Deadly American Beauty (St. Martin's True Crime Library)

by John Glatt

  As they prepared for work on Monday morning, they had another bitter argument. And, suspicious that his wife had relapsed into drugs, Greg searched Kristin’s purse and found three different types of pills.

  On her arrival at the medical examiner’s office at 8:51 a.m., she wrote Greg an angry e-mail, defending herself against his accusations that she was using again. Knowing that Greg knew nothing about drugs, she lied about the ones he’d found and why she was taking them, claiming that they had been provided by a friend at the conference.

  “Flat yellow (Diazepam), muscle relaxant given to me by Julia for cramps,” it began. She also claimed that a yellow pill found by Greg was an antidepressant sample obtained from a doctor because of the “severe anxiety I’ve been experiencing as a result of our relationship.”

  Kristin also claimed that her doctor had recommended she see a psychologist to help her work through her marital issues.

  Later she would accuse Greg of violating her trust by searching her purse, admitting that she had deliberately led him on “a wild goose chase” to make a point.

  A week after he’d returned from the SOFT conference, Michael Robertson separated from his wife Nicole and moved out to a new apartment in Hillcrest. They agreed to go into marriage counseling, and for the next few months they would unsuccessfully attempt to repair their marriage while he continued his affair with Kristin.

  On Saturday, October 14, 2000, Greg drove Kristin to Cathedral City to attend the wedding of his old friend, Aaron Waldo, who had been in Tijuana the night they’d met.

  Jerome de Villers was also there and was placed at Greg and Kristin’s table for the wedding dinner, after the ceremony. And despite the problems in their marriage, neither gave any indication that there was anything wrong. Kristin looked radiant in a simple black dress with a string of pearls, and Greg appeared upbeat and happy throughout the weekend.

  During dinner, Greg invited his brother to go golfing the next day and suggested they go snowboarding at Mammoth later in the year. Then Greg surprised him by suddenly announcing that he wanted to buy a house and have children with Kristin.

  “I was like, ‘Wow,’ ” said Jerome. “It took me by surprise.”

  Kristin then turned around to her brother-in-law, declaring that she was not ready to have kids, but they wanted a large house as she wanted to get a dog.

  After the wedding, the three drove back to a friend’s house, where they were spending the night. Their host, Christian Colantoni, had invited some mutual friends of theirs over for a reunion, and after a few drinks they watched the movie Office Space, the directorial debut of Beavis and Butt-head creator Mike Judge.

  During the video there was a scene where one of the office employees is terminated, and then attempts suicide by running his car engine in a closed garage.

  One of their friends, Jason Bacarella, an emergency medical technician, remarked that this was probably the best way of committing suicide.

  Suddenly Kristin turned around and contradicted him, explaining that she was a toxicologist and reeling off a specific combination of poisons which were painless and undetectable.

  “This is what I do,” Kristin told them, adding that she’d just given a talk about strychnine at a major toxicologists’ conference. “And this is why I know this.”

  Bacarella disagreed, but didn’t press the point. Then they all went back to watching the movie.

  On Sunday morning, Greg took Kristin shopping in Palm Springs, buying her a pair of sunglasses and some perfume. Then they met up with their friends to play eighteen holes of golf, with Kristin sharing Greg’s golf cart.

  Colantoni, who had finished law school and was awaiting the results of his bar exam, mentioned that if he passed, he was going to Las Vegas to celebrate the following weekend. Greg and Kristin immediately agreed to join him and his girlfriend.

  Then, after nine holes, Greg and Kristin left for the long, tense drive back to San Diego.

  Chapter 14

  The Devil’s Drug

  On Wednesday, October 25, Kristin Rossum celebrated her 24th birthday. The night before, Dr. Robertson had thoughtfully hidden roses and a box of truffle chocolates in her desk, as a present. She also received two dozen red roses and a birthday e-mail from Greg, wishing her much happiness and a successful year.

  Kristin was now high on crystal methamphetamine all the time. Later, her neighbors would remember how she always seemed in a hurry, dashing from her car into her apartment for no apparent reason. Her appearance also changed. She lost weight, developed acne and was “geeking,” —picking at her fingernails as she had done when she was strung out at Redlands, before Greg helped her clean up. To Greg’s consternation, she had also started smoking cigarettes.

  On Thursday, Kristin was working on a case involving fentanyl, which she was supposed to log into the ME’s drug room. But the Duragesic fentanyl patches didn’t end up in the standards locker, and prosecutors believe she stole them, as they have never been recovered.

  She had now exhausted the supply of methamphetamine she had stolen from the ME’s office, and was looking for alternative supplies of the drug she so craved.

  That afternoon, before leaving for work, she began searching Web sites on her office computer to discover how to synthesize methamphetamine. She logged onto one of the reference sites for methamphetamine that describes how to manufacture “the Devil’s Drug.”

  Then, back at home, she logged onto Greg’s iMac computer and typed “making crystal meth easy” into a search engine, punching up dozens of different hits on synthesizing methamphetamine.

  Greg had recently renewed his California driver’s license with the Department of Motor Vehicles, and that night a blank organ donor’s card arrived at their apartment. Greg filled it in, saying that in the event of an accident he wished to donate his entire body to help others. He and Kristin co-signed it, mailing it off the next day.

  A few miles away at his new Hillcrest apartment, Robertson watched the Yankees beat the New York Mets in the World Series. After it finished, he sat down and wrote Kristin a passionate two-and-a-half-page love letter, urging her to make a life-long commitment to him, and hinting that he would leave her if she didn’t act now.

  “Hi Gorgeous,” began the letter, later found in his office desk. Robertson proclaimed that he was “madly in love” with Kristin and eagerly waiting for the day when he could express his feelings in public as well as private. He told her that, in falling in love, they were playing out their “destiny” and that he had finally learned “to let myself go completely.”

  He then wrote of his frustration that she had celebrated her birthday and other family holidays with her husband and not him.

  On Friday, Kristin felt overpowered by everything that was happening, and plunged back into crystal methamphetamine with a vengeance. She felt guilty for letting everyone down, but she desperately needed the drug to numb her troubled mind and do what she had to do.

  Crystal changes the chemical composition of the brain, and studies have proved it does irreparable damage. If taken regularly, it can lead to paranoid psychosis, depression and memory lapses. Addicts with the biggest behavioral problems to begin with usually suffer the most damage.

  That day, she was obsessed with getting high from crystal meth. At 8:48 a.m., as soon as she arrived at her desk, she began searching Web sites for synthesizing the drug.

  Then, during an extended lunch break, Kristin went to Tijuana, where she met, a local taxi driver, Armando, who also facilitated drug buys.

  “I had [read] a newspaper article a couple of years before,” she would later testify, “that if you ever wanted to find anything in Tijuana, all you had to do was ask a taxi driver.”

  When Kristin got into his yellow cab, Armando asked her if she wanted pharmacy drugs or something else, mentioning “Christina.” She said yes, giving him a hundred dollars, and he drove her to a dealer. There, he bought her a bindle of meth for seventy dollars, pocketing the rest of the mon
ey as commission.

  Back at the border, Armando gave her his business card so she could call him next time from San Diego, to arrange things ahead of time. When Kristin returned to the ME’s office, she carefully hid his card in her desk and then went to the HPLC room to chase her dragons.

  On Sunday, Kristin wrote in her personal journal for the first time in a few weeks. Once again, she was apparently weighing up the pros and cons of her marriage to Greg, debating on how she was going to leave him.

  “This is not going to go away on its own,” she concluded. “I hope Greg realizes that it is what is best for the marriage.”

  But her affair with Dr. Robertson, and the escalating amounts of drugs she was taking, remained unmentioned.

  On Monday, October 30, Kristin purchased a cell phone and a crack pipe, from Woody’s Smoke Shop. But it would be another week before she used the phone.

  The next day, Halloween, she bought a second pipe and went on-line scouring the methamphetamine sites once again.

  That night, Greg and Kristin had planned to go to a fancy-dress Halloween party at the home of their friends, Jen and Ronnie Flores. A few nights earlier, Greg had made a rare visit to the ME’s office to pick up Kristin so they could buy their costumes at a Party City store.

  On Tuesday, Greg seemed worried when he arrived at work. At lunchtime he asked Dr. Gruenwald for the afternoon off, saying he had to deal with an urgent family matter. Dr. Gruenwald, who had never seen Greg take any time off, suspected he was going home to talk to Kristin about something.

  That night they put on their costumes and went to the party and enjoyed themselves, posing together for photographs.

  On Wednesday morning, Greg was back at work and seemed in his usual good spirits. That week he was involved in trying to organize a new Orbigen business plan with his old high school friend Christian Maclean, a financial advisor at Merrill Lynch.

  “He worked at a new company,” said Maclean. “[It was] trying to get some funding.”

  In a telephone conversation to discuss the plan, Greg seemed “excited” and “optimistic” about his future at Orbigen and happy to be part of the team. Maclean said he would come to San Diego soon to see Greg and talk over the business plan in person.

  “I was looking forward to just spending time down there with Greg,” he said. “An opportunity to hang out with my buddy.”

  That night Greg called his brother Jerome for a chat. Jerome was engrossed in a DVD about Alaska and wasn’t in the mood to talk.

  “I kind of put him off,” he would later remember. “We had both had long days. I remember telling him that I felt tired and I was going to bed soon.”

  Greg said he was also tired because he was working so hard. The brothers agreed to talk again soon.

  But it would be the last conversation they would ever have.

  On Thursday, November 2, Kristin got up early and smoked some crystal at a ladies’ restroom on the way to work. During the morning, she and Greg exchanged e-mails to arrange to meet for lunch. They discussed different restaurants in Little Italy, but finally decided to meet back at their apartment.

  Before leaving for lunch, Kristin hid her pipe in a drawer at the HPLC room and took a one-page love letter she had received from Dr. Robertson in July, putting it in her purse. The letter, which had been written on stationery from the Westin Rio Mar Beach Hotel, where the 1999 SOFT conference had been held, was addressed, “To a beautiful girl.”

  “When I think of the future,” it said, “I smile and think of the future and you. And we’ll come together. And it makes me so excited.”

  She was re-reading the letter in the living room when Greg suddenly came home and caught her. According to Kristin, she didn’t have enough time to hide it, and Greg saw her putting it into her back pocket. He then accused Kristin of being on drugs, and searched her purse, looking for evidence.

  As she vehemently denied taking anything, and protested her innocence, Greg found Dr. Robertson’s love letter.

  “He basically wrestled me to the ground to get the letter,” she would testify. “He almost struck me. He read the letter and was infuriated by it, and was storming around.”

  Then Kristin grabbed the note from Greg’s hand and pushed it into a shredding machine. Greg snatched the pieces and, according to Kristin, spent hours trying to put them back together with Scotch tape over the next couple of days.

  They spent the entire afternoon arguing. Kristin demanded a trial separation, saying she was already looking for a new apartment. They both called work, saying they would not be in the rest of the day for personal reasons.

  At one point that afternoon, Greg became so incensed that he threatened to take the letter to the medical examiner and reveal her affair with her boss if she didn’t stop using drugs and end her affair. For once, Kristin was terrified that he might go through with his threats.

  That night they had a takeout dinner and then slept in the same bed.

  “It was an emotionally draining day,” remembered Kristin. “We were both tired from arguing.”

  Later, prosecutors would contend that Kristin had lied about Greg finding the note and trying to repair it, as part of her elaborate preparations for murder. And it would take a computer expert six weeks working around the clock to finally reconstitute it.

  On Friday morning they both went to work as usual. Greg seemed particularly worried and preoccupied that day, obsessing about a high school friend whom he thought had cheated Orbigen on a project on which he had been hired as a consultant. Greg spent the morning trying to track him, calling pizza places all over San Diego, hoping one of them would have his address.

  “I will nail him now,” Greg excitedly told Dr. Gruenwald once he had the information. “I got him. I will visit him tonight.”

  Kristin also went to work that morning shaken about Greg’s ultimatum to tell the medical examiner about her affair and drug use. She even stopped smoking meth after the argument, in case Greg went through with his threat and she was drug-tested.

  Soon after she arrived, she went into Dr. Robertson’s office and told him about Greg’s ultimatum.

  “He was concerned,” she would later explain. “I had taken off a half-day on Thursday and he wondered what it was all about.”

  Dr. Robertson would later tell Homicide detectives that Kristin had told him that Greg suspected she was using drugs again, although she denied it. But Robertson already had his suspicions, he said.

  “She was not doing her routine as far as work was concerned. She would take breaks and things like that. I started to wonder whether or not she was maybe re-using again.”

  That evening, Kristin and Greg left work early to go grocery shopping. Greg would turn 27 in a week and a half, and her parents were coming to San Diego to celebrate both their birthdays. It was the first time they had seen the Rossums in almost a month.

  They went to a Vons supermarket and bought ingredients to make gin martinis, thinking that would be a suitable summer drink. And according to Kristin, they had agreed to be on their best behavior, so her parents wouldn’t be uncomfortable.

  Greg had made reservations for four at the Prado Italian restaurant in Balboa Park for 8:00 p.m., but Ralph and Constance Rossum got caught in traffic on 1-5 and didn’t arrive at their apartment until almost 7:30.

  When they walked in, Greg welcomed them, offering them gin martinis.

  “I didn’t really want one,” Constance would later remember. “But I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.”

  As the Rossums shared a drink, Constance remarked that a single red rose in a vase in the kitchen looked “exquisite.” Greg explained that he had bought Kristin two dozen roses for her birthday, and this was the only remaining one.

  Constance would later claim that Greg scared her, by suddenly saying dramatically, “Of all the roses, that single one survived.”

  “Ralph and I looked at each other,” she later testified. “We thought, ‘Wow, you are waxing poetic there.’ ”r />
  Kristin got her camera and they took photographs of each other, smiling at the dining room table. Then Greg drove them all to the Prado, where they were seated for dinner. They ordered drinks and then had a bottle of wine with their meal.

  Professor Rossum would later accuse his son-in-law of twice making a scene at dinner, and having to be told to keep it down.

  “Greg seemed very agitated about a number of matters,” Constance would remember. “Very strange table conversation.”

  The Rossums claim that Greg seemed upset that his mother had still not received her wedding album, seventeen months after the event. Constance assured him she had already spoken to the photographer, and it was being taken care of.

  Later in the meal, Greg brought up his former friend whom he suspected of taking financial advantage of Orbigen.

  “He said, ‘I’m going to ruin his life forever,’ ” said Professor Rossum. “That was not at all characteristic of Greg.”

  At one point Constance kicked her daughter under the table to signal that they should go to the ladies’ room for a private talk. According to her mother, Kristin told her things were “really bad” between her and Greg, and that she was leaving him next week.

  “I said, ‘You can leave with us now, Kristin. Please let us be there when you leave.’ ”

  Then Constance asked if she minded if they looked for a condominium in San Diego that she would be able to rent from them. Kristin had no objection.

  However uncomfortable the Rossums remembered the meal being, the photographs show Kristin nestling her head on Greg’s shoulder, looking every bit the devoted wife.

  It was a clear, beautiful November night, so after the meal, they went walking in Balboa Park, and then Greg took them on a tour of the historic Gaslight District in Downtown San Diego.