Talking with Serial Killers

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  Tammy’s father reported his daughter missing the next day and, on 6 January, a motorist found Tammy’s pocketbook, lying along Route 6, at the junction of Brickyard Road. Michael Ross explained that he had thrown the item out of his car moments before arriving back at his mother’s place, shortly after the murder.

  On Saturday, 30 June 1984, he guided police officers to the decomposed corpse of Tammy Williams, and said later that she had recognised him and that she pretended to enjoy the violent rape to avoid being killed. He also said that he returned to the corpse several times, during the weeks following the murder, in order to masturbate over the body.

  During January and February, 1982, Ross’s thoughts continually returned to Connie. Acting on impulse, he decided to drive to Ithaca to visit her, without prior warning of his intentions. On arrival, he found Connie in bed with another man. He stormed out in a rage and headed south in search of a victim to kill.

  * * *

  May Day fell on a Monday, in 1982, and Paula Perrera left Valley Central High School early because she didn’t feel well. With no money for a bus fare, she started hitch-hiking, and she was last seen alive near the Montgomery Auto Shop, on Route 211, during the early afternoon. Paula’s mother, Christine Canavan, reported her 16-year-old missing, to the Crystal Run Police, later that day.

  Although Ross has always been the prime suspect in the Perrera killing, there has never been enough evidence available to charge him with her murder, a situation exacerbated by the fact that Ross has refused to be interviewed by the police investigators. This changed when Ross was subsequently interviewed in prison as part of the research for this book. Confronted by me with police documents and a newspaper article, Ross made a full confession on videotape, giving details of the murder that only Paula’s killer could have known. The case is now classified as solved.

  He said that he had seen her walking along Route 211, and had offered her a ride home. At a spot near a marshy wooded area, and close to a rest stop, he pulled over and raped his victim before strangling her. He hid the body near a low stone wall, and then drove home. His confession closed the file on this murder enquiry. Asked during the interview what Paula had been wearing, he said he could not recall the details and tossed the documents to the floor, saying, ‘Well, it’s just another murder, isn’t it?’

  * * *

  Ross started work at Croton Egg Farms on Friday, 5 March 1982. The world’s largest poultry operation, based in the small town of Croton, north-east of Columbus, Ohio, hired him as a co-supervisor for 30 employees. He was also responsible for 14 hen houses and over one million birds.

  A fellow supervisor, Donald Harvey, remembered Ross, saying, ‘He was a disaster in the job, and we were planning to fire the guy pretty soon. He was very bossy. And he just didn’t relate to you in giving an order. He just didn’t know how to come across. He wanted everyone to know that his education was much higher than theirs, and they were hourly workers and high school drop-outs.’

  On Sunday, 25 April 1982, Ross spotted Susan Aldrich in a laundromat in Johnstown, a town close to Croton, and followed her home. She was completely unaware that she was being stalked and he was completely unaware that she was an off-duty police officer. He knocked on her door and told her that his car had broken down and asked if he could use her telephone. As soon as Susan turned her back, he reached over her shoulder, cupped his hand over her mouth to prevent her screaming, and forced her to the floor. She struggled, and managed to shout out, saying that her husband was a policeman, and that he would be home at any moment. After giving her a severe beating, Ross ran back to his car, ripped a parking ticket from the windscreen and drove off.

  Ross’s car had been parked close to the laundromat, and it was there that he got the ticket. Police also found a witness who saw him running from the direction of Susan Aldrich’s home towards his vehicle, so they put two and two together and traced the owner through the Vehicle Licensing Office. In an act of poetic justice, it was Susan’s husband who arrested her attacker.

  Ross was sacked from Croton Egg Farms on 3 May, and bailed to his mother’s home before sentencing. While there, he visited a psychiatrist, at the Learning Clinic in Brooklyn. He was trying to win a little sympathy from the doctor, who might have influence with the Ohio court.

  The following month was another disaster for Michael Ross, for, although he had returned a number of photographs to Connie, she still had his engagement ring and he wanted it back. However, the day before he turned up to collect it, she set off across country to marry her new boyfriend. When Ross learned of this, he went crazy with anger. But, if that slap across the face was hard to take, a family development enraged him even further.

  Financially, his mother’s divorce had paid off handsomely. When Patricia flaunted her new lover before speeding off in her flashy new Cadillac, it was too much for Michael. These emotional setbacks coming so close together were sufficient to set him off on the murder trail again.

  * * *

  The last time anyone could recollect seeing 23-year-old Debra Smith Taylor alive was around midnight on Tuesday, 15 June 1982. She was driving home with her husband when their car ran out of gas, on Highway 6, near Hampton, just eight miles east of Mrs Ross’s home. A state trooper came across the stationary car, and drove the couple to a service station in Danielson, where the boyfriend of one of Ross’s earlier victims, Tammy Williams, had lived. The trooper recalled that the Taylors were arguing, and that Debra was so annoyed that she said that she would find her own way home. After leaving her husband to his own devices, she walked across Danielson Town Green, to the bandstand, where she gratefully accepted the offer of a ride home from a bespectacled young man who had walked up and spoken to her.

  Two hunters discovered the skeleton of Debra Taylor on Saturday, 30 October, in one of the large tracts of woodland east of Route 169, in Canterbury. The spot was less than ten miles from the Ross’s farm. The body was so decomposed that identification was only possible by means of dental records and items of jewellery.

  * * *

  During the first week of August 1982, Ross returned to Ohio for sentencing over the assault he had committed four months previously. The psychiatrist who had examined him earlier said that Michael was an ‘over-achiever’, and had ‘too much spare time on his hands’. In his report, the psychiatrist also suggested that he should find a hobby, such as learning how to fly an aeroplane. The judge nevertheless packed Ross off to the Licking County Jail, where he would serve a six-month jail term for the assault on Susan Aldrich. He was ordered to pay a $1,000 fine. Daniel collected his son from prison on Wednesday, 22 December, drove him back to Connecticut, and offered him a place to stay.

  Michael Ross had misrepresented himself when he applied for work at Croton Egg Farms by declaring that he had never been in trouble with the police, and he did exactly the same thing again in May 1983, when he applied for a job with the Prudential Insurance Company of America. He would become one of the 40 agents selling health, life, automotive, property, casualty insurance and securities, from the company’s office in Norwich, Connecticut. With steady money in his pocket, Ross rented an apartment at 58 North Main Street, in Jewett City. He settled in, and his landlady remembers him as a decent, smart and extremely affable young man, whom she enjoyed having around her large, Victorian-style house.

  Ross’s female work colleagues also took an immediate liking to him. They thought of him as sweet, and inexperienced in romance. He dated when the opportunity arose, and when he met recently-divorced Debbie Wallace, while out canvassing for business, he reasoned that his past problems were well behind him.

  During this relationship, Ross says he spent a great deal of time masturbating, fantasising and stalking women. Some he followed at random. With others he set out to learn their daily schedules. He slipped into apartments, just to watch women undress and get into bed. And he raped once during this time, allowing to his victim to run away.

  Although he was often out until al
l hours of the morning, Debbie Wallace was totally ignorant of Michael’s perverted behaviour. She believed that he would make a good father for her three children; however, like Connie, Debbie was stubborn, independent and strong-willed. She was a spitfire, full of energy, and sex with Michael was excellent. Their relationship was volatile, too, and their frequent arguments often ended in physical violence. During Thanksgiving 1983, the couple had a furious fight over dinner arrangements.

  From the outset, Patricia Ross had never liked Connie, and she didn’t approve of Debbie either, so she invited her son for a meal but refused to extend the invitation to Debbie. Ross did not know what to do. He felt torn between the two women, so he and Debbie fought and the outcome was that he spent the holiday alone.

  Around the time Ross was learning the insurance business – giving a new meaning to the term ‘The Man from the Pru’ – 19-year-old Robin Dawn Stavinsky was moving from Columbia to Norwich, where she hoped to find a job that paid enough that would allow her to go to college.

  In August 1983, she took a job as a switchboard operator at DPM Enterprises. At 9.30pm on Wednesday, 16 November 1983, she disappeared after apparently arguing with her boss. Although it was cold and dark, Robin refused a ride from a workmate and, in what proved to be a fateful mistake, decided to walk to her boyfriend’s house.

  That evening, Ross was driving along Route 52 between New London and Norwich, when he saw Robin storming along the roadside. He stopped, climbed out of his car and approached her with the offer of a lift. When she rebuffed him, he became angry and dragged her struggling into a patch of dense woodland just a few hundred yards from the office of the Connecticut State Police Major Crime Squad. Ross had started to strangle Robin as soon as he grabbed her, and by the time he was ready to rape the young woman, she was barely conscious. Ross recalled that by now he was longer excited by the idea of sex, and his satisfaction came about only from the act of killing, and by reliving the moment, occasionally driving by the murder scene and masturbating, until the body was discovered eight days later.

  A jogger, running through the grounds of the Uncas-on-Thames Hospital in Norwich, found the partially-clothed corpse of Robin Stavinsky under a pile of leaves. Police retrieved the remainder of the dead woman’s clothing, from a river, after Ross’s arrest.

  The brutal murder of Robin Stavinsky was to prove a dreadful watershed in Ross’s killing career. Previously, he had murdered out of the fear of recognition if his victims survived. However, he had always hoped that one day he would achieve his ultimate sexual thrill, that of ejaculation as his victim’s death supervened. So far, the murders had provided him with only part-realisation of this fantasy. The overwhelming emotions, topped up with feelings of power, domination and the act of murder were there, but he reasoned that Robin Stavinsky had short-changed him. She had provided him with none of the sickening criteria because she had collapsed limp and helpless as he dragged her into the scrub. Nevertheless, he strangled her and raped her after death. He said later, ‘I was surprised, ya know. It was a pretty good thrill, but not the best.’

  * * *

  Two more young women, both 14, disappeared in eastern Connecticut on Easter Sunday 1984. Leslie Shelley and April Brunais, inseparable friends and neighbours in Griswold, had decided to walk into Jewett City. Both girls were aware that their parents would not permit them to walk back during the hours of darkness, so each said that the other’s parents had agreed to drive them home. It was this childish deception that would cost them their lives.

  As darkness fell, the girls phoned their homes; both were ordered to walk back as punishment. At 10.30pm, when neither girl had returned, their distraught parents called the police who made the initial mistake of listing the youngsters as ‘runaways’.

  The exact time Ross stopped and offered the girls a lift is unknown. It is known, however, that April, who was the more assertive of the two, climbed into the front passenger seat, while the petite and fragile Leslie sat behind. Both were understandably startled when Ross drove right past the end of their street, and despite their protests that he had missed their turning, he wouldn’t stop. April pulled out a small pocketknife, with which to threaten their abductor, but Ross easily disarmed her. Driving east out on Highway 138, he headed for Voluntown, and the nearby Beach Pond, a vast expanse of water with a dam holding back the Pachaus River, which separates the states of Rhode Island and Connecticut.

  Parking up at a still undetermined location, Ross tore off April’s jeans, cutting them into strips which he used to bind his victims’ hands and feet. He shut Leslie into the trunk of his car, and then dragged April a few yards and forced her to her knees. There can be no doubt that the terrified Leslie overheard her friend arguing with Ross. April put up a spirited fight for her life before he raped and strangled her to death.

  Ross now turned his attention to Leslie. He said later that the girl made a great impact on him.

  ‘She [Leslie Shelley] was delicate with wispy blonde hair,’ he stated. ‘She was calm as I talked to her in the car. I told her I didn’t want to kill her, and she cried when she found out that her friend was already dead. Yes, I suppose she started shaking and appeared resigned to her fate when I rolled her over. This is the murder that bothers me. I can’t remember how I strangled her, but her death was the most real and hardest to deny. With the others, it was like someone else did it, and I watched from afar through a fog of unreality. This was real but somehow not real. It was fantasy but not really fantasy. Her death? Leslie? It wasn’t someone else and for the first time I saw it was me. I watched myself do those things and I couldn’t stop it. It was like an invisible barrier was between us. I didn’t want to kill her.’

  At this point during his interview with me, Ross showed the first signs of stress and remorse. He stopped talking, lowered his head, and sucked in a lungful of stale prison air. When he resumed his sickening account of the murder of Leslie Shelley, there were crocodile tears in his eyes:

  ‘I couldn’t do anything but watch as I murdered her, and you want to know something outrageous? Well, I cried afterwards. You know something else? Well, ah, I don’t know but nobody knows this. Well, I wanted to have sex with her straight after I raped and killed April, but I couldn’t get it up. So, I had to sit back with Leslie for an hour, just talkin’ an’ stuff. Then, because she started crying, saying that she would be in trouble for being late home, I had to kill her. But, I anally raped her, after death, to release the tension. You see, nobody has been told this before.’

  Then he smiled sheepishly before adding, ‘You know, they call me a serial killer, right? Well, I’ve only killed eight women. Big deal. There are a lot more guys you could meet and they’ve killed dozens more than me. An’ in that context, I’m a nice guy. I’m such a nice guy really.’

  With that, he burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter, before explaining that he had dumped the bodies of April and Leslie at another location near Beach Pond, occasionally revisiting the site to masturbate over their remains.

  ‘I’d just sit there, just to look at their decomposing bodies. Like my childhood fantasies, they were there for me and they gave me pleasure when I needed it.’

  Ross took police to the bodies of April Brunais and Lesley Shelley shortly after his arrest on Tuesday, 28 June 1984, although the precise location of the murder scene was never established. This was put down as an ‘oversight’ by the Connecticut State Police, and later proved in court to be a deliberate attempt by them to avoid a jurisdictional boundary dispute with the Rhode Island law enforcement agencies who had to foot the bill for this murder enquiry.

  * * *

  Ross was now nearing the end of his run, he was mentally out of control, and his work at the Prudential Insurance Company was suffering as a result. Faced with the prospect of dismissal, as he was failing to bring in new business, Michael was also coping with his turbulent relationship with Debbie Wallace which had taken a more active turn. Debbie’s father had died while she and Mi
chael were on vacation and, after the funeral, on the return journey home, they had argued. A major rift followed and, once again, he felt alone and rejected.

  * * *

  For 17-year-old Wendy Baribeault, Friday, 15 June 1984 was the final day of examinations at Norwich Free Academy where she was a junior student. She stopped at her mother’s home after studies before catching a bus back to Jewett City to visit a convenience store. It was a fine afternoon, so she decided to walk back and, at around 4.30pm, she was seen, by a passing motorist, walking along the fairly busy Route 12. But she was not alone, for other witnesses later came forward to say that she was being followed rapidly by a man on foot. He was about 6ft tall, white, clean-shaven, of medium build and had dark hair. Other witnesses saw this man get out of a blue, compact car with a rear window wiper, and they recalled that he walked briskly off in the direction of the young woman who answered Wendy’s description.

  When Wendy failed to return home, her mother reported her missing the following day. Hundreds of police and local residents launched a search of the immediate area, and, two days later, her body was found by a fireman. The corpse was in dense woods and hidden in an ancient stone wall just a quarter-of-a-mile from her home. She had been raped and strangled.

  Ross explained later that he had intended to go to work that day, but had cut himself while shaving, and blood seeped on to the collar of his only clean shirt. After phoning in with the excuse that he was ill, he dressed himself in smart, casual clothes, and hung around his apartment, reading pornographic material and masturbating. At around 2.00pm, he went for a drive, and later on he saw Wendy walking along the road towards her home.

  After swinging his car around and parking up at the entrance of a gravel track, he dashed across the road and asked Wendy if she would like to go to a barbecue that night. When she turned him down, Ross her dragged into a clearing in nearby woods, where he rolled her over on to her stomach before strangling her. He ejaculated almost immediately, so he throttled her again. She struggled and kicked, and her body twitched. Michael had cramp in his hands as he fought to strangle the life out of his victim. When he stopped to massage his fingers, she heaved and squirmed under him until re-applied his grip. Finally, a kick of her legs told him she was dead.