting with Diane. Upset about the perceived rebuke, he paced around his apartment all afternoon, knowing that if he went out, someone might die. He tried desperately to control his urge to go on the hunt. Finally, following the pattern of what had already become his sick way of coping with the anger he felt toward a woman with whom he was involved, Michael got into his car. He rationalized it as a way to blow off steam, but he knew he was out looking for female prey. He had already committed five rape-murders and knew his pattern of hunting and stalking. He was only a few blocks from his apartment when he spotted April and Leslie and stopped to pick them up. They asked him to drop them off at a gas station in Voluntown. However, Michael had no intention of complying. When he drove past their stop, the girls became upset, and April startled him by pulling a steak
knife from her purse, causing him to swerve and almost drive off the road. Feigning control, but worried, Michael ordered April to give him the knife. She hesitated until Leslie told her to do exactly as he ordered. This was probably a fatal mistake, because if either of them had managed to escape, Michael would have panicked and run.
What happened next is disputed. In 1984, after a day of questioning by the arresting officer, Detective Michael Malchik, Michael confessed to murdering April and Leslie. However, he later contended that Malchik “twisted” the evidence and cajoled him into saying things that weren’t true so that he would be not only convicted, but also sentenced to die. Setting the record straight became one of Michael’s obsessions after his conviction in 1987.
What follows is what he told me when I first started reporting on the case, noting the discrepancies with his original confession. “I drove to an area in Rhode Island. I never knew it was Rhode Island until [Malchik] showed me a map at midnight on the night of my arrest.” Exactly where the murders took place would later become a legal battle between prosecution and defense lawyers; the prosecutors claimed that they had occurred in Connecticut because they wanted to make sure they had jurisdiction to prosecute them.
When he found a secluded spot, Michael pulled his car off the road and out of sight of passing traffic. Out in the woods where no one could come to their rescue, the girls were easily intimidated by his size and followed his commands without hesitation. He ordered April into the backseat as he tied up Leslie with strips of cloth that he cut from an old slipcover that was in the car and put her in the trunk. Then he bound April and pulled her out of the car, telling her to undress. As had become his gruesome ritual, he unzipped his pants and thrust his penis into her mouth, but only long enough to further arouse him. He pulled out before coming close to climax. He pushed her down onto her back and raped her. Flipping her over onto her stomach and using the same pieces of cloth with which he had bound her, he strangled her and then stuffed her lifeless body, naked from the waist down, into the front seat of the car with the back of the front seat lowered.
Michael’s version of what happened next differed depending on when he was telling the story. His confession says he took Leslie out of the trunk, then had her undress and “perform oral sex on me.” Michael claimed that “she was too small,” so he didn’t rape her. Instead, he apologized to her and then strangled her. He told Dr. Howard Zonana, a psychiatrist who examined him for the defense but did not testify in court, that “she was the only one who didn’t panic. They all fought me and resisted me. She didn’t.” He said that she “took the excitement out of it” and that he couldn’t get hard when he tried to rape her. “She never said a thing, not even when I was strangling her.”
However, while on death row, he changed his story. “I tried to rape her vaginally,” he claimed, “but I couldn’t penetrate her. So I raped her anally.” He used the cloth ligatures to strangle her before putting her body back into the trunk of the car. He then looked for a place to hide the bodies, perhaps because the location of the murders was too close to the road and he wanted to make sure the bodies weren’t discovered right away; Michael couldn’t explain his reasons except that every time he realized what he had done, he panicked. He didn’t want to get caught, and the best way to avoid being accused of murder was to hide the bodies. He drove back to Connecticut, toward the place where he had picked up the girls, and disposed of their bodies in a culvert within miles of where they lived. Like a ritualistic wake, Michael returned to that location on several occasions but was always worried that the bodies would be found and “that someone would recognize my car as being in the area. But I had to return to check them. I don’t know why . . . I just had to see that they were still there. . . . I didn’t stay long,” he later told me.
When he was arrested, Michael never went as far as saying that he had killed Leslie to cover his crimes, but because he admitted apologizing to her, it seemed the most likely scenario to many people. He always said that Leslie Shelley’s murder bothered him the most. Was any scenario better than another? Either he killed Leslie without sex and therefore may have done it as part of a cover-up, or he tried to rape the poor little girl, couldn’t, and settled for anal sex, making Leslie’s death more agonizing. Either option was equally abhorrent. That’s why Ed and Lera Shelley were present at every hearing and were determined that Michael Ross should be executed.
3
CONNECTICUT
1994
At the Law Tribune, we held weekly editorial meetings in a conference room that overlooked a salt marsh. During a Monday morning meeting in early August 1994, I was staring out the window watching a blue heron lying in wait, standing motionless trying to be invisible to unsuspecting fish, as Joe Calve, the editor of the paper, gave a summary of the Connecticut Supreme Court’s opinion that upheld Michael Ross’s conviction of guilt but overturned his death sentences.
Michael had been arrested in Connecticut in June 1984 after a three-year killing spree that began just before his graduation from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in May 1981. After his Connecticut arrest, he was charged with the rape and murder of six women. Tammy Williams, seventeen, and Debra Smith Taylor, twenty-three, were murdered in Windham County, Connecticut. Robin Stavinsky, nineteen, Leslie Shelley, fourteen, April Brunais, fourteen, and Wendy Baribeault, seventeen, were murdered in adjacent New London County. Later Michael admitted to raping and killing Dzung Ngoc Tu, twenty-five, and Paula Perrera, sixteen, in New York in 1981 and 1982. All of his murders were random. They were vulnerable women who happened to be walking alone along deserted paths or roads.
The Windham County prosecutor did not seek the death penalty. After consulting with his own psychiatric experts, he concluded that Michael was mentally ill and ineligible for a death sentence under the law. In a plea bargain, Michael was sentenced to two consecutive eighty-year prison terms. However, New London’s chief state’s attorney C. Robert Satti Sr. did not offer a plea bargain, and after a lengthy trial in 1987, Michael was convicted of the four murders in New London County and given six death sentences—a technicality of the law that allows someone to be charged more than once with the same murder.
Before any death sentence could be carried out, the Connecticut Supreme Court had to review the case. The 1972 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Furman v. Georgia required every state to rewrite its death penalty statute because the law was being applied in an arbitrary and capricious manner and thus was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection of the laws. Some of the justices also said it was a violation of the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The decision required that an appellate court in each state review any death sentence to make sure that the Constitution has not been violated, that the application of the death penalty was not arbitrary, and that the trial court did not commit any procedural errors. For twelve years, from 1965 until 1977, there were no executions in the United States while states rewrote their laws to conform to Furman. At the time of Michael’s sentencing, fewer than one hundred men had been executed—most in the South or West.
It had taken seven years for the Connecticut Supreme Court to reach a decision in Michael’s case. The justices upheld his conviction but overturned the death sentences. The court ruled that the prosecutor and trial judge had erred when they kept vital evidence from the jury. In addition, Justice Robert Berdon wrote a scathing criticism of the original prosecutor, Bob Satti, in his concurring opinion. The jury never knew that the state’s own expert psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Miller, agreed with the defense expert psychiatrists that Michael was mentally ill—a sexual sadist—and that his mental illness should preclude a death sentence. Dr. Miller had written the letter explaining his position to Satti on February 15, 1987, just two weeks prior to the start of jury selection in Michael’s trial. But Satti kept Miller’s letter out of the original trial.
In his letter, Dr. Miller sa
id that after ruminating about the case for a long time, he had changed his original analysis of the significance of Michael’s mental illness, which he admitted had been based on emotion rather than reason. Dr. Miller wrote that he believed Michael’s mental illness played a significant role in the murders and that he could not recommend a death sentence. “If it had been only one or two [murders] I could have held up, but the repetitive nature of the acts as well as past history of assaultive behavior make my (our) position untenable.” Michael had attacked, raped, and murdered too many victims for Dr. Miller to deny that his mental illness was linked to his crimes. In Connecticut, under the death penalty statute as it existed in 1987, mental illness was an automatic mitigating factor. A death sentence could not be imposed if there was even one mitigating factor. Yet in part because it never heard Dr. Miller’s findings, the jury rejected the psychiatric evidence put on by the defense and imposed six death sentences.
I had recently moved to Connecticut when Michael was first arrested in 1984. I remember being relieved to hear that a suspected serial killer had been apprehended. But I had a sense of dread three years later when I read the headlines announcing that he had been sentenced to die in the electric chair—the first successful capital prosecution since Connecticut had reinstated the death penalty in 1973. I’m not even sure if I knew that Connecticut had a death penalty statute. In New York, where I had been living, Governor Mario Cuomo had firmly planted himself in front of the executioner’s door, vetoing any death penalty statute passed by the legislature. It seemed odd that suburban Connecticut would have tougher penalties than New York. The state I lived in was the first New England state in three decades to sentence a man to death. Even though I knew there would be years and years of appeals, the verdict was unsettling. No one had been executed in Connecticut since 1960. I believed all killing was wrong—not just what Michael had done but also what the state of Connecticut wanted to do to him. Yet on the other hand, as a parent, I couldn’t even fathom the pain and suffering of the families of the young women and could sympathize with their need for justice for their daughters.