Poisoned Love

by Caitlin Rother

  On cross-examination by Eriksen, Stump said low-level users can go unnoticed by coworkers for years at a time, but once the level increases, they often begin to show up late, make mistakes, and let their appearance go.

  “Would it strike you as unusual that a heavy meth user would be able to graduate with a B.S. degree in chemistry at the summa cum laude level?” Eriksen asked.

  “Yes,” Stump said, “it would.”

  When UCSD police Sergeant Bob Jones took the stand later that morning, Goldstein ran him through the items he found in the apartment to establish the chain of evidence, noting the red swipes on the bedsheet and smudges on the carpet—signs that the rose petals were fresh.

  Jones said he returned to the apartment the next morning with two officers to make a videotape because he “had some unanswered questions.” As Goldstein played the tape for the jury, an eerie silence fell over the courtroom as the camera panned over the empty apartment where the paramedics had tried to bring life back to the body of a young man the night before.

  Despite all of his questions, Jones said it wasn’t until after Russ Lowe’s phone call on November 8 that he finally decided to call in the SDPD’s homicide unit for help.

  “At the moment I received the telephone call, it caused me to believe this might be something other than what it had appeared earlier and that San Diego probably [should] be brought into the loop,” Jones said.

  As he did during the preliminary hearing, Eriksen grilled the sergeant to underscore his investigative failures for the jury. Jones repeatedly said he didn’t collect the various items of evidence Eriksen listed, including Kristin’s diary, because he didn’t think they had any “evidentiary value” at the time. He said he left the apartment thinking the death was “equivocal,” or uncertain.

  Eriksen went on the offensive. “Normally,” he said, “when you are investigating an open-ended question like that as to the death of a human being, wouldn’t you consider everything around…where that person is found to be potentially relevant as evidence?”

  “Potentially, yes,” Jones replied.

  But, no, Jones acknowledged, he did not check whether the phones worked, did not look through the kitchen cabinets, did not inventory the balcony trash cans’ contents, did not collect the contents of the plastic cups in the bedroom, did not do any fingerprint analysis, and did not secure the apartment as a crime scene. Jones said he saw no sign in the apartment or trash cans of any baby’s breath or cellophane wrapping that would come with a single rose purchased at the supermarket.

  Eriksen also pointed out that Jones had changed his description of Kristin’s appearance. In Jones’s initial report, he said, the sergeant wrote that she “had no visible injuries,” that she was “visibly shaking” and “her display of emotions seemed genuine.” Yet, Jones had testified that Kristin looked “haggard, disheveled, did not look well, did not look healthy.”

  Then, in testimony some described as revisionist history at its best, Jones described his initial impressions of the crime scene.

  “The apartment was clearly, at least in my estimation…staged to look like suicide,” he said. “The fact that Ms. Rossum and Mr. Robertson were having an affair entered into the equation that there might be a motive for something other than just a suicide. That’s what prompted the call [to San Diego police].”

  But Eriksen wasn’t going to let him get away with that. “So, after doing your walk-through, your talking to fellow officers, your talking to the Medical Examiner’s investigator on the night of November 6 and the early morning hours of November 7, and having returned seven hours later and having done a videotaping session for approximately an hour, your impression was this was a suicide,” Eriksen said. “Is that correct?”

  “It was still an equivocal death investigation,” Jones said. “I wasn’t certain that it was a suicide, no, sir.”

  On redirect, Goldstein had the detective run through all the reasons why he hadn’t taken all the measures that Eriksen suggested. They all boiled down to the same excuse: Kristin Rossum had lied to him. If he’d known Kristin had hidden meth in the kitchen, he said, that she was having an affair with the man standing outside on the landing, and that she’d bought a red rose at Vons that afternoon, his actions would have been completely different.

  “That would have been…concrete information that I could’ve shared with San Diego [Homicide] and would’ve called them immediately that evening,” he said.

  Following up on Eriksen’s question about the cellophane wrapping, Goldstein called Jones’s attention to some plastic wrap in one of the photographs of the balcony trash cans and asked him to describe what he saw. From where the jury was sitting, the plastic looked like it could have been the kind of wrapping a single rose would come in. But on closer inspection, it was not so clear.

  “There are cardboard remnants; a plastic bag; a cellophane bag, wrapper, if you will, of opaque color; and then a clear cellophane bag or cellophane substance,” Jones said.

  Finally, Goldstein asked Jones to confirm that he’d asked—and received—Ralph Rossum’s permission to tape their conversation on the morning of November 7. This conflicted with Ralph’s testimony during the preliminary hearing that he didn’t know they were being taped. The tape clarified that Ralph did, in fact, give his permission.

  After only a half day of testimony, Thompson let the jury go home for the weekend.

  On Monday morning, October 21, Bertrand de Villers took the stand and characterized his brother as a “very rational, calm, levelheaded” guy who “didn’t get into despair over problems” but rather would overcome them. Greg was not one to act rashly or introduce drama into a situation, he said. Greg was very honest and was determined to finish projects he started. He also enjoyed his job tremendously. The only time Bertrand had ever seen him use drugs was the night before his wedding, when he smoked some pot.

  “I think he felt he shouldn’t have done it,” Bertrand said. “He didn’t really like it.”

  During the trip to Mammoth the July before Greg died, Bertrand said he and Kristin stayed behind at the campsite and talked while Greg went on a hike. She didn’t mention any marital problems, and Bertrand didn’t notice any strain between her and Greg. When they were sitting around the campfire, Kristin said she had gotten interested recently in meth’s effect on the brain. Bertrand didn’t know about her drug history at the time and thought nothing of her remark until later.

  Goldstein asked Bertrand a long series of questions about the conversation he, Jerome, and Kristin had in her apartment two days after Greg’s death. Bertrand said she mentioned cough syrup as something Greg might have taken, and that she’d spilled most of the bottle. Kristin also told him that the paramedics took a bottle of Vicodin that had been in the house.

  “You didn’t ask her about cough syrup, did you?” Goldstein asked.

  “No, she brought it up,” Bertrand said.

  Bertrand said he didn’t know Jerome was taping that conversation but learned later that they’d talked longer than the transcript showed because the tape ran out. He said he still didn’t know anything then about Kristin’s drug problem and felt they should go and leave her be, so he left the apartment, but Jerome stayed another twenty or thirty minutes.

  “I was pretty emotional,” Bertrand said. “I felt Kristin was having a hard time and it wasn’t right to ask her any more questions…. I believed everything she told me at that time. I no longer believe what she said.”

  By day six of the trial, the jurors showed signs of collegiality, smiling and talking to each other in the hallway before the bailiff called them into the courtroom. Kristin was wearing beige slacks with a blue shirt and a camel-hair blazer, her hair pulled back in the usual ponytail.

  Goldstein played the tape of Kristin’s 911 call after the bailiff distributed a transcript to the jury.

  “Is he in bed?” the dispatcher asked.

  “Yes,” Kristin said.

  “Can you take him off the bed an
d put him on the floor?”

  “Oh God!” Kristin said as she followed the dispatcher’s instructions.

  If there was a thudding sound of Greg’s body hitting the floor, as she and her parents had described, it was not audible in the courtroom.

  Kristin cried as the jury listened to her breathy and distraught voice, talking to the dispatcher through her tears and counting up to fifteen for the compressions on Greg’s chest. Ralph Rossum, who was sitting with his wife in the gallery behind Kristin, put his hand to his face, while Constance gazed off into space with a sad expression. When the tape was over, Kristin, still crying, turned and locked eyes with one of the reporters sitting in the gallery behind the prosecution table.

  Just before the lunch break, Diane Bartlett, the emergency room nurse who spoke to Kristin at the hospital that night, took the stand.

  They had worked on Greg for ten or fifteen minutes before calling the time of his death, she said, then she went out and talked to Kristin in the reception area. Kristin’s male coworker was at her side but didn’t say anything during their brief conversation. Before she told Kristin that Greg had died, Bartlett asked her a few questions to see if she could get any more information before Kristin grew too emotional to answer.

  Kristin said Greg hadn’t been feeling well the day before and she’d taken the day off work. When Bartlett asked why Kristin hadn’t called for help sooner, Kristin told her she’d been monitoring his condition. When Bartlett asked again why Kristin hadn’t called the paramedics, Kristin said she wasn’t in the area, then came back and found him unresponsive.

  “I thought it was extremely odd that someone would have a family member that they thought might have…overdose[d] and they did not call the medics at the time they thought this occurred,” Bartlett said.

  The nurse said she asked Kristin if she and her friend wanted to view Greg’s body in the hospital room. Kristin said she did, but Michael chose to stay outside. This, too, surprised the nurse.

  “Most people who have someone there to support them, truly support them, will go back. Sometimes it’s very difficult for loved ones to go back and see their deceased family members by themselves,” so usually the friend will go with them so they don’t feel alone, she said.

  But what surprised her most, she said, was that Kristin’s coworker kissed her before she went to view her husband’s body. Hendren asked her to describe the kiss.

  “The kiss was more of—it was not like my coworker would kiss me,” Bartlett said. “It was more of an intimate kiss…. I had never seen a coworker kiss a coworker like that before.”

  When Bartlett asked for Kristin’s phone number, she said, Kristin gave her Michael’s cell phone number.

  Eriksen followed up on the kiss during cross-examination as he tried to show that Michael and Kristin were not trying to hide their affair. He also questioned the nurse’s memory.

  “When he kissed her, you say intimately, he kissed her on the cheek. Is that right?” Eriksen asked.

  “No, sir,” she said. “He kissed her on the mouth.”

  Eriksen asked if she remembered telling a detective that Michael had kissed Kristin on the cheek.

  “I don’t believe I said that, sir,” she said. “I may have said he kissed her and it was not on the cheek. It was definitely a kiss that was lip to lip, sir.”

  Eriksen asked if she remembered telling the detective that it was more of an embrace than a kiss. No, Bartlett said, she told the detective she saw them kiss and embrace.

  “Okay,” Eriksen said. “So Detective Rydalch got that wrong then?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  The next witness, Bethany Warren, a social worker for the hospital, testified that she saw Michael touching Kristin supportively in the reception area. He held her hand, put his arm around her, and rubbed her arm while she answered Warren’s questions.

  Warren said Kristin told her that she and Greg had been fighting throughout that day and that she’d gone out “to cool off for a while.” Kristin indicated that another coworker from the Medical Examiner’s Office would be coming to the hospital and she wanted to leave before then. Warren collected phone numbers from both of them. When she called Michael a couple of weeks later to check on Kristin’s welfare, his wife answered and sounded incensed.

  “She used very strong language, indicating that there was an inappropriate relationship between the defendant and this man,” Warren said.

  “When you say ‘very strong language,’ what do you mean?” Goldstein asked.

  “I don’t think I can say the words in here,” she said.

  “Sure you can,” Thompson interjected.

  “When I identified myself and said who I was and that I was trying to reach Kristin Rossum, she said, ‘You tell that whore not to call here,’ and yelled that into the phone. I explained myself quickly to say who I was and why I was trying to reach her and clearly I wasn’t privy to the information that she had. She used words like ‘whore’ and ‘bitch,’ etc.”

  On cross-examination, Eriksen asked Warren if she might have confused the day that Kristin said she and Greg had been arguing. Warren said she thought Kristin had said the day of Greg’s death, but she didn’t have her notes with her.

  Warren said Kristin looked visibly shaken and was crying after they informed her that Greg had died. She accompanied Kristin into the room to see Greg’s body while Michael stayed outside in the hallway. She said Kristin seemed distraught and was “kind of wailing” as she touched Greg on his chest and then laid her head on his torso.

  On redirect, Goldstein had only one poignant question.

  “When she put her head on his chest, did she say she was sorry?” he asked.

  “Yes, she did,” Warren said.

  “Nothing further,” Goldstein said.

  Led by Hendren, Bob Petrachek, the computer forensic examiner, explained to the jury how he gathered, searched, cross-checked, and then organized all the electronic data collected in this case. Petrachek’s testimony was so full of technical detail that at times it was difficult to follow. But a number of important points got through.

  After reading every single e-mail from Kristin to Greg and Michael, and vice versa, Petrachek said he felt like he knew them all pretty well. And, by tracking their Internet browsing interests and poring through their computer files, he also learned a great deal about their finances, friends, family, and leisure activities.

  Greg, he said, never mentioned fentanyl or liking opiates in any of his e-mails. He never did any Internet research on fentanyl, and his e-mails showed no signs of him being depressed, suicidal, or infatuated with flowers or roses. A dozen or more e-mails between Kristin and Michael mentioned meeting at the Willows.

  Hendren distributed two big white binders to the jury. One contained computer snapshots of the Web sites Greg, Kristin, and Michael visited. The other contained e-mails considered relevant by the prosecution, printed on different shades of pastel paper and arranged chronologically. The first one in the pink section, which contained e-mails between Michael and Kristin, was dated May 12, 2000, shortly after the CAT conference in Los Angeles. That was the message in which Michael forwarded photos of his sister’s wedding to Kristin and said he was thinking of and missing Kristin.

  Hendren read aloud a sampling of Kristin’s e-mails to illustrate her pattern of lying and seeking the attention of men outside her marriage. Noting that many of her and Michael’s work e-mails had been recovered after being deleted, he read enough to give the jury a taste of how the two lovers’ emotions intensified as their affair progressed.

  Petrachek said he was able to track the whereabouts of Kristin, Greg, and Michael based on when they used the Internet on various computers, sent e-mail, or saved files to the hard drives. When investigators couldn’t prove exactly who was using the computer, other evidence helped to identify the user. For example, Petrachek said, someone signed on to Kristin’s work computer for about seven minutes around 2 A.M. on Tuesday, November 7, w
hen she was driving back to Claremont with her father. Hendren later said the prosecution had other information that placed Michael in the office at that time, when he believed Michael typed in Kristin’s password and attempted to change or delete files on her computer. Amborn also found a file on Michael’s computer titled “KR the night,” which, dated November 10, contained a chronology of the night Greg died. Petrachek testified that Kristin’s work computer was booted up with her password a second time on November 7, around noon, and was used for forty-five minutes while Kristin was still in Claremont. The last time prosecutors believe she used that computer was on November 6 at 9:24 A.M., when a file was saved to her hard drive.

  Petrachek said a file containing information on four drug-testing centers was saved on Greg’s iMac computer at home on Saturday morning, November 4. And on December 31, 2000, and January 2, 2001, someone accessed Michael’s Hotmail account, using the Compaq computer in Kristin’s apartment, to read messages Nicole and Michael sent to each other.

  Under cross-examination by Eriksen, Petrachek acknowledged that there were gaps in the e-mails because the county hadn’t backed up the data properly, so certain e-mails couldn’t be recovered. Eriksen asked if Petrachek thought the county contractor’s inability to recover the e-mails was accidental or intentional. Petrachek said he couldn’t say it was deliberate because such a loss wasn’t entirely unusual with backup tape, which wasn’t the most reliable medium.