During Michael’s last day, he wanted to be able to hold someone’s hand, to have some kind of human contact—not be sealed in like Hannibal Lecter. But the state wouldn’t hear of it. This was one of the many things about the machinery of death that perplexed me. Michael Ross had been a well-behaved prisoner. What harm would it have done?
When I asked a lawyer who had witnessed several executions of clients about the procedures, he said that the reason the DOC put up the Plexiglas was because they didn’t want the scene to get too emotional. “The DOC doesn’t get it. He’s a human being, but the fact is that they want everything to go smoothly, and they are afraid that any level of emotion will upset that. What they don’t understand is that by the time this guy is there in that death cell, he’s already gone, and there’s no bringing him back. They don’t understand the psychology of a death sentence. There’s nothing to be afraid of. By the time he’s there, he’s already dead.”
• • •
I can’t have my funeral where I wanted it. . . . I don’t know when it’s going to be. . . . I don’t know what’s going on here in terms of the rules. . . . I can’t have any contact visits. . . . Sister Helen doesn’t even have the right date. . . . Maybe you shouldn’t come. . . . I don’t know what’s going on,” he whined. Every call was filled with complaints and tears. “What does it matter? Just get it over with and kill me.” He began to sob.
“Would you stop being so negative?”
“I can’t help it. It’s so frustrating—even the date of the execution. They screwed me. They picked this day [January 26] so hopefully it’s going to be a freezing-cold day with a blizzard and nobody will be able to be here.”
I started to laugh. It was hard to imagine a date for an execution that wouldn’t “screw” the condemned person. “What day would you like it to be?” I asked sarcastically.
Without skipping a beat, he said, “I thought he’d [Judge Clifford] set it for April 6. That was sixth months from the hearing, and it would have been after Easter.” He wanted it after Easter so that it would be after the anniversary of Leslie’s and April’s deaths, which he honored every year with a day of prayer—and to give him another Easter Sunday to celebrate.
Susan, the last of Michael’s ex-fiancées, who had broken up with him just before his last suicide attempt, reappeared in January. They had developed a romantic relationship that had lasted less than a year. They hadn’t communicated since their breakup a year and a half earlier, but Michael wrote to her in early January to tell her he was going to be executed. He later told me that he felt he had to say good-bye to all his friends, but it was obvious that he was hoping for one last visit with her. He still cared about her. Though I had always discouraged him from getting “involved” with women, Susan seemed to break down Michael’s resolve to die, so I didn’t discourage his contacting her. But still, I thought his romantic entanglements cheapened his public statements about concern for the families of his victims. “How do you think the families will feel if they hear you have a girlfriend—or worse, a wife? Their daughters didn’t get that chance.” I repeated this over and over, but his response was always the same, “I can’t help it. I love her.”
• • •
Michael was still in a bad mood when he called on January 19 because he’d had his medical exam the day before. “The physical just messed with my head.” He mocked the foreign accent of the doctor, saying, “Don’t worry. I won’t go near the anal area.” At least the humor helped lighten the mood, but that was all he could laugh about. He also announced that once again everything had changed, that the day before the execution, he might not be able to visit two at a time. “You aren’t going to be on death row. I don’t know where they are going to put you, but not here. They keep changing things every friggin’ day.” Then he announced that my visiting times would be six to eight on Sunday, ten until noon on Monday, and three to five on Tuesday—his last full day on earth. Susan would be with him the last five or six hours.
Until that moment, I had assumed that I would be with him at the end or at least sometime near the end. It upset me that he wouldn’t want me there. Days before, I had received a call and an instruction booklet from Brian Garnett, the head of communications at the DOC, outlining the procedures for the night of the execution: where we would be, the order we would be taken into the viewing area of the execution chamber, what would be expected of our decorum, etc. It was becoming too real, and now he was taking away my time. “I don’t believe you. I’m flying all the way from California, and you’re not going to see me on the night of the execution? I’m the one who took your calls for ten years. I’m the one who stuck by you.” I was pacing from corner to corner in my kitchen, following the design of the tile floor as I argued with him. The more I talked, the more I could feel myself losing control. I wanted to hang up, but that would have given in to what I saw as his uncaring idiocy.
I began to cry. “I don’t believe you. I’ve been a friend to you, and now this? I thought you’d want me there during your last hours,” I said, sobbing. “What am I supposed to do between five P.M. and the execution at two A.M.?”
Hearing me cry, he finally relented and said he would change the schedule to give me an hour in the evening, but he added, “Don’t cry on me.”
“What do you mean, don’t cry on you? You’ve cried to me for ten years,” I snapped back, incredulous.
“Well, I didn’t think you felt that way. You’re supposed to be the unemotional one. You’re the strong one.”
“How the hell could I have talked to you for ten years if I didn’t care about you as a human being? I thought you regarded me as a friend.”
A blizzard was predicted for Saturday and Sunday. Barry Butler had called and told me three different systems were coming together. He also told me that the competency issue was now in the Federal District Court in front of Judge Robert Chatigny and that there was going to be a hearing on Monday morning at 9:30. The office of the chief public defender and the Capital Defense Unit had been working around the clock to try to get a stay of execution. The hearing was about whether to stay the execution pending the competency issue. My plane was late because of the blizzard, and I arrived at the courthouse just as they were taking a short break, so Barry and I went to see Michael.
I had never been inside Osborn. In comparison with Northern, it seemed a little old-fashioned and run-down, but more human. We entered a guardhouse where a friendly officer checked IDs against the short list of people who were permitted to visit Michael. We weren’t going to be allowed on death row, only in the death row visitors’ booth, a small room off the main corridor. The officer unlocked a door, revealing a very small cubicle, and then locked us inside. There were two plastic chairs, a window connecting the booth where the inmate sat, and a wall phone.
Within minutes, Michael was brought to the other side of the window and locked in. His appearance was startling; he looked feminine. I hadn’t seen him in a few years because of the distance from California, although we spoke more and more frequently. He had grown a ponytail. Although he had lost more than sixty pounds to make himself more attractive to his women friends, he was fleshy and had even developed what appeared to be breasts. The years of female hormones had obviously contributed significantly to the change. I took the phone to talk.
Predictably, Michael was upset when he heard that Chatigny was probably going to issue a stay. “I don’t care what he does,” he said defiantly. “I’m going in that death cell tomorrow one way or the other.” We knew he couldn’t force the guards to put him in the death cell, but there was no reason to argue with him. “There’s no way they’re going to find me incompetent now.”
I changed the subject. “You know Hannah asked me if she could talk to you. She insisted that she was the one person in the world who could persuade you not to go through with this.”
Tears welled up in Michael’s eyes. “Why are you telling a
n eleven-year-old about this?”
“Michael, how can she not be aware of what’s happening? You heard James’s fit when he said I cared more about a serial killer than my own son. I had to tell them. They care. They had to know why I was so upset.”
“I know, but I didn’t want them to know,” he said softly. “They shouldn’t have to deal with something like this.”
“Don’t you think they’ll wonder when you don’t call anymore?”
He put his head down, mumbling to the floor, “They shouldn’t have to deal with this.”
“If you don’t want her to deal with it, change your mind.”
“I’m not . . .” he began, but I interrupted, knowing what he would say. We chitchatted about the snowstorm and my trip for a while, occasionally gliding back to the legal issues at hand. After forty-five minutes, it was time to go.
When court reconvened, Judge Chatigny announced that he was going to issue a stay and that he wanted to hold a competency hearing. Michael would have to go back to court, and any new sentence would have to be at least thirty days past that date.
My flight back to California was not until late Wednesday, so I was able to visit Michael two more times before I left. On Wednesday morning, he told me not to come back for the execution. “I could do it on my own.” We talked about the future—as if he now had a future. “I’m a college graduate. I could also teach, maybe help them study for their GED. I think I could also be helpful to the people in mental health, because I could talk to other prisoners about depression—even about sexual disorders.” He was assuming that he would be allowed in general population and that tutoring would be possible if he was given a life sentence, and I didn’t want to discourage him.
“You’re a smart man, and you could make a big contribution,” I told him.
“I know,” he said, but caught himself before the daydream went too far. “I could make a difference, but I’m not going to change my mind.”
“You know I think this is crazy.”
“I know. I know, but I have to,” he said looking down at his feet. He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes.
I left confident that there had been a temporary reprieve of at least a month. The next afternoon when I was on my way home from picking up my children from school, my cell phone rang. It was Barry. “The Supreme Court lifted the stay. I’m out driving in my car, trying to calm down.”
My anxiety levels returned to their previous elevation. “Oh, my God,” I said. “Is it tonight?” I asked, knowing that I couldn’t get there in time.
“No, there’s another stay based on his father’s suit, but now that the Supremes have spoken, the Second Circuit won’t uphold it. It’s probably going to be early Saturday morning,” he said.
“I’m coming back,” I told him. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”
The phone was ringing when I walked in the door. It was Michael. “I don’t know if you heard or not,” I began.
“No, what?”
“Barry just called. The Supreme Court lifted the stay. . . . It was five to four.”
He joked. “I guess Rehnquist got out of his deathbed just for me so the vote would be five to four.” Rehnquist, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, was dying of cancer. “He must really care,” he said sarcastically.
“I’m getting on a plane tonight. Are you sure you’re not having second thoughts?”
“I’m not worried. I know where I’m going and I’m going to be safe. I’m just worried about the people I’m leaving behind.”
“Well you got two groups you care about, and they both want different outcomes. You’ve got the victims’ families, and you’ve got everyone else.”
“Tell me about it.”
23
SOMERS, CONNECTICUT
JANUARY 2005
Michael had worried that no one would come to his execution because there would be a blizzard and it would be freezing cold. The blizzard had come the weekend before; now it was bitter cold. I shivered as I waited for my escort into the prison. Predictably, Barry, Michael’s lawyer during the second trial, was waiting in the lobby when I got there.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“His dad’s back there. I thought I’d give them some time alone. I’m here to see him and waiting in case he changes his mind.” Several lawyers were standing by in the office in case anything needed to be done. The courts in Hartford and Rockville would have someone on duty all night. Throughout the evening, Barry remained in constant contact via pay phone to his office. That’s the only way we could find out what was going on in the outside world. Cell phones aren’t allowed inside.
“Do you think there’s a chance he’ll change his mind?” I asked.
“No, but I’ll be here, just in case.”
A few minutes later, I was taken back to see Michael. The death cell was at the very end of death row, next to the execution chamber and many doors behind the area where Barry and I had visited him. Three corrections officers were guarding the entrance to the tier. We walked past a few empty cells and went through the same ritual at the next metal door. The door opened, revealing several more cells on the right. On the left was a large window that flooded the tier with light.
There were two corrections officers guarding the two steps up to an open doorway. At the top of the steps to the left, next to another large window, a corrections officer sat at a wooden desk with a logbook. His job was to keep a constant eye on Michael and his guests and write down everything in the book, just as a guard had done when he first arrived on death row and had been placed in the same cell eighteen years before. The death cell was about ten feet to my right. Michael was entombed behind the barrier in his “Plexiglas coffin.” Two plastic chairs had been put next to it for visitors. Dan Ross was sitting in the one on the left. He was tall and of a heftier build than Michael, but I knew instantly who he was, because Michael resembled him. What surprised me was that he was not intimidating at all. All I really knew about him were Michael’s descriptions of a him as an “emotionless rock” and his stories about being taken to the woodshed and beaten with a stick. Dan seemed warm and friendly.
“Well, you finally get to meet my dad,” Michael chuckled.
I knew Dan didn’t approve of my writing about Michael, but he didn’t mention it. For the next four hours, we chatted and reminisced about farming and his family—his mother, culling chicks, and even cleaning the belts that collected chicken manure. They tried to outdo each other’s “mom” stories, confirming most of the stories that Michael had told me.
“That whole thing about you being a serial killer because of killing chicks is ridiculous. That’s just farming,” Dan said. Michael nodded in agreement—even though he had suggested the opposite many times, and he knew that psychiatrists suspected it might have contributed to his ability to kill without emotion.
He teased his father about supporting the public defenders’ suit by saying that he was narcissistic and incompetent. “After all, even you think I’m crazy.”
“You want to prove you’re competent?” Dan snapped back. “Change your mind. Stop this. Then I’ll know you’re competent. This whole thing is crazy.”
I laughed, but Michael sighed. “I’m not going to stop it. It’s going forward,” he said, looking away as his eyes welled up with tears. He had voluntarily dropped all his appeals, allowing his execution to proceed. All he had to do was file an appeal and the execution would be off.
Around 2:00 P.M., Dan and I had to leave death row because T. R. Paulding, Michael’s standby lawyer, was on his way to prison to speak with Michael and have a conference call with Judge Chatigny. Dan went home; I stayed in the lobby with Barry. We had been told that we would be sitting in the prison visiting room when we weren’t visiting, but that didn’t happen until later that evening. It was clear that the DOC had not planned for—or perhaps wanted—u
s to stay there all day. They left us to fend for ourselves in the freezing cold lobby with nothing to eat or drink. Because the temperature outside was in the single digits or below, it had to have been no more that 30 or 40 degrees Fahrenheit inside, and every time the door opened, gusts of frigid air wafted through the room. So we paced around with our jackets on to keep warm as the temperature dropped. By nightfall, the temperature had fallen even more, and I needed a hat and gloves and had to keep walking around to stay warm.
When we had visited Michael earlier in the week, Barry had dropped his public defender ID when we were registering in the guardhouse. He was using an old one because he had misplaced his current ID. “I didn’t lose it. I temporarily misplaced it. It happens all the time. That’s why I never get rid of the old ones. Insurance.” I was shocked by his photo. He had aged so much in the past decade. His hair was thinner. His face was drawn. Of course, we all had gotten older, but I wondered how much of Barry’s aging was due to this case. It had changed us all—physically, emotionally, and intellectually, maybe even spiritually. I wasn’t the same person who had started reporting on this story in 1995. I had always been against the death penalty, but now it was personal, not philosophical. I could put a human face on death, and the face of a human being who was also my friend.
I had also come to believe that God breathed life into all of us. No one but God had the right to take away that breath—and that included Michael Ross and the state of Connecticut. Before meeting Michael, I had been quick to judge others. Now I tried to make myself look for the good in people rather than the bad. My years getting to know Michael had been a liberating experience, because I no longer immediately attached labels to all kinds of people—liberal, conservative, intellectual, redneck, religious fanatic, serial killer.
The Man in the Monster Page 26
