Talking with Serial Killers

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  The relatives of Scripps’s partners on the gallows received identical letters, with only the names being changed.

  The apparently smooth procedure was later thrown into disarray when the priest, who had been in attendance at the execution, unexpectedly resigned. As part of his clerical duties, he had witnessed most of the executions at Changi during the previous ten years, but he was so horrified by the death of John Scripps that he resigned immediately afterwards. And, far from walking bravely to his death, Scripps had put up a fight to the bitter end.

  The guards did indeed come for John Scripps at 3.30am. He was ordered to step out of his prison-issue shorts, to avoid soiling them with urine and excrement, and told to dress in his civilian clothes. John refused, so his prison garb was torn from him.

  He should have been weighed to calculate the drop; however, he had told me that he would give his jailors an execution to remember, for he hated his prison guards who daily reminded him that he was not a member of the ‘’uman rase’. Crucially, he refused to be weighed for the drop, with all the consequences that might have for the efficiency and humaneness of his execution.

  Too long a drop, and he could be decapitated; too short a drop, and he could strangle to death at the end of the rope. In the event, it took 12 guards 20 minutes to drag him to the holding cell next to the gallows. During this struggle, he sustained a broken nose, cheekbone, jaw, two black eyes and multiple bruising.

  As the appointed time drew near, John was heard to be sobbing. The two other doomed men were already pinioned and hooded on the trap when he was prepared. Again, he lashed out before being bound with leather straps. Now ‘neutralised’, naked and tightly buckled, he lost control of his body functions. Quickly, a rubber bung was forced between his teeth. Then came the hood, followed by the rope, which was snapped tight under his left ear; a pull on a lever, and John Scripps plunged into eternity.

  For half-an-hour, his body swung silently in the pit before being taken down. The consequences of the failure to calculate a proper drop were only too obvious, for his head had almost been ripped from his body.

  At 10.30am, Scripps left prison for the last time. Wrapped in a white sheet and placed in a cardboard coffin, his body joined the other two corpses in an old, green, tarpaulin-covered truck, and taken to a funeral parlour in Sin Ming Drive. The two Singaporeans were dropped off for cremation en route. When Jean Scripps, with her daughter, viewed the body, she almost fainted. With the press pack beating on the funeral parlour door, they finally made good their escape and John was cremated, later that afternoon, at the Republic’s expense.

  In a final irony, John Scripps spent that night at The Riverview Hotel. The urn containing his ashes was in the charge of one of the representatives of the Scripps family, lots having been drawn to decide who should have this responsibility. On their arrival in England, and at a private service, attended only by relatives and close friends, the ashes were scattered, at a secret location.

  * * *

  John Martin Scripps had followed the tourist trail to Thailand and Phang-Na, popularly known as ‘James Bond Island’, which was one of the film locations for The Man with the Golden Gun. While there, he had his photograph taken and printed on a souvenir plate.

  ‘I can’t believe he killed them,’ said Nipa Eamsom-Ang, the receptionist at Nilly’s Marina Inn. ‘He was not crazy. I liked him very much,’ she added. ‘He was always smiling, smiling, smiling.’

  Locals say she has become nervous about ghosts since Scripps was convicted, though she seemed non-plussed when asked whether hotel business had suffered in the aftermath of the murder.

  Everyone who knew Scripps agrees he seemed ‘a really nice guy’. During his trial, he looked sensible, decent even, and chatted politely to his guards about the weather. Once, when the judge sneezed, he turned around and said quietly, ‘Bless you.’

  The Roman Catholic priest, whom John called ‘Father Frank’, said, ‘I try to imagine how his face would have looked when he was chopping up the bodies,’ concluding, ‘It’s impossible. I can only see him as he was with me – young, handsome, soft-spoken and gentle.’

  This is an all-too-familiar perception. When people meet serial killers, they often think they are shy, quiet, nice people who are not easily upset. The reality is that of the over-controlled personality, which may well lead to occasional outbursts of rage in appropriate situations.

  So, what was Scripps’s motive? Was it the lure of money that drove him to kill? Strangely, in view of his actions, many observers think that this was unlikely. He robbed his victims, but there was more to it than that, as Brian Williams, liaison officer for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Bangkok, said. ‘You can rob without killing, and you can kill without cutting up the body into bits. This man went to such an extreme and I can only think that he relished what he was doing.’

  Brian Williams may well be correct in his commonsense appraisal but, ultimately, it comes down to a common enough motive and, this I believe, boils down to financial gain.

  Scripps was a cold, calculating killer, who had planned his MO almost to perfection. His butchery skills merely added to the clinically efficient way he disposed of the bodies. That he ‘relished’ the dismemberment is open to debate.

  John Scripps was neither insane nor mad in the medical or legal sense. When he killed Gerard Lowe, in their hotel room in Singapore, he was deluding himself if he believed that the island Republic’s system of justice would not hand down a death sentence to an Englishman. As an experienced traveller in South-East Asia, he must have known that some countries in the region have an unequivocal attitude to murder and drug-smuggling, crimes which carry a mandatory death sentence.

  For their part, the Singapore authorities are tough on criminals. The Deputy Superintendent of Police, Chin Fook Leon, said to me during an interview, ‘We impose the maximum sentence of death without concern for race, colour or creed. Break the penal code in Singapore,’ he warned, ‘and suffer the consequences.’

  The deterrent value of the death sentence in Singapore is there for all to consider, if there is an intention to break the law. It is even printed on red-and-white notices, prominently posted around the city. Singaporeans argue that it is effectively the individual’s own choice. Go against the law of the country and suffer the consequences, and this uncompromising attitude is always applied.

  Five Thai men who entered Singapore illegally as labourers and were held as ‘guests’ of the Republic took it upon themselves to abuse their hosts by robbing construction sites between November 1991 and January 1993. In committing their crimes, they murdered a citizen of Myanmar and two Indian nationals.

  Panya Marmontree (22), Prawit Yaoabutr (22), Manit Wangjaisuk (31), Panya Amphawa (29) and Prasong Bunsom (32) were sentenced to death on 16 January 1995. Their appeals against execution were dismissed on 10 July and they were duly hanged at Changi Prison on Friday 16 March 1996.

  Thai Ambassador, His Excellency Adisak Panupong, told me, ‘My countrymen were aware of the laws and punishments of Singapore and, in breaking them, they also knew what the consequences might be. The decision was theirs to make.’

  John Scripps had made visits to the Far East before he killed Gerard Lowe, and therefore knew and understood the law very well. He was aware of the risks of committing serious crime in both Singapore and Thailand, and of the consequences of being arrested and found guilty of drug-smuggling and committing murder. When he killed Gerard Lowe, he did so for financial profit and the Singapore authorities took the view that, by committing this murder on their soil, he merely validated his own execution. It is consistent with this outlook that he demonstrated, by his unlawful behaviour, that murder was permissible. As far as the Singapore authorities were concerned, those were his standards, and he was treated accordingly.

  Consideration of punishment, whether it meant life in prison or execution, was also determined by John’s own actions. It was not his victim, the police, the Singapore judicial system, the
department of prisons, or the executioner, who initiated the sequence of events leading to his death by the judicial process. It was down to John Scripps himself. And if he had escaped the noose in Singapore, what would have been his fate in Thailand? It would have been execution by machine-gun.

  Legislation in Thailand has now been extended to include imposition of the death penalty for offences other than murder. The Royal Act on Habit-Forming Drugs (1979) introduced an optional death penalty for the possession of more than 100g of heroin, while maintaining a mandatory death sentence for its production, import or export. Although Thailand is reluctant to implement the death penalty in respect of convicted Europeans, who usually receive commutations by Royal pardon, the number of people under sentence of death and the number of executions carried out on Europeans have been rising steadily.

  It seems, therefore, that John was playing a lethal game, with his own life also at stake. Not only did he risk the death sentence, for international drug trafficking, he had committed two counts of aggravated homicide, which carries the mandatory death sentence in Thailand.

  A final dimension to his recklessness was provided by Singapore Drugs Squad Officers who discovered a substantial amount of heroin in a safety deposit box he had rented in the city. This was his stash which, on its own, was enough to send him to prison for the rest of his life. It seems that he was doomed in any event.

  This chapter is based on an exclusive interview between Christopher Berry-Dee and John Martin Scripps at Changi Prison, Singapore, in the week prior to his execution on 19 April 1996.

  MICHAEL

  BRUCE

  ROSS

  USA

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

  MICHAEL ROSS IN AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

  Suddenly, there he was, Connecticut’s only convicted serial killer, shuffling along, surrounded by three immaculately-dressed prison officers wearing starched shirts, knife-edge creased trousers, and spit-and-polished boots. He was handcuffed and shackled at the legs, his loose-fitting prison uniform covering a plumpish physique. Michael Ross stands around 5ft 10in, and weighs about 140lb. He appears bookish, with his spectacles perched high on the bridge of his nose, and is polite.

  Michael has the intellect. He has a bright intelligence and, with an IQ of 150, became an Ivy League student at Cornell University. He has a fresh complexion, with a chubby face, a cheeky smile and mischievous eyes, giving the impression of a stereotypical ‘All-American’ homespun boy. At face value, Michael is very much the boy next door; the type a father might approve of his daughter dating. But, as all fathers know, appearances can be deceptive. In real life, he is a sexual sadist and serial murderer who has raped six precious daughters before killing them.

  During the course of several interviews, for this book, he added to his murderous record by confessing, for the first time, to raping and killing two other girls, and having anal intercourse with the dead body of another.

  * * *

  Michael Ross was born in Brooklyn, Connecticut, on 26 July 1961, under the sign of Leo. He was the first of Daniel and Patricia Ross’s four children, the others being Donna, Kenneth and Tina. 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 was forced to get married because she became pregnant with Michael. From the outset, her 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 mental hospital at Norwich. A number of people who knew her had witnessed at first hand a volatile, manipulative woman who would take out her resentments on her family, especially Michael, whom she blamed for ruining her life.

  Michael remembers his mother’s mood swings, which all of the children feared. 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, Patricia tried to trick young Michael into shooting his pet dog, after convincing him that it was suffering, after a short illness. She even set his mattress on fire on the front lawn because she had caught him masturbating. So, by all accounts, Patricia 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 was angry. Like unwanted pets, which return even meagre scraps of affection with devotion and loyalty, the children had to love her just to survive.

  Michael Ross explained this in an audiotaped interview, 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, Connecticut. Eggs Inc would become the most important part of Michael’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. Michael 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. When asked 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 wood pile. 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 special 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.’

  Michael loved his parents despite the physical and psychological abuse they handed out, but the effects of such treatment on the developing mind are often irreparable unless drastic counter-measures 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 infant and child must experience love and feel valued, or the limbic nuclei in the brain will not develop normally and gross mental abnormalities may result. Children will lose the a
bility 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, and it is not surprising to learn that, 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, Michael’s future looked decidedly bright as he drove his car on to the Cornell University campus in Ithaca, New York. He had overcome long odds, and was justifiably proud of himself, as only 10 per cent of Killingly High’s vocational agricultural (vo-ag) students went on to college. Fewer still attended Ivy League schools.

  At Cornell, Ross enrolled as an Animal-Science major, and he started a course of study that would well suit his ambition to become the third generation to run the family poultry business. This was an obsession with Michael and, for a time, his fraternity brothers even called him ‘The Egg King’.

  Michael joined AgPAC, the Agricultural Student Union Council, and attended the Collegiate Future Farmers of America. He was a student teacher, counsellor, researcher teaching assistant, and a study group leader around this time. Alpha Zeta, one of the two campus fraternities dedicated to agricultural activity, recruited Ross, and he pledged to them in 1977. He lived in the fraternity house, throughout his sophomore and junior years, with his brothers, who were mostly young men, with small-town farming backgrounds.

  Since his incarceration for serial murder, a number of Michael’s old Cornell friends have said that he enjoyed the house, its social life, and the chance to share common interests. His classmates, though, also recall that Michael was a loner, aloof and somewhat arrogant at times.