The Man in the Monster Read Online Free PDF Page A

you hear from him,” I added, never really expecting to hear more.
    Michael Ross’s case could have ended with a life sentence after the Connecticut Supreme Court decision—handed down on his thirty-fifthbirthday in 1994. The New London state’s attorney now had a second chance to acknowledge that Michael suffered from a mental illness and offer him the equivalent of several life sentences without parole, saving the state the cost of another trial, decades of appeals, and perhaps inevitably an execution. But the prosecutor—“Bulldog” Satti to those who had battled him in court—did not give up so easily.
    Satti was barely five feet four inches, but he cut an enormous figure. Michael, at least ten inches taller, feared him. The veteran prosecutor had taken on the case of
State v. Ross
with all the aggression and tenacity his nickname suggested. This had been no ordinary case for the chief state’s attorney. When the Ross case came to trial in 1987, Satti had recently failed to secure a death sentence in the Terry Daniels case, involving not only a rape-murder, but also the throat slashing of the victim’s two-year-old daughter. Michael Ross’s prosecution provided Satti with a second opportunity to be the first Connecticut prosecutor to get a capital conviction under the new statute.
    The snowy-haired prosecutor was about to retire after nineteen years of heading the New London State’s Attorney’s Office and forty-three years of practicing law, but his devotion to this case fueled his effort to stay on part-time as a special assistant state’s attorney. There was no question in Satti’s mind that Michael Ross was a cunning, manipulative rapist who knew exactly what he was doing when he killed those eight women. He believed that Ross had murdered to ensure that his victims could never identify him and that his mental illness was a sham concocted by Michael to avoid a death sentence. In Satti’s mind, Michael should face death because he had committed heinous crimes.
    However, the inmate on death row in 1994 was not the same man who had been incarcerated in 1987. Once he was placed on death row, Michael received medication, first Depo-Provera and then Depo Lupron, two drugs that suppressed his production of testosterone. Administeredby injection, both were developed as contraceptives for women and contain progesterone, a hormone that prevents egg release. Eventually the medications were used by psychiatrists with considerable success to suppress the production of testosterone in male patients with sexual disorders. It was their belief that overproduction of testosterone might be a root cause of some aberrant sexual behavior. Studies have determined that recidivism rates drop dramatically when the medications are administered in conjunction with psychotherapy for convicted sex offenders who suffer from some paraphiliac disorders, such as pedophilia, exhibitionism, and sexual aggression. Michael was the perfect candidate because he was in a controlled environment where he had mental health personnel checking his medications and state of mind on a regular basis.
    When Michael’s testosterone production had virtually been eliminated, he said he no longer suffered from the violent sexual fantasies that had constantly played and replayed in his thoughts for more than a decade. He wrote that he had been freed from “the monster within,” and returned to being “Michael.” Seven years on death row had given him plenty of time to think about what he had done and what he would do when the court finally decided his fate. It also gave him a lot of time to begin a letter-writing campaign to newspaper editors and to write op-ed articles about the flaws in the criminal justice system and why the death penalty should be abolished. His writings also expressed remorse for what he had done.
    But Michael had come to a dramatically different conclusion about how