by John Glatt
On Sunday, November 12, Kristin looked every inch the grieving widow at the small family memorial service for Greg. After the service, Jerome went back to Greg’s apartment and noticed that Kristin had now removed every trace of him. The framed wedding pictures that had adorned every wall had been taken down, and he couldn’t see any of Greg’s possessions anywhere.
But when he left, he saw his brother’s favorite Nike sandals lying in a trash can outside the apartment complex.
Chapter 19
Under Suspicion
On Monday, November 13, one week after Greg’s death, Dr. Michael Robertson invited his laboratory staff to drinks at the 94th Aero Squadron Restaurant to show their support for Kristin. Only a handful turned up for the two-hour get-together, the majority preferring to stay away.
Kristin arrived late, looking sad and shaken-up, and appearing highly nervous and fidgety.
“She had scratches on her hands and face,” recalled Christine Robertson, a student worker at the ME’s office, and no relation to Dr. Robertson.
They all sat around a table at the restaurant, Kristin sipping a drink as she sadly told her colleagues about the arrangements she was making for Greg’s funeral. Then she brought them up to date with what she’d done since her husband’s death.
The gathering broke up after about an hour, and Kristin left to go home, followed shortly by Dr. Robertson.
A couple of days later, Pacific Laboratory’s Director of Toxicology Michael Henson got the results of the tests he had carried out on Greg de Villers’ samples, and was astonished. The comprehensive drug screen had tested positive for the obscure but lethal drug fentanyl, although the tests hadn’t revealed exactly how much was present.
He immediately called Frank Barnhart in the sheriff’s crime lab to inform him.
“Oh shit!” said Barnhart, who said he would get back to him.
Barnhart immediately called Dr. Brian Blackbourne with the news, who in turn alerted Lloyd Amborn. Dr. Robertson was immediately summoned into Amborn’ office and ordered to break off all contact with Kristin, without being told why.
Although Barnhart liked Kristin, he was also determined to find out how Greg had died. So on his own initiative, he ordered the samples to be re-tested by Pacific Laboratories, and also by specialist labs in Las Vegas and Canada. He instructed them to spare no expense and do whatever testing was needed to confirm fentanyl and measure the quantities in which it occurred. It was something he had never done in his long career.
That week, Kristin Rossum made several trips to Tijuana, scoring methamphetamine from her taxi driver contact. Now on bereavement leave, she spent her days getting high at home and most nights with Dr. Robertson. At this time, they had no idea they were being investigated by the Homicide task force, believing they were now free to “pursue their destiny” together.
Since Greg’s death, hospital social worker Diane Warren had become increasingly concerned about Kristin coping alone with her husband’s death. She began calling Kristin leaving messages, but she never got a reply. In mid-November she called Michael Robertson’s home number, which he had provided at the hospital, and his by-now estranged wife Nicole answered. When Warren asked for Kristin Rossum, Nicole went ballistic.
“You tell that whore not to call here!” yelled the angry Australian.
The social worker was so astonished by the outburst that, after trying to explain the circumstances, she put down the phone.
“She used words like ‘whore’ and ’bitch,’” Warren later testified. “Very strong language indicating that there was an inappropriate relationship between [Kristin] and this man.”
Angela Wagner, who had conducted the official ME’s office investigation the night of Greg’s death, was also worried about how Kristin and her family were coping. So she went to Dr. Robertson’s office to find out. He suggested they meet outside the office on a social basis. Consequently, she had dinner with Kristin and another colleague named Dan Maddox in the middle of November. Although he had arranged the evening, Dr. Robertson never showed.
A few days later, toxicologist Cathy Hamm happened to be using Dr. Robertson’s telephone when she looked in his desk for a blank sheet of paper. In a drawer, she found a two-page handwritten love letter that Robertson had written to Kristin but never given her. After reading the “Hi Gorgeous,” letter—which bemoaned the fact that he wouldn’t be able to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with her because of Greg—Hamm showed it to her colleague Donald Lowe. Then, believing it to be important evidence, he faxed it to Det Laurie Agnew, who seemed extremely interested.
Since opening the special investigation into Greg’s death, Agnew and her team of three detectives had begun questioning potential witnesses. She was in daily touch with the ME’s office and the UCSD Police Department, but so far had not approached Kristin Rossum or Michael Robertson.
On November 22, Sergeant Howard Williams told Agnew about the massive doses of fentanyl in Greg’s body that Pacific and the two other laboratories—who had confirmed Pacific’s results—had reported to Frank Barnhart the day before. The three labs had all run a series of tests that conclusively proved that Greg had had enough fentanyl in his body to have killed him many times over. In fact, his blood contained an astronomical count of fifty-seven nanograms per milliliter—nineteen times the amount that would have stopped his breathing.
In her twenty-three years in the police department, Det Agnew had never come across fentanyl, and immediately ordered her team to find out everything they could about the lethal drug.
That morning, Agnew called Medical Examiner Dr. Brian Blackbourne to discuss the results and their ramifications, asking him to keep them secret. Around noon, she telephoned Kristin Rossum, asking her to come to the police department that afternoon, to be interviewed about her husband’s death.
Kristin readily agreed to meet Det Agnew in the lobby at police headquarters an hour later, but when she put down the phone, she was shaken. She had been about to leave for Tijuana to score crystal meth, to help her cope with a visit she had received the night before from Jerome de Villers.
On Tuesday night, without warning, Jerome had shown up on her doorstep. He’d wanted to go through her story once again, convinced that Kristin knew far more than she was saying about his brother’s death. He began interrogating her, trying to get at the truth.
“I worry about him, because he can’t deal with this,” Kristin would tell police the following day. “He just seems like he’s going to explode.”
Jerome carefully led her through everything that she had told him in the days after Greg’s death, repeating that his brother had hated drugs. Kristin stood by her story, saying Jerome had no idea just how upset Greg had become. Eventually a frustrated Jerome asked her how she could possibly accept the idea that Greg had committed suicide. Grasping at straws, he even theorized that maybe a stranger had come into the apartment and murdered Greg while she was taking her bath.
“He just lets his mind go crazy,” Kristin later complained to police. “He would rather believe some ludicrous conspiracy theory rather than his brother maybe has [problems].”
First thing the next morning, Kristin had gone out and bought a Rottweiler puppy she named Bear, for company and future protection.
At 1:30 p.m., Det Agnew met Kristin on the second-floor lobby of the Homicide Department at police headquarters. She escorted Kristin to an interview room where they were joined by Det Jimmy Valle, who was also working the case. Earlier, they had decided not to mention that they now knew Greg had died from a massive fentanyl overdose, as they didn’t want to scare her. A video-recorder was turned on, and Det Agnew began the interview, saying that Kristin was free to leave at any time if she felt uncomfortable.
The middle-aged detective began by trying to put Kristin at ease and relating to her, saying that she had a son Kristin’s age. She said there were a number of discrepancies in the reports so far that she needed to straighten out, and began summing up the basic
facts.
“[I was] a total basket case at the time,” Kristin told her, before asking if it was standard procedure for the campus police to “pass off” cases to Homicide. Agnew explained that the campus police were not equipped to deal with real investigations.
Then she asked Kristin why she rarely used her married name.
“It’s a lot of paperwork,” replied Kristin. “And plus, he has this beautifully long, gorgeous French name that no American gets right.”
Agnew then asked how she had first met Greg. Kristin admitted running away because of a drug problem, saying that he had saved her and cleaned her up.
“He was my angel, and I clung to him,” she sobbed. “He helped me through the most difficult time in my life.”
Saying she realized how hard it must be for Kristin, Agnew asked about the day of Greg’s death. Kristin then went into a long monologue, telling the detectives how she had “freaked out” before the wedding. Things had only gotten worse, she said, after they’d married with his “constant clinging.” Then the Saturday before he died, she had told him she was leaving him.
“He got really upset,” Kristin explained to the detectives. “And, like he’s done in the past a couple of times ... he blows up, gets irate and won’t talk to me ... goes and hides himself in our bed.”
After a sleepless Sunday night, he had “sounded like he was drunk or something” and was slurring. She had then gone to work, after calling in sick for him. She had tried calling him, and when there was no answer she returned to the apartment at about 9:30 a.m. and found him asleep. She drove back to the ME’s office, but came home for lunch at 11:30 a.m. and made him some soup, which he pushed around.
“I said, ‘What’s going on? What did you take?’ And he said that he took some old prescriptions that he hadn’t thrown away. They were mine, like over five years ago. I said, ‘Please don’t take any more.’ He said, ‘There aren’t any more.’ I was so mad at him about that.”
According to Kristin, Greg seemed to improve, so she then went back to work.
“I needed to talk to Michael ... Dr. Robertson about some personal things,” she said. “So I left work early and he also left early. I spoke to him for about an hour and a half in the afternoon before going home at about 5:15 p.m.”
While she prepared dinner, Greg was “stirring a bit and snoring,” so she told him it was too difficult for her to be there and went out to run some errands and buy a wedding gift for her cousin.
“I came back,” she said. “He’s quiet and started sleeping peacefully. I told him I was going to take a bath. I went in and gave him a little kiss on the forehead. Half-angry and just half-sad for him.”
But after taking her bath and puttering around, she came into the bedroom to go to bed, discovering Greg cold and not breathing.
“I’m haunted by the image,” she sobbed to the detectives. “I didn’t know he was in distress. I didn’t. I called 911 and I gave him CPR. And it was so hard ’cause—I’m sorry...”
Kristin then broke down completely and Det Agnew told her to take a minute to compose herself.
“And he was gone,” Kristin continued after she had calmed down somewhat. “I can’t believe he’s gone. I really can’t. He was my best friend. I did plan a separation, but I never expected this.”
Det Agnew then asked Kristin to tell her about Greg. Calling the de Villers family “dysfunctional at best,” she said Greg “hated” his father for every “bad thing” that had ever happened to him. Three years ago, Greg had cut him off and hadn’t spoken to him since.
“His father is apparently a loose cannon,” she told them. “The mom has a very short fuse too.”
Kristin then rounded on Jerome, calling him “the angry middle child,” and saying she was scared of him because he looks like “a pressure cooker that’s about to blow.”
But she was far more charitable to Bertrand, who she described as “well-adapted” and “well-adjusted.” She also stressed that she came from a “different type of family.”
Asked about Greg’s reaction when she told him she was looking for apartments and wanted a separation, Kristin complained that he’d never let her have her own life or develop as a person. Becoming visibly angry, she said that Greg had tried to stop her going to the May 2000 CAT conference with Michael Robertson.
Kristin then told them how she had desperately tried to get Greg into marriage counseling, but that every time they’d argued, he became depressed, saying he couldn’t live without her.
Det Agnew then asked her about the oxycodone and clonazepam that Kristin claimed Greg had told her he had taken. She explained she had gotten them in Mexico five years earlier to help her get off methamphetamine, which she had once had a problem with.
“Greg was not amused at my logic in that,” she wryly observed. “He said, ‘We’re getting rid of them.’ I saw him throw away the containers that they came in.”
But Kristin reasoned that he must have secretly kept the pills.
“Hell, I’m a toxicologist,” she suddenly announced. “I went to schools and graduated with highest honors in chemistry. It was something I really loved, because it was something I was really close to. Probably too close.”
Det Agnew then asked for more details on how Greg’s body had been found. Kristin said that, although she had often seen dead people in her job, she had panicked when she turned on the light, seeing him “pale white.” The rose petals surrounding his body were Greg “trying to be melodramatic, I guess.”
The detective pressed the point, and Kristin said that she had first seen the rose petals while she was on the phone to the emergency dispatcher.
“It seems so selfish now, but I was always wanting him to be more romantic,” she explained. “I saw the red and the petals and I had to pull him down. His body just thumped and hit hard. It was just a mess. I struggled with that.”
Then, telling the detectives to treat it in confidence, she began discussing her relationship with Michael Robertson, having no idea how they had his “Hi Gorgeous” love letter. She explained how she had met him at work in March, and felt that he possessed all the qualities Greg lacked. They were in similar situations with “questionable home lives” and soon they had developed a very close relationship. She had told Greg in early July, and it was weighing heavily on her.
“I said, ‘Look, I’m sorry, we really do have issues. I’m questioning whether or not it was right to get married.’ ”
Telling the detectives that her relationship with Robertson was “real emotional” but “not physical at all,” Kristin explained that they had agreed to just have a “working relationship,” until they could figure out what was happening in their respective marriages.
She said Dr. Robertson had written her a “very sweet letter,” which she had kept at work, before bringing it home the Thursday before Greg’s death, intending to store it in her “keepsake” box.
“You know women are stupid and sentimental sometimes,” she told Det Agnew. “I was reading it when he came home, and I couldn’t refold it up in my pocket. He basically wrestled me to the ground and read it.”
She then claimed that Greg had become “mad and furious,” phoning Robertson at home and telling him to stay away from her.
Calling Greg “vindictive” and “revengeful,” she told Agnew that he had then given her an ultimatum: either she quit her job or he would tell the ME’s office about her “drug history.”
Kristin said she refused to give in to Greg’s threats, insisting on a separation. On the afternoon of Greg’s death, she had told her boss, Dr. Robertson, about her drug history, maintaining that it was all in the past.
“It’s something that I’m not proud of,” she claimed to have told him. “I just wanted to let you know, because someone might be informing you of this.”
Det Agnew then asked Kristin if anyone else in the ME’s office knew about their relationship. She admitted there had been a lot of gossip, and that three months earlier, Llo
yd Amborn had called them both into his office to explain themselves. Although they had both denied any unprofessional behavior at the time, Kristin confided that, since her husband’s death, Robertson had told Amborn they were close.
At this point, Det Valle began asking questions for the first time, trying to get a better idea of Kristin’s relationship with Dr. Robertson.
“I’m curious about rumors at the office, especially since this incident of Greg’s death,” he probed. “Can you tell me any rumors you’ve heard?”
Kristin said it was just that they were “an item,” but Valle pressed her to be more specific. Then Kristin began attacking Jerome, saying he refused to accept that his brother had “just made this stupid mistake.”
“It’s really hard for me,” she sobbed. “It makes me feel horrible.”
Det Valle than asked her why Greg would have overdosed after scattering rose petals around his body and propping up their wedding picture by his head. Kristin said it was a cry for help to show her how hurt he was.
Then Det Valle came right out and asked if she believed Greg had committed suicide.
“I don’t think he did,” she replied. “I can’t believe he would. He had too much going for him. He really did.”
Det Agnew then brought up her private journal, which had been found open near Greg’s body. Kristin acknowledged that Greg knew about it, saying that it had bothered him. She explained that she had written it to try to figure herself out.
“I guess women are more complicated than guys,” she rationalized. “I’m asking you to respect my privacy in this matter.”
Det Valle, aware that Greg had died of a massive dose of fentanyl, said that suicide would have been very uncharacteristic.