The Man in the Monster by Martha Elliott Page A

Borden testified at Michael’s 1987 trial, “a kind of brutalized killing of animals, chickens . . . became his thing.”
    â€œI learned how to do unpleasant things that I didn’t want to do, but had to be done,” Michael remembered. “I guess that’s when I learned how to turn off my feelings.”
    Even in high school, only Michael was given the job of culling the chicks; Michael’s mother wouldn’t let the others kill the birds because they found it too upsetting. As he got older, Michael was also the butcher of young roosters in the flock. Although the day-old chicks are sexed at the hatchery, some male birds were always mixed in—as many as 2 percent when the sexing got sloppy. At about ten to twelve weeks, whenthe roosters’ combs would start to grow, they were singled out and killed. Michael would round them up on a weekend and bring them home to butcher for the meat. “Dad was usually at work, so I had to kill them. I’d skin them, cut off the legs and breast, and cut out the heart and liver. . . . I got pretty good at it. I could kill and butcher a rooster so fast that I could take out his heart which would still be beating in the palm of my hand,” he bragged.
    â€œ[Michael] was the designated killer of the family. No one else wanted the job. His sisters were spared; the brother avoided it,” Dr. Borden asserted. “That became so much part of his life that he didn’t make anything of it. He was beyond repulsion.”
    I was haunted by the idea of an eight-year-old boy killing the chickens he had been caring for. Dr. Borden suggested that learning to kill without emotion was a skill that would later allow the young adult Michael to separate himself from the murders he was committing. It was the monster who raped and murdered, not Michael the man. Almost all of the psychiatrists I talked to brought up the chicken culling as significant, but none of them could definitively say that this early experience caused him to kill the women. Dr. Berlin noted the similarities in the way the women and the chicks were killed and ruminated, “So the question is did [killing the chickens] eroticize him? He doesn’t say that himself. Did it simply desensitize him to the idea of taking life by doing that? Again, we are left with more questions than answers.”
    Like the psychiatrists who evaluated him, Michael also didn’t know the answer. “There could be a connection. I honestly don’t know.” Yet he was tempted to accept it or any other reasonable hypothesis as proof of his mental illness and theorized, “I think it came in handy later on when I killed. I turned off everything inside of me and allowed it to happen.” He wanted to understand how he became a killer. As hereminded me several times, often sobbing, “I didn’t wake up one day and decide to be a serial killer. I would have done anything for it to turn out differently.”
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    M ichael worked on the farm while his elementary school classmates were playing Little League and building tree houses. Although it was easy for him to focus on his farmwork, he was hyperactive, impulsive, and disruptive at home and even worse at school. He wet his bed until he was twelve, walked in his sleep, and suffered from nightmares and night terrors.
    This behavior, while distressing, may not connect directly with the violence of Michael’s later life. “There’s a depressive rage in children which is expressed in hyperactivity,” explained Dr. Borden. “The child feels mad and bad. The feelings, the impulses get expressed in a more disorganized way, in emotional behavior, in distractibility, in restlessness. It’s discharged in action. That’s what little kids are: they are action. They don’t think.” Many other biological differences have been identified as contributing to hyperactivity