Poisoned Love

by Caitlin Rother

  At 2:40 P.M., word came down that the jury had reached a verdict, which would be announced at 3:30. A line formed quickly in the hallway, with more people than there were seats. Granted, it was over a three-day period with a weekend in between, but the jury had deliberated for only eight hours before reaching a verdict.

  Constance and Ralph gripped their daughter’s hands protectively as they walked as a block of Rossum solidarity toward the courtroom. This was the family’s last-ditch effort to shield Kristin from the consequences of her addiction to methamphetamine, the relationship she ultimately chose over her parents, her husband, her lover, and her own future. Despite the hand-holding, Kristin looked frantic. The Rossums, including Brent and Pierce, entered the courtroom around 3:25 P.M. The de Villers family showed up shortly thereafter.

  Marguerite Zandstra, Kristin’s aunt, reached over the wooden railing of the gallery to embrace her frightened niece and rubbed Kristin’s back to try to ease the obvious tension that wracked her body. Constance, too, hugged her daughter, and Ralph put his arm around her before they sat down to await the jury’s decision.

  Kristin stood up as Thompson emerged from his chambers. Shaky and unsteady on her feet, she rested her hands on the table to support her weight. The jurors filed in to the courtroom wearing a collectively somber expression, a marked contrast to the jovial camaraderie they’d displayed earlier in the trial, when they shared a chocolate cake.

  As Thompson read the jury’s verdict—that Kristin Rossum was found guilty of murder in the first degree, intentionally killing Gregory de Villers with poison—Kristin shook her head and began to gasp and cry. Ralph stared at the floor and brought his shaking hand to his forehead. Constance looked spent.

  Thompson polled the jurors individually to confirm their decision.

  “Yes,” Juror #1 said softly. The other jurors concurred, speaking loudly and firmly. Yes. Yes. Yes. By then, Kristin was crying so hard, she appeared to be having trouble breathing.

  Thompson announced that the sentencing hearing would be on December 12 at 2:30 P.M., until which time Kristin would be sent to the county jail without the ability to post bail. Frank Cordle, the bailiff, put handcuffs on Kristin’s wrists and attached them to a chain around her waist. As he was leading her out of the courtroom through a secure rear exit, Kristin turned to look over her shoulder and locked eyes with her parents, pleadingly.

  Thompson told the jurors they were under no obligation to discuss the case with anyone, but offered them an opportunity to meet with all the attorneys in a closed session after the hearing. None of them wanted to be interviewed by the group of reporters waiting in the hallway, so they snuck out of the courthouse through a back door. The de Villers and Rossum families declined interviews as well. To the continued chagrin of the media, Thompson announced that the gag order would remain in place until sentencing.

  “The gag order is going to live longer than us,” Loebig joked as he walked past the reporters in the hallway.

  Some speculated that there was significance to the day the jury chose to announce its verdict. November 12 was Greg’s birthday. He would have been twenty-nine.

  Kristin was led out of the courthouse to a sheriff’s cruiser waiting outside to take her back to Las Colinas. Inmates who had court appearances for lower-profile crimes that day were shuttled separately, by bus. Back at the jail, the inmates were expecting Kristin because they’d been watching her on the TV news. Kristin spent some time in protective custody in the A-2 housing unit again, where she cried for a day straight.

  A week before her sentencing, a probation officer came to interview Kristin, a routine part of the process even though she was ineligible for parole. The officer’s report illustrates that Kristin was still trying to elicit sympathy and offer new details about the events leading up to Greg’s death.

  Kristin said she told Greg on Thursday, November 2, about her plans to move out, which they continued to discuss over the weekend. Getting teary-eyed, Kristin told the probation officer that Greg went to bed early that Sunday night.

  “That’s the last time we talked,” she said, pausing, “about moving out.”

  Kristin said she didn’t know where Greg got the fentanyl or how he took it, but she theorized that he might have stolen some during one of their nighttime trips to her lab. Police found no evidence at the apartment that proved how he took the drugs, she said, because “there were two trash cans on the balcony that were not searched. There was a tumbler with clear liquid on the nightstand. They assumed it was water and did not test it.”

  She said that the Medical Examiner’s Office hadn’t audited its drug inventory in thirty-five years and that while fentanyl and some methamphetamine were missing, so were “lots of things.” The lab had no “checks and balances,” she said. “It was not secure.”

  Kristin acknowledged that she’d purchased a rose the day of her husband’s death, but she came up with yet another story about its origins. She said it had been a custom for her and her husband to exchange roses when the other partner was feeling badly, but the rose she purchased that day was not red.

  She said she’d relapsed about two weeks before Greg’s death, but didn’t know why.

  “Looking back, I had no reason,” she said. “I was planning to leave him. I was under stress. It was a bad habit.”

  “I still can’t believe the jury convicted me,” she told the probation officer, vowing to pursue every avenue available to appeal and exonerate herself. “We’re going to keep fighting this.”

  If she did win an appeal, she said, she planned to earn a graduate degree in analytical chemistry so she could continue to work in the biotech industry.

  “I want to have a family,” she said. “That’s it.”

  In an interview with the Melbourne Herald Sun, Michael told a reporter that his “roller-coaster ride” of fear and uncertainty had grown even bumpier since Kristin was convicted. He said he’d been living under the specter of possibility that American authorities would charge him and attempt to extradite him for trial in the murder of Greg de Villers, a crime he said he did not commit. Michael’s comments were republished in the Union-Tribune.

  “For the past two years, every time my phone rings, I wonder what it might be, who it might be,” he said. “…There were days when I planned just to get to the next weekend. I feel more uncertain now than I did a few months ago.”

  He expressed mixed emotions about the verdict in Kristin’s trial, saying he hoped she wasn’t wrongly convicted. “Having said that, I believe in fair punishment for a crime,” he said. “If she did do it, then she should be punished.”

  He said he still couldn’t believe that the Kristin he knew could have killed her husband, but he “had no knowledge or participation in the very sad events that led up to Greg’s death…. I was not there. I don’t know what happened over that weekend or that Monday to know if it was an accident, a suicide, or, as the court has found, a homicide.”

  Michael dismissed questions about the thirty-seven fentanyl articles found in his desk and the half dozen PowerPoint presentations on the drug found on his laptop, saying it was part of his job to collect such things.

  “I probably had a hundred PowerPoint presentations on my computer and a thousand or more articles on every drug from A-Z, of which fentanyl would be one,” he said.

  Michael said prosecutors had had a “free run” with their conspiracy theory, and it hurt knowing he had no chance to defend himself. If prosecutors charged him and sought to extradite him, he said, he would urge Australian authorities to be objective and fair in evaluating the Americans’ petition. He said the heavy media attention the case had drawn would make it “quite difficult” for him to receive a fair trial in San Diego.

  Kristin’s body language conveyed exhaustion and defeat as she was led into the courtroom on December 12, wearing a black pin-striped dress. She seemed far less put together than usual, with her hair pulled back loosely and little, if any, makeup. Her eyes were red,
as if she’d been crying, and she dabbed at them with a tissue while the attorneys met in the judge’s chambers.

  The defense attorneys had filed a motion asking for a new trial, restating many of the reasons they outlined in the pretrial motions that Thompson had rejected, including the request to move the trial out of San Diego County and to have Goldstein recused as prosecutor. They also said the judge failed to give instructions to the jury pointing out that Kristin didn’t flee while she was out on bail.

  Eriksen argued that by referring to Michael as Kristin’s “unindicted coconspirator,” the prosecution effectively precluded him from testifying for the defense by scaring him into thinking he’d be arrested if he returned to San Diego.

  Goldstein noted that the government did not deport Michael, saying that it gave his passport back to him when he asked to return to Australia to care for his dying mother, and it never initiated extradition proceedings to bring him back as a material witness.

  Eriksen pointed out that the U.S. extradition treaty with Australia has no mechanism to bring anyone back as a material witness; it only has one to extradite a suspect charged with a crime.

  Thompson announced that his previous rulings would stand and rejected the request for a new trial. He said he didn’t deny any of the defense’s challenges to jurors they thought were biased by pretrial publicity, and he had no doubt that “a fair and impartial panel” had been seated.

  Based on the verdict, Loebig said, there was only one sentence the judge could order—life without the possibility of parole. Constance and Ralph Rossum did not want to speak, he said, but asked him to read a short statement: “We are horrified by the verdict and the sentence. Our innocent daughter has been wrongly convicted. We know Kristin did not murder Greg. We understand there are solid grounds for appeal and intend to pursue them vigorously. Please keep us all in your prayers.”

  Kristin, too, chose to remain silent rather than, as some defendants have been known to do, apologize or ask the court for mercy.

  “Kristin doesn’t feel that she is physically or emotionally able to say anything more,” Loebig said.

  Kristin cried while each member of the de Villers family stood up to read a gut-wrenching statement. Although Jerome, Bertrand, and Marie all testified during the trial, this was their first opportunity to freely express their thoughts and emotions. Because Yves was unable to come to the hearing, he’d asked Bertrand to deliver his remarks.

  “You show no remorse and ask for no repentance, for any of your actions. You cried fake tears for Greg and real tears only for yourself. On the outside, you are a smart, beautiful young woman. On the inside, you are a lying, calculating, manipulating person that cares only about herself,” Bertrand said, reading his father’s words into the record.

  Yves said Kristin, either alone or with someone else’s help, killed his firstborn son, whom he had delivered himself. Greg had always been good to her and he tried to get her off drugs. But in return for Greg’s love, Yves said, Kristin repaid him “in the worst imaginable way.” She killed him. And then she lied about it.

  Yves went on to say that Greg’s death had deeply wounded Marie, tragically scarred Bertrand and Jerome, and prevented Yves from sleeping for three months. In fact, it still gave him nightmares. Yves closed by quoting from the Bible, saying he prayed God would pardon Kristin as “he shows generous patience, since he wants none to be lost but all to come to repentance.”

  Bertrand went on to read a lengthy heartfelt speech of his own, describing how his oldest brother had helped guide him through life. Greg was his compass, he said, and without him, he was having trouble “finding a direction.”

  “I feel alone and I feel scared and many times I actually don’t know how to feel at all,” he said.

  Speaking directly to Kristin, Bertrand said it was senseless to try to describe what Greg meant to him, because she already knew what good he could do.

  “You have your own personal proof of his abilities, for he saved you from the deepest valley of despair and lifted you to the highest peak of success that you will ever attain. When you reached the top, your reward for him was to push him off the cliff when he wasn’t looking…. Greg’s example to you was to love and trust you with all that he was and you used that against him.”

  While Greg chose hardship and sacrifice as the means to an end, Bertrand said, Kristin chose cowardice.

  “Your betrayal was the most despicable act imaginable. Like Medea, you wielded your black magic to poison your husband…. Each day, I feel a void in my spirit like a black hole whose emptiness pulls and sucks at me from the inside. I hate that you have done this to me, and I hate that you have given me this unrelenting sadness to battle against all the time. I pray that God has mercy on you because I cannot…. Kristin, you are the only person in the world that I hate, and I do so with all of the strength and all of the feeling that I possess within me.”

  Jerome followed his brother by talking about his childhood and teenage memories, how much Greg had taught him about riding a bike and how to adjust and change his brakes. Greg was his adviser, he said, a friendly competitor, but all in all, a good person who enriched his life.

  Then, in very open and honest terms, Jerome described the “huge emotional and psychological effects” of Greg’s death, which affected him for months.

  “I was angry and obsessed with finding the truth, so much so that I stayed up at night thinking and questioning everything over and over again. For months…I could not sleep or I would wake up in the middle the night…. I missed several weeks of work in lost productivity…. I became reclusive and tended toward social avoidance…. I shut people out. I became paranoid that the Rossums were plotting against my family. I was worried that someone might harm me, Bert, my mom, and girlfriend. At times I felt like I was being watched or followed. I even worried about my phones being tapped. My entire perspective on life changed. It became hard to trust anyone.”

  Jerome said he felt some closure to see Kristin going to prison, but it wouldn’t bring back his brother.

  “My family is still struggling and hurt. I don’t understand why this happened to us. I do not want this to happen to anyone else. I want justice for Greg, and I want Kristin behind bars for the rest of her life. She is a danger to society.”

  Finally, in a thick French accent, Marie described the pain of her loss by drawing parallels between Greg’s death and the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

  “By an act of terrorism so brutal and unthinkable, [Kristin] caused damage that cannot be rebuilt. Our beliefs were shattered; our hopes have been torn apart,” she said.

  “[Greg] treated life as a gift…always caring for people he loved. Greg paid the ultimate price for his goodness, because Kristin Rossum’s poor choices and irresponsible judgments led to his murder. He could not save someone drowning in turbulent waters mainly because this person was only thinking about surviving herself. As in most cases, the spouse is the last one to know his spouse was cheating on him, and often parents, who think they know their children, are the last to recognize the truth about their children’s involvement with drugs.”

  The de Villers family would never be able to forget the image of Greg dying in bed, she said, and would be “forever shaken by [Kristin’s] cold disrespect of life. She played a dangerous game with feelings and perpetually tried to cover up her secrets.”

  Marie said she wanted Kristin to receive the maximum penalty, because only then would “human justice…be levied.”

  As expected, Judge Thompson sentenced Kristin to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He denied Kristin’s request to go free on $1.25 million bail while her appeals were pending, saying she’d exhibited tendencies to run away and remain incommunicado for periods of time. And, at long last, he lifted the gag order.

  Immediately following the sentencing, Eriksen walked down the hallway to file papers to start the appeal process.

  Goldstein, Hendren, and Agnew held
a brief press conference in the Hall of Justice next door, which was attended by at least one Australian journalist, whose focus was the future for Michael Robertson and his possible extradition.

  Agnew, Hendren, and Goldstein confirmed that Michael was still under investigation in the murder of Greg de Villers, but they said they couldn’t comment further.

  “We’re happy to see that justice was done in this case,” Goldstein said. “[A life sentence] is the next best thing in the justice system that we can do. We can’t bring Greg de Villers back.”

  Goldstein said they were pleased that Kristin took the stand because they knew they’d “get incriminating evidence that way.” He also credited Jerome for his role in the case.

  “Jerome de Villers is a good human being,” he said. “He knew his brother better than anybody else…. He got the ball rolling.”

  As for the Rossums, he said, he didn’t blame them for not seeking a more aggressive drug treatment program for Kristin.

  “There’s no other blame to allocate other than to the defendant,” he said.

  During the investigation and trial, he said, the Rossums were just trying to protect their daughter. There was nothing unique about a murderer’s parents distorting the truth, he said, because “no one ever wants to believe their child is guilty.”

  “I see them also as victims of the defendant’s narcissism,” Goldstein said. “She was lying to them, too.”

  As Loebig walked back to his office after the hearing, he said Kristin was fearful of going to prison. After the verdict, her mood was “emotional but not irrational.” She’d turned out to be more resilient than he would have anticipated.

  “Her life is pretty much turned upside down,” he said.

  Loebig said he told her to “keep the faith” because convictions do get overturned. Personally, though, he said he would’ve liked to see Michael Robertson charged and the two of them tried together. In fact, he said, he’d still like to see Michael indicted.