The Roadside Strangler

Michael Ross’s childhood growing up on a Connecticut chicken farm might have looked idyllic from the outside, but in reality, he was raised in a household full of turmoil. Born in 1959, Michael was the eldest of Patricia Laine and Dan Ross’s four children, and he was also Patricia’s least favorite. She was physically abusive to all of her kids, but Michael was the one who received the most severe beatings. As well as the abuse that she dished out, Patricia also abandoned her young family for a period of time when the children were young, and at one point, she was institutionalized. 

As a young child, Michael was allegedly sexually abused by one of his uncles - and, when he was six, that uncle took his own life. After living through his own sexual abuse, Michael went on to molest two girls during his preteens. Even after his victims came forward about the assaults, he repeatedly insisted that he hadn’t assaulted the girls - they had just been “playing doctors” together. As a punishment for these incidents, he was once again beaten by his parents.

Despite becoming a sex offender at a young age, Michael was a surprisingly successful student, keeping to himself but maintaining good grades. When he graduated from high school, he decided to study economics at Cornell University, New York - and it was during his time at Cornell that he truly developed his habit of obsessively stalking young women. The stalking started during his sophomore year, and escalated to sexually assaulting one of his victims during his final year of college. Michael graduated from Cornell in May 1981 - and, that same month, he committed his first murder.

Just like the stalking, once Michael started to kill his victims after assaulting them, he didn’t stop. Between May 1981 and June 1984, Michael took the lives of at least eight confirmed female victims. The oldest victim was also his first - 25-year-old university student Dzung Ngoc Tu - and the youngest were April Brunais and Leslie Shelley, who were only 14 years old when they were killed. 

Michael followed a clear pattern when carrying out his crimes. He picked up most of his victims while they were hitchhiking or walking alongside the side of the road, then kidnapped and sexually assaulted them before strangling them to death. Strangely, he never looked his victims in the eye while killing them - instead, he strangled them from behind. He made some effort to dispose of the bodies in remote locations, but not enough effort to prevent the remains from eventually being discovered.  As law enforcement and the media began to pick up on the connection between the crimes, Michael was given the nickname “The Roadside Strangler”

On the 13th of June 1984, Michael picked up 17-year-old Wendy Baribeault - not knowing that she would be his last victim. Just like the seven girls before her, Wendy was sexually assaulted and strangled, and her remains were discovered several days later. However, unlike the other victims, multiple witnesses had seen the abduction take place… and their detailed descriptions of the Roadside Strangler’s vehicle eventually led authorities to Michael Ross, who happened to live close to the dump sites where each of the bodies had been discovered. 

When Michael was confronted and arrested, he went quietly, even confessing that he was the killer. He agreed to take investigators to the locations where he had dumped several of the bodies. In late 1985, he pleaded no contest to two of the murders, resulting in a 120 year prison sentence. 

In July 1987, Michael was found guilty of committing another four out of the eight murders that he confessed to… and this time, the judge sentenced him to death. For more than 17 years, he was imprisoned, waiting for the date of his execution. During his time on death row, Michael was discovered to have been the perpetrator of another murder - the killing of 16-year-old Paula Pererra in 1982, resulting in another 8 years being added to his sentence.

Despite her young age, Paula had struggled with mental health issues, and the year before her murder, she had even tried to take her own life by overdosing. However, she survived the suicide attempt - and when her peers at school found out, they started making fun of her and calling her “Tylenol”. Because of the bullying, Paula stopped taking the bus to school, choosing to hitchhike instead. Her boyfriend tried to convince her to just take the bus because he was worried about her safety, but Paula told him, “Only nice people pick me up.”

Then, in March 1982, Paula had hitchhiked home from school - and the driver of the car was the last person to see her alive. Almost three weeks after Paula disappeared, her body was found dumped on the side of the road in New York. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled to death. For more than a decade, the case was unsolved…until Michael admitted that he had been involved in two murders in New York, one of which seemed to match the details of the Paula Pererra case. 

To confirm Michael’s claims, investigators collected and analyzed Michael’s DNA, comparing it to samples that had been taken from Paula’s clothing. The samples matched - Michael had been the driver who had picked up Paula while she was trying to catch a ride home from school. During one of his police interviews about Paula’s murder, Michael admitted, “As soon as I saw her, she was dead.”

While Michael was imprisoned, he found love with a woman named Susan Powers, who quickly became his fiancee. She didn’t care that he was a serial killer - she loved him anyway, and believed that he had changed his ways.  Although Susan eventually broke up with Michael, she remained loyal to him, and kept visiting him in prison for the rest of his life. As well as his bond with Susan, Michael spent a lot of his time behind bars exploring religion, as he had quickly turned to Catholicism after he was arrested. Before long, he was a practicing Catholic, praying the rosary every single day, and having regular meetings with priests. 

Catholicism gave Michael a deep sense of peace about his own mortality. Even though he did not morally agree with the death penalty, he began to agree with the decision that he should personally be sentenced to death, claiming that this was because he “wanted to spare his victims’ families any more pain.” He was aware that the process of changing his death sentence to a less severe penalty would result in countless hours in court, during which the families of his victims would have to relive their trauma. 

A Cornell University graduate named Kathy Yeager argued that Michael was able to accept his death sentence because he truly believed that his sins were forgiven by God - including all of the sexual assaults and murders he had committed. “He’s not being punished,” she said. “He’s moving on to life eternal. That’s what is ironic about the death penalty…he’s looking forward to the peace.”

Finally, Michael’s execution was scheduled for the 26th of January, 2005. Only one hour beforehand, his lawyer managed to arrange a stay of execution, putting the execution on hold for another two days. It was rescheduled for 2am on the 29th of January, but once again, it was postponed - this time, because there were doubts about Michael’s mental competence after his lawyer claimed that he was affected by a condition called “death row syndrome”, which was known to cause delusions and suicidal tendencies in patients who had spent a long time waiting for their execution dates.

Despite the allegations of death row syndrome, the execution went ahead several months later. Michael Ross died on the 13th of May, 2005, at the age of 45. He was executed by lethal injection. Shortly before the execution was carried out, he was asked if he had any last words - and, keeping his eyes closed, he calmly responded, “No thank you.” It was the first execution to take place in New England in more than 4 decades, and the only lethal injection to ever take place in the state of Connecticut. 

When Michael died, he was more than twice the age of most of his victims. He’d graduated college, found love, and found religion. Despite the legal drama surrounding his execution, he died peacefully - a privilege that he had already taken from each of the girls that he murdered.