A flurry of legal wrangling this week has postponed the Connecticut execution of Michael B. Ross.

10:32 AM EST on Thursday, January 27, 2005

BY KAREN LEE ZINER
Journal Staff Writer

For now, Michael Ross must still arise at 4:30 a.m. so that the sounds of a prison stirring from sleep -- the shouts, the clanging of the bars, the toilets flushing -- do not disturb the serial killer's prayer routine and reading of the liturgies.

Ross, who took the lives of eight women in Connecticut and New York, is waiting for the executioner. He may have less than one day to live.

But will the executioner finally be allowed to proceed?

That depends on the courts. Ross was first scheduled to be executed at 2:01 a.m. yesterday, then at 2:01 a.m. tomorrow. A pair of rulings this week from a federal judge in Hartford may keep Ross waiting for as much as 10 days.

If and when the execution takes place, Ross will say his last prayers in an isolated holding cell at Osborn Correctional Institution in Somers, Conn., say his goodbyes, then be led to the death chamber to receive a lethal injection in what will mark Connecticut's first execution since 1960.

Ross' lawyer, T.R. Paulding, says Ross remains resolute in his wish to be executed. Resolute -- but apparently anxious -- even though he has fought for his own death.

Ross, 45, acknowledged that anxiety during a videotaped exam by a forensic psychiatrist last month that Paulding recently made public. The psychiatrist deemed Ross mentally competent to decide he wanted to forgo any further appeals. However, it is that very question of Ross' competency -- or lack thereof -- that remains in contention in the courts at this eleventh hour.

"I have to admit, I'm surprised at the level of anxiety I've been experiencing. I don't really understand it," says Ross, who stares with off-kilter intensity through the metal bars, in what could mark the last the public ever sees of Michael Bruce Ross.

Prison psychiatrists told him anxiety is normal under the circumstances. Ross jokes, "They told me, 'Duh,' What do I expect?' "

Ross wrote most of his goodbye letters in August, to allow emotional distance. He speaks into the camera, of funeral arrangements to be made, things he must do. "I have to prepare myself," he says.

Estranged from his mother and his siblings, Ross may only have his father left to say goodbye to in his immediate family. His spiritual advisers will pray for him as he exits this world; they include Sister Helen Prejean, the nun whose book about her experience with a death row convict was made into the film, Dead Man Walking.

Ross can change his mind as late as when he is being escorted to the execution chamber. But some who know him say there's not a chance.

"He's been a tortured soul," says Dr. Fred S. Berlin, founder of the Sexual Disorders Clinic at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "There are many who think he at the last minute will change his mind or is toying with others. None of that, I think, is true. He wants to bring an end to the suffering for the families and himself."

That's what Ross says. "I owe these people. I killed their daughters. If I could stop the pain, I have to do that."

Berlin, associate professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, testified for the defense at the trial. He has corresponded with Ross through the years and arranged for Ross to be treated with Depo-Provera, then Depo-Lupron; both are forms of chemical castration that have reduced the sadistic sexual fantasies that Ross said prompted him to kill.

Berlin is among those who had hoped to persuade Ross not to allow the execution. "My most recent letter was about perhaps coming to see him one last time to say goodbye," he said. "I myself wanted to try and talk him out of being executed, but he made it clear that he did not want me to do that. I responded that I would respect his wish, but he knows me as being against the death penalty."

Ross, too, is against the death penalty, and said he would have accepted a life sentence, had a jury prescribed that. But it didn't, and Ross says he believes no jury ever will accept his mental illness as a mitigating factor.

Berlin, for one, has sympathy for Ross. "Clearly," Berlin says, "the force of this sexual disorder not only caused such pain and agony for others, but has destroyed his life as well."

Berlin says, "I certainly don't think he's this way because he sat down as a little child and decided to have this disorder. In that sense, it's an affliction." But society tends to look at this as a moral issue, rather than a biological or mental issue, says Berlin, "and if Mr. Ross is seen as behaving in that way because of mental illness, that's somehow not acceptable."

"While we all have tremendous empathy for the victims' families," says Berlin, "I don't see it as an either/or situation. I grieve. I can't even put into words the feelings I have for the families, but I don't think that's incompatible with having feelings for a man who is genuinely sick and had urges he couldn't control."

Berlin said Ross has become a spiritual person. "I think he thinks he'll be going to a better place where he'll be forgiven for what has happened. He has expressed that to me."

Pastor Walter H. Everett, of the United Methodist Church in Hartford and a founder of an international group that opposes the death penalty, considers himself one of Ross' spiritual advisers. He, too, believes that Ross has changed over the years.

"He's a human being whom I like. I've come to appreciate the complexity of him. I do like him, and I see him as a child of God," Everett said recently.

"I think the state becomes what we abhor when we kill another human being. Not only isn't it right, but it doesn't make sense," says Everett. "The state doesn't have the right to kill someone to prove that it's not right to kill a human being."

Everett plans to join a vigil outside the prison during the hour of Ross' execution -- should it go forward. Pro-death penalty demonstrators plan to be there as well.

During the three years preceding Ross' capture in Jewett City, Conn., in 1984, Ross amassed a track record that in New England was apparently only eclipsed by the Boston Strangler.

He killed a young graduate student, and a 16-year-old girl he picked up hitchhiking, while he was a student at Cornell University, and tied himself to a string of unsolved rapes on campus. He raped and strangled a woman in North Carolina and left her for dead; the woman regained consciousness, crawled out of a soybean field, and survived.

He attacked a 15-year-old girl in Illinois, and an off-duty policewoman in her home in Ohio. Both women fought him off. And then, of course, there were the six young women and girls he killed in rural Eastern Connecticut.

Ross had hoped to take over his father's egg farm in Brooklyn, Conn., but instead became an insurance salesman who hunted human victims along his route.

He grabbed girls off the road, raped and strangled them, then dumped their bodies. He visited the corpses in what psychiatrists called a form of necrophilia. But finally, one June day in 1984, he got caught.

During his confinement, he wrote prolifically, to reporters and newspapers and magazines, and, according to Berlin, "with a nun he grew close to." He solved cryptograms and read spy novels to pass the hours, then the years. He developed a romance with a woman who periodically flew to see him, then tried to kill himself when the relationship ended. He developed an expertise in death penalty law that has been acknowledged by the lawyers and judges who have dealt with his case.

He says he became earnest about his Roman Catholic faith, rising at 4:30 each morning to do his Bible studies and the liturgy for the hours. He said that reciting the rosary calms him.

Now, says Ross, "I'm just trying to do the right thing."

And Edwin Shelley, whose 14-year-old daughter, Leslie, was killed by Ross on Easter Sunday in 1984, plans to witness Ross' execution from behind a window overlooking the execution chamber.

Shelley has said repeatedly in recent months he wants nothing more than to watch Michael Ross get his final wish.