Dead Men Talking (22 page)

LeRoy now found himself resentenced to a further one year and a day, which he served at the Federal Prison at Leavenworth, thirty miles from Kansas City. Here, under the name of Roy Taylor, he says that he ‘knocked a Mexican on his ass because he groped my ass’. He adds: ‘That brief action, in the observable presence of four elderly prisoners who promptly ordered a watching group of “Spanish gentleman” to stay out of it, which they did. Courage-plus! So, to my delight, those four old-timers were four of the most respected ex-professional thieves in the whole prison. So I hung out during recreation with them because they were educated in thieving on a professional level, and I knew (I soon learned all the basics).’

But, according to Leroy, during the same sentence he was placed in solitary confinement for ‘knocking out four blacks who tried to rape me. I put them in hospital’, he writes, adding, once again with more than a hint of invention, ‘and the fight turned into a full-bore riot involving at least 40 cons. I served my whole sentence (his prison record says eight months) in solitary.’

Whatever the case, he was released, aged seventeen, in 1932, but was soon back serving a further four years for parole violations.

And, the truth of shooting the hobo who stole LeRoy’s pal’s melon, when he was aged eighteen? In later letters LeRoy seems to have forgotten about the ‘melon shooting’ altogether. He says he had learned all about jewellery and diamonds; teaming up with the Mafia he was ‘making his bones’ selling gems to jewellers. His first sale earned him $24,000 in cash. ‘I bought a legal-size briefcase, second hand, big enough to hold my money, a clean shirt and my .357 Magnum, and a box of bullets.’

He then says he went out and robbed a jewellery store.

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So, what do we make of Viva LeRoy Nash? Well, for all of his sins, and when we compare him with seriously heinous killers, this is a man who most certainly does not deserve to be living out his last days on the Green Mile. He is highly intelligent (his IQ is measured at 150), he is articulate, and a first-rate story-teller, therefore, after reading and re-reading his countless letters, it is almost impossible to sort the wheat from the chaff, the facts from the fiction.

This old rascal has an eye for a pretty girl. He hates the US judicial system with a vengeance, an institution which he’s bamboozled for decades. As far as he is concerned the internet is ‘full of shit’. That most authors ‘especially American ones, are assholes who never get their facts straight’. And, what we read in newspapers is ‘erroneous crap’. All cops are ‘crooked’, and judges and prosecutors are ‘perjuring bastards’.

As for television? He reserves a special disgust for TV, and gives us the benefit of his thoughts, while at once complaining about news coverage of the New Orleans hurricane Katrina disaster of 29 August 2005:

Yes, sir, God doesn’t sit well with LeRoy at all. Referring to Iraq, he writes:

Having got that bit off his chest, LeRoy slipped into top gear:

On 12 February 2010, just over a year before the second version of this book went to press, LeRoy Nash died of natural causes at the ripe old age of 94.

For my part, I was very fond of the old fella… Death Row inmate or not. Although one should not appear to be glorifying a man who commits murder, Nash had an endearing, never-say-die quality which marked him out from the spineless guttersnipes who knock over convenience stores and kill women and children indiscriminately for a handful of loose change. Compared to the other killers in this book, I found LeRoy Nash to be a breath of fresh air.

I
t had taken years of lengthy correspondence, and Ross had written countless letters to me in his neat hand, then suddenly there he was, in person – Connecticut’s only convicted serial killer.

Surrounded by three immaculately uniformed correctional officers, wearing starched light-khaki shirts, knife-edge creased trousers, and spit-and-polished boots, Ross, who looked almost antiseptically clean, was in full body restraints – handcuffs chained to a heavy belt, chains down to ankle chains – he shuffled along, his loose-fitting prison garb covering a plumpish physique. In life, Michael stood around 5ft 10in, and weighed about 140lb. In life he appeared bookish, which indeed he was, with his thin-rimmed spectacles perched high on the bridge of his nose. A well-read young man and polite too. But that was in life. Now he is long dead. He was executed by lethal injection on Friday 13 May, 2005, and that’s the way he wanted it to be.

Michael was no dummy. He had the intellect. He enjoyed a bright intelligence and with an IQ of 150, became an Ivy League student at Cornell University. With a fresh complexion, a chubby face, a cheeky smile and mischievous eyes, he gave the impression of a stereotypical ‘All-American’ homespun boy. At face value, Michael was very much the boy next door; the type a girl’s father might approve of his daughter dating. But, as all parents know, appearances can be deceptive. Michael was a sexual sadist who had raped six precious daughters before killing them.

During the course of my relationship with him for the purposes of writing this chapter and the making of a TV documentary, Mike added to this tally, by confessing, for the first time, to raping and killing two other girls, and having anal intercourse with the dead body of another.

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Michael Bruce Ross was born in Brooklyn, Connecticut, on Wednesday, 26 July 1961, a Leo. He was the first of Daniel ‘Dan’ Graeme Ross and Patricia Hilda’s (nee Laine) four children, the others being Donna, Kenneth and Tina. By all accounts, the marriage was a stormy one, and Patricia, a borderline schizophrenic, who would later twice run away from her husband, never hid the fact that she had been forced to get married because she had fallen pregnant with Michael. From the outset, her first baby was an unwanted child.

Family and friends have described Patricia as a woman who could be charming one minute and cold and calculating the next. She had spent time in the state’s Connecticut Valley Hospital (CVH), at Middletown, and at another hospital in Norwich. A number of people who knew her had witnessed at first hand a volatile, manipulative woman who would takeout her resentment on her family, especially Michael, whom she blamed for ruining her life.

Mike remembered his mother’s mood swings, which all of the children feared. For example, they couldn’t understand how she could laugh after making them ill by feeding them bad meat. Or why she would ruin her two daughters’ clothes with a box of dye. Spiteful, vicious and sadistic, bordering upon pathologically unstable, it was Patricia who tried to trick young Michael into shooting his pet dog, after convincing him that it was suffering, after a short illness. It transpired that she had tried to poison the dog too. She even set Michael’s mattress on fire on the front lawn because she once caught him masturbating. So, by all accounts, Patricia Ross was ‘the Mother from Hell’.

Yet, the four kids loved their mother, simply because she was their ‘mom’. They grew to accept her mood swings, and learned to keep out of her way when she blew her top. Like unwanted pets, which return even meagre scraps of affection with devotion and loyalty, the children had to love her just to survive. As Keith Hunter Jesperson astutely points out: ‘We cannot pick our parents, so we accept our situation as being normal. Only when we venture out in later life do we question our upbringing.’

Michael Ross explained this in an audio-taped interview with the author, and the authenticity of his account has been verified by one of his sisters:

The Ross children had little time for fun and games, and they were even discouraged from having any friends, or participating in after-school activities. With these restrictions in place, they had bonded into a tight-knit group for self-preservation and mutual support, although Michael was alienated because his brother and sisters erroneously believed that he was favoured as a ‘mommy’s boy’.

For his part, young Michael was very proud of his father, and the family egg farm business in Brooklyn, a town of some 7,500 residents in Windham County, Connecticut. ‘Eggs Incorporated’ would become the most important part of Mike’s formative years. Indeed, by the age of ten, he had his own set of chores, which included wringing the necks of sick and deformed chicks. He was a hard worker, a mixed-up kid who desperately wanted to live up to his father’s high expectations of him, while, at the same time, he was very much seeking the approval of his schizoid mother, and constantly vying for her rare affection.

And, when the author asked him if he was physically abused as a child, he had this to say:

So, it now seems that Mr Ross was no great shakes, either!

Michael loved his parents despite the physical and psychological abuse they handed out in spades, but the effects of such treatment on the developing mind are often irreparable unless drastic countermeasures are taken to remedy the problems.

Many psychiatrists and psychologists now generally agree that if contact and interaction with others in a peer group are restricted during the early stages of infant development, the ability to interact successfully at a later stage in life is retarded. That is, the limbic nuclei in the brain will not develop normally and gross mental abnormalities may result. Children will lose the ability to form emotional attachments with others, or any attachment that does come about may only be superficial, and this abnormality may last for the rest of their lives.

Michael Ross certainly had this problem. During an FBI study of serial sexual murderers, 53 per cent of the subjects’ families had a history of psychiatric problems, 42 per cent of the subjects had been subjected to physical abuse, and 74 per cent had a psychological abuse history.

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In September 1977, after a period of schooling, at the ironically named Killingly High School, about 3.5 miles west of Brooklyn, Michael’s future looked decidedly bright as he drove his car on to the Cornell University campus in Ithaca, New York. The 16-year-old had overcome long odds, and was justifiably proud of himself, as only 10 per cent of Killingly High’s vocational agricultural students went to college. Fewer still attended Ivy League schools.

At Cornell, Ross enrolled as an Animal-Science major, and he started a course of study that would well suit his ambition to become the third generation to run the family poultry business. This was an obsession with Michael and, for a short time, his fraternity brothers even called him ‘The Egg King’.

Michael joined the Agricultural Student Union Council (AgPAC), and attended the Collegiate Future Farmers of America (FFA). He became a student teacher, counsellor, researcher, teaching assistant, and a study group leader around this time. Alpha Zeta, one of the two campus fraternities dedicated to agricultural activity, recruited Ross, and he pledged to them. He lived in the fraternity house throughout his sophomore and junior years with his ‘brothers’, who were mostly young men with small town farming backgrounds. He rarely cut class, and was known as an ‘all-nighter’ because often he swotted all night.

Since his incarceration for multiple murders, however, a number of Michael’s former Cornell friends said that while he enjoyed the house, its social life, and the chance to share common interests, they also recall that he could be a loner, aloof and somewhat arrogant at times.

The student body of Cornell (today it stands at around 20,000) was almost three times larger than the entire population of his hometown of Brooklyn, subsequently, the campus became an expansive playground for Michael Ross. Now free from his mother’s unpredictable influence, he could do whatever he wanted, without fear of reprisal. He literally went crazy with all the fun he was having, plunging headlong into the party life to the extent that he started taking Ritalin three times a day to control his hyperactivity. He would continue to use this drug for a further six years. He now drank heavily and he started to experiment with sex, often sleeping with different girls four nights a week (which Keith Hunter Jesperson suggests is ‘normal college behaviour’).

During his first junior year at Cornell, Mike met his first true love, the pretty Connie Young. They always say that ‘love is blind’ and ‘beauty is in the eyes of the beholder’, and if Ross was somewhat of an unattractive, lanky, thin and bespectacled youth, he must have considered Connie a ‘real catch’ when they met at a party. She was window-display CoCo Chanel, while he was Fred Myer. He walked her home through the moonlight, and according to Michael, they ‘kissed as we watched a team of divers swimming in the shimmering silver water of Beebe Lake’.

According to campus lore, if a couple walks the entire mile-long footpath around Beebe Lake holding hands, they are destined for marriage. They strolled to the statues of the college’s founding fathers, and he explained how they were supposed to move together and shake hands when a virgin passed between them. On this occasion, the statues apparently did not move, for ‘Connie was hotter than a kitchen stove’, Michael recalled.

Connie remembers Michael as a ‘go-getter’, and a guy who always liked to be ‘the centre of attention’. At first she accommodated this behaviour because he seemed a worthwhile prospect for a permanent relationship, even marriage, if the legend surround Beebe Lake had anything to do with it. She certainly overlooked his arrogance and constant boasting about his father’s egg farm. In Connie’s eyes, he was handsome, if just a little nerdy. He was articulate, took her dancing and dined her out. She recalls that he always had money when he needed it and, for his part, he enjoyed taking her places to show her off. To everyone who knew them, they seemed the perfect couple, and most were thrilled when they became engaged to be married. Maybe the legend of Beebe Lake wasn’t hogwash after all?

For a short period Connie shared Mike’s bed… then the arguments started. His fraternity brothers threw him out of the house because he was breaking the rules by sharing his room with a female. As a result of this, the couple rented a small apartment where Michael withdrew into himself. The schooling pressure and the demands made by the close relationship with Connie had started to take their effect. Added to this were his parents’ escalating marital problems, and these were clouding his judgement over the future, as home issues were never far from his mind.

Connie’s distress over her lover’s change of attitude came to a head when he started to miss classes. She was a dedicated student, trying to cram four years of education into three, but Michael Ross seemed to have lost interest, and he started to hang around their apartment all day, watching television and reading pornographic magazines. He changed his major, to Agricultural Economics, and his grades plummeted. He became bone idle, expecting Connie to do all the housework and cooking and, despite the fact that she was exhausted after studying, he demanded sex with her at least four times a day.

Initially, Connie complied with Michael’s priapic demands, for fear of rejection. She loved him deeply, and even allowed him to have rough sex with her, although it was very painful and hurt her badly. Then, as the day-to-day events became even more unpleasant, she now started to wonder if marrying Mike was such a good idea after all. He was, she now believed, sex mad and getting worse. With his graduation approaching in the spring of 1981, Michael could not face the prospect of leaving Connie behind at Cornell, and he became even more restless and agitated, withdrawing for much longer period into a fantasy dream world of his own.

Michael has admitted to me, in correspondence, that even as a pre-teen, he had experienced constant fantasies about women when he would take them to what he called ‘a special underground place’, where he hid them, and kept them so that they could fall in love with him. From juvenile records, it is known that, at the age of fifteen, he molested several neighbourhood girls. Now an adult, his fantasies grew even more sexually extreme and progressively more violent. During these fantasies, he says that he was always the assailant and, by the time of his graduation, Connie had joined his faceless dream victims. He terrorised his fantasy girls and humiliated them by forcing them to undress and drop to their knees in front of him. He said that he gained enormous sexual pleasure and relief from raping his fantasy victims. He savoured the sense of domination that accompanied their fear, and he reasoned that he had control over real women, too, even though these bizarre thoughts were still locked away inside his mind.