The Stay | Criminal Podcast | Forensic Files

Phoebe Judge: This episode contains violent content that may not be appropriate for everyone.
Please use discretion. Martha Elliott: He grew up with farm life. And at the age of about 8, 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, 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. Phoebe Judge: 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. 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. Phoebe Judge: 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. Martha Elliott: 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. Phoebe Judge: 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. Martha Elliott: He would just walk behind them, lone women. And he said he fed off knowing that they knew
he was behind them and feeling their fear. And then that escalated, and he finally
grabs somebody and eventually he rapes someone. And then just a few days before he graduated,
he raped and murdered his first victim. Phoebe Judge: The woman's name was Dzung Ngoc Tu,
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. Martha Elliott: Often he would try to gain
the upper hand with a woman, come up from them 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. Phoebe Judge: 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.
Martha Elliott: 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
a almost screechy, tire-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 narrow down who could it possibly be based on
proximity and where the cars were parked. Phoebe Judge: 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. Dzung Ngoc Tu, Tammy Williams, Paula Perrera, Debra Smith Taylor, Robin Dawn Stavinksy,
Wendy Baribeault, and his two youngest victims, Leslie Shelley and her friend, April Brunias.
They were only 14 years old. [Somber music.] 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's 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. Martha Elliott: I had moved to Connecticut in the
fall of 1983, and he was arrested in June of 1984. 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 till 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. Phoebe Judge: 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 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. Martha Elliott: 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, "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?
[Music.] Phoebe Judge: The first time she saw Michael Ross face-to-face was September 28th, 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 cellphones, 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. Martha Elliott: 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. Phoebe Judge: 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.
Martha Elliott: And I backed up, took a step backwards. And I forgot that there was a
ottoman in the middle of the floor, and I tripped over it and I found myself in a prone position.
And 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. But
her roommate came in, and with that he just let me go and ran out the door and he was caught.
Phoebe Judge: Martha said she went through a period of being afraid, afraid of someone in the
closet, someone under the bed. And that 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?" Martha Elliott: 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 — 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 ax 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've been in the back of my mind every time I picked up the phone. Phoebe Judge: What did he say when you told him? Martha Elliott: 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." Phoebe Judge: So he was respectful of the experience you had gone through? Martha Elliott: Extremely, and really caring,
and we never spoke of it again. It was like, it was mine to bring up and if I wanted to talk
about it I could, but I didn't. Phoebe Judge: You were really in it thick with him, it sounds like. Martha Elliott: 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 a 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, forget about that."
And he totally backed off of that sentiment. Phoebe Judge: In 1996, Martha published her
article about Michael's wish to be executed. But Michael kept calling and calling every week.
Martha Elliott: I didn't have the heart not to take his calls, because I knew there are
very few people in the world he could call. And he became my kind of community service. I was
listening to his problems and issues and legal concerns, et cetera. 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. Phoebe Judge: 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. Martha Elliott: 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. 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.
[Intense music.] Phoebe Judge: 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 Utne 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?
[Intense music.] 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. Martha Elliott: 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 him 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 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 like a serial killer better than your own son."
And that cut through the heart. And I got the message really clearly that I had abandoned
my children to talk to this man. Phoebe Judge: That you were paying for, too. You were paying for all these phone calls. Martha Elliott: Oh, I was paying for it through
the nose, because those calls that you get from death row — or from any prison — costs you about
15 bucks a call. And so, in one month — I had three lines in my house. One was dedicated to the
fax, 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. Phoebe Judge: 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.
Martha Elliott: 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 about them and had
been hearing about them for 10 years. 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."
Phoebe Judge: An interesting choice for him to — Martha Elliott: Yeah, I thought so, too. Because I
think it was 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. Phoebe Judge: 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 victims' families, the media, and then Michael's witnesses. Martha Elliott: 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. Shelly'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, sort of like a drama theater or a puppet show 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. 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. Phoebe Judge: How close were you to him?
Martha Elliott: Maybe 7 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. Phoebe Judge: He died at 2:25 a.m. on May 13th,
2005, at the Osborn Correctional Institution in Somers, Connecticut. He was 45 years old.
Martha Elliott: 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 crying. Phoebe Judge: 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. Martha Elliott: 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 Sydney 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.
[Percussive music.] Phoebe Judge: Connecticut repealed it's 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 Spohrer and me. Audio engineering help from Rob Byers.
Special thanks to Jack Hitt. Julienne 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 in 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. Jingle: Radiotopia. From PRX.

Michael Ross made history as the first person in Connecticut since 1960 to receive the death penalty. Ross claimed that he felt he deserved the death sentence in order to atone for his crime. This journalist spent twenty years trying to figure out whether his remorse was real.

Learn more about Martha Elliott’s relationship with Michael Ross in her book, The Man in the Monster. http://www.amazon.com/The-Man-Monster-Intimate-Portrait/dp/159420490X

Music in this episode: “Dark Matter” by Podington Bear “RGN iii: Anatomy of Fractals” by Hexigen “Moonlight Reprise” by Kai Engel “Diamond Variety” by Cahill Locksmith “Woodcut” by Sealadder “Running Waters” by Jason Shaw

Criminal is a show about people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle. Hosted by Phoebe Judge. Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. https://link.chtbl.com/n33u0HsA

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Episode transcripts are posted on our website https://thisiscriminal.com/.

Episode 34 originally published 1/8/2016 https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-34-the-stay-1-8-2016

Brief Summary

Michael Bruce Ross's life, crimes, and execution are examined through journalist Martha Elliott's perspective and experiences with him.

Key points

The Early Life of Michael Ross. Michael Ross grew up on a farm, where he learned to care for chicks, including killing those that were sick.
The Stalking Begins. At Cornell, Michael Ross began stalking women, leading to his first murder just before graduation.
Michael Ross's Execution. Michael Ross was executed on May 13, 2005, marking a significant moment in Connecticut's death penalty history.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

He said he fed off knowing that they knew he was behind them.

Martha Elliott describing Michael Ross's behavior while stalking women.

2:51WatchNov 10, 2022

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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