Criminal - The Stay

Episode Date: January 8, 2016

Michael Ross was the first person in Connecticut to be sentenced to death since 1960. He claimed that he wanted to die in order to atone for what he had done. One journalist spent twenty years trying to figure out whether or not his remorse was real. Learn more about Martha Elliot's relationship with Michael Ross in her book, The Man in the Monster. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family.

Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. Thank you. So, tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. This episode contains violent content that may not be appropriate for everyone. Please use discretion. with farm life, and at the age of about eight, he was called on to start taking care of the chicks that were delivered one day old to the farm each day, which involved getting up early in the morning, turning on the water, making sure they're fed, checking on them, you know, caring for them until one would show signs of having some disease or might not be developing right or had signs that it wasn't going to be a good layer. And then his job was to take that little chick who he'd been caring for and wring its neck and kill it.

Michael Bruce Ross was born in July of 1959 to an egg farmer and his wife in Brooklyn, Connecticut. We're hearing his story from journalist Martha Elliott. He really didn't like that. I mean, he didn't like killing the chicks at all at first, but he did it because that was part of his job. And he did that, and he became a very hard-working farm boy who did everything, learned to fix everything on the farm, cleaned out the chicken manure, just about every job that you could think of, Michael did. And he wanted to be a farmer more than anything, and he wanted to go to Cornell more than anything. He applied to Cornell and was accepted. He planned to study in their school of agriculture, but he wasn't just excited

about college. He was very eager to get away from his family. His family was extremely dysfunctional, and his mother had some mental problems, and he, in high school, was really not allowed to date. He was not allowed to really do much of anything, and getting off, out of her grip was just his goal. He did escape his mother's grip, moving to Ithaca, New York in 1977, where he tried to fit in. He joined a fraternity. He tried to date. But it didn't work.

And it was at Cornell that the aspiring chicken farmer from rural Connecticut began to stalk women. By the time he was 28, he was on death row and seemed to believe he deserved to be there. Martha Elliott would spend 20 years of her life trying to figure out how he got there and whether Michael Ross really did believe that he deserved to die. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. He would just walk behind them, lone women, and just, he said he fed off knowing that they knew he was behind them and feeling their fear. And then that escalated and he finally grabbed somebody

and eventually he raped someone. And then just a few days before he graduated, he raped and murdered his first victim. The woman's name was Zhang Naktou, a 25-year-old graduate student at Cornell to study economics. Michael Ross was not caught, and after graduation, he got a job as an insurance salesman, and he continued to rape and murder women. Often he would try to gain the upper hand with a woman, come up from behind and put a belt around their neck

or something else around their neck and gain control of them. That didn't always happen. Sometimes he just gave somebody a ride and then drove them to someplace where he killed them. But he would grab them and then tell them to take off their clothes and then he would rape them. But according to the psychiatrist who I talked to, it was not the rape that gave him the orgasmic release.

It was the actual murder, and that was how he had sexual pleasure, which is when your sex drive gets connected to the wrong thing. You sometimes do things that are not within the norm of what we would expect of homo sapiens. Over the course of her research, Martha Elliott came to believe that Michael Ross was suffering from an extreme form of sexual sadism disorder. And Martha thinks he knew he was sick. He said he'd been struggling with excessive masturbation and violent fantasies since he was a child.

I think he wanted to be caught. He had been trying to come up with a way to kill himself. He couldn't turn himself in because that would be too humiliating for him. And so he finally one day in broad daylight saw a girl walking down the road and turned his car around in an almost screechy, tired, squealing manner, stopped it, ran across the road, grabbed her, pulled her into the woods, and raped and murdered her. Twelve people came forward who had seen him or seen his car, and then it was easy for the detective to sort of narrow down who could it possibly be based on proximity and where the cars were parked. The police searched through thousands of DMV records before they tracked down a car registered to Michael Ross and arrested him.

He eventually confessed to killing eight women and raping most of them. Zong Nuc Tu, Tammy Williams, Paula Pereira, Deborah Smith-Taylor, Robin Dawn Stavinsky, Wendy Barabow, and his two youngest victims, Leslie Shelley and her friend, April Brunei. They were only 14 years old. The trial lasted almost six months. The jury deliberated for 87 minutes before returning a guilty verdict. The next step would be for the jury to decide Michael Ross' punishment.

The death penalty was on the books in Connecticut, and so would be an option for the jury, but it hadn't been used in decades. The defense argued that Michael Ross could not be executed because he was mentally ill, a sexual sadist suffering from borderline personality disorder. Psychiatrists for the defense testified to this, and Michael Ross's father and sisters described his disturbed childhood.

The prosecution argued simply that Ross was a brutal rapist who tortured women and murdered them to cover up his crimes. I had moved to Connecticut in the fall of 1983, and he was arrested in June of 1984. And I really had, there were no reports of serial killers out on the loose. But of course, when you see a headline that says a serial killer was apprehended, you're sort of relieved. And I didn't really give him any more thought until I heard the verdict in his trial, which was that he would be executed by electric chair. And that very much upset me because I didn't even know Connecticut had a death penalty. And I was brought up believing that all killing is wrong no matter who does it, including the state of Connecticut. And I really did not want my state to be using my tax dollars to execute somebody.

But Connecticut requires all death sentences to be appealed to the state Supreme Court. And the defense argued that big mistakes had been made during the trial. Most importantly, the prosecution's psychiatrist had actually agreed with the defense that Ross was mentally ill. But that was hidden from the jury. In 1994, the state Supreme Court ordered a new penalty trial, not to address whether or not Michael Ross was guilty, but whether or not he should be on death row. He then wrote a long piece for the Hartford Courant magazine in which he said that he didn't want the families of his victims to have to go through another trial.

And he was willing to accept the death penalty. And I read that piece and then I wrote to him and asked if he'd be interviewed, thinking, you know, well, is this guy serious? Is he depressed? What's he really up to? And also, I think in the back of my mind, wishing that he wasn't going to do that because I didn't want Connecticut to execute anybody. And I was the editor and publisher of the Connecticut Law Tribune at the time. And this was a great story.

I mean, who says kill me when you get a reprieve from a death sentence? The first time she saw Michael Ross face-to-face was September 28, 1995, in a courtroom. He turned around, smiled at her, and mouthed, Are you Martha? She nodded yes. Death row inmates were only allowed to make phone calls in the evenings, and only to landlines, not cell phones, which meant Martha would have to give her home phone number, which she didn't really want to do. She had a teenage daughter and year-old twins, so she gave him her fax line number to avoid the possibility of her

children answering his call by mistake. It took me from the fall until the end of April to gather all the information that I thought I needed and write the piece. And I really wanted to be done with it then because I had these nightmares of rape and murder, and I just was ready to move on. When Martha talks about nightmares of rape and murder, she wasn't only thinking of Michael Ross's victims. She herself was attacked when she was a student at Williams College. During her junior year, she went into a friend's dorm room, heard a noise, and found a man standing in the closet behind her.

And I backed up, you know, took a step backwards, and I forgot that there was an ottoman in the middle of the floor. And I sort of tripped over it, and I found myself in a prone position. And I, you know, for the next hour, I fought him off. And I was almost ready to give up and by that time I really thought he was going to kill me because he was not responding to anything I said and I, but her roommate came in and with that he just let me go and sort of ran out the door

and he was caught. Martha said she went through a period of being afraid, afraid of someone in the closet, someone under the bed. And then it went on for a number of years before she got married. She says she had buried that traumatic memory for the most part until she started working on this magazine piece about Michael Ross. And her husband brought it up and basically said, what are you doing? And said that I was chasing demons. And when he said that, I knew exactly what he was talking about. And it then made me fearful and agonized. And I finally decided I had to tell Michael because, and this was before I'd finished the story, and I finally decided I had to tell Michael because, and this was before I'd finished

the story, and why I decided I had to tell him, because I didn't want him to think I had an axe to grind if he ever found out somehow. And I told him, and that actually was important because it made it so that every time I talked to him, I didn't think about this experience. If I hadn't, it would have been in the back of my mind every time I picked up the phone. What did he say when you told him? He said, I've caused enough pain. If this is causing you pain,

you never have to speak to me again and forget about writing this story, and I'll just never call you. So he was respectful of the experience you had gone through? Extremely. And really caring, and we never spoke of it again. It was mine to bring up, and if I wanted to talk about it, I could, but I didn't. You were really in it thick with him, it sounds like. I was no longer terrified of him or even the idea of him.

And so I felt comfortable saying whatever I thought with him, and he knew that. One time he said to me, I forgive Mr. Shelley, who is the father of one of the victims. And I just got very upset, and I said, who do you think you are forgiving Mr. Shelley? You have no right to be talking about forgiving Mr. Shelley. Mr. Shelley may want you dead, but you have nothing to forgive him about. He has everything made to forgive you. And, you know, forget about that. And he totally backed off of that sentiment.

In 1996, Martha published her article about Michael's wish to be executed. But Michael kept calling and calling every week. I didn't have the heart not to take his calls because I knew there were very few people in the world he could call. And he became my sort of community service. I was listening to his problems and issues and legal concerns, etc. And just being there on the other end of the phone, I figured it was the least I could do for this lonely man on death row

who was likely to lose his life. Martha says it took her a long time to admit to anyone, even herself, that the two of them had become friends. And from her point of view, his remorse was very real. He didn't want to be remembered for the worst thing he ever did. He wanted to somehow make his last act one that in his mind was noble, that he was saying, end this now. End their nightmare. Just let's go, you know, kill me and make it all stop. And that was his way of trying to explain to the families that he was sorry for what he had done to their loved ones and to them. But if he had so much compassion for the families and didn't want to make them endure another trial,

why was he publishing essays with dramatic titles like Why I Choose Death rather than To Fight for Life in publications ranging from the Utney Reader to the Journal of Psychiatry and the Law? For years, he wrote a monthly newsletter called Walking with Michael that was mailed to a list of subscribers and later published online. If he was so sorry, then why not disappear from public view? In April 2000, a new jury convened to determine whether the death penalty was appropriate. They deliberated for nine days and, like the jury before them, chose the death penalty.

Michael fired his lawyers and told the judge he wasn't going to fight anymore. He wanted to be executed. But it didn't matter if Michael Ross didn't want to appeal. His lawyers intervened against his wishes, arguing that he was not competent to make that decision because, they argued, he was suffering from what's called death row syndrome, a suicidal level of despair thought to be caused by long-term confinement. The appeals and hearings and psychiatric evaluations went on for years.

Michael became needier and needier and was calling every day and all day. And I had not really understood the impact that it was having on my family until one morning. At this point, my two youngest children are twins, and they were in the fifth grade. And my son had the lead in the fifth grade play. And he couldn't find his script, and they were required to have their script with them every day. And he's the type of kid that always wants to do what he's told.

And so he wanted me to make a copy of his sister's script. So I was at the all-in-one printer fax copier. And I'm trying to make a copy, and the thing dies on me. And I say, James, I can't do this now. I'm on the phone, and Michael is talking to me, telling me about being examined by a doctor to see if he's healthy enough for execution. And he's all wanting to be—he's very needy and wanting to talk. And James is saying, take me to Kinko's and make a copy. And I'm saying, James, I can't now. It's too late.

And I'm on the phone. And he just got hugely angry. And he flounced across the room, threw himself on the couch and said, you are the worst mother in the entire world. You're like a serial killer, better than your own son. And that cut through the heart. And I got the message really clearly that I was not, I had abandoned my children to talk to this man. That you were paying for it too.

You were paying for all these phone calls. Oh, I was paying for it through the nose because those calls that you get from death row or from any prison cost you about 15 bucks a call. And so, you know, in one month, I had three lines in my house. One was dedicated to the facts and that was the line he normally called on. But then I had three lines in my house. One was dedicated to the facts, and that was the line he normally called on, but then I had two other lines. And in one month, just one of those lines had a bill of $900. In May of 2005, the court found Michael Ross to be mentally competent and scheduled his execution for May 13th. Martha took a red-eye from California so she could be there to spend time with him before the execution. And just a few hours before he was set to die, she was able to go in and see him one last time.

And I said, I wish I could give you a hug. And he said, tell the kids, because he, by that time, knew my children and knew, you know, about them and had been hearing about them for 10 years. He said, tell, he had given them a book, Ferdinand the Bull, which, as you probably know, is the story of a bull who is very peaceful and who gets stung by a bee and then goes crazy. He said, tell them to read Ferdinand and think of me. An interesting choice for him to pick. Yeah, I thought so too because I think it was sort of a message of how he viewed himself, that he had triggers that would make him act a certain way, but that he was really not that person.

And I told him I would miss him and I would miss our conversations, and that was it. Just before 2 a.m., the victims' families were escorted into the viewing area of the execution chamber. The viewing area was separated into three sections, the victim's families, the media, and then Michael's witnesses. What you looked at was this big window that behind it on the other side of the window was a blue curtain. And so it was reflective with the curtain pulled. And I could see Mr. Shelley's face very clearly in the reflection on the window. And I thought, oh my God, when they pull this

curtain, Michael is going to just totally freak out. And they do open the curtain, you know, sort of like a drama, a theater or a puppet show kind of feeling to it. And there he's lying on the gurney and they had it positioned so that his head was looking at the people who were his witnesses so he could see a friendly face before he died. However, he did not open his eyes. He kept them shut while he was lying there. He refused to give a final statement because I knew he probably wouldn't do it because he was afraid he would break down and cry during it. And he didn't want to insult anybody or have it misconstrued or have people quoting him and make it sound like he was self-centered. He just knew that whatever he said, it wouldn't be enough. You know, how do you say I'm sorry when you've done such dastardly things? So he just said no thank you when the warden asked him. And there's three drugs that you get. The first one is supposed to anesthetize you and make it so you're unconscious. The second drug paralyzes you so you couldn't blink an eyelash if you wanted to or tell anybody

that you were still conscious. And the third drug basically burns through your veins and then stops your heart and basically would feel like you were being choked to death because you couldn't breathe and et cetera. How close were you to him? Maybe seven feet away, something like that, not too far. And it was totally quiet. And it took several minutes, maybe 15 or 18 minutes,

and then finally they pulled the curtain and then announced that he was dead. He died at 2.25 a.m. on May 13, 2005 at the Osborne Correctional Institution in Summers, Connecticut. He was 45 years old. I held it all together until I walked out of that room, and the head priest for the whole correctional system of Connecticut, Father Bruno, was standing there, and he goes,

Martha, I don't know how you did that. I could not have stood there and watched that. And that, of course, was all I needed to start, you know, crying. After the execution, Martha drove straight to the airport and flew home to her family in California. She walked into her house, exhausted and overwhelmed, and greeted her children. They tried to take her to Disneyland to cheer her up. Her feelings about Michael Ross are as complicated today as they were when she first met him, wondering whether Michael Ross's wish to die was an act of atonement or, along with the many essays he published, an attempt to tell the world how to view him. There's no emotion that we have that is completely pure, I don't think.

I mean, he had never read A Tale of Two Cities, but to me, that was exactly the way he thought of himself. Like Sidney Carton, the unscrupulous lawyer who goes to the guillotine saying, it is a far, far better thing I do today than I've ever done before, because this was his act of redemption and will make people realize that I'm not so bad as everybody says I am. Now, did it have that effect? Not really. Connecticut repealed its death penalty statute in 2012. And last year, the state Supreme Court said it was unconstitutional to execute the remaining inmates on death row.

Michael Ross was the first person executed in Connecticut since 1960. And barring any legislative changes, he'll also be the last. Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohr and me. Audio engineering help from Rob Byers. Special thanks to Jack Hitt. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com, where we also have a link to Martha Elliott's book about Michael Ross,

The Man and the Monster. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of the 13 best podcasts around. Radiotopia from PRX is supported by the Knight Foundation and Mailchimp, celebrating creativity, chaos, and teamwork. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal. Radiotopia from PRX. Your own weight loss journey is personal. Everyone's diet is different. Everyone's bodies are different. And according to Noom, there is no one size fits all approach. Noom wants to help

you stay focused on what's important to you with their psychology and biology based approach. This program helps you understand the science behind your eating choices and helps you build new habits for a healthier lifestyle. Stay focused on what's important to you with Noom's psychology and biology based approach. Sign up for your free trial today with Noom's psychology and biology based approach. Sign up for your free trial today at Noom.com. Support for this podcast comes from Klaviyo. You know that feeling when your favorite brand really gets you. Deliver that feeling to your customers every time.

Klaviyo turns your customer data into real-time connections across AI-powered email, SMS, and more, making every moment count. Over 100,000 brands trust Klaviyo's unified data and marketing platform to build smarter digital relationships with their customers during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and beyond. Make every moment count with Klaviyo. Learn more at klaviyo.com slash BFCM.