Free The Man in the Monster by Martha Elliott

was on death row. Dr. Berlin became my guide to understanding Michael’s mental illness and his medication.
    He was adamant from the very beginning that the diagnosis of sexual sadism was correct. He explained that a sexual sadist is someone whose sex drive is attached to the wrong type of behavior—in this case inflicting pain and injury on someone else. Having a paraphiliac disorder meansthat there is something different about a person’s sexual makeup. It can be either the kinds of partners that one is attracted to sexually—children, corpses, animals—or it can be the sexual behaviors one craves, for example, exhibitionism. In Michael’s case, it was “recurrent erotic urges and fantasies that drive [the sadism],” Dr. Berlin explained. “[The urges] are driven by a powerful biological drive.” His ultimate climax resulted from degrading and killing a woman.
    I asked Dr. Berlin how a person can become a sexual sadist. “The question is really how do any of us develop the sexual desires that we have.” Dr. Berlin said. “How is it that some people are recurrently attracted to children, a diagnosis of pedophilia? Why is it that some men are aroused by dressing up in female clothing?” He said there are three reasons that are sometimes intertwined. The first is that none of these desires are voluntary. “No one as a little kid sits down and weighs their options of what kind of sexual desires they are going to experience as they grow older. People discover the nature of their own sexual makeup, and in the case of Michael Ross, he discovered that he was afflicted with intense recurrent sexual fantasies and urges about causing others to suffer and even causing their death.” There’s also nature versus nurture. In some cases, children have been warped in their sexual development because of traumatic sexual experiences during childhood. A significant number of pedophiles were sexually abused as children. But recent research data has also shown in some cases that abnormal sexual cravings may have resulted because something went wrong at a biological level. “No one is interested in having sex because we read a book and decide it makes sense. Those feelings well up inside because of our biology, because of chromosomes and hormones and areas of the brain that are clearly relevant to sexuality.” Dr. Berlin helped me understand the possible explanations for Michael’s condition, but he could offer no easy answers.
    Researchers have discovered that there are differences in the brainsof a significant number of sexual sadists. In Michael’s case, lesions were discovered on his brain that might help explain his loss of control—although Dr. James Merikangas, the neurologist and psychiatrist who examined him in the 1990s, could not explain how or why those lesions could actually produce murderous behavior. Someone may have lesions but not be violent. He explained that doctors don’t understand how the lesions result in loss of control, but they do know that there is a connection between the two. The brain scans of sexual sadists often appear different from those of normal patients’ scans.
    Dr. Berlin’s and Dr. Merikangas’s explanations only made me more curious. What was Michael’s childhood like? Had anyone else in his family been diagnosed with similar mental illnesses? How do lesions affect self-control? Some of my questions had easy answers that would just take some additional reporting, but others only led to more questions.
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    O ver the course of the next few months, I found that Michael was easy to talk to, and slowly I began to realize that the serial killer was never going to jump out and grab me. The man who emerged was soft-spoken, self-effacing, and even funny. He was sometimes articulate and sometimes slipped back into a farm-boy dialect with faulty grammar. It came out most when he