Poisoned Love

by Caitlin Rother

  Thompson’s father got calls in the middle of the night, prompting him to take a shower and put on a suit.

  “Daddy, what are you doing?” young John would ask.

  “I’m going to the jail to talk to a new client,” his father would tell him.

  Former California Governor George Deukmejian appointed Thompson in 1988 to the Municipal Court bench. He served there until 1992, when then-Governor Pete Wilson—who was San Diego’s mayor from 1971 to 1983, before becoming a U.S. senator and then governor—elevated him to the Superior Court bench. Thompson assumed that position fifty-six years and a day after his grandfather, Gordon Thompson, Sr., had done the same. Gordon Thompson, Jr., Thompson’s father, served as a chief U.S. district court judge in the 1980s.

  Thompson saw himself as a much better judge than trial attorney, and the bigger the trial the better—particularly the high-profile cases, the ones some other judges found distasteful because they had a large number of bodies and involved families in ruin and the most violent crimes. But they were the ones that drew the public’s attention. It’s not that he thrived on tragedy, but a case like Kristin Rossum’s was simply more interesting. It was meaty and full of sexy elements: drugs, adultery, and an attractive, complex defendant.

  Thompson could sometimes appear gruff, even a little irritated. Other times, though, he joked with the attorneys, slipping in a good-natured expletive or two. It generally wasn’t out of anger; it seemed more that he felt comfortable being in his own courtroom with the attorneys, out of public view.

  Depending on his mood, he might speak in a quiet monotone, but he was firm, respectful, and polite to defendants. Before sending a handcuffed defendant back to jail, he might say, “Good luck to you, sir.” But other times, he could be abrupt, cutting off attorneys who tried to talk out of turn. His one-time desire to become an umpire came through in his own brand of legal slang, a combination of baseball and jurisprudence. In one hearing, he barked at an attorney for a CBS news outlet to “Grab some pine,” referring to a bench in the dugout. In other words, “Sit down.”

  Outbursts like that only contributed to his reputation among reporters for disliking the media. He never allowed cameras, tape recorders, cell phones, or pagers in his courtroom, and he threatened to fine anyone who disobeyed his decree. Unlike his close friend, Judge William Mudd, who presided over the Westerfield trial, Thompson felt that cameras in the courtroom were disruptive and dangerous. The Westerfield trial drew prime-time attention, partly because Mudd allowed cameras to air the proceedings live, but also because the victims’ parents were swingers.

  But the perception that Thompson didn’t like the press, he said, wasn’t accurate. “I’ve never kept the press out of the courtroom. The press isn’t the issue.”

  Thompson suggested that the media’s perception that he didn’t like them stemmed from his move to hold a reporter in contempt in June 2000 for refusing to turn over his notes from an interview with a defendant in a murder case. After exhausting all appeals, J. Harry Jones, a legal affairs reporter for the Union-Tribune, had to make a decision. Thompson gave him a choice.

  “You’ve got to deliver up the notes,” Thompson told him. “You bring your notes or you bring your toothbrush.”

  The toothbrush comment referred to the possibility that Jones would have to go to jail for up to two years if he didn’t produce the notes. So, rather than leave his wife and daughter while he proved a journalistic point, Jones worked out a deal with Thompson. Jones was allowed to summarize the contents of his notes in an affidavit.

  At the same time Thompson was dealing with Jones, he was the target of an assassination plot by a murderer in another case, a gang member who’d been convicted in his courtroom and was serving a term of life without the possibility of parole for killing a clerk in a liquor store.

  At 11:30 one night, Thompson got a call from an investigator with the District Attorney’s Office. “When you look outside and see two vans,” the investigator said, “they’re our guys. We think there’s a contract out on you.”

  The shooters had an address for the prosecutor in the case, an address for the lead detective, and an AK-47 assault rifle, unaccounted for—all reasons to be concerned. For the next eight weeks, Thompson had as many as ten law enforcement officers around him at all times and two patrol cars to protect him.

  What was not evident from Thompson’s courtroom demeanor or his conservative appearance was how truly playful he could be. Literally.

  Thompson had performed in bands for forty years—since he was twelve—and still played guitar and keyboards in a group called Night Shift. He was most likely the only rock-and-roll judge in San Diego, a well-known fact only in the legal community. Performing old favorites such as “Mustang Sally” and newer ones like Pink’s “Get The Party Started,” Thompson, who wore a black robe over a shirt and tie by day, traded in his judicial uniform by night for a straw hat, black pants, and shirt and the shadows of a dimly lit stage. Part of the reason Thompson got such rock star security treatment during the hunt for the assassin was because the shooters also had the schedule for his band.

  Chapter 14

  On the morning of Kristin’s preliminary hearing, October 9, 2001, Constance and Ralph Rossum waited anxiously outside Thompson’s courtroom, situated along a hallway known among the judges as Murderers’ Row. Although Thompson wouldn’t allow cameras in the courtroom, he did nothing to limit their presence in the third-floor hallway.

  Television and newspaper reporters approached the Rossums, the bright light of the TV cameras shining down on them. The Rossums seemed quite willing to answer questions, even to welcome the attention. Such a gathering of reporters and their cameras was not an everyday occurrence in the downtown courthouse, so people began to congregate, watching the news story as it developed.

  “We should not be here,” Constance declared.

  Ralph said he and his wife were trying to keep a calm demeanor, but “inside, we are very indignant.” Their daughter’s life was “in front of the whole world,” he said, and she was dependent on her parents for support.

  “This is a vibrant, alive woman who should be outside pursuing her career in chemistry, not defending herself against what is a suicide,” Ralph said.

  The Rossums huddled with Alex Loebig, who advised reporters he wouldn’t be countering any facts the prosecution presented that day.

  “It’s more effectively done at trial,” he said.

  After changing out of her jail blues into a loose-fitting plum dress, Kristin was brought into the courtroom. Her eyes were red from crying, just as they were at her arraignment. Her bangs were pulled back from her face with a white elastic band. A woman who was Kristin’s boss at TriLink came in and joined the Rossums.

  Goldstein called UCSD Detective Sergeant Bob Jones as his first witness. And, with the caveat that he responded to a call of “a possible suicide,” Jones relayed the story Kristin told him the night Greg died.

  “She said that she found the rose petals on Greg and that they were everywhere,” he said. They all fell to the floor, she told him, when she pulled Greg off the bed.

  Kristin took notes during Jones’s testimony and stared at him, frowning, while a sketch artist sat in the gallery, scribbling a picture of the proceedings for one of the television stations.

  On cross-examination by Eriksen, Jones explained that he’d put on rubber gloves to go through the contents of two foot-tall trash bins in the house but found nothing of note. The next morning, when he came back to the apartment with the investigator, he said, he “briefly” examined the two thirty-gallon cans, which were full of trash, on the balcony.

  “Actually, what I was looking for was a can of soup,” he said.

  After he found it near the top of one of the bins, he said, no, he didn’t dig any further.

  The basis for the defense’s case was beginning to emerge.

  No, Jones told Eriksen, he didn’t inventory the contents of the trash cans on the balcon
y, nor did he look for syringes, patches, or any other drug-related items in them. And, no, he also didn’t collect the soup can or any other items he found there.

  He said he noticed some red streaks on the middle third of the fitted bed sheet, which looked like they’d been caused by the rose petals, but he also didn’t impound the twenty-five or thirty petals he saw on the floor or the liquid contents of the two plastic cups in the bedroom.

  He said he considered calling in the SDPD from the “get-go” but didn’t have enough information and saw no obvious signs of foul play. Russ Lowe’s call about the affair on November 8 provided him with “the motive for something other than suicide.”

  On redirect, Goldstein tried to salvage the findings and credibility of the campus police sergeant, whose investigative inadequacies had been underscored by the defense. Jones said he hadn’t searched the trash cans on the balcony more carefully because he’d been going on the information that the defendant had provided. He didn’t know that fentanyl was involved at the time, he said, because Kristin never mentioned it. Nor did she mention that she’d been having an affair with her boss, the man standing outside on the landing the entire time Jones was in the apartment. Jones also said he had no idea that she was a meth user. She was shaking and crying, and he could hardly understand what she was saying, but at the time he thought she was in shock and that her emotions were genuine. He said the drug most commonly used by students during his twenty-one years at UCSD was marijuana.

  Paramedic Sean Jordan testified that he started an intravenous line in Greg’s left arm above the elbow, leaving one or two needle marks.

  “I didn’t do three,” he said.

  Since he thought Greg had overdosed on something, he said, he looked for preexisting needle marks on Greg’s body but saw none. When he rolled Greg onto the backboard to take him to the hospital, he said, he saw no rose petals under Greg’s body.

  April Butler, the emergency medical technician who assisted Jordan that night, said she thought “it was kind of weird” that Kristin stayed mostly in the kitchen and living room, talking on the phone, while they were working to revive Greg in the bedroom. Most family members want to help out in any way they can, she said.

  She said the wedding photo was propped up on the floor against a chest of drawers, maybe three feet from Greg’s head, when she arrived. And as Jones testified, she saw no rose petals in the bed, either, only on the floor.

  When Goldstein called Jerome de Villers to the stand, he was expecting him to be one of his strongest and most important witnesses. But Jerome didn’t seem like himself. The usually articulate young man who could recite any obscure detail about the case off the top of his head was having problems remembering most everything. He sounded strange and he mumbled. It was almost as if he were uninterested in being there. Goldstein was getting so frustrated that he was about to ask the judge to declare Jerome a hostile witness when they recessed for lunch.

  Goldstein took Jerome out into the hall and was asking what was wrong with him when Jerome’s family gathered around to explain. Jerome had been attacked from behind in a bar in Costa Mesa two weeks earlier and suffered a bad head injury. He’d only just gotten out of the hospital. Goldstein had known about the assault, which his investigator, Frank Eaton, had checked out with the Costa Mesa Police Department. But Goldstein hadn’t understood the extent of Jerome’s injuries, so the prosecutor eased up on his witness and cut Jerome’s testimony short.

  Jerome testified that the last time he saw Greg was at Aaron Wallo’s wedding in Palm Springs. Although Greg said he was tired from working hard at his new job, he seemed happy and healthy. They talked about going on a snowboarding trip to Mammoth for his birthday, and Greg was starting to think about having kids. Greg said nothing about feeling depressed or having marital problems with Kristin.

  Jerome recounted his investigative efforts in the days after Greg’s death.

  “I felt something went wrong,” he said. “I didn’t understand what happened to my brother…. I did not believe that Greg [killed] himself.”

  Goldstein played the tape that Jerome made of his conversation in Kristin’s apartment two days after Greg died. Much of it was hard to hear—because of a scratching sound from Jerome’s nervous leg rubbing the tape recorder against the inside of his jacket pocket—so Thompson and the attorneys followed along on a transcript.

  On cross-examination, Loebig tried to paint Greg as a man trying to steamroll ahead with his relationship with Kristin. While Greg was talking about buying a house, Kristin was sending a clear message that she wasn’t ready, for children or any other major step forward.

  Loebig asked Jerome if he thought his brother was obsessed with Kristin.

  “Obsessed? I don’t think that’s fair,” Jerome said. “‘Obsessed’ is a strong word.”

  To him, Greg’s behavior reflected only that he was in love with his wife. But based on the affair she was having, he said, maybe it was more than that. Maybe Greg didn’t want her to be alone with other men.

  Goldstein then called Bertrand de Villers and Christian Colantoni, the friend Greg and Kristin stayed with in Palm Springs for the wedding, and both testified that they never saw Greg acting depressed or using drugs.

  “He did not like to be around chemicals,” Bertrand said. “He told me that.”

  During the breaks between sessions, Kristin was led out of the courtroom to a holding area by a bailiff. She wore handcuffs that were hooked to a chain around her waist, keeping her face to the wall as she walked back and forth along the hallway. She behaved and followed the rules.

  Back in court, Kristin cried and wiped her eyes with a tissue as toxicologist Donald “Russ” Lowe testified about handing over the reins to the lab to his new boss, Michael Robertson.

  Lowe explained the system for storing drugs collected at death scenes and described a locked box that sometimes overflowed with evidence envelopes through an open slot in the top. Those envelopes were then moved in plastic trash bags to the Balance Room, he said, and all the toxicologists knew where the keys were kept. From there, the envelopes were moved into lockers, and eventually, their contents were destroyed.

  After Greg’s death, he said, he did an audit of all the drugs involved in the case that were kept in the office. He discovered that fifteen fentanyl patches from three different case envelopes were missing, and the 10-milligram yellow screw-top vial of fentanyl citrate that Kristin had entered in the log in October 1997 was empty. The 100-milligram vial of amphetamine she’d entered in the log in September 1997 was also empty, and the 100-milligram vial of methamphetamine she put in the log in August 1997 was missing entirely.

  “The drug standard log should show what had happened to those…standards, and there were no entries,” Lowe said.

  Also, he said, drugs or the entire evidence envelopes containing white powder or paraphernalia were missing from a number of cases in which people died from overdoses involving methamphetamine or cocaine. He did not specifically testify to this, but the audit also showed that twenty Soma pills were missing from one case, clonazepam was missing from two cases, and sixteen OxyContin pills (a time-release form of oxycodone) were missing from another. In addition, half a vial of oxycodone was unaccounted for.

  On cross-examination by Eriksen, Lowe acknowledged that theoretically, any toxicologist and just about any Medical Examiner’s employee could have had access to the drugs in the Balance Room. In fact, Lowe said, no drug audit had ever been done during the thirty-two years he’d worked at the Medical Examiner’s Office.

  “So the checks and balances were relatively weak,” Eriksen asked.

  “Yes,” Lowe said.

  A story in the Union-Tribune that weekend expanded on Lowe’s testimony, calling the Medical Examiner’s Office “a virtual candy store for any employee tempted by drugs,” and noting that no county employee would comment outside of court about the lax security over drugs there. The nickname stuck, and some employees would refer to the of
fice as “the candy store” for years to come.

  Goldstein didn’t ask Blackbourne to offer any theories or conjecture about the autopsy results or cause of death. Essentially, all he wanted to hear from the chief medical examiner was essentially “dead guy died from fentanyl.” So, Blackbourne didn’t speculate how long it had been since Greg had gotten up to urinate, and he wouldn’t give a more specific estimate for the time of death.

  Goldstein asked a number of questions to which Blackbourne replied, “I don’t know.” Blackbourne said he didn’t bring his notes with him to court, and he didn’t apologize for it.

  Perhaps his most significant testimony was that he found a total of three needle punctures on the victim’s left arm, a point emphasized by the prosecution to show there was one extra needle puncture for which paramedics could not account.

  Blackbourne also said there was a large bruise on the front of the victim’s right arm, with a large needle puncture mark in the middle of the bruise. He found one more needle puncture in the right groin area, where the emergency room doctor had drawn blood.

  Greg’s liver was normal, he said, and, no, he did not have hepatitis.

  Asked by Eriksen to explain why several different labs came up with varying levels of fentanyl in the blood, stomach contents, and urine, Blackbourne said it could have been because some tests were done later than others, so the samples could have evaporated or degraded. Also, he said, different testing techniques may have been used.

  But Blackbourne said he could not explain how or when the fentanyl got into Greg’s body, or how much was administered. Only that it was a fatal dose.

  “The blood levels are all extremely high,” he said.

  On redirect by Goldstein, Blackbourne confirmed that the Medical Examiner’s Office had no set policy that private toxicology testing would be done on cases involving the deaths of employees or their spouses. Testing in the case of investigator Stan Berdan, for example, was done in-house after he died suddenly in 1999. And yes, Blackbourne said, Kristin was working in the toxicology lab when those tests were done.