Poisoned Love

by Caitlin Rother

By this point, Constance said, she was becoming afraid for her daughter’s safety. She offered to be there with Ralph when Kristin broke the news to Greg that she was leaving. Constance was worried that Greg might jump off the balcony and take Kristin with him. At the very least, she said, he might start breaking all the china and crystal.

  But Kristin was convinced that Greg wouldn’t hurt her.

  “Mom, I can handle it,” she said.

  Still, Constance cautioned Kristin that if she was going to leave, she ought to do it before the holidays.

  Constance and Ralph both recounted similar recollections of the last night they saw Greg, when they all had dinner in San Diego on Friday, November 3, to celebrate Greg and Kristin’s respective birthdays.

  The Rossums were running late, so they didn’t have time to drink much of the gin martinis that Kristin made for them at the apartment. But before they left for the restaurant, Constance and Ralph said they all talked about the one red rose that was standing in a vase on the table.

  “It was a very pretty, still tightly formed rose,” Ralph said. “It wasn’t opening too much, and we commented, Constance and I, on the beautiful rose. Greg waxed eloquently, said he’d purchased a dozen red roses and this was the only one that survived.”

  The evening continued to be surreal, the Rossums said, as Greg drank more than usual at the Prado in Balboa Park and raised his voice several times as he ranted about a guy he’d hired as a fund-raising consultant who had ripped off Orbigen. They had to shush him, he was talking so loud.

  Constance kicked Kristin under the table so they could go to the ladies’ room and she could ask her daughter why Greg was acting so strange. Kristin told her that things had gotten really bad. Constance repeated her offer to go back to the apartment and help Kristin move, but Kristin said no, she wanted to leave amicably. She loved Marie. Greg had been an important part of her life. And she wanted to try and remain friends.

  “I wish I said, ‘Stop it,’” Constance said. “I wish we had just yanked her out of the way.”

  On Saturday, November 4, Constance said she and Ralph were so concerned that they went to a real estate office to look for a condo for Kristin to live in during the trial separation.

  The next time they heard from Kristin was when she called, hysterical, from the hospital that Monday night. Ralph drove down to San Diego as fast as he could, and when he arrived at the apartment, he saw the rose petals on the bedroom carpet. He asked Kristin if it was the same rose from Friday night and she said yes.

  “This was Greg saying, ‘I know this is over. The romance is over. I’ve lost you,’” Ralph said.

  When Kristin pulled back the covers to put him on the floor as the 911 dispatcher directed, she told him, she saw the rose petals all over Greg and their wedding photo clutched in his hands.

  Constance and Ralph offered a number of scenarios for why Greg might have killed himself: He didn’t want to live without Kristin. Without Kristin, he couldn’t have children whom he would keep away from his father as a means of getting back at him. Greg was very concerned about his mother’s health, and it became overwhelming for him to think that without Kristin’s financial resources, he wouldn’t be able to take care of Marie. His act was a cry for help, an accidental overdose. Or maybe, with his knowledge of drugs, Greg set Kristin up for his murder because if he couldn’t have her, then no one would.

  “Greg was charming, but he was vindictive,” Constance said. “He didn’t want to anger you; he wanted you to suffer for eternity type of thing.”

  Plus, Ralph added, Greg had his own knowledge of, and access to, fentanyl, because the dentist had used it on him the year before when he had his wisdom teeth removed.

  Michael Robertson, Ralph said, was irrelevant because Kristin was already talking about getting out of the marriage in early 2000.

  “Kristin had no motive to do [Greg] in,” Ralph said. “One, there was no insurance. She wasn’t committed to staying at the Medical Examiner’s Office.”

  Why, he asked, would Kristin kill Greg, then divulge to police that Greg had threatened to report her drug use and infidelity? And why would she tell police that the drugs Greg took were those she’d gotten from Mexico to help get her off methamphetamine?

  “If you’re going to kill to keep a story quiet, you don’t admit it in the first interview, especially when it’s a wholly voluntary interview,” Ralph said. “Kristin is too darn smart to be so darn stupid. If you’re a toxicologist, would you do somebody in in a way that so directly points the finger at you? That’s her area. That’s what she knows better than anyone. She knows how to do it so no one can detect it.”

  In subsequent media interviews, the Rossums complained that they were never interviewed by police. They said paramedics and doctors had accounted for every needle puncture wound on Greg’s body. They repeated their claim that Kristin had never been arrested—even emphasizing their point by using all capital letters in written answers to questions from MSNBC.com in September 2001. The Rossums distributed these responses to other media organizations.

  The Rossums also told the media that Greg’s autopsy showed he had hepatitis B. They went on to say that hepatitis B is generally contracted through sexual contact or contaminated drug needles, insinuating that he’d had an affair or, more importantly, that he was an intravenous drug user and could’ve injected the fentanyl with a dirty needle he shared with an infected friend.

  “Greg couldn’t have gotten [hepatitis] from Kristin because she was inoculated against it for her job at the Medical Examiner’s Office. We don’t know what to make of it, but it does explain why Greg had become so sickly and tired,” Constance told Good Housekeeping magazine in an interview published in March 2002.

  Greg’s autopsy didn’t mention hepatitis B. However, some of Greg’s tissues were rejected by the agency that handled the donation, which saw test results that indicated he could have been exposed to hepatitis B. After some investigation, Eriksen and Loebig decided this was merely a false-positive and let the matter drop. The prosecution asked to have Greg’s liver tissue tested for hepatitis, and it came back negative.

  The Rossums told the media that Kristin said Greg had access to fentanyl in the storage locker containing items from his father’s now-defunct medical practice in Ventura County. When Ralph heard from a reporter that Yves de Villers said he’d never used fentanyl in his practice, Ralph replied, “Charitably, I think he forgot.”

  Asked by MSNBC.com to explain how fentanyl got into Greg’s body, the Rossums said this: “Greg had knowledge of, past use of, and his own independent access to fentanyl. It is unfortunate that the police and prosecutor never talked to Kristin after the drug he used to commit suicide was identified in the toxicology report. If they had, she would have been able to present this information to them, and she would never have been arrested.”

  They didn’t mention to MSNBC.com that Kristin declined Agnew’s request for a second interview, in which the detective was planning to do just that. They also didn’t mention that they, too, had declined the police’s offer to interview them after Kristin was arrested.

  Asked by MSNBC.com if the fentanyl was removed from the Medical Examiner’s Office, and if so, how and by whom, the Rossums referred the news outlet back to the previous answer.

  MSNBC.com asked if the defense would argue that Michael was involved in Greg’s death, to which the Rossums replied, “No, it was a suicide…. Kristin would have left Greg even if there were no Michael Robertson. He was not a factor.”

  The Rossums blamed Kristin’s drug relapse on Greg, saying she “reverted to a very small amount of drug use two weeks prior to Greg’s suicide as a result of his psychological abuse and refusal to consider counseling. She came ‘full-circle’ after six years of his insistence that he ‘was her savior.’”

  She got the drugs, the Rossums said, “on the street. During her voluntary interview with the police, she was on the verge of volunteering to them her source when they asked he
r not to do so.”

  The validity of the claim that she was about to volunteer her source is debatable. During her interview, Detective Jimmy Valle asked Kristin if she had a current drug habit. When she said yes, he asked what she was taking. She told him it was meth.

  “Where are you getting your supply?” he asked. “Don’t give me a name. Don’t give me a name.”

  “I’m not,” Kristin said.

  “Because I think you would if I ask, but I’m not going to ask you.”

  “No, I don’t know him,” she said.

  During the trial, the prosecution pulled quotes from the Rossums’ various media interviews to try to impeach their credibility in court.

  The Rossums, Loebig said later, “remained steadfastly pompous, defensive, and aggressive in their public address that their daughter was innocent, without ever coming forward with much specific evidence that helped the case.” But Loebig said he didn’t blame the Rossums for telling the media what they did, “particularly with a daughter they didn’t want to give up on and give every benefit of the doubt to. There was no overt hostility between us. It was just an inherently stressful situation.”

  Loebig never got personally involved in the case. It didn’t really grab him the way some others had. He kept waiting for evidence to be delivered that would exonerate his client, but it never came. So he did his best with the evidence he had.

  Eriksen, on the other hand, had more trouble than usual this time around, primarily because of the family dynamics involved. He tried to keep his usual professional distance, but as a father to two boys, he came to feel tremendous sympathy and empathy for Ralph and Constance. He couldn’t imagine what it must be like for them to be going through this, believing so strongly in their daughter, but knowing a jury could send her to prison for the rest of her life.

  In the months before the trial, Constance had more and more difficulty dealing with people, especially the reporters who didn’t accept the Rossums’ explanations at face value.

  “She felt that she placed trust in some people, and then they double-crossed her,” Eriksen recalled later.

  Constance and Ralph both developed stress-related conditions as they dealt with the frustration and anger stemming from the prosecution’s allegations about their daughter. Ralph’s hands started to shake. Constance became anemic, and her cholesterol and blood pressure shot up. Eriksen could see the anxiety in their faces as he watched them age from the experience.

  “We’re in the fight of our lives,” Constance told Good Housekeeping. “…We have to remember to eat, to sleep, to exercise…. Mentally it is very hard. You think about it all the time, and yet you have to go on. You have to get up, do your work, take care of your other children, and be there for Kristin.”

  Constance Rossum’s professional marketing experience and her academic training in journalism prepared her for the most important public relations campaign of her life—convincing anyone and everyone that Kristin had nothing to do with Greg’s death. And she set upon her task with a fierce determination.

  While Kristin was in jail, Loebig acted as the liaison to the three major news networks, while the Rossums tried to evaluate which one would be the best advocate for their daughter.

  “Everyone wanted the story,” Loebig said.

  Each of the networks sent out producers from New York, all sharp women who were trying to win the exclusive right for their reporter to do Kristin’s story. The Rossums wanted a commitment that the reporter would fight for Kristin’s innocence, Loebig said, which became more difficult once the evidence started to unravel.

  “They wanted agents,” Loebig said. “They didn’t want impartiality.”

  Ultimately, the Rossums decided to go with CBS and its national evening news magazine show, 48 Hours.

  In mid-July, Michael agreed to be interviewed about the case by an Australian reporter for the Melbourne Herald Sun. For some reason, he seemed to feel safer talking to the Australian media than to American reporters. But in the days of the Internet, not to mention the fact that reporters often share or trade information, that didn’t prevent his comments from reaching readers in San Diego, where he was under criminal investigation. Parts of his interview were republished in the Union-Tribune on July 15.

  Michael told the Herald Sun that he did not flee San Diego to escape scrutiny by the police. Rather, his mother was ill, and he wanted to return home to Melbourne to be with her. In addition, his work visa was tied to his job at the Medical Examiner’s Office.

  “I stayed there for many months after this happened in order to facilitate the investigation as much as I could,” he said.

  He also said he was shocked to hear that police had named him as a possible suspect in their investigation.

  Dr. Harry Bonnell, the pathologist who went to the college basketball game earlier in the year with Kristin and her mentor, Frank Barnhart, was fired from the Medical Examiner’s Office on August 7, after a decade with the office. At the time he was fired, Bonnell told the Union-Tribune that the chief medical examiner, Dr. Brian Blackbourne, had called him into his office and said, “I’m terminating you because I don’t feel confident in you being able to fulfill the responsibilities of chief deputy medical examiner.” Blackbourne would not comment on Bonnell’s termination.

  Bonnell was forced to stop doing autopsies during a state investigation in 1999, when he was accused of negligence and incompetence in connection with two 1995 autopsies. He was cleared in 2000. But Bonnell said he thought the firing had “to do more with administrative conflicts and priorities than professional responsibilities.”

  Three years later, he said he was fired because he told county officials he would fully answer questions posed by attorneys in the de Villers family’s civil case against the county. Loebig and Eriksen subsequently retained Bonnell’s services as a consultant to help them with Kristin’s defense.

  On September 17, 2001, Goldstein made a formal request to Judge Thompson to televise Kristin’s preliminary hearing, which was scheduled for October 9. The request wouldn’t have been unusual if it had come from a news outlet, but it appeared to be an unprecedented move by a prosecutor, at least in San Diego.

  Goldstein said he wanted an opportunity to balance the erroneous information the potential jury pool had been receiving through the media from Constance and Ralph Rossum. He was worried that the one-sided news accounts he’d heard on the radio and seen on TV and in print could interfere with witness testimony. Goldstein was particularly incensed by remarks Ralph made on a conservative radio commentator’s show, alleging that Goldstein’s motivation in going after him and his daughter was that the prosecutor was running for a judge’s seat.

  Goldstein was, frankly, fed up with Ralph Rossum. He said he’d rather see the judge put a gag order on the attorneys but allow cameras in the courtroom, because without cameras, the media would interview outside pontificators who often present inaccurate interpretations of the facts.

  “I’m willing to rest my case on the evidence,” Goldstein told the Union-Tribune. “This is a compelling case, and it points to the guilt of the defendant.”

  After learning about the sexy elements of Kristin’s case, Court TV also requested to film Kristin’s court proceedings. But Judge Thompson refused to grant either request.

  If cameras had been allowed in the courtroom, Thompson said later, the perky, photogenic, blond defendant probably would have drawn just as much, if not more, media than the David Westerfield trial, a child kidnapping and murder case that involved a seven-year-old girl whose parents were sexually adventurous swingers. The Westerfield trial, which ended about a month and a half before Kristin’s started, brought more television cameras to San Diego than any other trial in the city’s history. The only memorable exceptions were the trial and retrial of Betty Broderick, a former society matron from La Jolla, who was discarded by her ex-husband for a younger version. Broderick, who shot her ex and his second wife in their beds in 1989, was convicted of second-d
egree murder and is serving a thirty-two-year term. Hers was the first case Court TV ever broadcasted from a San Diego courtroom.

  “The presence of cameras changes the game, skews it in a way that, in my opinion, is inappropriate,” Thompson said later. “People forget to do their jobs. They do a different job. They’re playing to the cameras.”

  That goes for judges, too, he said. “It’s really not fair to the defendant, to anybody associated with the case. We sacrifice justice to ensure good theater, and it’s just not right.”

  Judge John Thompson came from a long line of judges. Every morning when he entered his courtroom, he faced a paneled wall of photos featuring four of his judicial ancestors, who joined the bench in San Diego starting in the early 1900s—his great-grandfather and grandfather, who were dead, and his father and uncle, who were still alive.

  His great-grandfather, Adam Thompson, was a volunteer pro tem judge, but his grandfather, father, and uncle made sitting on the bench their full-time job. They were all featured in black-and-white or sepia tones, looking a little stern, but distinguished and, well, judgelike. They were not labeled as such, so their meaning was not apparent to visitors, but to Thompson, they represented tradition, a certain dignity, and an accomplished lineage that kept him on his toes. They also served as a constant reminder of his job’s importance.

  Thompson never had an epiphany about wanting to become an attorney or judge. It was just in his blood. In fact, it was expected of him.

  “I thought everyone’s dad was a judge, lawyer, or bad guy,” he said. “I thought everyone did these things.”

  Starting when he was in the eighth grade, the young John Thompson and two friends who’d lost their fathers came to the courthouse over the summer and during the winter holidays to take in juicy trials like most boys watch cartoons. If Thompson’s father wasn’t trying an interesting case, he would call around and find one for the boys in another courtroom. The boys remained enthralled there for four and five days at a time.