The Man in the Monster

by Martha Elliott

  • • •

  Debra Smith Taylor was living with her parents in June 1982. Her marriage of a year and a half had been stormy. Her husband, James, was possessive and suspicious that she was seeing other men, so when they were together, they were often quarreling—and often drinking. She was very petite at four feet eleven inches. According to what James told police, she had a serious operation in April and in June weighed less than eighty-six pounds.

  On June 15, 1982, Debbie told her mother that she was going out for a drive, not mentioning that James would be with her, because she knew her mother might object. According to what James told the police, they drove around all day, drinking beer and talking. At one point they went into Rhode Island, took a walk on the beach, and then returned to Connecticut to continue to bar-hop. They ran out of gas in a remote area of Danielson, Connecticut. A trooper picked them up and took them to a gas station, but he couldn’t take them back to the car because he had been summoned on a police matter.

  Debbie began quarrelling with her husband. Angry and drunk, James hit her, threw the gas can into a ditch, and then began hitchhiking in the opposite direction. James later told police that he didn’t think she would hitchhike, “but that if she was offered a ride and a drink, she would accept, especially if she had been drinking.”

  Debbie kept walking but never made it to her car because Michael Ross stopped, agreeing to give her a ride to Jewett City. He had been out on the prowl, unable to control his urges to go “on a hunt.” He picked up Debbie and took her to a remote cornfield in Canterbury. “In my statement to the police, I said we started to make out but she stopped and I got angry—that is not true.” He explained that after his arrest, he had taken Malchik’s suggestion that there must be a reason for his killing. Somehow in his mind, if Debbie had rebuffed his advances, raping and killing her was more justified. He told me later that when he stopped and told her to get out of the car, she was very cooperative and did whatever she was told. He drove to an area he knew well, near the satellite farm where chicks were raised, far from anywhere that a passing motorist would notice them. He ordered her to take off her clothes, and perform oral sex on him, and then he raped her. It was the same rundown he gave of all the murders. “Her only concern was that she get home in time to wake up her younger brother for school. She never made it because I strangled her instead. I put the body in the car and drove to a more remote location on the farm and put the body in a shallow streambed under some brush.” Again, he visited this location several times after the murder. He had hidden the body far enough off the main road that he felt secure in visiting the site and staying as long as he could while he stared at her remains.

  Debra was reported missing two days later. James Taylor, her husband, immediately became a suspect because of their troubled marriage. Debra’s brother, James Smith, told police he was sure that his brother-in-law had killed his sister. Debra’s friends also suspected James. Although he insisted he was innocent, he didn’t help his case with comments he made around town. When asked if his wife had been found, he said, “No, it will take a bulldozer to find her.” Finally James offered to take a polygraph test. According to police reports, the tests confirmed that he was telling the truth about not knowing what happened to his wife.

  Eventually hunters found Debra’s remains on October 30, 1982. The location of the remains brought suspicion on some of the employees of Eggs, Inc. and should have made authorities wonder if Michael, who now had a record as a sex offender, was involved. The site was very close to an area known as Gluck’s fields where Eggs, Inc. dumped two loads of chicken manure every day. A neighbor told police that the only people who frequented the area on a regular basis were from the Ross farm. On November 3, officers interviewed Dan Ross about whether he ever was in the area and saw anything suspicious. Dan responded that two of his employees went up every day to dump the chicken manure, so the officers interviewed the two workers, who both said they often saw people in the area, but usually they were either hunters or people who didn’t arouse any suspicion by their behavior. Neighbors said that the only other people whom they noticed were kids having keg parties or hippies. Michael was worried that the police or his family would “put two and two together and suspect me.” But no one did—or at least admitted to it. No one connected the dots, Michael believed, because he wasn’t in town when the body was found; he was serving time in Ohio for the attack against Sharon.

  • • •

  The more he told me about his crimes, the more I saw patterns. Eventually I had to question him about the similarities.

  “Did you have a ritual way of killing your victims?”

  “I don’t know. It was sort of automatic. I wasn’t thinking ‘do this or do that.’”

  “Why did you flip them on their stomach and straddle them?”

  “Maybe to get a better grip on them and make the killing go faster. I told you I didn’t think about it. It just happened.”

  “But you could have straddled them from the front after you raped them.”

  “Then they could fight me,” he said.

  “So you were thinking about that?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “Do you think it was because you didn’t want to see their faces as you killed them?”

  He hesitated. “I really don’t remember, and what difference does it make now? I killed them. Okay?” By this time I could tell he was angry at me for pressing him. “I guess that may have been part of it, but I don’t really know. I don’t remember thinking about it. It don’t matter now. Okay? Can we drop it?”

  “After one more question. Do you think you were symbolically killing Betsy when you killed the girls?

  After a few minutes of silence, I asked, “Well, do I get an answer or not?”

  “Not. I don’t know. Okay?”

  It was odd, because when he described his stalking and the oral sex, he admitted that he was acting out Betsy’s nightmare. I could only guess that he had experienced the urge to strangle her and was ashamed of admitting it when he was talking to me. He later admitted to me that he had felt violent urges to hurt Betsy, but that he had actually hurt her only once or twice when he had been drinking.

  • • •

  Betsy showed up in Brooklyn for Michael’s birthday on July 26, but not to celebrate with him. She only wanted to return the engagement ring, making their breakup official. “I think she thought she was being kind by doing it in person, but seeing her only made me feel worse,” he told me. A few days later, he was sentenced to six months in prison for the Ohio attack, but he was released for good behavior after four months and returned to Brooklyn in time for Christmas. He lived with his father briefly until he found an apartment.

  Perhaps jail had sobered him—at least for a while. But on May 23, 1983, after taking a date home, he raped another woman in Moosup. Margaret (not her real name) said she pulled out “a buck knife” that she carried and threatened him with it when he grabbed her. She told police that he spread out his arms and pushed his chest up against the knife, daring her to stick it into his chest, but that she couldn’t do it. “I just started bawling my eyes out,” she said. “I looked up and he just smiled at me and grabbed me by the throat and started strangling me.” Michael never told police about the knife. When he tried to explain why he didn’t kill her, he said, “I don’t know why I let her go. After I raped her, I felt confused and not sure what was going on. She got up and ran off, and I didn’t try to stop her.”

  Margaret did not want to testify at Ross’s trial because she didn’t believe in the death penalty, but after his execution, she said that she felt responsible for the four women who died after she had had a chance to thrust the knife in his chest. When interviewed in 2005, she said she wished he had killed her like the other women because she’s had to live with the nightmare ever since.

  The fact that he raped her but didn’t kill her was us
ed against Michael at his trials. The prosecutor’s theory was that the rape proved that he didn’t always feel the compulsion to kill his victims and that he didn’t have to kill Margaret because it was dark and she wouldn’t be able to identify him. Michael later told me, “I don’t know why I didn’t kill her any more than I know why I killed the others.”

  In the fall of 1983, Michael began to date a woman named Diane (not her real name) who soon moved in with him in Jewett City. When Dan invited him to Thanksgiving dinner, Michael asked if he could bring Diane, but his father said there wasn’t enough room. That launched Michael into another rage. “I had to tell Diane that we weren’t going to my dad’s. That really upset me,” he said, trying to explain what led to his fifth murder. He didn’t seem to understand that I couldn’t comprehend his rage over a dinner invitation.

  • • •

  Robin Stavinsky, nineteen, had been trying to pull her life together. A natural athlete and former state discus champion, Robin had moved out after a fight with her parents during her senior year in high school. At first she stayed with a friend and later with her older sister, Debbie. Robin had been with Ron and Joan Stavinsky, her father and stepmother, for ten years. She had come to them when she was starting the fifth grade, after being taken away from her mother and put into foster care. Ron and Joan had also taken Robin’s half sister, Debbie, who was thirteen—even though Debbie was not Ron’s daughter. They didn’t want to split the girls up because they had always been together. The Stavinskys also had two small children from Joan’s previous marriage, David, four, and Jennifer, one.

  For Joan, it wasn’t easy to instantly become the mother of two teenage girls. She was an at-home mother and alone with them most of the time because Ron worked for a drilling company and was out of town at least half of the year. It was a challenge because she didn’t have any experience with teenagers. “Robin came from a place that was not happy,” explained her younger sister, Jennifer Carcia. “Foster care in the sixties and seventies—the stories she’d tell me about it were awful, so she knew how to self-preserve. She had seen a lot, but what she had lived through made her stronger.”

  Robin was always full of energy. Her family said she could clean their Columbia home from top to bottom in a couple of hours and then take a five-mile run and not seem tired at all. “She was so strong,” said Jennifer, that some of her friends “nicknamed her the hulk woman” because of her muscles, “but she had a feminine side to her.” In seventh grade, a coach got her interested in track and field—discus and shot put—and from then on, she was always in training. She was also a rebellious teenager who was spiteful and a little defiant. When she channeled her energy positively, things went well, but “like the little girl with the curl, she also had her difficult side,” a family member reported.

  Although Robin did well in school, getting mostly Bs and some As, she didn’t know whether she wanted to go to college, so after graduation she got a job working for a dry cleaner and moved in with her boyfriend Dave in New London. She also got a job answering phones for a phone-sex business. All she did was transfer the calls to the women who actually took the calls, but later the media tried to intimate that the job had something to do with her death.

  Her job was in Norwich, about twelve miles from New London. Without a car, Robin had to hitchhike back and forth. On November 16, 1983, she was on her way home from work, walking along Route 32, a busy commercial area, when Michael Ross spotted her. He parked his car and caught up with her as she walked along. They chatted for a while. She told him she was furious with her boyfriend and was going to walk to New London and stay with a girlfriend. Michael realized that she was physically fit and might be able to resist him, so he waited for her to be off guard and then began to strangle her right away. She passed out and was “half dead” when he pulled her out of sight. “I almost didn’t rape her, but then she started to come to. She tried to fight back when I raped her but she was too weak. The rape took only a few minutes, and then I strangled her. It was over very quickly.” He told the police that she did something to upset him. “But this was never true for any of them. I assaulted them without provocation. It was just an excuse because Malchik said they must have done something to anger me, and I picked up on that as an excuse.” The area was too well traveled to risk trying to put the corpse in the car, so he hid her remains under some brush and leaves. “They found the body a week later so I never returned to the scene—though I did drive by on a few occasions before her body was found. There was no place to pull off the road so I didn’t stop. I was afraid someone would see me,” he remembered. He also said that the medical examiner incorrectly estimated that she had been dead for two days, when it had actually been at least a week.

  A few days after the murder, her family heard from her friends that she was missing and hadn’t gone home to New London or appeared at work. It was her pattern to sometimes disappear for a while, staying with a friend because she didn’t want to be found. Having reconciled with her father, she occasionally dropped by his home, but they didn’t worry until she didn’t show up for Thanksgiving dinner.

  Late in the afternoon, Joan heard that a body had been found in Norwich, but she didn’t think it was Robin. At the urging of others, she finally called the police and gave a description of her daughter, including scars and birthmarks. She later learned that the detective she was talking to was standing right next to the body as she described Robin and that he knew instantly that the body had been identified. That evening, Detective Michael Stergio arrived at the Stavinsky house and hinted that he suspected that the remains that were found were Robin’s, but the police could not be sure until they had her dental records.

  Yet despite that news, Joan and Ron still didn’t think that the police had found Robin; they hadn’t processed what the officers had told them. About three o’clock in the morning, Joan sat up in bed and said, “Ron, she’s gone. It’s Robin.”

  Robin’s death was one of the two that specifically haunted Michael. Every Thanksgiving he would fall into a deep depression and stay in bed because he incorrectly thought that Joan Stavinsky had gone to identify Robin’s body on Thanksgiving afternoon.

  Michael was seeing Dr. DuCharme twice a week at the time of Robin’s murder, but he never spoke about the murders during his sessions. DuCharme had persuaded him to apply for a job as an insurance salesman for Prudential, but Michael felt that abandoning his dream of being a farmer was compromising his manhood. He was a failure. “I started drinking and had the classic signs of alcoholism. I drank alone. The first thing I did when I got home was make two or three drinks, Scotch.” The more he worked at Prudential, the more he felt oppressed and even ashamed—and the more he drank. He wasn’t performing well on the job, even though he lied and told his father that he was one of the top salesmen. “I had to be a success for my father even if it was all a lie.” Michael only wanted to take over the family farm, but years later, Dan Ross would say, “What did he think I was going to do? Roll over and play dead? I was years away from retirement.”

  By May 1984, Michael said he kicked Diane out of his apartment because of their constant bickering. “I don’t know why I ever started dating her. We had nothing in common. It was all physical.” He got angry with her because she didn’t have a job and was satisfied to collect unemployment. “I come from a family with the Puritan work ethic. You don’t go on unemployment. You work.”

  He began stalking almost every night. He had killed Leslie Shelley and April Brunais in April; committing four murders in less than a year made it impossible for him to convince himself that he could control his urges. The denial he had lived with since college was no longer feasible. He knew he was a killer, but he couldn’t bring himself to go to the police and turn himself in. But he wanted to stop, and he began to believe that the only way he could manage that was suicide. He now rehearsed his death by driving a hundred miles per hour down Route 169 in Lisbon, but he couldn’t
muster the courage to drive into the bridge abutment and actually kill himself. “I was a coward. I was too afraid to be a man,” he said shamefully.

  Years later, I could see that he wanted to admit his guilt and weakness, but I think it was also one of the many times that he also wanted to be comforted, to hear me say, “It’s okay, Michael. I understand.”

  After talking to Dr. Berlin and Dr. Borden many times, I didn’t doubt that his mental illness and his sexual sadism were responsible for his murderous behavior, but I also didn’t think he was without culpability. I continually brought this up with Michael for more than a decade, but he could never adequately articulate why he didn’t turn himself in or kill himself to prevent another murder. The reason was some mixture of denial, shame, not wanting to go to jail, and the irrational hope that he could stop himself from killing again.

  On some level, he must have made the decision to let himself get caught. He grabbed Wendy Baribeault in broad daylight on a busy stretch of road in Lisbon on a warm June day. If he didn’t have the courage to stop himself, maybe someone else would. Someone would see him, and he would be caught. He says he didn’t actually “plan” to go out and get caught, but “why else would I grab a girl in broad daylight on a busy stretch of highway?”

  Wendy, seventeen, was five feet two inches and 103 pounds. She was also an athlete and liked to take long walks, despite her mother’s warning that she shouldn’t walk alone on Route 12. She had finished her exams at Norwich High School and decided to take a walk to get some exercise. Dressed in blue shorts, a white T-shirt with black sleeves, blue socks, and red sneakers, she left a note on the kitchen table to tell her mother where she was going at about four o’clock in the afternoon of June 13 and headed toward Chucky’s Convenience Store. Roger Baribeault, Wendy’s father, who was working in the backyard, saw her leave but thought nothing of it. She never reached Chucky’s, because Michael was also on that stretch of road after a coworker with whom he was supposed to go out canvassing had called in sick.