Poisoned Love

by Caitlin Rother

  It also became clear that Michael had no alibi for his whereabouts between 3:00 and 5 P.M. the day Greg died, only his and Kristin’s admissions that they were together, somewhere “near” the apartment. Given the autopsy results and the way fentanyl worked in the body, Goldstein suspected the two lovers were actually in the apartment that afternoon, administering the drug to Greg. After cross-checking Michael’s police interviews with his e-mail exchanges with Kristin, Goldstein’s suspicion that Michael had helped her kill Greg grew even stronger.

  While Kristin was looking for a new job, she called Barnhart and asked if he’d be willing to write her a letter of recommendation based on her job performance at the Medical Examiner’s Office. He knew she’d left the lab but didn’t know why, so he agreed. When she came over to his house to pick up the letter, dated January 17, 2001, she looked strained and tired. She didn’t mention that police had searched her apartment and arrested her.

  Around that time, Kristin applied for a job at TriLink BioTechnologies, a company with about thirty employees that made synthetic DNA. Never mentioning that she’d been fired from her previous job, she was hired to run the company’s HPLC machine, the same piece of equipment she’d operated before.

  Kelly Christianson, one of the people who interviewed Kristin, was her supervisor in TriLink’s Oligo group lab. She considered Kristin a quick learner and one of the best employees she’d ever had. Kristin was always on time, she got along well with everyone else, and she did whatever she was asked.

  Kristin, who often went to happy hour with her coworkers, told them she left her last job because she needed a change. One day she mentioned to Christianson that she’d found it difficult to work at the county’s toxicology lab because of someone “who came through the office.” She didn’t elaborate.

  Kristin confided more intimate details to Claire Becker, another assistant chemist, who worked right next to her. The two of them ate lunch together, went out for dinner or drinks several times after work, and went together to a work-sponsored outing, where everyone played pool during business hours.

  Kristin told Becker that she and Greg were very much in love when they were first married, but she came to realize that she loved him as more of a friend. She appreciated all his support in helping her get off drugs, but she wanted a more romantic relationship. Kristin told Becker that she’d found one with Michael, her boss at her old job, and that they began dating. She never mentioned that Michael was married. Kristin said she’d told Greg about her relationship with Michael, but he wanted to stay together and try to work things out. She, on the other hand, decided she wanted to get a divorce.

  Kristin also told Becker that Greg committed suicide by overdosing on pills. After Greg died, she said, she started doing drugs again, drugs she bought in Tijuana. But she said she’d stopped using and was taking only Paxil, an anti-depressant.

  She told Becker that her attorney had told her to stop seeing Michael, but she didn’t want to stop. So when Michael came to her apartment for dinner or to spend the night, he parked a ways from her apartment so no one would see his car. Kristin said she wanted to have children with Michael and she had gone off birth control. If she got pregnant, that was okay with her and Michael.

  Michael came to TriLink to take Kristin to lunch once or twice. He also went out with the company softball team after they played night games after work a couple of times. Kristin, Michael, and another coworker, Jessica Vanella, had dinner after a game. Kristin confided in Vanella that she’d run away from home when she was eighteen because her parents weren’t supportive enough of her. She also told Vanella that Michael was working on getting divorced and that the two of them were planning to be together.

  Melissa Prager saw Kristin on a trip to San Diego in early 2001 and could not believe how much her friend had changed. She was all skin and bones and had black circles under her eyes. Kristin had looked so good and so healthy the last time Prager had seen her. It made her sad to see Kristin this way.

  “What’s going on?” Prager asked.

  “Since Greg died, I totally had this relapse,” Kristin told her.

  She’d been suffering so much emotional pain, she said, and the de Villers family wouldn’t mourn with her. Kristin said nothing about their accusations that she’d murdered Greg.

  Kristin continued to see Frank Barnhart throughout the spring of 2001, while she was being investigated for murder. Barnhart later claimed they spoke only generally about the case because he didn’t want to compromise the investigation. He also said she told him she had a relationship with Michael but didn’t go into detail. She did make one comment that offended him, though, that Michael was the best thing to ever happen to the toxicology lab at the Medical Examiner’s Office.

  Barnhart and Kristin went to dinner at a Thai restaurant one evening near his house in Carmel Mountain Ranch. Another night the two of them went to a basketball game to watch the San Diego State Aztecs play at Cox Arena. Since Barnhart was good friends with Dr. Harry Bonnell the three of them sat together. Barnhart, who was sitting in front of Kristin and Bonnell, overheard them talking about the case. It made Barnhart uncomfortable, so at halftime he got up and walked upstairs. He bought two alumni sweatshirts, one for himself and one for Kristin. As he gave Kristin hers, he later recalled, he looked at her and Bonnell and asked them to stop talking about the case.

  Kristin volunteered to keep Barnhart company in line one day at Qualcomm Stadium, where he was planning to buy San Diego Padres tickets through a lottery process. She showed up as promised, and after a couple of hours of waiting, he suggested that she go home, since they were his tickets. She said her family was in town and invited him to come to dinner with them at Fleming’s, a high-end steakhouse in La Jolla. Barnhart agreed. During dinner Ralph and Constance thanked him for hiring Kristin and being her friend. As they were leaving the restaurant, Ralph thanked him again.

  Barnhart cautioned him that he couldn’t take sides.

  “Ralph, do understand something,” Barnhart recalled telling him. “If this thing goes to trial, I’m going to be a prosecution witness.”

  Ralph told him he was aware of that.

  On April 2, toxicologist Christina Martinez was searching for a piece of equipment for the HPLC machine in some cabinets in the lab at the Medical Examiner’s Office. She found a yellow box and expected to find a plastic cylindrical tube of guard columns for the HPLC machine inside. Instead, she found a glass tube, two inches long, with burnt residue on one end.

  A day or two later, she found a white box in one of the cabinet drawers. Inside was an evidence envelope for case #377, rolled up with one end cut off. The envelope contained glass pipes, a small piece of foil, and some shards of broken glass that looked like they would form pipes if they were pieced together. The glass tube in the yellow box appeared to be one of five pipes listed as evidence collected at the death scene. Knowing the envelope wasn’t where it was supposed to be, Martinez called her supervisor, Cathy Hamm, and showed the items to her.

  The burnt residue in the pipe bowl from the yellow box tested positive for methamphetamine. But the clincher was that DNA matching the skin cells in Kristin’s mouth was found at the other end of the pipe.

  Chapter 12

  In the coming months, Goldstein would issue hundreds of subpoenas for documents such as Kristin’s phone, bank, and credit card records. Because the phone records listed numbers but no names, the prosecution team had to figure out which calls were potentially important, identify and then interview people who might know something, cross-check the records with the new information, then issue more subpoenas and do more interviews as leads emerged.

  For example, they didn’t know that Kristin had a cell phone until they discovered a purchase in her bank records. So, they went after her cell phone records and found what they thought was a significant call to Michael at 9:02 P.M. on Sunday, November 5, especially given that it was the first call she’d ever made on the phone after buying it on October
30. Goldstein came to suspect that Kristin called Michael to tell him about Greg’s ultimatum and that they had to do something about it.

  District Attorney Paul Pfingst gave Goldstein all the time and resources he needed to prosecute the high-profile case, which consumed the father of two even while he was playing basketball with friends or driving somewhere with his family. But that, Goldstein said, was as it should be.

  By June 2001, Agnew and Goldstein felt they were getting close to making an arrest. But first, Agnew needed to put together affidavits to obtain search warrants for Kristin’s new workplace and new apartment. She knew that Kristin had moved to Twenty-sixth Street in Golden Hill, a neighborhood of beautiful old houses, social service agencies, and some pretty low-end apartments, including Kristin’s. However, Agnew didn’t know where Kristin was working, and she wanted to search the two areas simultaneously. That way, Kristin wouldn’t have time to hide or throw away important evidence.

  On June 25, Agnew figured they were a week or two away from making an arrest, so she sent two detectives to camp out in front of Kristin’s apartment and then follow her to work. They arrived around 5:30 or 6 A.M. in two unmarked cars, parked on the street, and waited for Kristin to emerge. The problem was, they were wearing suits, which, suffice it to say, did not blend into the neighborhood. And, to anyone who had been arrested, been followed home by an unmarked police car, or watched cop shows on television, their cars were identifiable as well. For whatever reason, Kristin figured out they were cops as she was leaving for work at 7 A.M. She took off in her white Toyota and lost both detectives on Interstate 5, a major freeway with an on-ramp a mile from her apartment.

  When the two detectives returned to the office and told Agnew what had happened, she was not pleased. This changed everything.

  That morning around 10:30, Becker saw Kristin looking very upset at her workstation. In fact, she looked panic-stricken. Becker followed her out of the lab and found her crying near the bathroom. Kristin told her she’d spoken to her attorney and learned she was going to be arrested later that day.

  Kristin later said she’d thought it was safe to do some meth while her attorney, Michael Pancer, was away at a conference in Georgia, because he’d assured her she wouldn’t be arrested while he was gone.

  Back in the lab, Kristin gave Becker an envelope and a small stuffed kangaroo and asked her to hang onto them. Becker had previously noticed the kangaroo on Kristin’s workbench. When she asked where it came from, Kristin said it was a gift from Michael. Becker would later say that she got the impression Kristin wanted her to hide the items for safekeeping.

  After Kristin left TriLink that day, Becker looked inside the envelope and found some photos and a letter that Michael sent from Melbourne, Australia. In May, his attorney, Chuck Goldberg, had asked Goldstein if Michael could have his passport back so he could go home and be with his mother, who was dying of breast cancer.

  “That’s the last we ever saw of him,” Goldstein recalled later.

  Now that Kristin knew the police were watching her, Agnew was worried she might flee or destroy whatever incriminating evidence she might have in her apartment. So, Agnew called Goldstein, and they decided they had no choice but to arrest Kristin right away. It was time, he thought. Enough messing around.

  Agnew got her search warrant materials together as quickly as she could and headed down to the courthouse.

  “I expect to find evidence of communication between ROBERTSON and ROSSUM, which may show evidence of their relationship and/or planning of DE VILLERS’ death,” Agnew wrote in the affidavit. “…Additionally, I believe the presence in the premises of the drugs and drug paraphernalia…will provide evidence of the identity of persons responsible for the death of DE VILLERS. While it is common for suspects to discard evidence used in their crimes, it is also very common for them to retain items that may provide circumstantial evidence of their involvement. They do this because oversight is common, particularly when a suspect is working in haste to hide evidence.”

  Judge John Thompson signed the warrant but refused to approve the portion that allowed police to take yet another computer from Kristin. He told Agnew that if Kristin had purchased another one, Agnew would have to get a separate warrant to take it. In the meantime, Agnew sent a detective back to Kristin’s apartment to prevent her or anyone else from going inside. By law, a detective could keep people out by saying he had probable cause that a crime had been committed and a search warrant was pending.

  When Kristin got to TriLink that morning, she called her attorney. Goldstein had, in fact, told Pancer that he had no intention of arresting Kristin while Pancer was out of town. But that morning’s events reconfigured the playing field. Attorney Gretchen von Helms, who was filling in for Pancer, left a number of messages for Agnew, saying she wanted to arrange for Kristin to turn herself in. But Agnew didn’t get the messages until the next day because she was down at the courthouse. When von Helms couldn’t reach Agnew, she tried calling Goldstein, but Kristin had already been arrested. That von Helms did not reach him before the arrest was of no consequence, Goldstein said, because he wouldn’t have allowed Kristin to turn herself in, anyway.

  When Kristin returned to her apartment around 3 P.M., she brought a private detective with her, perhaps, investigators thought, to help cleanse her apartment of incriminating evidence. Instead, Detective Felix Zavala arrested Kristin on suspicion of murdering her husband.

  Zavala took her to police headquarters a couple of miles away, where she was tested for drugs. The results, which came back several weeks later, showed that she tested positive for methamphetamine and amphetamine.

  Agnew’s search warrant was signed and issued at 5:10 P.M. She took it straight to Kristin’s apartment and saw that she’d been right: Kristin had bought another computer. But since the courts were closed by then, Agnew had to get another warrant approved by phone before she could take it.

  Items seized during the search included a silver metal lighter labeled “Pocket Mega Torch,” a device commonly used by meth users that was a step up from the plastic disposable lighters Kristin had been using. It was found in the outside pocket of Kristin’s canvas briefcase, along with papers showing Michael’s address and phone number at his parents’ house in Melbourne. Agnew took Kristin’s Palm Pilot, more cards and letters, and an address book, in which she found the Tijuana phone number for a man named Armando Garcia. She also found a third diary. In addition to the entries written in the book itself, a hardback titled “Meditation Journal,” it also contained a number of entries on loose pages that were tucked inside.

  Earlier that afternoon, Agnew had figured out that Kristin worked at TriLink and sent a detective to the lab. Within the next couple of days, Kristin’s boss gave police two envelopes and the stuffed kangaroo. Both envelopes, one of which had been opened, contained greeting cards. Agnew got another search warrant on June 28 so she could open the sealed envelope right away. The cards were similar in tone and content: Michael loved Kristin, and he missed her.

  Kristin was brought to Las Colinas in Santee, a quiet suburban city east of San Diego, at 3:30 P.M. The beige cinder-block building looks almost like a small public high school and is surrounded by tall conifers that drop pinecones on the grass in the winter.

  Inside, Kristin was asked four questions by a nurse in a cagelike room with bars that separated her from the inmates: Are you injured/hurt or have you been in an accident within the last seventy-two hours? Do you have a major medical problem? Do you have an infectious disease? Are you feeling suicidal? If Kristin had answered yes to any of these questions, she would have been taken to a hospital.

  Kristin stood on footprints made of tape so a sheriff’s deputy could take her booking photo against the gray wall. Then, she was put into a room with wooden benches and two phones. State law required that inmates be allowed to make three phone calls.

  According to jail officials, even if she were high on methamphetamine, Kristin wouldn’t have been
treated any differently than other inmates unless she became violent or seemed like she might hurt herself. Only then would she have been placed in a padded cell.

  Next, she was strip-searched by a female deputy wearing rubber gloves, who was looking for drugs or weapons. During a search, female inmates are asked to take off their clothes so a deputy could search through their hair and look in their mouths, behind their ears, under their arms and breasts, and on the soles of their feet. Inmates are also asked to spread their legs, bend over, and cough twice to make sure nothing is hidden in the genital area, where women have been known to insert drugs wrapped in various materials. They are issued two pairs of socks, two pairs of panties, a pair of pants, a shirt, a sweater, a pair of slip-on shower sandals, a nightgown, and a thin white towel.

  From there, Kristin’s fingerprints were scanned and recorded by a machine that checks for outstanding warrants in the local, state, and federal criminal justice systems. The booking clerk took her address and phone, told her what crime she was being held on, and gave her her first court date—her arraignment. Because Kristin was charged with murder and the deputies knew her case would get media attention—“the whole rose petal thing,” as one deputy put it—she was placed in the A-2 unit, where inmates are housed in single cells, each with a bunk bed. Hers was on a corner, #209.

  “She was very polite and had good manners,” said Corporal Erika Frierson. “She never disrespected the deputies. She was never a problem child at all.”

  Kristin’s eight-by-ten-foot cell had a television mounted in a corner of the ceiling. The televison was encased in a cage, with a Plexiglass sheet covering the screen to protect it from anything an inmate might throw at it. A circular hole was cut out of the bottom, large enough for an inmate to stick her finger in to change the channel or turn off the power. Kristin had to climb up to the top bunk to reach the controls. Inmates don’t get remotes.