Poisoned Love

by Caitlin Rother

  Greg de Villers, his brothers Jerome and Bertrand, and Aaron Wallo were walking across the bridge that same evening. Their trip to “TJ” was intended to be a rite of passage for Bertrand, who came down with Wallo from Palm Springs to visit. At fourteen, Bertrand had never been drunk before.

  Night had fallen by the time the de Villers crew was walking along the dirty sidewalk leading to the intertwining metal bars that made up the first of two turnstiles at the border crossing. A loud clanking sounded repeatedly as a stream of tourists and Mexican day laborers pushed through the worn gate.

  Kristin was walking sideways near the turnstile when she bumped into Greg. She dropped her brown leather jacket, and they both went to pick it up, which sparked a conversation. Since Kristin was alone, she was happy to tag along with his group, and Greg was happy to have her. She thought Greg seemed like a really nice guy, and it was obvious that he was attracted to her. They walked along the dimly lit sidewalk, past a long mural caked with the same dark layer of car-exhaust dust that seems to cover much of Tijuana.

  They passed the money exchange booth as they approached the second turnstile and the bright yellow taxi sign, its edges lined with the same tiny blinking lights found on strip-club marquees. As soon as they pushed through the turnstile, they were surrounded by taxi drivers offering to take them into the city. They got into one of the cabs and asked to be dropped off at the most popular tourist destination, a street called Avenida Revolución, which is lined with bars and dance clubs. The taxi driver drove fast, which was a little nerve-wracking given that there were no seat belts in his car.

  For some Americans, Tijuana is a place to stock up on prescription drugs, which are far cheaper and easier to obtain without a prescription than in the United States. It’s as easy as walking into a pharmacy and asking the clerk behind the counter for a drug of choice. The clerks don’t ask for a prescription, nor do they tell buyers that purchasing medications without one could get them arrested at the border. Kristin would take advantage of this opportunity in the years to come, buying muscle relaxants, diet pills, and other drugs.

  For students or young members of the U.S. military stationed in San Diego, Tijuana is more of an escape destination, where they can act crazier than is acceptable back home. In essence, Tijuana is a bombardment of the senses. Everything is bright, loud, aggressive, and sometimes a little surreal. The neon lights flash across buildings so rapidly a person can almost hear them, making him feel as if he were starring in his own cartoon.

  As tourists walk down Avenida Revolución, they are accosted every few feet by vendors whose arms are covered with hanging necklaces. Barefoot children with grimy faces thrust out empty paper cups, begging for money. Or they sell small, individually wrapped packets of chewing gum squares, eight for $1. Mothers with two or three toddlers in tow sell handwoven bracelets or crepe-paper flowers in brilliant colors. Men sitting on benches call out “something else,” code words for drugs.

  Over the years, the stores that line Avenida Revolución have offered little variation in the goods they sell: hand-carved onyx chess sets, velvet paintings, ceramic pots, figurines, leather wallets and belts, pocket knives, and white cotton dresses with floral embroidery.

  Outside the nightclubs, clusters of young men hand out free drink tickets, trying to entice passersby to enter their steep black stairwells. “This is the place,” they say. “Come inside.”

  The de Villers crew strolled along Avenida Revolución and went into several of these bars that night, at least one of which had a second-floor balcony overlooking the street. They ordered tequila shots and beers, while the bass beat of the dance music pounded the night air, and smoke machines belched out streams of gray fog. It soon became clear that Greg and Kristin were together.

  Sometime between midnight and 2 A.M., the group walked back over the pedestrian bridge to San Ysidro and their car. Greg invited Kristin to stay with him and his crew at the two-bedroom apartment he shared with Jerome and a roommate in the La Jolla Del Sol complex. Kristin felt safe with Greg. She sensed no permanence in the situation, and she didn’t want to go back to an empty motel room. So she accepted his offer.

  Greg and Kristin shared the same bed, and they had sex. There was no mention of Teddy Maya. Greg was smitten, and it appeared to be mutual.

  “Greg wasn’t the type to bring women home for one-night stands,” said Chris Wren, Greg’s roommate.

  The next morning, Bertrand woke up on the couch with a plastic trash bin next to him in case he got sick. The whole crew got up late and went out for something to eat before Bertrand and Wallo drove back to Palm Springs.

  Then Greg asked Wren to move out of the bedroom they shared and into the other bedroom with Jerome. Kristin was going to stay for a while.

  Kristin’s parents checked in with her teachers and learned that she’d missed her finals. When she hadn’t turned up by the day after Christmas, they filed a missing person’s report with the campus police. They also contacted the Claremont Police Department.

  George Dynes, a Claremont police officer, wrote in his report that Maya had seen Kristin on the morning of December 26. She had a 104-degree fever and “was depressed and suicidal.” Ralph Rossum told Dynes that his daughter might “try and hurt or kill herself.”

  “The parents are worried about the safety of their eighteen-year-old daughter. According to people that the parents have contacted, their daughter has been very depressed lately,” Dynes wrote.

  Dynes also filled out another form, recording the Rossums’ report of a “voluntary missing adult.” He put Kristin in the “at risk” category, stating she was “depressed and suicidal,” with a destination unknown. He described her as being five feet two inches, 105 pounds, with green eyes and chin-length blond hair, wearing a brown leather jacket.

  Constance feared that Kristin might have fallen prey to foul play. She and Ralph were both devastated by the cold fact that their daughter likely had relapsed. When Kristin was on drugs, she became self-destructive. And this time, they had no idea where she’d gone or what she was doing.

  A couple of times in the weeks after Kristin ran away, Constance answered the phone and heard a mewing on the other end of the line. She figured it was Kristin making those quiet sobbing sounds, but her daughter wouldn’t say anything. She would just hang up. She knew she’d ruined her family’s Christmas.

  In early January, Kristin sent her parents a letter saying she was very sorry for running away like she did. The letter had no return address or phone number but carried a San Diego postmark. Soon afterwards, Kristin called her parents.

  “Thank God you’re safe,” Constance told her.

  Kristin said she’d been staying with some nice people in San Diego. She hadn’t wanted to call until she was ready to prove that she was serious about getting herself together. If the family wanted to see her, she wanted to come home for a visit.

  “Mom, I have three jobs. I’m starting to turn my life around,” she said.

  Her parents were thrilled to hear that Kristin was okay and that she was trying to get better. Borrowing Greg’s car, she drove up to Claremont on a Sunday to see her family and to collect some belongings.

  “There was a little bit of the prodigal son kind of feeling,” Ralph recalled later.

  Over a tearful but happy reunion lunch, Kristin shared how she’d driven up in the car that her friend Greg de Villers loaned her. Seemingly clearheaded, she told them that she was teaching ballet classes and working at a pasta restaurant and that she had also landed a third job, at California Pizza Kitchen. It seemed important to her that they believe she’d turned the corner. They were happy to buy in and got her the uniform she needed for the pizza place. They also managed to squeeze a church service into her visit.

  Constance and Ralph were eager to meet Greg, so they arranged to come down to San Diego in a few weeks. Greg wanted to take them all out to lunch.

  They met in a parking lot in the Gaslamp District in downtown San Diego, an
area lined with bars and restaurants that are teeming with people on weekend nights. Greg was wearing sunglasses and a suede jacket.

  When he took off his glasses, Constance noticed that he had kind eyes. Ralph thought he was charming and good-looking.

  “I thought Kristin had met a really good person,” Ralph said.

  Kristin spoke with Teddy Maya at one point in January about her sudden disappearance, telling him she’d been kidnapped at gunpoint and driven around Mexico in the trunk of a car.

  About a month after the Rossums’ lunch with Greg, Kristin told her parents she was renting a van and moving in with a young female coworker from the pizza restaurant. In reality, however, she was still living with Greg.

  The Rossums eventually figured this out. As devout Episcopalians, Constance and Ralph disapproved of premarital sex. But at the same time, they were relieved. Kristin seemed to be in such good hands with Greg, who obviously had her best interests at heart. And if he could do what they couldn’t—get her off drugs—then so be it. Her previous lifestyle was certainly worse than this.

  To them, Greg was their “saving angel.”

  Meanwhile, back in the La Jolla Del Sol apartment, it wasn’t long before tensions began to rise. Not only was Jerome being forced to share his bedroom, but the rent was still being divided only three ways. He also wasn’t thrilled when Greg started letting Kristin drive to work in the car that he and Greg had been sharing.

  To make matters worse, some of Greg’s jewelry—a gold ring with the family crest and a gold necklace—went missing from the bathroom, and Greg blamed Jerome’s friends for taking it. Jerome said it was more likely Kristin. But Greg didn’t want to believe it.

  Jerome called Christian MacLean, a friend of theirs from high school, and expressed his frustration.

  “There’s this girl staying with us,” Jerome told him. “She’s weird.”

  After meeting her, MacLean came to agree. He noticed Kristin didn’t really connect with the people around her. To him, she seemed like a nerdy, serious bookworm who didn’t really get the joke.

  “She’s just kind of off,” he said.

  Chris Wren felt that Kristin was kind of quirky, which in his mind wasn’t necessarily a bad trait, at least in most people. But in her, he saw something else, something he didn’t recognize or understand. She acted erratically, swinging from one extreme emotion to the next. One afternoon he walked into the apartment and found her alone with a strange man. Kristin didn’t introduce them.

  About a week after Greg’s jewelry disappeared, Wren discovered that some of his personal checks were missing. Greg admitted that Kristin had taken them. He also said he’d torn them up so she couldn’t use them.

  “You can’t use someone else’s checks, anyway,” Kristin said later, trying to dismiss the act and claim she wasn’t intending to use them to buy drugs.

  When Greg found a glass tube containing a whitish yellow substance in Kristin’s jacket pocket, he showed it to Wren and asked if he’d ever seen anything like it. No, Wren said, he hadn’t. But it certainly helped explain Kristin’s nervousness and what Jerome described as her “twidgety” behavior. She was smoking drugs, and it sure wasn’t marijuana.

  Jerome wanted her out of the apartment, but Greg wouldn’t listen. Kristin was going through some rough times, he said. She was trying to stop using drugs, and he was trying to help her do it. He’d fallen in love and he’d fallen hard.

  Other than Kristin’s problem, drugs weren’t a part of Greg’s life. He didn’t drink much alcohol or do recreational drugs. His friends couldn’t even remember him using over-the-counter cold remedies. Greg made it clear he didn’t like Jerome smoking pot and told him he’d have more motivation if he didn’t. Greg also didn’t approve of the couple of marijuana plants that Jerome and Wren tried unsuccessfully to grow in the apartment as an experiment.

  Greg and Jerome had always been close, but things had become strained between them since Kristin arrived. Jerome was doing laundry in the apartment one day and put his clothes in the dryer before he went out. When he came back, he found his clothes—still damp—heaped on top of the dryer and Greg’s clothes tumbling inside. Jerome was so angry, he and Greg started fighting over the insult. The two brothers had always roughhoused and wrestled, pinning each other and putting the other in a headlock or a choke hold. Only this time, things got so rough that Jerome thought they might really hurt each other. Luckily, Wren came home and broke them apart.

  Kristin never really confided in Jerome, but she did feel comfortable talking with Wren. She told him she’d run away from home because things weren’t going well with her parents, and she admitted to having a problem with crystal meth.

  “She was looking for acceptance, and when you have a problem, you need to talk about it,” Wren said.

  Two or three months after she’d moved in, the roommates decided to have a party. Kristin sat on Wren’s lap as the guests began to arrive. At one point, she told Wren she felt she was meant to be with him, not Greg, and started to cry.

  Ralph and Constance took Greg and Kristin to dinner one night and expressed their concern that neither of them was back in school, informing them that education was important for their futures. Since he’d stopped taking courses at UCSD, Greg had been supporting himself by working at Rush Legal, where he’d also helped Kristin get a job, but it didn’t provide health benefits. Kristin decided to enroll at San Diego State University (SDSU) in the fall, and Greg planned to return to UCSD.

  Constance filled out Kristin’s SDSU application for her, purposely omitting her two lousy quarters at Redlands, even though the form required a listing of all previous coursework. She thought her daughter should have a fresh start, and that was that.

  When the lease to Greg’s apartment ran out in June 1995, Wren moved to Solana Beach. He still played tennis with Greg and came by the apartment, but they saw less and less of each other. Wren had always admired Greg for believing that if things weren’t going well, he could turn them around. He figured it was Greg’s optimism that made him want to help Kristin. And perhaps a little gullibility as well.

  “That’s what made him honest,” Wren said.

  Jerome moved out that summer, too. He’d been studying chemistry at UCSD, but he decided to transfer to the University of California, Santa Barbara, which offered better economics courses. His girlfriend and another good friend were also thinking of transferring there, so he was guaranteed a roommate.

  Wren and Jerome kept wondering when Greg was going to wake up and see Kristin for what she really was.

  That summer Greg told Kristin’s father that he wanted to marry her. But Ralph told Greg he needed to finish college first, so Greg and Kristin settled on getting informally engaged. As much as the Rossums didn’t approve of the couple’s living arrangement, they decided to acknowledge the situation and allowed them to move into another apartment together.

  “Kristin loved Greg, and we wanted to help them both to the extent that we could,” Constance recalled.

  So, they agreed to pay the rent. They also bought furniture for the couple and a white 1990 Toyota Cressida for Kristin. They were proud of both young people and so pleased that Kristin seemed like her old self again that they happily paid for her tuition, books, clothes, and car insurance. They even threw in a little extra spending money.

  Constance took Greg aside and made him promise to tell them if he saw any signs that Kristin was back on drugs. He told her not to worry; he knew what to do. His father was a doctor.

  By all accounts, the couple seemed giddy with love, sitting close on the couch and holding hands all the time. Marie, Greg’s mother, described them as lovebirds.

  That summer Kristin went with her family for a vacation in the south of France. Every day she would wait by the phone for Greg to call at a prearranged time, and he would follow through, no matter where he was.

  Greg waited as best he could to formally propose marriage. Then, on October 25, 1996, he couldn’t wait
any longer. The two of them were driving down to Puerto Nuevo, Mexico, to celebrate Kristin’s twentieth birthday with dinner at Lobster Village. As they were driving down the toll road, Kristin opened the glove compartment to store the toll ticket and thought she saw a jewelry box. She was right. After dinner Greg opened the compartment, pulled out an engagement ring, and popped the question. She said yes.

  The next day, Kristin drove to her parents’ house in Claremont to show off the ring. The Rossums were happy—cautiously happy—and said they hoped it would be a long engagement.

  Chapter 4

  Greg, like Kristin, came from a well educated, suburban family. Although their childhoods and teenage years were quite different, experiences in their formative years groomed them to come together as a codependent couple, with strengths and needs that complemented each other.

  Greg’s family life trained him early and often to be a protector, an adviser, and a caretaker. As the oldest son in a single-parent household, Greg shouldered the responsibility for the welfare of his two brothers and their mother, whose respiratory problems put her in the hospital starting when they were in elementary school. It is not uncommon for children of parents who are chronically ill or addicted to drugs or alcohol to end up in a romantic relationship with a substance abuser.

  Through all of this, Greg somehow learned how to stay positive, or at least to maintain the appearance that everything was fine. And if it wasn’t, then he’d do his damnedest to make it better.

  When Greg met Kristin in late 1994, she was eighteen and addicted to crystal meth. At twenty-one, with little experience in the girlfriend department, Greg was determined to be her savior and get her off drugs. His efforts were successful. Their troubles developed in the next few years, as Kristin increasingly wanted her independence. In turn, Greg displayed the typical behavior of someone involved with an addict—he tried to control and protect Kristin and their relationship, even more so when he saw signs that she’d relapsed. The knowledge that she was having an affair and that their marriage was falling apart—especially after living through his parents’ acrimonious divorce—undoubtedly fueled the dynamic.