Free The Man in the Monster by Martha Elliott Page A

was angry or when he was using humor to deflect discomfort. He had a charm that was either disarming or manipulative and cunning. I wasn’t sure. Michael and his psychiatrists acknowledged that his highly developed defense of denial sometimes hid the truth from him. Yet he seemed almost incapable of lying intentionally. When asked a question that he found difficult to answer, he would deflect it with an inappropriate nervous laugh or joke. How had he managed to keep his sense of humor after so many years on death row? “I don’t know. I must be crazy.”
    This openness was also apparent in the months just after his arrest.In nine hours of taped sessions with Dr. Zonana, Michael appeared to answer every question as truthfully as possible, even when his answers might not be in his best interest legally.
    The first time I remember him speaking about the monster as a separate person was in a telephone conversation in which he was talking about how his medications had helped him. I was startled at first. I knew he blamed his mental illness for the killings, but I had not heard him refer to it so specifically as a separate person over which he had no control. “He was cunning. He would be satisfied and go away for a while after I stalked someone or killed someone, and then I would realize what he had done and feel like a total piece of shit. But he was always there waiting to take control. My medication changed all that. He was caged. He didn’t go away completely, but he was under control.”
    He saw his decision to accept death as his way of conquering the monster. He wrote, “The one great consolation is that I will get the last laugh. I may die, but I find it quite satisfying to know that the bastard of my mind will die with me. . . . And he hates that because he knows that finally, only in death, will we be separated from one another. I will go to the light and understanding, and he will go to darkness and truly be alone—forever.”
    It was disturbing that on some level he didn’t consider himself personally responsible for what “the monster” did. “I couldn’t control him. He controlled me, and I never knew when he would reappear and take control.” Michael could live with himself by blaming his murderous behavior on an alter ego.
    Dr. Merikangas and Dr. John Cegalis, who examined Michael six times and testified as one of his psychiatric witnesses at the 1987 trial, theorized that he suffered from some type of dissociative disorder. In a dissociative disorder, a person goes into a fuguelike state and adopts a different personality. Sometimes one is aware of what is going on butfeels like an observer of the action; at other times, one has no memory of what occurred. Michael Ross was totally aware of what the monster had done and, I would later find, had experienced the pleasure that the monster had experienced when he was doing the killing. But because he saw himself as a good person—or desperately wanted to believe that he was—he could not accept that he was a lustful rapist and murderer, so he named the bad part of himself the monster.
    In addition to talking with Michael, Dr. Cegalis gave him a battery of psychological tests to aid in making a diagnosis. One such test, the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), consists of a number of ambiguously drawn pictures about which the test subject is asked to convey his feelings: What is the person in the picture thinking and feeling? What is happening? What will happen in the future? From Michael’s responses, Dr. Cegalis concluded that he had difficulty relating to other human beings and that he had a lot of anger pent up inside. The Rorschach or inkblot test revealed he had “evident psychopathology,” meaning he was mentally ill. Cegalis said that Michael had difficulties “modulating or controlling strong emotions like aggression, like violence, like fear, like sexuality.” He said