..  ..Michael B. Ross ...No 127404 ...State Correctional Institution at Huntington ...Huntington, Pennsylvania ...Year of Birth 1959 ...Marital Status single ...Children none ...Date of offense 1982-1984 ...Sentenced to death July 6, 1987 ...Status Under Appeal . Click on the image to view a larger version. Scroll below for an account of the session.

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Michael B. Ross was convicted of the kidnapping, rape & murder of four teenage girls in New London, Connecticut, in 1983 & 1984, as well as the murder of 2 other women in 1982. A 1981 graduate of Cornell University, Ross was an insurance salesman in the Norwich area. On his arrest in June 1984, he confessed to strangling the women & raping all but one. At trial, Ross's defense attorneys did not contest his guilt; instead, Ross pleaded insanity. At his sentencing, his attorneys argued that he suffered from extreme emotional disturbance & an abusive childhood. Ross was the first person to be sentenced to death under a statute enacted by the Connecticut state legislature 7 years earlier. In 1994 Ross wrote to several newspapers to announce that he was dropping his appeals & requesting execution. Then, because the trial court had excluded evidence that would have supported a life sentence, he won a new hearing from the Connecticut Supreme Court. At the end of 1995, Ross was trying to fire his attorneys & waive the new hearing. "Very first feeling I had was my heart pounding. It was really pounding & then the next feeling was my hands hurt because I manually strangled them & my fingers were all cramped & then the third feeling I remember was fear coming in, "Oh, my God, there's a dead body in front of me," & that's when I would hide the bodies & go through all that." Michael Ross doesn't remember actually strangling the women he killed. Michael was a predator. His victims, ranging in age from 14 to 26, were faceless to him. "I would think anyway that I should have in my mind a picture of what they looked like when I was strangling them, when I was killing them, & I don't. I have no idea of what they looked like. My only recollection of what they looked like was what was in the newspaper afterwards, like the high school picture or whatever." At college & after, Ross raped & murdered while at the same time maintaining normal relationships with girlfriends. "They were saying that when I'm with one type of women, when I'm with one that pampers me...I don't hurt anybody. When I'm in an aggressive relationship with someone who fights & we bicker & we argue all the time, then that's when I go out & hurt people....With one relationship, I killed 4 people. Then I was in another relationship where I didn't kill anybody. Then I was in another relationship where I killed 4 people & they call it something like 'splitting.'"

His account was delivered so matter-of-factly. These were real lives he was talking about, yet to him they were anonymous. Michael Ross was a serial murderer, so his crimes had produced large headlines. I had sought Ross out because I needed to include a worst case in my project. It's so easy for the public to cry for execution, but I wanted to illuminate the sympathetic & the heinous with the same light. Michael attributes his problems to mental imbalance: he could not control his emotions. Troubled in childhood by his fantasies, he became more & more tormented in college. "But I guess the easiest way to explain it is everybody's had a tune that's been playing in their head, like a melody that they heard on the radio or something. It just plays over & over & over again....I have that & no matter how hard you try to get rid of that melody, it's still there. And that could kind of drive you nuts. But if you replace that melody now with thoughts of rape & murderer & degradation of women..." I had thought I would encounter a madman, a captive of Thorazine & the straitjacket. But because of modern pharmaceuticals, his life had changed. He did not fit my preconception of the archetypal serial killer. Ten years after his crimes, Ross was friendly, affable, even ebullient-he bounced. His curiosity & enthusiasm overwhelmed & slightly unsettled us. He had once been a handsome Ivy Leaguer, an engineering major. Somehow he had metamorphosed into a killer. During his years on death row, Michael demonstrated his instability by appealing at different times to be executed, castrated, or retried. Now , on therapeutic medications, Ross says he no longer has the fantasies that made him dangerous. No matter what scientists find out about him & his obsessions, mental illness or insanity, he will never be released. "If I'm executed or if I die, I just want to be cremated & my ashes scattered. I want no gravestone, no reminders....I just want to be forgotten."