The Man in the Monster (27 page)

The protocol for lethal injection in Connecticut would be a three-step process. The inmate is given three different chemicals. The first, sodium thiopental, is a sedative, supposedly rendering the condemned person unconscious. The second, pancuronium bromide, is a muscle relaxant that makes it impossible for the person to move, even to bat an eyelash. The reason, of course, is to make the final moments appear serene. The third chemical, potassium chloride, stops the heart. Apparently, if the person is not adequately sedated, he feels the last drug seize his heart—feeling like a heart attack but much more painful, because it burns through the veins. Some autopsies indicate that the sedative can wear off if too little is given, but the second drug makes it impossible for the person being executed to say or do anything. Theoretically, that could mean he would feel the last drug—and no one would come to his aid. The condemned person's final minutes would be torture. Michael knew it and feared it.

 • • • 

M
y MCI phone bill in December for just one phone line—and I had three—was nearly a thousand dollars, but it wasn't just the cost of the calls that got excessive. It was the fact that it was eating into the rest of my life. My husband was spending a lot of time working on the East Coast or traveling out of the country, and my almost eleven-year-old twins were already feeling the impact of his absence. So Michael's new neediness was not welcomed. There was an early morning call in December that made me realize that I had to be more sensitive to the rest of my family.

With my cordless phone tucked awkwardly under my chin as I tried
to listen to Michael's latest problem, I fumbled with my all-in-one multifunction printer-fax-scanner-copier. It was a little after 6:00
A.M
., and my son James was telling me to hurry. He had lost his script for the fifth-grade class play and was eager for me to use his twin sister's copy to make him another. I pressed the
copy
button, but nothing happened. While I flipped through the troubleshooting manual, I turned my attention back to Michael, who was complaining about the uncertainty of everything. James waved his hands in front of my face. I pushed another button. All the lights suddenly flashed on the all-in-one multifunction printer-fax-scanner-copier, indicating, I believed, a total digital meltdown.

“I don't know why they can't mind their own friggin' business,” Michael said, now aware that the public defenders' lawsuit would be moving through the courts for the next few weeks.

“Mom! Will you get off the phone?” James demanded.

“Tell James we're busy,” Michael barked into my ear.

I didn't answer, although I would have been just as likely to tell Michael to shut up. I had not told James or his twin sister, Hannah, that Michael had an execution date set for January. They were thinking about spending that weekend skiing, and besides, I was hoping that the courts would make it go away. I took a deep breath, not wanting to scold either of them; all the players in this domestic drama knew of one another and knew how to exquisitely ply the emotions of the woman who was struggling with an all-in-one multifunction printer-fax-scanner-copier and also trying to carry on a conversation.

“You are the worst mother in the entire
world
!
” James screamed. “You care more about a serial killer than your own son.” He plopped down on the couch, arms folded across the chest in a full-body pout. Michael's voice cackled with laughter from the phone.

“Man, if I had ever said that,” he said chuckling, “my mother would have thrown me across the room.”

“Well, Michael, that's the difference between your mother and me. I'm hoping that James doesn't turn into a serial killer.” He went silent. I knew that I had offended him. I had reminded him that no mother wants her son to grow up to be Michael Ross. But I also knew that he accepted my comment as an attempt at gallows humor. James was now strewn supine like a dying Garbo on the couch.

Michael decided to change the subject. His last weeks on earth centered on control of his own death. There was no detail that didn't concern him, including his final meal.

“By the way, I'm not having a last meal,” he said almost boasting.

“What? Why not?”

“Because I don't want friggin' Brian Garnett to friggin' stand out there and say, ‘Mr. Ross died at 2:17
A.M
. His last meal was blah, blah, blah.'” Garnett was the head Department of Correction spokesman. “I don't want to give them any more to say. It's none of their friggin' business what I eat. Friggin' media. You know what it's going to be like—anti–death penalty people out there singing ‘Kumbaya' and drunken yahoos all yelling for blood and revenge. It's always the same. But this time they aren't going to hear what I friggin' ate.”

“Sometimes I think I know you, and then you surprise me.”

“Don't worry. Lieutenant King will take care of me.” William King was the head officer in the death row unit.

“What do you mean?”

He didn't want to answer me directly because we were being taped. “I mean about what we were talking about a minute ago.”

I realized that King would get him the last meal.

“We're going to get cut off. And I have to get the kids ready for school,” I said.

“Yeah, you better tend to James, since you don't want him to become a serial killer or anything,” Michael said, indicating that he wasn't offended. “I'll call you back later.” Across the room, James began to emerge
from his sulk when he saw me hang up the telephone, and we grabbed our coats and left to get the script copied.

 • • • 

M
ichael continually complained that the rules and protocol for the execution were changing every day. The most upsetting change was that he would not have a contact visit before his death because he was going to be sealed behind a floor-to-ceiling bulletproof wall in the death cell. It looked like Plexiglas, so Michael referred to it as his Plexiglas coffin. The barrier had only a few small holes drilled in it to allow people to talk and also a little pass-through slot that the guards could unlock to give him meals and medications. At Michael's request, I called Major Coates, the head corrections officer at Osborn, to ask why the DOC was going to such extremes when Michael had never been a security risk, and the major told me, “It's not up to me. I gave them my opinion, and they didn't listen.”

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.”

 • • • 

M
ichael 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.