Michael Ross was a Cornell graduate who strangled eight girls and women in Connecticut and New York between 1981 and 1984, raping seven of them. He confessed to all eight and was convicted of four, receiving a death sentence in 1987. After eighteen years he dropped his appeals and asked to be executed; Connecticut put him to death in 2005, the first execution in New England in forty-five years and the state’s last.
Michael Bruce Ross was a Cornell graduate working as an insurance salesman in eastern Connecticut. Between 1981 and 1984 he killed eight young women and girls, six in Connecticut and two in New York; the youngest were two fourteen-year-olds, Leslie Shelley and April Brunais, killed together in 1984. He was charged with six capital counts and convicted of four.
He was sentenced to death on July 6, 1987, and the Connecticut Supreme Court affirmed in 1994. In 2001, from death row, he pleaded guilty in New York to first-degree manslaughter over a 1982 killing and received eight and a third to twenty-five years. One of the two New York deaths was never prosecuted at all.
What made the case nationally argued was that he then stopped fighting. Ross waived his remaining appeals and asked to be executed, saying he wanted to spare the victims’ families further hearings. That turned the last four years into a dispute about whether a man on death row for two decades can competently choose to die: there were competency hearings, a reprieve refused by the governor, and a stay application brought by his own sister, which the Second Circuit denied. His father supported the execution. Some of the victims’ relatives did not.
He was executed by lethal injection at Osborn Correctional Institution in Somers on May 13, 2005, aged forty-five. It was the first execution anywhere in New England since 1960 and the last in Connecticut, which abolished capital punishment in 2012, so the state carried out one death sentence in fifty-two years, and it was one the condemned man had asked for.