Convicted murderer Michael Bruce Ross. Photo credit: Connecticut Department of Corrections.
Martha Elliott was nervous and apprehensive when she began her first conversation with Michael Ross.
“I was petrified. I knew he had raped and murdered eight women,” Elliott says. “The first time I talked to him on the phone I hung up and I was totally soaking wet [with sweat] even though it was the dead of winter.”
In person, however, the killer defied the journalist’s expectations.
“What I found was an articulate, intelligent, religious and thoughtful man,” Elliott tells Steve Fast. “He did horrific things. He knew he did horrific things and there’s no way of making the two people be one because they are so different.”
Elliott began her communication with Ross in 1995 when the convicted murderer was seeking an impasse to the a ruling that has overturned his Connecticut court death penalty sentences. Ross wanted to avoid a re-trial and go directly to Death Row.
After several interviews resulted in coverage of the murderer’s legal status, Ross called the journalist every week for ten years. Even though she was not actively working on a story about Ross, Elliott kept taking the calls from prison.
“I honestly didn’t have the heart not to take his calls when he kept calling me,” Elliott says. “I guess he became my community service.”
Elliott has written about Ross, his victims and the killer’s battles with the legal system in seeking his own execution in the book “The Man in the Monster.”
Listen to the interview: Martha Elliott on The Steve Fast Show
Follow Steve Fast on Twitter @SteveFastShow
