Ed felt that the fact that Michael had changed his story about how Leslie died was telling. “He was his own worst enemy saying that he had raped Leslie anally.”
“You should know. That part is just not true,” I told them. “I made him admit it to me. He didn’t rape Leslie.”
“We knew that. We knew that,” Ed said. “That’s when he hung himself, when he killed Leslie. That’s when the jury lost all credibility in his statements.”
Lera got up and came back with a scrapbook. “I kept every newspaper article since they found the girls—ten scrapbooks full.” She put the first one on the table and opened it. It began with pictures of Leslie.
Tears filled Lera’s eyes as she turned the pages. “If you read it, you’ll see the difference between the first trial and the second.”
We flipped through the pages of several of the books as I scribbled down notes. “Would you mind if sometime I made copies of some of the scrapbooks?” I asked.
Lera hesitated. “You can have them,” she said. “I’m done clipping newspapers. I’ve got to move on. I just want to take out the pictures of Leslie.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “These must be very important to you.”
“Yes, I’m sure,” she said. “I need to move on.”
It was almost 7:00 P.M., and we had come to a place where we didn’t have more to say or ask without some time and reflection. I was hoping that I could look for the location where the girls’ bodies had been found, but I didn’t want to ask directly, not wanting to seem too morbid. “How far was it from here where the girls’ bodies were found?” I asked Ed.
He offered. “You got a minute? Let’s take a ride.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” he said confidently. Then turning to Lera, he said, “Put that out,” pointing toward a scented candle.
“No, I’m staying here,” she said adamantly. The day had already been too much for her.
It was still raining steadily as we got into his car and headed toward Route 38. The constant beat of the windshield wipers clicking back and forth added suspense and tension. Finally we arrived at the culvert where Michael had dropped the two girls’ bodies—on a lonely stretch of road in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. “I’d never have found this on my own,” I admitted.
“That’s what I thought,” he chuckled. “No use in you getting yourself lost out here.”
“Right over there,” he said as we got out of the car. It had been sixteen years. Some areas had become overgrown, some had been cleared, but it was not difficult to see the spot where the bodies had been thrown into an irrigation ditch on the side of the road.
I just stood there staring for a minute, trying not to visualize the gruesome crime scene photos of the girls’ partially decomposed bodies. He said that some of the other family members had not realized what happens to a body after being exposed to the elements for more than two months. “I’ve been out hunting enough to know that they would be in no condition for anyone to see. That’s why we decided to have them cremated.”
“Do you come by here much?”
“No, you can’t. You have to move on. You have to move on,” Ed said and then paused. “Okay, now let’s get macabre.” I looked at him, wondering what could be more macabre than what we were doing. Reading my puzzled expression, he said, “I’ll show you where the girls are buried, only a few hundred feet from each other—Love Ya Always Like a Sister.” As we drove into the small cemetery, Ed pointed to a large gravestone partway down one of the first rows, “That’s where Debra Smith Taylor is buried, right over there.”
“That seems so improbable that three of the victims would all be buried in the same cemetery,” I said.
“Not if you start to look at how small an area it is. You know, that’s why I wanted to start a civil suit against Ross’s father. He should have known. His son had already been convicted of two attacks, and then women start being murdered. He should have known. We went to a lawyer at the time of the first trial, but you know what he said? ‘Got thirty thousand dollars?’ And of course, I don’t have anywhere near that. So the suit didn’t go anywhere. I was hoping that he’d sue me for defamation in court, and then I could have countered with a wrongful death suit.”
We drove near the back of the cemetery and stopped by the two girls’ graves. I got out despite the rain because I wanted to see the headstones. A large rose-colored stone that says SHELLEY marks Leslie’s grave. There is also a plaque on the ground that says LESLIE ANN. The grave is decorated with little brass angels, two lying down on the top of the headstone and two sitting by the front of the stone. Flowers are planted around the stone. At first they planted a tree, but the roots got too big. “I had a heck of a time getting that tree out.”
A mystery surrounds Leslie’s grave: A few times a year someone leaves flowers. Ed and Lera have tried to figure out who the mystery person is, to no avail. “It’s strange. I have no idea who’s been doing it. It’s almost eerie,” Lera had explained.
Ed showed me April’s grave. Like Debra Smith Taylor’s, her grave was marked only by the family stone—Roode. It was as if both young women had been swallowed up without a trace.
Instead of heading back to the house, Ed drove in the opposite direction, into Jewett City, a down-at-the-heels town of about three thousand people. He slowed down as we rounded the corner where the girls had called home to say they were running late. “They must have hung up, crossed the street, and within a few minutes, Ross picked them up,” he said, “because in his confession he said it was right around here. There used to be a telephone booth on the corner here, but it’s gone now.”
He drove on a few more blocks. “That’s the house,” he told me. “That’s where he lived.” It was nothing like what I had imagined. I had thought of it more like an apartment complex, but it was a large boxy house that had been divided into apartments. Ed turned his car around and started back toward Griswold.
“So he picked them up in Jewett City, and they asked to be taken to a gas station in Voluntown, but he just drove past the gas station . . . and then ended up in the Exeter woods in Rhode Island?” I asked.
“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” he answered in a tone that implied he didn’t believe Michael’s version of the story.
“You don’t think the murder scene was in Rhode Island?”
“Actually, I think the place they claimed it happened was the Arcadia woods, not Exeter. From where the girls were picked up, I believe it’s twenty-three miles, and he brought the girls back and dropped them over here with a dead girl in the front seat? I don’t think it happened [in Rhode Island], because when the detectives went up there, they scoured the woods because of April’s shoes and the pants missing, and they couldn’t find them.” Ed’s theory was that the two girls were killed somewhere near where their bodies were found.
Ed said he had been to the murder scene, but I wasn’t sure if he was talking about the location where Michael claimed he committed the murders or the one Malchik had described in his directions. “Well, let’s go see if we’re talking about the same place,” Ed suggested. When we passed Beach Pond and crossed into Rhode Island, I was sure that he was going to the place that Michael had described. Within a few minutes, he pulled into the exact location that I had found when I followed Michael’s directions, and we got out of the car. “No way did it happen here. Somebody would have seen them,” he said, pointing out that the area was too open and that someone might have seen from the road. “And it’s just too suspicious that they’d come out here two years later and find pieces of cloth,” he said, referring to the strips of slipcover that the defense claimed to have found.
“No more suspicious than Malchik writing down directions two years later,” I reminded him.
“Maybe not. We’ll probably never really know.”
• • •
When I told Michael I had been to the Shelleys’ house, he was curious about what they had said. I told him about our conversation. I said I’d told them that he didn’t rape Leslie. He seemed shocked that I had told them that, but I wouldn’t let him backpedal on the admission. “Mr. Shelley even said he had proof on the autopsy report that she had not been raped.”
“That’s not what I said,” he argued. “You misunderstood me.”
But I hadn’t misunderstood. I knew what the truth was. “I asked you point-blank which story was the truth, and you said the one on the tape—the confession tape.”
The next week, Michael and I talked more about the Shelleys and their feelings. “Mr. Shelley’s anger—I can’t blame him for not being able to forgive me. I know I caused it all. I forgive Mr. Shelley because when he is angry and says some of the things he says . . .”
“You better be careful how you say things, because saying, ‘I’ve forgiven Mr. Shelley, but he can’t forgive me’ is ridiculous. What the hell should you forgive Mr. Shelley about?”
He started to cry. Blaming the prosecutor was one thing; blaming the parent of his murder victim was another.
Lera and I corresponded for the next several months and continue to occasionally make contact by mail or phone. Sometimes she wrote to fill in gaps, sometimes just being friendly by sending me a Christmas card or a friendly thinking-of-you kind of note. She also had questions for me about Michael that I answered as best I could.
Immediately after talking to Lera and Ed, I found it difficult to talk with Michael. In one very awkward occurrence during the summer of 2000, I was speaking to Michael on the phone when the other line rang. It was Lera. “I gotta go,” I told him. “I have another call I need to take. Don’t call me back today,” I said, knowing he might try to call back and that I wouldn’t be able to handle talking to him after talking to her. Later I explained to him who had been on the phone. “I’m glad you talked to her,” he said. “I hope they’re doing okay.” On some level, I think he hoped that my talking to the Shelleys would make them forgive him, but I had no intention of being a go-between, and I already knew that the idea that they would ever forgive him was nonsense. If there was one thing I learned from meeting them, it was that Ed Shelley was never going to forgive Michael Ross—and I didn’t see why he should, unless he believed that Michael was sincere in his remorse—and he didn’t—or he felt forgiving Michael would help him get past losing Leslie.
Leslie’s death had been especially hard on her sisters—her older sister, Robin, and Jennifer, who was only eight at the time. I met Jennifer during another visit to the Shelleys’. As she spoke of Leslie, her eyes welled with tears. “I kept thinking they’d come home. I never thought she was dead until I heard that they had found two bodies. Then I knew it was Leslie.”
Besides reminiscing about Leslie, she also talked about the death penalty. It was clear that Jennifer had no doubts about the fact that Michael should die for what he had done, but she was also angry at the criminal justice system. “I never had a childhood,” she said, sobbing. “It was like the only thing that was important was for Michael Ross to die. Nothing else mattered—every court date, every time the legislature was going to discuss capital punishment. There was hardly any time for anything else.”
Even in college, she couldn’t escape her sister’s murder. In April 2001, Lera wrote that Jennifer was taking an English class at New England Institute of Technology in Rhode Island. She said the class was “studying . . . the death penalty. Of course she has discussed her interest in it because her sister was murdered by M. Ross!” She asked that I make copies of anything I had that she could use in writing her paper. She told me that Jennifer was thinking about getting in touch with Michael via the Internet, but “does not know what she would say to him.” She didn’t know that death row inmates in Connecticut had no Internet access. The Department of Correction does not want them contacting victims, convicted felons, or going on inappropriate Web sites. Lera said that if Jennifer decided to contact Michael, “it has to be her decision, and I will not try to talk her out of it. I don’t know how her dad will feel about it.”
I sent a few articles I had written as well as other background material from the scrapbooks or documents I had collected. Jennifer was determined to tell Michael what he had done to her life. She wanted some answers to questions that had plagued her for almost two decades, so I gave her his address, in case she wanted to write. She did.
She wrote him a short letter, saying that she was writing “to you to let you know how you ruined my life seventeen years ago when you took my sister away from my parents and I. My parents have had to live with emptiness in their lives which can never be filled.” She said she had grown up trying to figure out “why this happened to my family, why my sister had to die at such a young age and why someone like you would still be alive after seventeen years of sitting on death row.” She told him that she was satisfied with the outcomes of the trial “because my sister will forever haunt you. She is the girl who screws up all your lies and excuses you seem to come up with so you can have a new trial or another appeal. I am disgusted with all your excuses and reasons to explain why you killed six young ladies and how sorry you are for the crimes you have committed when you stole a life away from the family and friends of your victims. . . . The lives of the girls you stole away from us will always be remembered and for this reason you will never have peace in your life and the remorse you say you have will always fall on deaf ears!”
Jennifer told me that she would like to hear back from Michael, so I relayed the message. He was hesitant to write, but when I told him it was important to Jennifer, he complied. He ended up sending the letter to me, and I forwarded it to her, because inmates are not allowed to have direct contact with their victims or their families. Because I had a request from Jennifer to communicate with him, I didn’t feel I was abetting him in skirting the rule.
He said that he was writing only because I had made it clear that she wanted and expected a response to her letter. “If I have been wrongly informed, please destroy this letter right now, for I have absolutely no desire to invade your privacy.” Knowing that he could not say anything to change her opinion of him, he wrote, “I offer no excuses, because there are none. I murdered your sister. She did not deserve to die. She did nothing to provoke me to kill her, and you and your family did not deserve the ordeal that you have been through.” He said he had tried to explain his mental illness for many years, but he did not mean it as an excuse for what he did. “I do not care if I am executed; in fact, part of me longs for the sweet release of death. . . . I tried to accept full and complete responsibility and I did my best to get the judge to accept a stipulation agreement which would have compelled the court to sentence me to death without dragging everyone through a second penalty phase . . . and I regret that I failed your family and all of the families in that regard.” He reiterated his wish that he could undo the pain he had caused and said that every time he closed his eyes, he could see her mother, because he was haunted by “the unfathomable emptiness of her eyes. It is as if I can see straight into her soul and it is full of nothing but pain, pain that is there solely because of me.” During the trial, he said he forced himself to look at Mrs. Shelley every day because he didn’t want to insult her or any other family member by avoiding eye contact as he had in the first trial. “Every day I looked into those dark empty eyes and hated myself.”
He said he was sorry that he could not make amends to them. “And I am sorry that you will never be able to accept the remorse that I do feel as being genuine, and that my words here—as inadequate as they are—‘will always fall on deaf ears.’”
22
SOMERS, CONNECTICUT
MAY 2004–JANUARY 2005
“I’m not surprised. It’s what I expected,” Michael said when he called me to tell me that the Connecticut Supreme Court upheld his six death sentences in May 2004,
four years and a month after the jury’s verdict and almost two decades since his arrest. Despite his protestations, Michael was upset, more by the reasoning than the outcome. “They said that even though I’m mentally ill, it had nothing to do with the crime. That is the most idiotic thing I ever heard. If it weren’t for my mental illness, I would never have hurt anyone.”
Because of his reaction to the decision and his enthusiasm about his lawyers’ opinion that he had winnable appeals issues, I thought that Michael would go forward with his appeals after all. For one thing, Bob Satti had died. Satti’s tactics had been a big part of his reason to forgo another trial. Even if a court eventually ordered a third penalty trial, that would be years away. Why stop the process when there was a chance that a court might order a life sentence?
He had been depressed in the winter of 2002 because he had broken up with his current girlfriend, Susan from Oklahoma, the summer before. Susan had found his Walking with Michael newsletter on the Internet and written to him, and their correspondence soon blossomed into a romantic relationship while Michael was waiting to be sentenced for Paula Perrera’s murder in New York. But it did not take long before she became overwhelmed by his neediness and cut off the relationship on his birthday in July 2002. The following February he attempted suicide a second time, but once again he was discovered and the state of Connecticut nursed him back to health. By the time the decision came down, Michael seemed better. So I was shocked and confused when he called me in July to report that he had fired his lawyers and stopped his appeals. I challenged him on his decision.
The Man in the Monster Page 24
