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

by McEvoy, Colin

  However, the defense had a major problem. And her name was Danielle Kaufman.

  Most of the reports mentioned Danielle to at least some degree, and some went into greater detail about the letters Ballard had exchanged with her. That meant that if the defense introduced those reports in the courtroom, it would allow John Morganelli to raise questions about those letters, even some that might not be otherwise admissible during the trial. The legal term for this is opening the door, meaning the allowing of inadmissible evidence by the prosecution after the defense introduced that evidence itself, even indirectly or inadvertently.

  The letters Ballard sent to Danielle were damning for his defense. His drawings of the crime scene, his claim that he “should have raped” Denise Merhi’s daughter, the fact that he had pricked his finger so he would bleed all over the letters—all of these could work against him. Although they couldn’t be considered physical evidence, they could only hurt him in the eyes of a jury. And when it comes to a trial, that’s all that really matters.

  CHAPTER 21

  It was a chilly, cloudy day, with the threat of rain looming in the air, when Morning Call reporter Riley Yates arrived at State Correctional Institution–Frackville on April 8. Yates, a tall, lanky man twenty-nine years of age, had grown up in his native Petersburg, Alaska, as well as Seattle before coming to work for newspapers in Pennsylvania. The spectacled, soft-spoken reporter had been covering the courts in Northampton County for the Morning Call since 2008, and had reported on several homicide cases in that time.

  Today he was about to speak with Michael Ballard, the first and only media interview the suspected five-time killer had granted up to that point.

  Yates had been corresponding with Ballard since September, when the reporter sent him a letter requesting an interview, according to a report published later in the newspaper. The two had exchanged about half a dozen letters back and forth for months, and Yates had found in the tone of Ballard’s writing a casualness that seemed rather cold, given the subject matter.

  “On a personal note, I hope you’re as excited to see spring arrive as I am!” read one of Ballard’s letters, a portion of which was later reprinted in the Morning Call. “Such a beautiful time of year. The electricity of life revving back up to full throttle after the dormant slumber of winter. Do you fish? Love springtime! I just love it!”

  After a lengthy wait and vigorous screening process with the prison staff, Yates was led to a visitor’s booth, where he came face-to-face with Ballard for the first time outside of a Northampton County courtroom. The prisoner sat waiting for Yates behind a pane of thick glass, wearing shackles and an orange jumpsuit. Correctional officers kept a watchful eye on Ballard, but this time his attorneys were nowhere to be seen; Ballard had agreed to meet Yates without them, no doubt against the advice of Michael Corriere.

  According to the story Yates later wrote, Ballard spoke in a relaxed, matter-of-fact tone during the hour-long interview. Speaking to Yates with a phone cradled under his chin, Ballard did not expressly admit to killing Denise and the others, but he did not deny it, either, according to the story. He simply explained that it was something he couldn’t discuss much before his trial.

  But one thing that became abundantly clear from Yates’s interview was that Ballard was very much aware of his perception by the general public.

  “Popular opinion isn’t necessarily in my favor,” Ballard said. “… My side needs to be said.”

  While limited in what he could say before his pending trial, Ballard seemed to express little optimism about the pending verdict. He did not hide the fact that he expected to be found guilty, according to Yates’s story, and said his best hope was that he would get life in prison rather than the death penalty.

  “I don’t want to die,” Ballard told the reporter. “I don’t have a death wish.”

  Portraying himself as a human being, rather than a monster, seemed to be one of Ballard’s primary goals for the interview. He took exception to the way John Morganelli was portraying him in his statements to the public, according to the story, particularly the district attorney’s description of him as a “rabid dog” who needed to be “put down.”

  “He’s wanted to dehumanize me,” Ballard said of Morganelli, whom he’d referred to as “Little Napoleon” in one of his earlier letters to Yates. “He’s wanted to portray me as some vicious animal, and that’s not the case. I’m flesh and blood. I’m human. I have emotions.”

  When asked whether he felt remorse about Denise and the other victims, Ballard responded: “You’ve got to understand, we’re not even a year removed. Despite what the prosecutor wants to believe, there’s still a lot of raw emotion in me.”

  In his attempt to humanize himself, Ballard spent several moments talking about things that had nothing to do with his murder, such as his past and his time outside of prison when he was paroled for the first time, according to Yates’s story. Ballard seemed to light up when he remembered those days, talking with pride about how he was able to find work upon his release and the way he “hit the ground running” despite the “chips [being] certainly stacked against me.”

  “Even the ones that are close and involved in this … they don’t know the whole story,” Ballard was later quoted by Yates as saying. “They make assumptions, but that’s the best they have.”

  Ballard spoke about the pain he experienced from his suspicions that Denise was cheating on him after he got out of prison the second time. He said that something inside him snapped after her friend Marilyn Rivera inadvertently confirmed his suspicions when he spoke with her on the phone.

  “It was a constant deception, and when it was finally validated by her girlfriend, that’s when everything came to a head,” Ballard said. “That’s when everything I was in fear of became truth.”

  Ballard seemed to be angry not only about his own public image, but also about the way Denise was being perceived by the public. Yates’s story later quoted one of the letters Ballard had sent him in January, where he claimed Denise had a “dirty secret, skeleton cache,” adding, “Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction!”

  “The martyrdom she’s been given makes me fucking retch!” Ballard wrote to Yates.

  Although he could not speak freely about whether he killed Denise and the others, Ballard answered affirmatively when Yates asked whether he regretted killing Donald Richard back when Ballard was eighteen years old.

  “I do. He’s still human,” Ballard was quoted as saying. “There are so many emotions that are tied into an event like that. It’s hard to boil them down and say, ‘Do you regret things?’ There’s a lot of things I wish I could have done differently.”

  Other than trying to humanize himself, Ballard appeared to use Yates’s interview to set the record straight about a number of aspects of his case. He claimed he did not remember making the confessions at the scene of his car accident or in the hospital later—confessions his defense attorneys were now desperately trying to have thrown out.

  “You have to understand the medical condition I was in,” Ballard told the reporter. “I bled out … There’s a lot I don’t remember.”

  And then there was Danielle Kaufman, a subject that seemed to make Ballard fume. He insisted to Yates that “eighty percent” of what he told Danielle was “horseshit.”

  “She’s a groupie, and with that said, she wants to be told certain things and she asks for them,” Ballard said.

  He also addressed the letters written to the district attorney’s office by John Patrick McClellan and Wilfredo Riddick. Ballard claimed the two prisoners were “absolute liars” who were seeking preferential treatment. He seemed to view their actions as petty and selfish.

  “What more despicable motive do you need, especially to involve yourself in something this serious?” Ballard was quoted as saying. “My life is what’s hanging in the balance.”

  * * *

  On April 14, just a few days before Yates’s story was to hit the press, Judge Edwa
rd Smith issued an eighty-eight-page ruling denying Ballard’s pre-trial motions. It was another blow to Ballard’s defense, the most significant of which was the denial of Corriere’s attempts to have Ballard’s confessions suppressed, including his statement to emergency responders during the car crash: “It’s obvious, I just killed everyone.”

  Corriere had argued that Ballard was severely injured and intoxicated at the time, so he could not be considered to have been speaking voluntarily. To allow those confessions, Corriere had argued, would violate both Ballard’s constitutional rights and medical privacy rights. Smith, however, found that Ballard made a rational choice to speak with the doctors and emergency responders; and while his injuries were serious, they “did not negate his ability for rational thought or overwhelm his free will.”

  The defense had also tried to argue that authorities had improperly searched both Denise’s car and the halfway house where Ballard was staying at the time of the murders. But once again, Smith was not persuaded, and he found the searches to be legal. The only question left unanswered by Smith’s ruling was whether or not testimony about Ballard’s past murder of Donald Richard would be allowed during the trial. That question would have to be answered before jury selection began in Wayne County on May 2.

  On April 17, in the Sunday edition where it would be the most widely read, Riley Yates’s story about his jailhouse interview with Ballard was published in the Morning Call. The public response was massive because it was the first time, short of his brief statements in court or reports of what he’d said to police, that Ballard’s own words were directly conveyed to readers.

  The story began: “Michael Eric Ballard casts himself as a man wronged by many. A girlfriend who started seeing someone else. A district attorney who is seeking his death. A parole system that treated him unfairly.”

  It was a lead that neatly summed up everything Ballard had said during his interview with Yates. But to Express-Times reporter Sarah Cassi, it said a lot more than that. It also represented what she felt amounted to Ballard’s attempt at media manipulation to convey the exact representation of himself that he wanted conveyed.

  What nobody outside of her newsroom knew was that the Express-Times had been corresponding with Ballard for as long as the Morning Call had been, also attempting to arrange the same prison interview. Cassi had been writing to him since at least October. She remembered the timing because in one of his letters, he had casually noted how much he was looking forward to Halloween, his favorite holiday.

  In her letters to Ballard, Cassi said she knew that he would be limited in what he could say before his upcoming trial, but if he were willing to talk to her, she would come to Frackville to interview him. At first, it seemed the arrangement would come together and that Ballard was anxious to tell his story. But he also seemed guarded.

  At the bottom of his very first letter, Ballard wrote a disclaimer: “Until otherwise directed by myself in writing, you do not have my permission to reproduce, in any form, quote, or paraphrase the contents of my correspondence with you.” Cassi was surprised. She had had sources ask to speak with her off-the-record before, of course, but she had never gotten a letter or an email from anybody with such a statement, even from people used to dealing with the press on a regular basis. It struck her as a shrewd and calculating move on Ballard’s part.

  He’s a quadruple murderer who’s media savvy, she thought.

  But it did not stop there. After two or three letters, Ballard started dictating requirements for the story and their prospective interview. He made it very clear that there would be certain questions and topics that would be off-limits, although he declined to specifically identify what they would be. The more he wrote, the more he tried to assert what could be included or excluded from the story. He also wanted a list of questions in advance so he could review them.

  From those letters, it was obvious to Cassi that Ballard had a specific purpose in mind for her interview. He spoke about the reporter as if they were to have a mutual, symbiotic relationship: She would get to sell a lot of newspapers, and Ballard would get to tell his story the way he wanted it told. In Cassi’s view, that wasn’t the point of the interview at all. She was looking to tell the story, not his story.

  Cassi took the letters to her editors for discussion, including Express-Times editor Joe Owens, managing editor Jim Deegan, assistant managing editor Nick Falsone, and Lehigh Valley editor Rudy Miller. After a group discussion, they decided they would not agree to any of Ballard’s proposed restrictions. It was one thing for a source to decline to answer a question during the course of an interview. It was something else entirely to let the source dictate the terms of an interview.

  “It’s kind of like the cliché: You don’t negotiate with terrorists,” Cassi later said.

  Cassi wrote back to Ballard explaining that she could not agree to his requirements as he had presented them, but if he was still willing to talk, she was still willing to make the trip to interview him. He never wrote back.

  It was a fine line in journalism. Practically everyone who speaks to a reporter has a motive for doing so, and all sources try to convey themselves or their issue in the most favorable light possible. But in Cassi’s opinion, there comes a point where it is less about the story and more about propaganda, and she felt Ballard had crossed that line; that he simply wanted a platform to express the perception he held of himself. Cassi believed it all came back to Ballard’s obsession with control, something she had been observing with growing frequency as the case unfolded.

  It wasn’t just the fact that Ballard had allegedly taken four lives, exerting the ultimate control over whether somebody lives or dies—Cassi could see it in the smaller things as well. Always wanting to be in control, Ballard made Danielle Kaufman sit in the same place during each of his court appearances: right behind him on the aisle of the second row. Even when he was in prison for his parole violation, he constantly needed to know what Denise had been up to. And when denied a Northampton County Prison visit, Ballard’s sense of control was so threatened that he barricaded himself into a cell and fought the guards so fiercely that he had to be shot with a Taser three times before he went down.

  For Michael Ballard, Cassi surmised, it was all about control.

  CHAPTER 22

  Just as many had questioned why Michael Ballard had been able to make parole in the first place, others started to voice the opinion that parole should be abolished altogether. Some of the harshest critics of parole in the American criminal justice system have made that argument before, at least for violent offenders. But efforts to put that idea into practice have met with mixed results, at best.

  The murder of Philadelphia Highway Patrol Sergeant Patrick McDonald at the hand of a recent parolee drew such a furious response from the public that Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell took an unprecedented step. On September 28, 2008, just five days after the killing, Rendell placed a temporary moratorium on all parole releases in the state.

  It was such an extraordinary decision that some questioned whether he even had the legal authority to do it. In fact, four state prison inmates sued the governor, arguing he was illegally increasing the length of their incarcerations. Nevertheless, Rendell announced there would be no more paroles until a thorough review of the policies of the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole could be conducted, and a determination could be made as to whether the handling of inmates returning to society could be improved.

  The board agreed to the demand, and Rendell retained John Goldkamp, chairman of the criminal justice department at Temple University in Philadelphia, to conduct the study. Goldkamp, who had spent decades studying drug courts, inmate treatment, and alternatives to correctional confinement, was widely considered one of the nation’s foremost experts on the subject of incarceration.

  As Goldkamp began his review of the state parole system, one of his earliest findings was that Rendell’s parole moratorium was a mistake.

  The Pennsylvania Bo
ard of Probation and Parole attempted to continue holding parole hearings, even though there could be no releases, in anticipation of the moratorium eventually getting lifted. But the sudden halt of inmate releases was creating such a tremendous backlog of cases that Goldkamp grew concerned that the board would not be able to afford the time and attention required for major cases when and if the releases resumed. Promising parole candidates who had been nearing their release were now back to square one, and any arrangements that had been made for employment or housing on the outside were suddenly lost.

  And the problem spread beyond the parole board itself into all of the state’s prisons. Without parole releases, the already-crowded institutions were now under more pressure than ever, morale among the inmates plummeting. Goldkamp concluded that the difficulty in managing these growing prison populations would only become more difficult, and the parole system was at risk of losing credibility altogether.

  At Goldkamp’s recommendation, Rendell lifted the moratorium on all non-violent offenders in October 2008, keeping the freeze in place only for violent crimes. By December, those restrictions were also lifted as a result of Goldkamp’s conclusions, and parole releases for all types of crimes resumed.

  The rest of Goldkamp’s review lasted about eighteen months. But if members of the public were thirsty for a major overhaul of the parole board, or an indictment of what they perceived as a heavily flawed or corrupt parole system, his results were bound to be unsatisfying. In fact, the study found both the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole and the state Department of Corrections to be meeting or exceeding expectations, especially when compared with similar systems in other states.

  “[They] are considered among the well-functioning corrections and parole agencies among their peer systems in the nation,” Goldkamp wrote in his final, ninety-six-page report. “Our findings do not identify dysfunction or poor performance responsible for the tragic police killings motivating this critical review.”