Dead Men Talking

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  Conveniently forgetting that the threat of deadly force may be met by the use of deadly force, LeRoy goes on, while at once pointing a handgun at Mr West:

  Note 4. One of the known reasons of the standard prohibiting store clerks from shooting a suspect to death without any warning is that, if allowed to shoot first if a potential enemy had a gun, was because then any feuding store clerk could point a gun over the store counter, then promptly shoot him before he could ask, ‘Why?’

  Note 5. It is rather far-fetched for any store owner to hand a loaded gun to an untrained amateur employee, and to then consider he will only kill in order to save the boss some money.

  Note 6. Mr West was not trying to merely get the better of me, he was deliberately trying to murder me so he would be a hero. I’d bet his wife thought that was kind of stupid, as well as suicidal.

  Note 7. It should be illegal for any store manager to give a clerk a loaded gun and not send him to a class to learn to shoot it correctly and lawfully.

  Having now admitted to the murder, LeRoy soon backtracked, saying that he didn’t want to kill West, but that he nudged his arm and his gun fired, the bullet ‘accidentally’ hitting the clerk in the chest. LeRoy could not account for the other two shots that he fired into the man – going to write another fourteen pages explaining why it was an accident.

  I also questioned LeRoy about his alleged daring escape over the high prison wall, through the razor wire, dodging the bullets and evading the police in one of America’s largest manhunts. He had previously told me that he had been serving two life sentences for murder, however, the truth later emerged that, in reality, he was serving two five-years-to-life concurrent sentences for a 1947 conviction for assaulting a Connecticut police officer with intent to kill. The escape? He was working, unshackled, on a forestry crew, and made a run for it.

  All of this information now puts LeRoy in an entirely different light. He is not the cold-blooded cop-killer he once portrayed himself as. His only murder was that of Gregory West, which he argues was an accident. Indeed this extremely successful jailhouse lawyer has managed to tie the Arizona judicial system up in knots for years – just as he did in Connecticut, a talent even acknowledged by the Supreme Court.

  On Death Row, LeRoy says this:

  I have never heard a death row inmate discussing his crimes. Everyone knows about me, but not the details. When I was acting as a paralegal, decades ago, I encountered mostly a bunch of sad people who were nervous and neurotic, afraid to discuss their case, for fear that other cons would hate them, often because their trial transcripts exposed them as gutless rats.

  Yet there actually are a few good people in death row. But prison officials seldom know much about the prisoner’s actual character.

  On the other hand, alert prisoners hear a lot about prison psychiatrists, or psychologists; but most such professionals are used by prison officials for only one purpose: to learn if the prisoner is a danger to the prison administration in any way.

  Most prison guards, the same as most prisoners, are uneducated, low-level people, incapable of worthwhile sociobiological cogitation; followers and freeloaders.’

  So, what about his hunting adventures around the Hoover Dam? Sadly, this all seems to be the invention of our man’s over-active imagination. At the age of fifteen, when he was supposed to be hunting deer around the Hoover Dam construction project, his rap sheet shows that he was arrested for riding in a stolen car and started serving a one-year plus six-day prison term at the Ohio Federal Reform School, at Chillicothe, from which he promptly escaped. A woman, living nearby, heard the prison escape siren, spotted him, and he was recaptured about four miles away.

  LeRoy now found himself resentenced to a further one year and a day, which he served at the Federal Prison at Leavenworth, thirty miles from Kansas City. Here, under the name of Roy Taylor, he says that he ‘knocked a Mexican on his ass because he groped my ass’. He adds: ‘That brief action, in the observable presence of four elderly prisoners who promptly ordered a watching group of “Spanish gentleman” to stay out of it, which they did. Courage-plus! So, to my delight, those four old-timers were four of the most respected ex-professional thieves in the whole prison. So I hung out during recreation with them because they were educated in thieving on a professional level, and I knew (I soon learned all the basics).’

  But, according to Leroy, during the same sentence he was placed in solitary confinement for ‘knocking out four blacks who tried to rape me. I put them in hospital’, he writes, adding, once again with more than a hint of invention, ‘and the fight turned into a full-bore riot involving at least 40 cons. I served my whole sentence (his prison record says eight months) in solitary.’

  Whatever the case, he was released, aged seventeen, in 1932, but was soon back serving a further four years for parole violations.

  And, the truth of shooting the hobo who stole LeRoy’s pal’s melon, when he was aged eighteen? In later letters LeRoy seems to have forgotten about the ‘melon shooting’ altogether. He says he had learned all about jewellery and diamonds; teaming up with the Mafia he was ‘making his bones’ selling gems to jewellers. His first sale earned him $24,000 in cash. ‘I bought a legal-size briefcase, second hand, big enough to hold my money, a clean shirt and my .357 Magnum, and a box of bullets.’

  He then says he went out and robbed a jewellery store.

  * * *

  So, what do we make of Viva LeRoy Nash? Well, for all of his sins, and when we compare him with seriously heinous killers, this is a man who most certainly does not deserve to be living out his last days on the Green Mile. He is highly intelligent (his IQ is measured at 150), he is articulate, and a first-rate story-teller, therefore, after reading and re-reading his countless letters, it is almost impossible to sort the wheat from the chaff, the facts from the fiction.

  This old rascal has an eye for a pretty girl. He hates the US judicial system with a vengeance, an institution which he’s bamboozled for decades. As far as he is concerned the internet is ‘full of shit’. That most authors ‘especially American ones, are assholes who never get their facts straight’. And, what we read in newspapers is ‘erroneous crap’. All cops are ‘crooked’, and judges and prosecutors are ‘perjuring bastards’.

  As for television? He reserves a special disgust for TV, and gives us the benefit of his thoughts, while at once complaining about news coverage of the New Orleans hurricane Katrina disaster of 29 August 2005:

  There is a lot of fraud and blatant criminals, illegal information, plus degeneracy, on today’s TV junk. Especially by those freaky religious scam artists. For example: last week, after watching a few camera shots of the wreckage, flooding, fires and destruction of the Katrina hurricane damage of New Orleans, especially the many dead bodies in the flood waters, our main TV station then allowed a goofy Christian minister to take over the microphone in New Orleans, and he began in a loud voice, waving his fists and yelling: ‘God has destroyed New Orleans because of its habit of wanton sin, and bawdy houses and dens of corruption. He has smitten the evil city because of their indecent parades by the corrupt elements of their vile French Quarter. The hundreds of bodies floating in the flooded streets, or rotting in the ruined buildings attest to the power of our God we have dishonoured.’ That ranting and raving of an obviously insane nature was by a famous southern preacher who is the son of a famed deceased preacher. After he had ranted and raved, he begged listeners softly to send donations to his church, giving their address, with the soft promise that ‘our Christian group need help to do life-saving work at once’.

  Yes, sir, God doesn’t sit well with LeRoy at all. Referring to Iraq, he writes:

  When our combined Forces in Iraq had won a series of battles, and many of the local military enemy holdouts had acted as if they had quit the war, and thousands of Iraq people were actually seriously considering adopting a new Constitution of their own making, God got into it again, supposedly loudly.

  One of our regular TV m
inisters was seen loudly, and with happy exclamations with both hands reaching high, he screamed: ‘Praise the Lord! At Last! God is at last going to have his way. The people of Iraq are finally going to adopt an honourable Christian-type of Constitution for their own country as a whole’.

  Having got that bit off his chest, LeRoy slipped into top gear:

  Even I, a supposedly vile convict on death row, recoiled in shock to hear such an idiotic scream by a famous Christian minister on our Sunday morning nationwide television. Muttering to myself: ‘Damn! Doesn’t that idiot realize there are thousands of devoted Muslims right here in our country?’ And at least a few of them, respecting their own, will promptly report that idiotic statement to the Muslim Mullahs in Iraq. So what are we in America going to do about our own supposed Christian big-mouthed own ministers, and their satanic habits as dangerous as the idiotic and vile as the ‘shaken baby’ syndrome? Or other religious ideologies?

  On 12 February 2010, just over a year before the second version of this book went to press, LeRoy Nash died of natural causes at the ripe old age of 94.

  For my part, I was very fond of the old fella… Death Row inmate or not. Although one should not appear to be glorifying a man who commits murder, Nash had an endearing, never-say-die quality which marked him out from the spineless guttersnipes who knock over convenience stores and kill women and children indiscriminately for a handful of loose change. Compared to the other killers in this book, I found LeRoy Nash to be a breath of fresh air.

  CHAPTER 6

  MICHAEL BRUCE ROSS

  THE ROADSIDE STRANGLER

  There was nothing they could have said or done. They were dead as soon as I saw them. I used them. I abused them. I treated them like so much garbage. What more do you want me to fucking say?

  Michael Ross, in a Death Row interview with the author, 26 September 1994.

  It had taken years of lengthy correspondence, and Ross had written countless letters to me in his neat hand, then suddenly there he was, in person – Connecticut’s only convicted serial killer.

  Surrounded by three immaculately uniformed correctional officers, wearing starched light-khaki shirts, knife-edge creased trousers, and spit-and-polished boots, Ross, who looked almost antiseptically clean, was in full body restraints – handcuffs chained to a heavy belt, chains down to ankle chains – he shuffled along, his loose-fitting prison garb covering a plumpish physique. In life, Michael stood around 5ft 10in, and weighed about 140lb. In life he appeared bookish, which indeed he was, with his thin-rimmed spectacles perched high on the bridge of his nose. A well-read young man and polite too. But that was in life. Now he is long dead. He was executed by lethal injection on Friday 13 May, 2005, and that’s the way he wanted it to be.

  Michael was no dummy. He had the intellect. He enjoyed a bright intelligence and with an IQ of 150, became an Ivy League student at Cornell University. With a fresh complexion, a chubby face, a cheeky smile and mischievous eyes, he gave the impression of a stereotypical ‘All-American’ homespun boy. At face value, Michael was very much the boy next door; the type a girl’s father might approve of his daughter dating. But, as all parents know, appearances can be deceptive. Michael was a sexual sadist who had raped six precious daughters before killing them.

  During the course of my relationship with him for the purposes of writing this chapter and the making of a TV documentary, Mike added to this tally, by confessing, for the first time, to raping and killing two other girls, and having anal intercourse with the dead body of another.

  * * *

  Michael Bruce Ross was born in Brooklyn, Connecticut, on Wednesday, 26 July 1961, a Leo. He was the first of Daniel ‘Dan’ Graeme Ross and Patricia Hilda’s (nee Laine) four children, the others being Donna, Kenneth and Tina. By all accounts, the marriage was a stormy one, and Patricia, a borderline schizophrenic, who would later twice run away from her husband, never hid the fact that she had been forced to get married because she had fallen pregnant with Michael. From the outset, her first baby was an unwanted child.

  Family and friends have described Patricia as a woman who could be charming one minute and cold and calculating the next. She had spent time in the state’s Connecticut Valley Hospital (CVH), at Middletown, and at another hospital in Norwich. A number of people who knew her had witnessed at first hand a volatile, manipulative woman who would takeout her resentment on her family, especially Michael, whom she blamed for ruining her life.

  Mike remembered his mother’s mood swings, which all of the children feared. For example, they couldn’t understand how she could laugh after making them ill by feeding them bad meat. Or why she would ruin her two daughters’ clothes with a box of dye. Spiteful, vicious and sadistic, bordering upon pathologically unstable, it was Patricia who tried to trick young Michael into shooting his pet dog, after convincing him that it was suffering, after a short illness. It transpired that she had tried to poison the dog too. She even set Michael’s mattress on fire on the front lawn because she once caught him masturbating. So, by all accounts, Patricia Ross was ‘the Mother from Hell’.

  Yet, the four kids loved their mother, simply because she was their ‘mom’. They grew to accept her mood swings, and learned to keep out of her way when she blew her top. Like unwanted pets, which return even meagre scraps of affection with devotion and loyalty, the children had to love her just to survive. As Keith Hunter Jesperson astutely points out: ‘We cannot pick our parents, so we accept our situation as being normal. Only when we venture out in later life do we question our upbringing.’

  Michael Ross explained this in an audio-taped interview with the author, and the authenticity of his account has been verified by one of his sisters:

  We had what we called ‘Mom Drills’. The first person up in the morning would go downstairs while the rest of us kids would wait and be real quiet and listen to what type of reception we’d get from our mother. And, if we got one kind of reception, we’d know how to act. An’ I’ll give you an example.

  See, one day my sister, Tina, was setting the table, and, uh, there was six of us in the family, you know. So, she opened up the dishwasher to get six glasses, three in each hand. You know how you do it. You know, the glasses clink together. My mother went off. She was screaming and yellin’, so we knew that was a bad day coming. You just knew how she was but we loved her.

  The Ross children had little time for fun and games, and they were even discouraged from having any friends, or participating in after-school activities. With these restrictions in place, they had bonded into a tight-knit group for self-preservation and mutual support, although Michael was alienated because his brother and sisters erroneously believed that he was favoured as a ‘mommy’s boy’.

  For his part, young Michael was very proud of his father, and the family egg farm business in Brooklyn, a town of some 7,500 residents in Windham County, Connecticut. ‘Eggs Incorporated’ would become the most important part of Mike’s formative years. Indeed, by the age of ten, he had his own set of chores, which included wringing the necks of sick and deformed chicks. He was a hard worker, a mixed-up kid who desperately wanted to live up to his father’s high expectations of him, while, at the same time, he was very much seeking the approval of his schizoid mother, and constantly vying for her rare affection.

  And, when the author asked him if he was physically abused as a child, he had this to say:

  It’s hard for me to tell you what was wrong with my family because I don’t know anything different. That’s how I was raised. I was beaten sometimes but I don’t think that was it. It was more emotional abuse, an’ like I mean with my dad when we were beaten, we would have to go out an’ pick up a stick out of the garage where we had a woodpile. An’ what you would do was to go out and you couldn’t pick one that broke ’cos if it broke he’d get pretty mad. But, you didn’t pick yourself a club. You know, you didn’t want to get the hell beaten outa you. An’ so I had my own stick put away, hidden away in the back so that people coming in
to get firewood wouldn’t inadvertently take it. But, I mean there is something wrong there when a kid goes to the wood house and picks up his stick; his own stick for getting beaten. And, he hides it so no one accidentally takes it. And, you know if you got beat you didn’t scream because my father just got madder.

  So, it now seems that Mr Ross was no great shakes, either!

  Michael loved his parents despite the physical and psychological abuse they handed out in spades, but the effects of such treatment on the developing mind are often irreparable unless drastic countermeasures are taken to remedy the problems.

  Many psychiatrists and psychologists now generally agree that if contact and interaction with others in a peer group are restricted during the early stages of infant development, the ability to interact successfully at a later stage in life is retarded. That is, the limbic nuclei in the brain will not develop normally and gross mental abnormalities may result. Children will lose the ability to form emotional attachments with others, or any attachment that does come about may only be superficial, and this abnormality may last for the rest of their lives.

  Michael Ross certainly had this problem. During an FBI study of serial sexual murderers, 53 per cent of the subjects’ families had a history of psychiatric problems, 42 per cent of the subjects had been subjected to physical abuse, and 74 per cent had a psychological abuse history.

  * * *

  In September 1977, after a period of schooling, at the ironically named Killingly High School, about 3.5 miles west of Brooklyn, Michael’s future looked decidedly bright as he drove his car on to the Cornell University campus in Ithaca, New York. The 16-year-old had overcome long odds, and was justifiably proud of himself, as only 10 per cent of Killingly High’s vocational agricultural students went to college. Fewer still attended Ivy League schools.