Poisoned Love

by Caitlin Rother

  Don’t let the irony of this case escape you, he warned the jury. Greg’s “detestation for drugs” is what ended up killing him.

  Kristin’s journal was staged, too, he said. She left it on the coffee table to send a message, first to Greg, then to police.

  “Why would you lie in your own diary?” he asked the jury rhetorically.

  Goldstein suggested that Kristin did not bring the love note home on Thursday, November 2, as she’d claimed, but much later, so she could try to make it look like Greg had been trying to piece it back together—a task that a police detective took six weeks to do, even on a computer. What really happened that Thursday, he said, was that Greg came home, “saw that she was tweaking,” and told her he would turn her in if she didn’t clean up her act. The next night Greg may have been upset about the consultant he hired at work, but otherwise he was fine. Why else would Kristin and her father describe the evening as fun or very pleasant?

  Goldstein submitted to the jury that the murder was set in motion with Kristin’s cell phone call to Michael, her lover the fentanyl expert, at 9:02 P.M. on Sunday night. Greg was snoring that night. Something was in his system. Clonazepam could have been used to immobilize Greg, which enabled Kristin to administer massive doses of fentanyl. Why else did Kristin feel safe enough to call her drug dealer four times from home for the first time the next morning? Because the threat was gone, Goldstein said. Greg was unconscious, and he was going to die. When she called in sick for him, Goldstein said, she called his own voice mail, even though she had Stefan Gruenwald’s and Terry Huang’s numbers right there in her address book.

  “She had numbers. She could have easily notified people that Greg was sick,” Goldstein said. “She didn’t want to…. Why? Because he was going to die. That’s at 7:42 [A.M.]”

  Kristin went to Vons, he said. Why? To buy soups, cold medicine, and a rose. But, of course, she wasn’t going to admit that the rose was red.

  “They know we can’t prove what color it is by the receipt,” he said.

  She is the one obsessed with roses, and whose favorite movie is American Beauty, he added.

  “That’s not Greg de Villers’s gig,” he said. “She bought a rose. She bought a red rose.”

  Goldstein told the jurors that they couldn’t really believe anything Kristin said. “I’d submit she’s been impeached to a degree that it would be very difficult to trust anything this defendant had to say about any subject.”

  She also didn’t take a bath that night, he said, because she was busy staging a suicide scene. On the 911 tape, she did sound hysterical, because it must have been very hard for her to try to pretend to do CPR on Greg and talk on the phone at the same time.

  “How was she doing all that and doing real CPR at the same time? You can’t,” he said.

  Why was the wedding photo propped up at the base of the chest? That photo didn’t just fall off the bed and stand up by itself, he said. Kristin wasn’t expecting the dispatcher to tell her to put Greg on the floor, so she had to sweep all the petals off the bed and move the photo from under the pillow to the floor, where the paramedics found it.

  “She had to reset the crime scene,” he said. “She didn’t do a very good job of it.”

  Goldstein dismissed the defense’s theory that Greg drank fentanyl from one of the cups in the bedroom that went untested, calling it “a red herring.”

  “She’s very good. She’s very manipulative…. I don’t know if there was fentanyl in there…. I don’t care, because there’s no container for fentanyl.”

  The notion that Greg threw the fentanyl container away is ridiculous, he said. If he wanted to frame her, why didn’t he just type a message on the computer: ‘Kristin Rossum did this to me’?”

  Greg had been dead sixty to ninety minutes by the time the paramedics arrived, Goldstein said. “He didn’t have lunch with the defendant. He was out…and the medical testimony shows it.” The opiate had to be in his system since at least 10:30 A.M., he said, and there had to be multiple applications of fentanyl to get it there.

  “Ten milligrams of fentanyl would probably wipe out everybody in this room,” he said, holding the vial up for the jury to see once again.

  The only reason Kristin can say she stopped using drugs between January and June 2001 is because no one tested her, he said.

  “She is a methamphetamine addict. That’s what she is and she always will be.”

  Kristin’s “numerous lies” about Greg’s death, her affairs, the staging of the crime scene, and her drug use are “tantamount to a confession,” he said. “The defendant is guilty of murder.”

  Eriksen was nowhere to be seen the next morning, so Loebig had to do both portions of the closing argument, using notes he made from the points Eriksen had typed up. Loebig let the jurors know that Eriksen was home with the flu, and lest they think his partner didn’t have faith in the defense’s case, Loebig pointed out that Eriksen was “desperately missing this experience, having lived through this case for over a year.”

  Loebig started by telling the jury that he had a different take than Goldstein about the notion that truth always make sense.

  “I suggest to you, in many, many instances, that things aren’t that black and white,” he said. “They aren’t that simple.”

  He said they’d all heard about young people who do something to the point of obsession, such as playing video games, or more commonly, engaging in romance, and end up committing suicide.

  “These children, these adolescents, these adults that do these things usually do it by surprise,” he said.

  As the prosecutor mentioned, he said, why didn’t Kristin walk out the door? Loebig urged the jury to look again at the evidence and see that she had been working toward it, certainly. He cited the computer evidence showing she’d subscribed to a rental service in August 2000 as well as the comments she made to her parents, Melissa Prager, and Tom Horn that she was looking for a new place to live.

  “It’s not so easy to say good-bye, even when there are no children,” he said.

  Loebig said he wasn’t asking the jury to give Kristin extra credit for being “decent looking,” nor was he going to downplay her drug use.

  “We all know what addiction means in some form or fashion,” he said. “…Once addicted, there’s always an addiction…. You are never over it.”

  But, Loebig said, the prosecution overplayed the concerns expressed by Kristin’s parents during her teenage years that she was out of control. There was nothing staged about the confrontation she had with her parents, he said.

  “What’s the play there?…She’s not conniving at sixteen; she’s not honing her skills. She’s desperate…. Then she starts using again. That’s addiction. She isn’t going out and acting violently towards people…. She was going to hurt herself. Her MO, if you want to call it that, and reaction to [drug] use and being confronted with it, is to run away, not run at you and do something to you.”

  When Kristin met Greg, it started off “as a modern-day fairytale,” close to love at first sight—at least for Greg. Yes, they slept together on the first night, but, Loebig reminded the jury, they weren’t there “to judge her sex life against ours or anyone else’s.”

  Did she ever really love Greg romantically? Who knows, he said, but even if she only loved him as a friend, “You don’t harm somebody you love.”

  With Kristin and Michael’s relationship, he said, “There’s a bond. There’s an enthusiasm. This is a quest for destiny” that started as early as May 2000. And it was no secret to their coworkers, he said, no matter what the prosecution argued.

  “So this idea of a secret relationship that was reiterated over and over and over, which doesn’t surface, if you believe the prosecution, until after the conspiracy, is malarkey,” he said.

  Loebig dismissed Kristin’s alleged motive—Greg’s ultimatum—reminding the jury that Kristin admitted it to police right away.

  “So Kristin herself is creating the so-called
motive that the prosecution is trying to suggest to you,” he said.

  Likewise, he said, the prosecution made too much of Kristin’s initial denials during her police interview that she was using drugs and having a sexual affair. By the end of the interview, he said, “she basically owned up…. I suggest to you that when a woman is describing her relationship with a man, that an emotional relationship easily includes a sexual relationship.”

  At that point in the closing, Loebig switched to a yellow notepad, from which he read notes for the rest of his statement, the portion Eriksen had intended to deliver.

  If this were a conspiracy between Kristin and Michael, Loebig said, they could’ve used drugs such as succinylcholine that were far less detectable than fentanyl. Or they could’ve spiked the stomach, blood, and urine samples, left unguarded overnight at the Medical Examiner’s Office, with higher levels of oxycodone and clonazepam. But they didn’t. He also cautioned the jury not to get sidetracked by the Stan Berdan case.

  Kristin’s e-mails to Greg were routine, he said, just like the events of their last weekend together. And even though Kristin’s e-mails to Michael reflect their passion, he said, “Passion does not translate into violence. It can, but in this case, it didn’t.”

  If Kristin had been planning to kill Greg on Monday, she would not have been expecting to lose her job. So why was she working on her resume on Sunday?

  “It’s fairly routine,” he said. “It’s optimistic.”

  Loebig said Dr. Blackbourne’s findings that Greg would have been semicomatose for six to twelve hours were not inconsistent with Kristin’s story about seeing him at noon and then finding him cold and not breathing around 9 P.M. In fact, he said, “It’s pretty much right on.”

  Loebig attributed the lack of red marks on Greg’s chest from CPR to the fact that Kristin is a “small, petite person…not a big, burly EMT person.”

  If Kristin were trying to hide her relationship with Michael, why would she invite him to the hospital? Why wouldn’t she have told him to wait in the bedroom when Jerome and Bertrand came to talk to her the night of November 9?

  Because, Loebig said, “there was no secret relationship.” She lied to Greg about the affair only because she didn’t want to hurt him.

  Loebig took one last jab at the lax security over drugs at the Medical Examiner’s Office and another at the UCSD police’s initial investigation, reiterating that investigators should’ve collected samples of the liquid in those plastic cups.

  “This becomes fairly critically important because we have testimony from very expert doctors that fentanyl was, in all medical certainty, ingested…. Greg drank some of it. There was no testimony it was poured down his throat. It didn’t go down and into his lungs.”

  The investigators, he said, also should’ve inventoried the trash on the balcony. And they should’ve tested the cups for fingerprints to see if they were handled by the “unindicted coconspirator.”

  “We’re never going to know,” he said. “That’s a big piece of evidence.”

  Kristin was an episodic meth user, he said, “but that’s not violent.”

  Jerome’s testimony about Kristin throwing away Greg’s belongings was disproved by the photos, and Marie de Villers’s testimony about her husband’s domestic violence was contradicted by her 1981 divorce filing, he said.

  “Not everybody has perfect recollection,” he said, adding that people may have an interest that “may make them testify less than truthfully.”

  Fentanyl can be purchased on the street, where it’s known as China White, he said. “Fentanyl is around. People use it and abuse it.” And while fentanyl patches were missing from the Medical Examiner’s Office, no residual patch marks were found on Greg’s skin, “so don’t just wildly speculate,” he told the jury.

  The tissue donation was also a red herring floated by the prosecution, Loebig said. Kristin did not initiate the donation at the hospital, and it didn’t stop the toxicology tests that found Greg died of a fentanyl overdose.

  Kristin did lie to Teddy Maya, he said, but only because she didn’t want to hurt him.

  He dismissed the prosecution’s claim that the murder started with Kristin’s short cell phone call to Michael at 9:02 P.M. Sunday, noting that even TV murder plots aren’t hatched in a two-minute call.

  “There was no conspiracy,” he said. “…I suggest to you that in this case, not only is there not a motive to commit murder, it’s quite the opposite. There’s lack of motive…. There’s reasonable doubt from beginning to end in this case.”

  When the jurors considered the prosecution’s conspiracy theory, Loebig said, they needed to ask this question: Why didn’t Kristin leave town between the day Greg died and the day she was arrested, go to Australia, and hook up with Michael Robertson?

  “It didn’t happen, because she didn’t kill her husband to be with this person,” he said. “She’s not with him no matter what her feelings were then.”

  In the final portion of the trial, Hendren spent two and a half hours presenting a rebuttal argument, which Thompson thought was one of the best he’d heard in his sixteen years of hearing cases.

  Hendren highlighted the many instances where Kristin admitted she’d lied. He also underscored all the instances where Kristin changed her testimony to either agree with or contradict the testimony of other witnesses, meaning she’d also lied to the jury. But perhaps the most powerful portion of his argument was a list of coincidences and conjecture that the jury would have to believe to find Kristin not guilty.

  First, that she was a credible witness.

  That Greg held on to the oxycodone and clonazepam for five years, even after moving to various apartments.

  That he was suicidal and would use drugs to kill himself, contrary to what all his friends and family believed.

  That Greg also knew about fentanyl, a highly regulated substance that most people had never heard of before the trial. That he figured out how to get it without ever mentioning it to anyone, only a few days before he decided to kill himself. And that he found a way to get the oxycodone and clonazepam, too.

  That someone other than Kristin took the fentanyl vial and the patches that were missing from her lab.

  That since Kristin insists she wasn’t using or stealing any meth from the office, that someone else with a key and the knowledge of where the meth was kept took all the missing meth. And that someone else stole the missing Soma, oxycodone, clonazepam, and amphetamine.

  “Remember, she’s got a meth problem that’s so bad she’s willing to risk her job, felony conviction, respect of her peers, husband, everything else,” Hendren said. “It’s so bad, she has a meth pipe in the office and meth in the office. That’s how bold she was. She has this candy store, drugs missing. But it wasn’t her. She’s not like somebody that hasn’t stolen before.”

  That it was a coincidence that the drug Greg used to kill himself “was odorless, colorless, soluble in water, lethal in small doses, and difficult to detect,” and that it was synergistic with another drug in his system.

  That it was a coincidence that Michael Robertson “is an expert, a genius, on fentanyl.”

  That Greg hid the packaging, container, syringe, or whatever he used to take the fentanyl. “People committing suicide don’t hide that stuff,” Hendren said. “…There’s no reason to. They are going to be dead…. She didn’t think they were going to [detect the]…fentanyl, and [she] wouldn’t have to explain it.”

  That Greg was also able to spread the rose petals over himself in bed, tuck the photo under his pillow, and pull the comforter up to his neck, all before he took enough fentanyl to kill himself.

  That Kristin was too frail to leave red marks on Greg’s chest from CPR, but not so frail that she couldn’t pull his 160-pound body off the bed and onto the floor.

  That her father was wrong when he said Kristin told him Greg was clutching the wedding photo in his hands.

  “You can see how much dad…wants to protect her
,” Hendren said. “That’s understandable…. Gee, but she says, ‘No, that’s not what I said.’…In any event, it’s behind his head, according to her, or [in] the crook of the neck. Somehow in the course of this, that photograph magically flies off when she pulls him off, lands down, and a little three-by-five photograph that’s very thin props itself right up next to the head of the victim. That’s beyond comprehension.”

  That it was a series of coincidences that she “loves roses, is infatuated with roses…sends them to her boyfriend, keeps cards that have roses in them, and that she bought a single rose at 12:41 P.M. on the day of her husband’s death.”

  And that she “just happened to be mistaken” when she told Jerome and Bertrand that she went to Vons between 3 and 5 P.M. on the day Greg died.

  “The evidence is compelling,” he said.

  Greg was gone, he said, but his “remnants” could still speak to the jury. His tissue, his blood, his urine, all the parts that “have those massive doses of fentanyl. And the remnants of his body are crying out for justice in this case.”

  Judge Thompson was watching Kristin while Hendren delivered his argument. Up until then, he sensed that Kristin thought she was going to get off, because the jury would believe her story.

  “It was clear that no matter how overwhelming the evidence became, she truly thought throughout the case that she could carry the day,” Thompson recalled later. “She thought she was an equal match to Goldstein and would be able to convince one or more of the jurors that she had nothing to do with the case.”

  But as Hendren was talking, Thompson saw an expression on Kristin’s face that, for the first time during the trial, reflected a realization that the prosecution had won.

  “It was like the air going out of the balloon,” he recalled. “You could just see it coming out of her. At that point in time, she knew the game was up.”

  Chapter 21

  After Hendren finished his rebuttal on Thursday afternoon, the jury deliberated for one hour, then for three more on Friday, before leaving for a three-day weekend. They resumed at 9 A.M. on Tuesday, November 12.