by John Glatt
After picking up their car at La Jolla del Sol Apartments, the Rossums drove to the Marriott in Solana Beach, where they were staying overnight. During the short drive to the hotel, Constance told her husband that Kristin was leaving Greg the following week and had accepted their offer to buy a condo she could rent.
The next morning after breakfast, the Rossums went to two realtors to look for condos. Constance asked for something reasonable, in the $200,000 range, that they could buy as an investment, explaining that they wanted to rent to their daughter and son-in-law.
“I didn’t want to divulge anything,” she later explained.
They then spent three hours driving around the Solano Beach and Encinitas areas, looking at a number of available properties in the half-million-dollar range, before returning to Claremont.
While her parents were looking at condominiums for her to move into, Kristin started researching methamphetamine, opium and heroin production on Greg’s new iMac. The twenty-five different Web sites she hit included, “Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture,” “Making Crystal Meth Easy,” and “Opium Preparations.”
Kristin would later claim that she spent much of Saturday arguing with Greg, after telling him she was leaving within the week.
“He was not in a state to talk about it all,” Kristin would later tell Homicide detectives. “He was never able to handle things in a very logical way.”
She would later tell police that they had started drinking some wine in the afternoon and then Greg downed a couple of beers before she made him a gin and tonic. Finally they decided to change the subject to relieve the tension. Greg barbecued some steaks that her brother Brent had sent them as birthday presents, while Kristin made pasta.
After eating, they put in a DVD of Fiddler on the Roof, and during the first half of the movie, Greg, who wasn’t used to drinking gin, became sick.
“He had drank too much,” Kristin said. “[He] went to the bathroom.”
Then they stopped the movie and went to bed together.
On Sunday, November 5, Kristin got up early and went to the medical examiner’s office, spending three hours updating her resume. Greg’s threat to expose her affair with Dr. Robertson had scared her, and she wanted to be prepared to find a new job if he went through with it.
“He wanted me to quit my job there,” she would later testify. “And if I didn’t, he was going to bring in the evidence of that letter, plus the accusation that I had begun using drugs again.”
At 9:23 a.m., she called Greg and had a one-minute conversation. Six minutes later she telephoned the smoke shop where she had previously bought a meth pipe. Half an hour later she called home again to ask Greg a question.
After transferring her resume to a floppy disk, she had a dark epiphany. There and then, it is believed, she decided she was not going to sit by and let Greg carry out his threat to expose her affair and drug use to the medical examiner. She loved her job and Dr. Robertson, and besides, she was addicted to methamphetamine. There was no way Greg was going to come between her and her present life.
Soon after she left the ME’s office, Dr. Robertson walked in, looking uncharacteristically disheveled, as if he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. Since Thursday he had been suspicious that Kristin was back on meth, and went straight to the HPLC room, where she spent most of her time.
While he was going through cabinets, he was disturbed by toxicologist Cathy Hamm, who was preparing equipment for a presentation. She asked him what he was doing, and he was abrupt with her, saying he was just cleaning and throwing junk away.
Then he offered to help her set up her equipment, asking sarcastically if she was happy now.
“He was real short,” she said. “I thought that was very unusual.”
After Hamm left, Dr. Robertson resumed his search, finding a bindle of methamphetamine in Kristin’s desk drawer.
“Being the scientist that I am, I ran a quick little spot test,” he would tell police. “It was consistent with a stimulant. A methamphetamine compound.”
Greg got up late that Sunday, nursing a hangover after the gin the night before. At 3:37 p.m., his brother Bertrand called him from Thousand Oaks for advice on setting up their mother’s new America Online account on her laptop.
After Greg talked him through the installation process, Bertrand asked why he sounded so tired.
“He told me that Kristin had made him a couple of drinks and it surprised him how much he felt the effects of alcohol,” said Bertrand. “They were kind of celebrating, [but] Greg wasn’t a big drinker.”
The brothers discussed snowboarding on his upcoming November 12 birthday, and Bertrand told him he was short of funds and couldn’t afford the trip. Greg understood, saying it was a luxury they didn’t need right now. Instead, Greg suggested he and Kristin come to Thousand Oaks the following weekend and have a birthday dinner with his family.
At the end of the four-minute conversation, Greg promised to call during the week to finalize arrangements. Bertrand would be the last person, apart from Kristin Rossum, whom Greg would ever talk to.
Kristin later told police that, after leaving the ME’s office, she had run errands and gone shopping for Greg’s birthday present.
“I was trying to get out,” she said, “because I couldn’t be there.”
She would later claim that at 5:00 p.m., she and Greg had another argument about her leaving, lasting until he went to bed at 8:30.
“I started pushing the issue again,” she explained. “He cried just a little bit. He told me to go away. He went to bed.”
Kristin shut the bedroom door and saw the love letter that Greg had been trying to piece together on the kitchen table. She cleared it off as it was making a mess, leaving it on another table nearby.
At around 9:00 p.m. she left the apartment to call Michael Robertson, because she was “frustrated,” and needed to hear a “comforting voice.” It would be the very first call she made on her new phone which she had bought six days earlier. The call lasted just two minutes, but prosecutors believe it would seal Greg de Villers’ fate.
After her short conversation with Dr. Robertson, Kristin claims she returned to the apartment and watched television until about 10:45 p.m.
“I was getting ready for bed,” she would say, “when he emerged from the room, saying he was tossing and turning, couldn’t sleep.”
Greg then got some water and went back to bed at 11:00, with Kristin following shortly after. She would later complain that he had kept her up most of the night breathing hard and snoring.
“I would kind of elbow him,” she said, “and he would stop for a little bit.”
But Homicide detectives believe that Kristin had already given her husband a cocktail of drugs, which would be found in his body later.
Greg de Villers was already dying.
Chapter 15
“My Husband Is Not Breathing!”
When Kristin Rossum awoke at around 7:00 a.m. on Monday, November 6, Greg was almost certainly unconscious, fast lapsing into a coma. Forensic experts later speculated that she had first sedated Greg the night before with clonazepam, a date-rape drug, and oxycodone, a powerful painkiller known on the streets as “hillbilly heroin.” Then, said the experts, as Greg lay unconscious in his bed that morning, Kristin began methodically administering fentanyl, either as a liquid, or through patches similar to ones smokers use to quit.
Fentanyl is a lethal drug many times stronger than morphine, but it takes time to work its way into the bloodstream. Greg was in good physical shape and his body valiantly fought off the effects for many hours. According to prosecutors, Kristin would spend the day shuttling between work and her apartment, administering more and more doses, until her husband was finally dead.
At 7:16 a.m., telephone records show, Kristin called her Mexican drug dealer Armando from her home phone, something she had never done before. When there was no answer, she called his cell phone three times in rapid succession. She was clearly despera
te to buy drugs, as her methamphetamine stash at home was almost exhausted. Her desperation was understandable, prosecutors would later argue:
she knew she needed to numb herself with dope to get through her ordeal.
At 7:42, Kristin called Greg’s personal voicemail extension at Orbigen, leaving a message that her husband would not be in that day. Later it was noted that she called his personal extension instead of Orbigen’s main number, which was readily available in the phone book.
“This is Kristin, Greg’s wife calling,” said her message. “He’s not feeling well at all today. So he’s most likely going to be taking the whole day off. Hopefully someone else will get this message and that it will not be a problem. Okay. Bye. Thank you.”
Shortly after making the call, she went to work. Forensic investigators would later conclude that she left her dying husband on their bed, his lungs filling up with fluid from bronchopneumonia and his bladder no longer functioning.
She arrived at the medical examiner’s office at 8:00 a.m., more than an hour later than usual. Her fellow toxicologists recall her looking distressed and near tears. At 9:30, when Dr. Robertson returned from his regular morning meeting, she rushed straight into his office, closing the door behind her.
“They seemed to be having a very serious discussion,” said Cathy Hamm, who could see them clearly through his glass door, from her desk. “She was crying at one point. She was very upset.”
Kristin would later claim that her boss had then angrily challenged her about the methamphetamine he had found in her drawer, but prosecutors believe that that was a red herring and they were actually discussing Greg’s deteriorating condition.
After about half an hour, Kristin left Robertson’s office, walking out past the other toxicologists without saying a word. Then she jumped in her car and drove home. During the ten minutes she was there, Kristin claims she washed her face and looked in on Greg. But it also would have given her adequate time to give him more fentanyl, say prosecutors.
At 10:11 a.m., as Kristin was preparing to return to the ME’s office, the phone next to Greg’s bed rang, but he couldn’t answer. The caller was his boss, Stefan Gruenwald, concerned that Greg hadn’t turned up for work without reporting in sick. In all the years he had worked with Greg at Pharmagen and Orbigen, Dr. Gruenwald had never known him to take a sick day.
“I was actually very worried,” said Dr. Gruenwald, who didn’t leave a message. “I thought something strange was going on.”
Dr. Gruenwald voiced his concerns to Orbigen’s general manager Terry Huang, who agreed, saying he would also try to contact Greg. Huang called at 10:17 a.m., and when there was no answer, decided to try again later.
After leaving her apartment, Kristin returned to the medical examiner’s office, spending the next hour working in the HPLC room, where she kept her stash of crystal meth and pipes. She tried to distract herself with work, but just before midday she went home again. Kristin later claimed that she was concerned about Greg and wanted to check on him. But the evidence would tell a different story: That she knew Greg was dying and wanted to see if he was still alive.
Kristin was probably high on meth and not thinking straight. At 12:10 p.m. the La Jolla del Sol’s regional service manager, Herman Schledwitz, was walking to his office when he saw Kristin’s Toyota Cressida careen into the parking lot, parking at a 45-degree angle. He watched in astonishment as she got out of the car and ran into her building.
Ten minutes later, after looking in on her dying husband, she called Michael Robertson on her new cell phone. It was during that conversation, prosecutors would argue at trial, that the couple finalized plans to stage Greg’s death as a suicide. Then Kristin drove straight to Vons, purchasing soup, cold medicine and a single rose. As she was paying the cashier, she handed the clerk her Vons discount card to save a few cents, and it recorded the transaction at 12:41 p.m. This would be her single biggest mistake.
She returned home yet again to see whether Greg had died. According to the forensic evidence, he would have by now been in a deep coma, his crippled body bravely struggling against the lethal drugs overpowering him. But he was still alive, and it was at this point, perhaps, that Kristin gave him another dose of fentanyl.
Back at Orbigen, Dr. Gruenwald was getting increasingly concerned about Greg, who still hadn’t called in. At lunchtime, he went into Terry Huang’s office and they decided to try his home again. But the phone next to Greg’s bed kept ringing and the answering machine didn’t pick up. Huang would try yet again at 2:24 p.m. with similar results.
“I was worried,” said Dr. Gruenwald. “I thought that there was something going on at home. An emergency in the family, maybe someone in the hospital.”
Dr. Gruenwald even considered driving to Greg’s apartment to check on him, but he was too busy to make the short trip.
By 1:30 p.m., Kristin was back in the medical examiner’s office, appearing “frazzled.”
“She still looked upset to me,” remembered Cathy Hamm. “She was cleaning up. It seemed like she was maybe wrapping things up in the lab.”
An hour later, she left the ME’s office and made the fifteen-minute drive back to her apartment. Donna Tabor, the La Jolla del Sol marketing director, later remembered seeing Rossum’s car parked askew next to hers when she left for lunch at 2:45.
Just after 3:00, Dr. Michael Robertson suddenly left work to meet Kristin near her home. For the next few hours they would be together, later providing each other with alibis.
“These two meet,” Deputy DA Dan Goldstein would later tell a jury. “That reason is to finish Greg off.”
According to Goldstein, Kristin and Dr. Robertson went back to her apartment and injected a massive dose of fentanyl into Greg’s left arm, as he wasn’t dying fast enough. Later, experts would testify that it was enough to kill him many times over. In fact, they had never seen a body with so much of the drug in it. Paramedics would also find a needle puncture mark on his arm that could not be accounted for.
At 5:40 p.m. the phone rang in Kristin’s apartment and this time she answered. It was Terry Huang from Orbigen.
“I asked for Greg,” remembered Huang, “and she said he was sleeping. I said I was concerned that everything was okay [because] he was not in the office.”
Kristin calmly explained that she had called in sick for him that morning, leaving a message on his answerphone. She assured him that her husband was all right and had had some soup at lunchtime and would be back at his desk tomorrow. But she would not let him talk to Greg, saying he was sleeping. Huang felt as though Kristin was being unresponsive and trying to rush him off the line.
“I did feel some uneasiness there,” he said later. “But I was not certain.”
At 6:30 p.m., Kristin drove to the ME’s office one last time that day. Later, she would claim she went to turn off the HPLC machine, but it is believed she was dumping evidence.
When Kristin returned to her apartment ninety minutes later, Greg was almost certainly dead. It was then, prosecutors say, that she began carefully setting the scene for his “suicide,” knowing that she had to get away with murder. Here is how investigators reconstructed Kristin’s actions over the next hour and a half:
Inspired by American Beauty, she took the red rose she had bought in Vons and scattered the fresh petals around Greg’s body dressed only in his pajama bottoms and lying on the bed. Then she took their favorite framed wedding photo, placed it by his head and carefully left her journal open on a nearby table.
She also wrote a note to Greg, which she placed near the bed.
“Hi Sleepy, ” it read. “I’m going to go shopping to get a wedding gift for Barb. Leftovers in the fridge for you. I hope you feel better and I’ll see you later. ”
At about 9:00 p.m., satisfied that everything was in place, she took a quick shower and put on her pajamas. She then smoked some crystal methamphetamine before taking one final look at her carefully orchestrated suicide scene.
Th
en she dialed 911 from the cordless phone in the kitchen.
Kristin Rossum’s hysterical 911 call came in to the UCSD emergency dispatcher at 9:22 p.m. as a “code blue,” meaning that the patient has no pulse and is apneic.
“My husband is not breathing,” sobbed Kristin hysterically.
The dispatcher transferred her to the fire medical dispatcher, who asked Greg’s age and where he was.
“Okay, stay on the line with me,” said the dispatcher, “because I need to give you some instructions.”
“He’s cold,” Kristin screamed, as the dispatcher assured her that paramedics were on the way.
Through sobs, Rossum explained that her 26-year-old husband had stopped breathing, adding that he hadn’t been feeling well the previous day and had slept a lot.
“I came home a little while ago to check on him,” she said. “And then I took my bath and ...”
The dispatcher told her to listen carefully as he guided her through cardiopulmonary resuscitation, to try to revive Greg. But when the dispatcher ordered her to put Greg on the floor, she would have had to think fast—if, as investigators believe, her staged suicide scene was by now fast falling apart.
“And is he in bed?” asked the dispatcher.
“What?” asked Kristin, evidently taken by surprise.
“Is he in bed?” repeated the dispatcher.
“Yes.”
“Then take him off the bed and put him on the floor. Are you able to do that?”
“Uh ... Maybe,” she replied, adding that she was by herself and there was no one to help her.
Then, while speaking to the dispatcher on the cordless Princess phone, she apparently pulled Greg’s 153-pound body off the bed. According to prosecutors, she began quickly re-staging the death scene before the paramedics arrived.
“Is he on the floor now?” asked the dispatcher.