THROUGHOUT THE winter of 2004–2005 the biggest local story in Middletown, Connecticut, was the impending execution of convicted serial killer Michael Ross. The execution was scheduled to take place a few towns away, and was to be the first execution in New England since 1960.
Ross’s killing spree bore many similarities to the Michigan Murders. He started out in 1981 on the campus of Cornell University, and over the next three years killed eight girls and young women; John Collins had been a student at Eastern Michigan University, and many of the girls he allegedly killed were students at either Eastern or the U of M. Unlike Collins, however, who to this day maintains his innocence from prison, Ross pled guilty. Also unlike Collins, Ross was convicted in a state with the death penalty, and in 1987 Ross was sentenced to death by lethal injection.
Over the next eighteen years on death row Ross filed a variety of appeals—to be castrated, to be retried, to be executed. But as his execution date in January 2005 drew near he refused to file any more. In court after court he and his lawyer insisted that he was mentally competent, that he knew what he was doing. Like Gary Gilmore before him, Ross was fighting to die. I want no gravestone, no reminders … I just want to be forgotten, he said in an interview posted on the elaborate Web site he maintained from prison.
On this same Web site, Ross described his mental state—which is clinically (if broadly) classified as “sexual sadism”—as follows:
I guess the easiest way to explain it is everybody’s had a tune in their head, like a melody that they heard on the radio or something. It just plays over and over again … I have that & no matter how hard you try to get rid of that melody, it’s still there. And that kind of thing could drive you nuts. But if you replace that melody now with thoughts of rape & murder & degradation of women …
This description chilled me to the bone. It was an excellent description of murder mind.
On January 23, 2005—the Sunday before his Wednesday execution date—the Hartford Courant was thick with Ross. I saw its front page through a cracked, graffitied newspaper box on Main Street, in front of a Dunkin’ Donuts that served as a kind of halfway house for the town’s many vagrants. The Dunkin’ Donuts was adjacent to the local theater, which was now featuring the horror movie Saw. Its poster featured a woman’s severed, bloody leg, alongside the tagline How much blood would you shed to stay alive?
I went inside to get change, bought the edition with a fistful of quarters, and sat down at the counter to look at it.
The front page bore several large color photographs of four girls and young women, with this text underneath them:
These [victims] were snatched by a man who first made small talk with them, then forced them into his car or into the woods. He has admitted to raping all but one. After the rapes he forced them to roll over on their stomachs. Then he would straddle them and strangle them from behind.
I knew these kinds of articles well. A few years back I had spent a long, sweltering summer printing out dozens of them from microfilm in the basement of the New York Public Library in service of Jane. I blasted through reel after reel of the Detroit News, keeping my eyes peeled for the row of photographs that signified the dead girls. Invariably I would get moored up in the wedding pages until I realized my error: Not dead, just married.
Although over thirty years apart, the Detroit News and Hartford Courant articles kept to a similar script. They both paired a “she had so much to live for” sentimentality with quasi-pornographic descriptions of the violence each girl had suffered. The main difference was that the ‘60s articles used a more modest lexicon: “violated,” “co-ed,” etc.—and that they were sandwiched in between articles about the war in Vietnam instead of the war in Iraq.
How does one measure the loss of eight young women? asked the Courant. There is no way to know what they would have done with their lives—the careers they might have pursued, the people they would have loved, the children they might have had.
I know that I am supposed to care about these questions. Especially as the author of Jane, in which I bent over backwards to pay more attention to Jane’s life than to her death. But somehow they instantaneously make me not want to read on. How does one measure the loss of anyone? Is measurement a necessary part of grief? Is a life less grievable if its prospects for the future—here imagined as a range of career options and the potential to bear children—don’t appear bright? The people they would have loved—that was a nice touch. But what about the people they already had loved? Or what if they hadn’t loved anyone, or no one had loved them?
More to the point, I knew that this tally of grief, along with the brutal physical details of Ross’s rapes and murders, was supposed to do more than bring tears to one’s eyes or sell papers. It was also supposed to drum up support for the long-dormant death penalty in Connecticut, and in New England at large. The “Commentary” section regularly rehashed the most heinous aspects of Ross’s crimes before immediately reminding the reader, The vast majority of people in this state and country continue to support the death penalty for certain types of murders—i.e., for this kind.
So despite the fact that the so-called “Blizzard of ’05” had just dumped two feet of snow in the Connecticut region, in addition to bringing subzero temperatures and wind gusts of hurricane proportions, I was planning to attend the overnight protest march and vigil at the Osborn Correctional Institution in Somers, Connecticut, where Ross was to be executed in the dead of night.
The principal organizers of the protest set up a helpful if daunting informational Web site that listed all the ways one might protect against or treat hypothermia. One steadfast, activist colleague of mine at the university promised to go with me no matter what; another begged me not to go, insisting that my presence wouldn’t affect what happened, and all I would do out there was freeze to death. I tried to explain to her that you don’t go to a vigil expecting to halt an action. You go to bear witness to what the state would prefer to do in complete darkness. And if your family has lost a loved one via an act of violence, you speak out so that advocates of capital punishment can’t keep relying on the anger and grief of victims’ families as grounds for their agenda. I tell her that I consider anti-violence activists to be bodhisattvas, “master warriors”—not warriors who kill and harm but warriors of nonaggression who hear the cries of the world, as one Buddhist book puts it. [M]en and women who are willing to train in the middle of the fire … [men and women who] enter challenging situations in order to alleviate suffering.
The author of an essay with the frightening title “The Moral Worth of Retribution,” which I came across in a primer called What Is Justice? lent to me by an ethicist at the university, sees things differently:
My own view is that [a transfer of concern from victim to criminal] occurs in large part because of our unwillingness to face our own revulsion at what was done. It allows us to look away from the horror that another person was willing to cause. We almost cannot bear the sight…. By repressing anger at wrongful violation, we may be attempting to deny that we live in a society in which there really are fearful and awful people.
Certainly I didn’t feel unwilling to face my revulsion. Sometimes I felt as though that was all I was doing. But was I “repressing anger at wrongful violation”? Was I denying the fact that “we live in a society in which there really are fearful and awful people”? What would it mean not to deny such a thing?
Ross’s execution didn’t happen that winter. A federal judge threatened to disbar Ross’s lawyer for being insufficiently suspicious of his client’s willingness to die, and the lawyer subsequently requested a new hearing on Ross’s competency. The execution was delayed indefinitely.