On June 13, 1984, Wendy Baribeault, seventeen, of Lisbon, Connecticut, was last seen walking along State Highway 12 toward a convenience store. Witnesses remembered a thin white man with glasses following her. That description led the state police to Michael Bruce Ross, a twenty-four-year-old insurance salesman, and on June 28 he came voluntarily to the Lisbon town hall to talk to them. In a conference room, before he had been read his rights, he asked Detective Michael Malchik what kind of person could have killed Wendy and whether such a person might get psychotherapy, and then whether Malchik thought he had done it. Malchik said yes, and that what mattered most to him was that it not happen again. Ross began to confess.
He admitted Wendy's murder, then that of a nineteen-year-old killed in Norwich the previous Thanksgiving, then two fourteen-year-olds taken on Easter Sunday, then killings in Windham County, and in time eight in all. Seven of the eight had been raped. He had been killing for three years, and for most of that time nobody had connected the deaths. The confessions were corroborated by what he showed the police: in each case the bodies and clothing were where he led them, and medical testimony confirmed that all but one of the Connecticut victims had been sexually assaulted and that all had been strangled.
Ross was born on July 26, 1959, and grew up on his family's farm in Brooklyn, Connecticut. The first killing came in his senior year at Cornell. On May 12, 1981, Dzung Ngoc Tu, twenty-five, a Vietnamese graduate student in agricultural economics, was last seen studying in Warren Hall, the building where Ross worked; her body was found days later at the bottom of Fall Creek gorge, and her death was at first taken for a suicide. Ross later admitted raping and strangling her, but he was never prosecuted for it.
The others followed as he moved between Ithaca and home. Tammy Williams, seventeen, was abducted on January 5, 1982, as she walked home from her boyfriend's house in Brooklyn; her remains were found years later, hidden in a fieldstone wall. Paula Perrera, sixteen, who hitchhiked for a sense of adventure, was picked up in Wallkill, New York, in March 1982 and left in a marsh off Route 211; her case stayed unsolved for nearly two decades. Debra Smith Taylor, twenty-three, of Griswold, was taken near Danielson on June 15, 1982, after she and her husband ran out of gas and went separate ways to find help.
On Thanksgiving Day 1983 he accosted Robin Dawn Stavinsky, nineteen, of Norwich, on the grounds of the Uncas on Thames State Hospital, pulled her into a wooded area, raped her and, after ordering her onto her stomach, strangled her; he covered her body with leaves before he left. (The court records spell her first name Robyn.) Leslie Shelley had asked her father that Easter Sunday, April 22, 1984, whether she could go to the movies with her best friend, April Brunais, who lived two houses away, and he said yes; the girls told him April's mother would drive them home. Both were fourteen. Instead they were hitchhiking to Jewett City on Route 138 when he picked them up. He drove east on Route 165 past where they wanted to go, and when April pulled a knife to make him stop, he took it from her and kept driving, through eastern Connecticut and over the state line to Beach Pond in Rhode Island. There he tied both girls hand and foot, walked April a short distance from the car, raped and strangled her, and then killed Leslie without assaulting her. According to court documents, he had put Leslie in the trunk of his car, where she could hear what was happening to her friend, and that he apologized to her before he knelt on her back and strangled her. He drove the bodies back into Connecticut and left them in a culvert in Preston, where they lay for two months.
Wendy Baribeault was the last. On Route 12 in Lisbon he talked with her briefly and then pulled her over a stone wall into the woods and on to an open field, where he raped her, turned her onto her stomach and strangled her.
The Windham County cases came first. In November 1985 Ross entered pleas of nolo contendere to the murders of Tammy Williams and Debra Taylor and was sentenced to two consecutive life terms, 120 years in all. For the four New London County deaths he was charged with eight counts of capital felony. The trial court dismissed two for lack of territorial jurisdiction, since April and Leslie had died in Rhode Island, and allowed the state to proceed on the theory that their kidnapping had continued in Connecticut. At trial he did not deny the kidnappings, rapes or killings. The trial had been moved to Bridgeport because of the publicity in eastern Connecticut, and the New London state's attorney, C. Robert Satti, prosecuted it himself; the victims' families made the long drive from eastern Connecticut to follow it, and Satti met with them in the evenings after testimony. His defense was insanity. The jury rejected it and convicted him of six counts of capital felony, and on July 6, 1987, he was sentenced to death.
In 1994 the Supreme Court of Connecticut affirmed the convictions but threw out the death sentence. The trial court had kept from the penalty jury evidence the defense said would show his mental illness, centered on a diagnosis of sexual sadism and including a letter from a court-appointed psychiatrist, and the state's high court held that the statute required it to be heard. A new penalty hearing in 2000 returned death again, and in 2004 the court upheld that sentence. In 2001, from death row, he pleaded guilty in New York to first-degree manslaughter for Paula Perrera, after a confession to New York state police and a DNA match closed the case, and Judge Nicholas DeRosa of Orange County gave him eight and a third to twenty-five years. Paula's aunt, Alicia Catlos, told the court that the girl had now been dead longer than she had been alive. Ross said he had never hidden what he had done.
By then Ross wanted to stop. He waived his remaining appeals and asked to be executed, saying he wanted to spare the victims' families another round of hearings, and the last years of the case became an argument about whether a man who had spent two decades on death row could competently choose to die. His father, Dan Ross, and the state public defender tried to intervene in his name. In January 2005 a federal judge, Robert Chatigny, stayed the execution so that a full competency hearing could be held; the Second Circuit ruled that the public defender had no standing to act for him. The trial court appointed a special counsel to argue the other side, that he was not competent, and one of that counsel's experts testified that Ross's stated concern for the families masked a wish to avoid being publicly humiliated again. His own lawyer, T.R. Paulding, never wavered in his view that his client was competent.
On April 22, 2005, Judge Clifford of the Superior Court found that Ross's decision was competent and voluntary, and on May 9 the Supreme Court of Connecticut affirmed. His sister, Donna Dunham, then went to court as his next friend; the state courts turned her away, and on May 12 the Second Circuit denied a stay. The execution was set for 2:01 the next morning, Friday, May 13, 2005, at the Osborn Correctional Institution in Somers, and until the drugs began he could have stopped it by saying he wanted to appeal. He did not. He spent his last day in a holding cell with a Bible, a book of Bible verses and some candy, took communion and ate the regular prison meal. About three hundred people kept a vigil outside. In the witness room, separated by curtains, sat nine relatives of his victims, the two detectives who had first arrested him, a victims' advocate, four people he had chosen and five reporters. When the curtain opened at 2:08 he was strapped to the table with his eyes closed and his fingers wrapped in gauze. Asked whether he wished to make a final statement, he said, "No, thank you." The warden took a five-minute call to confirm there was no stay, the injection began at about 2:13, and witnesses saw him gasp and shudder and then lie still. Death was announced at 2:25. It was the state's first execution by lethal injection.
"I thought I would feel closure," said Robin Stavinsky's sister, Debbie Dupuis, "but I felt anger just watching him lay there and sleep after what he did to these women." Edwin Shelley, Leslie's father, said the families had waited twenty-one years for justice. Dzung Tu's brother, Lan Manh Tu, had come from Maryland but was not allowed to watch, because her murder had never been charged. It was the first execution in Connecticut since Joseph Taborsky went to the electric chair on May 17, 1960, and the last. The state abolished capital punishment in 2012.