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condemned or the gruesome, distorted face of the corpse. Both the executioner and the condemned were anonymous, hiding their humanity.
    While negotiations continued upstairs, I looked around the sparsely filled courtroom at that first hearing for the usual journalists or lawyers. Across the aisle from where I was sitting and a few rows back sat Ed and Lera Shelley, the parents of Leslie, the youngest of Michael’s victims. At least one of them attended every court proceeding, generating ten years of missed workdays and irritated bosses. “We wanted to be there for our daughter,” they had explained to reporters over and over again. No one had to point them out, because it was obvious that Mrs. Shelley found it painful to be in court. As soon as Michael’s case was called, she dabbedher eyes with a tissue. Ed was stoic, but it was clear that he regarded Michael as pure evil. His steely-eyed expression almost cried out that he not only wanted all of this to be over, but that he also would have liked to offer to personally pull the switch at Michael’s execution. Ed later told me that during the first trial, he and a father of one of the other victims sneaked a gun into the courtroom with the intention of killing Michael. In the end, neither could bring himself to do it. Neither could risk hurting someone else or getting hurt himself. Perhaps the fleeting sensation of being in control of Michael’s fate as he had been in control of their daughters’ lives was enough to assuage their urge to kill him.
    When Michael and Satti finally appeared in court that afternoon, they reported that they were making progress but that there was more work to be done. Satti outlined for the court what had and had not been agreed to in minute detail. They would report back to the court in a month.
    My immediate concern was to report on the hearing. I had been there not just to write a future article, but also to report for the
Law Tribune
on each hearing I attended. From the tone of Michael’s magazine article in the
Northeast
, I believed that he was so tired or depressed that he actually wanted to die, so the lead of my story about the hearing read, “Convicted serial killer Michael Ross wants to die, but in volunteering to waive a new death penalty hearing, he unwittingly may be delaying his execution.”
    Within a few days of the article’s publication, Michael sent a letter with a number of enclosures, including his competency report and a gentle upbraiding, saying he had sent the competency report “to show that I’m not incompetent and well aware of what I am doing, but, more importantly, to show you that I have very concrete reasons why I am doing this. When reporters write ‘Michael Ross wants to die,’ they areincorrect. I have no death wish and would much prefer to receive an effective natural life sentence.” However, he said the cost to achieve that would be too high.
    Michael was becoming even more of a contradiction: He was against the death penalty but willing to accept it for himself. He wanted to live but felt that he could not fight for his own life because it would hurt the families.
    Michael continued to send me more and more information about his case. He was clearly obsessed with “getting” Satti, and I sensed that there was more to the story than Michael’s offer to die. Did Michael get a fair trial in 1987? Were there mistakes or acts of misconduct by officers and prosecutors? Was Michael really mentally ill, or was that a mere excuse for his murderous conduct? Did his drugs change him? Had he changed significantly since committing the murders? Answering those questions was going to require an interview not only with Michael, but also with the few people who really knewhim.

4
NEW LONDON COURTHOUSE
    NOVEMBER 9, 1995
    While I was waiting for
State v. Ross
to be called in the New London Courthouse several weeks after the first hearing I attended, a man