Couple’s conflicts intensified near end
Professor, attorney struggled with many issues before slaying
Carmin D. Ross was a seeker: an attorney by training who became interested in alternative medicine, fell in love with a new man midway through life and dreamed of leaving Kansas and moving to California to become a healer.
Thomas E. Murray was a soft-spoken Kansas State University English scholar who got a three-day stomachache every time he had to fail a student; he said he liked his life to be “dull and boring.”
“I consider myself more of a thinker than a physical person,” the 48-year-old Murray said in an interview with police before he was arrested and charged in the November 2003 stabbing and beating slaying of Ross at her home northwest of Lawrence.
Prosecutors have called Ross’ death one of the most brutal crimes in Douglas County history, but the personal circumstances of her life before the killing have been a mystery for more than a year.
That changed last week with a five-day preliminary hearing that detailed Ross’ and Murray’s personalities, their divorce in June 2003 and a child-custody dispute that grew increasingly bitter in the weeks before her death.
Two sides
People who knew Ross say Murray was controlling, made all the decisions and punished Ross emotionally. For a few years before their separation in 2003, Ross thought she’d try to make the marriage work, but eventually she gave up.
“She’d been unhappy for a long time,” her best friend, Angela Hayes, testified.
Murray said his ex-wife liked to play by her own rules. He thought the alternative-healing pursuits she was taking up were “bizarre.”
Carmin D. Ross' family, from left, Heather Bowman (sister), Samantha Fabbri (sister), Danny and Judi Ross (parents), and April Russell (sister) are pictured during a court recess on Thursday at the trial of Thomas E. Murray at the Douglas County Judicial & Law Enforcement Center. Murray is accused of killing Carmin Ross, his ex-wife, in her home northwest of Lawrence.
“She started communicating with spirit guides and angels and deceased relatives,” Murray told police.
Still, he didn’t want her to leave him.
At one point in fall 2002, he said, he was “paralyzed” and “shaking like a leaf” after he found a sexually suggestive e-mail between Ross and her new love.
Again and again, detectives who questioned Murray suggested that every person had a breaking point. When emotion is involved, good people do bad things, Douglas County Sheriff’s detective Pat Pollock told him.
But the level-headed scholar maintains to this day he never reached his breaking point and never would have deprived his daughter, now age 6, of a mother.
“I’m sort of the original Boy Scout,” he told police.
Popular teacher
Several of the Kansas State University students who testified last week smiled at Murray as they walked past him on their way off the witness stand. He smiled back at them, at times holding up his tie and jacket sleeve to help students describe his clothing so the record could show they’d identified him.
In his classes about the history and structure of English, Murray always knew the answers to students’ questions but never denigrated anyone, students said.
One student summed up by saying, “He’s brilliant.”
Couple’s conflicts intensified near end (12-12-04)
6News video: Murray to stand trial for murder of ex-wife (12-10-04)Carmin Ross, too, was a student of Murray’s in 1984 when they met in a class he taught at Ohio State University. They married a year later and moved to Manhattan in 1988.
They bought a cabin in Wisconsin and worked with a financial planner. Ross worked for a while at a law firm, as Manhattan city prosecutor and as K-State’s employee-relations director. She became a mediation expert.
Murray told police one of Ross’ complaints about him was that he wasn’t social enough.
Daughter born
In 1998, Ross and Murray had a daughter, Ciara Ross-Murray, and Ross became a full-time mother. Ciara liked to play imaginative games and act out movies. Ross and Murray believed in the concept of attached parenting, so the girl often slept in their bed.
“She would say that she has the perfect mommy and the perfect daddy,” Murray told police.
All the students who testified this week said it was clear Murray, who sometimes told stories about his daughter in class, was a loving father.
But in a letter written to Murray after Ross’ death, her father, Danny Ross, of Lapel, Ind., wrote that one reason Murray had a motive to kill Ross was that he never wanted to have children and blamed Ross for ruining his life.
“Carmin wanted children and when she became pregnant, you blamed Carmin and punished her and Ciara from the time Ciara was born until she could not take it any more and decided to leave,” he said in the letter.
When Ciara developed a problem with an eye, Ross wanted to try energy-medicine instead of going to a doctor to heal it, Murray told police.
New love
In September 2002, Ross went to Wichita to attend a workshop on “consegrity,” an alternative-healing technique that involves accessing information stored in the unconscious mind. There, she met Larry Lima, a California resident and holistic-health educator who once gave workshops on improving father-daughter relationships.
“Carmin is someone you fall in love with when you first meet her,” Lima said this week in court.
Murray told police he had no respect for Lima for getting involved with a married woman.
“I was trying to convince her to stay, and I think he was trying to convince her not to,” Murray told police.
Ross visited Lima at least three times shortly after meeting him in Wichita, and by spring 2003 she had moved out of Murray’s home in Manhattan. In May 2003, Ross and Murray went to their cabin in Wisconsin to divide their belongings.
Carmin Ross’ mother, Judi, said that at that meeting, she saw Ross and Murray hug each other.
“She knew this was very, very painful for him, and she wasn’t trying to make it worse,” Judi Ross said.
Murray told police he and Ross never fought, despite their differences.
“Carmin was a very fair and equitable person,” he told police. “Her language was never contentious with me.”
Custody battle
But Ross intended to move with Lima to California, and in court last week, witnesses testified that Murray didn’t want to be separated by such a great distance from his daughter. Husband and wife began gearing up for a child-custody fight and entered mediation to try to resolve their differences.
At one point, Murray said he would have to make things ugly and make Ross look bad by emphasizing her new-age interests, Ross’ best friend, Hayes, testified.
Lima and Ross were planning to have a marriage ceremony Nov. 24 at Lima’s brother’s home in San Diego. After that, Lima was going to drive to Lawrence the first week in December, where they would live for the next several months.
An attorney advised Ross it might be a good idea to make Lawrence Ciara’s primary dwelling by finding play groups, going to church and getting a doctor here.
On Nov. 13, Ross missed an appointment with an acupuncturist whom she’d been seeing every few weeks in Kansas City. The acupuncturist said she was treating Ross for what she thought were stress-related problems.
‘Always gets caught’
On. Nov. 14, Lima called police because he’d been unable to reach Ross. Two deputies went to the rural home. When they looked through a window, they saw blood on the carpet and a knee visible around a corner.
A coroner later said Ross had been stabbed about 13 times in the upper chest and neck and had about 15 lacerations on her head. Police arrested Murray in October after a nearly yearlong investigation.
According to the preliminary hearing last week, there is little physical evidence. Instead, the prosecution case will rely largely on strange or inconsistent statements Murray made to police, such as saying Ross’ blood would be found in his car because she had a nose bleed.
A judge last week found there was enough evidence for Murray to stand trial, but a date has not been set.
Murray told detectives he didn’t think he was capable of killing anyone, but if he somehow were, it would be through poison or putting something deadly in the air — not a physically violent method. And he said he watched enough television to know people can’t get away with murder.
“There’s no such thing as the perfect crime,” Murray said. “The bad guy always gets caught.”
— 6News anchor and reporter Janet Reid contributed to this report.,/i>
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