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

by John Glatt

  He immediately arranged to use the UCSD morgue facility for the autopsy and, for the first time ever in office history, he would send all Greg’s toxicology work to an outside agency, to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest. Then he called Dr. Robertson into his office to inform him of that decision.

  “[He] expressed real surprise,” remembered Amborn. “Shock, I would say. I emphasized to him that because of this decision, neither the tox lab or anyone in it, including him, was to have anything to do with the toxicology in this case.”

  Amborn then called Kristin’s friend Frank Barnhart, the former employee of the ME’s office who was now with the sheriff’s department crime lab, and he agreed to store Greg’s toxicology until it could be sent out for analysis.

  Then he made one final call to San Diego County Medical Examiner Brian Blackbourne at his home, informing him of Greg’s demise.

  “He told me that Kristin Rossum had made a request that I perform the autopsy,” said Dr. Blackbourne, who was taking the day off. “I was happy to do that.”

  At 8:15 a.m., after Professor Rossum had left to take Pierce to school, Kristin remembered that she had forgotten to tell Greg’s boss, Dr. Gruenwald, about the tragedy. Her mother immediately volunteered to call.

  As Kristin had done the previous day, Constance called Greg’s personal voicemail and immediately hung up. She tried the same number again, this time asking for Dr. Gruenwald’s son, Chris, who shared the same line as Greg, and left a message. Then she called 411 and got Orbigen’s main switchboard number.

  Kristin then called Michael Robertson at the ME’s office and he agreed to call Dr. Gruenwald and give him their number.

  It was just after 9:00 a.m. when Gruenwald drove into the Orbigen parking lot, hoping to see Greg’s car in its spot. When he didn’t see it, he walked into the building, planning to make another round of calls to find Greg. As he was putting down his briefcase, his assistant, Esme Nguyen, told him there was a phone call for him from a Michael Robertson, whom he had never heard of.

  Dr. Robertson introduced himself, saying, “Don’t ask me any questions. This is regarding Gregory de Villers, and something’s happened to him.”

  Robertson then gave him Kristin’s parents’ phone number in Claremont, telling him to call immediately. When Dr. Gruenwald asked what had happened to Greg, Robertson told him to call the Rossums and hung up.

  When Dr. Gruenwald called the number, Constance Rossum answered, introducing herself as Kristin’s mom. He told her he was very concerned about Greg and asked what had happened.

  “Oh, he passed away yesterday,” Constance told him. “Well, he took some drugs and it was an allergic reaction.”

  Totally shocked by the news, Dr. Gruenwald asked her what drugs, as he knew Greg hated them. Constance said that her son-in-law had taken cough medicine over the weekend with some other drugs, as he was not feeling well. The drug combination must have produced an allergic reaction, she told him.

  As a medical doctor, Dr. Gruenwald asked exactly what drugs he had taken, and Constance told him that Greg had not felt well on Saturday, and had continued taking medicine through Sunday. Then, when she told him Greg’s allergic reaction had happened Monday night just before he died, Dr. Gruenwald became suspicious.

  “This is totally unusual,” he said. “When you have an allergic reaction, like a bee sting, it comes right away, not after two days. It was the first thing that made me a little suspicious there’s something maybe going on.”

  Throughout Monday morning, Kristin made calls to friends from her parents’ house in Claremont, informing them of Greg’s death. She also received a call from Greg’s childhood friend and neighbor Laurie Shriber, who had heard the sad news from Bertrand de Villers.

  “I was truly beside myself,” said Shriber. “I wanted to hear from Kristin what had happened. I took the liberty of calling her at her father’s home.”

  When she asked how Greg had died, Kristin said he had taken an overdose of over-the-counter sleeping pills.

  “Well, she was not crying,” Shriber remembered. “She was not hysterical. She was sorry. Gregory would be missed. I was uncomfortable with the conversation.”

  Late that morning, Greg’s mother, Marie, and brothers, Jerome and Bertrand, drove from Thousand Oaks to Claremont for a family meeting to decide funeral arrangements. They arrived at lunch time, and as they drew up to the house, Kristin was standing in the courtyard by herself crying.

  Jerome started to talk to her and was shocked by her drug-ravaged appearance.

  “She was skinnier than I had ever seen her,” he remembered. “She had scabs on her head, face, all over.”

  Jerome asked her what had happened to his brother, and she replied that he had taken her old medication. Then she broke down, sobbing that she didn’t mean to hurt him.

  Then, between long pauses of hysterical crying, Kristin said that Greg had taken all of her oxycodone and clonazepam.

  She also told Jerome that Greg had been upset as she had refused to stop seeing an old boyfriend and he did not like her working in the ME’s office.

  “I just had no idea what was going on,” he said. “She never clarified anything.”

  Bertrand was also startled by his sister-in-law’s appearance when he went to hug her.

  “She kind of felt bony,” he said. “She was very skinny, especially in her face.”

  He was also appalled to see the scabs on her face and hands, and her chapped lips.

  Then Constance Rossum sat the de Villers family around the kitchen table, alongside Kristin, Professor Rossum, Brent and Pierce.

  “Marie asked that he be cremated because of the ashes going to heaven,” recalled Constance Rossum.

  It was finally decided that Greg’s remains would be cremated the following Sunday, which would have been his 27th birthday. The memorial service would just be for the family, and a celebration of his short life.

  Professor Rossum had reservations about the funeral taking place on Greg’s birthday, although he went along with the consensus choice.

  Then Kristin announced that she was going back to San Diego that afternoon to personally take care of the funeral arrangements, saying she only had three working days to pull everything together. She wanted to feel closer to Greg in their apartment, saying it would help her deal with his passing better.

  “[That] was pretty strange to all of us,” said Bertrand. “We were worried about her going back to the apartment where Greg had died.”

  Bertrand offered to drive her back, but she refused. She also turned down offers from Marie de Villers and her mother, who pleaded with her to let them accompany her. Finally she announced that her brother Brent would take her.

  After the meeting, Bertrand, who used to play soccer with Brent years earlier, pulled him aside, saying that he shouldn’t let his sister stay alone in the apartment.

  “Yeah, you are probably right,” said Brent. “Maybe we can stay with Mike.”

  On hearing that, Kristin looked visibly shaken, rushing over to explain.

  “No, no,” she cried. “That would be inappropriate. He’s my supervisor.”

  Suddenly a light went on over Bertrand’s head, and he began wondering who “Mike” was and why Kristin was so shaken up by what her brother had said.

  “Her reaction was alarming to me,” he said. “She made it seem like her brother said something he shouldn’t have.”

  It was mid-afternoon when the de Villers family left to return to Thousand Oaks with more questions than answers about Greg’s death. Jerome did not believe that his brother would ever kill himself with drugs. He was highly suspicious of Kristin’s story, well aware of her past drug problems.

  “Her emotions seemed fake to me,” he would later explain. “Greg was anti-drugs. He wouldn’t take drugs. I was being told this by someone who looked like she was on drugs.”

  While the two families were discussing arrangements for his cremation, Greg’s body was wheeled to the U
CSD Medical Center Tissue Bank, housed at the south side of the ME’s office. There, in accordance with Kristin’s wishes, doctors removed her husband’s corneas, heart valve, femurs, knees, hip joints and even the skin off his back. His remains were then driven to the UCSD facility in Hillcrest to await autopsy.

  Dr. Brian Blackbourne, the San Diego County Medical Examiner since 1990, began the autopsy at 3:30 p.m., assisted by Dan Schaff. But the prior removal of Greg’s organs for tissue donation meant that the medical examiner could not conduct a complete examination of the body.

  “At the time, we didn’t think it was going to be an issue,” Dr. Blackbourne said. “So our office did give permission for that to occur.”

  The autopsy began by documenting what was left of Greg’s body from head to toe. There was an incision in the middle of his chest where his heart valve had been removed, and incisions over the hips and down each leg, where bones had been taken. There were also several five-inch-square fleshy areas on his back where his skin had been removed by a microtome machine, to help burn victims.

  During the internal examination, Dr. Blackbourne removed Greg’s lungs and weighed them. They were almost three times heavier than normal, indicating there was congestion and that Greg had been unconscious for six to twelve hours before death. The pathologist also found signs of early pneumonia, meaning that Greg had been unable to breathe properly and clear his lungs.

  Greg’s bladder was almost bursting with 550 milliliters of urine, and Dr. Blackbourne deduced from his body weight that he had not been able to relieve himself for at least ten hours.

  “The books say 150 milliliters, you want to go and empty your bladder,” said the medical examiner. “400 milliliters of urine, it’s rather urgent. At 550, it would be very uncomfortable.”

  Factoring in the condition of the lungs and bladder together, Dr. Blackbourne would later testify that Greg had probably been lying in bed unconscious from 7:30 Monday morning until 9:30 that night.

  He also noted that there were three needle puncture marks on his left arm, although paramedic Sean Jordan had only made two when he was trying to find a vein to insert a catheter.

  Dr. Blackbourne also removed specimens of tissue and blood for further laboratory analysis during the eighty-minute autopsy. These were taken back to the ME’s office by Dan Schaff and transported to Frank Barnhart at the sheriff’s office a couple of days later. He also wrote Barnhart a one-page note requesting that Greg’s samples be sent out and tested for alcohol, drugs of abuse and a urine drug screen.

  But he never asked for fentanyl testing, which was not routinely tested for by the ME’s office.

  “That was a drug we occasionally found,” he explained. “But we hadn’t found enough of it to make it economical to screen everybody for it.”

  That Tuesday, a brown box of Dr. Robertson’s love notes to Kristin was removed from a shelf above her desk at work. The typed notes—including one reading “I.O.U. A night of love-making”—had been read by fellow toxicologist Ray Gary a week earlier, when he had examined her desk for proof of her relationship with Robertson.

  “The box was there on [November] seventh,” he would testify, “and was not there on the eighth.”

  Chapter 18

  “Suicide Is Not an Option”

  On Tuesday afternoon, Brent Rossum drove his sister back to her apartment in La Jolla, staying the night for emotional support. It was in a mess after the police and paramedics had left, but as soon as she walked in, Kristin started making phone calls.

  “She called all of Greg’s friends and let them know [he] had died,” said Brent. “I was on the couch and heard every phone call. It was awful.”

  One of the first people she called was Bill Leger, who had first met Greg when they worked at Longs Drugs ten years earlier. Leger was stunned when she told him that Greg had died, saying he’d get the first plane out from his home in Lake Tahoe.

  “I wanted to be with the grieving widow of one of my closest friends,” he would later say.

  But he found Kristin’s tearful story of Greg overdosing on pills somewhat suspect.

  “I had a really difficult time believing it,” he later told CBS’s 48 Hours. “Him laying in bed all weekend popping pills. No. No, I don’t see it.”

  Jerome de Villers was also having a tough time reconciling Kristin’s version of events with the drug-hating brother he knew. During the drive back to Thousand Oaks, Bertrand had told him about his conversation with Brent and the mysterious “Mike.”

  Jerome knew that once Greg’s body was cremated on Sunday, it might be too late to discover how he had really died. So he decided to go to San Diego and carry out his own investigation into their brother’s death.

  “I wanted to find out what killed my brother,” said Jerome. “I was going to try and contact as many people as I could to see if they knew anything.”

  Late Tuesday night, after her brother Brent had gone to bed, Kristin Rossum sat down in her kitchen to write eight pages in her journal, apparently trying to come to terms with Greg’s death. Whether she was high on crystal and rambling, or trying to lend support to the suicide story is a matter of conjecture. Over the next few months, she would voice her helpless plight in her journal, often blaming Greg for the suspicion she would increasingly find herself under.

  “My dearest Gregie,” she began. “Last night I lost you, your precious life so unfairly cut short. I can’t believe you are truly gone from this world.”

  Writing that everything he had given her would be “etched into my soul,” she claimed that she could still hear his voice, still see him gazing at her lovingly, still feel his embrace.

  The grieving widow described her unbearable heartbreak at losing her best friend, lover, and “future father of my kids” and lamented that she had ever doubted the truth and purity of their love and marriage.

  Then Kristin self-pityingly asked how she would ever move on and regain her life and rebuild her spirit.

  “I have to take it hour by hour,” she concluded. “Day by day. Only time will tell.”

  She ended on a euphoric note, writing that Greg’s death had given her a new perspective on life. Underlining the Latin expression “Carpe diem!” (“Seize the day”), Kristin reasoned that ultimately she only wanted to be a “good wife” and a “good mother.”

  On Wednesday morning, Jerome de Villers drove from Thousand Oaks to San Diego, calling Greg’s friends on his cell phone during the long drive. Chris Wren, who lived in Huntington, immediately volunteered to meet up and help.

  He made another call to the San Diego Police Department, which was referred to an on-duty Homicide detective named Laurie Agnew. In her twenty-three years with the department, Det Agnew had worked narcotics, undercover and domestic violence, as well as spent eight years on special investigations.

  She carefully listened to Jerome’s concerns that his brother’s death was being labeled suicide, noting that his body would soon be cremated.

  “He wanted an independent autopsy,” she would remember. “He wanted to talk to police about the circumstances of his brother’s death. I agreed to meet him.”

  Half an hour later Jerome walked into Homicide and told Agnew what he knew so far. The detective took notes, promising to look into it and get back to him.

  He then met up with Chris Wren and they went to UCSD Hospital, as he had been told Greg’s autopsy had been performed there. When he was informed that it hadn’t been, he thought it strange. They then drove to the medical examiner’s office, where he met Dr. Brian Blackbourne, who had performed the autopsy.

  During their fifteen-minute meeting, Dr. Blackbourne said that Greg had died of a drug overdose. But when Jerome explained how Greg detested drugs and would never even take an aspirin, Dr. Blackbourne mentioned the rumors of Kristin having an “improper relationship” with her boss, Dr. Robertson. He said he had personally questioned his chief toxicologist, who had denied anything improper. Dr. Blackbourne promised to re-examine the body.r />
  Their next stop was Orbigen, where they spoke to Stefan Gruenwald and Terry Huang, who both shared their suspicions.

  “We were all voicing our concerns,” remembered Jerome. “They didn’t understand what was going on.”

  Dr. Gruenwald mentioned that Greg had taken the previous Thursday afternoon off for family reasons, saying it was something he had never done before. And since Greg’s death, Dr. Gruenwald had checked his computer, discovering some alarming e-mails from Kristin, which he now showed to Jerome.

  One of them was the e-mail sent October 9 after the SOFT conference when Greg had searched her purse for drugs.

  “You’ve hurt me beyond repair,” she’d written Greg. “I wish that I had been able to talk to you about more, but ... [you] make me feel so uncomfortable, so alone. It’s a very unhappy place to be.”

  “That was really disturbing,” said Jerome, who suddenly began to realize the terrible ramifications of just who “Mike” was.

  On Wednesday afternoon, Kristin’s toxicologist colleague Donald Lowe called the UCSD Police Department, informing Det Sergeant Robert Jones that he had some important information regarding Greg de Villers’ death.

  “I told him that I felt Kristin Rossum and Michael Robertson were having an affair,” said Lowe. “And I felt they needed to have [this] information regarding the circumstances.”

  Detective Jones listened carefully, realizing that this could provide a motive for murder. He also remembered how Robertson had spent nearly two hours lurking outside Kristin’s apartment the night of Greg’s death.

  After putting down the phone, he walked down the hall to Chief of Police Maudie Bobbit, who agreed they should now hand over the investigation to San Diego Homicide.