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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast, the podcast dedicated to Serial Killers. I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Weiborg2. It's mid-summer here in Norway, and before I leave for my brief summer vacation, I wanted to share with you, the listener, a little treat to nibble on while we wait for the cold of autumn. We stay in the United States of America, but we do not visit a Serial Killer that is in any way famous.
This Serial Killer is, as so many of the lesser known are, just as evil and depraved as the Serial Killer Superstars. But for some reason his name has faded from the public memory. He operated in the early 1980s, starting the same year I was born, 1981. We know how many women he murdered.
And he was apprehended before his body count could rise, as it surely would have if he had not been stopped. Eight young women fell victim to Michael Bruce Ross, also known as the Eggman. And this episode is part one in a two-part exposé of his life and crimes. I am very fond of doing this show, and I could not do it without you, the listener.
However, even though I from time to time have great sponsors, in order to keep the show going, I am very much dependent on my dear patrons. If you enjoy the show, please head on over to patreon.com forward slash the Serial Killer podcast. There you can join the $10 plus club, where everyone who donates $10 or more gets 100% exclusive access to bonus episodes and content. Right now there are three such episodes out, and they really add spies to the show.
Remember, patreon.com forward slash the Serial Killer podcast to support the show and gain exclusive benefits as an official TSK producer. Summer's is a town in Tollum County, Connecticut. The population was 11,444 at the 2010 census. And as such, it is a quiet suburban place filled with mostly upper middle class families.
Houses in the area are large and stately looking. The town center looks very much like it has been taken out of a Stephen King novel. It's idyllic, with a very handsome white church, called the Summer's Congregation Hall in the town center, right across from Summer's Town Hall, a low key brick and wood building. Just seven miles from the town hall lies Osborne Correctional Institution, where Serial Killer Michael Bruce Ross was pronounced dead at 2.25 am the 13th of May 2005.
He was the first convict executed in New England in 45 years. But before we go into more detail about Ross's final fate, let us flip back to pages of time to the beginning of the tragic tale of Michael Bruce Ross. Daniel and Patricia Ross's marriage was beset with problems from the beginning. The troubles began while Patricia, called Pat, was in high school and became unexpectedly pregnant, which led to their forced union.
According to a 1996 article by Martha Elliot, in the Connecticut Law Tribune, Pat wanted no part of the marriage or of being the wife of a chicken farmer in Brooklyn, Connecticut. Yet, at the time, she had little choice. Michael Bruce Ross was born on the 26th of July, 1959. He would be the first of four children born to the hapless couple over the space of five years.
During Michael's youth, there was evidence that his mother wrought with psychiatric problems mentally and physically abused him. In fact, Pat purportedly became so psychologically unstable and volatile towards her children that she was admitted to a psychiatric institution on at least two separate occasions, and Daniel eventually became the primary guardian of the children. When Michael was only eight years old, there was evidence that his teenage uncle, who babysat him and formed a close bond with the boy, made Michael perform oral sex on him, and eventually coalesced a young boy into being repeatedly anally raped. The uncle, who in his final letter to the world, explained that he was a homosexual, shot himself in the head with a 22-caliber rifle at only 16 years of age.
After his uncle committed suicide, the job of killing sick and malformed chickens became eight-year-old Michael's responsibility. He would strangle the chickens with his hands. As Michael got older, more of the farm responsibilities became his, and by the time he was in high school, his father depended a lot on Ross's help. Michael loved farm life and met his responsibilities while also attending high school, with a high IQ of 122, balancing school with farm life was manageable.
In 1977, Ross entered Cornell University and studied agricultural economics. He began dating a woman who was in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps, ROTC, and dreamed of someday marrying her. When the woman became pregnant and had an abortion, the relationship began to falter, and after she decided to sign up for a four-year service commitment, the relationship ended. In retrospect, Ross says in interviews that as the relationship became more troubled, he began to have fantasies that were sexually violent.
Catherine Davis reported in the Cornell Daily Sun in October 2000 that while at school, Michael was socially active and joined several organizations, including the Alpha Zeta fraternity and the Future Farmers of America. Moreover, he became involved in several relationships with some beautiful young co-eds, one to which he became engaged. But, despite being engaged to another woman, Ross's fantasies were starting to consume him. It didn't take long for Michael's fantasies to spiral out of control.
During his second year at school, Michael started to stalk young women he fantasized about from afar. Eventually, his violent sexual urges took on a new dimension when he began raping many of the women he stalked. Amazingly, he evaded capture for a couple of years. However, in September 1981, shortly after his graduation, he finally landed himself in jail for assaulting a young teenage girl.
Now, the early Sun, reading about Ross, especially his developing years from high school through college, reminds your humble host Moore and Moore of Ted Bundy. There were both attractive young men, both sporting a good physique and good head of thick dark hair, and both were highly intelligent. Bundy had a reported IQ of about 136 and Ross 122. Both had a troubled childhood and both started developing paraphilic fantasies early in life.
They both were very popular with women in their age group, and they both fantasized about murdering those women in gruesome ways. Even behaviorally, they were similar. Ted, just as Michael, began by stalking women and acting as a peeping charm before such behaviors simply weren't enough. Thus, they began to rape women before ultimately evolving into full-blown torture and murder, which escalated until they were caught.
They even started their criminal behavior in the same decade, the 1970s. Ted was, however, somewhat earlier than Michael, starting to murder women in the 1970s, while Michael only stalked and raped women in the 1970s and murdered his first victim in 1981. At the time of his first rape that he got caught for, Michael was working as a management trainee for a car-gill incorporated in North Carolina. During a business trip to Illinois, he kidnapped a 16-year-old girl, dragged her into the woods and gagged her before being interrupted by the police in mid-activity.
Michael was arrested for unlawfully restraining the girl, was fined $500 and put on probation. The police had no idea that a man they arrested and subsequently let go was responsible for not only assault but something far more sinister. That may, in 1981, the body of Zungnok II, 25 years old, was discovered in Fall Creek, located at the bottom of a gorge in Ithaca, New York State. The young woman was a student at Cornell University and described as a highly intelligent, quiet young woman from Vietnam.
The gorge she was found in was beneath a bridge, where several people every year chose to commit suicide by jumping off it. As such, initially police believed that she committed suicide. Eventually, however, they realized that Zungn was actually the victim of a brutal rape and murder. Her body showed signs of being severely vaginally raped and strangled before being thrown off the bridge.
Michael's violent fantasies had finally taken a deadly toll, and Zungn would be considered his first known murder victim. It was his lifelong career, working with egg-producing poultry that gave Ross his rather silly nickname of the Eggman. Once he was off probation, he needed a job, and his mother used her connections to get him an interview with Croton egg farms in Croton, Ohio. A week before, he was to start his new job, he drove an announce to Cornell to visit his fiancé Betsy.
He was waiting for her at the apartment when she came home with another man, a fraternity brother of Michael's. According to a later interview given by Michael, the situation turned awkward, and although Betsy claimed that the other man was just a friend, Michael Ross thought both of them actually knew better. Monday morning, 1 March 1982, Michael started the drive back to Connecticut, but was still upset about the other man. Instead of calming down during the long drive, his anxiety and rage increased.
It was then he saw a girl hitchhiking along the road in front of a high school. The family had moved from New Jersey when she was in elementary school. Paula lived with her single mother and siblings in a trailer at the Valleyview Mobile Home Park in Middletown, New York. All her friends knew that her dysfunctional family life was drained, so she spent as much time as possible at her friends' homes.
Her friends said that when she visited their happy two-parent homes, she would say, I never knew people had lives like this. She never complained, but apparently the stress of an unhappy home became too much for her. In October 1981, she tried to commit suicide by swallowing pills, and was nicknamed Tylenol by teasing classmates thereafter. She seemingly got over her suicidal tendencies, however, and Paula liked to ride her bike, along route to 11, or hitchhiking to town, or to one of her friends' house.
Her friends begged her not to hitchhike, but she kept telling them that only nice people picked her up. On the 1 March, that fateful Monday in 1982, she left school early because she didn't feel well. Her intention was to go to her boyfriend's house a few miles from school. But she never made it.
Michael Ross drove past her, turned around, and then picked her up. She gave him directions, which he followed until he suddenly pulled off into a deserted area. He then dragged her out of the car, forced her to undress, and told her to get on her knees and give him oral sex. When he was fully erect, he pushed her on her stomach and savagely raped her first vaginally and then anally, causing massive pain and probably bleeding.
As she was screaming out in pain and fear, he finally took hold of her throat from behind and strangled her for several minutes until she died. He left her body out in the brush, naked, to the critters, animal, and elements. Then he got back into the car and drove home. About a week later, on his way to his new job, he drove past a site where he had killed Paula, although he didn't know her name and wouldn't, until nearly two decades later when he officially confessed to the crime to New York police.
According to Michael, he didn't go back to the actual site, like he reportedly did with his other victims. He wanted to, but was afraid of being seen in the area. He kept driving to his new job at Croton Egg Farms as an assistant complex manager in charge of 40 workers and 1.2 million egg layers. Donald Harvey, a truck driver at Croton, told police that Michael was belligerent and didn't know it all at work.
He also kept our dows, sometimes coming and going late at night. According to coworkers, Michael Ross had no friends. This is symptomatic of psychopathic sexually motivated serial killers, especially it's the case for the high functioning ones such as Ted Bundy and Michael Ross. Outwardly, they managed to appear confident, charming, and very much normal to their surroundings.
But, as they descend into murderous behaviour, kidnapping, torturing and killing more and more victims, they seem to withdraw from society at large. They acquire few new friends and their behaviour gets increasingly erratic. It was during his time in Ohio that Betsy told him that she didn't wear the engagement ring anymore, because if she did, no one would ask her to dance at parties. He knew his relationship with her was over, but he still couldn't admit it fully to himself.
This situation probably only fueled how his obsessive, sadistic behaviours became more frequent. He began driving around almost every night looking for women. On the 26th of April, 1982, Michael spotted a woman leaving a laundromat in Jonestown, Ohio, at about 10.30 pm and followed her home. Sharon, which is not her real name, was a police officer with the Columbus Police Department.
She was driving her car and said she thought she saw a small red car following her, but was not certain. She arrived home at about 11.30 to an empty house because her husband was working. Instead of trying to grab her when she got out of her car or, breaking to her house, Michael went through an elaborate charade, knocking on her front door and pretending that he had car trouble. He even told her his real name when he asked to use her phone, pretending to call someone but actually dialing his own apartment.
He told her that there was no answer and asked to borrow a flashlight to look under the hood of his car. According to Michael Ross himself, she was in the kitchen cutting up vegetables when he came back. She says he asked for a phone book and he used a phone again. When she returned with the phone book, he had put a glove on his right hand.
He grabbed her around a neck and threw her to the floor, dazing her with her head hit. The police report says that he pinned her arms back and had his leg over her as they wrestled on the floor. He punched her in the face over her and over, perhaps as many as ten times. She said that the first two punches hurt considerably and then it went numb.
He was choking her with one hand and punching her with another. She felt herself about to pass out but pulled one arm free and reached up and yanked his hair as hard as she could and with that he let her go. Sharon got up but he lunged at her and they fell on a stone fireplace with Michael on top of her knocking the wind out of her. Surprisingly, he suddenly got up and ran and she ran after him.
When she reached a road, they stopped and stared at each other for a moment before she ran back. The police had been back to the house to get her gun but by that time he had driven off in his car. A few days later, police came to Michael's office and said a woman had been attacked by someone using his name and asked if he had any idea who would do such a thing. Instead of confessing, being a true psychopath, he saw the opportunity to cause someone else a lot of hardship and pain and as such Michael gave them a list of people who had been recently fired.
The police were not so easily fooled however and a few days after that the police showed up at his apartment and asked him to step out onto the front porch. The woman he had attacked was in the police car and looked to see if she could identify him. When the police left he assumed she had not recognised him but he was arrested at work the next morning. After his sister Donna bailed him out, he returned to Connecticut to a wait trial.
17-year-old Tammy Williams was a high school dropout, a street kid according to the missing person report that was filed after her disappearance. Originally from the area she had lived with her mother, Norma Deems in Honolulu, Hawaii. But moved back to live with her father and stepmother in Brooklyn when she was 13. According to the police report, her father did not take any steps to control her and let her do as she pleased.
If she did not attend school, he didn't force her. At times, she remained away from home for long periods of time but would notify her parents of her well-being. She didn't have a criminal record other than an arrest for disturbing the peace when she was fighting with another girl. She stayed out of trouble but did what she wanted.
During the holidays in the fall of 1981, Tammy had been hired by Kings Department Store in Danville to work part-time in their camera department. Apparently she had finally found something that she enjoyed. She showed promise according to her supervisor. To her friends, she seemed happy that she had found a job that she liked.
Monday, the 4th of January 1982, Tammy spent the night on a friend's couch. The next morning she left and then stopped to see her boyfriend, Andy Willett, at his house on Dyer Street in Danielson, Connecticut, at about 9am on the 5th of January 1982. He was 20 years old and they had been dating for a year. According to Willett, they chatted for about an hour and then Tammy left to walk to her apartment on Prince Hill Road.
Several people saw her on the way home, including two friends, who talked to her when she dropped in at the Brooklyn Bowl Yally. They told police that she was in a good mood and told them she had to work that evening and left. Some time around 11am, as Tammy was walking along Route 6 in Brooklyn, Michael Ross spotted her. He was driving to a satellite farm to prepare it for a batch of baby chicks that were to arrive soon.
When he saw Tammy, whom he said he didn't know even though they lived about a mile apart, Ross pulled off the road behind her. A school bus driver who knew her reported that she saw Tammy walking west on Route 6 and that a white male was following her. Michael also recognised the school bus driver and later varied than she would identify him. Another witness said she saw a white male running through the fields towards Tammy.
A third witness, driving by a little later, reported to police that he had seen Tammy tussling with a white male with dark hair, wearing a hip-length coat, dark in colour. The man had his arm around Tammy's neck, quote unquote, as if they were playfully wrestling. But there was nothing playful in that grasp. And Tammy's 5'2", and 100 pounds or 45 kilos were no match for Michael's 6'1", and 165 pounds or 75 kilos.
Michael's report of what happened next is sketchy. I quote, I grabbed her from behind and dragged her into the woods. I brought her to my car, bound her hands and drove her about a mile away to a deserted area of South Street, where I could pull my car off the road and not be seen. End quote.
Once he was sure he was out of sight, he took her out of the car and dragged her even deeper into the woods, making sure that no passersby could see them. Then he began what had become his ritual. He forced her to undress, made her perform oral sex on him while on her knees, and forcibly raped her vaginally. Then he turned her over on her stomach and straddled her as he strangled her.
After well over a minute of excruciating pain, she finally died, and as always, he ejaculated as she did so. He proceeded to drag her corpse to his car and stuffed her into the trunk before he drove off, looking for a place to dispose of the corpse. Deborah Smith Taylor was living with her parents in June 1982. Her marriage of a year and a half had been stormy.
Her husband, James, was possessive and suspicious that she was seeing other men, so when they were together, they were often quarreling and often drinking. She was very petite at four feet, eleven inches. According to what James told police, she had a serious operation in April and in June weighed less than 86 pounds. On the 15th of June 1982, Debbie told her mother that she was going out for a drive, not mentioning that James would be with her, because she knew her mother might object.
According to what James told the police, they drove around all day, drinking beer and talking. At one point, they went into Rhode Island, took a walk on the beach, and then returned to Connecticut to continue to bar hop. They ran out of gas in a remote area of Danielson, Connecticut. A trooper picked them up and took them to a gas station, but he couldn't take them back to the car, because he had been summoned on a police matter.
Debbie began quarreling with her husband. Angry and drunk, James hit her, threw the gas can into a ditch, and then began hitchhiking in the opposite direction. James later told police that he didn't think she would hitchhike. But that if she was offered a ride and a drink, she would accept, especially if she had been drinking.
Debbie kept walking, but never made it to her car, because Michael Ross stopped agreeing to give her ride to Jewett City. He had been out on the prow, unable to control his urges to go on a hunt. He picked up Debbie and took her to a remote cornfield in Canterbury. After he stopped the car, he told her to get out, and according to Michael, she was very cooperative and did whatever she was told.
He ordered her to take off all her clothes, and perform oral sex on him, which she did without question. Then he ordered her to lie down so he could rape her, which she did, vaginally. Apparently, Deborah managed to keep cool during her ordeal. She didn't refuse, Michael, and obliged to his commands.
She also told him her only concern was that she got home in time to wake up her younger brother for school. However, even though Deborah stayed brave in the face of evil, she never made it back to her little brother. When he had ejaculated inside her, his anger grew, and already being behind her, he took hold of her neck and strangled her to death. When she was dead, he put the body in the car, drove to a more remote location on the farm, and put the body in a shallow stream bed under some brush.
He visited this location several times after the murder. He had hidden the body far enough of the main road that he felt secure, in visiting the site and staying as long as he could, while he stared at her remains, probably masturbating to the memory of her murder. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. This podcast would not be possible if it had not been for my dear patrons who pledged their hard money every month.
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