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

by John Glatt

  He was then fired from his $70,000-a-year county job for failing to report that he’d known Kristin Rossum was abusing drugs. In his official termination letter, his offense was described as “a key personnel issue with serious operational implications.”

  At 4:15 p.m. the same day, Rossum was also fired from her $35,000-a-year toxicologist job for breaking her probationary status by using illegal drugs. During the emotional meeting, Kristin looked like she was under the influence of drugs, with no make-up and unwashed hair.

  “She didn’t look her normal self,” remembered Amborn. “It was clear that she probably was distressed and crying from time to time.”

  After leaving the ME’s office for the last time, Kristin went home and called her Mexican drug dealer and then, after withdrawing $360.00 from the ATM of Vons, went off to Tijuana.

  On Wednesday, December 6, San Diego TV reporter Kevin Cox, on an assignment for News 8, turned up unannounced at Kristin’s Regents Road apartment for an interview.

  Kristin answered the door, wearing a pullover and jeans, her once-long blonde hair now cut short and brushed behind her ears.

  “She is really cute, and she is really trembling,” Cox would later write in an in-depth feature for San Diego Magazine. “She looks like she’s been crying all day and could start again.”

  Cox commiserated about Greg’s death, asking what he was like. Instead of slamming the door in his face, as he had expected, she invited him in. The apartment was a mess and smelly, as Bear had still not been house-trained. Cox noticed that there were no pictures of Greg on the walls, although there was a framed one of Kristin and her dog.

  Everything went well until Cox brought up the investigation, saying that the police considered her a suspect. Then Kristin told him to leave.

  “The detectives, they lie,” she sobbed, walking him to the door. “I really can’t talk to you, but the truth will come out.”

  That night, News 8 broke the sensational story of a love triangle at the ME’s office, and that Homicide detectives were investigating. Over the next few months, Cox would update San Diego viewers as the story built momentum.

  Soon after Dr. Robertson was terminated, toxicologist Donald Lowe took over his job, moving into his office. While cleaning out Robertson’s desk, Lowe found a number of articles on fentanyl, including a case study of twenty-five fentanyl overdoses by Robertson’s friend Dr. Daniel Anderson, of the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office. He immediately sent them to Homicide.

  An investigator then called Dr. Anderson, as an expert, asking him specific questions on fentanyl. Although the detective was vague, never mentioning the specific case he was investigating, Dr. Anderson later warned Dr. Robertson that he suspected fentanyl had been found in Greg’s body.

  “Everything was being kept hush-hush,” said Dr. Anderson. “I kind of put that together and talked to Michael.”

  A few days later, Lloyd Amborn asked toxicologist Cathy Hamm to clear Kristin Rossum’s desk and box up her personal belongings. In a hanging folder, she found Mexican prescriptions for the drugs Aslenix, which metabolizes amphetamine in the body, and Somacid, a muscle relaxant. Nearby, she discovered the drugs, still in their Spanish prescription bottles. She also found the business card of Kristin’s drug connection, Armando, as well as a hotel room key.

  When she pulled out Kristin’s pencil tray, she found reddish-orange rose petals in the desk, alongside a Post-it note reading, “Happy Birthday to my Sweetheart,” in Dr. Robertson’s writing. Hamm immediately told Donald Lowe, who alerted Homicide.

  On Thursday, December 14, Robert Petrachek of the RCFL visited Orbigen, where he took for forensic analysis two Apple iMac computers that had been used by Greg de Villers. Taking the computers back to his laboratory, he began examining their contents for e-mails and Web sites that had been visited. But it would be another three weeks before detectives would seize Kristin’s and Dr. Robertson’s computers for forensic analysis.

  The following Tuesday, Lloyd Ambom gave Donald Lowe a list of thirty-eight death cases involving methamphetamine, that had passed through the ME’s office that year. He then ordered Lowe to audit eight of them in which the drug had been impounded in evidence envelopes. Out of those eight, Lowe discovered that the evidence was completely missing for seven of them. These had all been stored in a room where Kristin Rossum had easy access during her time working for the ME’s office.

  In late December, Kristin Rossum and Deputy Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Harry Bonnell, went to a ladies’ Aztec baseball game at San Diego State University’s Cox Arena. Frank Barnhart happened to be sitting one row in front of them, and heard them discussing the investigation into Greg’s death.

  “I recall Dr. Bonnell saying something to the effect that an investigation like this takes time, and it’s hard to know where it’s going to go,” remembered Barnhart. “I honestly wasn’t real comfortable.”

  Barnhart then turned around and told Dr. Bonnell that he shouldn’t be discussing details of Greg’s death with Kristin.

  Dr. Robertson spent much of the week after Christmas at Kristin’s apartment, where he accessed his e-mail on several occasions. When Robertson was not around, Kristin would make trips to Tijuana to score methamphetamine.

  On December 30, she began accessing several drug addiction sites on her home computer, presumably now wanting to clean up.

  “I’m really looking forward to the end of this year,” she wrote in her journal, “and the beginning of a new one ... A new year, a fresh start, a new life.”

  Writing that it seemed the perfect opportunity to rebuild her life, Kristin had decided to move on.

  “[I don’t want] to feel that I need to wait until the investigation wraps up. God I hope it’s soon.”

  Chapter 21

  The Net Closes

  At 7:00 a.m. Thursday, January 4, 2001, the San Diego Homicide task force made their move. To prevent anyone from tipping off anyone else, they obtained simultaneous search warrants for Kristin and Dr. Robertson’s apartments, as well as the medical examiner’s office.

  And as a team of detectives led by Laurie Agnew arrived at Kristin’s Regents Road apartment, a five-officer surveillance team positioned itself outside Dr. Robertson’s new Eighth Avenue apartment, awaiting instructions.

  When Kristin answered the door, Agnew handed her a search warrant. Kristin went to read it in the living room. She looked terrible, and Officer Dan Dierdoff, whom Agnew had brought along because of his drug expertise, immediately suspected that she was high.

  After reading the warrant, Kristin nervously told Det Agnew that she needed to talk to her in private, and they went into the bedroom.

  “I have something to tell you,” said Kristin, whose hollow-looking face was covered in acne and her breath was foul.

  Det Agnew nodded and told her to go ahead. Kristin fidgeted as she nervously told the detective that they were going to find something in the apartment. The detective asked her what it was, and Kristin mumbled, “meth and paraphernalia.” Then Agnew asked if she would voluntarily show them or if she wanted them to search.

  Kristin walked over to a chest of drawers by the bed on which Greg had died, opened the top drawer and pointed at a box inside. Agnew opened the box to find a disposable Bic lighter, a glass pipe and some white powdered methamphetamine.

  “She sat down on the bed,” Det Agnew would later testify, “and started to cry.”

  “Please don’t do this to me,” she begged. “Please don’t do this to me.”

  Scratching her face in desperation, Kristin asked the detective if she could flush her drugs down the toilet, begging the detective to get rid of them. Agnew refused, saying that that would be destroying evidence.

  “She was crying,” remembered the detective, “and probably three more times said, ‘Please don’t do this to me.’ ”

  As the rest of the team searched the apartment, Dierdoff, at Agnew’s request, examined Kristin as they sat on the living room couch. Her
eyes were extremely dilated and he smelt a “bad odor” on her breath. She was dehydrated, her lips were chapped and she seemed very thirsty.

  He checked her heart rate twice over the next couple of hours. Her resting heartbeat was 103 per minute. An hour later, after she had been arrested and taken to the police station, it had leapt to 133, compared to the normal rate of 60 to 90 beats per minute.

  Throughout the examination, Kristin kept getting up from the couch to pet her Bear, and her mood kept changing for no apparent reason.

  “It was shocking at first,” Officer Dierdoff remembered. “There would be different times when nobody would be saying anything, and she would be sobbing. Almost an out-of-control sob. And then back to normal like nothing had happened.”

  He also noted her “caved-in jowls” and that she was almost skeletal.

  He took a photograph of Kristin. Although normal pupils constrict when the flash goes off, Kristin’s remained dilated.

  While Dierdoff was examining Kristin, a detective photographed the bathroom, careful to show the shower ledge on which the bath stopper was still resting. In the bedroom, Agnew found Greg de Villers’ wallet, containing his California driver’s license, credit cards and a yellow sticky Post-it with Michael Robertson’s old apartment address and phone number on it. She also found his organ donor card signed by Greg and Kristin, with instructions to “donate my whole body.”

  Also in the bedroom, detectives found files containing a 1999 article by Frank Barnhart entitled “Drugs of Abuse.” The sixty-four-page article, which mentioned Kristin by name as a researcher featured a discussion of methamphetamine and, of special interest to the investigators, fentanyl analogs. It listed the psychiatric symptoms of methamphetamine abuse as: “Violent behavior, repetitive activity, memory loss, paranoia, delusions of reference, auditory hallucination, and confusion or fright.”

  Kristin’s latest journals were also found by her Compaq computer, which Bob Petrachek would later remove for forensic analysis along with Greg’s iMac.

  After the search finished, Kristin was read her rights and arrested for being under the influence of drugs. She was then driven to police headquarters by Officer Dierdoff, where she was re-examined. Later, her blood was found to contain 363 nanograms per milliliter of methamphetamine and 70 nanograms of amphetamine. Her urine had 17,700 nanograms of methamphetamine and 2,740 nanograms of amphetamine. And the white powder found in her bedroom was .36 grams of methamphetamine.

  Kristin was then booked and given the opportunity to make a telephone call. She immediately called Michael Robertson’s cell phone, asking if he could raise bail.

  “I said, ‘Sorry, I just can’t,’” recounted Robertson, whose apartment was being searched at the time he got her call.

  After putting down the phone, Dr. Robertson called his lawyer, Charles Goldberg, as investigators seized his computer and passport. Later they would discover several PowerPoint presentations and thirty-seven articles on fentanyl. Among them was a case called “The Crooked Criminalist,” involving missing fentanyl patches, which was solved after the drug was detected in hair samples.

  Robertson then called his wife, Nicole, warning her what had happened and that she would probably also be questioned by police. Nicole was furious, and told him to come over immediately and explain.

  At 9:52 a.m., after the police had left the apartment, the five-man surveillance team saw Dr. Robertson come out of his upstairs apartment, carrying a white trash bag which he dropped into a large Dumpster at the back of the building. He was also observed putting something into his sports car.

  He then walked south along Eighth Avenue, calling his attorney on his cell phone for a ten-minute conversation. After the call, he returned to his apartment, constantly looking over his shoulder to ensure that he wasn’t being followed.

  Ten minutes later he came out of the apartment again, carefully looking behind him, before returning to the Dumpster.

  “His behavior was suspicious in nature,” remembered Detective Randy Alldredge, a San Diego undercover narcotics officer, who was leading the surveillance team. “He actually walked past the Dumpster one time before approaching it again.”

  Convinced he was not being watched, Dr. Robertson went back to the Dumpster and opened the lid.

  “I saw something in his left hand,” said the officer. “Looked like he was moving the trash.”

  Robertson lifted up the trash and placed a manila envelope under it, before patting it down and closing the lid. He then walked to his car and drove off.

  As some of the surveillance team followed Robertson’s car, Officer Alldredge donned his evidence gloves and removed the large white trash bag and the envelope, storing them in a brown paper evidence bag.

  After leaving his apartment, Robertson drove to I-5 toward La Jolla, where Alldredge rejoined his surveillance team. They observed Robertson pick up his wife Nicole, and then drive to Torrey Pines State Beach.

  Detectives watched as Nicole got into a heated argument with her estranged husband. Still arguing, they walked down the beach until they were out of the surveillance team’s sight.

  “We became concerned with what was going on,” said Officer Alldredge, “because of the verbal confrontation.”

  Alldredge then commandeered a Jeep from a lifeguard, having him drive north along the beach, until he located Robertson and Nicole, who were sitting on some rocks in deep conversation. He had the Jeep drive past them again, parking at a safe vantage point where he could observe them in case the discussion turned violent.

  “Once I was satisfied it was just a conversation,” said Alldredge, “the lifeguard brought me back to my vehicle so we could continue on with the surveillance.”

  Eventually the Robertsons walked back to the sports car, shouting at each other. Then a furious Nicole reportedly slapped her husband three or four times, as he tried to shove her away.

  Dr. Robertson got into his car and drove off, abandoning Nicole on the beach. The team left her stranded as they resumed following Robertson, who drove straight to Kristin Rossum’s apartment.

  The following day, Kristin was released from custody and went to Claremont to explain her relapse to her parents. In an emotional family meeting around the kitchen table, she told them about her drug arrest, finally admitting that she and Robertson had been lovers before Greg’s death.

  “She told my family about it,” her brother Brent later testified. “We were all very displeased with her. The flood-gates opened. She let us know everything at that point.”

  Kristin’s religious family was shocked to discover that she had been committing adultery for months before Greg’s death, and Brent was said to have “gone ballistic.”

  “We were very disappointed,” Constance Rossum would later tell Good Housekeeping. “I think it’s terrible. But Kristin had decided the marriage was over.”

  A few days later, Kristin’s high school friend Melissa Prager met her in San Diego and was shocked at her appearance. It was the first time Melissa had seen her since Greg’s death, and she looked painfully thin, far worse than she had when she was addicted to drugs at Claremont High.

  “She was deteriorating,” Prager later said. “I remember her having black circles around her eyes, and obviously very stressed. She confronted me with the truth that she had been using drugs.”

  At the police station, Randy Alldredge would examine the manila envelope that Dr. Robertson had thrown into the Dumpster, finding Kristin’s love letters and greeting cards, some of which had been torn into pieces. There was also a SOFT bag he had been given at the Milwaukee conference, containing love notes and a book on sex.

  On Tuesday, January 9, Michael Robertson’s lawyer, Charles Goldberg, called San Diego Homicide, requesting a meeting. Initially, Goldberg had resisted, but Robertson insisted he wanted another meeting with investigators, who had already interviewed Nicole. He also wanted the computers that had been seized from his apartment returned.

  At 9:10 a.m. the nex
t morning, Robertson and Goldberg arrived at police headquarters and were shown into an interview room at the Homicide Department. There, Detectives Laurie Agnew and Jim Valle joined them, and informed them that the meeting would be recorded.

  “You are not under arrest,” Det Valle told Robertson. “In fact, I’m not even going to advise you of your rights.”

  Goldberg told the detectives that he didn’t want Dr. Robertson to discuss his relationship or contacts with Kristin after Greg de Villers’ death.

  “‘This is a very sore point,” said the attorney, “that has caused a problem with him personally in terms of his wife [and] his marriage.”

  After asking Dr. Robertson about routine procedures at the ME’s office and the storage of impounded drugs and standards, Det Valle asked him if he knew that fentanyl had been found in Greg’s body. Robertson admitted he had heard that from his friend Dr. Anderson, although he had still not been told officially.

  Then Valle asked if an employee of the ME’s office would know that the office did not routinely screen for fentanyl. Knowing that, might someone think he or she could get away with murder?

  At this point, Goldberg stepped in, telling the detective to back off. But Dr. Robertson answered anyway, saying the fentanyl would eventually be found in a second round of testing.

  Det Valle also told Robertson that they now believed Greg had been injected with fentanyl, but Robertson refused to be drawn into a discussion of how that could have happened and how much of the drug would be lethal. Frustrated, Valle changed course and tried to reason with him.

  “You are a very intelligent young man,” said the detective, adding that it wouldn’t take a scientist to figure out they weren’t buying the suicide story. “Someone had to have taken an active role in this. Possibly Kristin ... or in this case, it just happens [that] you’re having a relationship with her at the time.”