by John Glatt
“The evidence in this case is immaculate,” he announced resolutely.
Back in Claremont, the town was stunned by the arrest of the daughter of one of its most prominent citizens. Professor Rossum’s colleagues at Claremont McKenna College rallied to his defense, offering their support. But some of Kristin’s old friends were not so certain she was innocent.
“Well, I was shocked,” said former boyfriend Ted Maya, who was now studying to be a lawyer. “My initial reaction was certainly ‘Yeah ... she did it.’ And most of the people that knew her then had the same reaction. It was just such a fantastic story. In fact, I don’t know any [of her friends] who actually didn’t think that she had done it. I mean, she lied so well it was like she really believed her own lies.”
By the weekend, the story had gone international, and was covered extensively in Australia’s Melbourne Herald Sun, Michael Robertson’s hometown newspaper. Under the banner headline, “American Beauty and the Beast Within,” the paper concentrated on Robertson’s affair with Rossum, interviewing his old Monash University mentor, Professor Olaf Drummer.
“I was not aware of any of this,” said the professor. “But I know he is back in Melbourne. To my knowledge, he is not working.”
At her arraignment on Monday, July 2, Kristin Rossum pleaded not guilty to the first-degree murder of her husband. Looking haggard and skeletal, her greasy hair falling into reddened eyes, she was escorted in chains into court by a bailiff.
After making her plea, Kristin burst into tears, as her father stood up in court to request Judge Szumowski grant bail. Professor Rossum said there was no chance of her running away, noting that she had not fled to Mexico during the eight-month police investigation.
“She would jeopardize our love and financial future,” he added.
Deputy DA Dan Goldstein opposed bail, saying that the charges against her carried the death penalty.
The judge ordered her to be held without bail, setting a preliminary hearing for July 16. He also appointed a public defender to represent her, after Professor Rossum claimed that hiring a private lawyer was beyond his means.
Outside the court, the well-to-do professor told reporters that he could not afford the legal fees, which could run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. He said he would rather spend the money for Kristin’s bail.
One week later, the preliminary hearing was postponed until October 9, to give Kristin’s new defense team time to prepare their case. The San Diego Superior Court assigned the high profile case to Judge John M. Thompson.
The following day, faculty members of Claremont McKenna College set up a legal defense fund for Kristin.
“We have known Kristin and the family for years,” read a press statement from the fund, “and know that she could not have committed this crime.”
The Rossum family also cooperated on a special ABC Good Morning America segment, featuring the case.
Professor Rossum described his daughter’s drug taking and adulterous affair with her boss as “examples of moral weakness,” admitting that she’d displayed bad judgment.
“But that is very, very different from ... committing murder,” he said.
The tabloid TV show Inside Edition also sent a team to San Diego, to prepare an in-depth story which was broadcast the following week.
On the other side of the world, Dr. Michael Robertson gave his first interview, denying reports that he’d “fled” to escape prosecution. Speaking from his parents’ home in Melbourne, he proclaimed his innocence, saying he’d returned to Australia because his mother was ill.
“I stayed [in San Diego] for many months after this happened in order to facilitate the investigation as much as I could,” he told a local reporter. “To say I fled is not the case.”
But while the Rossums were busy exerting spin control on behalf of their daughter, the de Villers family hired top San Diego civil lawyer Craig McClellan, filing a wrongful death suit against San Diego County. This would be the first step in a $2.1 million family civil action against the ME’s office, Kristin Rossum and Michael Robertson.
The de Villerses accused the ME’s office of negligence, by hiring Rossum without running background checks, and placing her in charge of logging dangerous street drugs into the lab evidence locker. It also claimed that the ME’s office should have prevented her from donating Greg de Villers’ organs, so a proper autopsy could have been conducted.
On August 7, County Medical Examiner Dr. Brian Blackbourne fired his long-time deputy, Dr. Harry Bonnell, just a day after the Board of Supervisors had given him a commendation. Dr. Blackbourne refused to discuss the matter with reporters, who questioned if it was related to Rossum and Robertson.
“Dr. Bonnell is no longer working for the county,” Dr. Blackbourne told a TV reporter. “This is a confidential personnel matter, and I really can’t go into it.”
On July 16, three weeks after Kristin Rossum’s arrest, Det Agnew’s superior officer, Sergeant Howard Williams, left a message on her parents’ answering machine, requesting an interview. The next day, when he checked his voice mail, there was a message from Professor Rossum, declining to be interviewed on the advice of an attorney.
“I chose not to respond at that point, because it was subsequent to Kristin’s arrest,” Rossum would later testify. “I saw nothing that could be of value at that point by speaking to that officer.”
However, a week later, Professor Rossum went on San Diego’s Channel 10 News, vigorously defending his daughter.
Asked about the red rose petals scattered around his late son-in-law’s dead body, Rossum had his own interpretation of what had happened.
“My reading on that,” he said, “is, this was Greg telling Kristin, not in a letter but symbolically, that the romance that could be embodied in a single rose was now over.” Insisting that Greg had committed suicide, Rossum claimed that Kristin’s affair with Dr. Robertson did not provide a motive for murder. As for fentanyl, Rossum said that no one knew how long it had been missing from the ME’s office.
In an earlier interview, Constance Rossum had compared Greg’s behavior the Friday before he died to a scene straight out of the Stephen King movie The Shining.
“We saw a man spiraling down,” she would tell The San Diego Union-Tribune.
In her cell at the Las Colinas women’s jail, Kristin spent her time consulting with her defense team to prepare for her preliminary hearing. She was also working on a scientific paper for TriLink, and receiving regular monthly visits from the supportive company president, Rick Hogrefe.
Since their daughter’s arrest, her parents had spent at least four hours daily speaking to attorneys and giving interviews to media outlets, in a dogged attempt to put forward her case before it could go to trial.
To counter this, the de Villers family, talking through their attorney, Craig McClellan, claimed that Kristin had been lacing Greg’s food and drink with drugs in the days before his death.
As the preliminary hearing drew nearer, it was fast becoming San Diego’s highest-profile case in years, making front-page headlines almost daily with the latest twists and turns.
Public defenders Alex Loebig and Victor Eriksen had now been assigned Kristin’s case, but they had found themselves spending more time fielding media inquiries than working on her defense.
“In the first couple of months I put all my time and energy in dealing with the press,” remembered Loebig. “All the shows—48 hours, Dateline and everyone else——wanted to interview her. I tried to coordinate Kristin’s screening of prospective interviewers so that she had the final choice of who to cooperate with.”
Ultimately the Rossums would decide to allow CBS’s 48 Hours exclusive coverage, hoping for a sympathetic story.
Additionally, Professor Rossum allowed MSNBC’s Mike Brunker to send him a list of questions about the case. In one of the questions, Brunker asked: “How does the defense explain the presence of the controlled substance fentanyl in de Villers’ body? Is there a
theory of how the drug was administered?”
Professor Rossum responded that “Greg had knowledge of, past use of, and his own independent access to fentanyl.”
Later, when asked where that information had been obtained, Professor Rossum said it had come from his daughter.
In mid-September, Deputy DA Dan Goldstein took an unprecedented step for a San Diego prosecutor, asking Judge Thompson to allow television cameras into his courtroom. He argued that the Rossum family had now given so many “erroneous” interviews to national media outlets that they had prejudiced his case. Usually it is the media organizations that request television coverage of criminal trials, and the prosecution that opposes it.
Judge Thompson, one of the few San Diego Superior Court judges never to have allowed cameras into his courtroom, denied Goldstein’s motion, only allowing reporters to take notes.
Two weeks before the preliminary hearing, the DA’s office offered to fly Michael Robertson back from Australia to testify as a witness, all expenses paid. But unless he was charged, there was nothing they could do to compel him. A spokeswoman for the DA’s office said they were giving him the opportunity to clear his name, as he had repeatedly said he wanted to do.
“By Australian law, he doesn’t have to come back,” said the spokeswoman. “We can’t force him back.”
Asked whether Dr. Robertson might also be charged with Greg de Villers’ murder, the spokeswoman said the investigation was ongoing, and by no means over.
Ultimately, Dr. Robertson would refuse to return to the U.S. to testify, instead closely following coverage from his parents’ home.
Chapter 24
“She Will Be Held to Answer”
On Tuesday, October 9, Judge John Thompson’s Courtroom 38, on the third floor of San Diego County Superior Court, was packed for the first day of Kristin Rossum’s preliminary hearing. Under California law, the district attorney would have to prove there was a case to answer before it could go to trial. The defense would not even have to call witnesses. Outside in the corridor reporters milled around, discussing the case.
Inside, Greg de Villers’ mother, Marie, and two brothers, Jerome and Bertrand, took their seats, averting their gaze as Kristin’s parents entered, taking their places on the opposite side of the public gallery. A handful of reporters who had managed to secure seats filed in. The atmosphere was electric.
Then Kristin was escorted into the court, wearing a stylish maroon dress, and looking nothing like she had in her police arrest photo. She had put on weight and regained her looks, after three months at Las Colinas women’s lock-up without methamphetamine.
Prosecutor Dan Goldstein was all business, going through his notes at the prosecution table. The youthful 42-year-old deputy district attorney, who had won convictions in some of the city’s most high-profile murder cases, had been a paramedic before he graduated from law school. He was careful and methodical, having deliberately not rushed into arresting Rossum until he was certain he had an iron-clad case against her. He also planned a run for a Superior Court judgeship in 2002, and knew that this might be his last case on this side of the bench if he won.
On the other side of the courtroom were the two public defenders, Alex Loebig and Victor Eriksen, whom the county had appointed to represent Kristin. Loebig had spent more than thirty years as a defender, starting his career in the 1970s working gang-related murders in Los Angeles. He then spent four years in Guam, as the Pacific island’s head public defender, before moving to San Diego in 1981. The Rossum case was the biggest in his career, and he knew he had a tough battle ahead.
“She was difficult to defend,” Loebig would admit eighteen months later, “in that [the prosecution] had a lot of evidence against her that was difficult or impossible to explain.”
His partner in the case, Victor Eriksen, was also a highly experienced public defender, having successfully defended murder suspects for many years.
Dan Goldstein began by calling a procession of witnesses who had been at Kristin’s apartment on the night of Greg’s death, to demonstrate inconsistencies and contradictions in her story.
His first witness was UCSD Campus Detective Sergeant Robert Jones, who had first investigated the possible suicide. Jones said he had arrived soon after Greg had been taken to the hospital, and seen the red rose petals littering the bedroom. Then, on a cursory search, he discovered the Ziploc bag containing Dr. Robertson’s shredded love letter, the “Hi Sleepy” note in the dining room, and Kristin’s journal on the coffee table.
Kristin looked stoic, taking notes at the defense table, as Jones expressed surprise at seeing the bathtub stopper suspiciously out of place, resting on a shower shelf and not in the bathtub, as would have been expected after the leisurely bath she had claimed to have taken.
Det Sergeant Jones said the investigation had changed from suicide to homicide after toxicologist Donald Lowe tipped him off that Rossum and her boss were possibly having an affair. Then Jones had turned it over to San Diego Homicide.
In Victor Eriksen’s cross-examination, the detective admitted never removing any evidence from the death scene for further analysis, or cataloguing the contents of two trash cans on the apartment balcony. He had also not impounded the rose-streaked sheet or two cups of clear liquid, which had been in the apartment but later disappeared.
Asked by the public defender whether he had initially considered passing the case on to Homicide, Det Sergeant Jones said he had, but that there had not been enough information until Lowe’s call supplied a motive.
Then Campus Police Officer Edward Garcia took the stand, describing how he and his partner, Bill MacIntyre, had arrived at the apartment as paramedics were battling to revive Greg de Villers. Garcia told Judge Thompson that Kristin said her husband had taken oxycodone and clonazepam to help him sleep. He had then searched the apartment for any remaining drugs and a suicide note, but all he found was a half-empty bottle of cough syrup.
“I asked her, ‘What happened to him today?’ ” said Officer Garcia. “She answered like she didn’t know.”
The prosecutor then asked when he had first seen the rose petals. Garcia said Kristin told him that she’d thought they were on the bed and that when she’d pulled the blanket back, they had fallen to the floor.
Then Officer Garcia described driving her to Scripps Hospital in the back seat of his police car.
“She acted like she was crying,” he told the court. “Her face would wince and she would look upset.”
Then, while in the hospital waiting for news of Greg, she called Michael Robertson on her cell phone, and he arrived about twenty minutes later.
“They were whispering,” said the officer. “I couldn’t hear what was said at all.”
Garcia had then returned to the Regents Road apartment to secure the death scene for ME Investigator Angela Wagner, who was on her way. A few minutes after he got there, Kristin had walked in with Michael Robertson.
Paramedic Sean Jordan then took the stand, telling the judge how he and his partner April Butler were first at the scene after the 911 call. Finding Kristin talking on a cordless phone, they went straight into the bedroom to see Greg lying on the floor, surrounded by rose petals. By his head, resting up against the dresser, was his wedding photo.
“[It] was like he propped it up and was looking at it,” Jordan remembered.
Goldstein asked about Greg’s skin temperature when Jordan first tried resuscitation.
“When I walked in, it was warm, fresh. Like he was newly deceased,” he said. “He didn’t have any rigor mortis.”
The paramedic then explained how he had fought to revive Greg with cardiac drugs and narcan, in case he had overdosed. By this time, another team of paramedics had arrived, and Jordan told of making two puncture wounds in Greg’s left arm, attempting an IV. Another paramedic, Joseph Preciado, made another one in the right arm.
The prosecutor then asked if he was certain that he hadn’t made three puncture wounds in Greg’s l
eft arm. Jordan said he was.
Public defender Alex Loebig, knowing the prosecution’s contention that Greg’s left arm had been injected with fentanyl, asked if the paramedic had looked for any prior injection marks. Jordan said they’d done exactly that, but had not seen any.
“We looked for needle track marks,” he said. “That was one of the first things I looked for.”
The next witness was EMT April Butler, who’d thought Rossum’s behavior “weird,” as she spent most of the time on the cordless telephone in the kitchen and living room. Prompted by Goldstein’s questions, Butler testified that Kristin had told her that, on the orders of the 911 dispatcher, she had placed Greg’s body on the ground before starting CPR.
“Did you see any rose petals in the bed or on the bed?” asked the prosecutor.
“No, there were none,” Butler replied emphatically.
In his cross, Victor Eriksen asked why Butler had said that Kristin was a “little distraught,” when she was in fact hysterical. The EMT admitted Rossum had been hysterical, saying that was only to be expected with her husband lying dead in the bedroom.
There was much anticipation in the courtroom as Jerome de Villers took the stand. He was the prosecution’s most powerful witness, and Kristin Rossum began nervously playing with her blonde hair as he began to testify. He told the court how he and his brothers Bertrand and Greg had first met Kristin on a “fun” night out in Tijuana in 1995. Greg had hit it off with her right away, and she spent that night in his bed.
“She came home with him,” he said. “She moved in with us that night.”
Jerome told of the last time he had ever seen Greg alive, at a wedding two weeks before his death. He had seemed highly positive about the future and was organizing his birthday trip, planning to go snowboarding in Mammoth with his brothers and Kristin.