Poisoned Love

by Caitlin Rother

  When it came time to introduce Michael to the jury, Loebig adopted some of the same heightened rhetoric of passion and drama that was reflected in the love notes Michael and Kristin exchanged. He described Michael as “Sir Lancelot” and “a big hunk of an Australian guy…. When she’d look at him, it would be with love, make it lust, if you want.”

  He said the tone of the e-mails between Kristin and Greg illustrated the contrast in her two relationships. Life with Greg was more comfortable and “matter of fact,” Loebig said. To her, Greg was more like a roommate than a husband. There was none of the electricity she felt with Michael.

  “When Michael Robertson walked in, he had a Ph.D. He played rugby. He had other girlfriends, too. He was one smooth guy. He was married, but he was separated. He was going to counseling. He, initially, I will suggest to you, probably looked at Kristin and just was mutually attracted. But it grew fast and it grew intensely. And, if you believe a third of the communications between them, they were considering a long-term relationship.”

  Loebig argued that Kristin had no motive to kill Greg. She and Michael didn’t try to hide their affair or keep it a secret, as the prosecution suggested, he said. Everyone in their office knew about it. And, it wasn’t surprising, he said, that Greg didn’t tell anyone the embarrassing truth that his marriage was in trouble.

  “What man…wants to go to their family and friends and say, ‘I desperately love this person that I have loved since I saw her the very first time, and I know she doesn’t love me because she’s told me, so I guess we’ll split up’? You are going to fight to stay in that house. You are going to ignore it. You are going to sleep through it. You are going to drink a little more. You are going to deal with it however you have to from your gut.”

  Loebig also argued that the prosecution “overly exaggerated” the claim that Kristin went out of her way to keep her renewed meth use a secret out of fear she’d lose her job. On the night of Greg’s death, he noted, she admitted to police that she’d used meth, oxycodone, and clonazepam. And, after she lost her job as a county toxicologist, it didn’t take her long to find another one.

  “So this drug use, it’s serious, it’s real serious to her personally. But as far as her career as a toxicologist, maybe not for the county…there’s plenty of other places to work,” he said.

  Loebig said he was surprised Goldstein didn’t play the 911 tape as part of his opening, but the jury would get to hear it before long and would realize that Kristin’s emotions were genuine that night.

  “When you hear that tape, you will hear the terror, the excitement, the urgency in Kristin’s voice,” he said. “It’s up to you to listen to it and then listen to her before you arrive at any conclusions.”

  The authorities never tested the contents of the plastic cups in the bedroom, Loebig said, and no one can say for sure whether that’s how the fentanyl got into Greg’s body. An expert witness would testify that Greg had to have known he was ingesting fentanyl because it has a bitter taste, and so, he said, the “best evidence” was that Greg purposely ate or drank something with the drug in it.

  As for the claim that Kristin stole the drugs from her lab, he said, the office had such lax security that anyone could have taken the missing drugs.

  “There was no proof by anybody that it was Kristin that took all this stuff,” he said.

  Attempting to knock down some of the prosecution’s other claims, Loebig said Kristin didn’t pursue Greg’s organ donation. It was a choice he made before he died. She also didn’t push for cremation as a way to “get rid of evidence.” As a county toxicologist, she knew that eventually they would find the substance that killed Greg. Kristin had no reason to kill her husband, he said. But Greg had a very real reason to kill himself.

  “Greg told Kristin Rossum any number of times, from very close to the beginning of their relationship, that he didn’t want to live without her. On November 6, unfortunately, before he could tell anybody else, he showed Kristin that he couldn’t live without her.”

  The first witness for the prosecution was paramedic Sean Jordan, who came dressed in uniform. At the defense table, Kristin dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief while Jordan talked about her.

  When he and April Butler arrived at the apartment, Jordan said, Kristin was in the living room, crying and talking to the 911 dispatcher on a cordless phone—not in the bedroom, doing CPR on Greg.

  Jordan said he remembered poking Greg’s left arm twice to start an intravenous line.

  “Did you do a third attempt?” Goldstein asked.

  “I didn’t do a third attempt, no,” Jordan replied, again confirming Goldstein’s premise that there was one extra needle puncture in that arm for which the paramedics could not account.

  Jordan said he saw no red marks on Greg’s chest as he normally would when someone has been doing compressions for CPR. Also, he said, Greg’s pupils were fixed and dilated.

  “What’s that mean to you?” Goldstein asked.

  “That he’s pretty dead,” Jordan said.

  Usually, he said, the pupils of someone who’d overdosed on a narcotic were pinpointed.

  Jordan said he couldn’t figure out why Greg, an apparently healthy young man, was down. And when he repeatedly asked Kristin questions about what Greg might have taken, she wasn’t much help.

  “At that point, we were pretty much grasping at straws,” he said.

  On cross-examination by Eriksen, Jordan admitted that he hadn’t looked at Greg’s hands to see if there was any residue from the red rose petals.

  The next morning, Russ Lowe, who’d retired six months earlier from the toxicology lab after thirty-two years, took the stand. Kristin wore a dark blue suit with a white shirt.

  Lowe said he called the UCSD police on November 8 to tell them Kristin was having an affair with Michael, because he felt it could be important to the investigation.

  “I felt that Dr. Robertson had told me things that weren’t true in the past, and I didn’t trust him,” Lowe said. “Specifically, he denied a relationship with Kristin.”

  Lowe said he was cleaning out Michael’s desk to make way for a new lab manager sometime in early February 2001 and was surprised to find thirty-seven articles on fentanyl, which he handed over to Dr. Blackbourne.

  Lowe proceeded to go into more detail about the series of drug audits he’d mentioned during the preliminary hearing. On November 28, 2000, he said, Lloyd Amborn came to him with Detective Victor Zavala and asked him to do some confidential research in relation to Greg’s death, including an audit of evidence envelopes that contained fentanyl collected at death scenes in 2000. He found that fifteen patches were missing from five cases and that Kristin had done some toxicology work on three of those cases. He also found that eleven drug standard vials were missing, including cocaine and amphetamine, and that four vials were there but had contents missing, including the empty vial of fentanyl citrate.

  On December 19, 2000, Lowe said, Amborn gave him a list of thirty-eight cases from 2000 in which methamphetamine was listed as the cause of death. He asked him to check the contents of those evidence envelopes, eight of which should have contained some amount of the drug. In seven of those, the white powder was gone.

  Then, in July 2001, he said, he and Cathy Hamm did a broader search of cases from 2000, including the types of paraphernalia and drugs that were relevant to this case. Putting together a sixty-three-page spreadsheet, they found that the drugs predominantly missing from the lab were white powder; Soma, the same drug Kristin bought in Tijuana; hydrocodone, the generic name for Vicodin; oxycodone; and clonazepam.

  On cross-examination by Eriksen, Lowe acknowledged that some lethal drugs—such as succinylcholine, potassium chloride, and nitroglycerine—could not be detected by drug screenings used by his lab. Asked whether a vial of succinylcholine had, in fact, gone untouched since Kristin logged it in in 1997, Lowe said that drug was not included in the audit.

  Lowe acknowledged that Kristin would no
t have had to touch the actual drug evidence when she did tests for the cases with the missing fentanyl patches. He also acknowledged that toxicologists did not faithfully log drug standards in and out when they used them to do screenings. Kristin did an inventory for the drug standard log when she was a student worker, Lowe said, but she wasn’t responsible for ensuring that her coworkers made proper use of the log.

  Eriksen asked if Lowe had ever seen Kristin take any impounded drug evidence or anything else out of the Balance Room without logging it out. No, Lowe replied.

  On redirect by Hendren, Lowe confirmed that the HPLC machine, which Kristin used alone in a room for hours at a time, had a hood and a vent that sucked up smoke and fumes. The implication was that Kristin could have been smoking meth in that room without anyone knowing.

  Dr. Brian Blackbourne, the county’s chief medical examiner, confirmed for Hendren that the autopsy for investigator Stan Berdan was done at UCSD, but Greg’s case was the first time the lab had sent all the blood samples to private labs for toxicology testing. But Blackbourne said that even if his toxicology lab had done the drug testing on Greg’s case and failed to determine a lethal level of any particular substance, they would’ve sent out for more specific testing until they figured out what killed him.

  Shortly after the hospital called the time of Greg’s death, he said, his office gave the go-ahead for the organ and tissue donation to proceed because “at the time we didn’t think it was an issue.” He conceded that he was unable to do a complete autopsy since many of the tissues, bones, and other body parts had been removed.

  Blackbourne went over his findings in more detail than at the preliminary hearing, explaining that Greg’s lungs were two to three times heavier with congestion than normal, with some pneumonia and blood—all symptoms that he hadn’t been breathing properly for a minimum of six to twelve hours. He said Greg also had 550 milliliters, or 18 ounces, of urine in his bladder, which would have felt “very uncomfortable.” This was another sign that he’d been semiconscious or unconscious in the minimum six-to twelve-hour range. And yes, he said, the lividity that the paramedics saw when they put him on the board meant he’d probably been dead for about an hour by the time they arrived, so Greg could have been down for as long as fourteen hours, or since around 7:30 A.M.

  The delay in getting the blood, urine, and stomach content samples from the Medical Examiner’s Office to the sheriff’s crime lab, Blackbourne explained, was because Barnhart wanted to maintain the chain of evidence. And because Barnhart wasn’t working until November 9, there was a thirty-six-hour wait before they could make the face-to-face transfer. Barnhart, Kristin’s mentor and friend, was noticeably absent from the prosecution’s list of witnesses at trial.

  Asked how he thought the fentanyl got into Greg’s body, Blackbourne answered a slightly different question, which was how such a large amount could have ended up in Greg’s stomach. One way was by ingestion, he said, and another way was directly into the bloodstream and then through secretions into the stomach. But Blackbourne said, no, he hadn’t been able “with any degree of reasonable medical certainty” to determine how the fentanyl had gotten into Greg’s body.

  On the morning of day three, the jurors who glanced over at Kristin as they filed into the courtroom to take their seats saw she was wearing a green pantsuit and a woeful expression.

  Under questioning by Goldstein, Dr. Theodore Stanley, a fentanyl expert, gave the jury a detailed lesson on the drug.

  Fentanyl, Stanley testified, is a synthetic morphine-like opiate. Morphine comes from plants, but fentanyl is made in the lab and is one hundred to one hundred fifty times more potent. Introduced into the United States in 1968 as an anesthetic to produce unconsciousness and supreme pain relief, fentanyl has one serious side effect: it can cause a person to stop breathing.

  Stanley, the board chairman of a company working on a more sophisticated fentanyl skin patch, said this was his second foray into fentanyl products. His first company produced the fentanyl lollipop. Because fentanyl is a Class 2 narcotic, highly regulated by the federal Drug Enforcement Agency, he said, these lollipops are available only in hospitals, and the patches only by prescription.

  Stanley said fentanyl is odorless and doesn’t have a taste “until you use huge amounts of it,” such as more than 10 milligrams. When it’s swallowed, he said, 65 percent of the drug gets destroyed, so that only 35 percent is absorbed into the bloodstream. There are ways to “fight off” the effects of a fentanyl overdose—shaking a person, yelling at him, or hitting or exciting him would stimulate the brain and central nervous system enough to counteract the depressant effects. Also, if a person has never had fentanyl, he said, he would need less than a regular user to experience the same effects.

  For example, Stanley said, if he gave a dose of 4 nanograms per milliliter to people in the courtroom, half of them would be breathing very slowly or not breathing at all.

  “What about somebody that had 57 nanograms per milliliter in their blood?” Goldstein asked, referring to the highest level measured in Greg’s body, from his heart blood.

  “If they were opiate naïve, there would not be anybody in this room who would be conscious, let alone breathing,” Stanley said.

  Under the law, both sides were required to ask Stanley questions about Greg’s blood levels in theoretical scenarios so they didn’t have to argue the facts of the case—especially since no one could prove exactly how the drugs got into Greg’s body.

  After hearing all the different levels of fentanyl in Greg’s blood, urine, and stomach identified by the different labs, Stanley summed them up as “a whole lot of fentanyl.” In fact, he said he’d never seen such high amounts in a person. He also noted that with fentanyl, blood levels can go up by 20 percent after death.

  Based on the high levels of fentanyl found in the stomach, Stanley said, the drug likely was administered in more than one form, possibly through the stomach but also through the bloodstream or skin. He explained how effects of the different forms of administration vary, with injections being fast acting, ingestion less so, and skin patches even less so. Based on the time that Greg was unconscious, Stanley’s testimony indicated that he may have had multiple doses of fentanyl over a long period of time before it killed him. The fentanyl, clonazepam, and oxycodone would have compounded each other.

  One fentanyl patch alone can take sixteen hours to reach a peak effect, he said, which compares to about five minutes with an injection into the blood, fifteen to twenty minutes for an injection into muscle tissue, and somewhere in between for eating or drinking something containing fentanyl. Stanley said it would take multiple patches to reach the levels found in Greg’s blood.

  On cross-examination, Eriksen asked Stanley if he was aware that the Physicians’ Desk Reference said fentanyl has a bitter taste. Stanley said no, pointing out that volunteers given 10 milligrams in his clinical studies for the lollipop did not taste anything.

  Quizzed on the properties of succinylcholine, the doctor said the drug was metabolized by the body in five minutes and then was gone without a trace, rendering it undetectable.

  Asked how fentanyl could be extracted from a patch and ingested, Stanley said the gel could be squeezed out of the patch and then dissolved in a cup of alcohol. In a powder form, he said, fentanyl citrate could be dissolved in water. In all but 5 to 10 percent of people, he said, a patch didn’t leave a mark on the skin after it was removed. After three days, a patch could leave an irritation or red mark on those 5 to 10 percent.

  Dr. Jack Stump, an emergency room doctor from Vancouver, Washington, testified on Friday morning of day four. He had a specialty in pharmacology, methamphetamine abuse in particular, and had done clinical research for the Department of Justice that involved the regular observation of addicts.

  Methamphetamine, he explained, is in a group of drugs called amphetamines but has a molecular shape that allows it to cause more psychological and physiological effects than most other drugs in t
hat family. Meth causes the heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure to increase, while decreasing the appetite and making users seem jittery, nervous, and anxious. Large quantities can push blood pressure levels to 250. The drug can also cause malnutrition, resulting in dental and skin problems.

  But, he said, “in the first two weeks or so of regular use…what methamphetamine does for you is give you what’s called supernatural pleasure, a pleasure you could not obtain anywhere else in nature. There aren’t enough vacations, aren’t enough births of babies, not enough pleasant events in life to get remotely close to what methamphetamine can do for you.”

  After a few weeks of use, however, people no longer get as high as they did at first. Those who try to attain that feeling by using more of the drug find they need that much more just to feel close to normal again. In fact, if they don’t use the drug, they will crash and feel depressed. They will also have problems thinking clearly. Chemically, methamphetamine resembles adrenaline, he said, so it causes the same “fight or flight” symptoms, such as dilated pupils, dry mouth, and bad breath.

  Typically, a high will last four to six hours in the one-time recreational user and three to five days in someone who is trying to maintain the high with repetitive use. When heavy users come down, they might sleep for two days while their bodies and minds recover. But unlike drugs such as marijuana, heroin, and cocaine, where the body returns to its usual state, methamphetamine changes the brain chemistry.

  “People who use, especially repetitive use, don’t always return to the person they were before,” Stump said.

  He said even light users might have trouble learning, demonstrate poor judgment, or experience extreme paranoia, the latter of which can cause hallucinations. In the 1950s, the military fed methamphetamine to bomber pilots to keep them awake, but they found that even these healthy, bright, mentally stable, and physically fit men became paranoid. Also, Stump said, because of tighter government controls on ingredients used to manufacture methamphetamine, makers of the illegal drug have resorted to more toxic chemicals, such as jet fuel, that are less regulated and more available. That is contributing to worsened physical problems, such as enlarged hearts, liver and kidney failure, and brain damage. Facial sores, a common symptom of meth use, are caused when the user scratches an itchy area until he digs a hole in the skin, a symptom known as “meth bugs.” Stump said meth users often use other narcotics, such as sedatives or muscle relaxants, to combat such symptoms.