When the decision was handed down in 1994, I’d been out of the country adopting twins from Paraguay and then was coping with the twenty-four-hour-a-day job of caring for two premature babies, so I missed the newspaper reports. The decision meant that a new jury would determine whether Michael would be sentenced to death or to as long as 480 years in prison—in addition to the 160 years he was already serving. In Connecticut, as in most states, capital murder cases are conducted in two parts. If the jury finds the defendant guilty of a capital crime during the first phase, a second phase with the same jury follows to determine the penalty.
• • •
As we walked out of the meeting that day, Joe recounted Michael’s personal history. “When he was just a kid, like eight years old or something, his job at the family chicken farm was to weed out the sick chickens and wring their necks. When you read about Ross’s life, it’s no wonder he was crazy. His sixteen-year-old uncle blew his brains out with a shotgun and left a long suicide note that was written in a spiral, in which he confessed that he was a homosexual and that he couldn’t stand to live anymore.”
I stopped in the middle of the corridor. “He killed chickens when he was only eight?” I asked.
“He killed the women in the same way—strangling them with his bare hands—after he raped them.” Joe had covered parts of the original trial and began to describe the murders in detail. “Ross would be out driving and see some random young girl, pull over, and grab her. He raped them, but he made each of them perform oral sex on him before the actual rape. Then he would strangle her. Sometimes it would take several minutes because his hands would cramp, and he’d have to stop for a moment before finishing them off.”
I couldn’t take any more. “Okay. I get it.”
“But Ross is intelligent. He has a high IQ and graduated from Cornell. He’s always sending us articles on why the death penalty should be abolished. And guess what? He used to be for capital punishment, but I guess being sentenced to death prejudices one’s worldview on such issues,” he chuckled.
“I can see why he might have a change of heart.”
“He’s not only changed but become a missionary. He is a prolific writer. There’s not that much to do on death row, and with all that time on his hands, he cranks out article after article. His pieces are usually pretty good. We’ll see what his next move is, but I bet you anything that we’ll get a letter from him analyzing the court’s decision in a few weeks. Like a lot of people in his position, he’s learned a lot about the law.”
“Let me know if you hear from him,” I added, never really expecting to hear more.
Michael Ross’s case could have ended with a life sentence after the Connecticut Supreme Court decision—handed down on his thirty-fifth birthday in 1994. The New London state’s attorney now had a second chance to acknowledge that Michael suffered from a mental illness and offer him the equivalent of several life sentences without parole, saving the state the cost of another trial, decades of appeals, and perhaps inevitably an execution. But the prosecutor—“Bulldog” Satti to those who had battled him in court—did not give up so easily.
Satti was barely five feet four inches, but he cut an enormous figure. Michael, at least ten inches taller, feared him. The veteran prosecutor had taken on the case of State v. Ross with all the aggression and tenacity his nickname suggested. This had been no ordinary case for the chief state’s attorney. When the Ross case came to trial in 1987, Satti had recently failed to secure a death sentence in the Terry Daniels case, involving not only a rape-murder, but also the throat slashing of the victim’s two-year-old daughter. Michael Ross’s prosecution provided Satti with a second opportunity to be the first Connecticut prosecutor to get a capital conviction under the new statute.
The snowy-haired prosecutor was about to retire after nineteen years of heading the New London State’s Attorney’s Office and forty-three years of practicing law, but his devotion to this case fueled his effort to stay on part-time as a special assistant state’s attorney. There was no question in Satti’s mind that Michael Ross was a cunning, manipulative rapist who knew exactly what he was doing when he killed those eight women. He believed that Ross had murdered to ensure that his victims could never identify him and that his mental illness was a sham concocted by Michael to avoid a death sentence. In Satti’s mind, Michael should face death because he had committed heinous crimes.
However, the inmate on death row in 1994 was not the same man who had been incarcerated in 1987. Once he was placed on death row, Michael received medication, first Depo-Provera and then Depo Lupron, two drugs that suppressed his production of testosterone. Administered by injection, both were developed as contraceptives for women and contain progesterone, a hormone that prevents egg release. Eventually the medications were used by psychiatrists with considerable success to suppress the production of testosterone in male patients with sexual disorders. It was their belief that overproduction of testosterone might be a root cause of some aberrant sexual behavior. Studies have determined that recidivism rates drop dramatically when the medications are administered in conjunction with psychotherapy for convicted sex offenders who suffer from some paraphiliac disorders, such as pedophilia, exhibitionism, and sexual aggression. Michael was the perfect candidate because he was in a controlled environment where he had mental health personnel checking his medications and state of mind on a regular basis.
When Michael’s testosterone production had virtually been eliminated, he said he no longer suffered from the violent sexual fantasies that had constantly played and replayed in his thoughts for more than a decade. He wrote that he had been freed from “the monster within,” and returned to being “Michael.” Seven years on death row had given him plenty of time to think about what he had done and what he would do when the court finally decided his fate. It also gave him a lot of time to begin a letter-writing campaign to newspaper editors and to write op-ed articles about the flaws in the criminal justice system and why the death penalty should be abolished. His writings also expressed remorse for what he had done.
But Michael had come to a dramatically different conclusion about how his own case should play out. After years in prison and in treatment for his disease, he decided that the only way he could prove to the families of his victims that he was repentant for what he had done was to accept a death sentence. In September 1994, Michael requested that his public defenders hand-deliver a letter to Bob Satti, offering a deal—stop the penalty hearing from going forward, and he would accept a death sentence. He explained that there was “no need and no purpose served in inflicting additional emotional harm or distress on the families of my victims. I do not wish to hurt these people further—it’s time for healing. . . . I am willing to hand you the death penalty ‘on a silver platter,’ on the condition that you will work with me to get this over with as quickly and as painlessly as possible.” He asked to be allowed to go into court to admit his guilt and take responsibility for his crimes by accepting the death penalty.
Michael said he would sign a stipulation, a legal declaration, that said his crimes were “especially cruel, heinous, and depraved” (a requirement in a capital case) and that there were no mitigating factors that would preclude a death sentence. In exchange for this deal, Satti had to agree that the state would offer no evidence of any kind to prove its case—no autopsy reports, no gruesome crime scene photos, and no emotional testimony from the victims’ families.
However, Michael could not resist editorializing. He said he didn’t expect Satti to accept the offer because “I know that you want your circus trial, and that you couldn’t care less about how it affects the families of my victims. You want your day in the sun, your day of glory. You want to be the man who sends Connecticut’s most hated and despised criminal to the electric chair. And you will probably want to pull the switch yourself. And even though that is exactly what I am offering you with this deal, if you agree there wil
l be no circus trial with you as master of ceremonies. That kind of takes the wind out of your sails, and doesn’t make it so much fun, now does it?” He offered to meet with Satti at the prison to work out the details. He said he understood that a meeting would be unpleasant, but that it was necessary to ensure that they were “playing from the same sheet of music.”
What he didn’t know was that his public defenders, Fred DeCaprio and Peter Scillieri, never delivered his letter to Satti. They later explained that they could not participate in his decision to give up without a legal fight. With no response from the prosecutor, Michael decided that his next best option was to make his offer public. In March 1995, he wrote an article for Northeast, the Sunday magazine supplement of the Hartford Courant, entitled “It’s Time to Die.”
Michael’s article began with a description of his recurring nightmare of his execution in Connecticut’s electric chair. The horror in the dream comes not in the execution itself but in visualizing the crowd outside, counting down the last seconds and cheering as they hear that Michael Ross, the monster serial killer, is dead. He also wrote of life on death row and explained that his mental illness, sexual sadism, had caused him to have repetitive thoughts of rape, murder, and the degradation of women. He was sexually aroused by humiliating and raping women. He claimed that his medication, prescribed by one of his psychiatric expert witnesses, had freed him from those obsessive thoughts and enabled him finally to face what he had done. Over time, he said, he had lost the intense desire to prove his mental illness in a court of law and now wanted to forgo the penalty phase of his trial and accept death, sparing his victims’ families the pain of another proceeding. One section of the Northeast article suggested that he might be suicidal, making me wonder if his years on death row had made him depressed. I suspected that his real motives might have been state-assisted suicide rather than a selfless act to help give the families closure.
Initially, Michael had been consumed with a desire to prove that he was mentally ill. “When I first came to death row, I was filled with anger at how the prosecution had twisted and distorted facts of my case. I was consumed with an intense desire to prove that my mental illness does in fact exist, and that the mental illness did in fact deprive me of my ability to control my actions and that my mental illness was in fact the cause of my criminal conduct.” He said he wanted everyone to “believe that I was sick and that it was the sickness in me that did the killing. I wanted to prove that I wasn’t the animal that the state portrayed me to be.” But he said he was tired and had “come to believe that any such thinking may be simply wishful thinking.” He didn’t think anyone would ever believe that his mental illness was the cause of his lack of self-control, so he believed the only logical course of action was to accept death.
• • •
Why would anyone opt for death over life? Why was Michael, who was openly opposed to the death penalty and who churned out articles expressing that opinion, willing to accept execution? Was he depressed, as many death row inmates are, and just giving up? Was he actually asking the state to help him commit suicide? Was the prospect of life imprisonment so grim that death became a more palatable option? What did the victims’ families think of the offer? To those who had followed Michael’s case—his subsequent crusade to establish misconduct on the part of the state, his one-man campaign against the death penalty, and his desire for the world to understand his mental illness—his actions were not only baffling, but also contradictory. Only a few months earlier, in December, he had written, “Executions degrade us all. They are carried out in the middle of the night, in the dark, away from us all to hide what they really are—a barbaric punishment symbolic of our less civilized past.” How could the man who had penned that now offer to accept a death sentence for himself?
The Northeast article concluded, “Kill me if you must, but please don’t let it end there. Learn from this horrible experience.” What could anyone possibly learn from executing Michael Ross—or anyone else, for that matter?
I paced around my office considering these questions. Michael’s story was both horrifying and fascinating. Was he really mentally ill and the victim of an overzealous prosecutor?
I decided to learn all I could about the case. I gathered up all the documents and articles we had on it in the office. Together, the articles, trial transcripts, court decision, and briefs concerning Ross’s case took up a large filing cabinet and three banker’s boxes. The most difficult task was getting started, not because of the daunting amount of work, but because opening the boxes was like turning on a horror film. I started with articles that Michael had written, thinking that they would give me clues. Then I began reading the trial transcripts and briefs.
I read some of the documents at work and took some home in handfuls to read at night. I didn’t want to bring all of it into my home because it would have been like taking Michael Ross into my house. As I began reading the material—it would take me months to get through it all—two things stood out. First, it was apparent that Michael suffered from mental illness. All five of the psychiatric experts who examined him—even the state’s expert witness—agreed that he was mentally ill, a sexual sadist. The second thing I suspected was that in Michael’s first trial, the judge, the prosecutor, and the state police’s head investigator had, at the very least, made some errors and at the worst, trampled over Michael’s rights. As editor in chief and publisher of a newspaper for lawyers, I couldn’t ignore a case involving a possible violation of a defendant’s Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
Woven within this legal morass was also a story of horror and suffering—of young women who were brutally raped and then literally had the life squeezed out of them and of their families, who had been waiting for some sort of closure for more than a decade, waiting to know if Michael Ross would pay the ultimate price for killing their sisters and daughters.
I wrote a letter to Michael, in the late summer of 1995, introducing myself, expressing my interest in what he was doing, and asking if he’d be willing to be interviewed. It was only a matter of days before I received his reply in a handwritten envelope with his return address clearly printed on the front. I held the envelope and hesitated before I opened it, afraid of what might be inside. I think that I feared that the serial killer, the monster, would reveal himself to me, jumping out in front of me. I stared at the hand-printed letter, thinking about the man who had written it, trying to imagine him—not in a physical sense but as a person, his soul, if he had one. What type of man would commit such brutal acts?
“I would be happy to grant you an interview but . . .” he began. Death row had been transferred into the state’s maximum security prison, Northern Correctional Institution, and access to the press had been cut off. Only immediate family members were allowed to visit death row inmates. The policy seemed Draconian, as families often don’t always support relatives on death row. But I could understand the state wanting to keep journalists out; they give the death row inmates a mouthpiece and threaten the state’s veil of secrecy about what happens behind the prison walls. So I called the Connecticut Department of Correction to try to set up an interview and was told that it was not possible. I wrote a letter appealing to the commissioner and to the attorney general of the state, Richard Blumenthal, who was known in the journalistic community as accessible and open to reasonable requests. With time, Blumenthal approved my request, but it took even more time to get through the red tape. It would take almost six months just to get on Michael’s phone list, to hear how he answered questions rather than see written, thought-out responses about what was making him offer to give up his life. In the meantime, I started attending the court proceedings.
A few days before the first hearing I attended, a second letter from Michael arrived. Parts of the letter were almost lawyerly, yet it was also passionate and, at times, contrite. He seemed remorseful, but there was also an underlying anger and frustration with the system.
Michael accused Satti of being willing to do anything to sway the jury’s emotions, including using “crime scene photos, autopsy reports, and, most important, the victims’ families. He will put them on the stand and tear open old wounds. If he can get them to break down on the stand he will do it. He doesn’t give a damn about them.” He also was reneging on his willingness to cooperate. He was afraid that an article by me would “piss him off.” He expected that the stipulations would be full of lies but that he would sign them anyway to stop Satti from hurting the families of his victims further. “That’s what is most important at this time. Not my life, not justice, but my victims’ families’ well-being. . . . I owe my victims’ families the world. I can never even begin to repair the damage that I have done to them. Reconciliation is impossible. I can’t even ask their forgiveness. How could I?”
Repeating what would become his mantra, he insisted that it was his duty to prevent the families any harm. “How can I justify putting the families of my victims through that again? Especially for something as intangible as a principle of ‘justice.’” In order to prevent a new trial, he said he would sign anything, “including something that says I’m the biggest scumbag in the world, that I knowingly and willingly killed my victims in cold-blooded ecstasy, and that I deserve to die, I will do so. For they are only words that won’t change the ultimate truth.” Michael said he didn’t expect me to understand what he was trying to do, but he hoped I would understand why he couldn’t grant an interview at that time unless I promised that none of it would be printed until his negotiations with Satti were completed.
The Man in the Monster Page 3
