by John Glatt
The next witness was Professor Ralph Rossum, who described the family’s repeated attempts to break his daughter’s drug addiction. As he had in the preliminary hearing, he described Greg’s dramatic outburst about the single rose on November 3, 2000, and his angry behavior later. And once again, under cross-examination, Professor Rossum acknowledged never mentioning either incident to the campus police investigating Greg’s death.
When Dan Goldstein suggested that, like any father, he was protecting his daughter so she wouldn’t get hurt, Professor Rossum became evasive.
“Depends on what it means to protect my daughter,” he replied. “For example, I did participate in calling the police on her when we knew that there was this meth problem. So protecting her, in one sense, could be just to hide it. Protecting her in another way would be to do the right thing.”
At the end of that afternoon session, Alex Loebig called Kristin Rossum to the stand. There was a hush in the courtroom as Kristin, her blonde hair tied back, walked nervously over to the stand to be sworn in. Loebig began taking her through her life story and the circumstances that had led to her meeting Greg de Villers.
She seemed dreamy, as if reliving a movie, as she spoke about her early childhood in Germantown and Chicago. Some wondered if she had taken tranquilizers.
“I don’t have too many specific memories from Tennessee,” she said, staring straight at the jury. “More flashbulbs and fuzzy images.”
Saying she had a “wonderful childhood,” Kristin sounded like the all-American girl, as she described her successes at school and her aspirations to become a professional ballet dancer.
Prompted by Loebig, she spoke about her first drug experiences in sophomore year at Claremont High School and how a girlfriend had turned her on to methamphetamine at a football game.
“I knew it was illegal,” she said. “I figured I was open to experimenting with it.”
As she dabbed her eyes, she told how she had gotten deeper into drugs, losing friends as she retreated into using it alone at home. Her class grades slipped from A’s to B’s, and she started finding it hard to study.
Loebig asked when she realized she had developed a drug problem and how she felt.
“Just worn out, tired,” she said tearfully. “It had gotten to the point where what started off as a good feeling was just something I really needed to feel normal.”
She sadly told the jury of her two early brushes with the Claremont Police Department, and how she had gone to the University of Redlands to break away from the Claremont drug crowd.
But in her second semester there, she had fallen back into methamphetamine with a vengeance.
“I thought I could study harder,” she said in a breaking voice. “Work better, not realizing my limitations and how quickly that would snowball into more regular use.”
Then she described how she had run away on Christmas, 1994, winding up in San Diego with $200 in her pocket. She had decided to go to Tijuana for the night for something to do.
“I began walking on the path to go over the border,” she said. “I think I dropped my jacket. I bent down to pick it up and kind of bumped into Greg, literally. We kind of hit it off from there.”
After bar-hopping in Tijuana, Kristin said, he’d invited her back to his apartment for the night.
“To be candid and blunt,” asked Loebig, “did you guys have sex?”
“We did,” she replied. “It felt safe and I didn’t want to feel alone.”
Within a week, she said, Greg had told her he loved her, inviting her to move into his room. When she told him about her problem with drugs, he was supportive, pledging to help her. But before she cleaned up, she confessed to stealing some checks belonging to Greg’s roommate Christopher Wren, saying she had never been able to cash them.
At this point, after Kristin had been on the stand for one hour, Judge Thompson recessed for the day. Outside the court, Kristin, wearing wraparound dark glasses, walked back to her hotel chased by television news crews, refusing to even acknowledge them. It was her fifteen minutes of fame, and she appeared as jaded to the reporters’ shouted questions as any movie star.
On Friday morning, The San Diego Union-Tribune’s city edition carried the front page headline, “Rossum Testifies at Trial: Drug use began in high school 10 years ago, defendant says.” Above the story was a three-column-wide picture showing her leaving court, being chased by the media.
Re-taking the stand later that day, she told the jury she’d had misgivings six weeks before her wedding. But she had gone through with it, putting it down to normal wedding jitters.
Loebig then asked if she had loved Greg when they were at the altar exchanging vows.
“I loved him very much,” she replied, her voice wavering with emotion.
Prompted by her attorney, she described how the relationship had soured after she graduated from SDSU and began working for the ME’s office. She said Greg had felt threatened by her growing self-confidence, and became overly possessive.
“I was becoming more disheartened with our marriage,” she said. “I just felt like I had married the wrong person.”
Then Michael Robertson had started working at the ME’s office, and they soon became close, finding much in common.
“Were you attracted to him?” asked Loebig.
“I sure was,” replied Rossum. “I remember distinctly the moment I first saw him.”
She said they had first slept together that June and that they were in love.
“It was very romantic,” she declared. “Very exciting, very passionate.”
Soon afterwards she told Greg that she had “developed very strong feelings” for her boss. Her angry husband had then called Dr. Robertson, telling him to stay away from his wife.
Kristin said that over the summer, as her love affair blossomed, her marriage had disintegrated. She told Loebig she had spoken to Greg about her fears for their marriage and he’d taken to his bed for a couple of days.
“I was devastated, too,” she said. “It was pretty painful to see someone you love hurt so much.”
After returning from the SOFT conference, she had told Greg, at her mother’s suggestion, that she wanted a trial separation. He had not taken it well, and after finding a love letter from Dr. Robertson in her pocket, they had argued all through the last weekend of his life.
By this time she had begun taking methamphetamine again, and Greg was highly suspicious. Then, on the weekend before his death, Greg had threatened to expose her relapse into drugs and her affair with Michael Robertson.
“Were these threats so serious that you planned to take your husband’s life?” asked Alex Loebig.
“Absolutely not,” declared Kristin.
Then Loebig gently led her through the final hours of Greg’s life. Sunday night, she said, Greg had snored a lot, at one point getting up complaining that he couldn’t sleep. On Monday morning his speech was slurry and she had called in sick for him, before going to work.
When she arrived, she said, Dr. Robertson had called her into his office, accusing her of using drugs again.
“I broke down sobbing,” she testified. “I was very upset. I was devastated and humiliated, disappointed in myself.”
After the showdown with Dr. Robertson, she claimed, she had driven home to check up on Greg, staying for ten minutes before returning to work. Later, she went back again for lunch. Since the revelation that she had bought a single rose at Vons, Kristin now incorporated this into her story for the first time.
“I bought a rose bouquet with baby’s breath that was wrapped up,” she told the jury, adding that she’d also purchased two cans of soup, a bottle of NyQuil and an over-the-counter sleeping aid.
Two years earlier, she had told Homicide detectives that she had made Greg soup at 11:30 a.m., but now her story had changed to ninety minutes later. She then returned to work, but at about 2:30 p.m. she left to meet Michael Robertson, who wanted to discuss her drug relapse.
“
He had a lot of questions for me about it,” she said. “We agreed to meet at a spot in La Jolla where we had met on frequent afternoons, just to chat and walk along a little trail.”
She said they spent an hour and a half at the spot they called “the Willows,” and then returned home at about 5:00 p.m.
“Greg was still sleeping,” she said. “I figured he was up at noon; he went back to bed. I didn’t want to disturb him.”
Then at about 6:30, she said, she left to run some errands at a local mall and bought some gas, before quickly returning to the ME’s office to make sure she had shut down some equipment.
When she returned at 8:00 p.m., Greg was “sleeping peacefully,” so she took a bubble bath, shaved her legs and had a shower.
“I changed into my PJ’s,” she continued. “And I towel-dried my hair. I went out. I had a booklet.” The next day was going to be Election Day. “I was reading the voting polls for the next day, deciding how I would vote.”
She claimed that, after brushing her teeth, she went into the bedroom, turned on the light and discovered Greg not breathing.
“I was petrified,” she told Loebig, beginning to sob. “I called 911.”
She said she had followed the emergency dispatcher’s advice, pulling Greg off the bed and onto the floor to administer CPR.
“By the time Greg passed away,” asked her attorney, “did you love Michael Robertson so much that you intended to take your husband’s life so that you could have Robertson?”
“Absolutely not,” declared Kristin. “That’s what divorce is for.”
When Alex Loebig finished questioning his client, it was near Friday lunchtime. Judge Thompson then recessed for the rest of the day, giving Kristin Rossum two-and-a-half days to prepare for her cross-examination by prosecutor Dan Goldstein. And she could be sure that it wouldn’t be as easy a ride as her attorney had given her.
Chapter 28
“I Wasn’t Telling the Whole Truth”
A little after 9:00 a.m. on Monday, November 4, prosecutor Dan Goldstein began his cross-examination of Kristin Rossum. He walked over to the witness box, looked straight into her eyes and asked: “Have you taken any drugs within the past ninety-six hours?”
Unfazed, Kristin said she had.
“Those medications are prescribed or non-prescribed?” Goldstein demanded to know.
“They are prescribed,” she answered blandly.
“What are you taking?”
“I took last night a sleeping pill to help me sleep,” said Kristin, her eyes darting around the courtroom. She had also taken a drug called Sonata, which had been prescribed by her primary care physician. Asked what other drugs she had taken in the last four days, she admitted taking half a Xanax, which the doctor had told her to take if she was particularly anxious or nervous.
“So you have taken medication, Xanax, which is some type of mood elevator, before you testified?” asked the deputy DA.
“It’s not a mood elevator,” snapped Kristin, adding that she had not taken any other drugs over the weekend except ibuprofen.
Over the next day and a half, the veteran prosecutor would rapid-fire salvos of questions from all directions to prove she was a liar, highlighting the many inconsistencies between her story and the evidence surrounding Greg’s death. And although she had often sobbed during the testimony of defense witnesses, she now remained surprisingly restrained, a fact not lost on the jury.
Early on, he asked why she hadn’t told detectives she had used her new cell phone to call Michael Robertson on the Sunday night before Greg’s death. Kristin said she had forgotten making the call until she had seen the phone records.
“You graduated summa cum laude?” said the prosecutor sarcastically.
In another exchange, Goldstein questioned her about why she’d called her drug dealer four times in rapid succession on the morning Greg died.
“Two things had happened, correct?” he told her. “One, you weren’t trying to stay clean anymore, were you?”
“That’s not true,” replied Rossum angrily.
“Were you calling [your drug dealer] to go golfing with him?” Goldstein asked mockingly.
Defense counsel objected and Judge Thompson sustained the objection. The question was argumentative.
Then Goldstein began asking her about keeping a stash of methamphetamine at the ME’s office. Kristin admitted she had, as Greg had started searching her things, suspicious that she had relapsed. She admitted lying to her husband that she was back on drugs, saying that she hadn’t told him the truth since she was about to walk out on the marriage.
Asked why she had left a bindle of meth at work, Kristin said she hadn’t wanted to bring it home because of the tension. But she did admit having a supply at home the night of Greg’s death.
Goldstein then asked her to show the jury how she smoked methamphetamine in foil.
“You can arrange it so that it can hold just a little bit of crystalline powder,” she answered, starting to pantomime constructing a tin-foil pipe with her hands. “And just hold a flame of some sort, a heat source, under it. And it will eventually melt and produce a little bit of smoke, which you can inhale.”
He then asked her why she had told Det Laurie Agnew that drugs were in her past, although she had smoked meth before the police interview.
“I wanted to keep my current drug use out of it,” said Kristin. “So yes, it was a lie. I was in a police station, of all things.”
The prosecutor asked her about hiding a meth pipe near the fume hood of the HPLC room at the ME’s office, pointing out that the machine removes fumes from the building. He then moved his questioning to her e-mails, asking about the one she sent Greg after the SOFT conference, accusing her husband of hurting her beyond repair, and listing a number of drugs including diazepam, zolpidem and Seroquel.
Kristin said that Greg had searched her purse and found dietary supplements and an over-the-counter drug, and that she had deliberately misled him, claiming the drugs were anti-psychotics and a hypnotic given to her by a friend because of her marital stress.
“Those pills didn’t actually exist,” she admitted. “I was sending Greg on a wild goose chase to show him how wrong he was. I was making a point.”
Goldstein asked whether she had told her husband that she’d had sex with Robertson in a hotel room at the conference. He then asked why she had lied to detectives about having a sexual relationship with her boss and why she hadn’t told investigators about it right away.
“I’m very sorry I wasn’t more forthcoming with that information,” she replied. “I was too ashamed to talk about the sex stuff.”
Questioned why she had told Det Agnew that she and Robertson had only met for coffee the summer before Greg’s death, Rossum was forced to admit that she had lied again.
“I wasn’t telling the whole truth, no,” she conceded.
“Because it might make you look bad?”
“Yes, I was very embarrassed.”
She also admitted lying to Jerome and Bertrand de Villers when they’d found Dr. Robertson at her apartment a couple of days after Greg’s passing.
“And you told them that Robertson was merely dropping off a paycheck, correct?” demanded Goldstein.
“No, he didn’t bring over a paycheck,” she said, adding that she had direct deposit.
Then, under intense questioning, Goldstein forced her to admit making up the whole Natalie Merchant concert raffle story she had told Greg.
“Michael asked me to go to the concert,” she explained. “I wanted to create an excuse to go.”
Kristin became emotional when Dan Goldstein produced some photographs taken of her and Greg by her parents at the Prado Restaurant, three days before his death. She suddenly burst into tears when she looked at the affectionate pictures, showing her head resting on Greg’s shoulder.
“We were celebrating our birthdays,” she sobbed.
The deputy DA then asked why she had criticized her husband for n
ot giving her flowers. After saying that she often exchanged roses with her lover, she said Greg thought that being romantic was too expensive.
“I liked the romance of a single rose,” she declared. “I had mentioned [to Greg], actually, back on our anniversary, that it didn’t cost that much for a single rose.”
Kristin then offered the theory that Greg had seen rose petals in her desk when he’d visited the ME’s office on October 26, and had spread them on his chest before he killed himself.
“So he had seen rose petals in your desk,” asked Goldstein incredulously. “Ergo, when he decided to kill himself, he was going to put rose petals on his chest as a symbolic event. Is that what your testimony is?”
“Yes,” she replied.
Judge Thompson then recessed for the day, and Kristin Rossum left the witness stand after five-and-half hours of intense questioning.
On Tuesday, November 5, Kristin Rossum entered the witness box for the second straight day of withering cross-examination. The consensus among the reporters in the court was that she was holding up remarkably well. Although she had already admitted lying on numerous occasions, she showed no signs of breaking down on the stand and confessing all.
Continuing his relentless questioning, the prosecutor asked why she had never mentioned Michael Robertson in the journal that she had given Det Agnew after her interview with Homicide on November 22, 2000.
“I talked about love and what love means to me,” she replied. “But I didn’t mention his name specifically.”
Goldstein then asked if she had lied in her journal, intimating that it was part of an elaborate staging of her husband’s murder. Kristin maintained that she had written it to express her feelings, conceding it was also to help Greg understand why the marriage wasn’t working, so as not to hurt his feelings.
“You wrote this diary,” asked the prosecutor, “this alleged diary, didn’t you, for Greg to read?”
“That wasn’t the sole purpose,” she replied. “If he would read it, I wanted him to be able to get an understanding from it.”