Poisoned Love

by Caitlin Rother

“We were both very interested in one another, and it felt safe,” she said. “I didn’t want to feel alone.”

  About a week later, she said, Greg told her he loved her. Loebig asked if she said she loved him, too.

  “I believe I reciprocated,” she said. “I don’t know. I don’t remember specifically. But it’s hard not to say ‘I love you, too’ when someone says, ‘I love you.’”

  When she told Greg about her meth problem about a week later, she said, he told her he wanted to help her get off the drugs. She acknowledged that she took the checks from Greg’s roommate, Chris Wren, but said she didn’t try to use them.

  “You can’t use someone else’s check, anyway,” she said.

  As the trial broke for the day, Kristin remained in the witness box, blowing her nose. The next morning was a Friday, so everyone was prepared for a half day in court.

  Loebig started off by asking Kristin about her drug use, the three jobs she worked that summer, and the apartment in Point Loma her parents thought she was living in. Kristin admitted she never stopped living with Greg. She said she got clean for a while but started using again after she was hired at California Pizza Kitchen.

  “Did you have some problem in that job that resulted in your being fired or let go?” Loebig asked.

  Yes, Kristin said, she was late several times and “made errors in a lot of my billing transactions. It resulted in my termination…. I made a lot of mistakes in that job in terms of the credit card billing especially. But I didn’t take the money to buy meth. I used my tips to.”

  Greg was angry that she had relapsed, she said, but he stuck by her and helped her get clean again. They were best friends and spent all their time together.

  “When we first met, the circumstances were so intense and tumultuous, I really needed the steady support that he was able to offer me,” she said.

  But over time, she said, the dynamics of their relationship changed, and she wondered whether she would be with him if she hadn’t been on drugs when they met. She said she loved Greg very much, but she didn’t know if she was in love with him. She was also concerned about his estrangement from his father and how it would affect children they might have down the road.

  “He had told me the history of his family,” Kristin said, “and how he resented his father for what he had done to his mother, the domestic violence and—”

  Goldstein interrupted with an objection. “Lack of foundation, unresponsive,” he said.

  Thompson sustained the objection on the second grounds, saying any such alleged statements by Greg could be used only to establish their effect on Kristin, not to establish whether they were true. So far, no other witness had mentioned anything about domestic violence in Greg’s family.

  About six weeks before the wedding, Kristin said, she shared her doubts about marrying Greg with her parents and tried to back out. She talked to her father over the phone, then decided to visit her parents in person. She said she wanted to go alone, but Greg insisted on coming with her. Kristin said Constance told her that “relationships do change over time and…maybe I was expecting too much in terms of what it’s like to be in love.” So, in the end, Kristin decided to go through with it.

  In the summer of 1997, she got a job as a student worker for the county Medical Examiner’s Office and found it fascinating, especially after discovering Patricia Cornwell’s novels, in which the protagonist, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a chief medical examiner in Richmond, Virginia, helps the FBI solve murders.

  After graduating from SDSU in December 1999, Kristin said, she’d gained confidence and was thinking about who she was and what was important in life.

  “I think that Greg felt very threatened by that,” she said.

  They’d been happy for the first six months of their marriage, she said, but then Greg became “clingy” and was less willing to give her more time for herself. She felt them withdrawing from each other, and in January she told Greg she needed more personal space.

  When she and Michael met, she said, smiling, they “hit it off right off the bat just in terms of how we got along. I think we took to each other very quickly.” Initially, they talked about their likes and dislikes, but their conversations soon led to more intimate matters, including their respective marital problems.

  “Were you attracted to him?” Loebig asked.

  “I sure was. I—I remember distinctly the moment I first saw him,” Kristin said.

  The first time they were in a social setting together was at a farewell party for a colleague at the 94th Aero Squadron that spring, she recalled, but Greg was there, too. Shortly after that, she and Michael had their first outing alone, when they grabbed a sandwich at lunch. He started sending her personal e-mails in early to mid-May.

  Loebig asked when she first slept with Michael, if she could remember. She said she believed it was in June, by which time she was already in love with him.

  “It was very romantic, very exciting, very passionate,” she said.

  Kristin said she told Greg in June or July that she’d developed very strong feelings for her boss. Greg got angry and demanded she give him Michael’s phone number. Then, “absolutely irate,” Greg called Michael and “told him expressly never to talk to—well, not have any inappropriate contact with his wife, stay away from me.”

  Loebig asked if Greg demanded to know whether she’d slept with Michael. No, Kristin said, but Greg assumed that she had. He went to bed, devastated, for a couple of days and wouldn’t talk to her.

  “I was devastated, too,” she said, adding that it hurt to see someone she loved feeling so much pain.

  Moving on to the SOFT conference, Kristin said she was very excited at the opportunity to give her first professional paper. Michael had some “personal problems” that made him unsure at times whether he would be able to go with her to Milwaukee, but things worked out in the end. She admitted they took the same plane, stayed in the same hotel, and had sex over the course of the six-day conference.

  “Were you trying to hide your relationship with Michael Robertson at that conference?” Loebig asked.

  No, Kristin said, but she was trying to be discreet so as not to embarrass her husband. Once the conference was over, she said, her feelings for Michael were even stronger, and she knew her marriage would be ending soon.

  “I couldn’t put up a false front any longer, much longer,” she said, correcting herself.

  Then, in testimony that conflicted with e-mails Greg and Kristin sent each other on Thursday, November 2, she said she and Greg decided to meet at home for lunch. She was reading one of Michael’s love letters when Greg walked into the apartment.

  “As Greg was coming in, I put it in my back pocket,” she said. “He became suspicious of me and basically wrestled me to the ground to get the letter. He read the letter and was infuriated by it and was storming around.”

  Kristin said she took the letter from him and tried put it through the shredder because Greg threatened to show the letter to her superiors as proof of the affair. But since the machine was broken, the letter didn’t go all the way through. So, she said, Greg retrieved it with tweezers and spent hours trying to tape it back together.

  She said she and Greg called their offices to say they needed to take the rest of the afternoon off for personal reasons and spent that time arguing about the state of their marriage. She said she asked for a trial separation, and Greg accused her of doing drugs again.

  “During this argument or, for that matter, during any argument you had had with Greg, he never struck you, did he?” Loebig asked. “He didn’t slap you around or anything like that?”

  “No, but—” Kristin said.

  “But what?”

  “But in the moment when he entered the room and wrestled me down to the floor for the letter, he almost struck me, and I was just blown away by that,” Kristin said. “And he said the words that ‘He didn’t want to turn into his father.’”

  She said she showed Greg some listings she’d
gathered—for apartments for herself and for some counselors they could see as a couple and possibly individually as well, then they went to bed around 9 or 10 P.M.

  The next night they’d already planned to go to dinner with Kristin’s parents, and so they went to the neighborhood supermarket to buy the ingredients for gin martinis, not knowing that a martini was a “summer drink.” When her parents arrived, Kristin said, they didn’t feel like having a summer drink after all, so they took only a few sips before they all left for the restaurant.

  Despite Goldstein’s aggressive cross-examination of her father about the last surviving rose, Kristin repeated the same story her parents had been telling since she was arrested.

  “I indicated that Greg had bought me, I think, a dozen and a half—I now know it’s two dozen roses—beautiful red roses—for my birthday. This was the last remaining rose. Greg proceeded to comment that of all the roses that were there, this is the lone surviving rose. It was still in beautiful condition,” she said.

  They all took snapshots of each other that night, she said, because they were supposed to be celebrating each other’s birthdays, which were about two weeks apart; she and Greg didn’t “want to make the evening unpleasant for my parents. My parents didn’t want to make the evening unpleasant for Greg. It ended up being a lovely evening, but it was very strained and kind of strange, too.”

  The next day, she said, she and Greg argued some more about her plans to move out. It was a stressful day, but they tried to make the best of their Saturday night. They started drinking in the afternoon, they had wine with dinner, and then Kristin made Greg a gin and tonic while they were watching Fiddler on the Roof. It was unusual for him to drink that much, she said, and they had to stop the movie halfway through so Greg could go to the bathroom and throw up. He went to bed after that.

  On Sunday morning, she said, she went to the lab to update her resume because “Greg had fixated on the idea of exposing the affair. And he also said that he would tell the Medical Examiner’s Office of my drug history and that he believed me to be using again.”

  Loebig asked if she had, in fact, relapsed, and Kristin admitted that she had started using again, “I think around the 27th of October. So it had just been a very short time.” Asked how she felt about that, Kristin said she felt “very guilty” and ashamed.

  “I had used only sporadically up to that point,” she said.

  By that Sunday, she said, she hadn’t used in three days—since they’d started arguing on Thursday—because she “was cleaning out in case he did say anything.” If Greg did carry out his threat and it became too uncomfortable to work at the lab, she planned to look for a new job.

  Kristin said she felt sympathetic toward but frustrated with Greg as he tried to piece together the love letter, an act she viewed as a way of venting his emotions. Nonetheless, she said, she really didn’t think he would follow through on his ultimatum.

  “Let me ask you, was that ultimatum so upsetting to you that you planned to take your husband’s life?” Loebig asked.

  “Absolutely not,” Kristin replied.

  “At some point, you ended up losing your job, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you ended up in jail for six months, isn’t that correct?”

  “I think it was closer to nine, but yes,” she said.

  Loebig asked why she called Michael with her new cell phone that Sunday night. Kristin said she and Greg had been arguing again for several hours before Greg turned in early, around 8:30 P.M. She stepped outside, took a walk around the block, and called Michael “to hear a comforting voice.”

  Around 10:45 P.M., as she was getting ready for bed, she said, Greg complained that he couldn’t sleep and got a drink of “something, water”—she couldn’t see what it was—from the kitchen. She went to bed but didn’t sleep much, because Greg was snoring and breathing loudly all night.

  “I had only seen him do that a few times before,” she said. “But it was keeping me up. I would kind of elbow him, and he’d stop for a little bit.”

  She said she awoke to the alarm clock the next morning and spoke briefly to Greg. He was slurring his words, so she called in sick for him and then went to the lab. She got there about 8 A.M., and Michael pulled her into his office after his morning meeting. When he confronted her about the bindle of white powder he’d found in her desk the day before, she “broke down sobbing. I was very upset. I was devastated and humiliated, disappointed in myself.” So, he suggested she go collect herself.

  As she gave a timeline for the day Greg died, she provided new explanations for the numerous discrepancies and allegations posed by the prosecution. She said, for example, that she went home for lunch around 11:45 A.M. or noon but then realized they were out of soup, so she went to Vons.

  Loebig asked if she remembered what specific items she’d bought at the store. Kristin said she bought a couple cans of soup, some “over-the-counter sleeping aids and a bottle of Nyquil. I didn’t know if Greg was coming down with the flu. We were running low. I bought a rose with—rose bouquet with baby’s breath that was wrapped up.”

  She repeated her story about Greg telling her over soup at lunch that he’d taken some of her old prescriptions. And, yes, she said, she did think “it was weird” and figured he was either crying for help or looking for an escape.

  However, she said, since he was moving around and his speech was better, she assumed he was “coming out of it…If I didn’t think so, I would have called 911 at that time or suggested that he call 911 at that time.”

  After lunch, she said, she went back to work until about 2:30 P.M., then met up with Michael near the place they called “the Willows.” They spent about ninety minutes together, she said, until about 5 P.M., mostly talking about her drug problem.

  Loebig backed up to the calls she’d made that morning and asked whom she’d been trying to reach. She explained that Armando Garcia was the Tijuana taxi driver she’d bought drugs from for the first time on October 27, after reading in the newspaper that “if you ever wanted to find anything in Tijuana, all you had to do was ask a taxicab driver.” She said she’d intended to buy more diet pills from the same pharmacy she’d visited in September, but when she told Garcia what she was looking for, he offered her something stronger: “Christina” or “crystal,” both of which are street names for crystal methamphetamine.

  After meeting with Michael on the afternoon of November 6, she said, she returned home for about ninety minutes, went shopping at the mall, then stopped at the lab to make sure she’d turned off the HPLC machine. Asked if she often stopped in at work at night, Kristin said yes, and that on at least ten occasions, Greg came with her.

  “I gave him the full tour the first time he was down there,” she said. She acknowledged, however, that she’d never seen him take any drugs from the lab.

  After running her errands, she said, she went home and gave Greg a kiss on the forehead before going into the bathroom to take a bubble bath, shave her legs, and shower “off all the goop.” She said she unscrewed the tub stopper and put it on the ledge to let the water drain out faster. Then she dried off, and read through her sample ballot to figure out how to vote in the election the next day.

  Loebig asked what happened next.

  “I turned on the light and saw that Greg was cold to the touch and not breathing,” she said.

  “What did you think at that moment?” Loebig asked.

  “I was petrified.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I called 911.”

  Kristin started crying again, clutching her chest as she recounted how she pulled Greg onto the floor and began doing CPR. After the paramedics took Greg to the hospital, she said, she rode over in a police car, then called her parents and also Michael.

  “I believe I was practically hysterical,” she said. “I told him that Greg was in the hospital in the emergency room, could he please come down there, and I was very scared.”

 
; “Were you worried when you called Michael Robertson and invited him to come down to the hospital that it might expose your affair with him?” Loebig asked.

  “That was the farthest thing from my mind,” she said.

  Loebig asked Kristin a final series of questions that jumped around chronologically but were apparently intended to address the prosecution’s allegations of malicious intent.

  It was the hospital staff, not she, who initiated the process for organ and tissue donation, Kristin said. She’d been a donor since she was sixteen, and four years earlier, she’d also signed up to be a bone marrow donor.

  She’d never done any toxicology testing for fentanyl, she said, and Michael had never shown her any of the fentanyl articles he kept in his office. The only time the subject of such testing came up was at a general lab meeting, in the context of putting fentanyl on the “extended to-do list.”

  She said she knew it was office policy to do autopsies on employee relatives off-site, and she anticipated toxicology testing would be done on Greg because his death appeared to be drug related.

  And she admitted she was in love with Michael the day Greg died but said she’d planned to move out on her own, not into an apartment with him.

  “By the time Greg passed away, did you love Michael Robertson so much that you intended to take your husband’s life so that you could have Robertson?” Loebig asked.

  “Absolutely not,” Kristin declared. “That’s what divorce is for.”

  “Did you fear the loss of your job because of drug use or your affair so much that you would have killed your husband?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  Loebig showed Kristin the exhibit photos that depicted the yellow plastic cup of colorless, odorless liquid next to the bed and asked if she drank out of it, touched it, or smelled its contents. No, Kristin said. She said the yellow and blue plastic cups and a mug in the bedroom all went into the dishwasher within a day or two of Greg’s death.

  Asked about the glass pipe with her DNA on it that was found in the lab, Kristin said she put it in the drawer before lunch on Thursday, November 2.