Poisoned Love

by Caitlin Rother

  By this point, Goldstein felt his investigation was being compromised by many of the agencies involved in the case. Certain people working in the Sheriff’s Department, Medical Examiner’s Office, and Police Department were leaking information, trying to protect themselves or unable to believe that Kristin was guilty. So, after receiving a tip that Greg’s samples might have been switched with some others, Goldstein sent them out for DNA testing as well.

  On December 28, Nicole e-mailed Michael to warn him that people back in Pennsylvania were gossiping about his situation.

  “You may want to do some repair work,” she wrote.

  Nicole’s message was retrieved by someone using the Compaq computer in Kristin’s apartment.

  The next day Michael e-mailed a friend of his in Australia, calling himself “the bastard” and letting the friend know he should send all e-mails to Michael’s personal Hotmail account.

  “Things here getting messier by the day,” he wrote.

  The friend wrote back on January 2, saying he’d talked to Nicole on New Year’s and heard all about the “situation you managed to get yourself into this time.” He offered to come to San Diego if Michael needed a buddy. But if Michael was coming back to Australia, he said, they should head off together for “a little medicinal port and a good dose of summer afternoon-evening sailing.”

  That message was retrieved from someone using Kristin’s Compaq around 1 P.M. on January 2. Around 9 P.M. that same day, someone used the same computer to browse a Web page on different types of condoms. Kristin bought a pregnancy test from Vons on February 25 and a box of condoms on March 7.

  Goldstein helped Agnew prepare the first search warrant, which she and her team planned to serve simultaneously at four locations in San Diego on the morning of January 4, 2001: Kristin’s apartment on Regents Road in University City, Michael’s apartment on Eighth Avenue in Hillcrest, the apartment he’d shared with Nicole on Costa Verde Boulevard in University City, and the Medical Examiner’s Office in Kearny Mesa.

  Agnew initially approached Judge Gale Kaneshiro to sign the search warrants and then seal them to prevent the media from screwing up their investigation with any more publicity about the evidence they sought. The television reports had been bad enough. She wanted her case to have integrity.

  But Kaneshiro said she couldn’t agree to seal the warrants and suggested that Agnew try one of her colleagues. So, Agnew walked down the hall and came to Judge John Thompson’s courtroom. She didn’t know Thompson or anything about him, but he agreed to sign and seal the warrants. He remained the judge who considered all her future warrant requests. By the time Agnew had finished, she’d obtained nine warrants, an unusually high number for a homicide case, which typically requires only one or two.

  Goldstein was more familiar with Thompson’s judicial talents.

  “There’s a lot of good judges on the bench, but John Thompson is probably one of the finest judges around,” he said.

  Chapter 11

  Kristin’s face registered shock as she opened her door to Detective Laurie Agnew and a group of police officers at 7 A.M. on January 4. Agnew handed her the search warrant and, as they walked into the living room, told her she could read it to her or Kristin could read it herself. Kristin chose the latter and sat down on the couch. Agnew stood next to her and did nothing until she’d finished.

  Kristin was wearing a tank top and sweat pants. The apartment was messy. Clothes and papers were strewn about, there were dirty dishes in the kitchen, and the bathroom wasn’t picked up. In a timid and nervous voice, Kristin asked to speak with Agnew alone in the bedroom. She seemed so fidgety that Agnew figured she’d probably been up all night, high on meth.

  “I have something to tell you,” Kristin said.

  Agnew nodded. “Go ahead,” she said.

  “You’re going to find something,” Kristin said.

  “What?”

  “Paraphernalia.”

  “What kind?” Agnew asked.

  “Meth,” Kristin said.

  Agnew asked if Kristin wanted to show her the stash or let the investigators find it during their search. Kristin agreed to show Agnew where it was, opened the top drawer of the chest next to the bed, and pointed to a small white box. Agnew opened it and found a plastic ziplock bag containing a disposable lighter, a glass pipe, and some white powder. Kristin sat on the bed and started to cry.

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

  Kristin asked Agnew if she would get rid of the drugs or at least allow Kristin to get rid of them—flush them down the toilet or something. Agnew said no, she couldn’t do that. That would be destroying evidence.

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

  Now that Agnew had proof Kristin had narcotics in the apartment, she asked Officer Dan Dierdorff to formally examine Kristin and evaluate her condition. During the search, he noticed that her mood fluctuated several times. She’d be sobbing, almost out of control, then stop, showing no emotion at all. Her resting heart rate was 103, which is ten to forty beats per minute faster than normal. Later, at the station, it rose to 133. Her pupils were so dilated they didn’t even respond to a light shined in her eyes. She had bad breath, her lips were chapped, her cheeks were drawn, and she had sores on her face.

  Meanwhile, Agnew began to search the rest of the apartment. She took some photos of the bathroom, specifically of the tub and shower area, following up on Jones’s suspicions about the screw-in stopper. It was sitting in the same place as he’d noted, on a shelf above the bathtub. She noticed that it was covered with calcium buildup, but that none had been worn away along the threads. If Kristin had taken a bath as she’d claimed, Agnew figured some of the calcium buildup would have come loose when Kristin screwed the stopper into the drain.

  Agnew found Greg’s wallet in the bedroom and looked through its contents. Among other things, it contained his driver’s license, credit cards, ATM card, and Ralph’s club card. He’d written the address and phone number for Michael and Nicole’s apartment on a little yellow sticky note, which was tucked inside. He apparently didn’t know that Michael had moved into his own apartment in Hillcrest.

  The wallet also contained an organ-donor card issued by the California Department of Motor Vehicles, which Greg had signed and dated on October 26, 2000. Kristin also signed the card as a witness to Greg’s signature on the same date. He’d marked the box that read, “Donate my entire body,” and listed Marie, Jerome, and Bertrand de Villers as next of kin.

  Agnew pulled from a desk drawer a sixty-four-page academic paper, written by Frank Barnhart and dated January 28, 1999, called “Drugs of Abuse,” which contained a section on the methamphetamine problem and related homicides in San Diego County. The paper, which drew information from a book by Randall Baselt, listed the most common behavioral and psychiatric symptoms exhibited by meth users: “violent behavior, repetitive activity, memory loss, paranoia, delusions of reference, auditory hallucination, and confusion or fright.” Several studies, Barnhart wrote, have shown that people who have used methamphetamine don’t actually have to be currently using the drug to exhibit methamphetamine psychosis or paranoia. In fact, it can show up years later. Barnhart reported that meth was detected in thirty-one of the one hundred fifty-five homicides, or 20 percent, that occurred in San Diego County in 1997.

  Barnhart also made a brief mention of fentanyl. “Fentanyl analogues have a rapid onset (one to four minutes) and a short duration of action (approximately thirty to ninety minutes) which varies according to the particular drug. Because of the potency and quick onset, even a very small dose of fentanyl analog can lead to sudden death. The most common route of administration is by injection,” he wrote, again quoting from Baselt’s book.

  A drug analog is a derivative of an actual drug and can be many times more potent. Such is the case for China White, the street name for the fentanyl analog, which is also called alp
ha-methylfentanyl.

  The detective found another diary that Kristin kept in a drawer next to the computer in the bedroom. As in Kristin’s first journal, Agnew found no mention of any drug use.

  Kristin was arrested that morning for being under the influence of a narcotic and for possession of a narcotic, .36 grams of methamphetamine to be exact. She was taken to the police station downtown, where Dierdorff had her blood and urine tested. Then they took her to Las Colinas Detention Facility in Santee, the county’s only jail for female inmates, where her parents bailed her out. When her test results came back, they were positive for methamphetamine and amphetamine.

  Goldstein debated whether to file drug charges against her but ultimately decided it was better to keep her out of court and out of the media, so she could continue to do drugs, talk to potential witnesses, and incriminate herself further. Besides, charging her also would have required the search warrants to be unsealed. The last thing Goldstein and Agnew wanted to do was muck up a complex murder investigation over a measly misdemeanor.

  While Agnew and her team were searching a dresser in Kristin’s bedroom, Bob Petrachek, an examiner for the Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory (RCFL), showed up with a trainee to collect the remaining computer, a Compaq that had been sitting next to the desk where the iMac from Orbigen had been.

  When Petrachek entered the apartment, he didn’t even recognize Kristin. He saw a girl with stringy hair and a pale complexion sitting at the dining-room table with her head down, hugging her knees to her chest, and thought it was just some druggie. He walked right past her into the bedroom to do his job.

  After taking the computer, Petrachek and his trainee went to the Medical Examiner’s Office, where Petrachek met with Lloyd Amborn to figure out how their computer system worked so he could collect e-mails and search for evidence on Michael’s and Kristin’s computers. When he’d determined what he needed, he and the trainee disconnected the relevant hardware, including computers, disks, and hard drives, from Michael and Kristin’s computers.

  The RCFL bills itself as the first in the nation to work with the FBI to provide computer assistance to its county’s law enforcement agencies. The lab aids in the investigation of activities related to terrorism, child pornography, violent crimes, theft or destruction of intellectual property, Internet crime, and fraud.

  Although he worked in the RCFL offices, Petrachek, like other examiners there, was actually employed by another agency, which, in his case, was the California Highway Patrol. He’d worked for the highway patrol since 1986 and as an officer for the El Cajon Police Department for nine years before that. Along the way, he founded a company that designed and manufactured computer devices used by law enforcement.

  By the time all was said and done in this case, Petrachek would have collected seventeen sources of electronic data, including two iMac computers, one from Kristin and Greg’s apartment and one from Greg’s office at Orbigen; two Compaq computers that had been in their apartment, one of which had been moved to Kristin’s parents’ house in Claremont; another computer Kristin bought some months later; Michael’s laptop from work; e-mail backup tapes from the Medical Examiner’s network server; and Kristin’s Palm Pilot.

  Before Petrachek could examine any of the electronic data he’d collected on these computers and components, he first had to make copies of the data so as not to disturb the original. That took a couple of months. Then, after searching through all the data, he organized the information into a form that could be digested by the prosecutors and then presented to each juror to examine. Since it wasn’t realistic to try to read every file on these computers himself, Petrachek used key words and text strings with names of people or drugs specific to the case to find what the attorneys needed.

  Petrachek sifted through a huge amount of electronic material to find such relevant information. All told, he searched through 137 gigabytes of information, including photos and graphics, which can take up a lot of space. In layman’s terms, one typed character takes up one byte, and there are one billion bytes to one gigabyte. One CD-ROM holds about 650 megabytes, or 650 million bytes, of information. If all the information on a CD were printed out on paper, the stack would stand nearly as tall as the Washington Monument, which rises 550 feet over the nation’s capitol.

  For several months, this was the only case that Petrachek worked on. He’d get so engrossed that he could follow a thread of evidence for twelve hours, look up, and not even remember a coworker’s name.

  “It was a fascinating case,” he said. “There was a great deal of significance to it.”

  At the same time that Agnew was searching Kristin’s apartment, Detective Felix Zavala was doing the same thing at Michael’s Eighth Avenue studio apartment, and Detective Jimmy Valle was examining the apartment Michael shared with Nicole before they separated.

  Nicole was not pleased to be woken up by police at 7 A.M., and neither was her sister, Claire, who was there visiting. While police searched her apartment, Valle interviewed Nicole and tried to help her understand what was really going on between Michael and Kristin and what a skewed version of the relationship Michael had given her. When Nicole told him that Michael said he’d gone to the conference in Milwaukee alone, for example, Valle said she might want to ask Michael about that trip again. The officers seized Nicole’s diary and some pills.

  Nicole told police she’d been beating herself up about the demise of her marriage. Before they’d left Pennsylvania, she and Michael had engaged in a one-time foursome with a couple who lived in the same apartment complex. The other woman and Michael initiated the liaison. Afterward, the woman started having second thoughts about her relationship with her boyfriend and became more infatuated with Michael. But when the woman talked to Michael about it, he told her not to expect anything more from him and to go ahead and marry her boyfriend. Michael and Nicole’s move to San Diego stemmed partly from a desire to get some distance from that situation. However, the woman and Michael continued to stay in touch, and then she and her boyfriend ended up moving to San Diego County. The court record includes a number of e-mails she and Michael exchanged that mentioned getting together and also talked about his affair with Kristin. The woman and her boyfriend lived in Encinitas, where Michael and Nicole each stayed with them for a time.

  The search of Michael’s studio in Hillcrest, which is not only San Diego’s gay mecca but also has one of the city’s largest inventories of affordable apartments, lasted less than an hour. The officers seized a laptop computer and a black canvas briefcase labeled SOFT, a perk from the Milwaukee conference, which Michael kept in a closet. They also took his passport.

  Inside the briefcase, the officers found a whole collection of mementos, cards, and letters that gave them a deeper and more personal insight into Kristin’s relationship with her boss. Because Michael had written some of these cards and letters to Kristin, it appeared that he was holding them for her in case police searched her apartment.

  Among the other items in the briefcase was a plastic box of little white scrolls of paper, each inscribed with a message, such as “I will be your servant for one day,” “I will wash all of the dinner dishes,” “I will make an ice cream sundae and feed it to you,” and “I will wash your hair.” It also contained an unopened box of Kamasutra love oils flavored with chocolate mint, cherry almond, raspberry kiss, and vanilla crème; a small bag labeled “French countryside seed mix”; and seven coupons, each redeemable for a romantic interlude—a stroll under the stars, a massage, breakfast in bed, a candlelight champagne bubble bath, a weekend getaway, or a favorite meal. Souvenirs from their Milwaukee trip, including airline ticket stubs, a business card from an Italian restaurant called Mimma’s Café, and a photo of them sitting at a banquet table at the conference. A miniature hardcover book of love poems titled The Kiss, with a signed Christmas note from Kristin’s brother Brent; a handful of candy Valentine’s hearts, inscribed with “Husband & Wife,” “Always and 4 Ever,” “I Thee Wed,” a
nd “Mr. & Mrs”; four poetry books; and a sex manual titled 52 Invitations to Grrreat Sex. Kristin had written a note in the sex manual that promised they would “enjoy a lifetime of passion” together.

  Kristin also inscribed a note in each of the books of philosophical poetry by Max Ehrmann she’d given him. One of the notes was dated May 12, 2000, right after the CAT conference they’d attended in Los Angeles. In one of the undated notes, she explained that she’d been given that particular book, Desiderata, when she was a little girl. She wrote that it “illustrates what’s important in life” and had “brought [her] comfort.”

  One of the cards Kristin gave Michael featured an elderly couple dancing barefoot on the beach. Inside, her handwritten message asked him to save her a dance in fifty years. “My dance card is filled with your name for the rest of my life,” she wrote.

  Michael gave Kristin a card with two small children dressed as adults, sitting on a bench and laughing. The little girl was holding a long-stemmed red rose. Inside, Michael wrote that he loved Kristin just the way she was.

  “I will never ask you to do anything you don’t want to do,” Michael wrote in another card. “I will never need you to say anything you don’t want to say.”

  Michael wrote a poem to Kristin on Hyatt Hotel notepaper, describing the color of her eyes, her skin, and her hair and the way her body moved, “with elegance, style and grace.” If she would be a queen, he asked, “Can I be your King?” He signed the note “ELE,” an abbreviation for “eye love ewe,” a secret message they included in group e-mails to colleagues and each other as a private joke.