Read Online The Man in the Monster by Martha Elliott - Free Book Online

you write your story, I want you to have pictures of all of them on your desk.”
    The only topic off-limits was his religious views. He explained that he had discussed his religious feelings once with a reporter, and the conversation had been distorted. “He said that I said, ‘God made me do it,’ which is totally not true.”
    â€œI’d never say that God made you do it. Hell, no,” I said. “I’d say the devil made you do it.” Michael laughed. It was my first successful stab at tearing down his wall of defenses. It would take years before he would ever talk about his faith with me—other than reports about his visits with Father John—and he did so first through a journal he started keeping. Some of those discussions would not come until we were literally sitting a few feet from the execution chamber. I eventually realized how desperately he wanted to believe that God forgave him for what he had done, in the same childlike way that he wanted some tangible proof that he was mentally ill.
    In our first phone call, I did not press him about the details of the crimes because he still scared me. But there were a few questions I had to ask about his mental state when he killed. Michael had written me that when a killing was over, it was like walking through a door, so in an early telephone conversation I asked him if he could explain what he meant. “After they were dead, it was a very distinct feeling that all of a sudden I realized what had happened. I mean I knew what was going on when I was killing them. I never blacked out or anything like that. It was on a different level. It’s hard to explain.” He told me that the door analogy wasn’t accurate but that it explained how quickly he would become aware of what he’d done. He’d realize “my heart was pounding, really bad, really beating in my chest. And the next thing I remember was my hands were cramped, and they actually hurt. And the next thing I remember is that I felt fear because I was realizing there was another body.”
    It didn’t make sense to me that a man of his intelligence—an IQ of 122—hadn’t realized that what he had done was wrong and that he needed professional help after he had killed someone.
    â€œAt some point when you were having these urges and then raping and killing women, didn’t some part of you say, ‘This isn’t normal’? Why didn’t you get psychiatric help?” I asked.
    â€œI kept telling myself that it would end, that I could control myself. Plus, you don’t understand how I was brought up. People didn’t go to shrinks. That showed weakness. Psychiatric problems were just an excuse. You just sucked it up and went on—and I was too ashamed to tell anyone what was going on inside my head. It disgusted me. What would anyone else think?”
    â€œDidn’t you know what you were doing was wrong?”
    â€œYes, but I kept telling myself it would never happen again. I was in denial.”
    This was not the whole truth. I later learned that Michael told Dr. Howard Zonana, the psychiatrist who evaluated him for the defense in 1985 but who was never called by the defense, that he actually forgot about some of the killings. It wasn’t that he forgot
about
them because he could remember them if prompted, but that they were completely gone from his conscious memory. As Michael later told me, “I don’t know how, but I really forgot about some of them. I know it doesn’t make sense, but it’s true.”
    Soon Michael began calling me on an almost daily basis. He regarded reporters as a lifeline. The courts had rejected his mental illness, and the only way he was going to get his story out was to tell it to people who could write about it. I was not the first reporter to whom he had told his story, but I was his current hope. He was powerless without help, and to get help, he had to surrender