The Man in the Monster Read Online Free PDF

his own case should play out. After years in prison and in treatment for his disease, he decided that the only way he could prove to the families of his victims that he was repentant for what he had done was to accept a death sentence. In September 1994, Michael requested that his public defenders hand-deliver a letter to Bob Satti, offering adeal—stop the penalty hearing from going forward, and he would accept a death sentence. He explained that there was “no need and no purpose served in inflicting additional emotional harm or distress on the families of my victims. I do not wish to hurt these people further—it’s time for healing. . . . I am willing to hand you the death penalty ‘on a silver platter,’ on the condition that you will work with me to get this over with as quickly and as painlessly as possible.” He asked to be allowed to go into court to admit his guilt and take responsibility for his crimes by accepting the death penalty.
    Michael said he would sign a stipulation, a legal declaration, that said his crimes were “especially cruel, heinous, and depraved” (a requirement in a capital case) and that there were no mitigating factors that would preclude a death sentence. In exchange for this deal, Satti had to agree that the state would offer no evidence of any kind to prove its case—no autopsy reports, no gruesome crime scene photos, and no emotional testimony from the victims’ families.
    However, Michael could not resist editorializing. He said he didn’t expect Satti to accept the offer because “I know that you want your circus trial, and that you couldn’t care less about how it affects the families of my victims. You want your day in the sun, your day of glory. You want to be the man who sends Connecticut’s most hated and despised criminal to the electric chair. And you will probably want to pull the switch yourself. And even though that is exactly what I am offering you with this deal, if you agree there will be no circus trial with you as master of ceremonies. That kind of takes the wind out of your sails, and doesn’t make it so much fun, now does it?” He offered to meet with Satti at the prison to work out the details. He said he understood that a meeting would be unpleasant, but that it was necessary to ensure that they were “playing from the same sheet of music.”
    What he didn’t know was that his public defenders, Fred DeCaprioand Peter Scillieri, never delivered his letter to Satti. They later explained that they could not participate in his decision to give up without a legal fight. With no response from the prosecutor, Michael decided that his next best option was to make his offer public. In March 1995, he wrote an article for
Northeast
, the Sunday magazine supplement of the
Hartford Courant
, entitled “It’s Time to Die.”
    Michael’s article began with a description of his recurring nightmare of his execution in Connecticut’s electric chair. The horror in the dream comes not in the execution itself but in visualizing the crowd outside, counting down the last seconds and cheering as they hear that Michael Ross, the monster serial killer, is dead. He also wrote of life on death row and explained that his mental illness, sexual sadism, had caused him to have repetitive thoughts of rape, murder, and the degradation of women. He was sexually aroused by humiliating and raping women. He claimed that his medication, prescribed by one of his psychiatric expert witnesses, had freed him from those obsessive thoughts and enabled him finally to face what he had done. Over time, he said, he had lost the intense desire to prove his mental illness in a court of law and now wanted to forgo the penalty phase of his trial and accept death, sparing his victims’ families the pain of another proceeding. One section of the
Northeast
article suggested that he might be suicidal, making me wonder