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It's midsummer here in Norway, and before I leave for my brief summer vacation, I wanted to share with you, dear 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 expose of his life and crimes. I am very fond of doing this show.
And I could not do it without you, dear 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 enjoyed 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 spice 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. Somers is a town in Tolland 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 Somers Congregation Hall in the town center, right across from Somers 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 a.m. 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 the 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 Elliott 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 that 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 teenaged uncle, who babysat him and formed a close bond with the boy, made Michael perform oral sex on him, and eventually caused the 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 coeds, 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, dear listener, reading about Ross, especially his developing years from high school through college, reminds your humble host more and more of Ted Bundy. They were both attractive young men,
Both sporting a good physique, a 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 Tom, 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 70s 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 Cargill 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 the 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 Zung Nok Tu, 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 Zung was actually the victim of a brutal rape and murder. Her body showed signs of being severely beaten, vaginally raped, and strangled before being thrown off the bridge. Michael's violent fantasies had finally taken a deadly toll.
and Zung 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 unannounced to Cornell to visit his fiancée, 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 the other man was just a friend, Michael Ross thought both of them actually knew better.
Monday morning, the 1st of 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.
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This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. As a family man with three kids, I know firsthand how extremely difficult it is to make time for self-care. But it's good to have some things that are non-negotiable. For some, that could be a night out with the boys, chugging beers and having a laugh. For others, it might be an eating night.
For me, one non-negotiable activity is researching psychopathic serial killers and making this podcast. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's often near impossible to make time for it. But when you feel like you have no time for yourself, non-negotiables like therapy are more important than ever.
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Visit BetterHelp.com slash SerialKiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash SerialKiller. According to local newspaper reports about her, 16-year-old Paula Pereira was a good student and loved to read. Her high school friends described her as spunky and said that everybody loved her.
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 Valley View Mobile Home Park in Middletown, New York. All her friends knew that her dysfunctional family life was strained, 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 211, or hitchhike into 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 1st of 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 in the car and drove home. About a week later, on his way to his new job, he drove past the 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 a know-it-all at work. He also kept odd hours, sometimes coming and going late at night. According to co-workers, 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 manage to appear confident, charming, and very much normal to their surroundings. But as they descend into murderous behavior, kidnapping, torturing, and killing more and more victims, they seem to withdraw from society at large. They acquire few new friends, and their behavior 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 behaviors 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 p.m., 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.
Bert 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 break into 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 the phone again. When she returned with the phone book, he had put a glove on his right hand. He grabbed her around the 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 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 the road—
They stopped and stared at each other for a moment before she ran 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 recognized him, but he was arrested at work the next morning. After his sister Donna bailed him out, he returned to Connecticut to await trial. Seventeen-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 King's Department Store in Danville to work part-time in the 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 9 a.m. 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 bowling alley. They told police that she was in a good mood, and told them she had to work that evening and left. Sometime around 11 a.m., 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 recognized the school bus driver and later worried that 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 color.
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 feet 2 inches and 100 pounds, or 45 kilos, were no match for Michael's 6 feet 1 inch 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 4 feet 11 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 a ride to Jewett City. He had been out on the prowl, 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. 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 he 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 and 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 off 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.
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And so ends part one of the saga of the Eggman, Michael Bruce Ross. I hope you enjoyed it, and please feel free to give a review on Apple Podcasts, Facebook, Reddit.com, The SK Podcast, or elsewhere podcast reviews can be found. Join me next week, when I will tell you the final part in this tale of lust, anger, and murder. So...
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