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

by John Glatt

  In his cross-examination, defender Victor Eriksen asked Dr. Stanley if, given the fentanyl levels in Greg’s blood, urine and stomach contents, he could determine the amount of the drug “that was actually taken by Mr. de Villers?”

  Dr. Stanley replied that there was no way of knowing, as it is not routinely measured in the stomach contents.

  “In all my career, I haven’t ever seen such high gastric levels,” said the doctor. “So, it’s a large amount.”

  Another crucial prosecution expert witness was the emergency room physician, Dr. Jack Stump, who had studied the behavioral and physiological effects of methamphetamine and trained police officers in how to deal with addicts. Asked by Goldstein to describe the drug, Dr. Stump said that frequent use could actually change the chemistry of the brain.

  “What methamphetamine does for you is give you what’s called supernatural pleasure,” he explained. “A pleasure you could not obtain anywhere else in nature. There aren’t enough vacations, aren’t enough births of babies, not enough pleasant events in life to get remotely close to what methamphetamine can do for you.”

  But he said that after a few weeks on the drug, an addict would lose the ability to get the “supernatural high,” and become acutely depressed. Soon they would be taking it just to feel normal. Long-term use, he said, leads to “extreme paranoia” and even hallucinations.

  “When a person has used long enough,” he told Goldstein, “we see several things. We see, oftentimes, weight loss. We see skin lesions. Part of the methamphetamine is an obsessive disorder in which they will start to scratch their skin. Face and arms are most common. They will scratch until they wear an ulcer in their skin. It‘s, on the street, called ‘crank bugs’ or ‘meth bugs.’ ”

  The prosecutor then showed Dr. Stump a picture of Kristin Rossum soon after her arrest, asking if he saw meth bugs on her face.

  “Yes,” he replied, saying that he saw several on Kristin’s forehead and face, one with a scab on it and others in the healing process.

  In his cross-examination, Victor Eriksen asked if a habitual meth user could function at work. Dr. Stump said that at low levels of the drug, a person could without too much difficulty, but the more they took, the more difficult it would become.

  “Would it strike you as unusual,” asked Eriksen, “that a heavy meth user would be able to graduate with a B.S. degree in chemistry at the summa cum laude level?”

  “That would be unusual for a heavy meth user,” conceded the doctor.

  On Friday, October 25, Kristin Rossum passed her 26th birthday. She had little to celebrate—on the stand, the DAs paralegal Meredith Dent described how she had accidentally discovered that Kristin had bought a single rose from Vons the day Greg died. She also testified how Kristin had called her drug dealer four times that day and numerous times later, and how she usually withdrew $360 from her ATM before going to see him.

  Later that day, the prosecution screened the three-hour video of Kristin’s interview with Detectives Laurie Agnew and Jimmy Valle for the jury. Throughout it, Kristin remained composed at the defense table, taking notes and whispering to the two public defenders.

  The following Monday, two weeks after the start of the trial, the prosecution’s last witness, Jerome de Villers, took the stand, emotionally testifying that he had refused to believe his brother had committed suicide. He told of growing up with Greg in Palm Springs after their father had left, and how they had literally bumped into Kristin on the Mexican border.

  “She was alone,” he said. “She asked to hang out with us.”

  She moved into Greg’s room that night, but never paid her share of the rent. Soon, valuables began disappearing from the apartment, like Greg’s gold ring with the Tremolet-de Villers family crest, and a gold necklace, as well as some checks. But Greg had initially refused to believe that Kristin was the culprit.

  Jerome said he was shocked when Greg announced they were engaged, but after they married, his brother seemed happy in the relationship, and had no idea that Kristin was being unfaithful.

  After Greg’s sudden death, Jerome said he had been suspicious of Kristin’s behavior and gone to the police, prompting the investigation.

  Throughout his testimony, Kristin seemed agitated and upset, continually shaking her head at the jury and saying “No!”

  When Judge Thompson recessed that night and dismissed the jury, prosecutor Dan Goldstein took the defendant to task.

  “Your Honor,” he told the judge, “I have been fairly patient during this trial about the defendant’s conduct in this courtroom. During my opening statement, in twelve or thirteen years’ experience of doing cases, I’ve had very few defendants chipping at me during opening statement. I think the defense counsel noted it. I don’t know if Your Honor did?

  Judge Thompson said he had noticed it too.

  “I’d ask the court to tell her to stop, knock it off,” said the visibly angry deputy DA. “This is the victim’s brother who is on the stand, who doesn’t deserve this type of conduct.” Goldstein accused Kristin of “interfering with the court process,” demanding it stop immediately.

  Alex Loebig said that, although he was sitting next to her, he didn’t see her do anything more than reacting “to some degree.”

  “All right,” Judge Thompson told her. “Don’t do it again.”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” replied Kristin smugly.

  Angered by her tone, the judge then launched into her in an uncharacteristic burst of profanity.

  “You are smiling at jurors,” he thundered. “Absolute bullshit. I think it’s really hurting you. I don’t think they are buying it for a second. It’s up to you. You are to have no contact with any witnesses one way or the other. Don’t sit there and tell me you are not doing it. I’m not a fucking idiot.”

  Before seating the jury the next day, Judge Thompson apologized to the court for losing his temper and using profanities.

  “To the extent anyone was offended by the language that was used I apologize,” he said. “But, as I said, I will not apologize for the message.”

  Chapter 27

  In Her Own Defense

  Since the beginning of her trial, Kristin had dominated the television news in San Diego. Every night the city’s viewing public was treated to footage of Kristin and her parents entering the court in the morning, and then leaving at night to return to their hotel. Now that the trial was under way, her parents had stopped giving interviews to the scores of reporters and TV news crews camped out on West Broadway outside the modem courthouse.

  Some reporters noted that Kristin had adopted the air of a runway fashion model, sashaying into court wearing a smart new outfit each morning. She dressed conservatively in somber suits and white shirts, but appeared to be enjoying all the attention, even smiling for cameras on occasion.

  On Tuesday, October 29, Kristin seemed upbeat for the start of her defense. Her legal team would have an uphill battle trying to prove that Greg had died a tragic suicide. One of the first defense witnesses was Melissa Prager, Kristin’s best friend since Claremont Junior High School.

  Calling Kristin “my dear friend,” Prager told the jury that she had found Greg “overly protective,” saying he’d discouraged his wife from seeing her old friends without his permission. Finally, she said, Kristin had told her that she had fallen in love with her boss, Dr. Michael Robertson.

  “She finally found someone who truly respected her for her mind and appreciated her beauty,” Prager testified. “Someone who she was in love with.”

  Defender Victor Eriksen then asked if Kristin had expressed reservations about telling Greg she wanted a separation.

  “She seemed terrified,” said Prager. “She informed me that she had told Greg about her affair and that [he] was very upset about it.”

  During his cross-examination, Dan Goldstein tried to demonstrate to the jury how Melissa Prager was part of the Rossum family PR machine, asking about interviews she had given to The San Diego Union-T
ribune and Good Housekeeping.

  “I was interviewed by so many people,” she said. “I don’t remember Union-Tribune, but it could have happened.”

  The defense’s next witness was Constance Rossum, who recounted Kristin’s childhood and adolescence. She told the jury of Kristin’s early career as a child model and how she had dreamed of being a prima ballerina. But everything changed, said her mother, when Kristin was seriously injured in a ballet accident and had to give up dancing.

  “Without her ballet, she felt very unhappy,” said Constance. “She said, ‘Mom, after being the Sugar Plum Fairy ...’ ”

  Then Kristin’s grades started to fall and her behavior changed as she started keeping bad company at Claremont High. Constance started sobbing as Loebig asked her about the time police had been called to the house after her brother had discovered drug paraphernalia.

  “I felt very stupid that I probably did not see or connect the signs,” she said. “I wouldn’t know a drug if I fell over it.”

  Describing her first meeting with her future son-in-law, Constance thought he had “very kind eyes.” Soon afterward she had personally found the couple an apartment on the UCSD campus and helped pay rent and expenses. She had even prepared a three-page summary of all the money they had lavished on the couple over the period of their relationship and marriage, saying it totaled $74,425.

  “It was our initiative,” she stated. “They would remind us if the rent check was late.”

  Constance said that, soon after they’d met, Kristin had come home, saying she and Greg planned to be married.

  “I asked them to please wait,” she said. “I wanted Kristin to go back to school.”

  Kristin dutifully agreed and was accepted into SDSU, where she became a straight-A student.

  “They seemed very hard-working,” she said. “We were quite proud of them.”

  Constance told how, a few weeks before the wedding, Kristin had burst into tears, telling her she wanted to cancel it. Thinking she had “wedding jitters,” Constance asked her daughter if it was wise after all the arrangements had been made.

  “I gave her the wrong counsel, I’m afraid,” she said. “I thought it was best at the time.”

  Throughout her testimony, Constance painted Greg as an angry, immature man, emotionally dependent on Kristin. By the beginning of 2000, she said, her daughter had told her that the marriage had no future, and her doubts about Greg had resurfaced. By September, testified Constance, Kristin had told her over lunch that she planned to leave him, but didn’t want to hurt him, as his mother Marie was facing eviction.

  “I said, ‘Kristin, you can’t stay with a man simply because you don’t want to hurt his mother’s feeling.’ ”

  Constance had encouraged her daughter to walk out on Greg, even offering to help her move out that day.

  Then she described how she and her husband had gone to San Diego to take Greg and Kristin out for a birthday dinner. When they arrived at the apartment, she commented on a single red rose in the dining room.

  “It was strange and scary,” she testified. “He was facing me. He said, ‘Of all the roses, that single rose survived.’ Ralph and I looked at each other. We thought, ‘Wow, you are waxing poetic there.’ ”

  Later, over dinner, she described Greg as “agitated” that his mother had still not received her copy of the wedding album. Then, according to Constance, her son-in-law began shouting and making a scene in the restaurant about a friend who had let him down in a deal to raise funds for Orbigen.

  “He was very upset,” she said, “and wanted him to burn in hell. I kicked [Kristin] under the table. And that’s a signal that Mom wants to talk to you.”

  According to Constance, Kristin then told her it was “really bad” with Greg and that she was leaving next week. The following morning, she and her husband went out to search for available apartments for their daughter. In his often-combative cross-examination, Dave Hendren challenged Constance about her defense testimony. He questioned her closely about when Claremont High School had called in the police, concerned that Kristin was being physically abused at home.

  Saying that her daughter was engaging in “self-harm,” she described how she and her husband had searched Kristin’s backpack, finding a meth pipe. Constance admitted that she then “got physical” with Kristin, and Professor Rossum had “grabbed her arm” as she was attempting to run away.

  “I slapped her in the face,” she said, adding that her husband had given her a “spanking” on her buttocks. “I was very worried. I was very angry. She did things we could not handle.”

  Hendren then asked about Kristin’s second encounter with Claremont police, after the Rossums had found methamphetamine in her bra.

  “We confronted Kristin about drugs again,” Constance answered. “And she said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I’m so embarrassed.’ ”

  She said her daughter had then picked up a kitchen knife and held it up, before running upstairs and going into the bathroom. She denied that Kristin had tried to cut herself with the knife, but confirmed that she had taken a razor blade and drawn blood.

  “‘Perhaps I’ll slit my wrists,’ ” Constance remembered her daughter saying. “But she didn’t.”

  She said her daughter’s continued drug use had devastated the family and put her at her wits’ end.

  “Image is not important if your daughter’s life is in danger,” she said, referring back to Dan Goldstein’s opening statements. “How can you teach ethics if you don’t keep it at home?”

  The deputy DA also asked her whether she had hired an agent to handle book and film rights on Kristin’s story. Constance admitted that she had been approached on the subject, and had talked to a couple of agents, but “We told them our focus is on our daughter’s trial,” she said. “Please don’t bother us until after the trial.” So far she had only hired a professor at the UCLA School of Communications for illegal use of copyright.

  Pointing out her extensive marketing and public relations background, Hendren asked if she realized the importance of accuracy. Then he brought up an interview she had given Good Housekeeping, intimating that Greg had Hepatitis B, and linking it to drug use and multiple sex partners.

  Constance claimed she had been misinformed that he had the disease after Greg’s eyes were rejected for donation after his death.

  “You were suggesting to a national news media,” said Hendren, “that Mr. de Villers either used needles or had a sexual partner outside of his marriage, weren’t you?”

  “That’s what we’d been told,” she said. “That was our understanding.”

  The next defense witness was Kristin’s twenty-three-year-old brother Brent. In line with defense strategy to show Kristin’s unhappy marriage, he told of a series of e-mails in 2000, in which his sister spoke about her relationship with Greg. He confirmed that in a May 23 e-mail, Kristin had told him she should have listened to her instincts and called off the wedding. But she had never mentioned her affair with Michael Robertson, or that she had relapsed into methamphetamine prior to Greg’s death.

  On his cross-examination, Dan Goldstein asked Brent what Kristin did when she was taking drugs in the early 1990s.

  “She was picking at her knuckles,” he replied. “Fidgety. That’s the behavior I associated with the meth use.”

  Describing his late brother-in-law as “a good guy,” Brent said they often played golf together. But in the months before his death, Greg’s behavior changed and he became “distant.”

  Kristin’s aunt, Marguerite Zandstra, then took the stand, describing how Greg had gotten angry the night before his wedding at the thought of his estranged father turning up.

  “He said to me, ‘If he shows up, I’ll kill him,’ ” said her aunt.

  Then, under questioning by Goldstein, Zandstra said that in the three times she had met Greg, she had found him “wimpy” and “immature,” and that “he didn’t act like a man.”

  The following day, the defense called
its own medical expert, Dr. Mark Wallace, to try to show that Greg could have taken fentanyl himself. He testified that it would be hard to deliver the drug orally, as it gets destroyed by stomach juices and only twenty-five percent of the hit is absorbed. Unlike the prosecution’s drug expert, he described fentanyl as “very bad-tasting,” saying it would be impossible to deliver raw fentanyl without masking the taste.

  Asked by Victor Eriksen if someone would taste ten milliliters of fentanyl dissolved into an eight-ounce glass, Dr. Wallace said it would taste bitter.

  On cross-examination, Dan Goldstein challenged the doctor’s claims about the drug’s taste.

  “Obviously ‘bitter’ is kind of a subjective word,” said the deputy DA. “Let me ask you, how bitter is fentanyl?”

  “I don’t know,” replied the doctor, who admitted that he had never seen a dose as high as the one in Greg’s body.

  Kristin’s youngest brother Pierce then took the stand, describing how Greg had changed after the wedding.

  “He stopped playing video games,” said the 16-year-old. “Stopped talking with the family. Just became overprotective of Kristin and very clingy.”

  Asked by Eriksen how his sister had reacted to Greg’s “clinginess,” Pierce said she got annoyed at times and wanted her own space. He mentioned one time when Greg had come to Claremont for the Rossums’ wedding anniversary, and insisted on watching a video of Kristin dancing the Sugar Plum Fairy again and again.

  “I said, ‘Come on, Greg. Let’s play. You have seen that enough times. You have your own copy in San Diego.’ ”

  When the Defense was finished, Dan Goldstein stood up, asking Pierce about some notes he had written, and whether he’d heard his mother and aunt testify. Pierce said he had written up the notes the night before, but had not discussed them with his parents.