Deadly American Beauty (St. Martin's True Crime Library)

by John Glatt

  “Yes,” said Kristin. At this point, to maintain the “suicide” staging, she would have had to sweep the rose petals off the bed and begin re-scattering them around Greg’s body. The stem of the rose ended up on the floor next to a pair of shoes.

  After confirming that Greg was flat on his back without any pillows under his head, the dispatcher walked her through CPR.

  “What I want you to do is put your hand on his forehead,” he instructed. “Are you listening? Okay. Place your other hand under his neck and tilt his head back. I want you to put your ear next to his mouth and see if [you can] feel or hear any breathing, or if you can see his chest rise. Do that now.”

  Once again, Kristin broke down in tears, sobbing that Greg was not breathing. Meanwhile, prosecutors would later explain, she was carefully placing the deep red rose petals around Greg’s body, from head to toe and repositioning the wedding picture by his head.

  “I’m going to tell you how to give mouth-to-mouth, okay?” said the dispatcher. “Are you listening?”

  “I am,” Kristin replied, as she apparently walked away out of the bedroom and into the kitchen.

  The dispatcher then instructed her to pinch Greg’s nose closed and cover his mouth with hers.

  “I want you to force two deep breaths of air into his lungs like you’re blowing up a balloon, okay? Do that now!”

  Then, according to investigators, Kristin began to blow into the phone, pretending she was administering CPR to Greg. This was later considered to be her big mistake, as it is impossible to give CPR while talking on a cordless phone.

  “Okay, I did it,” said a tearful Kristin.

  “Did you give him two breaths?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see his chest rise?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you feel the air going in?”

  “Yes.”

  The dispatcher then told Kristin to check Greg’s pulse, by sliding her index or middle fingers into the grooves next to his Adam’s apple. Kristin told the dispatcher she couldn’t feel a pulse. He then told her to put the heel of her hand on Greg’s breastbone in the center of his chest and put her other hand on top, between his nipples, and push down firmly two inches to begin CPR.

  “And do it fifteen times,” ordered the dispatcher, “like you’re pumping his chest. Go ahead and start counting.”

  Kristin slowly counted up to fifteen, but prosecutors believe she was only pretending to pump Greg’s chest. The dispatcher then told her to put her hand back under his neck and pinch his nose closed with the other, tilt his head back and give him two further deep breaths.

  So Kristin simply blew into the telephone twice, prosecutors say, as she walked over and unlocked the front door, leaving it ajar for the paramedics. Then she was told to pump Greg’s chest another fifteen times, and keep repeating the sequence, until help arrived.

  Kristin was standing in the kitchen/living room area talking to the dispatcher on the cordless phone when the paramedics rushed through the front door, just three minutes after her initial 911 call.

  “They’re here!” she sobbed. “They’re inside! They’re setting up.”

  At 9:23 p.m., veteran Firefighter Paramedic Sean Jordan and his EMT assistant April Butler were working an overtime shift in Torrey Pines, when they received the emergency call from the police dispatcher. They were ordered to #204, 8150 Regents Road on the UCSD campus, for a “non-breather.” Butler immediately turned on the ambulance’s flashing red lights and siren, driving straight to La Jolla del Sol, where they arrived three minutes later.

  Butler parked the ambulance on the red-brick driveway outside the complex, where a security guard let them in. Then Jordan grabbed the heart monitor and drug box, while Butler took the defibrillator and suction device. Then they rushed up one flight of stairs, where they saw Kristin wearing pajamas in the living room, talking on the phone.

  “I saw the wife,” Jordan would later testify. “She was crying.”

  When he asked where Greg was, Kristin pointed toward the bedroom, saying he had overdosed. Then, to their astonishment, Jordan and Butler walked into the bedroom, where they saw the eerie tableau of Greg’s body naked to the waist, lying to the right of the bed by a dresser, surrounded by red rose petals. He and Kristin’s wedding photo was lying on the floor by the dresser, as if Greg were looking at it. By the head of the bed lay a yellow cup, a blue one on the right side of the bed on the dresser and another blue cup in the bedroom. None of them would ever be examined later.

  Both paramedics would later testify that there were no red marks on Greg’s chest, which would have been inevitable if Kristin had been giving him CPR. They also noted there were no rose petals underneath Greg. There were none on top of him either, as would have been expected when she had pulled him onto the floor.

  “He was pale and cyanotic. Blue around his lips. He looked dead,” said Butler, who remembers that the bed looked freshly made, as if no one had slept in it.

  Still sobbing, Kristin remained in the living room talking on the phone, as Jordan walked up to Greg’s head to check his vital signs.

  “He still felt warm,” he said. “Still felt like he had recently taken his last breath. Like he was newly deceased. He didn’t have any rigor mortis.”

  Then Jordan went into action, sticking a tube down Greg’s throat so he could breathe for him. As he furiously worked on Greg, Butler began setting up a cardiac monitor and an IV bag. But it was already too late. Greg’s pupils were fixed and dilated and a heart monitor showed he was flatlining.

  While Jordan was trying to resuscitate Greg, a “hysterical” Kristin came into the bedroom in tears. The paramedic asked her what had happened, trying to ascertain why an apparently healthy 26-year-old man would be in this condition: he was far too young to die from heart disease.

  “We tried to find out some information,” he would testify. “Does he do drugs? Does he have some medical history we need to know about?”

  Kristin broke down, saying Greg had overdosed on medication that she believed he had been taking for a while. Then she went back into the living room and resumed talking on the phone.

  “We thought [it] was kind of weird,” Butler would later testify. “As we were working on her husband, she was more outside and in the kitchen and living room on the phone. Most family members want to be near us and helping us out.”

  Then their superior officer, Captain James Barnett, arrived and began questioning Kristin. She explained that she had found Greg in bed and thought he was breathing funny. She believed he might have taken some oxycodone and clonazepam, which he had had for several years, but she thought he had thrown away.

  Hearing this, Jordan and Butler searched unsuccessfully for any sign of drugs in the apartment that might explain Greg’s cardiac arrest.

  “He’s twenty-something years old,” said Jordan. “It’s just not normal for somebody that age to be down. It’s usually a drug-related thing.”

  Then Jordan began intubating Greg’s body, trying to establish an airway to help him breathe, and looking for a suitable vein to start setting up an IV, so he could try to insert a catheter to revive Greg with cardiac medications. As he was doing this, another team of four firefighter engineer paramedics from the San Diego Fire Department arrived, led by Joseph Preciado and Paramedic Engineer Kevin Carter.

  “I saw the dark blotches,” remembered Preciado, who would later testify that he thought Kristin looked as if she were under the influence of a stimulant. “I thought it was blood that was all over the room. When I knelt down, I saw them move [and] realized it wasn’t blood. It was rose petals.”

  Immediately, Preciado asked if there was anything that he needed to do, and Jordan asked him to help start up an intravenous line, which he did. Butler kneeled down behind Greg’s head, placing a mask over his mouth and squeezing an ambu bag to help him breathe.

  An agitated Kristin came into the bedroom again, repeating that her husband had overdosed on pills. Then she wa
lked into the bathroom, looked through some drawers and produced a vicodin pill bottle, which she handed to Jordan, who put it on the dresser.

  Jordan worked on finding a good vein in Greg’s left arm above the elbow, while Preciado tried the right one. Preciado was unsuccessful, but on Jordan’s second attempt, he got a flash of blood from a vein, meaning it was suitable. He stuck in a needle and hooked up a catheter, dispatching the cardiac drugs atropine and epinephrine through a saline solution on the IV. He then administered two milligrams of narcan, which would neutralize any opiates present in Greg’s body. He also gave Greg D-50, pure sugar, through the IV, as his blood sugar was low.

  “At that point we were pretty much throwing in our drug box,” said Jordan. “We were trying to do everything we could do to get him back.”

  As the paramedics desperately fought to revive Greg, UCSD uniformed police officers Edward Garcia, Scofield and Bill MacIntyre arrived at 9:27 p.m., and immediately began interviewing Kristin in the kitchen. Leaning against a counter, she tearfully repeated her story of how Greg had been ill the previous day and had overdosed on medicine.

  Officer Garcia started searching the apartment for any signs of drugs or a suicide note, but found nothing except a bottle of cough syrup and a Ziploc bag on the dining room table. When he asked about the bag, she explained it was a note from an old boyfriend that she had shredded after her husband had found it. She said he had spent much of the weekend trying to tape it back together.

  “I asked her what happened to him today,” said Officer Garcia. “She said that in the morning she left for work, and she came back to check on him, and he was asleep. She came back home from lunch to check on him, and he was still asleep.”

  At about 9:30 p.m., as the paramedics were trying to resuscitate Greg, Dr. Gruenwald called again and Kristin picked up on the first ring.

  “She was very agitated,” remembered Dr. Gruenwald. “She said, ‘Oh, Stefan, I can’t talk, the ambulance is here right now.’ ”

  Dr. Gruenwald asked her what was going on and Kristin said that Greg wasn’t feeling well and that she really couldn’t talk, as the ambulance was there. Then she promised to call him back. He waited anxiously by the phone until 1:00 a.m., but she never called.

  By this time, Greg had turned blue from lack of oxygen and Jordan and Preciado log-rolled him onto a backboard, strapping him down to move him out of the apartment. Jordan noticed that there was already some lividity in Greg’s body, as his blood began to pool in his back and buttocks, where he had been lying. They also noticed there were no red rose petals under his body.

  “[There] was pretty much no chance of bringing him back,” said Jordan.

  At 10:03 p.m.—thirty—seven minutes after the first paramedics had arrived—EMT April Butler began bagging Greg’s body to transport it to Scripps La Jolla Hospital for the official death pronouncement. Kristin was still talking on the cordless phone as her husband’s body was carried out of the apartment, down a flight of stairs and into the waiting ambulance outside.

  Chapter 16

  “The Patient Can Give No History Due to His Condition”

  At 10:07 p.m. Paramedics Jordan and Preciado wheeled Greg into the ER at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla. A minute later, Kristin Rossum arrived, still in her pajamas, having been driven there by Officer Garcia. As emergency room doctors spent another ten minutes desperately trying to revive Greg, Kristin called Dr. Robertson on her cell phone, asking him to meet her at the hospital.

  Gregory Tremolet de Villers was pronounced dead at 10:19 p.m. by Dr. Monte Mellon. As his body was being transported to the morgue, ER supervisor Nurse Diane Bartlett found Kristin and Dr. Robertson sitting together in the registration area in front of the ER. Kristin explained that Robertson was a co-worker who had come to help her.

  As Kristin was given the news that Greg had been officially pronounced dead, Dr. Robertson stood by her side, holding her hand.

  “I asked her if she knew what had happened to him,” remembered Nurse Bartlett. “She told me that there was a possibility that he had taken an overdose.”

  Rossum explained that she thought he might have taken some oxycodone that that she had bought in Tijuana some five years earlier, as she was trying to kick crystal meth. She also told the nurse that she had taken the day off from work to care for Greg, and that they had been arguing all day. She said she had left the apartment in the afternoon to take a break from the fighting.

  “I said, ‘Why didn’t you call the paramedics long before now?’ ” said Bartlett. “She goes, ‘Well, I’ve been watching him.’ ”

  The nurse asked Kristin and Robertson if she wanted to go and view her husband’s body in the privacy of the orthopedic room. Kristin said she did. Then Robertson kissed her on the mouth and they embraced, surprising Bartlett that she would be so “intimate” with a co-worker, so soon after her husband’s death.

  Dr. Robertson did not want to see the body, so Bartlett led Kristin to where Greg was laid out, thinking it unusual that her friend did not want to come and support her. She was also surprised at how calm and collected the new widow appeared to be.

  “I was a bit taken aback that she was not as emotional as I thought she might be,” Bartlett later testified. “I did not see tears. I think I would have been devastated.”

  But when social worker Bethany Warren took Kristin to see her husband’s body, she broke down as she identified him.

  “She was kind of wailing as she was in there,” Warren would remember. “She touched him on the chest, laid her head down on his chest.”

  When they left the orthopedic room and returned to where Dr. Robertson was waiting at the registration desk, Kristin gave his cell phone number to Nurse Bartlett, saying she should contact her through him. Then Warren interviewed Kristin, telling her and Robertson that an investigator from the medical examiner’s office would be arriving soon, as the cause of death was unknown.

  Kristin explained that she and Robertson both worked for the ME’s office, appearing embarrassed.

  “I know these people,” she told Warren. “I don’t want to be around when they are here. Let’s go!”

  But Michael Robertson calmed her down, saying he would take care of the matter. At 11:00 p.m. he put in a call to the ME’s on-duty death investigator, Angie Wagner, alerting her to Greg’s death. Wagner had already received a call from the hospital a few minutes earlier and knew the brief facts. Dr. Robertson informed her that the dead man was Kristin Rossum’s husband, and Wagner made the case a priority, as it was the spouse of an office employee. Soon after talking to Dr. Robertson, she left for the Scripps Hospital to begin her investigation.

  ER Physician Dr. Monte Mellon, who had led the unsuccessful hospital battle to save Greg, also spoke to Kristin. He later wrote a report.

  “The patient can give no history due to his condition,” he wrote. “Further history was obtained from the female accompanying him, who admitted she had an addiction problem with crystal meth and obtained some oxycodone from Mexico to help her calm down during these periods.

  “The patient and her had gotten into some sort of disagreement this weekend. He had taken some of the oxycodone and had been sleeping much the last several hours. She claimed she had seen him just an hour and a half before, woke him up. He seemed to be okay. He went back to sleep. Then when she went to check on him again... she found the patient pulseless and apneic.”

  As Kristin and Robertson were preparing to leave the hospital, they were intercepted by Operations Supervisor Michelle La Fontaine, who helped Kristin fill out the necessary paperwork. La Fontaine took Kristin and Dr. Robertson into the triage room for privacy, while they discussed donating Greg’s organs.

  Within one hour of Greg being pronounced dead, Kristin, as next of kin, gave her permission for all of his organs to be removed and given to the tissue donation center. At 11:30 p.m. she quickly read the consent forms, allowing doctors to remove whatever body parts were needed, and then signed “K. Ros
sum-de Villers.”

  Ten minutes later, Kristin and Dr. Robertson left the hospital and drove straight back to her apartment.

  By this time Professor Ralph Rossum was heading toward San Diego, after receiving a frantic phone call from his daughter at the hospital.

  “Daddy, Greg stopped breathing,” Kristin had tearfully declared. “I’m so scared.”

  He told his daughter he was driving straight there, and she gave him directions to the hospital. Then he gave his wife Constance the phone and left.

  “Mom, I’m at the hospital with Greg,” Kristin told her mother. “He’s in intensive care.”

  Constance Rossum assured Kristin that her father was on his way to help her and put the phone down.

  A few minutes later, Dr. Robertson called Constance Rossum from his cell phone. It was the first time they had ever spoken.

  “He identified himself,” Constance would later remember. “We had never met him or heard of him. I thanked him for being with her and asked him to please drive her home, because she was in her pajamas and [had] told me she was cold and wearing a sweatshirt.”

  After putting the phone down, Constance immediately called Greg’s mother, Marie, saying that Greg was in the hospital after having a bad reaction to some medication. Then a startled Marie telephoned Jerome in his apartment a few miles away in Thousand Oaks.

  “I immediately called the hospital to find out what was going on,” remembered Jerome. “I spoke to a nurse who scared me and asked if I was alone. I told her I was and she said she would call back.”

  But she never did.

  Then Jerome drove straight to his mother’s house and called Constance Rossum, who told him she had spoken to Kristin, who said Greg had had an allergic reaction to cough syrup. Jerome called the hospital again, eventually being put through to a nurse who told her that his brother had “expired.”

  At that moment a sheriff’s car pulled up in the driveway to give them the terrible news. Jerome tried to compose himself and then called his younger brother Bertrand in Westwood to tell him.