Poisoned Love

by Caitlin Rother

  Jordan rolled Greg’s body over to slide him onto a backboard for transport to the nearest hospital. That was when he saw the purple marks of lividity on Greg’s back and buttocks, a sign that the heart had ceased to beat and gravity was causing blood to pool in areas closest to the ground. There were no rose petals under his body.

  At 10:03 P.M., Jordan and Butler carried their patient down the stairs to their ambulance and drove him to Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla, about four minutes away. One of the campus police officers followed, with Kristin in his cruiser. The emergency room doctor tried again to revive Greg, but he was gone. Greg was officially declared dead at 10:19 P.M., six days before his twenty-seventh birthday.

  Kristin called her boss, a handsome, thirty-one-year-old Australian toxicologist, as soon as she got to the hospital and asked him to join her there. Two minutes later, she called her parents, crying. Her father answered the phone.

  “Daddy, Greg stopped breathing,” she said. “I’m so scared.”

  Ralph Rossum said he would meet her at the hospital as quickly as he could, handed the phone to his wife, Constance, and ran out to the car. Kristin spoke briefly to her mother, explaining that Greg was in intensive care.

  Kristin’s boss, Michael Robertson, arrived at the hospital about fifteen minutes later. While they were in the waiting area together, he put his arm around her, comforted her, and held her hand. The nurses thought he seemed like a very supportive supervisor.

  Kristin was still crying, but she was able to answer the ER nurse’s questions about Greg’s medical history and what drugs he might have taken. Kristin said he might have used some old prescriptions she’d purchased in Tijuana five years earlier, when she’d been trying to get off crystal methamphetamine. Then, the nurse told her the bad news. They’d tried again to resuscitate her husband, but they couldn’t get him back.

  Kristin’s mother got a call at 10:49 P.M. from Michael, who introduced himself as Kristin’s boss, and they talked for about ten minutes. He said Kristin was cold standing there in her pajamas, and he wondered what to do. Constance thanked him and suggested he drive Kristin back to the apartment. Kristin’s father was on his way down to meet her at the hospital, but he would figure out where to go.

  After allowing the news of Greg’s death to settle in, a social worker approached Kristin about tissue donation. Greg had decided to join Kristin as an organ and tissue donor about two weeks earlier, when he’d renewed his driver’s license, but because his heart had already stopped, his organs couldn’t be harvested. However, some of his skin could be used to help burn victims; his corneas, veins, and heart valves could be transplanted into needy recipients; and some of his bones could be saved as well. At 11:30 P.M., Kristin signed the necessary paperwork and then headed home with her boss.

  Earlier that night, Constance phoned Greg’s mother, Marie, to tell her Greg was being taken to the emergency room after having a bad reaction to cough syrup and some other medication.

  Marie called the hospital to see if she could learn more. But since Marie was home alone, the nurse said she’d have to call her back. Marie immediately called Jerome, the oldest of Greg’s younger brothers, with the upsetting news.

  Jerome tried calling Scripps himself, but he, too, was home alone, so the nurse told him to go to his mother’s and call back from there. Why wouldn’t she just tell him what was going on? Jerome drove to Marie’s condo in Thousand Oaks and called Constance to see if he could get some better information. She didn’t know anything more and promised that Ralph would call them from the hospital with any new developments.

  But Jerome couldn’t wait for that. He wanted to know what happened, and he couldn’t understand why no one would tell him. He called the hospital again, and this time the nurse asked if the sheriff’s deputy had arrived. “No,” he said, so she put him on hold to talk to the deputy, who was coming to deliver the bad news in person. Marie, who was sitting by the window, saw a Ventura County sheriff’s cruiser pull up outside. The nurse got back on the line with Jerome, but he was so insistent that she went ahead and told him that Greg had “expired” before the deputy made it to the front door.

  Jerome couldn’t believe it. How was this possible? He’d spoken to his brother only a few days earlier. Greg had called while Jerome was watching a DVD on Alaska, and he was too tired to talk, so he put Greg off and promised to call him back. Unfortunately, he never got around to it.

  Marie was beside herself. A chronic smoker and an asthmatic since childhood, she’d had part of a lung removed, and now she was sobbing so hard she could barely breathe. Jerome was upset and he was scared. He didn’t want to lose his mother, too. Now the oldest of Marie’s sons, Jerome tried to comfort her while he called his other brother, Bertrand, and told him to meet them at their mother’s in Thousand Oaks. Bertrand, who lived about forty-five minutes south, near the University of California, Los Angeles, started crying and said he’d come as soon as he could. He was so emotional that his roommate decided to take the wheel and drive Bertrand to his mother’s.

  When they arrived around 11 P.M., Marie and Jerome were still waiting for more definitive answers. But they never came. So, the family spent the night together, wracked with grief and confusion, asking each other questions and trying, unsuccessfully, to make sense of it all.

  Jerome figured that now was the time to tell Marie that Kristin—the only one of her sons’ girlfriends she’d ever really accepted—was a former methamphetamine user. But when Jerome raised the question of whether Kristin might have had something to do with Greg’s death, Bertrand said he was talking crazy. Marie, who loved Kristin like a daughter, wouldn’t hear of it. There had to be a rational explanation.

  UCSD Detective Sergeant Bob Jones met Kristin and Michael on the landing in front of her apartment when they returned from the hospital around 11:45 P.M. It was understood that Michael should stay outside while Jones picked up the interview with Kristin where his officers had left off. Sitting at the dining-room table, Jones asked Kristin to tell him what happened.

  She told Jones that she and Greg had been fighting all weekend. It started on Thursday, she said, when she announced that she was moving out. They’d had dinner with her parents on Friday, spent Saturday night together, and then, on Sunday night, Greg, still upset, had taken some of her old prescriptions to help him sleep. He’d been sleeping all day on Monday, in fact. Her lab was only fifteen minutes away, so she came home a number of times to check on him. Each time she’d found him breathing—a little loudly at times—but otherwise he seemed fine.

  Kristin said they’d had some soup together around lunchtime, and that’s when he told her he’d taken some of her old oxycodone and clonazepam. Oxycodone is a narcotic painkiller similar to Vicodin. Clonazepam, a sedative and also a narcotic, is classified as a date rape drug.

  She told Jones she’d run some errands after work and then came home to take a long bath and a shower. She was about to get into bed sometime around nine o’clock, when she leaned over to kiss Greg. His forehead was cold, and he wasn’t breathing, so she called 911. The dispatcher told her to pull Greg off the bed and onto the floor, so that he was flat on his back and she could start doing CPR. Kristin wasn’t sure she’d be strong enough to get him off the bed by herself, but the dispatcher insisted. She pulled back the covers so she could turn him sideways, and that’s when she saw the rose petals all over his chest and their wedding photo under his pillow.

  Jones asked her about the shredded letter he’d found in a plastic ziplock bag on the dining-room table. Kristin said Greg found it on Thursday and got angry, so she put it through the shredder, but he’d been trying to piece it back together with tape. Jones took the letter as evidence, along with a note in Kristin’s handwriting that one of his officers found in the kitchen. Signed with a heart and Kristin’s first initial, it said: “Hi, sleepy. Hope you feel better. I’m out to get a wedding gift,” and told him there were leftovers in the fridge. Jones didn’t take Kristin’s diary
, which an officer found lying on the coffee table.

  Ralph Rossum arrived at the apartment around midnight, after stopping first at the hospital, where the social worker notified him of Greg’s death. He joined his daughter and Jones at the dining-room table.

  Angie Wagner, an investigator colleague of Kristin’s at the Medical Examiner’s Office, showed up around 1 A.M. By then, Kristin was sitting on the couch in the living room. Wagner didn’t know her very well. In fact, she hadn’t even known Kristin was married. Wagner asked Kristin her own series of questions for her report.

  After all the interviews were over, Michael left, and Ralph helped his daughter into his car to start the difficult drive back to Claremont. Kristin’s hair was a mess, her face was puffy, and her eyes were swollen from crying all night.

  “I’ve lost my Greggy,” she told him. “I’ve lost my best friend.”

  It was about 1:40 A.M. The investigators saw no reason to disbelieve Kristin’s story. There were no broken doorjambs and no sign of a struggle. They left the apartment, thinking it was probably a suicide.

  Stefan Gruenwald arrived at Orbigen on Tuesday around 9:45 A.M. and scanned the parking lot for Greg’s car. It wasn’t there, so he headed inside, intending to call Greg’s apartment first thing. But before Gruenwald even got to his desk, his assistant told him there was a phone call for him in his office.

  “Who is it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know—a Mike Robertson,” she said. “It’s about Greg.”

  Michael Robertson introduced himself as Kristin’s boss and told Gruenwald that something had happened to Greg. He gave Gruenwald the Rossums’ phone number in Claremont and asked him to call them right away. Michael said he couldn’t answer any questions and deferred to the Rossums.

  Gruenwald called the number and got Constance Rossum. She said Greg had passed away the night before.

  “What happened?” he asked, in disbelief.

  Constance said Greg had experienced flu-like symptoms over the weekend, so he started taking cough syrup with some other drugs on Saturday and continued on Sunday. He must have had an allergic reaction, she said.

  That sounded odd to Gruenwald, who’d earned a medical degree and a Ph.D. back in Frankfurt, Germany, and had spent some time doing forensics work. If someone was going to have an allergic reaction, he thought, it would develop right away, not two days later. He didn’t say anything to Constance at the time, but he thought the story sounded suspicious. Gruenwald called back a few hours later so he could talk to Kristin directly.

  “I can’t believe what happened,” he said. “He was such a good person.”

  Kristin was crying. She agreed and said she couldn’t believe it, either. But from there, he said, the story changed. This time Kristin described Greg’s death as more of an overdose, perhaps an accidental one.

  An overdose? Gruenwald had never seen Greg drunk, let alone under the influence of any drugs. He wouldn’t even go near the lab at Orbigen, which was used mostly for cancer research. Gruenwald had once asked Greg to help clean out the storage room, where they kept hundreds of containers of chemicals, but he refused, saying he didn’t want to touch them. Greg was much more comfortable with the business side of things. So, for Gruenwald, the idea of Greg dying from a drug overdose, even accidentally, just didn’t ring true.

  Jerome de Villers felt the same way. Greg wasn’t the kind of guy to do or take too much of anything, and now he was dead. It just didn’t make sense. His head was jumbled with questions: Where did Greg get the medication that killed him? Did Kristin give it to him? Did Kristin have drugs in the apartment? Were they were doing drugs together and something went wrong?

  He dismissed the last scenario because he remembered it wasn’t that long ago that Greg wouldn’t even take the anti-histamines Marie offered him for his stuffy nose. Jerome, an insurance investigator, was determined to find out from Kristin—and whomever else he had to ask—exactly what happened to his brother and why.

  Chapter 2

  Kristin Margrethe Rossum, the eldest child of two driven and accomplished Midwestern parents, was raised with the pressures to perform and to succeed, almost from the very start. At an early age, they instilled in her the importance of image and appearances, which no doubt contributed to the perfectionism she described in her diary years later.

  “It was always obvious to me that I was expected to do well in school,” she wrote. “I wanted to make my parents proud of me. I wanted to be the best in everything I did. I wanted to be perfect. For the most part, I excelled at everything I tried.”

  But this sense of self-confidence was vulnerable to other forces at work in her psyche. At times, she wrote, she found herself “torn between sound, logical ideas and unreasonable, unattainable ideals. It’s an interesting internal conflict.”

  That conflict was perpetuated by a persistent inner voice that criticized the way she looked in the mirror. She thought her legs and arms were strong and she had an attractive face. But her butt was rounder than she liked, her inner thighs were a little too flabby, her stomach wasn’t flat enough, and her arms could be more toned. “At 5 feet, 2 ¼ inches tall,” she wrote, she was “vertically challenged. OK, SHORT!!!”

  “I continue to feel dissatisfied with my body, because I don’t think it’s perfect,” she wrote. But, she added, “I guess that my belief is that it is within my power to control the shape of my body. Therefore, if I am dissatisfied with my body, it is only the result of my own failings.”

  It’s possible that this drive to be perfect grew so overwhelming at times that her only relief came from getting high. One friend said Kristin’s addictive relationship with methamphetamine may have been the only part of her life that Kristin saw as her own, separate from the parents who had such a strong influence on her. And people high on meth don’t think or act rationally.

  Kristin came into the world on October 25, 1976, in Memphis, Tennessee, where her father was a political science professor and her mother was a marketing researcher. Kristin’s brother Brent was born in nearby Germantown about three years later, and Pierce, the youngest, about four years after that.

  As Kristin and her brothers were growing up, they moved around the country as their parents’ careers progressed. Sometimes, Kristin said, her mother “would hold down the fort” when her father had to leave town for a professional opportunity elsewhere.

  When Kristin was four or five, the Rossums moved to Wilmette, a suburb on the north shore of Chicago, where she saw a lot of her extended family. She and her mother would take the train into the city to watch a performance of The Nutcracker or go Christmas shopping at Marshall Field’s.

  The focus on her outward appearance started when she was very young. When she was four, her parents arranged for Kristin to have a commercial head shot taken. The photographer sat her at the piano, laid one of her little hands on the keys, and told her to turn and smile. Her straight, shoulder-length blond hair was pulled back with a barrette, and she wore a tent dress with a tiny white collar and embroidered flowers that covered her legs. She was three feet three inches tall, weighed thirty-four pounds, and wore a size 4 to 4T dress.

  In a head shot taken two years later, in December 1982, she’d grown in confidence and dress size. This time her big, hypnotic green eyes stared straight into the camera. She was simply beguiling.

  On the back of the photo, along with her particulars, she was featured in five different poses, illustrating her versatility and ability to switch from mood to mood and from one outfit to another. She was goofy in one, serious or playful in the others, wearing a dark leotard and white tights, a sailor suit, or a button-up shirt with a sweater tied around her neck, clutching a handful of daises or holding a balloon on a string. In one shot, she feigned surprise as she pretended to read one of the Madeline children’s books, glasses perched on her head, her mouth and eyes agape.

  The pretty, towheaded girl worked as a model for Marshall Field’s, Sears, McDonald’s, and Montgomery Ward
. She was a natural. She wore a standard size 6X dress, and the camera loved her.

  Kristin gave up modeling for ballet the following year, when the family moved to Bethesda, Maryland, and her father took a job as a deputy director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice. He worked for the Bureau—the national repository for crime statistics collected by government and law enforcement agencies—in 1983 and 1984, during the Reagan administration.

  Six-year-old Kristin began training at the Maryland Youth Ballet Academy, where she proved to be quite a talented little dancer. She was chosen for a walk-on role as a page in the Joffrey Ballet’s performance of Romeo and Juliet, reveling in the honor of being backstage at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Years later she wrote in her diary that the powerful Prokofiev score touched her to the core and remained one of her favorites.

  “There is so much passion in his notes,” she wrote.

  Around that time, she also began to discover a love for science. And the academic pressures soon began to mount.

  Ralph Rossum relocated to Claremont, California, in 1984, when he was granted tenure as a faculty member at Claremont McKenna College. He stayed for one semester, then spent some time working on a grant in Washington, D.C., where his wife, Constance, was a marketing manager for the Marriott Corporation. By June 1985, the family had reunited in Claremont, a small enclave of primarily white, highly educated residents. This community would serve as the family’s base in the years to come.

  The fourteen-square-mile city is located about thirty miles east of downtown Los Angeles. In 2000 it had a population of 34,000 and a median income of about $70,000. Known for its tree-lined streets and small-town feel, Claremont generally houses about five thousand students and professors associated with the eight institutions of higher learning in the area. Of those, seven are within the city’s limits and are collectively its largest employer: Claremont McKenna College, Pomona College, Pitzer College, Scripps College, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont Graduate University, and the Claremont School of Theology. Azusa Pacific University, a small evangelical Christian university where Constance Rossum was director of nonprofit graduate programs and a professor of marketing and management, is ten miles away.