Poisoned Love

by Caitlin Rother

  Horowitz told Kristin to inform her parents about their conversation and to warn them he’d be calling that night to set up an interview. Back at the station, he followed police procedures by notifying the child abuse hotline of the incident and preparing a written report of suspected child abuse.

  Around six o’clock, Kristin called to clarify her story. She said the bruise on her arm was really caused by her dad grabbing her as she tried to leave the house, not from hitting her as she’d said before. Horowitz thought she was backtracking to minimize what had happened, posturing to protect her parents.

  When he called the Rossum house at 7:15 P.M., he told Constance that he was investigating a reported case of child abuse and made an appointment to meet with her and Ralph at home around 8 the next morning.

  The Rossums lived in a white, two-story house at the end of a cul-de-sac on Weatherford Court, a short, quiet street with well-kept lawns and flowerbeds. In 2004 the house had red rose bushes growing in the front yard.

  Horowitz talked with Constance and Ralph for about an hour in the family room off the kitchen, while Kristin stayed in her bedroom. He found the Rossums to be quite cooperative. After their anniversary cruise, Constance told him, she and Ralph learned that Kristin was using drugs, smoking cigarettes, and having parties for friends who stole checks and credit cards. The incident happened when they tried to confront her about all of this.

  “Ralph got mad and did hit her in the arm,” Constance said. “I admit that I slapped her in the face, but she tried to hit me first.”

  Constance explained how Kristin tried to cut her wrists, first with a knife and then with razor blades, but that she had made only superficial cuts, so they didn’t take her to see a doctor.

  “I was afraid of what would happen if we took her to the hospital,” she told Horowitz. “We don’t know who to go to or what to do.”

  Then it was Ralph’s turn. He said he found it unusual that Kristin had asked to use the car to go to the library because her driving privileges had been suspended due to “her actions while we were gone.” It was also unusual, he said, for her to carry a backpack. When he found the drug paraphernalia inside, he said, he began tugging on her arm, demanding to know the truth.

  “I admit that I took my open hand and struck her three or four times on the upper arm,” he told Horowitz. “She told me what had been going on and apologized. Kristin was visibly upset and started talking about killing herself.”

  After things had settled down later that evening, Ralph told him, they all agreed to work on the situation.

  “I realize that there’s a lot going on and that we need some help,” Ralph said.

  Horowitz saw a few discrepancies in the stories he’d heard. For one, Ralph said he hit Kristin with an open hand, while Kristin claimed it was a closed fist. Still, Horowitz didn’t see any basis for the child-abuse claim.

  After the ordeal, Constance and Ralph took Kristin in for a full physical. They told the doctor about finding the glass pipe, and he gave her a good talking-to about using drugs. Then, life in the Rossum household seemed to calm down for a while.

  “We thought we had the problem licked at that point,” Ralph said.

  Like all the other seniors at Claremont High, Kristin went to a photo studio for her senior yearbook portrait. The boys posed in tuxedo shirts and bow ties, and the girls wore black, V-necked formal dresses. Kristin’s photo showed no sign of drug use. She seemed healthy, wearing a string of pearls, her hair long and very blond. She looked attractive and comfortable with herself, just like the model she was trained to be. Kristin also sang with the A Cappella Singers Choir that year, posing for the yearbook with the other students in a long dark dress, the pearls, and some tasteful makeup.

  But that fall, her parents began to notice the unwelcome reminders of her troubled past: she was picking at her hands again, she was losing weight, and her grades weren’t as good. They definitely knew something was wrong when they saw that she was doing poorly in calculus. Kristin had always been so good at math.

  It’s typical for parents to feel sad, frustrated, helpless, and angry when they can’t fix their child’s drug problem, and the Rossums appeared to follow the norm.

  “All this beauty and talent and wasting it all on people who were unworthy of her,” Ralph later recalled thinking.

  This would become a sad refrain throughout Kristin’s life.

  On January 14, 1994, Kristin came home from school around 3 P.M., acting erratically. Constance suspected her daughter was using methamphetamine again and felt compelled to confront Kristin about it. But that only escalated the situation.

  Kristin started to touch her tank top protectively, so Constance asked if she had drugs on her. Kristin became defensive and tried to run away. Constance grabbed her, reached into her shirt, and pulled a glass pipe out of her bra. She was horrified. She didn’t know what else to do but call the police and report that her daughter was under the influence of drugs. She’d hoped they were done with this mess.

  Because Officer Horowitz had dealt with the Rossum family before, he took the call. When he arrived at the house on Weatherford Court, Constance seemed to be at her wit’s end as she handed him the pipe. She also handed him a few other things she’d found in Kristin’s belongings—some Ex-Lax, a small mirror, and some razor blades.

  “Kristin has had a drug problem for the past several years,” she told him. “The episodes with her friends using the credit cards and the checks and taking the car have caused us to realize how extensive her involvement was. We have tried doctors and therapy, but nothing so far has worked. This incident is the last straw, and something needs to be done about this.”

  After talking with a distraught Constance, the officer went upstairs, where the door to Kristin’s room was ajar. Kristin was inside, sobbing, her nose running and her eyes red from crying. He asked what was going on, but she didn’t answer him. The floor of the room was covered with papers and clothes strewn about. She was fidgety and obviously distressed, unable to complete a sentence or express a clear thought.

  He did a quick physical examination, shining a penlight into her eyes, which did nothing to shrink her dilated pupils. She seemed dry-mouthed, and her pulse was going at a rate of 118 beats a minute. He asked if she’d smoked speed before going to school.

  Yes, Kristin admitted, she’d gotten some drugs and the pipe from a boy the night before at Claremont High, where she’d gone to watch a performance of the musical Oklahoma.

  “He owed me some money, so he paid me back with the drugs and pipe,” she told Horowitz.

  Kristin said she’d smoked at the high school that night and again the next morning in her bedroom before going to school. She took the pipe and the remainder of the drugs with her to school and brought them home again. She told him she used the drugs to help her study and with “other activities.”

  Horowitz placed Kristin under arrest for possession of paraphernalia and for being under the influence of a controlled substance. He snapped handcuffs on her wrists, read her her rights, and took her away in his squad car. He got the feeling that Kristin’s family was more concerned about the image problem her drug addiction caused than about the drug problem itself.

  At the city jail, the seventeen-year-old was fingerprinted, booked, photographed and ordered to produce a urine sample. A marked contrast to the pretty pictures Kristin took as a child model, her first booking photo shows her with her eyes closed, grimacing and crying.

  Since Kristin was still a minor, Horowitz had a choice of moving her to Juvenile Hall within six hours of the arrest or releasing her to her parents. He chose the latter. Kristin was placed in a holding cell for about two hours until her parents came to get her.

  Generally, he explained later, juveniles are released to a parent or guardian unless they are habitual offenders or have committed a violent crime. He was unable to explain why nothing ever came of the arrest, saying that county probation officials had jurisdiction over her case. Pe
rhaps, he said, it fell through the cracks because she was so close to turning eighteen. At the time, he’d hoped that the court would compel her to attend a drug rehab program and get some help.

  “She had every resource and ability through her family to get through life…but again, methamphetamine is a very, very pernicious drug, and you don’t lose the taste once you cross that line,” he said.

  This time the Rossums decided to try something different. What Kristin needed, they concluded, was a change of environment. Surely, it would help to get her away from her drug friends at Claremont High. So, they had her graduate early and enrolled her at the University of Redlands, about thirty miles from home. She took only two courses her first semester there, but getting mumps and chicken pox didn’t help.

  Since Ralph was teaching a course at Redlands that semester, he drove her door to door so he could monitor her comings and goings. The two of them coordinated a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule and tried to rebuild their tattered relationship in the car driving to and from school each day. It worked. They soon recaptured the rapport they’d had when Ralph drove her to ballet rehearsal in Anaheim. At night, after school, the two of them attended twelve-step family-group therapy meetings in Chino, a city southeast of Claremont, where no one knew them.

  Kristin dated Chris Elliott for a couple of months in 1994, before he went off to Johns Hopkins University. To him, she seemed to be trying to figure out what made her happy, not her parents. Elliott didn’t think Kristin was that interested in him romantically, but he never had the impression that she was doing drugs.

  “She seemed like an incredibly motivated person, very disciplined,” he said.

  For their final date, they went surfing together at Dana Point Sands. Elliott was still a beginner, but he was hoping this would strengthen the bond between them. Unfortunately, his plan went awry. Nothing seemed to go right.

  First, the waves were much bigger than he expected. He offered to help Kristin, but that only seemed to insult her because she was so athletic. Meanwhile, the waves kept getting bigger. They paddled out, trying to get beyond them. Kristin tried to catch one particularly large wave, but it crashed over her. All but her feet disappeared into the wall of water, her board shooting into the monster and out again. She seemed upset and embarrassed by the experience.

  “I felt really bad about it,” Elliott said.

  After surfing, Elliott thought they could try roller-blading so Kristin could regain her self-esteem. At one point, they stopped skating, and for no apparent reason, she fell. On the way back to the car, she fell again. From there, they went to a party, and when the date was over, they didn’t speak to each other for two years.

  That summer the sores on Kristin’s hands and face healed. Ralph saw no other signs that the drugs were back, and he thought she was over the worst of it. She was spending time with friends he and Constance liked, and they thought it would be good for her to live in the dorms the fall semester.

  They didn’t sense anything unusual when they saw their daughter at Thanksgiving. In fact, they didn’t know anything was wrong until Kristin disappeared one day in December 1994.

  Chapter 3

  Kristin was nowhere to be found the day her mother and two brothers came to pick her up from the University of Redlands for Christmas vacation. There was no note in her dorm room and no clue as to her whereabouts. Only a ringing phone.

  Constance Rossum picked it up.

  “This is Patrick,” the man said. “Is Kristin there?”

  Constance felt a surge of anger as she recognized the name of her daughter’s drug dealer.

  “I know who you are, and I know what you’ve done. Now stop it,” Constance snapped and hung up.

  All she wanted was for these predators to stop trying to persuade Kristin to buy crystal methamphetamine. Then, maybe Kristin could have a chance to get her life back on track, the family could return to its normal routine, and the nightmare of the past two years would end.

  It was December 17, 1994. And that nightmare was far from over.

  Kristin’s boyfriend, Teddy Maya, also came to the dorm that day to pick her up. When he found her room empty, he figured she’d already left with her parents.

  It had been a regular routine that fall semester for him to make the drive from UCLA, where he was going to school, to Redlands on weekends. He would collect Kristin from her dorm, they would go out on a date, and he would drop her at her parents’ home in Claremont afterward.

  They’d been dating since the summer, when they got reacquainted through Kristin’s friend Melissa Prager, whose parents knew the Rossums. She was dating a friend of Maya’s. Kristin’s parents liked Maya and Prager, and thought they were good influences on their daughter.

  But Maya’s stepmother, Karen Greenbaum-Maya, a psychologist in Claremont, wasn’t so sure about Kristin. For one thing, Maya’s stepmother didn’t like the way Kristin always asked Maya to drive her places. Greenbaum-Maya held her tongue until Kristin asked Maya to shuttle her around while he was still heavily medicated from having his wisdom teeth removed.

  “That finally got through to him,” she said. “…I really didn’t care for her calling on Teddy for everything. Even if you’re eighteen, that’s really just not a good relationship.”

  She also didn’t like the fact that Kristin’s parents allowed Maya to transport her to and from school on weekends, which she saw as a parental duty.

  Greenbaum-Maya repeatedly asked her stepson to bring Kristin by the house. The couple did stop by one Friday evening for a few minutes to pick up a jacket for Maya, but that didn’t allow for any meaningful conversation.

  Greenbaum-Maya watched her stepson agonize over whether to wear a jacket or tie to Thanksgiving dinner at the Rossums’, where propriety seemed to be the order of the day. Apparently, Kristin had expressed concern that he might not dress up enough for the occasion.

  “That seemed odd to me,” Greenbaum-Maya said.

  Finally, Greenbaum-Maya, his parents, and Kristin all had breakfast together one Sunday. Greenbaum-Maya tried to get to know Kristin, but she didn’t open up much.

  “She wasn’t going to let anything out,” Greenbaum-Maya said. “She wasn’t going to show us or tell us anything. She was guarded, and I couldn’t help but notice.”

  The day after Maya’s failed attempt to pick up Kristin for Christmas vacation, Ralph Rossum called the house and Greenbaum-Maya answered the phone. Ralph demanded to know where his daughter was.

  “I don’t know,” Greenbaum-Maya said. “We thought you or your wife had picked her up yesterday.”

  Ralph’s voice softened, saying they, too, had gone to get her, but she wasn’t there. “We thought maybe—” he said, his voice trailing off.

  Greenbaum-Maya didn’t much like Ralph’s tone and didn’t think she or her stepson had done anything to deserve it. But when Ralph asked if she would call him if she heard anything, she said yes.

  Kristin left the Redlands campus that morning because she couldn’t face Teddy Maya or her mother. There would be hell to pay once her parents learned that she’d started smoking meth again. Plus, with an embarrassingly low grade point average of 1.67, Kristin had received a notice that she was on academic probation.

  She’d gotten away from her druggie friends that spring, after her parents enrolled her at Redlands. She’d stayed clean over the summer, often double-dating with Melissa Prager and her boyfriend.

  Kristin was pleased to have her parents’ approval again, and they, in turn, were thrilled to have their old Kristin back. So thrilled, they let her move into the dorm at Redlands, where she decided to take a full load of courses that fall. After struggling with a meth addiction since her junior year, it felt great to be drug free.

  But that didn’t last long. Kristin ran into a student who’d been in her calculus class the previous semester and, unbeknownst to her, was a fellow meth user. The friend offered her some at a party, and she took it. The problem was, it left her wanting more. So
, she started using again. Gradually at first, once a week, then maybe every few days. She figured she could handle smoking just enough to help her study harder, to earn the good grades she used to get, so she could please her parents and feel good about herself again. But the cravings grew stronger, and things began to snowball.

  By midsemester, Kristin was using every day. As Christmas vacation approached, she knew she couldn’t let her parents see her like this again. They would be so disappointed. She knew it would upset them, but she decided she’d better go before her mother came to pick her up.

  Kristin decided to go visit a male friend in Hemet. On Christmas Eve, her parents received a call from a family in Newport, telling them she was okay. Then, on Christmas night, she called Teddy Maya from a motel in Redlands and asked him to join her.

  Kristin looked bad, nothing like her usual attractive self, and she seemed edgy after not sleeping in who knows how long. The next morning, Maya got out of the shower and found she’d emptied his wallet and left. Again, not even a note to say where she’d gone.

  Kristin felt she still needed more time to get her act together. So she boarded an Amtrak train and got off at the end of the line in downtown San Diego. She transferred to the slow-rolling red trolley and continued south.

  At the first trolley stop in Chula Vista, there was a Motel 6 to the east, and beyond it, across the parking lot, a Best Western. To the west, with the Pacific Ocean as a backdrop, was a Good Nite Inn. It’s unclear which motel she chose, but with only $200 in her pocket, Kristin likely rented the cheapest room she could find.

  But, after smoking some meth that morning, she was in no mood to sit around the room. She’d heard that Tijuana, the first town across the border into Mexico, was a fun place for college students to party. And, since she’d just turned eighteen, she could drink legally—all night if she wanted to. So she hopped back on the trolley and took it to San Ysidro, the last stop on the U.S. side of the border. She followed the signs to the pedestrian crossing and joined the throng of people walking over the bridge, their noses stinging from the fumes that emanated from the long lines of stop-and-go traffic heading into Mexico. It would be only a few minutes before she could lose herself in another country, another culture, another reality.