The Man in the Monster (24 page)

Sentencing day was May 12, the anniversary of Michael's first murder.
He felt he deserved to be sentenced to death on that date—especially because it was the only murder for which he had never been prosecuted. He would never serve time in New York because he already was under a death sentence in Connecticut, so the prosecutor in Ithaca declined to pursue the case.

The media trucks were everywhere, and the courthouse halls were filled with reporters. Five of the jurors and three of the alternates had also come to hear Judge Miano mete out justice. Everyone had to wait in the hallway for the sheriff to unlock the door. Just before the crowd filed into court for the sentencing, Mrs. Shelley came up to me in the hallway.

“Are you Martha Elliott?”

“Yes,” I said, hoping that she wasn't about to scream at me or tell me that my writing to them had been hurtful.

“How did you get my address?”

I explained to her how I had gotten it, and she realized that there was nothing unethical about how I had figured it out.

“You can call me,” she said. “You have my number.”

Judge Miano gave each victim's family a chance to speak. Ed and Lera Shelley didn't speak. All during the trial, it seemed as if Ed was champing at the bit to express himself, to say what he had been feeling for sixteen long years. Later he explained, “I sat there and I thought about saying something, but what can you say? I felt that enough had been said. . . . I had burned myself out, really. I kicked that around for the first five or six, maybe ten years, I would have had plenty to say, but after a while you have to realize that life goes on. You just can't dwell in the past. I think the jury spoke volumes when they gave the verdict, and I couldn't have said anything any better.” Lera echoed Ed's sentiment. “I had something memorized, but then I thought, no, I won't.”

Finally, Michael was given the chance to speak. It was his chance to
apologize. “I am sorry I was not strong enough to fight the illness in my mind. I am sorry I did not have the courage to take my own life at Cornell before I allowed my illness to take the lives of others.” He also repeated his wish to exchange his life for the victims, sobbing as he spoke.

Judge Miano spent twenty minutes going through the evidence to reiterate that the jurors had made the right decision. He made it clear that he did not believe that Michael Ross was mentally ill, but rather had raped and then murdered to cover his crimes. He set the execution date but explained that the State Supreme Court would stay the execution until it had upheld the jury's decision.

JUNE 6, 2000

It was a torrentially rainy day when I drove to the Shelleys' modest home in Griswold, Connecticut. I was more than an hour late, and my anxiety levels were escalating. The rain was causing accidents everywhere, and traffic on the interstate was at a standstill. The Shelleys knew I had been talking to Michael for years, and I didn't know how they would react to my questions. Very few family members actually agreed to talk to me, so in my mind the Shelleys represented all the families who suffered the excruciating pain of losing a child at the hands of Michael Ross.

Jumping mud puddles, I ran to the Shelleys' front door and rang the bell. Within seconds, a cacophony of barking sounds greeted me as the five family dogs scrambled to be first to the door. Inside, I could hear Ed and Lera Shelley trying to get their brood of dogs and endless cats under control. Even before Ed opened the front door, it was obvious that the house was in need of a lot of repairs, but he made no bones about the state of his property. He must have seen my eyes dart around, because he brought it up as soon as I stepped inside. “My house has been falling apart for sixteen years,” he admitted. “I didn't do squat. I really didn't. I've got so much stuff to do because of the time spent in court and time spent with Jennifer [the Shelleys' youngest daughter]
doing whatever she wanted to do. Dad was there, and it was time that I had set aside. . . . So now my house is falling apart. I've got to put siding on. I've got to paint it.”

The Shelley family had been consumed with the fate of Michael Ross since the day he was arrested. They attended almost every hearing and never missed a day of either trial. Nothing else mattered; for Ed and Lera, holding their vigil in many different courtrooms was far more important than painting or fixing the holes in the bathroom wall or even satisfying a supervisor at work.

Sitting around the kitchen table, animals crowding, and smoke swirling as both Shelleys chain-smoked, we began a conversation that went on for years and continues to this day. No one had to say that their daughter's murder had wreaked havoc on this family. It is evident in every word they spoke and everything around them. Their hurt and anger permeates the house—and only one person was responsible.

It was easy to like Ed and Lera. They were decent people, straightforward with no pretensions. Ed spent a good part of his career working for the U.S. Postal Service, but at the time of my first visit, he had retired and was working at a golf course. Lera worked as a nurse's aide at the state mental hospital in Norwich. They both had a sense of humor and were willing to laugh at themselves.

Lera could not speak of her daughter without tearing up; Ed got teary at times, but he also had a visceral hatred of Michael Ross. He got right to the point early in the conversation, looked me straight in the eye and said, “When he took Leslie out of the car, he apologized to her and told her he was sorry, and then he murdered her. And the fear that kid went through knowing what was happening to her friend outside the car is unimaginable.” He paused and sighed. “That's the thing that really gets me. What was she thinking? What was she saying?” It was easy to see why he became obsessed with Michael Ross's fate. To know
that his child died in agony and fear must have been almost unbearable. As a parent, I could only imagine their excruciating sorrow, and I understood their crusade. Ed was adamant that Michael should be executed. Period. Lera, a Roman Catholic, said she never thought about it much before her daughter was murdered. “In some cases, I do believe in the death penalty,” she said thoughtfully. “But I believe that God is the only one that can decide when and how Ross will die. If Ross had gotten life without the possibility of parole, we would have lived with it,” she said. “If this had happened to one of your daughters, how would you feel?”

I had asked myself that question ever since I first started talking to Michael Ross. I took a deep breath because I wanted to be honest with them but not offend them. “How would I feel? I know I would have wanted to strangle him with my bare hands. But I hope that I wouldn't because I believe that all killing is wrong,” I answered. “I've thought about it a lot. How would I feel if someone were drunk and had an accident and killed somebody? We would never have the death penalty for him, but the person who drinks and gets behind the wheel is doing something they could control, and the person who is mentally ill doesn't have control. Isn't the mentally ill person less culpable?” I asked.

“Yes, but how do we know for sure that Michael Ross or anyone is really mentally ill?” Ed asked.

“That's part of the problem,” I admitted. But I didn't want to do the talking. “Tell me about Leslie.” They both smiled. Leslie's life was a topic they both liked to think about. Ed's most vivid image of Leslie was as a little girl, covered with chocolate ice cream. “I can always remember her as that little runt with a dirty face, big smile, long hair, happy face, sitting on the porch.”

I looked at a picture of Leslie. “She looked a lot like you,” I told Lera.

“She was Lera's daughter,” Ed said. “They were very close.” I looked
over at Lera, the tears streaming down her face as she looked at the picture of her daughter. He said Leslie had hoped to someday go to nursing school and become an RN, following in her mother's footsteps. “Les often waited up for her mother on weekends so that they could play cards or watch a horror movie. She liked watching shows that were scary but wouldn't watch them alone.”

Leslie also liked to spend time with her dad, sometimes playing softball. She wasn't much of an athlete, but she loved to play softball. It didn't matter that she wasn't very good at it. “The only hit the kid got the whole year was a home run. I mean, there were errors all over the place, kids throwing the ball the wrong way. And she couldn't run. She was as slow as a turtle,” Ed said chuckling. “But everybody's yelling, ‘Keep going, keep going' and she got her home run. She was just ear to ear with a grin,” he remembered.

Leslie Shelley was devoted to the things she loved, like her pets—dogs, cats, ferrets—who were equally devoted to her. Casper, her pet Chihuahua, wouldn't let anyone but Leslie go near him. “He was Leslie's dog, and that was it,” remembered Lera. Casper would follow her to the Roodes' house and sit on the front steps until Leslie came out and went home. He slept with her at night, and if someone walked past her bed, they'd be lucky not to be bitten by Casper. “He was so protective of her,” Lera recalled. “You couldn't even go into her room because he was guarding her.”

Both Ed and Lera agreed that Leslie was headstrong. Ed tells the story of when she was six or seven and they were driving home in the car. “You know how kids can get going in the car. I said, ‘Leslie, if you don't knock it off, right now, you are going to walk home.' Well we were just pulling into the project and she says, ‘You wouldn't put me out.' I stopped the car and that little devil got out. I had to drag her back into the car.” So it's no wonder that if she was determined to
go to the movies that Easter afternoon, she would find some way to do it.

The year before, the pair had been missing for about four hours. April had decided to run away from home, and Leslie dutifully accompanied her, even though running away was not the way that Leslie usually handled her own problems. She was more likely to call her married sister, Robin, who was nine years older. On average, she called Robin a few times a week for advice or just to talk. For whatever reason, when they decided to run away, Leslie decided against consulting her sister and packed up enough clothes for a lifetime. Before leaving, Leslie instead told her younger sister, Jennifer, that they would be staying at their friend Sandy's house. A seven-year-old, Jennifer was not a good confidante and reported all she knew to her parents. So Ed, Lera, and Raymond Roode, April's stepfather, drove over to Sandy's to retrieve their daughters. Leslie came downstairs when Ed called and then confessed that April was hiding in an upstairs closet. It was over in less than four hours.

Because of the earlier runaway attempt, April's and Leslie's parents first assumed that they were up to the same shenanigans. Nevertheless, they were concerned and began searching for the pair in familiar places. “We drove down the railroad tracks,” says Ed. “We went to see my son. We went to a friend's house. We checked all around, and then it started—rumors, sightings.” One of the girls' friends insisted that they had called from Florida. Someone else said they had seen them in court the next day. Someone else claimed that April had been spotted at the soup kitchen.

Ellen Roode and Lera rode down to the soup kitchen, where a number of Lera's patients from Norwich Hospital worked, and showed them pictures of the girls, but no one remembered seeing either of them. “So then we went over to the Wauregan Hotel,” said Lera, because
someone reported seeing a girl resembling April. “At that time, it was drugs, alcohol—you name it—were in there. So I got a room number and I went up, and this woman answered the door. I showed her a picture of April, and she said that the girl that was staying there could pass for April's twin but that it wasn't April.”

They contacted the missing-children's bureau in Rhode Island, and called Ed's nephew, a police officer in Florida, to try to get the word out. Ed, a postal worker, sent a letter to the
Postal Record
, a monthly newsletter that goes to all postal workers, asking them to run a picture of Leslie. The picture was published on June 28, the day Leslie's and April's bodies were found.

For the two months the girls were missing, the Shelleys never let themselves believe that Leslie wasn't coming home. “You have to understand that people are in shock,” explains Ed. “She was gone about two weeks, and I was at Nelson's, which is an auction house . . . and I bought a beautiful French provincial bedroom set for her, and I had the bureau and the night table, the bed all set up. That would be Leslie's room when she finally came home.” He said it took two or three years after their remains were found before he finally put an ad in the paper and sold the furniture.

“The thing that got me the hardest,” Ed said sullenly, “was the day they recovered the bodies.” He had taken his youngest daughter, Jennifer, to Plainfield to watch the horse races from the road. Afterward, they went to meet his daughter Robin and her four-year-old daughter for some ice cream. “We were driving down the road, and the news flash came on the radio that they had recovered two young girls' remains in Preston. My little eight-year-old girl looks at me and says, ‘Daddy, that's April and Leslie.' I just sat there and I knew. I knew. I went in and I got her some ice cream and then when I saw my oldest daughter come in, I had no doubt. So I had Robin take Jennifer with her.”
Lera heard the news while she was at work at Norwich Hospital. The state police came to the hospital to ask her for Leslie's dental records.

When Ed got home, he saw a detective leaving the Roodes' house and heading over to talk to him. “I said, ‘It's my daughter Leslie, isn't it?' And he said, ‘Well, we're not sure.' And I said, ‘Like hell you're not sure. We gave you exactly what the girl was wearing. You mean you can't tell me what she was wearing?'” The officer told Ed they had to wait for the autopsy report.

The next morning Ross was arraigned for the murders of Robin Stavinsky, April Brunais, Leslie Shelley, and Wendy Baribeault. “They didn't want us at the arraignment,” Ed says. “They told us about five minutes before the arraignment was going to start. I guess they came walking down Water Street with about twenty state troopers surrounding him. They had sharpshooters on top of the Shannon Building, on top of the courthouse, on the parking garage to protect him. You know, I don't think that would have protected him, not the way I was. I would have taken my shotgun and blown him away.”

After the police and media had left the place where they found the bodies, Ed and Lera needed to go to the spot. “It was eerie,” Ed remembered, gesturing to Lera. “She'll tell you. When we went over there, the road curves around and there is a swamp there. I got out of the car with her, and we went walking over to the swampy area. And I told her, ‘This isn't the spot.' I walked across the road and the hairs just jumped on my arms. I mean the back of my neck just crawled, and I knew right then and there, where it was.” They took pictures of the area and left. Although Lera had promised Ed that she wouldn't go back, she was compelled to go again. One day while Ed was working, she drove over and went down the embankment to the spot where Leslie was found. She sat down and just put her head down, her hands
covering her face, and began crying uncontrollably. “That was the last place Leslie had been. It was hard.”

 • • • 

P
eople's reactions to the murders both helped and hurt the family. The night Leslie's body was found, Ed called a friend in the middle of the night. “He says, ‘What the hell do you want at two o'clock in the morning?' I said, ‘They found my daughter's body.' He said, ‘Come on down.' I stopped to get some cigarettes, and some guy picked up the paper and said, ‘These girls asked for it.' And if I had turned around and told him it was my daughter, I think I probably would have poked him right out on the spot, because I did have a temper, but I just ignored him and walked away.” Ed felt that people are always too willing to blame the victims. “Wendy Baribeault went out for a walk. She was in her shorts. So they say she was asking for it. People are so asinine when they think that kids—girls, boys, or whatever—go out and are asking to get killed or get raped; it's stupid. People just don't understand. But some care. People care. It's just that they don't know how to show it. Just a pat on the back. Or ‘I'm sorry' suffices. . . . You can survive it. It's tough. But you have to survive. You have to go on.”