The Man in the Monster (14 page)

The third attack that spring was even bolder and more aggressive. It was a warm night after dark when Michael felt the urge to stalk. “I
followed a woman as she walked towards the Pancake House, a campus eatery in a secluded part of the campus, towards the dorms. As she walked up a slight rise, I grabbed her around the neck, dragged her over a wooden fence, down a hill through some woods to the footpath along Beebe Lake. I walked her along the lake going towards a stone bridge on the far side of the lake, but got frightened when I heard others approaching. I pushed her down a small embankment towards the lake and ran off. If I hadn't heard the voices, I think I would have raped her.”

WINTER 1996

A few months after I met Michael Ross face-to-face, my husband and I were having dinner with our friends Steve and Michelle at the restaurant in the Metropolitan Opera House. Steve and Michelle were familiar with my work. Hearing that I was now having telephone conversations with a serial killer, Michelle asked why I liked talking to murderers.

This was the conversation I was always trying to avoid. It wasn't that I liked talking to murderers; it was more that I was willing to listen. “I guess once you do a story about prisons or crime, someone is always calling or writing you about some injustice. It becomes impossible to escape doing more prison stories.”

“If a murderer called me, I'd have no problem hanging up the phone,” Michelle responded.

“It's probably also because this is a death penalty case, and I'm opposed to capital punishment. I was brought up to think that all killing is wrong.” My father, a clergyman, had been brought up with Quaker ideals and was a conscientious objector in World War II. He often repeated a quote attributed to Gandhi: “An eye for an eye and the whole world is blind.”

I suspected that Michelle was in no way opposed to the death penalty for serial killers. I might have said more before my husband interrupted.

“She's chasing her own demons.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“You're confronting your attack in college.”

I was dumbstruck. I hadn't thought about the incident for nearly twenty years. I had buried the memory for years, but now he had put the attack squarely in front of me, and I had to deal with it. I also had to explain it to our friends.

“During my junior year at Williams, I was attacked by a stranger who had come looking for a friend of mine. I thought he was going to kill me. But honestly, my motivation for doing this story doesn't have anything to do with it.”

 • • • 

T
he more I considered it, the more I began to suspect that on some level my husband was right. I hadn't thought about the attack for more than a decade. Until that night at the opera, I'd thought I had gotten past it.

It was a Sunday. I had been working out for the crew team in the tanks in the gym and was exhausted, but there was the never-ending homework to do. I didn't even have the energy to eat dinner; I went straight to my room, put on a nightgown, and started to work. Then the phone rang. It was my friend Katie's mother asking me to give her daughter a message. Katie had just gotten back from a semester in India, and her phone had not yet been installed. Over Christmas break, an old high-school classmate had been hanging around Katie's house, and there were signs that made her family believe that he was not stable. “David's been acting strange. We think he might be on his way up to Williamstown. Please tell Katie that if he arrives call campus security. He could be dangerous.”

“Sure,” I said, thinking she might be overreacting. Because Katie
lived in the next entry, all I had to do was put on enough clothes, go out into the cold, go out one door and into the next, give Katie the message, and go back to my environmental geology. I pulled on a pair of corduroy jeans, tucked in my Lanz nightgown, slipped on hiking boots and a warm sweater, and ran next door. I knocked on the door, but there was no answer. Katie, like me, lived in a two-room double. Her roommate had the larger, outer room; she had the inner one. The door was unlocked, so I let myself in and went into Katie's room to leave her a note, not bothering to turn on the light in the inner room. As I scribbled down the warning, I heard a noise behind me and spun around. A man was standing in the doorway of Katie's closet. Worried that Katie was in the closet, I stepped forward to see past him. In hindsight I should have run out of the room and called for help. I feared that Katie was injured, tied up, or worse, dying in the closet. My mind shot back to the note I'd just written. So I made sure I was clear of the desk.

“Hello,” I began. “You must be David. Have you seen Katie?”

“No, I came to marry her or rape her depending on what she said, but you'll do.”

Katie obviously wasn't there, and I saw my chance to exit. “Okay, I guess I should go back to my room to do my homework.”

“Wait,” he said, lunging toward me. I stepped back to avoid his grasp, forgetting that there was a large ottoman in the middle of the room. I lost my balance and found myself in a prone position. David, a former New Jersey state wrestling champion, now had control, but at that point, he didn't terrify me. I thought I could handle myself because I was strong from rowing crew. I remembered someone saying that the best thing to do is to not resist.
What turns rapists on is fear, so don't be afraid. They get off on the resistance. Act like you aren't the least bit upset.
So I smiled and tried to talk my way out of the predicament. I argued that I had a steady boyfriend, that I was not on the pill, that I didn't
even know him—anything and everything that I could think of to persuade him to leave me alone.

Every so often I yelled, “Help!”
There are dozens of guys in the dorm; one of them is bound to hear my cries for help.
However, those cries made things much worse. David responded by hitting me every time I yelled. As my resistance to him became more intense, so did his physical response. He started slamming me against the walls, which made me yell louder and more frequently, but that only made him hurt me more. By that time, I was panicked, but I didn't want him to know it. He had given up on any type of cooperation and was trying to rip off my clothes. Something changed. His eyes were angry; he no longer responded to anything I said. My heart began to pound in my ears.
Oh shit. Now what are you going to do, smart one? You obviously can't get away or fight him off. No one is hearing you or at least no one has come to your rescue. You need to come up with something—quickly.
I was totally panicked. I had run out of ideas and I knew that I was running out of time.

Soon it didn't appear that rape was his motive—he wanted to hurt me. Finally he picked me up and threw me down on Katie's bed.
He's going to kill me. He is actually going to kill me. Why the hell didn't I just let him rape me and be done with it?
But of course that solution doesn't come naturally to anyone in this situation. I could persuade myself not to resist for a while, but the instinct to fight back and protect myself was far too strong. I used every ounce of energy to fight back, but my strength was running out. My arms felt weighed down.
No one is going to help you. But you can't give up. Keep fighting.
But by that point I was having trouble even blocking the blows, never mind fighting back.
God, please don't let me die. I haven't even finished my homework.

By that point I was beyond being scared. It's hard to explain, but I didn't have the strength to be scared. I don't know why, but the panic subsided. Maybe it's a natural grace that allows us to live our final moments without excruciating fear.

Then came my miracle. Katie's roommate, who was much larger than I in height and weight, arrived. I managed one last weak “Help!” and she rushed into Katie's room. What happened next was surreal. David regressed, acting like a small child who had been scolded by his mother. He released me, grabbed his raincoat, and ran out the door half dressed. I was in a state of shock. I couldn't feel anything. I got up and pulled my clothes back on. I was paralyzed. Karen must have called campus security, because they arrived almost instantly, catching him as he tried to escape. Williamstown police also arrived within minutes and questioned me about what had happened.
Thank you, God. Now this is over. Just let me go back to my room and get away from all of this.

David was indicted by a grand jury, but before the case went to trial, he was killed in a car accident. For years afterward, I couldn't walk into a dark room without feeling a sense of panic. I couldn't go to bed without checking underneath it and in the closet. When I finally lived alone in my first apartment, I got triple locks on the door. But after I was married, I was able to bury it deep enough that I never thought about that night.

My husband's assertion unnerved me. Was I unconsciously going through some cathartic exercise, trying to understand why a man would rape and possibly murder? Was I looking for some sort of closure in my own past, some sort of inner peace or sense of forgiveness? Had the college attack really had that much of a long-term effect on me?

I began to feel vulnerable again. I had nightmares. When I was alone in the house, I went through the bedrooms checking the closets. I was reliving the ordeal all over again—except this time it was worse, and I didn't know why.

I was not sure whether to tell Michael about the attack. I didn't want him to find out later and think that I had misled him. On the other hand, I was terrified to tell him. It would turn me into a victim. It would give him power.

The next time Michael called, I gathered up my courage and said, “When I was in college I was the victim of an assault and attempted rape. I don't think that has anything to do with why I am writing this story, but you should know. I don't want you to think that I have some ulterior motive.”

There was an agonizing silence, but his reaction was considerate. “I'm sorry,” he said. “You know that getting this story out is important to me, but if writing about this is too painful, you should stop. I've caused too much pain already. I don't want to be the cause of any more pain.”

I assured him that he was not causing me any psychic pain (a lie), and that was the last time we ever spoke about it. I think knowing Michael actually helped me to get over the trauma once and for all. I realized that David had not hurt
me
; I was just a convenient object, something I later learned from talking to Michael. I didn't have to take it personally. David probably wouldn't have even recognized me if he ever saw me again. Perhaps more important, after the first six months, I wasn't afraid of Michael. If I could be comfortable talking with a serial killer and believe his remorse, I could stop being afraid.

1996

I knew I might never meet the monster, but I had to face the horror he had caused, and it was important to do it by looking at evidence that had been presented in open court, to see what Michael feared having to sit through again.

To read the transcripts of the taped confessions and to look at the evidence in Michael's case, I went to the New London Judicial Department clerk's office and carefully sifted through the box of documents and photographs that survived the first trial. I knew that the crime scene photos were grisly—photographs of partially decomposed bodies, autopsy pictures, ligatures used by Michael to strangle the girls—but I needed to see the reality of the damage that he had done. I wasn't prepared for the impact that the evidence would have on me. I was overwhelmed by the sheer gruesomeness of seeing corpses and autopsy pictures. I thought of how a mother and father would have felt looking at these photos of their dead daughter, and I wondered if Michael had ever
really
looked at the pictures. I knew I had to look at them.

I was almost done with my article and I knew I could no longer avoid some of the hard questions I had to ask him. When he called a few nights later, Michael knew that I had carefully examined the evidence, and he asked if I had looked at the autopsy photos. “Did it look like they had been beaten up?”

“Yes. There were bruises.” I couldn't tell what had caused all the bruises, but Wendy Baribeault had two black eyes. There were bruises on the face that looked like they were the result of punches.

“I don't remember hitting anybody. I can't believe I did that, but if it's in the pictures, I must have,” he conceded reluctantly.

I realized that he was more upset about hitting the women than raping and killing them. He was whining. And in some odd way, he wanted sympathy. He wanted me to say, “Don't worry about it, Michael. You didn't know what you were doing. It was the monster, not you, hitting those women.” He had struck a raw nerve. I exploded. “I really don't get you. You murdered them. What the hell could be worse than that? Believe me; I'll take a good punch any day over death.” It was the first time I had actually screamed at him, and it startled me as much as it did Michael.

“I know it doesn't make sense,” he admitted.

“You're being kind to yourself. It's totally insane.”

“I know. I know; it's just, I was brought up to think that hitting a woman was wrong.”

“And you were brought up to think that raping and killing was right?” I stopped because I was afraid he'd hang up on me—and because I realized that by dwelling on the hitting, Michael was avoiding the killing. Or maybe he couldn't tuck the act of hitting a woman neatly into his mental illness. He couldn't control the raping and killing, but on some level he thought he should be able to stop himself from hitting a woman.

I changed the subject to the taped confessions he made on the day of his arrest. Michael had always insisted that when he was making his confessions, Detective Michael Malchik, one of the arresting officers, had suggested to him that he might have killed the girls because he didn't want to go to jail. “They kept asking me this all day. It was mostly
after the tape. I was with them for another twelve hours,” he said. Michael insisted he never said he was trying to avoid jail time but that they talked about that motive only hypothetically.

“The problem with that,” I said, “is that some of the things that you say aren't true are things that you actually said on the tape. In a lot of places you say, ‘I raped them and got scared and tried to kill them.'”

Michael was surprised. “I haven't seen them in so long that I can't tell you what I said. The last time I heard the tape was eight years ago. So I don't remember, and I don't understand it. I was trying to understand why I did it back then. . . . I know that before those taped statements, they fed me some of that stuff. Why did I kill? I think if you listen to the tapes, it sounds more like that.”

I told him that he had said it himself without any prompting.

“I don't know. Maybe that's what I thought back then. I don't believe it to be true, but you know, maybe that's what I said. They didn't believe me whatever I said. I don't know why I did it. That's why I said this other stuff.” He was still trying to convince himself that the tapes were doctored in some way.

I read him one section: “I took her in the back and I raped her. She didn't really struggle or anything. I didn't know what to do because I had got in trouble before, and I killed her and I strangled her.”

“Oh. . . . Well, if I said it, I'm not going to dispute it now. That's what I said. It's not true but . . .” Everything was a “yes, but.” Yes he said it,
but
it wasn't true. I had questions about contradictions from statements of girlfriends as well as contradictions on the tapes. He had confessed that he and Tammy Williams had been making out, and then she wanted to stop. He said he got angry, lost control, raped, and murdered her. Why did he say that if it wasn't true?

“Because before when [Malchik and I] were discussing it, it made it sound better that they were doing something. In a way I was sort of
blaming it on the victims. . . . That came four hours before the tape was ever turned on. . . . He just had to play me until I fuckin' said it. All right?” I could hear the fury in his voice, but we had a lot more to cover.

The bigger question for Michael to answer was why he killed Leslie Shelley. This murder couldn't be attributed to his mental illness. As Dr. Borden had explained, for all the others the murders had been the sexual climax of the rape. However, after he had achieved that when killing April Brunais, his sexual sadism should have been satisfied. He killed Leslie after he had killed April and even apologized to her before he killed her. This issue could not be avoided. I began gently. “I think there's only one of the murders which is really an issue, and that is Leslie Shelley. That's the hardest to explain. . . . On the tape you said you didn't rape her.”

“Yeah, well there's some things about that that you don't know. I can't tell you. Well, actually, I can. Satti knows. She was sodomized.”

“Why didn't you mention that before?”

“Because I had a problem with that. I had a problem with her being so small so I said all I did was kill her. It made me feel better and then afterwards, I didn't want it to come out because I didn't want the parents to know, and I didn't think Satti knew until I found out during our conferences. He asked me point blank at one of the conferences,” Michael said. “See, I felt bad about that because she was the only one I sodomized. All the others were vaginal rapes. She was so small, and I just . . . I'll tell you some other time. I don't want to talk about it on the phone. She always bothered me. I don't know if it was because she was so small or the other.” He seemed embarrassed to say “sodomized” again.

“You somehow think that sodomizing her is worse than vaginally raping her?” I was trying not to sound too incredulous, but controlling my reactions was getting more difficult.

“Yeah. I tried to rape her vaginally.”

“But you're talking as if sodomy is worse than killing. How could that be worse than killing?” I asked.

“Huh? I don't know. I guess that's just the way I feel. I tried to do it vaginally and I couldn't penetrate her, and I raped her anally.”

He had confounded me again, but now I was also angry. “In the grand scheme of things, compared to killing, this is nothing.”

The phone cut off. I thought he had hung up on me until it rang again. “I thought you hung up on me. I was afraid it was because of what I said,” I admitted.

“I won't get another fifteen minutes, just another eight minutes,” he said curtly.

“Rape, whether vaginal or anal, is rape,” I argued.

“It don't make any sense,” he admitted, regressing into his farm-boy dialect. “I don't particularly want the parents to know. They think that she wasn't raped, and I'd prefer to keep it that way.” He heaved a big sigh, apparently hoping that the conversation would end.

“You keep saying how important it is for you to prove your mental illness, but you pleaded guilty in Windham County to two murders. Why wasn't it important then?”

“Fred and Peter [his attorneys] wanted me to plead guilty. They were telling me back then I didn't have a defense anyway.” It wasn't until after the trial that he became determined to prove that he wasn't faking a mental illness.

“They made me out to be such a big liar,” he began. He said if he had pleaded guilty, he wouldn't have felt the need to prove he was mentally ill. “I thought the truth was going to come out at the trial, but it was just a big circus. All right? I gotta go.”

We'd been corresponding and talking for more than six months at the time, but he had never been so mad, and I wasn't sure if he would ever call back again. When he made his weekly call to Ann a few days
later, he told her he was “tired of talking to Martha.” He knew Ann better than I did; he had trusted her for a decade. Perhaps he wanted to see if she would counsel him to stop contacting me, but she didn't. In fact, she told me what he had said.

He did, however, write me a long letter a few days later. He said he owed Malchik an apology because, “If I did in fact say that I killed the girls so that I wouldn't go back to prison—if that's on tape, then I can't deny it. I don't remember saying it that way. All this time I thought that Malchik had made it up and was lying, and now I find out that it was I who was lying to myself. I am sorry that I misled you and I'm sorry that I falsely accused Malchik.”

He said he truly did not believe that he killed to avoid detection. But he admitted, “If I could make myself believe that I wouldn't kill again, then I can make myself believe anything. I know that I want to believe that the mental illness did the killing, not me. But maybe I'm just using that as an excuse. Maybe I'm hiding behind it because I'm afraid to face what I might truly be. Maybe I am the monster that Satti says I am. How am I supposed to know when I can't believe myself?” He told me to send Ann and Father John copies of the confessions and apologized for taking up my time.

The next time he called, he confounded me again. “Well, it hasn't been easy. These interviews seem to be getting harder and harder, and you ain't asked me no tough questions, neither.” I thought he had hung up on me because I had pressed him too hard.

“So what should I have asked you?”

“I don't know,” he said, whining like a little boy. “But you really haven't confronted me on anything. You ain't challenging me, accusing me of lying. . . . I think that's why the confessions bothered me so much. It's because I try to be open and honest, and then I find that I've been saying stuff that ain't what happened.”

“In the last two weeks, I have called into question almost everything you have told me. I
have
been asking hard questions.”

“I don't know. It just seems like you aren't calling me a liar.”

Perhaps I wasn't yelling and screaming, but I had pressed him on a lot of tough subjects and shown him where there were contradictions in his story.

The next day, April 20, he wrote to me trying to explain his position. “The real issue boils down to just two simple facts. One, I raped and murdered eight women. Two, I am responsible for those actions and the consequences of those actions on the families of my victims.” He said he often got so caught up in proving his mental illness that he forgot his responsibilities. He said he got so excited when I read the transcripts, interviewed his doctors, and acknowledged the lies and distortions in his case because he wanted the truth to be known that he was not evil but merely sick. “I don't want to be hated and despised—I don't want people cheering at my execution. I get concerned with how others perceive me. It is self-centeredness. But I have to fight the urge to protect how others perceive me because in my case it carries a dreadful cost. And in the end, which is more important: how others perceive you or how you perceive yourself?”

If he continued to try to prove his mental illness, he would run the risk of hurting the victims' families. “If I allowed [them to be hurt], it would affect how I perceive myself, for in my mind it would take me one step closer to being exactly the person Satti portrays me as being. Right now I have nothing left except who I am, and I can't let anyone take that away from me—even if it costs me in how I am perceived by others. I have to do what I believe is the right thing to do—even if it is misinterpreted, misunderstood, and/or unappreciated by others—to do anything less would be to betray who ‘Michael Ross' really is (to betray myself). Ultimately, I guess that's what this whole thing is about—
being true to one's self and beliefs.” In other words, trying to change how others perceived him wasn't worth the chance of doing more harm. “And ultimately how I perceive myself is far more important than how others perceive me. Am I making any sense?”

It remained hard for me to understand why anyone wouldn't want to fight for his life or fight to prove he was mentally ill. Perhaps there comes a point for all death row inmates when they give up because letting go of hope actually sets them free.