Dead Men Talking

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  In June 1987, after four weeks of testimony, the eight men and four women jurors took just 87 minutes to convict Ross of capital felony murder. At the penalty phase, three weeks later, it took them under four hours to prove that Connecticut’s death sentence could be imposed. On Monday, 6 July, 20 days before his 28th birthday, Ross was condemned to death. Under Connecticut law, he would have been spared this sentence if the court had found even one redeeming factor or quality that the jurors believed to indicate remorse or mitigation. They could not, for Ross, it seemed, did not have a conscience and didn’t give a damn.

  During and after the trials, Michael became angered because he felt that the judge and jury were biased and the testimonies of some of the witnesses were grossly inaccurate. Yet, probably his greatest source of irritation was that he felt the court failed to recognise his alleged mental illness. Michael suggested that this was most evident when the judge disallowed testimony by his psychiatrist, Dr Robert Miller. The defence team claimed that had Dr Miller been allowed to submit his testimony concerning Michael’s psychological state, the jury would likely have been more lenient during the penalty phase. Moreover, his ‘mental illness’ might have even been considered a mitigating factor, which could have spared him the death penalty altogether.

  Ross had told me that he wasn’t afraid of dying in the electric chair. He said that living was too good for him, but he was worried that, if that fateful moment did arrive, he might say the wrong thing or show weakness in the face of death. He was also afraid of something he said was far worse then death:

  I’ve always felt that I had to be in control of myself and, even to this day, I feel the need to be in control. What scares me the most isn’t life in prison, or the death penalty, but insanity. I’m scared of losing touch with reality. Sometimes I feel I’m slipping away and I’m losing control. If you’re in control you can handle anything, but if you lose it, you are nothing.

  When asked if he had feelings or remorse for his crimes, he replied bluntly:

  Nope! I don’t feel anything for them. I really wish I did. I don’t feel anything. I feel really bad for the families. I mean, I feel lots of times. Like I can see Mrs Shelley, the mother of one of them girls I killed, on the witness stand crying. And, then there’s Mrs, ah, I can’t remember her name, but I can think of another one on the stand describing her daughter. She went to the morgue and saw her at the morgue. But the girls themselves I feel nothing for, and I never have.

  Ross then explained why he hadn’t turned himself in to the police when he started to commit his earlier offences, way back at Cornell University, when he knew he needed help:

  I made myself believe that it would never happen again. And, I know it sounds hard, but looking back, I can’t understand how I did it. It was a fluke because I really didn’t do those things. Even sitting here now, I know if I was released I’d kill again. There’s no reason to think otherwise. But, I can’t, as I sit here now, picture myself wanting to do that. I can’t really see myself doing it. I mean, it’s like being on different levels.

  When asked if he had any detailed memories of the murders, Ross chuckled, and then said:

  Yes and no. I used to fantasise over the crimes every day and every night. I would masturbate to the point of, um, actually having raw spots on myself from the masturbation. I would bleed. It’s weird. I get a lot of pleasure from it. It is really a pleasurable experience. But, when it’s all over, it’s a very short-term thing. I guess it’s like getting high. You know I’ve never used drugs, but you can get high, then you come down and crash. That’s almost how it is. It’s just not an easy thing to live with.

  An inevitable question was to ask him what had been going through his mind when he was raping and killing his tragic victims. His reply was:

  Nothin’! That’s what so weird about this thing. Everybody seems to think, you know, the state’s theory that I’m a rapist and I kill them so they can’t identify me. Look, most of the time it’s broad daylight. I mean, I’m not a stupid person. As sure as hell, if I was going to do something like that, I sure as hell wouldn’t do it that way. There was nothing going through my mind until they were already dead.

  And then it was like stepping through a doorway. And, uh, I remember the very first feeling I had, was my heart beating. I mean really pounding. The second feeling I had was that my hands hurt where I always strangled them with my hands. And, the third feeling was, I guess, fear, and the kind of reality set in that there was this dead body in front of me.

  And, again, I don’t want to mislead you because I knew what was going on, but it was like a different level. I mean it was like watching it [on TV]. And, after it was all over, you know, it kind of sets in, an’ that’s when I would get frightened and stuff. I would hide the bodies and cover them up, or something.

  I abused them, I used them and I murdered them, what else do you need?

  The Osborn Correctional Institution, formerly known as the Connecticut Correctional Institution-Somers, was opened in November 1963 as a replacement for the Old Wethersfield State Prison. It served as the state’s maximum-security prison and as the Reception/Diagnostic Center for incoming male inmates state-wide. When I first met Michael Ross, before Death Row inmates were transferred to the newly opened Northern Correctional Institution, in 1995, he was incarcerated at CCI-S, and his ‘house’ on ‘The Row’ was a truly ancient dungeon painted a muddy-brown colour. ‘Death Row’ was stencilled in white on the brown-painted steel door leading to the tier which housed Connecticut’s seven ‘Dead Men Walking’. Indeed, there will be few readers who have not seen the 1999 movie The Green Mile, starring Tom Hanks, as Officer Paul Edgecomb, but I can assure you that the squalid conditions on Death Row at Somers made the Louisiana‘s imaginary Cold Mountain Penitentiary seem like a first-rate hotel.

  On my final visit to Death Row, only Michael Ross and Robert Breton were ‘at home’. Sedrick Cobb, Ivo Colon, Richard Reynolds, Todd Rizzo and Daniel Webb were enjoying fresh air in the yard and taking in a little sun.

  * * *

  Robert Breton, Sr was sentenced to death in 1989. He was convicted of two counts of murder and one count of capital felony for the 13 December, 1987, beating and stabbing deaths of his 38-year-old ex-wife, JoAnn Breton, and their sixteen-year-old son, Robert Breton, Jr. In the early morning of 13 December 13, 1987, Breton entered the Waterbury apartment that his ex-wife rented after their divorce eleven months earlier. Surprising her while she slept, he slashed at her with a sharp five-inch knife and pounded her with his fists. JoAnn Breton scrambled across the room. Her ex-husband followed and killed her by thrusting the knife through her neck, opening a major artery. Robert Breton, Jr heard his mother’s screams and ran into her room, where his father attacked him. Bleeding from his arms, hands, and fingers, the younger Breton tried to escape down a flight of stairs. His father pursued him, overtaking his son at the bottom of the staircase and continuing the attack. Robert, Jr. bled to death from a wound that severed his carotid artery. Police found him, clad only in his underwear, at the bottom of the stairs, his head propped against a wall.

  Sedrick Cobb was sentenced to death in 1991. The former deliveryman from Naugatuck was convicted of the rape and murder of 23-year-old Julia Ashe of Watertown, whom he kidnapped from a Waterbury department store parking lot on 16 December, 1989. Cobb flattened one tyre of Ashe’s car using a valve stem remover and, when she returned, offered to help her change the tyre. When he asked her for a ride to his car, she obliged. He then forced her at knifepoint to drive to a secluded road and raped her. Cobb then bound and gagged Ashe with fibreglass tape and carried her to a concrete dam. He pushed her, and she fell 23 feet into the shallow, icy water below. She managed to free her hands by rubbing the tape across wire mesh protruding from the concrete and gouged her face trying in vain to remove the tape across her mouth. When she tried to crawl up the bank to freedom, Cobb forced her, face down, back into the water. Her ice-encrusted body was found on Christmas Day, 1989. />
  Ivo Colon beat two-year-old Keriana Tellado to death. He was the mother’s live-in boyfriend. He was also beating another child called Crystal, as well. He would hit the girls with his hands and a belt because they were slow in potty training. Two days before she died, he picked up Keriana by the arm after she wet herself and, ‘heard something go pop’. He refused to let the mother take the girl to the hospital to treat the broken arm, because he feared the doctors would see the cuts, bruises and burn marks that covered her little body. He began beating Keriana again, kicking this poor baby and cutting her with his rings. When she threw up after dinner, he took her to the bathroom and began banging her head against the shower wall. Little Keriana could not stand up, so he kept on picking her up by the hair, He picked her up a couple of times and her hair was coming out in his hands. The medical examiner ruled that little Keriana died of blunt force trauma to the head. As of December 17, 2004, the death sentence of Ivo Colon was overturned by the State Supreme Court. The prosecuting attorney has indicated that he will move towards a second death sentence.

  Richard Reynolds, a Brooklyn, New York, crack dealer, was convicted for the murder of 34-year-old Waterbury Police Officer Walter T. Williams, on 18 December, 1992. While being searched by Williams, Reynolds bumped against him to determine if the officer was wearing a bullet-proof vest. Reynolds then shot Williams point-blank in the head with a handgun.

  Todd Rizzo confessed to, and was convicted of the 1997 murder of thirteen-year-old Stanley Edwards of Waterbury. He lured Edwards into his backyard under the guise of hunting snakes and then hit him thirteen times with a three-pound sledgehammer. As of October 6. 2003, the death sentence of Todd Rizzo was overturned by the State Supreme Court. The prosecuting attorney has indicated that he will move towards a second death sentence.

  Daniel Webb was convicted of kidnapping and murder for the 1989 slaying in Hartford of Diane Gellenbeck, a 37-year-old Connecticut National Bank vice-president. Prior to this, Webb already had an extensive criminal record including a 1983 robbery conviction, 1984 rape and kidnapping conviction and an arrest in 1987 for rape. While out on bail after the 1987 arrest he raped one woman, robbed and assaulted another and murdered Gellenbeck.

  * * *

  When I visited Ross, it was obvious that he was proud of his cell. It was piled high with books and writing materials; indeed he boasted about the fact that he was allocated a second cell next to his own where even more of his books were stored. He also bragged about the dozens of pretty young women who courted his attentions, one of whom was as pretty as a starlet and had even signed her photograph, ‘With Love’. Her letters contained promises that she would marry him in a heartbeat. It would have probably been the last heartbeat she would have ever had, for he would have killed her in an instant.

  And, while he was not busy writing letters, or studying the law, he was learning how to transcribe Braille. The pompous and self-opinionated Michael Ross was a very busy Death Row inmate indeed.

  Michael Ross is not unique among the serial killer breed but, to his credit, he did try to understand why he had been driven to commit such terrible crimes on young women. In fact, he was striving to understand the forces that propelled him into such severe anti-social behaviour in the first place. To this end, he had volunteered for a series of treatments, which included chemical and surgical castration, the latter being refused by the state.

  Many acknowledged experts seemed to believe that this treatment could separate the beast from the decent Michael Ross and, for an extended period, he was treated as a human guinea pig, and prescribed the female contraceptive Depo-Provera to reduce his enormous sex drive. At the same time as he was taking this drug, he was being prescribed Prozac – a powerful anti-depressant – and this cocktail certainly reduced his abnormal sexual cravings. Unfortunately, the excessive use of Depo-Provera ballooned his weight by several stone and, as a result, he suffered pathological changes in liver function and hormone levels. He was troubled by abdominal pains, headaches, asthenia (weakness or fatigue), and nervousness, and his depression reappeared, as one might well expect.

  Before these drugs were prescribed, Ross claimed he masturbated constantly. Occasionally, when in the company of a female correctional officer, he experienced an overwhelming desire to kill her. The Depo-Provera reduced his sex drive, and Michael said:

  You know that everybody has had a tune playing over and over again inside their heads. And if you have this tune that plays all day, over and over, it can drive you nuts. An’ just imagine having thoughts of rape an’ murder, an’ you can’t get rid of it. Well, just like the tune, it’ll be driving you nuts. No matter what you do to get rid of that tune, it’s going to stay in your head. And that’s how I am. I don’t want these thoughts.

  Asked if he thought this tune was, in reality, the monster, he replied with one of the most chilling statements I have ever heard from any serial murderer:

  No, I think he’s separate. He goes to sleep for a while and, uh, you never know where he’s gone, and that’s very true. I mean, sometimes he’s there, and especially with the Depo-Provera, I can feel him back here [Ross touched the back of his head]. I don’t know how anybody is going to understand this, but he used to be always in front of my mind, and was always intruding, like an obnoxious roommate, always butting into your business and you can’t get rid of him.

  In a letter to the author, Ross described what happened to him when he became used to the drugs:

  I would do anything to clear my mind. The medication gave me some relief but my body has adjusted to it now, and the thoughts and urges have returned. Now, my obnoxious roommate has moved back in and things seem worse because now I saw what it was like without him. Today, I feel like a blind man from birth who was given eyesight as a gift, but was taken away a month later. It’s really hard to understand what is normal for everybody else if you’ve never had it yourself.

  Excluding the two years he spent in prison before his first trial, for the better part of fourteen years, Michael Ross lived in a state of limbo, volunteering for execution, while at once thinking that the State would never execute a man who was ‘mad enough’ to want to die using a method known as ‘State-sponsored suicide’. When I interviewed Mike, in 1984, he was the very picture of health, but after he was transferred to the newly opened Northern Correctional Institution, in 1995, his physical and mental well-being deteriorated to the point that I would have hardly recognised him. To those who came into contact with him he came across as a man literally begging to die.

  Following years of legal wrangling, and after nine days of deliberation, the Superior Court jury finally reached a verdict. On Thursday, 6 April 2000, he once again received the death penalty for the murders of April Brunais, Wendy Baribeault and Leslie Shelley. He stood impassively as the verdicts were read, whereas the families of the victims wept or sat with bowed heads. It had taken the state a total of sixteen years to secure a death sentence against him and they were determined to make it stick this time around, despite the fact that he had an automatic right to appeal.

  ‘It’s over until the first appeal,’ Edwin Shelley said. ‘But I don’t think any appeal will hold up now.’ Sixteen years of court proceedings, the Shelleys said, have taken their toll emotionally. ‘We did all of the 1987 trial. We did all of this trial,’ Lera Shelley added. ‘If we have to go through it again we will, for our daughter.’

  In August 2001, while his death penalty appeal was pending, Ross was extradited to the Sullivan Correction Facility, Fallsburg, New York – the same prison that holds Arthur Shawcross. From there he was transferred to Orange County to face arraignment in the rape and murder of Paula Perrera. The filmed admission he had given to the author during the making of the TV documentary series, The Serial Killers, was incontestable. On Monday, 24 September 2001, this killer stood before Judge Nicholas DeRosa and pleaded guilty to the first-degree murder charge, and the following month he was sentenced to eight to 25 years in prison for killing Paula. Mic
hael expressed relief when the sentence was handed down, and was quoted as saying: ‘I regret that this has taken so long to be taken care of,’ reported Timothy O’Connor for The Times Herald-Record.

  Despite his filmed admission to the rape and murder of Dzung Ngoc Tu in 1981, Tompkins County District Attorney said that it was pointless to seek a conviction against Ross because he had already been sentenced to death in Connecticut. Besides, Dzung’s family in Vietnam had no interest in pursuing the case and had no wish to relive the pain.

  Ross’s last few days were spent back in his old cell at the Osborn Correctional Institution in Somers. Two last-minute appeals from his father and his aunt, Ann L Rich, were rejected by the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals in New York. Then the US Supreme Court rejected a final 11.00pm appeal on Thursday, 12 May 2005. The ruling was that Ross was mentally competent to choose death. He opted not to have a special last meal, choosing from the standard menu Ross lunched on a cheeseburger and hash browns, at 3.00 pm. Then he spent much of that Thursday afternoon talking with visitors. For his last meal, he ate the regular prison meal of the day, which was turkey a la king with rice, mixed vegetables, white bread, fruit and a beverage.

  Michael was escorted to the death chamber around 2.00 am, Friday, 13 May. He could have stopped his execution right up until the moment the lethal drugs started to flow. Now, strapped down onto the gurney, he offered no final words, and was given a lethal injection. Nine members of his victims’ families witnessed his final moments, and he coughed once and fell silent, being pronounced dead at 2.25am.