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I don't know.
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Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently, I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes. And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those onerous two-year contracts, they said, what the f*** are you talking about, you insane Hollywood a**hole?
So to recap, we're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes per detail. Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Weyborg Thun. And in tonight's episode, we conclude the saga of the Eggman.
Last week I covered the early life of Michael Bruce Ross, as well as the beginning of his series of murders. I have read some of my listeners' reviews, and it seems a small group of people seem to think I quote-unquote get off on describing details from murders committed by serial killers.
This offends me, and I am really saddened that some people actually think that. I am disgusted by the heinous acts committed by serial killers, and I abhor violence in all forms. It is no secret that I find serial killers fascinating, and the fact that millions of people listen to this show confirms I am not alone in this.
Just as many people are fascinated with the terror of Adolf Hitler's Nazi dictatorship in the 1930s and 40s, it does not mean that all those people love Nazism. The opposite is most likely the case. I, too, am fascinated by history, with all its terrible and magnificent details. But I do not condone of the horrors that humankind have committed.
Serial killers represent the absolute worst in humanity. They are not only killers, but killers who enjoy killing and torturing again and again. There is no worse crime one can commit, and I think it is valuable to learn as much as we can about them. If we can,
come some way in understanding evil, we might be able to fight it more effectively. Truth has a value in itself, and I think I would do my listeners a disservice if I were to gloss over the brutal facts in the sagas of serial killers.
In order to truly understand the depths of evil these people sink to, we must face the gruesome reality of their actions, not the Hollywood version of it.
What you are going to hear in this episode is at times very graphic. I do not take pleasure in giving you these horrendous details, but I do think they are absolutely necessary in order to truly understand what Michael Bruce Ross did and what sort of man he was. 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. From behind, there was nothing they could have said about them. It was me, it wasn't them. They were dead as soon as I saw them, I think. What you just heard was a brief recording of an interview with Michael Bruce Ross, where he, in his own words, describes his crimes.
One of the girls that in his eyes were dead as soon as he saw her was 19-year-old Robin Dawn Stavinsky. She had just moved from Colombia to Norwich, where she hoped to find a job that paid enough that would allow her to go to college. In August 1983, she took a job as a switchboard operator at DPM Enterprises.
At 9.30 p.m. on Wednesday, the 16th of November, 1983, she disappeared after apparently arguing with her boss. Although it was cold and dark, Robin refused a ride from a workmate and, in what proved to be a fateful mistake, decided to walk to her boyfriend's house alone.
That evening, Michael Ross was driving along Route 52 between New London and Norwich, where he saw Robin walking briskly along the roadside. He stopped, climbed out of his car and approached her with the offer of a lift.
She rebuffed him, he became angry, and dragged her struggling into a patch of dense woodland just a few hundred meters from the office of the Connecticut State Police Major Crime Squad. Ross had started to strangle Robin as soon as he grabbed her, and by the time he was ready to rape the young woman, she was barely conscious.
According to Ross, in later interviews, he was by then no longer excited by the idea of sex, and his satisfaction came about only from the act of killing. Thus he didn't rape Robin when she was alive, but finished strangling her, ejaculating as he saw her dying.
Then he raped her dead body, several times before leaving the body barely covered by a bunch of leaves, before driving off. Ross had by now killed five young women. So far, all had been over the age of sixteen. But just as Ted Bundy escalated his crimes to be more and more depraved, so did Ross.
He wanted his victims to be as lithe and innocent as possible. And just shy of five months after murdering Robin, he found what he was hunting for. Physically, they were as different as night and day. Leslie Shelley was blonde and, as her father described her, a beanpole at 4 feet 11 inches and 85 pounds.
"'April Brunet had brown hair, and was chunky at five feet five inches and one hundred and sixty pounds. "'No stranger would have suspected that they were less than seven months apart in age.'
Yet Leslie Shelley and April Brunet were inseparable 14-year-olds who had been the best of friends for nearly six years, ever since April had moved into a house two doors away in Griswold, Connecticut. Mimicking the cabbage patch doll craze, they had adopted each other as sisters, even filling out mock adoption papers.
Their notes to each other were signed L-Y-A-L-A-S. That stands for Love You Always Like a Sister. Typical teenage girls. Their world consisted of clothes, makeup, a few select boys, and making sure they never missed a school dance. The parameters of their universe were set by school and their parents.
When they hung out at the Shelley's, they'd go down to the basement, where there was a bed and a collection of heavy metal albums owned by Leslie's older brother Edwin. They'd play them so loud that it would drive Leslie's father crazy. April, less than a month shy of her 15th birthday, was already a freshman at Griswold High School.
Leslie was nearly finished with the eighth grade at Griswold Elementary School, where she had successfully worked her way through the remedial reading program. Despite being extremely shy, Leslie was excited about moving on to high school and joining her best friend there, and had filled out the paperwork during the first week of April. Although she had been baptized a Roman Catholic,
Leslie had gravitated to a local Protestant church, where she rarely missed Sunday school. On Easter Sunday, the 22nd of April, 1984, Leslie had attended church services before spending the afternoon with April. That afternoon, they were looking for something to do, something that did not involve grown-ups.
This time, they were plotting to go to Jewett City, a town a little more than three miles away. The trick was getting their parents to let them go. Ed Shelley was sitting in his living room watching television when April and Leslie came into the house. April stayed on the landing, a half-story lower, as Leslie went up to woo her father. "'Can I go to the movies with April?' she asked."
"'Give me a kiss,' Ed teased, pointing to his unshaven face. Leslie leaned over and gave him a peck on the cheek. The girls told Ed that the broods, April's mother and stepfather, were driving them.
As they went to leave, Jennifer, then eight, asked if she could go along. But sensing that Leslie didn't really want her baby sister tagging along, Ed decided that Jennifer would stay home. Ellen Rood, on the other hand, was told that the pair was going to meet friends for pizza, and that the Shelleys were giving them a ride.
In all likelihood, the girls cut across a neighbor's yard and hiked over the golf course, knocking a few miles off the trip and keeping out of sight. Only April and Leslie know the truth of what they did that afternoon. That is, until they decided to catch a ride home.
When they realized that they were in danger of missing their 8.30 curfew, they called their families from the phone booth near a gas station in Jewett City to say they were running late. There wasn't time to walk home, so they decided to hitchhike. The first car to stop to pick them up was driven by none other than Michael Bruce Ross.
They asked him to drop them off at a gas station in Volontown. However, Michael had no intention of complying. When he drove past their stop, the girls became upset, and April startled him by pulling a steak knife from her purse, causing him to swerve and almost drive off the road. Feigning control but worried, Michael ordered April to give him the knife.
She hesitated until Leslie told her to do exactly as he ordered. Having gotten control back and the knife out of harm's way, Michael drove until he found a secluded spot. There, he pulled his car off the road and out of sight of passing traffic. Out in the woods, where no one could come to their rescue, the girls were easily intimidated by his size and followed his commands without hesitation.
He ordered April into the back seat, as he tied up Leslie with strips of cloth that he cut from an old slipcover that was in the car, and put her in the trunk. Then he pulled April out of the car, telling her to undress. As had become his gruesome ritual, he unzipped his pants and thrust his penis into her mouth as she was kneeling in front of him, but only long enough to further arouse him.
He pulled out before coming close to climax. He pushed her down onto her back and raped her vaginally. After ejaculating, he flipped her over onto her stomach, and using the same pieces of cloth with which he had bound Leslie, he strangled her to death, and then stuffed her lifeless body, naked from the waist down, into the front seat of the car, with the back of the front seat lowered.
As her best friend was lying lifeless in the car, Leslie was pulled out of the trunk and ordered to undress. She was smaller and lesser developed than April, and after forcing her to perform oral sex on him, Ross had trouble penetrating her vagina. In his original confession, Ross stated he then simply apologized to Leslie before strangling her to death.
However, probably in order to clear his conscience before dying, he told a darker tale just before his execution. In this revised confession, he told of how her vagina was simply too small for him to penetrate, so instead he managed to rape Leslie anally. This probably caused her rectum to tear, as he didn't use any lubrication, and would have been extremely painful for the young girl.
When he had once again ejaculated, he proceeded to use the cloth ligatures to strangle her, before putting her body back into the trunk of the car. He then looked for a place to hide the bodies. He drove back to Connecticut, towards the place where he had picked up the girls, and disposed of their bodies in a culvert within kilometers of where they lived, like a ritualistic wake.
Michael returned to that location on several occasions in order to relive raping and murdering the two young girls, masturbating to the memory.
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That's I-L-M-A-K-I-A-G-E dot com slash quiz. Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. At Mint Mobile, we like to do the opposite of what big wireless does. They charge you a lot. We charge you a little. So naturally, when they announced they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you.
That's right. We're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. 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. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Everyone needs someone to talk to, even psychopaths, even your humble host.
Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash serialkiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash serialkiller. Michael Bruce Ross's reign of terror was by now spinning out of control.
As with many other sexually motivated serial killers, instead of slowing down his rate of murder, he sped up and wanted that feeling he got from killing even more urgently. For 17-year-old Wendy Baribo, Friday the 15th of June, 1984 would prove fatal.
She had her final day of examinations at Norwich Free Academy that day, and stopped at her mother's home after studies, before catching a bus back to Jewett City to do some shopping. It was a fine afternoon. So she decided to walk back, and, at around 4.30 p.m., she was seen by a passing motorist walking along the fairly busy Route 12. But she was not alone.
Other witnesses would later state they saw a man following her. He was about six feet tall, clean-shaven, of medium build with dark hair. When Wendy failed to return home, her mother reported her missing the following day. At around 2 p.m., Michael Ross had just finished masturbating to porn, but simply couldn't get satisfied. He wanted to kill Wendy.
and decided to go out once more to hunt for a victim. He found Wendy, and after parking his car he went up to her and asked if she would like to go to a barbecue that night. She flatly turned him down, and he answered by dragging her into a clearing in the nearby woods. There, he rolled her over onto her stomach and started to strangle her.
He ejaculated almost immediately, so he let go of her throat in order to rape her properly. She struggled and kicked, and her body twitched. Ross had a cramp in his hands as he fought to rape and strangle her. When he loosened his grip to massage his hands, she bucked even harder, and he reapplied his grip until a spasm of her legs told him she was dead.
Michael Mulchick was a handsome state trooper and a member of the Connecticut Major Crimes Unit. In 1983, Tammy Williams was still missing, and Mulchick had been assigned to the case to see if he could come up with any new angles. Coincidentally, he sat next to the detective assigned to the Deborah Smith Taylor case at the station.
And as the two of them began to compare notes, he started to see similarities between the crimes. The women were the same size and were seen roughly six miles apart. So, he surmised that one person might be responsible for what were classified as a disappearance and murder. While he was working on this theory, Wendy Baribo disappeared.
Four days later, her body was found in Lisbon, about eighteen miles from Danielson, and Malchik was assigned as chief investigator. A dozen witnesses had given a description of the man they saw in the vicinity of the crime. A few saw him abruptly turn his car around, almost as if he had lost control of the vehicle.
For the first time, the police had a description of a car and a description of the perpetrator. Malchik looked at the list of 3,600 Toyota owners and selected names of those who lived closest to the crime scene for questioning. Michael Ross's door happened to be the first one Malchik knocked on because of its proximity to the crime scene.
Malchik knew nothing about Michael's past convictions, but did have a reason to go to Michael's apartment first. George MacDonald had already reported that he'd found the car. No one was home the first two times Malchik knocked on Michael's door. But on the third try, Malchik arrived very early in the morning, catching Michael before he left for work on the 28th of June, 1984.
Michael was still in his bathrobe when he answered Malchik's knock. The detective identified himself and explained that he was investigating the homicide of Wendy Baribo. Seeming relaxed and unfazed by the visit, Michael said that he had been expecting the police because he had read in the papers that the police were looking for a small blue car like his. At first, Malchik thought he had the wrong man.
Michael was wearing glasses when he answered the door, and that didn't match the composite sketches of the man who had been following Wendy. While stalking, Michael always removed his glasses so he wouldn't be recognized, a kind of magical thinking that he had held on to since the stalking began. Yet every time Malchik indicated that he might be ready to leave—
Michael would drop a crumb to make the investigator think that he should ask more questions. Michael couldn't bring himself to confess, so he dropped hints instead. Still, Malchik wasn't entirely suspicious. However, the officer was ultimately tipped off by Michael's memory of the 13th of June, 1984, the day Wendy had disappeared.
He could remember in great detail what he had for breakfast, what color socks he had on, when he arrived at work, and to whom he talked. But his memory was spotty at best, starting about three or four p.m., just about the time that Wendy was last seen alive. After that time, he remembered only that he went home.
He also placed himself in a direct line from where the girl was last seen, and the officer thought that was odd. Malchik decided to bring him down to the temporary command post at the Lisbon Town Hall for questioning. A talented and experienced law enforcement officer, Malchik slowly calmed Michael down and gained his confidence once they were at the command post.
They talked about Michael's family and the farm. They talked about college and Michael's former fiancée. The conversation went on for about four hours, varying between small talk and pointed questions about what Michael had done on the 13th of June. It was, by all accounts, exquisite police work. Malchik was able to make Michael feel as if he were on his side.
Perhaps this was because Malchik had yet to make up his own mind about Michael. Sitting across from him, I'm asking myself, is this someone who has killed a number of women, or just some guy? He doesn't have a tail, fire, or horns. He looks just as much like the average guy as anyone, Malchik remembered in a later interview. Michael then asked if the detective thought he had killed Wendy Baribo.
Malchik responded that he did think that he had killed her, and that he would probably kill again, but that he probably really didn't want to kill again. He told Michael that the most important thing was that he not hurt anyone else. That was just what Michael Ross wanted to hear. Within hours, Michael had confessed not only to Wendy Baribo's murder, but also to seven others.
Zung Noc Tu, Tammy Williams, Deborah Smith Taylor, Robin Stavinsky, Paula Pereira, April Brunet, and Leslie Shelley. In 1987, Ross was convicted of the murders of four of the eight women he confessed to having killed. It took the jury only 86 minutes of deliberations to convict him, and only four hours to decide on his punishment. Death.
During the next 18 years that he spent on death row, Michael Ross met Susan Powers from Oklahoma, and the two were engaged to be married. She ended their relationship in 2003, but continued to visit Ross up until his death. Ross became a devout Catholic while in prison, and would pray the rosary daily.
He was also accomplished at translating braille and helping troubled inmates. In the final year of his life, Ross, who had always been opposed to the death penalty, said he no longer objected to his own execution. According to Cornell graduate Catherine Yeager, Ross believed that he had been forgiven by God and that he would be going to a better place once he was executed.
She also said that Ross did not wish for the victim's families to suffer any more pain. Visits consumed most of Ross's last day on earth. He awoke about 5.45 a.m. and had breakfast of oatmeal and grapefruit. Ross watched television and read newspapers until 8.10 a.m., when he was moved to the execution holding cell.
It resembles his other open-barred cell at the old death row at Osborne Correction Institution, except that it is encased in plexiglass, with a circle of holes drilled midway down the front of the door, so Ross could communicate back and forth with visitors. Where formerly Ross could hold hands with visitors, now he could not. Only priests were allowed physical contact.
necessary so they could give him the Holy Eucharist, which Ross received at 9 a.m. Later, he received last rites. Ross and the visitor allegedly joked that Thursday morning about how Ross' cell was similar to that of Hannibal Lecter's cell, a reference to the cannibal psychiatrist in the thriller movie Silence of the Lambs.
Ross lunched on a cheeseburger and hash browns, and chose to have his last meal the same thing all the other inmates at Osborne would be eating for dinner. Turkey a la king with rice, mixed vegetables, white bread, fruits, and a beverage. In the end, the man described as both monster and manipulator controlled his own fate.
He had until 2.01 a.m. to call off the execution by saying he wanted to pursue more appeals. He did not, and the series of three lethal drugs coursed through his veins. Osborne Correctional Institution warden Christine Widden announced Ross's death from a podium at 2.28 a.m., the 13th of May, 2005.
Media witnesses described what appeared to be a shudder, a gasp for air, and an otherwise motionless death. Ross, his wrists and fingers wrapped in gauze, said nothing and looked at no one, the witness said. Ross said no thank you when asked if he wished to make a final statement.
Shelley Sindland of Fox 61 TV said she heard one female witness, hidden from Sindland by a curtain separating the media from the families of Ross's victims, mockingly say, Oh, are you in pain? when Ross seemed to gasp. Sindland said she heard another man utter, It's too peaceful.
Victim Wendy Baribo's cousin, Robin Baribo III, expressed relief that Ross was finally being put to death. But he stressed that his cousin's death will always be a part of his family's life. His death will give us some closure, but will never bring back the lives he has taken.
There will always be an open wound in the hearts of the families and friends who knew and loved these young ladies. To Michael Ross, may you rot in hell, Baribo said.
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And so ends 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, or the SK Podcast, or elsewhere podcast reviews can be found.
Next week I will bring to you a fresh new Serial Killer Expo say. 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 pledge their hard-earned money every month. There are especially a few of those patrons I would like to thank in person. These patrons are my 19 most loyal patrons.
They have contributed for at least the last 30 episodes. And their names are...
You really helped produce this show, and you have my deepest gratitude. Thank you. If you wish to join this exclusive club of TSK producers, go to theserialkillerpodcast.com slash donate and pledge $15 or more to have your name read live on this show. Thank you. Good night, and good luck.