Fatal Jealousy: The True Story of a Doomed Romance, a Singular Obsession, and a Quadruple Murder

by McEvoy, Colin

  Ballard looked back and forth between the two guards. One looked about six feet eight inches tall and carried a large shield. The other was a man Ballard spoke with almost every day and genuinely liked. In fact, as other CERT members began to funnel in through the door, Ballard found that he recognized and liked most of them.

  Nevertheless, he felt almost obligated to put up a fight. We’re committed to this little party …

  The tall guard, the one holding the shield, lunged toward Ballard, but he dropped low and the huge man barreled right over him. The second guard rushed forward next, but Ballard jumped back up and spit the wad of toothpaste he had been saving in his mouth directly into the man’s mask, obstructing his vision. Ballard started barraging the man with a series of fast, wild punches, well aware that the guard would barely feel any of them through the body armor.

  Hey, it’s a party, Ballard thought as he kept punching. This is what’s expected.

  By now, the tall guard was back on Ballard, hurling him to the ground, but Ballard struggled back up. Another guard who had entered the room—a sixty-year-old man whom Ballard recognized—was shouting, “Lay down, Mr. Ballard! Stay down, Mr. Ballard! Lay down, Mr. Ballard! Stay down, Mr. Ballard!” Ballard had heard this guard had a heart condition, and he worried the old man would keel over from the excitement any moment.

  By now, six guards had descended upon Ballard and one of them—whom Ballard recognized at the last moment as Jason—fired a Taser into Ballard’s right leg. It was the first time he had been shot by a Taser, and he had seen men go down immediately after one blast, but to Ballard’s surprise, he found it didn’t hurt very much.

  As he continued to struggle, another guard fired a second Taser shot at him, but once again it failed to take him down. By now he was mostly restrained by the half dozen armored men who had piled onto him, but his right arm was still free and he swung it wildly. His adrenaline was pumping so hard, Ballard felt like nothing could stop him.

  Then he was shot by a third Taser blast. This time, it knocked him out cold.

  Ballard, who was extremely proud of the fuss he had caused, suffered no serious injuries except for some bruising, including a large red mark on his right cheek. He appeared in court the next day for a pre-trial motion; he was fitted with extra shackles but otherwise appeared no different from usual. However, when the reporters noticed his injuries and inquired about them, the story of his prison exploits from the day before became prominently featured in their stories.

  Danielle Kaufman was horrified when she heard the news.

  “Oh my God babe! I just read online that you’re hurt?!?” she wrote in a letter the night of the hearing. “Why would you do that babe? I can’t deal with you getting hurt. Maybe I should leave you alone. Nothing good seems to come with you knowing me.”

  Danielle blamed herself for what had happened to Michael. In her letter, she explained that she believed in karma, and she felt that by dressing up nicely for Ballard in her high heels and “fruffy froo froo shirt,” she somehow upset the balance of things for him and caused the incident in the prison. She even suggested that she intended to harm herself as punishment for what happened to him.

  “You were burned, so I have to get burned now too…,” she wrote. The next day, she wrote in another letter, “I would die for you if I knew that it would take away your pain. I miss you Blue.”

  But Ballard was far from comforting in his responses to Danielle. Instead, he seemed angrier than ever with her for cooperating with Trooper Judge and the police, whom he regularly referred to as the “goof troop.” Ever since learning Danielle had handed over her Michael Book, the tone of Ballard’s letters seemed to fluctuate even more widely than usual. Sometimes he would say he loved her; other times he berated her and insisted everything that was going wrong with his case was her fault. During one previous court appearance, he had even turned to Danielle and mouthed the words, “This is all your fault.”

  His letters after the prison incident were along those same lines. Only this time, rather than apologizing or feeling guilty, Danielle became angry. She tore up and shredded some of the other letters she had kept from Michael. And in a letter she wrote to him on March 11, she angrily defended herself, insisting she was not going to risk getting charged with obstruction of justice and losing her daughter by refusing to cooperate with the police.

  “I’m sorry to bruise your ego Michael, but I didn’t know you in June last year. I didn’t know her either,” she wrote, referring to Denise Merhi. “I didn’t twist your arm or force you in any way shape or form to do what got done, nor did I twist you to tell me about it. You done that all on your own. Your lawyers were even telling you to shut the fuck up and close your hole because they knew you were telling me too much.

  “You’re pissed because you want to control me and I won’t let you have that power, which I’m really starting to realize was Denise’s deal with you as well. You couldn’t control her. Ohh you tried but in the end she obviously wasn’t planning to settle with you, for whatever reason, and you couldn’t handle that. ‘If I can’t have you then no one will.’ And I dig that about you! Your intensity makes me so hot. But you’re not going to control me either Michael.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Throughout the month of April, Michael Corriere and James Connell began to receive the expert reports they had requested from their panel of psychiatrists and doctors: James Garbarino, Gerald Cooke, Robert Sadoff, Frank Dattilio, and Susan Rushing. Most seemed to paint a similar portrait of Michael Eric Ballard, and as the lawyers reviewed them, the possibilities and limits of their defense began to come into focus.

  First of all, it was the unanimous consensus of the reports that Ballard was mentally competent to stand trial. He knew what he was doing at the time of the murders, understood that it was a crime, and knew that it was wrong and that it was a capital offense. He also fully understood how the legal system worked and was taking an active role in his defense.

  It was obvious he did not suffer from the kind of impairments that rise to the level of an insanity defense.

  However, the reports also claimed that Ballard’s neurological testing indicated organic brain dysfunction stemming from the many head injuries in his past, and that this brain damage did contribute to the commission of his crime. Corriere and Connell had worked extensively to discover possible head injuries Ballard might have suffered and quickly found there was no shortage of such instances.

  For example, there was a story the attorneys learned from Jack Gibson, who had been Ballard’s close friend growing up. In ninth or tenth grade, Gibson and Ballard were outside a convenience store in Fayetteville when, all of a sudden, another high-school-aged boy jumped Ballard from behind, seemingly for no reason. The boy, whom neither of them knew, repeatedly punched Ballard in the head, then started bashing his head against the sidewalk before Gibson was able to pull him off.

  “What is this about?” Gibson asked the boy after pulling him away.

  “Look at his haircut!” the boy replied. Apparently, he had attacked Ballard because he didn’t like his hairstyle.

  Ballard refused to go to the hospital despite serious injuries to his head. In fact, Gibson recalled, he had never known Ballard to go to the hospital at any time that he was hurt. That pattern continued to emerge the more Corriere and Connell spoke to others.

  The attorneys also talked to Russell Drake, a friend from Ballard’s teenage days who admitted the two often abused drugs together, including hard drugs such as methamphetamine, cocaine, and acid. Drake also recalled that the two would ride their motorcycles together, and on more than one occasion Ballard would miss a corner and be sent flying. He hit his head several times—including one instance when he was knocked unconscious for several minutes when he was fifteen—but he always refused to go to the hospital.

  Joseph Bearden, Ballard’s first cousin, recalled a seventeen-year-old Ballard barging into his home at 3 a.m. with cuts and bruises all over his body and a s
oftball-sized lump on the top of his forehead. As soon as he got into the house, Ballard passed out in front of their kitchen stove.

  “He was beaten up pretty good,” Bearden said. They later learned he had wiped out on his motorcycle on a dirt road outside Bearden’s house. He had hit the ground so hard, he left a face imprint in the dirt. An emergency responder was called to the house, but, as usual, Ballard refused medical treatment.

  “He didn’t want any part of it,” Bearden said.

  Justin Cook Letwich, one of the sons of Ballard’s former caretaker Lavern Cook, remembered another head injury caused by very different circumstances. When Ballard was sixteen, he was staying at a house with a girl he liked when that girl’s boyfriend—or ex-boyfriend, Letwich could not recall which—had barged in and accused Ballard of being together with her.

  Ballard was not in much of a state to defend himself—“We were tanked,” as Letwich put it—and the man struck his head with a metal baseball bat, then hurled him off a second-floor terrace onto the ground below, where he landed headfirst. Ballard did not lose consciousness and, as with all the other injuries, he declined to go to the hospital. He instead simply dusted himself off and walked away.

  Corriere and Connell worked to gather as many of these stories as they could. They eventually learned of as many as a dozen such serious head injuries, including at least three that rendered Ballard unconscious. The injuries, the fact that Ballard never received medical treatment for them, and the expert reports about brain damage still wouldn’t allow the attorneys to seek an insanity defense, they knew, but they could serve as mitigating factors in the eyes of the jury when it came to the death penalty.

  The neuroimaging from Ballard’s MRI showed that his overall brain volume was within normal limits, but that individual structures of the brain were severely damaged, specifically the regions crucial for regulating behavior. In other words, while Ballard could communicate clearly and outwardly appear to function properly, he had a great deal of trouble with impulse control, emotional regulation, and moral judgment.

  Dr. Ruben Gur, the neuroimaging expert at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine who conducted Ballard’s tests, identified abnormalities in several areas of Ballard’s brain. For one thing, his damaged frontal lobe would diminish his ability to suppress socially inappropriate reactions to stress; nor would he be able to fully appreciate future consequences. Damage to this area could cause several of the behaviors that factored into his crime, such as hypervigilance, increased aggression, decreased empathy, impulsivity, grandiosity, and peculiar sexual habits.

  Likewise, Ballard had damage in his cingulate cortex, which regulates conflict response and the ability to make decisions based upon emotions. This, Gur wrote, could explain Ballard’s hostility, irresponsibility, disagreeableness, and emotional blunting.

  Ballard had also suffered damage to his amygdala, which handles the processing of emotional reactions such as fear, anger, and pleasure, as well as perception of this information in others. Gur wrote that this damage was especially dangerous when combined with the abnormalities in his frontal lobe, which serves almost like a car’s brakes to the primitive emotional impulses coming from the amygdala.

  Without those brakes, Gur said, the resulting behavior would be disorganized, erratic, and unable to adjust to situational demands: “The situation is analogous to a car with weak brakes that are already engaged when it begins to race.”

  The more Corriere read in the reports, the more evidence emerged indicating damage to various parts of Ballard’s brain. Damage to his temporal lobe could cause hypersexuality, disregard for social convention, and lack of respect toward authorities. Damage to his thalamus could have impacted the way he processed auditory, visual, and sensory information. Damage to his nucleus accumbens could have put him at a greater risk for hostility addiction.

  Susan Rushing pointed out that much of the damage was to the right hemisphere. Religious delusions such as those she witnessed in her interviews with Ballard were usually associated with right-sided brain damage.

  “It is my opinion to a reasonable degree of medical certainty that Mr. Ballard’s head injuries predisposed him to psychosis, anti-social personality disorder and substance abuse,” Rushing wrote. An insanity defense may be off the table, she said, but evidence existed that Ballard had “a psychotic disorder due to a traumatic brain injury with prominent delusions,” which is a recognized psychiatric illness and an extreme mental disturbance.

  As intimidated as Ballard was at first about learning the results of his MRI and PET scans, he now believed that the results made perfect sense. He felt they fully explained the enormous amount of rage he felt leading up to the murders, as well as his racing thoughts and erratic state of mind in the months afterward. He thought it even explained some of the things he had written to Danielle Kaufman and later came to regret.

  I was in a total state of psychosis, Ballard thought.

  The experts also indicated that Ballard’s emotional problems from brain damage were exacerbated by the significant psychological trauma that he experienced early in his life, most prominently from the loss of his mother during a critical development stage, as well as the estrangement from his father.

  Ballard’s father and other members of his family openly discussed his mother’s cheating in front of the young Ballard. That, combined with her absence in his life, formed a strong association in his mind between infidelity and abandonment, the reports indicated.

  Dattilio in particular pointed out that Ballard had been abandoned by virtually every maternal figure in his life, whether through voluntary departure or death. He had been exposed to numerous female caretakers throughout his childhood—such as his grandmother and Lavern Cook—but they were all short-term, and in Ballard’s mind their departures repeated the early abandonment he had suffered from his mother.

  As a result of these past emotional injuries, Dattilio said that Ballard had great difficulty forming emotional closeness with others and harbored tremendous hostility and resentment, especially toward women. Garbarino echoed this analysis, and said these past traumas made abandonment a particular “hot spot” for Ballard.

  Garbarino said Ballard suffered from “rejection sensitivity,” where signs of rejection lead to panic, then rage, then aggression. In particular, women whom he viewed as having failed to nurture him threaten to unleash his rage to an uncontrollable degree. This, Garbarino said, is exactly what happened when he learned Denise Merhi was cheating on him.

  “In many ways, Mr. Ballard might be described as a shell of a person who is not always in touch with his emotions,” Garbarino wrote. Dattilio added that Ballard’s angry outbursts might be a basic way of trying to control others, especially women.

  The reports indicated that, in some ways, Ballard’s father was just as responsible as his mother for their son’s traumas. Ballard himself adamantly denied that his father ever struck him, but the doctors nevertheless suspected there had been some physical abuse in their relationship, as well as a great deal of psychological abuse.

  Whether Mickey Ballard hit his son or not, he certainly rejected him and neglected him emotionally, they wrote, throwing him out of his home at a critical time in his childhood when he was already reeling from abandonment by his mother. Garbarino wrote that the lack of a strong male role model in his life left him feeling particularly vulnerable, and thus susceptible to whatever negative influences surrounded him.

  Garbarino said many individuals who commit homicides in adolescence, as Ballard did, exhibit childhood experiences that result in serious developmental damage, like severe abuse and neglect by the family, violently traumatic experiences in their home community, high levels of family disruption such as abandonment or rejection, and exposure to anti-social lifestyles. Ballard seemed to fit that bill all around, the doctor wrote, and it placed him at high risk for a lifelong pattern of anti-social behavior.

  “Mr. Ballard was at risk for developing a social p
erspective characterized by extreme sensitivity to threat and a high probability of responding to perceived threat with aggression, including preemptive assault: ‘Get them before they get you,’” Garbarino wrote.

  “These two factors often provide the basis for rapid escalation of conflicts, even to the point of becoming lethal,” he wrote.

  Several of the reports indicated that the sexual abuse Ballard suffered in his youth at the hands of an older female relative further contributed toward his animosity and rage toward women. Dattilio said Ballard tended to confuse sexuality with aggression as a result of that abuse, and that made him prone to masochistic relationships in which he set himself up to be rejected, then acted out violently as a result.

  In summary, the reports all seemed to indicate that Ballard had been suffering from major depressive disorder and anti-social personality disorder most of his life, with strong narcissistic paranoid and aggressive personality characteristics. Worse yet, Ballard’s history of mental problems went essentially untreated for his entire life. Although he received some counseling and medication during his prison sentence for killing Donald Richard, it was nowhere near the type of in-depth psychotherapy he required.

  This made Ballard particularly angry. If he had even a fraction of the kind of testing back then that he had now, Ballard felt he could have gotten the help he needed and maybe the other four murders would never have happened.

  They dropped the ball on their end, Ballard thought.

  The reports were helpful to Corriere and Connell, who well understood that they would need all the help they could get in providing Ballard with a defense. There was no arguing that Ballard didn’t commit the murders, but the brain damage angle could at the very least keep him from receiving the death penalty. The reports indicated that the brain damage made Ballard more susceptible to the effects of alcohol, so they could couple that with Ballard’s high blood alcohol content and testosterone levels on the day of the murders.