Read The Man in the Monster for Free Online

at the very least, made some errors and at the worst, trampled over Michael’s rights. As editor in chief and publisher of a newspaper for lawyers, I couldn’t ignore a case involving a possible violation of a defendant’s Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
    Woven within this legal morass was also a story of horror and suffering—of young women who were brutally raped and then literally had the life squeezed out of them and of their families, who had been waiting for some sort of closure for more than a decade, waiting to know if Michael Ross would pay the ultimate price for killing their sisters and daughters.
    I wrote a letter to Michael, in the late summer of 1995, introducing myself, expressing my interest in what he was doing, and asking if he’d be willing to be interviewed. It was only a matter of days before I received his reply in a handwritten envelope with his return address clearly printed on the front. I held the envelope and hesitated before I opened it, afraid of what might be inside. I think that I feared that the serial killer, the monster, would reveal himself to me, jumping out in front of me. I stared at the hand-printed letter, thinking about the man who had written it, trying to imagine him—not in a physical sense but as a person, his soul, if he had one. What type of man would commit such brutal acts?
    â€œI would be happy to grant you an interview but . . .” he began. Death row had been transferred into the state’s maximum security prison, Northern Correctional Institution, and access to the press had been cut off. Only immediate family members were allowed to visit death row inmates. The policy seemed Draconian, as families often don’t always support relatives on death row. But I could understand the state wanting to keep journalists out; they give the death row inmates a mouthpiece and threaten the state’s veil of secrecy about what happens behind the prison walls
.
So I called the Connecticut Department of Correction to try to set up an interview and was told that it was not possible. I wrote a letter appealing to the commissioner and to the attorney general of the state, Richard Blumenthal, who was known in the journalistic community as accessible and open to reasonable requests. With time, Blumenthal approved my request, but it took even more time to get through the red tape. It would take almost six months just to get on Michael’s phone list, to hear how he answered questions rather than see written, thought-out responses about what was making him offer to give up his life. In the meantime, I started attending the court proceedings.
    A few days before the first hearing I attended, a second letter from Michael arrived. Parts of the letter were almost lawyerly, yet it was also passionate and, at times, contrite. He seemed remorseful, but there was also an underlying anger and frustration with the system. Michael accused Satti of being willing to do anything to sway the jury’s emotions, including using “crime scene photos, autopsy reports, and, most important, the victims’ families. He will put them on the stand and tear open old wounds. If he can get them to break down on the stand he will do it. He doesn’t give a damn about them.” He also was reneging on his willingness to cooperate. He was afraid that an article by me would “piss him off.” He expected that the stipulations would be full of lies but that he would sign them anyway to stop Satti from hurting the families of his victims further. “That’s what is most important at this time. Not my life, not justice, but my victims’ families’ well-being. . . . I owe my victims’ families the world. I can never even begin to repair the damage that I have done to them. Reconciliation is impossible. I can’t even ask their forgiveness. How could I?”
    Repeating what would become his mantra, he insisted that it