Cancer, paranoia, and then revenge

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It's a long one.

Cancer, paranoia, and then revenge

Posted Friday, March 11, 2005

Bart Ross
Bart Ross
By his own account, Bart Ross' life started to fall apart with a cancer diagnosis on July 10, 1992.

It then would erode little by little for the next 13 years until it came to a lonely, violent end on a suburban Milwaukee street.
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The 57-year-old Polish immigrant wrote several suicide notes, angry letters explaining how he killed U.S. Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow's husband and mother. He also left three dismissed lawsuits documenting his descent into a bitter, paranoid world from which he never escaped.

A slight man who neighbors described as meek, Ross first felt something under his tongue in the winter of 1992 and dismissed it as an infection. His general practitioner wanted him to have a biopsy, but court records indicate he refused.

If "this thing," as the Chicago man called the tumor, was malignant, he thought he would surely die. The self-employed electrician had no money or health insurance to cover the medical costs.

But when Henry Briele, a doctor at the University of Illinois at Chicago hospital, offered to help him arrange financing, Ross decided to fight the cancer, according to his lawsuits. He underwent radiation therapy and believed himself cured.

He thanked Briele on behalf of his "family," then showed the doctor a photograph of himself with his dog and two cats. Briele warned him the cancer could return.

"If the cancer reoccured (sic) I would blow myself away," court documents quote Ross as saying.

The cancer did come back. Ross underwent surgery, which left him permanently disfigured. His face, which once boasted the strong jaw of his Polish ancestors, seemed to disappear after his upper lip.

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