by John Glatt
“What I see here is behavior that he’s never exhibited before,” he told her. “The petals, the picture, the slurring, the grogginess.”
Kristin agreed, saying that it had been driving her crazy, wondering what had happened. And the hostility from her in-laws had only added to her grief.
“We’re just looking for answers,” she said. “I’m just saying ‘Wait until the freaking toxicology report comes back before you start.’ ”
Det Agnew then took over, asking exactly where Dr. Robertson fitted into her wanting a separation.
“Michael—I cared for him a great deal,” Kristin said. “He’s a wonderful person and he possesses almost all the qualities that I would like to see in a relationship.”
Describing Greg as “a great friend,” she admitted that, had he lived and they’d separated, she would have dated Robertson. Now that Greg was dead, she claimed not to be pushing Robertson into their being a couple until he had resolved his issues with Nicole.
“I just want to support him in whatever he decides to do,” she told the detectives. “I just want to be there for him.”
Now, after previously maintaining that there was nothing physical about her relationship with Dr. Robertson, Kristin told the detectives that Jerome had learned about the affair.
“His idea is that foul play must be involved,” she said. “Either by me or Michael.”
Then Det Valle asked if she had killed Greg. Breaking into tears, Kristin said it had been so painful, as she felt guilty by wanting a separation and hurting him.
“I was the cause,” she sobbed. “I didn’t control his actions ... but I did provide the stimulus.”
She said she was now seeing a psychologist who was helping her get through it.
Toward the end of the three-hour interview, Det Agnew suddenly produced the “Hi Gorgeous” letter that had been found in Dr. Robertson’s desk, asking Kristin to explain. As she read it for the first time, Kristin seemed lost for words. But she agreed that it appeared to be his writing, and was very “sappy.”
Det Agnew then moved to the offensive.
“All right, I’ll be very blunt with you,” she began. “I don’t know you and I didn’t know Greg. I don’t know Mike. But we have somebody that’s dead and we have two people that wanted out of a marriage. And we have somebody that wants somebody by the holidays. Just look at it as a mystery on TV, okay? Maybe you loved [Mike] enough that you guys had to get rid of Greg?”
Kristin started floundering, repeating how much she had loved Greg and that he was her best friend.
“That’s disgusting,” she sobbed. “That’s horrible. That’s ludicrous. I don’t even know how to support that. Just because I may have wanted out of my marriage does not mean I’m capable of harming my husband.”
“When I have somebody that’s dead,” Det Agnew continued, “my job is to determine why this person is dead and if there’s somebody responsible for it. And I have questions that I don’t have answers to do. I don’t know why this young man is dead. He’s a healthy individual. According to you, he took some drugs that he shouldn’t have taken.”
Then Det Valle moved in, as “good cop.” Telling Kristin he was sure that her “mind [was] going a million miles an hour,” he went on to say that some people thought she had murdered her husband.
“I don’t even know how to deal with that,” Kristin replied, after Valle refused to say who was pointing the finger.
“Some people say you could have put something in his food or drink,” he continued, “because you have access to drugs at the office.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she snapped.
Valle assured her that he and Agnew were not going to “blab” what they’d learned of her relationship with Dr. Robertson to other people.
Then steering the questioning around to skin patches, one of the ways fentanyl can be administered, he asked if she had any nicotine neck patches in the apartment, like the ones used to beat smoking. When Kristin replied that she didn’t, he changed tactics, asking if she still had a drug habit.
“Look at me,” he said forcefully. “Please don’t lie to me.”
Kristin broke down in tears, confessing that she had relapsed and was now working with a drug counselor.
“I need to heal,” she sobbed, saying she was taking meth she got off the street. “I have slipped up a couple of times, but I haven’t since Saturday.”
She explained that she had started taking methamphetamine to build up the courage to leave Greg, admitting she had hidden drugs in her kitchen drawer that hadn’t been found by the investigators.
She also told the detectives that Greg had suspected she’d been using drugs, but she had denied it to him.
“He was very upset about that,” she said.
Finally, Det Agnew asked Kristin if she would be willing to take a polygraph test, and she agreed to, if necessary.
“If nothing else, that would probably put a lot of people’s mind at ease,” said the detective. “Take a lot of the rumors down the drain and get rid of a lot of pressure.”
The interview finished at around 4:15 p.m., and Kristin agreed to let the detectives come to her apartment and collect her journal. They were so concerned about her state of mind that they offered to drive her to La Jolla, but Kristin insisted she was all right.
After getting the detectives’ cards, Kristin drove Det Agnew back to 8150 Regents Road, with Valle following in his police car. During the twenty-minute drive, Det Agnew made small talk, deliberately trying not to prolong the emotional interview.
“She was upset,” the detective remembered. “I was trying to keep her calm so we wouldn’t have a crash.”
Back at her apartment, Kristin handed over her journals and proudly introduced the detectives to her new Rottweiler puppy, Bear. When the detectives left her apartment, Kristin must have breathed a sigh of relief. For the moment, at least, the police appeared to have accepted her story.
Later, writing in her journal about her interrogation, Kristin said she was “shocked” that Greg’s death was now being treated as a potential murder case. And she rounded on her in-laws for being responsible.
“Their wild imaginations started this whole thing,” she wrote, calling Jerome “the primary instigator” and claiming that she was afraid of him.
Then she complained how that “stone-cold lady detective” had suddenly shown her Robertson’s “lovey-dovey” letter that she had never seen before. She also considered it “an abomination” that a colleague of hers would go through Mike’s trash bin—where she believed the letter had turned up—find the letter and then fax it to Homicide.
“Apparently the detectives are considering it as a possible motive. I can’t even begin to comprehend how anyone could think that.”
Chapter 20
The Investigation
Soon after the detectives left, Kristin Rossum telephoned Dr. Robertson, telling him about her interview with San Diego Homicide. She carefully went over what she had told detectives, and the timing of events leading up to Greg’s death.
She said she had not admitted they were lovers, only saying that they had a close emotional relationship.
Later that night, she drove to Claremont to spend Thanksgiving with her family in the comparative safety of their home. The following afternoon she called Robertson, who was at a friend’s Thanksgiving party. That evening, he called her back at her parents’ home.
She drove back to San Diego on Friday morning, calling Armando, her Tijuana drug connection, twice from her apartment. The following day, Armando called to set up a meeting across the Mexican border, and Kristin withdrew $361.00 from an ATM at the Vons near her home, and went to Tijuana.
On Friday morning, Detectives Laurie Agnew and Jimmy Valle drove to Nicole Robertson’s apartment at 8550 Costa Verde Boulevard, where Dr. Robertson was staying while his estranged wife was out of the country. After their first interview with Kristin two days earlier, they were suspicious of her relationsh
ip with Dr. Robertson and wanted to see if the couple’s stories matched up.
The audiotaped interview began at 10:20 p.m. and Dr. Robertson readily acknowledged that Kristin had told him about her Homicide interview. Det Valle began by asking him what he knew of Greg’s death. Backing up Kristin’s account, Robertson said he’d sent her home on the morning Greg had died to check on him. Later that day, he had spent a short period of time with her outside the office.
He told detectives that he had been at a marriage counseling session with Nicole when Kristin called in tears, saying that Greg was in the ER and asking Robertson to come to the hospital.
“She was an emotional wreck,” he told detectives. “She just said, ‘He’s gone, he’s gone.’ I tried to comfort her.”
Robertson said he picked up Kristin at the hospital and took her back to her apartment, as she was cold and had a headache. The police investigation was under way by the $time they arrived, so he waited outside the apartment before speaking with the officers. Then Professor Rossum had arrived, telling him to leave, as he was taking her back to Claremont.
Robertson told the detectives that he suspected it was a drug-related death. When Det Valle asked him how he could be so certain, Robertson said Kristin had told him that Greg had taken a large amount of “unknown medications.”
“He may have taken some of these things to help him sleep,” theorized the chief toxicologist. “However, the effects on him suggest to me that he took more than just to get some sleep.”
Robertson said that Kristin had said she was worried about Greg’s reaction when she told him she wanted a separation, as he was a “volatile type of individual,” who was unpredictable.
Asked about their relationship, Dr. Robertson said that they had become “fond” of each other soon after he joined the ME’s office, and had begun a “personal relationship.” He said Kristin had no idea why the police were investigating her husband’s death, except that Greg’s family didn’t believe her account of what happened.
He said his wife, Nicole, who was due back from her English vacation that afternoon, knew about Kristin and that he was aware of the rumors in the ME’s office about him and Kristin.
“I had a discussion with my immediate boss [Lloyd Amborn] with regards to some concerns that he had about the rumors,” said Robertson. “I make the point of trying not to get involved in rumors.”
Det Valle told him that Kristin had been “very candid” about their relationship, asking him to do the same. Refusing to be drawn, Robertson downplayed it, denying that they had ever been to bed together. But he admitted spending the night in her apartment three or four times since Greg’s death to comfort her, saying that she had never stayed over at his place.
“I told Kristin that if my wife and I separate, then I would certainly look to pursue a relationship with her, if she was also separating.”
He said that after Greg had confronted him on the phone, warning him to stay away from his wife, he and Kristin had both decided to “re-focus” on getting their own relationships back on track. He was also aware of Kristin’s past addiction to drugs and her relapse before Greg’s death, saying he was “upset and disappointed” with her. But he had made “a personal decision” not to tell the ME’s office that she was back on drugs, although as her boss, he had a responsibility to do so. He agreed with Valle that a “drug abuser” would be a problem in the lab, but strenuously denied knowing if she had stolen drugs from work.
Det Valle then asked him if he thought Kristin had had anything to do with Greg’s death.
“I don’t believe she has the ability to do it,” said Dr. Robertson. “She’s a sweet, caring, loving individual. Could she be fooling me? I guess.”
Then, without mentioning the massive amounts of fentanyl found in Greg’s organs, Valle told Dr. Robertson that he was giving him just one chance to tell police what he knew about Greg’s death.
“This is the opportunity,” said Valle. “Not tomorrow, not next week, not next month. Because the end of our investigation is gonna be concluded one way or the other. What did Greg die from? What drugs, and who had the ability to obtain these drugs?”
Robertson merely replied “Mm-hm,” to all Valle’s questions, refusing to be drawn any further.
“I’m not clear in my mind,” he said, “whether or not [Greg’s death] was a scare tactic that went wrong or it was an intentional overdose.”
The detective then tried to trap Dr. Robertson, claiming that Kristin had told Homicide she was involved in Greg’s death and he knew about it. But Robertson insisted he knew nothing.
For the next half-hour they played a cat-and-mouse game, with the doctor refusing to give an inch. Finally the tape ran out and Det Valle began taking notes for the remaining eighty-minute interview. Robertson stuck to his story and finally the detectives gave without the breakthrough they had hoped for.
After she’d heard that her lover had been interrogated by San Diego Homicide, Kristin voiced her growing insecurities and fears in her journal.
“I’m terrified of losing him,” she wrote. “I know that we have nothing to hide (besides the full extent of our relationship). I put my faith in the legal system and pray.”
On Monday, November 27, Lloyd Amborn returned from a vacation in Mexico to learn that fentanyl had caused Greg de Villers’ death. He immediately checked his computer database for all cases the ME’s office had handled involved the drug, and the ones where it had been impounded at death scenes.
The following day, he instructed toxicologist Donald Lowe to work with San Diego Police Department Detective Felix Zavala, searching all the cases in 2000 where fentanyl had been collected.
Two days later, Amborn summoned Kristin Rossum into his office and put her on administrative leave. He took her keys, so she could no longer have access to the ME’s office.
“She had initially been put on compassionate leave,” Amborn would later testify. “Based on the events we had learned about, I wanted to put her on administrative leave and restrict her access.”
A few days later, Zavala and Lowe would discover that fifteen fentanyl patches were missing out of twenty-four that should have been locked away in the toxicology lab’s drug storage room. A total of 127.5 milligrams of the drug could not be accounted for. And they also discovered that a further ten milligrams of fentanyl citrate, which Kristin had officially logged in on October 3, 1997, had disappeared from a two-inch vial.
In every one of these cases, Kristin Rossum had been responsible for logging in the fentanyl and benzodiazepine, and had screened them on the High-Pressure Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) machine she operated. When Detective Agnew was told just how much of the lethal drug was missing, she moved her investigation into high gear, convinced that Greg de Villers had been murdered.
On Friday, December 1, Lloyd Amborn telephoned Kristin, asking her to come to his office the following Monday to review her status at the ME’s office. Suspecting that she was about to be fired, she wrote a letter to her parents, telling them about her relationship with Dr. Robertson, but not admitting they were lovers. She apologized for not telling them the entire story of Greg’s passing, saying she needed their “love and support,” fearing they would abandon her if they knew the real story.
“What I didn’t tell you,” she wrote, “was that I had met someone who I quickly developed a close, emotional relationship with.”
The letter repeated Kristin’s version of the Robertson relationship, emphasizing that she and Michael were both in unhappy marriages and that both tried to work out their marital problems. She blamed Greg for refusing to talk to her, especially after she first told him about the “emotional” involvement with Robertson. And she complained that Robertson was being investigated by the police, as well as in danger of losing his job.
Just as she had throughout her life, she played the sympathy card to her parents, saying that her entire life was crumbling.
“I’m scared,” she said. “I feel so alone
and feel helpless. The police see our relationship perhaps being a motive. That is ridiculous though.”
Once again, she railed on the de Villers family for creating suspicion and pushing the idea that somehow foul play was involved. Why, she asked, would they do something “so stupid,” to turn her into an “emotional wreck”?
Since Greg’s death, Kristin had been seeing a counselor twice a week. She also acknowledged that she had become addicted to methamphetamine again.
“I was falling apart,” she would later testify. “I was lapsing into much greater drug use. I needed a professional to talk it through with and help me overcome it.”
Throughout December, Kristin made drug runs to Tijuana two or three times a week, each time withdrawing $360.00 from an ATM. She was now numbing herself with methamphetamine most of the time, and her behavior was increasingly erratic.
On Monday, December 4, Greg de Villers’ body was at last released to his family by the police, and they could finally give him a proper funeral.
San Diego Homicide Detective Laurie Agnew was closing in on Kristin Rossum, calling in Robert Petrachek, a computer forensic examiner at the Regional Computer Forensic Laboratory (RCFL), to bring his expertise to the investigation. With more than twenty-five years as a peace officer, Petrachek, who was attached to the California Highway Patrol, had worked on some of the most high-profile murder cases in the state. Later, he would work on the World Trade Center investigation and the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan.
Over the next few months, Petrachek would spend almost a thousand hours analyzing computer hard drives used by Kristin, Greg and Robertson, as well as floppy disks and CDs. And he would discover a series of incriminating e-mails between the lovers that would turn the case.
That afternoon, Dr. Robertson was summoned into Lloyd Amborn’s office, where he found Dr. Blackbourne and Det Paul Torres from the San Diego Sheriff’s Department waiting for him.
