The Man in the Monster (28 page)

Predictably, Michael was upset when he heard that Chatigny was probably going to issue a stay. “I don't care what he does,” he said defiantly. “I'm going in that death cell tomorrow one way or the other.” We knew he couldn't force the guards to put him in the death cell, but there was no reason to argue with him. “There's no way they're going to find me incompetent now.”

I changed the subject. “You know Hannah asked me if she could talk to you. She insisted that she was the one person in the world who could persuade you not to go through with this.”

Tears welled up in Michael's eyes. “Why are you telling an eleven-year-old about this?”

“Michael, how can she
not
be aware of what's happening? You heard James's fit when he said I cared more about a serial killer than my own son. I had to tell them. They care. They had to know why I was so upset.”

“I know, but I didn't want them to know,” he said softly. “They shouldn't have to deal with something like this.”

“Don't you think they'll wonder when you don't call anymore?”

He put his head down, mumbling to the floor, “They shouldn't have to deal with this.”

“If you don't want her to deal with it, change your mind.”

“I'm not . . .” he began, but I interrupted, knowing what he would say. We chitchatted about the snowstorm and my trip for a while, occasionally gliding back to the legal issues at hand. After forty-five minutes, it was time to go.

When court reconvened, Judge Chatigny announced that he was going to issue a stay and that he wanted to hold a competency hearing. Michael would have to go back to court, and any new sentence would have to be at least thirty days past that date.

My flight back to California was not until late Wednesday, so I was able to visit Michael two more times before I left. On Wednesday morning, he told me not to come back for the execution. “I could do it on my own.” We talked about the future—as if he now had a future. “I'm a college graduate. I could also teach, maybe help them study for their GED. I think I could also be helpful to the people in mental health, because I could talk to other prisoners about depression—even about sexual disorders.” He was assuming that he would be allowed in general population and that tutoring would be possible if he was given a life sentence, and I didn't want to discourage him.

“You're a smart man, and you could make a big contribution,” I told him.

“I know,” he said, but caught himself before the daydream went too far. “I could make a difference, but I'm not going to change my mind.”

“You know I think this is crazy.”

“I know. I know, but I have to,” he said looking down at his feet. He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes.

I left confident that there had been a temporary reprieve of at least a month. The next afternoon when I was on my way home from picking up my children from school, my cell phone rang. It was Barry. “The Supreme Court lifted the stay. I'm out driving in my car, trying to calm down.”

My anxiety levels returned to their previous elevation. “Oh, my God,” I said. “Is it tonight?” I asked, knowing that I couldn't get there in time.

“No, there's another stay based on his father's suit, but now that the Supremes have spoken, the Second Circuit won't uphold it. It's probably going to be early Saturday morning,” he said.

“I'm coming back,” I told him. “I'll see you tomorrow morning.”

The phone was ringing when I walked in the door. It was Michael. “I don't know if you heard or not,” I began.

“No, what?”

“Barry just called. The Supreme Court lifted the stay. . . . It was five to four.”

He joked. “I guess Rehnquist got out of his deathbed just for me so the vote would be five to four.” Rehnquist, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, was dying of cancer. “He must really care,” he said sarcastically.

“I'm getting on a plane tonight. Are you sure you're not having second thoughts?”

“I'm not worried. I know where I'm going and I'm going to be safe. I'm just worried about the people I'm leaving behind.”

“Well you got two groups you care about, and they both want different outcomes. You've got the victims' families, and you've got everyone else.”

“Tell me about
it.”

JANUARY 2005

Michael had worried that no one would come to his execution because there would be a blizzard and it would be freezing cold. The blizzard had come the weekend before; now it was bitter cold. I shivered as I waited for my escort into the prison. Predictably, Barry, Michael's lawyer during the second trial, was waiting in the lobby when I got there.

“What's going on?” I asked.

“His dad's back there. I thought I'd give them some time alone. I'm here to see him and waiting in case he changes his mind.” Several lawyers were standing by in the office in case anything needed to be done. The courts in Hartford and Rockville would have someone on duty all night. Throughout the evening, Barry remained in constant contact via pay phone to his office. That's the only way we could find out what was going on in the outside world. Cell phones aren't allowed inside.

“Do you think there's a chance he'll change his mind?” I asked.

“No, but I'll be here, just in case.”

A few minutes later, I was taken back to see Michael. The death cell was at the very end of death row, next to the execution chamber and many doors behind the area where Barry and I had visited him. Three corrections officers were guarding the entrance to the tier. We walked past a few empty cells and went through the same ritual at the next
metal door. The door opened, revealing several more cells on the right. On the left was a large window that flooded the tier with light.

There were two corrections officers guarding the two steps up to an open doorway. At the top of the steps to the left, next to another large window, a corrections officer sat at a wooden desk with a logbook. His job was to keep a constant eye on Michael and his guests and write down everything in the book, just as a guard had done when he first arrived on death row and had been placed in the same cell eighteen years before. The death cell was about ten feet to my right. Michael was entombed behind the barrier in his “Plexiglas coffin.” Two plastic chairs had been put next to it for visitors. Dan Ross was sitting in the one on the left. He was tall and of a heftier build than Michael, but I knew instantly who he was, because Michael resembled him. What surprised me was that he was not intimidating at all. All I really knew about him were Michael's descriptions of a him as an “emotionless rock” and his stories about being taken to the woodshed and beaten with a stick. Dan seemed warm and friendly.

“Well, you finally get to meet my dad,” Michael chuckled.

I knew Dan didn't approve of my writing about Michael, but he didn't mention it. For the next four hours, we chatted and reminisced about farming and his family—his mother, culling chicks, and even cleaning the belts that collected chicken manure. They tried to outdo each other's “mom” stories, confirming most of the stories that Michael had told me.

“That whole thing about you being a serial killer because of killing chicks is ridiculous. That's just farming,” Dan said. Michael nodded in agreement—even though he had suggested the opposite many times, and he knew that psychiatrists suspected it might have contributed to his ability to kill without emotion.

He teased his father about supporting the public defenders' suit by
saying that he was narcissistic and incompetent. “After all, even you think I'm crazy.”

“You want to prove you're competent?” Dan snapped back. “Change your mind. Stop this. Then I'll know you're competent. This whole thing is crazy.”

I laughed, but Michael sighed. “I'm not going to stop it. It's going forward,” he said, looking away as his eyes welled up with tears. He had voluntarily dropped all his appeals, allowing his execution to proceed. All he had to do was file an appeal and the execution would be off.

Around 2:00
P.M
., Dan and I had to leave death row because T. R. Paulding, Michael's standby lawyer, was on his way to prison to speak with Michael and have a conference call with Judge Chatigny. Dan went home; I stayed in the lobby with Barry. We had been told that we would be sitting in the prison visiting room when we weren't visiting, but that didn't happen until later that evening. It was clear that the DOC had not planned for—or perhaps wanted—us to stay there all day. They left us to fend for ourselves in the freezing cold lobby with nothing to eat or drink. Because the temperature outside was in the single digits or below, it had to have been no more that 30 or 40 degrees Fahrenheit inside, and every time the door opened, gusts of frigid air wafted through the room. So we paced around with our jackets on to keep warm as the temperature dropped. By nightfall, the temperature had fallen even more, and I needed a hat and gloves and had to keep walking around to stay warm.

When we had visited Michael earlier in the week, Barry had dropped his public defender ID when we were registering in the guardhouse. He was using an old one because he had misplaced his current ID. “I didn't lose it. I temporarily misplaced it. It happens all the time. That's why I never get rid of the old ones. Insurance.” I was shocked by his photo. He had aged so much in the past decade. His hair was
thinner. His face was drawn. Of course, we all had gotten older, but I wondered how much of Barry's aging was due to this case. It had changed us all—physically, emotionally, and intellectually, maybe even spiritually. I wasn't the same person who had started reporting on this story in 1995. I had always been against the death penalty, but now it was personal, not philosophical. I could put a human face on death, and the face of a human being who was also my friend.

I had also come to believe that God breathed life into all of us. No one but God had the right to take away that breath—and that included Michael Ross and the state of Connecticut. Before meeting Michael, I had been quick to judge others. Now I tried to make myself look for the good in people rather than the bad. My years getting to know Michael had been a liberating experience, because I no longer immediately attached labels to all kinds of people—liberal, conservative, intellectual, redneck, religious fanatic, serial killer.

“I'm afraid this is going to happen,” I said, pausing. “And I really don't want to watch,” I admitted to Barry.

“Nobody's making you,” he told me adamantly.

“I know. I didn't have to come back. Michael told me not to come back, but here I am and I'm not changing my mind now. If he can be stubborn, so can I.”

Barry laughed. “Yeah, I guess you're right. But what if the joke's on him?”

“On who? Michael?”

“Yeah. What if this is it? What if all this religious stuff is a sham and there's no God or no heaven? What if there's nothing after this? Then the joke's on Michael because he's doing this for nothing 'cause there's no one out there—no God, no Jesus, no heaven. I've thought a lot about this,” Barry continued. “Maybe nobody's going to forgive Michael. Maybe he's just killing himself for nothing.”

I didn't know what to say.

“I'm glad you didn't suggest that to him,” I finally answered.

“Yeah, it might freak him out, but maybe he'd change his mind.”

“That's impossible. He doesn't know how to change his mind,” I said. “Although I think there already is some uncertainty there.”

“You're right, but he puts on a good show. I still think he may be doing this for nothing.”

I couldn't argue with that; it was the truth. Dying would stop the legal process, but none of the people who mattered would ever forgive him and none of us—even Father John—had any concrete proof that God would forgive him.

For the next few hours, state helicopters began landing and taking off on the pad next to the parking lot. Snipers were posted on the roof. The conference call with Judge Chatigny, T. R. Paulding, the public defenders, and various state officials went on for hours. Barry called the office to try to find out what was happening, but because they were on the call and using the speakerphone, all he could find out was that the judge was upset and was saying that T. R. hadn't fulfilled his responsibility as Michael's lawyer.

Although at the time we didn't know the details, Chatigny had accused T. R. of “enabling him,” saying, “You are not investigating this matter and fulfilling your obligation to the court, and if you don't do something, I'm going to have your law license.” He had also said something that no other judge had ever publicly said about Michael Bruce Ross—that if you look at this case “in the best possible light” Ross “never should have been convicted. Or if convicted, he never should have been sentenced to death because of his sexual sadism, which was found by every single person who looked at him [to be] clearly a mitigating factor.”

When T. R. finally left the warden's office, his face was flushed and
he was visibly shaken. It appeared that he might have been crying. We assumed he was upset because the judge had chastised him. However, there were myriad possibilities. He was fond of Michael. He acknowledged us with a gesture but did not stop because he needed to speak to Michael.

T. R. had taken the case pro bono as a favor to Michael, and now he found himself with an unanswerable choice—lose your law license or defy your client's wishes. Wearily, he explained his conundrum to Michael, who felt like he had been sucker punched but knew he could not go to his death thinking that he had caused T. R. to lose his livelihood. He had no choice. He told T. R. to “do whatever you have to do.”

After T. R. left, I went back to see how Michael was holding up. His emotions ranged from desperate sobs to angry frustration. “They couldn't break me, so they went after T. R.,” he fumed—although I wasn't sure who “they” were. In his mind, it was all the fault of the public defenders whom he blamed for starting the whole mess. As I sat by the death cell, trying to ignore the turmoil around us, I started to ask Michael some of the questions that had to be asked before it was too late—and I was thinking about my conversation with Barry.

“Did you believe in God before you got here—on death row?”

Michael stared at me. “I think so,” he said in a tone that indicated anything but certainty. “I believed there must be a God or a supreme being out there. I certainly didn't believe in any form of religion. I hadn't been brought up that way.”

“I remember you writing in your journal that you wish you had known Father John earlier but that you might not have wanted to listen to him back then.”

“I was too angry. I blamed God for what I had done. But God didn't kill those girls. I did.”

“But now you believe, and you are sure God has forgiven you.”

“Yes,” he said quietly, looking down at the floor.

“So does God talk to you? Do you actually have conversations with him—or her?” I was joking, but when he didn't answer, I knew what he was thinking. He was wondering if I was trying to trick him. He was wondering if I was going to use it to prove he was crazy. He didn't want to answer. “I'm really curious. I read your journals. Over and over, you pray to God. You tell him what you think. I just want to know if he talks back.”

“If you want to know if I hear voices, the answer is no.”

“I'm not trying to prove you are crazy. Honestly. I want to understand your relationship with God. You told me you weren't afraid. You said you would be forgiven—or that you had been forgiven by God. What I want to know is how you know that.”

He was getting nervous. I sensed that I had touched a nerve. “We talked about this before once. You have to have faith. That's what the word means. You have to believe even if you don't have concrete proof like evidence in court,” he said, almost challenging me.

“Okay. You can have faith that God exists. You can have faith that the Scriptures contain some truths in them and that God will forgive you because you have confessed your sins and you have atoned for them. But even you ask the question all through your journals—how do you know what is God's will?”

He sighed. He thought I was trying to use religion and logic to put him off guard. “I don't know. I just have to have faith,” he told me. “If it's the right thing to do, then it should be God's will.”

“If—the big if,” I said. “So God hasn't actually told you that you are forgiven,” I began.

“He forgives everyone. Henri Nouwen says that—”

“I don't want to hear what other people say. I want to hear what Michael says.”

“God is forgiving. Like you said, I've confessed my sins. I've repented. God has forgiven me.”

I looked him in the eye. “So you've forgiven Satti, and Malchik, and everyone else?”

“What's that got to do with it?”

“You know the Lord's Prayer is pretty scary on that subject. It asks God to forgive us as we forgive others. So that means if you want to be forgiven, you have to forgive everyone else. What about your mother? The public defenders for starting a suit saying you're incompetent? Because if you haven't, you are asking God to forgive you the way you forgave them.”

He took a deep breath. I could see that I was annoying him at the very least and maybe even shaking him up. “I am at peace with all that. Okay? I'm not angry anymore. I carried a lot inside for a long time, but I've worked through it.”

“Okay. But how do you know there's a heaven? How do you know you're going there?”

“I know it in my heart,” Michael answered softly, staring at the floor again.

“I don't know if I'm sure there's a heaven; I'm becoming more and more convinced that hell is right here on earth. We have to suffer through all of this. Who knows? Maybe you're right; death may be ‘sweet.'”

“I'm not going to argue with you on any of that,” he said, smiling as if he had won.

By 7:00
P.M
., preparations for the execution were well under way. We had been escorted into the visiting room and the lobby was buzzing with DOC officials. All sorts of prison personnel kept bringing in food trays for them—cold cuts, cookies, coffee—standard fare for a funeral reception. The staff was busily hanging curtains over every window so
no one could see who was coming in and going out. “They must be bringing in the victims' families,” I said.