The Man in the Monster

by Martha Elliott

  The Shelley family had been consumed with the fate of Michael Ross since the day he was arrested. They attended almost every hearing and never missed a day of either trial. Nothing else mattered; for Ed and Lera, holding their vigil in many different courtrooms was far more important than painting or fixing the holes in the bathroom wall or even satisfying a supervisor at work.

  Sitting around the kitchen table, animals crowding, and smoke swirling as both Shelleys chain-smoked, we began a conversation that went on for years and continues to this day. No one had to say that their daughter’s murder had wreaked havoc on this family. It is evident in every word they spoke and everything around them. Their hurt and anger permeates the house—and only one person was responsible.

  It was easy to like Ed and Lera. They were decent people, straightforward with no pretensions. Ed spent a good part of his career working for the U.S. Postal Service, but at the time of my first visit, he had retired and was working at a golf course. Lera worked as a nurse’s aide at the state mental hospital in Norwich. They both had a sense of humor and were willing to laugh at themselves.

  Lera could not speak of her daughter without tearing up; Ed got teary at times, but he also had a visceral hatred of Michael Ross. He got right to the point early in the conversation, looked me straight in the eye and said, “When he took Leslie out of the car, he apologized to her and told her he was sorry, and then he murdered her. And the fear that kid went through knowing what was happening to her friend outside the car is unimaginable.” He paused and sighed. “That’s the thing that really gets me. What was she thinking? What was she saying?” It was easy to see why he became obsessed with Michael Ross’s fate. To know that his child died in agony and fear must have been almost unbearable. As a parent, I could only imagine their excruciating sorrow, and I understood their crusade. Ed was adamant that Michael should be executed. Period. Lera, a Roman Catholic, said she never thought about it much before her daughter was murdered. “In some cases, I do believe in the death penalty,” she said thoughtfully. “But I believe that God is the only one that can decide when and how Ross will die. If Ross had gotten life without the possibility of parole, we would have lived with it,” she said. “If this had happened to one of your daughters, how would you feel?”

  I had asked myself that question ever since I first started talking to Michael Ross. I took a deep breath because I wanted to be honest with them but not offend them. “How would I feel? I know I would have wanted to strangle him with my bare hands. But I hope that I wouldn’t because I believe that all killing is wrong,” I answered. “I’ve thought about it a lot. How would I feel if someone were drunk and had an accident and killed somebody? We would never have the death penalty for him, but the person who drinks and gets behind the wheel is doing something they could control, and the person who is mentally ill doesn’t have control. Isn’t the mentally ill person less culpable?” I asked.

  “Yes, but how do we know for sure that Michael Ross or anyone is really mentally ill?” Ed asked.

  “That’s part of the problem,” I admitted. But I didn’t want to do the talking. “Tell me about Leslie.” They both smiled. Leslie’s life was a topic they both liked to think about. Ed’s most vivid image of Leslie was as a little girl, covered with chocolate ice cream. “I can always remember her as that little runt with a dirty face, big smile, long hair, happy face, sitting on the porch.”

  I looked at a picture of Leslie. “She looked a lot like you,” I told Lera.

  “She was Lera’s daughter,” Ed said. “They were very close.” I looked over at Lera, the tears streaming down her face as she looked at the picture of her daughter. He said Leslie had hoped to someday go to nursing school and become an RN, following in her mother’s footsteps. “Les often waited up for her mother on weekends so that they could play cards or watch a horror movie. She liked watching shows that were scary but wouldn’t watch them alone.”

  Leslie also liked to spend time with her dad, sometimes playing softball. She wasn’t much of an athlete, but she loved to play softball. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t very good at it. “The only hit the kid got the whole year was a home run. I mean, there were errors all over the place, kids throwing the ball the wrong way. And she couldn’t run. She was as slow as a turtle,” Ed said chuckling. “But everybody’s yelling, ‘Keep going, keep going’ and she got her home run. She was just ear to ear with a grin,” he remembered.

  Leslie Shelley was devoted to the things she loved, like her pets—dogs, cats, ferrets—who were equally devoted to her. Casper, her pet Chihuahua, wouldn’t let anyone but Leslie go near him. “He was Leslie’s dog, and that was it,” remembered Lera. Casper would follow her to the Roodes’ house and sit on the front steps until Leslie came out and went home. He slept with her at night, and if someone walked past her bed, they’d be lucky not to be bitten by Casper. “He was so protective of her,” Lera recalled. “You couldn’t even go into her room because he was guarding her.”

  Both Ed and Lera agreed that Leslie was headstrong. Ed tells the story of when she was six or seven and they were driving home in the car. “You know how kids can get going in the car. I said, ‘Leslie, if you don’t knock it off, right now, you are going to walk home.’ Well we were just pulling into the project and she says, ‘You wouldn’t put me out.’ I stopped the car and that little devil got out. I had to drag her back into the car.” So it’s no wonder that if she was determined to go to the movies that Easter afternoon, she would find some way to do it.

  The year before, the pair had been missing for about four hours. April had decided to run away from home, and Leslie dutifully accompanied her, even though running away was not the way that Leslie usually handled her own problems. She was more likely to call her married sister, Robin, who was nine years older. On average, she called Robin a few times a week for advice or just to talk. For whatever reason, when they decided to run away, Leslie decided against consulting her sister and packed up enough clothes for a lifetime. Before leaving, Leslie instead told her younger sister, Jennifer, that they would be staying at their friend Sandy’s house. A seven-year-old, Jennifer was not a good confidante and reported all she knew to her parents. So Ed, Lera, and Raymond Roode, April’s stepfather, drove over to Sandy’s to retrieve their daughters. Leslie came downstairs when Ed called and then confessed that April was hiding in an upstairs closet. It was over in less than four hours.

  Because of the earlier runaway attempt, April’s and Leslie’s parents first assumed that they were up to the same shenanigans. Nevertheless, they were concerned and began searching for the pair in familiar places. “We drove down the railroad tracks,” says Ed. “We went to see my son. We went to a friend’s house. We checked all around, and then it started—rumors, sightings.” One of the girls’ friends insisted that they had called from Florida. Someone else said they had seen them in court the next day. Someone else claimed that April had been spotted at the soup kitchen.

  Ellen Roode and Lera rode down to the soup kitchen, where a number of Lera’s patients from Norwich Hospital worked, and showed them pictures of the girls, but no one remembered seeing either of them. “So then we went over to the Wauregan Hotel,” said Lera, because someone reported seeing a girl resembling April. “At that time, it was drugs, alcohol—you name it—were in there. So I got a room number and I went up, and this woman answered the door. I showed her a picture of April, and she said that the girl that was staying there could pass for April’s twin but that it wasn’t April.”

  They contacted the missing-children’s bureau in Rhode Island, and called Ed’s nephew, a police officer in Florida, to try to get the word out. Ed, a postal worker, sent a letter to the Postal Record, a monthly newsletter that goes to all postal workers, asking them to run a picture of Leslie. The picture was published on June 28, the day Leslie’s and April’s bodies were found.

  For the two months the girls were missing, the Shelleys never l
et themselves believe that Leslie wasn’t coming home. “You have to understand that people are in shock,” explains Ed. “She was gone about two weeks, and I was at Nelson’s, which is an auction house . . . and I bought a beautiful French provincial bedroom set for her, and I had the bureau and the night table, the bed all set up. That would be Leslie’s room when she finally came home.” He said it took two or three years after their remains were found before he finally put an ad in the paper and sold the furniture.

  “The thing that got me the hardest,” Ed said sullenly, “was the day they recovered the bodies.” He had taken his youngest daughter, Jennifer, to Plainfield to watch the horse races from the road. Afterward, they went to meet his daughter Robin and her four-year-old daughter for some ice cream. “We were driving down the road, and the news flash came on the radio that they had recovered two young girls’ remains in Preston. My little eight-year-old girl looks at me and says, ‘Daddy, that’s April and Leslie.’ I just sat there and I knew. I knew. I went in and I got her some ice cream and then when I saw my oldest daughter come in, I had no doubt. So I had Robin take Jennifer with her.” Lera heard the news while she was at work at Norwich Hospital. The state police came to the hospital to ask her for Leslie’s dental records.

  When Ed got home, he saw a detective leaving the Roodes’ house and heading over to talk to him. “I said, ‘It’s my daughter Leslie, isn’t it?’ And he said, ‘Well, we’re not sure.’ And I said, ‘Like hell you’re not sure. We gave you exactly what the girl was wearing. You mean you can’t tell me what she was wearing?’” The officer told Ed they had to wait for the autopsy report.

  The next morning Ross was arraigned for the murders of Robin Stavinsky, April Brunais, Leslie Shelley, and Wendy Baribeault. “They didn’t want us at the arraignment,” Ed says. “They told us about five minutes before the arraignment was going to start. I guess they came walking down Water Street with about twenty state troopers surrounding him. They had sharpshooters on top of the Shannon Building, on top of the courthouse, on the parking garage to protect him. You know, I don’t think that would have protected him, not the way I was. I would have taken my shotgun and blown him away.”

  After the police and media had left the place where they found the bodies, Ed and Lera needed to go to the spot. “It was eerie,” Ed remembered, gesturing to Lera. “She’ll tell you. When we went over there, the road curves around and there is a swamp there. I got out of the car with her, and we went walking over to the swampy area. And I told her, ‘This isn’t the spot.’ I walked across the road and the hairs just jumped on my arms. I mean the back of my neck just crawled, and I knew right then and there, where it was.” They took pictures of the area and left. Although Lera had promised Ed that she wouldn’t go back, she was compelled to go again. One day while Ed was working, she drove over and went down the embankment to the spot where Leslie was found. She sat down and just put her head down, her hands covering her face, and began crying uncontrollably. “That was the last place Leslie had been. It was hard.”

  • • •

  People’s reactions to the murders both helped and hurt the family. The night Leslie’s body was found, Ed called a friend in the middle of the night. “He says, ‘What the hell do you want at two o’clock in the morning?’ I said, ‘They found my daughter’s body.’ He said, ‘Come on down.’ I stopped to get some cigarettes, and some guy picked up the paper and said, ‘These girls asked for it.’ And if I had turned around and told him it was my daughter, I think I probably would have poked him right out on the spot, because I did have a temper, but I just ignored him and walked away.” Ed felt that people are always too willing to blame the victims. “Wendy Baribeault went out for a walk. She was in her shorts. So they say she was asking for it. People are so asinine when they think that kids—girls, boys, or whatever—go out and are asking to get killed or get raped; it’s stupid. People just don’t understand. But some care. People care. It’s just that they don’t know how to show it. Just a pat on the back. Or ‘I’m sorry’ suffices. . . . You can survive it. It’s tough. But you have to survive. You have to go on.”

  Lera joked. “With all the people at Norwich Hospital, I had five hundred pats on the back. I had enough. They can keep their pats to themselves.” She chuckled for the first time since we had begun to talk.

  Even Ed’s own mother showed no sensitivity. “She was a wench,” said Ed. “She says to me, ‘Well, it’s better than being in white slavery.’ And I said, ‘But then at least she’d be alive. I could get her back, but this is eternal.’” He shook his head as he considered the comment.

  Because the girls’ bodies had been so badly decomposed, both families had decided to cremate the remains. “There was no reason to spend thousands of dollars on a casket,” Ed explained. “There wasn’t much there.” The Shelleys also wanted to get the funeral over as soon as possible because they knew it would be a painful ritual. The funeral was not a bonding experience for the two families; in fact, it was the beginning of a rift between them that would result in the next-door neighbors barely speaking. Ed said that Ray and Ellen Roode wanted to have a big funeral with Channel 3, Channel 8, and Channel 30 allowed to come to the grave site, but Ed and Lera wanted no media attention. “My thought at the time was, Let’s get it over with and make it as easy as possible on everybody,” Ed explained. “I didn’t want to go through shaking people’s hands and having them tell me how sorry they were.” The Shelleys told the Roodes that they didn’t have to bury April when they buried Leslie. They could do what whatever they wanted to do.

  Reverend Lou Harper of the First Congregational Church in Griswold, where Leslie and April attended the youth group, conducted a brief service by the mausoleum near the gate to the tree-lined cemetery on Route 38 in Griswold. The girls’ urns had been placed side by side—friends forever. After the service, Ed picked up Leslie’s urn and Ray picked up April’s. “Ray did his thing with April’s remains, and I got up and I was really nervous. I said something.” Although the formal services were short and without fanfare, Ed and Lera have carefully tended to the grave site, planting flowers every year. One Easter, Lera even hung Easter eggs on a tree that Ed had planted.

  Eventually, the conversation circled back to Michael Ross. Lera and Ed were convinced that Michael had no remorse for what he did. They also didn’t buy his mental illness. “Do you think he is mentally ill?” I asked.

  Lera answered immediately with a resounding “No!”

  Ed extrapolated. “I look at it this way. Evil? Yes. I think he could control himself when he was in homes selling insurance.” He pointed to one case in Moosup, Connecticut, where Michael forced a girl to perform oral sex but let her go. “Well, like the girl said, ‘I can run faster than him with my pants up than he can with his pants down,’ and that’s exactly how she got away. It wasn’t that he let her go. He admitted to having stalked women. So there wasn’t a question of, Is there a mental illness?—because he could control himself when he was stalking. He wanted what he wanted regardless of what damage or harm it caused.”

  Michael never could explain why he had let the Moosup woman go or why he had stalked many women but did not rape or murder all of them. “Raping and murdering isn’t a logical thing. I didn’t just go out and think I’ll rape this one and murder that one. I don’t know why any of this happened.”

  Ed was certain that the sexual sadism was all faked. “All it had to take was one person to put the idea of sexual sadism in his mind. It wouldn’t take him long to digest a book on what sexual sadism consists of—voices in his head. Things like that. And if it could keep me from the death penalty, you could shoot me with Depo-Provera all day long. . . .” Ed explained, “I honestly feel that if a person is truly mentally ill and I didn’t feel that he could control his actions, it would have a bearing on my feelings towards him.” Not wanting to leave any doubt about how he felt about Michael Ross, he added, “But knowing that Ross could control
himself when he felt like controlling himself, that was the deciding factor in my feeling toward wanting the death penalty.”

  “Do you think he’s mentally ill?” Lera asked, turning the tables on me. “Because you talk to him a lot.”

  I thought for a moment. “I think that anybody who kills anybody is sick,” I began slowly. “I don’t think a normal person can kill another—except defending oneself or in a fit of rage—and even that shows that there is something wrong if he can’t control his anger. So I start with that point of view. I don’t see how anybody could do what he did and not be mentally ill.”

  “I don’t think Ross has remorse, though. I really don’t think he does.” Lera was adamant.

  “You really don’t? So you didn’t buy the apology he gave in his statement at the sentencing?”

  “No, I’ll tell you like I told Barry. . . . I could have predicted every time Ross took off his glasses and wiped his eyes, tears, looked down at the floor when someone was on the stand that was testifying when he didn’t like what they were saying. If someone was on the stand that he liked, he looked right at them, smiled,” she observed. “No, I don’t think he is sorry. I think the only thing he’s sorry about is that he got caught and he’s in jail. I don’t think he’s remorseful.”

  She was right on one level. He didn’t like to see the pain and destruction he had caused. The question was whether he felt remorse about it or just sorry for himself or a combination of both. Only Michael Ross could know what he felt, and I wasn’t even sure he was capable of separating the two emotions. Even the psychiatrists disagreed about whether he felt remorse or empathy. I tried to explain. “I think the thing that drives him crazier than anything is that he will always be known as Michael Ross, the serial killer. In fact, I think that is where the stipulation came from. He was trying to do something that would take the onus off what he had done.”