Joanne Baribeault Welch wants to look into Michael Ross’ eyes when they strap him into the death gurney.
She wants to see the needle disappear into his arm.
And she wants to see the life drain from his body.
“It’ll be good for him,” says Welch, 45, whose sister Wendy Baribeault was 17 when she was raped and strangled in 1984 by Ross, an Ivy League serial killer who is waiting to die on Connecticut’s gone-to-seed Death Row.
“It’s not too tragic,” says Welch. “It’s justice, and I want to see justice done.”
Baribeault was one of eight young women murdered by Ross, who is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 2:01 a.m. on Jan. 26. If his execution goes through as planned, the 45-year-old killer would be the first to be put to death in Connecticut since Joseph “Mad Dog” Taborsky in 1960.
“I am going [to the execution] for my sister, and I am going for my father, who has passed away,” Welch told The Post. “I’m glad it’s finally happening, and I hope this will give us some closure.”
Welch vividly remembers the day the Cornell grad calmly showed up at her house two weeks after murdering her sister. He sat down at her kitchen table, opened his briefcase – and tried to sell her insurance.
“He knew who I was, but I didn’t have a clue who he was,” she said. “I still feel the anger. It’s unbelievable to me, 20 years later, that this happened to all those poor girls. He should die for what he did.”
Police say Ross picked his victims at random, sneaking up behind them along the rural roads of eastern Connecticut.
“They were all minding their business,” says Welch. “Until he came along.”
Ross, a salesman with a high IQ who graduated from Cornell University in 1981, confessed to raping most of his eight victims, then turning them on their stomachs and strangling them.
As his date with death draws near, Ross insists he wants to die to spare his victims’ families any more pain.
But those who have observed him for the past two decades say he could be bluffing and might try a final appeal before being put to death. They accuse him of being a media-savvy chatterbox who uses his confessional Web site to draw sympathetic ears. Ross has also appeared on true-crime TV shows and written a newspaper column about life behind bars.
With Post Wire Services