Poisoned Love

by Caitlin Rother

  “We think it’s outrageous,” he said, characterizing Agnew as inexperienced, with only a few weeks on the homicide team.

  “We are deeply troubled to see that the San Diego police and District Attorney’s Office have failed to heed the warning offered by the USC Annenberg School of Communication to its aspiring journalists about accepting a story, or in this instance, a case, that is too good to check,” the Rossums said in a news release. “We are convinced that had we and others who knew Greg’s mental state the weeks before his suicide been contacted, Kristin never would have been arrested.”

  Ralph said the defense attorneys had advised him and Constance to keep Kristin on edge so she didn’t accept her fate. They wanted someone on the witness stand who was alive, not defeatist. That night, he said, the family planned to take Kristin out to dinner at a sushi bar in Claremont.

  “It’s bittersweet because obviously the battle isn’t over, but it’s wonderful to know we’re going to be able to bring her home,” he said.

  Constance brought a black sweater, dress pants, and a string of pearls for Kristin to change into before she spoke at her first press conference. Through the glass doors of the jail, Constance could be seen primping Kristin, stroking her hair and hugging her, before she stepped outside.

  Kristin was all smiles, practically breathless with emotion as she told reporters she felt overwhelmed. She said she was just so grateful to all the friends and family who helped her get out of jail. She looked a little fuller in the face than before she went to jail.

  “I look forward to proving my innocence in court this summer,” Kristin declared. The charges are “without truth…I did not harm my husband in any way.”

  Kristin started crying, laid her head on Ralph’s shoulder, and told him she loved him. Then, holding her parents’ hands, Kristin walked with them through the parking lot to the car, a mob of cameras following behind.

  Still answering reporters’ questions, Kristin said, “It’s hard not to be bitter, but six months has been taken out of my life. I had no doubt throughout this ordeal that there would be a day that I would go home.”

  Kristin and her family let 48 Hours film them drinking champagne that night at their home in Claremont.

  After reviewing tapes of interviews Ralph had given to broadcast media, Judge John Thompson decided to put an end to what he saw as a media circus. He’d been particularly irritated by Ralph’s recent comments on a local conservative radio commentator’s show.

  “I’m going to do now what I should have done when this case came to me,” Thompson said at a hearing on January 15.

  He issued a gag order that covered Kristin, her attorneys, the prosecutors, and all police and investigative personnel.

  “You are to have absolutely no contact with anyone from the media,” Thompson declared.

  Directing his comments specifically at Ralph, Thompson said he certainly would have included him in the order if he could. But at the time, Ralph had not yet been declared an official witness, which would have given the judge the legal jurisdiction to gag him as well.

  “You, I can control,” Thompson said to the attorneys. “Mr. Rossum, I cannot.”

  Over the past few months, Thompson said, he had no doubt that Ralph had been trying to “potentially poison the jury pool in this case.” And he wanted all of that to stop. If it didn’t, Thompson threatened to take action that was in his power and move the trial to another county, possibly north of San Francisco. He said Kristin’s attorneys could request such a move, although he would not agree to hold the trial in neighboring Orange or Riverside Counties. He would, however, approve of taking it to Imperial County, the next jurisdiction to the east.

  “We’re not going to try the case in the paper,” he said.

  Although Goldstein liked having the media spotlight on the court process for public education purposes, he didn’t mind this particular gag order. It was much less distracting not to have to worry about inadvertently saying something outside the courtroom that he shouldn’t or about how his comments would play in the press.

  The defense attorneys felt the same way, but they also weren’t thrilled that the prosecution had already released details of its case to the media before Thompson imposed the order.

  Later, Thompson said he wished he’d handled Ralph Rossum and the gag order differently. He hadn’t realized that he did have the authority to gag Ralph because he was going to be called as a witness. But Thompson hadn’t been sure of that at the time.

  “I rued the day I didn’t gag him in the beginning, right out of the chute,” Thompson said.

  Goldstein was elected in the March primary, though he wasn’t scheduled to take his seat on the Superior Court bench until the following January. He and Pfingst discussed whether he should continue on the case, and they decided that he was the best one to follow it through, even if he had to postpone the start of his judgeship. Kristin’s trial was supposed to begin in early June, but trials had a way of being delayed.

  Goldstein also decided that for the first and last time in his prosecutorial career, he wanted to bring on an attorney as second chair. He picked Dave Hendren, with whom he’d worked for the past eight or ten years, and whom he had supervised for the past two. Goldstein wanted to give Hendren, a very thorough, efficient, and hardworking prosecutor, a shot in the limelight. An oversized Boy Scout wearing a suit and sometimes a big grin, Hendren and his courtroom manner made him a good foil for Goldstein. But Hendren was a capable prosecutor in his own right, with a cross-examining style that could impeach a witness. He’d won his share of cases, though none as high profile as Goldstein’s. This case would put his name in the news.

  Shortly after the election, Kristin’s attorneys filed a motion seeking to remove Goldstein from the case, arguing that letting a judge-elect continue as prosecutor would lead to an unfair trial for their client. Because of the gag order, none of the attorneys could tell the media about the motion, which was filed under seal. Thompson said the media seemed to have an “insatiable appetite” for the case.

  When the Union-Tribune found out he’d sealed this motion and possibly others, Thompson wouldn’t even disclose its topic when questioned informally by the newspaper’s attorney, Guylyn Cummins. So, Cummins asked for an immediate hearing.

  “We don’t have to shield every high-profile case from public scrutiny,” she wrote in her motion seeking to unseal the documents.

  Thompson held a hearing the next day but wouldn’t budge on his decision, so Cummins took it to the Fourth District Court of Appeal. On April 24, the day before Thompson was scheduled to hear the motion, the appeals court overturned his decision to keep this or any other pretrial motion sealed.

  Kelli Sager, a First Amendment attorney in Los Angeles, said the law could not be more clear in prohibiting what Thompson tried to do.

  “A blanket sealing order like the kind entered in this case is flatly unconstitutional,” she told the Union-Tribune.

  When Hendren was assigned to the case, he had less than two months to prepare for the June 3 trial date. It was quite a daunting task. His first thought was, “Oh my gosh, twenty-some thousand pages [of discovery] to go through. How am I ever going to get up to speed on this?”

  The father of two spent virtually every waking hour reading. And that included a lot of late nights and weekends, constantly analyzing, researching, and doing follow-up, as he tried to catch up with Goldstein’s knowledge. As he read through the drug audits, he thought that too many drugs relevant to the case were missing to be a coincidence. He wondered why, when the paramedics arrived, the wedding photo was propped up against the chest next to the bed when Kristin said it had been tucked under Greg’s pillow.

  Luckily, Hendren’s wife was very understanding when he was in trial mode. In fact, because she was about Kristin’s size and his tall, lean build was pretty similar to Greg’s, she even helped him reenact Kristin’s story about how she pulled Greg off the bed and onto the floor to start CPR. Hendre
n’s wife had to pull him by the arms to get him off, and it wasn’t easy.

  It was somewhat unusual to have two prosecutors working a homicide case, but this one was complicated and high profile, and the records were still coming in. In mid-May, because of the tremendous volume of evidence, both sides agreed it would be better to delay the trial for several months. A new date of October 4 was set.

  Goldstein and Hendren divvied up the witnesses and evidence by subject matter, but in such a way that each prosecutor’s role would be clear to the jury. Hendren got the computer documentation, the character witnesses, and issues related to the Medical Examiner’s Office, such as the drug inventories. Because of his medical background, Goldstein took the paramedics and the expert drug witnesses. They split up the Rossums, with Hendren taking Constance and Goldstein taking Ralph, his old nemesis. They figured the jury wouldn’t like it if Goldstein attacked both parents on cross-examination.

  Kristin maintained her innocence during her first televised jailhouse interview, which was featured on 48 Hours when it first aired in April 2002. It was updated and re-aired after the trial in February 2003.

  “I ask myself every day, how did I go from the happy little girl to being in here, facing murder charges?” Kristin said in a childlike voice through tears to reporter Bill Lagattuta, who was on the other side of the glass, talking to her by phone. “I want to shout at the top of my lungs, ‘I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it.’”

  Her worst fear, she said, was that she would spend the rest of her life in prison for a crime she didn’t commit.

  As Kristin characterized her life with Greg, she repeated many of the same images and phrases her parents had been disseminating since her arrest. Not long into the marriage, she said, Greg became “very, very clingy” as she tried to pull away from him and find herself as an individual.

  “He always wanted to keep tabs on me and stop me from having any independent life outside our marriage,” she said.

  Kristin’s friend Melissa Prager was interviewed to back up her story.

  “Kristin and Greg’s relationship was very unhealthy in that he was very controlling; he was very obsessed with her,” Prager said. “Kristin was becoming Greg’s project and less Kristin Rossum.”

  The happiest Prager had ever seen Kristin was after she’d fallen for Michael. “It was an entirely different love, a love that was true and sincere and that she was discovering on her own,” Prager said.

  Bill Leger spoke up in Greg’s memory, disputing the Rossums’ claim that his close friend had been a dark, moody person.

  “He was just a straightforward, upfront, no-nonsense kind of guy, hardworking guy. Greg was very happy. He was looking forward to possibly purchasing a home.”

  Asked about the rose petals, Kristin echoed her parents’ claim that Greg “had given me a dozen beautiful long-stemmed roses for my birthday a few weeks earlier. He was making a big deal of the last rose standing.” Greg may have scattered the petals over his chest, she said, to make a statement that he knew their relationship was over.

  Kristin looked and sounded like she was crying, but her eyes were dry. “I don’t know if it was a cry for help or, or an intended suicide,” she said. “I, I really don’t know.”

  Kristin dismissed what prosecutors cited as her motive—that she wanted to prevent Greg from carrying out his threat to report her affair and her drug use to her superiors.

  “That’s just ridiculous,” she said. “Those certainly aren’t motives.”

  She acknowledged that she hadn’t wanted her coworkers to know about her drug problem, but it wouldn’t have been “the end of the world.” Surely, her bosses would have worked with her on her drug problem and put her into counseling. She also acknowledged that she had access to fentanyl at the Medical Examiner’s Office, but so did everyone else who worked there.

  “I certainly did not take any of it,” she said. “I’m not a murderer. I did not harm my husband.”

  Goldstein was featured saying he didn’t think Kristin had told the truth in ten years and that the evidence against her was “immaculate.”

  Loebig countered that it wasn’t such a stretch of the imagination that Greg committed suicide because he couldn’t live without Kristin. All he had to do, Loebig said, was empty an ampule of fentanyl into a water glass, throw away the ampule in one of the trash cans on the balcony, then get into bed and drink the contents of the glass.

  48 Hours traveled to Australia to interview Michael Robertson. This was apparently the only time he spoke to the American media.

  Before Greg died, Michael said, Greg called him and told him to stay away from Kristin. But, Michael said, “Emotions sometimes rule…your better judgment.”

  Michael said he didn’t have anything to do with Greg’s death, and he didn’t think Kristin was capable of murder.

  “It was never an issue of homicide in my mind,” he said. “I don’t believe Kristin is the type of person that would even consider anything like this.”

  Lagattuta quoted experts as saying that if Greg had injected the fentanyl into himself, he wouldn’t have had time to throw away the syringe because he would have been dead before he got to the bathroom.

  Michael didn’t disagree.

  “So it looks suspicious,” Lagattuta said.

  Again, as uncomfortable as the comment appeared to make him, Michael had to concur.

  “It can look suspicious, absolutely,” he said.

  In his recusal motion, Loebig brought up Goldstein’s “immaculate” evidence comment as an example of “loaded” statements that could prejudice potential jurors, coming from a judge-elect. It was inevitable, he argued, that the public would learn of Goldstein’s new position because the “extremely newsworthy” case continued to hold the media’s attention. The jury pool would no longer view Goldstein as “an ordinary person,” but as someone with exceptional judgment.

  Deputy District Attorney Jim Atkins countered that Goldstein’s status did not meet the legal standard to have him removed. The defense had to show reasonable doubt that Goldstein wouldn’t conduct himself in an “evenhanded manner.”

  “It’s like trying to ram a square peg into a round hole,” Atkins said. “Being elected a judge is not a conflict of interest.”

  Atkins noted that Goldstein got 178,694 votes, which represented only 8.5 percent of the pool of prospective jurors. That meant 1.9 million potential jurors did not vote for him, plenty to seat an objective panel.

  Judge Julie Conger, from the Alameda County Superior Court, wrote an opinion for the Ethics Committee of the California Judges Association, stating that Goldstein had no conflict in this case.

  “He has a duty to ensure continued competent representation of his clients, and while he is still licensed as an attorney, that duty is satisfied by uninterrupted and undelayed resolution of his pending cases,” she wrote.

  Thompson denied the defense’s motion, saying he saw no evidence that Kristin wouldn’t get a fair trial.

  The prosecutors wanted Bob Petrachek, the computer forensic examiner, to have “everything done yesterday.” So, he ended up working some weekends, when he also took calls from Hendren to answer questions. The prosecutors’ enthusiasm and dedication were contagious.

  About midway through his work on the case, Petrachek came across a PowerPoint presentation on Michael’s laptop that had some very interesting similarities to Kristin’s case. The presentation, called “The Case of the Crooked Criminalist,” was based on a study published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences in July 1995 by four toxicologists and criminalists who worked at Michael’s former employer, National Medical Services. The case involved a state crime lab director who discovered that four fentanyl patches in foil pouches were missing from an evidence bag in the vault. Shortly after two chemists with access to the vault volunteered to be drug-tested using hair samples, one of them got his hair cut shorter than ever before. (The drug is fast acting and clears quickly from the body, so it wouldn’t neces
sarily turn up in blood or urine.) Hair tests revealed that the short-haired chemist was a chronic fentanyl abuser. Initially, he denied breaking into the evidence bag. Rather, he contended, he’d ingested 10 milligrams of fentanyl from a drug standard vial. According to the case study, that amount of fentanyl equated to two thousand fatal doses—one dose being 5 micrograms—over the course of about three months. This, his bosses decided, was “a highly improbable scenario.” Ultimately, the chemist pleaded no contest to larceny and possession of a regulated drug.

  For Petrachek, finding this case on Michael’s laptop “was a hell of a coincidence. The parallel on it was just amazing.” Hendren and Goldstein thought so, too. Especially given the thirty-seven articles on fentanyl that police found in a large manila envelope in Michael’s office.

  Since the Public Defender’s Office is part of the county government umbrella, Petrachek also assisted Kristin’s defense attorneys. Specifically, he searched three computers seized from a man in San Bernardino County who’d been arrested and jailed for selling fentanyl. Loebig and Eriksen were hoping to find a link between Greg and the man, who’d once lived near the Regents Road apartment. However, they were never able to find one.

  As the trial was approaching, Petrachek finished organizing the most important e-mails by sender and recipient, that is, all but the ones that the county’s computer contractor could not seem to retrieve. Much to the chagrin of the prosecution, the company that handled the county’s information technology business tried but could not produce e-mails from Michael and some from Kristin at the most crucial period—right before and after Greg’s death.

  Petrachek also made a timeline of Kristin’s, Greg’s, and Michael’s computer activities—such as which Web sites they visited, particularly between November 3 and 6—as well as of Kristin’s and Michael’s activities after Greg’s death.

  Petrachek got a few surprises as he searched through the Medical Examiner’s records. For one, Petrachek learned that the death of Stan Berdan, a reserve police officer who’d worked at the Medical Examiner’s Office, wasn’t natural after all.