The Man in the Monster

by Martha Elliott

  “What’s wrong with allowing the appeals to go forward?”

  He said he didn’t care if he had good issues. He had made up his mind ten years earlier and he wasn’t going to change it.

  “You’ve changed your mind several times in the last ten years,” I reminded him.

  “I’m not changing my mind; it’s done. I don’t want there to be a ‘Ross III,’” he said with a mix of sadness and anger, referring to a third penalty hearing. “I owe it to the families. I can’t risk another trial. You know that’s what would happen.” He was adamant but with a note of self-pity.

  “I don’t get you. I don’t understand why you want to throw away your life,” I said.

  “Life? You call this a life? I live in an eight by ten cell, hermetically sealed in a tomb. I go out for rec a couple of times a week in a dog run. I have to put up with the idiots here. The other day, Cobb [another death row inmate] left me a little love note calling me Satan and signing it ‘Jesus.’ I’ll send it to you. The guards treat me like crap—like a worthless piece of shit. You call this a friggin’ life?”

  Having been inside Northern, I understood. Yet Michael Ross had committed horrendous crimes and damaged many lives. He took up a lot of my time, energy, and money, but he’d become a fixture in my life, a constant. It was in the months that followed that I really understood the extent and depth of our friendship. It had been years since I regarded my role as simply a reporter covering a story, but I never had tried to tell him what to do. When he asked my opinion or my advice—usually about legal matters—I was always straight with him. Now he had started what U.S. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia likes to call “the machinery of death”—and I had no idea where the off button was.

  When he called on August 19, I knew something was wrong. I could barely hear Michael say hello.

  “What’s the matter now?”

  “I can’t be buried in Brooklyn,” he sobbed, explaining that Tammy Williams’s grandmother didn’t want him buried in the same place that her husband was buried, nor did she want him to have a funeral Mass in St. John’s, her parish church. “I just wanted to go home. . . . I asked if we could have it there, out of courtesy. I didn’t think that anyone would have a problem. No one else had a problem.” He said that maybe he could have the Mass at the Benedictine Grange, the home of Father John Giuliani (the priest who succeeded Father John Gilmartin as Michael’s spiritual adviser). “It’s supposed to be a beautiful place,” he said.

  “Why don’t you just get buried on the farm?” I asked. “You always wanted to go back to the farm.”

  “We don’t even own the farm anymore,” he explained. Uncertainty agitated Michael. He wanted control of his death, his funeral Mass, and his burial, and now he could control none of them.

  On October 7, Michael went to court and told Judge Patrick Clifford that he had dropped his appeals. The judge set an execution date of January 26, 2005. Now his death was not just a theoretical possibility; it had a date attached. Within a few days, Michael was transferred across the parking lot from death row in Northern to Osborn Correctional Institution, the location of the execution chamber. When Michael finally called me, he sobbed throughout the conversation. He told me that he was emotional because in the afternoon he had made arrangements to be cremated. “It was hard. It makes it very real, and it hurts.”

  “Are you having second thoughts?” I asked

  “No, I’m not going to change my mind. You know that. Just because I’m getting emotional doesn’t mean I’m going to change my mind.” Then he said something that startled me. “I’m not going to trust the feelings that I’m having now because I know that for ten years I’ve had one goal and that was to get this over with. I can’t trust my feelings now. I have to stick with what I decided because I was sure of it for so long. Every time I let my emotions take over, I make a mistake. I’m going through with this.”

  • • •

  When Michael called on December 4, he was tearful again. He sounded more depressed every day.

  “What’s wrong now?” I asked.

  “Have you been following what they’re doing?”

  “What? Who?”

  “The public defenders filed motions.” Michael proceeded to read me parts of the motions. He was angry that the public defenders were trying to stop the execution, but he was livid that they alleged he was not competent to make the decision to drop his appeals. It was an unusual and perhaps desperate move, because they no longer represented Michael.

  “Michael, they aren’t saying you’re incompetent. They are saying your decision to accept death is due to your mental illness.” I tried to tell him, but he wasn’t listening to me.

  “This is ridiculous. I’m really scared that they’re going to take me across the way.” Michael was petrified that he would be sent back to Northern. “Why won’t they just let me go? No court will call me incompetent,” he said bitterly, choking up as he spoke.

  I didn’t want to argue with him, but I did want him to understand what the public defenders were thinking. “You said you’d been having second thoughts but that you didn’t want to trust your emotions because you had made the decision ten years ago, and you weren’t going to change your mind because of emotions. That’s enough to say you’re not competent.” I knew he would be ticked off at me for suggesting that his emotional state made him incompetent, but at that point I had to be sure I spoke my mind. I was surprised that he almost agreed with me.

  “I do have mixed feelings,” he admitted, adding what he would repeat a million times. “But I believe I’m doing something for a reason, a principle. I’ve thought about this for a long time. . . . What right does any public defender have to interfere with what I’m doing? I’m pissed.” He was bitter. “They’ll get me another month or six months and call it a victory, but it won’t be a victory for me. Don’t they understand that? Don’t you understand that?” I did, and as long as he wouldn’t change his mind and fight, he was right.

  To Michael’s way of thinking, there were two problems about the lawsuit. For the public defenders to call him incompetent—even if based on his mental illness, not his mental capacity—was an affront. “I’m not some friggin’ moron,” he said over and over. He had also written in one of his journals, “My mind is all I have left. Even though the monster resides there, I am still proud of my mind. My mind is what keeps me sane. It is my only companion, my only true friend that I can completely trust.”

  The second problem was the timing. He felt that they had waited until the eleventh hour to make sure that the execution would be delayed. “They could have done this last summer when I fired them,” he said. By waiting until December, he charged, they were making it impossible for the issue to be resolved before the January 26 execution date. That meant that the execution would be on hold until his competency was resolved, which also meant uncertainty for Michael. He had planned on taking the last month or so to try to prepare himself spiritually for the execution, but instead he was full of the anxiety of uncertainty. I wondered if he was afraid on some level that the delay would give him time to change his mind, but I didn’t want to suggest it, because it would probably make him dig in his heels even deeper.

  As soon as I answered the phone on November 13, I could hear that Michael was very distraught, which was becoming the norm. “I have only seventy-four more days of this,” he cried. Although his words made it sound as if he were looking forward to the execution, his tone made it clear that he was afraid. “At least it’s only seventy-four more days of this crap.”

  “What crap? I thought you said they were treating you better at Osborn.”

  “It’s all the friggin’ rules. I’m depressed that every time I leave my cell I have two guards with me. When the deacon comes, we have to do communion through the bars. Even the legal visits have been through the glass,” he said, sobbing. “Twenty years of following the rules
means nothing. They treat me like friggin’ Danny Webb.” (Webb was another death row inmate, who had threatened to “take out” a few guards on his execution day.) “I have to accept it, but I don’t have to like it. But it really pisses me off. Guards are running around the unit as if I’m Genghis Khan.”

  Michael’s mood greatly improved after Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking, visited him in November. “I think we really connected. She said she would be here for me. I don’t know if she meant that she would be with me inside or outside protesting. I need to clarify what she meant.” Either way, Michael thought things were looking up. He had called at his usual time—6:00 A.M. on a Saturday, knowing I’d be up to take his call. He was excited and wanted me to be excited about meeting Sister Helen. Then he paused. “By the way, before I forget, I assume you’ll be there on January 26.”

  He had intimated over the years that he might ask me to be there—maybe he even assumed I would—but he had never asked me directly or demanded my commitment. I took a deep breath, trying to fight the panic. “Can I think about it?” I asked. The sudden reality of Michael’s execution was daunting.

  “You don’t have to come. There will be others there. I don’t need you there. I just thought you’d want to be there so you could write about it.”

  “Michael, it’s not that I wouldn’t come if it was important to you. I have two problems. One is that I feel as if my presence would mean I condone capital punishment. I don’t want to give your execution or any execution my imprimatur. The second is that . . . I don’t know if I can handle it.”

  “You don’t have to come,” he said convincingly.

  “I know, but I want to think about it.”

  I didn’t sleep well for the next week, trying to decide what to do. Ultimately, I knew that if there actually was going to be an execution, I would be there. I owed it to him. I had started out wanting to understand his decision to accept death; now I had to see it through. Ten years of telephone calls couldn’t end without a final good-bye, but I still held tight to the hope that somehow it wouldn’t ever come to that. Within a week, I told him I’d be one of his witnesses.

  On November 28, he called to say, “It’s been a hard week. I could hardly make it through Thanksgiving,” sounding as if he were going to cry.

  I paused, realizing that it would probably be his last Thanksgiving. “Because it would be your last one?” I asked gingerly, in part because I had a hard time not only choosing my words, but also saying them out loud.

  “No, because I think of Mrs. Stavinsky waiting for her daughter to come home and having to go identify the body. I can’t deal with it anymore,” he said, crying.

  Michael felt ashamed of what he had done and the pain he had caused, but he also wanted sympathy. If he had been upset about the fact that it might be his last Thanksgiving, I would have tried to comfort him, but I just couldn’t bring myself to let him off the hook for Robin’s death because I knew what it had done to the Stavinsky family. He was not going to get sympathy for Mrs. Stavinsky’s tears. That was her pain, not his.

  • • •

  Soon he started calling me every day, sometimes two or three times a day. Mostly he just wanted to complain about the public defenders’ lawsuits to stop the execution—and eventually a few that his father filed, including one that alleged that he was incompetent and narcissistic. “Now I’m really getting upset. By him doing this, he’s putting a bull’s-eye on my back,” he complained. “He once told me that he couldn’t stand being in prison and would rather be executed. How can he go and argue against me?”

  “Maybe it’s because he loves you. He doesn’t want to lose you.”

  “I know. I know, but it gets to me.” Soon it seemed to Michael that everyone was in court trying to stop the execution. His sister Donna filed a suit. Some of the men on death row protested the scheduled execution by filing suit, arguing that the method of execution was cruel and unusual punishment. Then Connecticut doctors filed a suit claiming that the death penalty as administered in Connecticut was cruel and unusual. According to the doctors’ suit, the method of execution that the state used was illegal for veterinarians to use to euthanize animals, so it shouldn’t be performed on humans.

  The protocol for lethal injection in Connecticut would be a three-step process. The inmate is given three different chemicals. The first, sodium thiopental, is a sedative, supposedly rendering the condemned person unconscious. The second, pancuronium bromide, is a muscle relaxant that makes it impossible for the person to move, even to bat an eyelash. The reason, of course, is to make the final moments appear serene. The third chemical, potassium chloride, stops the heart. Apparently, if the person is not adequately sedated, he feels the last drug seize his heart—feeling like a heart attack but much more painful, because it burns through the veins. Some autopsies indicate that the sedative can wear off if too little is given, but the second drug makes it impossible for the person being executed to say or do anything. Theoretically, that could mean he would feel the last drug—and no one would come to his aid. The condemned person’s final minutes would be torture. Michael knew it and feared it.

  • • •

  My MCI phone bill in December for just one phone line—and I had three—was nearly a thousand dollars, but it wasn’t just the cost of the calls that got excessive. It was the fact that it was eating into the rest of my life. My husband was spending a lot of time working on the East Coast or traveling out of the country, and my almost eleven-year-old twins were already feeling the impact of his absence. So Michael’s new neediness was not welcomed. There was an early morning call in December that made me realize that I had to be more sensitive to the rest of my family.

  With my cordless phone tucked awkwardly under my chin as I tried to listen to Michael’s latest problem, I fumbled with my all-in-one multifunction printer-fax-scanner-copier. It was a little after 6:00 A.M., and my son James was telling me to hurry. He had lost his script for the fifth-grade class play and was eager for me to use his twin sister’s copy to make him another. I pressed the copy button, but nothing happened. While I flipped through the troubleshooting manual, I turned my attention back to Michael, who was complaining about the uncertainty of everything. James waved his hands in front of my face. I pushed another button. All the lights suddenly flashed on the all-in-one multifunction printer-fax-scanner-copier, indicating, I believed, a total digital meltdown.

  “I don’t know why they can’t mind their own friggin’ business,” Michael said, now aware that the public defenders’ lawsuit would be moving through the courts for the next few weeks.

  “Mom! Will you get off the phone?” James demanded.

  “Tell James we’re busy,” Michael barked into my ear.

  I didn’t answer, although I would have been just as likely to tell Michael to shut up. I had not told James or his twin sister, Hannah, that Michael had an execution date set for January. They were thinking about spending that weekend skiing, and besides, I was hoping that the courts would make it go away. I took a deep breath, not wanting to scold either of them; all the players in this domestic drama knew of one another and knew how to exquisitely ply the emotions of the woman who was struggling with an all-in-one multifunction printer-fax-scanner-copier and also trying to carry on a conversation.

  “You are the worst mother in the entire world!” James screamed. “You care more about a serial killer than your own son.” He plopped down on the couch, arms folded across the chest in a full-body pout. Michael’s voice cackled with laughter from the phone.

  “Man, if I had ever said that,” he said chuckling, “my mother would have thrown me across the room.”

  “Well, Michael, that’s the difference between your mother and me. I’m hoping that James doesn’t turn into a serial killer.” He went silent. I knew that I had offended him. I had reminded him that no mother wants her son to grow up to be Michael Ross. But I also knew
that he accepted my comment as an attempt at gallows humor. James was now strewn supine like a dying Garbo on the couch.

  Michael decided to change the subject. His last weeks on earth centered on control of his own death. There was no detail that didn’t concern him, including his final meal.

  “By the way, I’m not having a last meal,” he said almost boasting.

  “What? Why not?”

  “Because I don’t want friggin’ Brian Garnett to friggin’ stand out there and say, ‘Mr. Ross died at 2:17 A.M. His last meal was blah, blah, blah.’” Garnett was the head Department of Correction spokesman. “I don’t want to give them any more to say. It’s none of their friggin’ business what I eat. Friggin’ media. You know what it’s going to be like—anti–death penalty people out there singing ‘Kumbaya’ and drunken yahoos all yelling for blood and revenge. It’s always the same. But this time they aren’t going to hear what I friggin’ ate.”

  “Sometimes I think I know you, and then you surprise me.”

  “Don’t worry. Lieutenant King will take care of me.” William King was the head officer in the death row unit.

  “What do you mean?”

  He didn’t want to answer me directly because we were being taped. “I mean about what we were talking about a minute ago.”

  I realized that King would get him the last meal.

  “We’re going to get cut off. And I have to get the kids ready for school,” I said.

  “Yeah, you better tend to James, since you don’t want him to become a serial killer or anything,” Michael said, indicating that he wasn’t offended. “I’ll call you back later.” Across the room, James began to emerge from his sulk when he saw me hang up the telephone, and we grabbed our coats and left to get the script copied.

  • • •

  Michael continually complained that the rules and protocol for the execution were changing every day. The most upsetting change was that he would not have a contact visit before his death because he was going to be sealed behind a floor-to-ceiling bulletproof wall in the death cell. It looked like Plexiglas, so Michael referred to it as his Plexiglas coffin. The barrier had only a few small holes drilled in it to allow people to talk and also a little pass-through slot that the guards could unlock to give him meals and medications. At Michael’s request, I called Major Coates, the head corrections officer at Osborn, to ask why the DOC was going to such extremes when Michael had never been a security risk, and the major told me, “It’s not up to me. I gave them my opinion, and they didn’t listen.”