Poisoned Love

by Caitlin Rother

  On Friday, November 3, Greg told Gruenwald how mad he was at the guy he’d recommended be hired as a fund-raising consultant because the guy hadn’t done the work he was supposed to do for Orbigen. Gruenwald noticed that Greg was acting unusually hyperactive and angry that day.

  “He used to be my friend, and he screwed me over,” Gruenwald recalled Greg telling him.

  That night after work, Greg and Kristin went to Vons and bought all the fixings for gin martinis before they went out to dinner at the Prado. Constance and Ralph arrived late because traffic was bad, so they were only able to take a couple of quick sips before they had to head downtown. They ate dinner and then walked around the Gaslamp District so Kristin and Greg could show the Rossums the Friday night scene.

  On the previous Thursday, October 26, someone sat at the iMac computer Greg brought home from Orbigen and searched the Internet, using key words such as “speed,” “crank,” “meth,” and “amphetamines.”

  Four days later, someone sat at the same computer and searched for a job as a translator, foreign language teacher, and bilingual tutor in New York, Atlanta, San Francisco, Beverly Hills, Oklahoma City, Costa Mesa, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis.

  On the following Saturday, November 4, between 11:15 A.M. and 12:05 P.M., someone used the computer to do a Google search for facilities in San Diego that screened blood and urine for drugs, including LabCorp Patient Service Centers. Other Internet searches were done on how to make opium and crystal meth using household chemicals, to access the Mayo Clinic’s medical reference library on various prescription drugs, and to check the weather report for Mammoth. Some of the same drug sites were visited by someone using Kristin’s computer at work, which required a password to log on.

  Then, on December 30, around 6 P.M., someone sitting at the new Compaq computer in Kristin’s apartment, which Greg had purchased sometime in October, did a search for information on the Narconon drug addiction treatment program, developed by William Benitez, an inmate at Arizona State Prison, who drew inspiration from the writings of L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology. The person also searched the site for Narcotics Anonymous.

  Kristin came into the Medical Examiner’s Office on Sunday morning, November 5, to update her resume. She made a quick call home around 9:23 A.M. and then called Woody’s Smoke Shop, a head shop in Normal Heights that sells all kinds of smoking paraphernalia, around 9:30 A.M. She dialed her apartment again at 10:04 A.M.

  Around 3:30 that afternoon, Bertrand called Greg from Marie’s condo in Thousand Oaks. Bertrand was having trouble setting up an e-mail account for Marie and asked Greg for his help. They talked for about half an hour. Greg said he was tired and had been “just kind of hanging around the house” all day. He said he and Kristin had been drinking gin the night before, and he wasn’t used to it. They talked about going snowboarding for Greg’s birthday, and Greg said he would make the arrangements. As an alternative, they also talked about Greg driving up to Ventura County for a family dinner the following weekend.

  Michael had noticed a change in Kristin’s behavior of late, so he came into work on Sunday, November 5, and decided to go through her desk. He found a bindle of white powder that looked like meth, which he flushed down the toilet. He felt physically sick, angry, and disappointed. Why hadn’t she told him she was using methamphetamine again?

  Cathy Hamm came in at midday and saw Michael going through cabinets in the lab. He looked disheveled, as if he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. She asked how he was doing and told him he looked like he was “bach-ing it,” meaning he was living like a bachelor.

  Michael was short with her. He said he was cleaning up, tossing stuff away. But she saw no pile of items that he might have gathered to throw away.

  She told him she’d come in to get ready for a lab meeting by setting up the equipment she was going to use. He said he’d help her.

  After they set it up, he said, “Now are you happy?”

  “I want to try it out,” she said.

  Michael turned on the machine and it worked.

  “Now are you happy?” he asked again.

  The two of them got ready to go together, but Hamm left first, leaving Michael behind in the lab.

  Michael spoke to Nicole for about half an hour just before 5 P.M., then again for twelve minutes around 8:20 P.M.

  Chapter 8

  On Monday morning, November 6, Kristin made a quick series of calls from the cordless phone in the kitchen to Armando Garcia in Tijuana: two at 7:16, one at 7:17, and one at 7:33.

  Then, at 7:42 A.M., Kristin called in sick for Greg. But for reasons that would be debated later in court, she left a message on Greg’s own voice mail at Orbigen. She later said she figured someone else would hear the message because Greg shared a phone number with Chris Gruenwald, the owner’s son.

  “Yes, hi, this is, um, Kristin, Greg’s wife, calling,” her message said. “He’s not feeling well at all today, so he’s most likely going to be taking the whole day. He’s sleeping right now, but I just wanted to let you know. Hopefully, someone else will get this message and um, that it will [not] be a problem. Okay, thank you. Bye.”

  Kristin got to work later than usual, between 8:00 and 8:30 A.M. She looked tired and upset, as if she hadn’t slept. Her coworkers saw her go into Michael’s office and close the door right after the morning meeting that he typically attended, which ended around 9 A.M. She was in his office for at least half an hour, and they could see through the glass pane in the door that she was crying.

  After that, Kristin left the lab and went back and forth several times to her apartment to check on Greg. Just after noon, maintenance manager Herman Schledwitz saw Kristin drive into the La Jolla Del Sol parking lot a little faster than he liked to see in a residential area. In fact, she almost hit another car as she parked in front of the office. He knew it was she because he’d helped her jump-start that white Toyota. He saw her jump out and run toward her apartment.

  Kristin called the Medical Examiner’s Office on her cell phone—her second call ever on that phone—at 12:20 P.M. A little while later, she returned to the lab for a bit, still looking upset. She met with Michael again and then left for the day around 2:30 P.M. Michael took off shortly thereafter to meet Kristin somewhere outside the office, where they’d arranged to talk in private.

  Around 2:45 P.M., Donna Tabor, the Del Sol’s marketing director, came out of her office and saw Kristin’s white Toyota parked askew in the space next to hers. When she came back from lunch between 4:00 and 4:30, Kristin’s car was gone.

  At 9:22 P.M., Kristin called 911. She told the dispatcher that her twenty-six-year-old husband was in bed—cold, unconscious, and not breathing. The dispatcher told Kristin to pull him off the bed and onto the floor, flat on his back. Kristin couldn’t even respond to some of the dispatcher’s instructions, she was sobbing so hard.

  “Is there anybody there to help you?” the dispatcher asked.

  “No,” Kristin said. “I’m by myself.”

  The dispatcher told her to kneel by her husband, tilt his head back, put her ear next to his mouth, and see if she could feel or hear any breathing, or see his chest rise. Kristin said he wasn’t breathing, so the dispatcher started telling her how to do CPR, alternating mouth-to-mouth breathing and compressions on his chest. The dispatcher had to repeat herself several times through Kristin’s sobs.

  “What I want you to do is put the heel of your hand on the breastbone in the center of his chest, right between his nipples,” the dispatcher said.

  “Okay,” Kristin said, sobbing.

  “Put your other hand on top of that hand…. Are you doing that?”

  “Yes,” Kristin said.

  The dispatcher told her to push down firmly, pump fifteen times, and count out loud. “Go ahead and do it.”

  “9, 10, 11…,” Kristin counted.

  After leading Kristin through the steps of CPR—pumping, counting, and breathing—the dispatcher told Kristin that
the paramedics were outside the building but instructed her to keep pumping and breathing for Greg. Kristin continued to cry as she counted aloud.

  “Okay, two more breaths,” the dispatcher said. “You’re doing fine…. Are they inside?”

  “No,” Kristin said, wailing. “They’re here. They’re inside.”

  The dispatcher asked if they’d taken over or if Kristin was going to continue.

  “They’re with him now,” Kristin replied.

  “Okay. Are they doing CPR?”

  “Not yet,” Kristin said.

  When the dispatcher heard the paramedics trying to talk to Kristin in the background, she told Kristin to hang up.

  UCSD officers Bill MacIntyre, Karen Scofield, and Edward “Scott” Garcia arrived at the Regents Road apartment at 9:27 P.M., along with the fire engine. The paramedics had already begun CPR on Greg by then, so the officers started looking around the apartment.

  They found a nearly empty bottle of prescription cough medicine, dated February 6, 1999, in the bathroom, but no other drug containers. On the dining-room table, they found a shredded letter that was partially taped together and stuck in a ziplock bag, a note Kristin wrote to Greg that she was going shopping for her cousin’s wedding present, some apartment rental ads from the newspaper, and a listing of some mental health counselors. The officers saw no evidence of a struggle and no suicide note.

  Garcia thumbed through a three-ring binder he found on the coffee table, hoping to find a suicide note, but soon realized it was Kristin’s journal. He later summarized its contents in his report: “Rossum felt her marriage was a mistake, she’d gotten married too young, she’s self-conscious about her looks, wants to separate from Greg.”

  Garcia questioned Kristin about what had been going on with her husband. She told him she and Greg had been discussing a separation on Saturday and Sunday. She said Greg told her “I can’t live without you,” but he wouldn’t discuss it further. Then he’d taken some pills “to sleep,” she said.

  After the paramedics had given up on trying to resuscitate Greg and carried him out on a backboard to the ambulance, Garcia took Kristin to the hospital in the backseat of his cruiser. She cried the whole way. Once she got to the hospital, Garcia heard her calling a friend on her cell phone. Her boss arrived about fifteen or twenty minutes later, and Garcia saw them standing close, whispering. Garcia left and returned to the apartment.

  UCSD Detective Sergeant Bob Jones was asleep when he got a call at 10:22 P.M. He usually went to bed early so that he could get up at 4:30 A.M. and into work by 6 A.M., bypassing the commuter traffic between his home in Escondido and the station on the La Jolla campus.

  He was told that an hour earlier, three of his officers had responded to a medical aid call for a man who had stopped breathing at the La Jolla Del Sol apartments. Jones was told the man had possibly committed suicide.

  Jones spent the next few minutes waking himself up, then he called back to arrange a four-way conference call with Garcia at the hospital; MacIntyre, who’d stayed behind at the apartment; and the dispatcher. After nailing down who’d seen what, Jones got into his car and headed for the Regents Road complex. He arrived at 11:25 P.M.

  Garcia and MacIntyre showed him around the apartment, while Scofield stayed outside on the front landing. The fewer people inside the apartment, the better. While looking for drug vials, MacIntyre found a plastic syringe cap on the floor, next to the bed, under the comforter. Jones put on some rubber gloves and took everything out of two small white trash receptacles that his officers had moved into the living room. He found nothing of interest in them.

  Jones interviewed Kristin after she returned from the hospital around 11:45 P.M., listening closely for inconsistencies with what she’d told his officers earlier that evening. She was visibly shaking, sometimes incoherent, and crying. It was hard to understand what she was saying. When her father arrived around midnight, she jumped up to hug him.

  That morning, Kristin told Jones, Greg didn’t feel well so she called in sick for him. She left for work at the Medical Examiner’s Office and arrived around 8 A.M. Later that morning, she called Greg several times, but there was no answer. So she drove home around 10:30 to check on him and found him asleep. She returned to work fifteen minutes later. She came home again for lunch around 12:30, woke Greg up, and saw him eat “a little soup.” Over lunch, she said, he told her he’d taken some of her old oxycodone and clonazepam to sleep, but she didn’t know when or how much. She said she thought the drug vials had been thrown out, but Greg must’ve saved the pills somehow. Greg returned to bed, and she went back to work around 1 P.M.

  Kristin said she came home again between 5:00 and 5:30, found Greg sleeping, and gave him a kiss. He was warm and breathing. She ate some leftovers for dinner and left around six o’clock to shop for a wedding gift for her cousin at the University Towne Center, a shopping mall nearby. She then went by the lab to turn off a machine she’d left on earlier that day and stopped to get some gas. She returned home around 8 P.M., saw Greg sleeping and heard him breathing, then took a long bath and a shower, dried herself off, and got ready for bed.

  She said it was about 9:20 when she walked over to the bed. Greg’s head was sticking out from the covers, with the blanket all the way up to his face. She went to give him a kiss and realized he wasn’t breathing and his face was cold. She immediately called 911. When the dispatcher told her to put Greg on the floor, she said, she pulled back the blanket and saw rose petals over his chest. They fell to the floor when she pulled him off the bed.

  Jones was surprised by how different Kristin looked compared to the healthy and attractive young woman in the wedding photos that were displayed around the apartment. She seemed distraught, but as he listened to her story, he saw no immediate reason to disbelieve her. Her emotions seemed sincere. Plus, since the paramedics took the body, he figured they must’ve thought they had a chance to revive him. If Greg had been dead for a while, he thought they would’ve left his body on the bedroom floor.

  In his twenty years with the campus police department at UCSD, Jones had investigated dozens of deaths, and about half of them were determined to be suicides. The most common method that suicidal students chose was to jump off a building. He’d also seen several cases involving students who shot themselves in the head, two who drove off a cliff, two who hung themselves, and one who lit himself on fire. Another died of carbon monoxide poisoning, and another from sliced wrists.

  In Jones’s experience, there were only four ways a person could die: murder, suicide, accidental death, or natural death. And in domestic violence cases, he found there were always three sides to every story. Her story, his story, and the truth, somewhere in the middle.

  His department was not qualified or equipped to investigate homicides and had an agreement with the San Diego Police Department (SDPD) to pass those cases along. However, Jones had never been faced with that necessity before.

  Jones and his officers took Kristin’s “Hi, sleepy” note, the shredded letter, the list of mental health counselors, and the apartment listings as evidence. Kristin told the officers that the shredded letter was one an “old boyfriend wrote,” and that Greg had been trying to tape it back together.

  Angie Wagner, the investigator from the Medical Examiner’s Office, got a call at 10:41 P.M. from Scripps Memorial Hospital, saying they had a sudden and unexpected death. Michael Robertson called the office on his cell phone at 11:04 P.M. and 11:27 P.M., and spoke at least one of those times to Wagner, letting her know that the man who died was Kristin’s husband. The only other investigator on duty already had a death call pending, and it would have been hours before she could respond, so Wagner said she’d handle Greg’s case. The Medical Examiner’s staff considered it a professional courtesy not to keep a coworker waiting when a relative died.

  Wagner arrived at the hospital around 11:45 P.M., only minutes after Kristin and Michael had left. She pulled back the sheet that covered Greg’s body and di
d her examination, noting that he was wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt that had been cut during the resuscitation efforts. She saw no obvious trauma or sign of foul play. Because Kristin worked at the Medical Examiner’s Office, Wagner secured Greg’s body bag with a red, tamper-resistant seal. The red tag meant that no one was allowed to open the bag in the absence of the pathologist assigned to the case.

  After finishing at the hospital, Wagner went to Kristin’s apartment around 1:00 A.M. and saw Michael standing at the base of the stairs leading to it.

  As Wagner examined the bedroom, she noted that the bedding had been rolled down to the foot of the mattress and that there were numerous rose petals, along with a stem and sepals, on the carpet but not in the bed. They felt moist so she could tell they were fresh. Because she’d been told that Greg probably died of an overdose, she was looking for clues to help identify whatever he’d taken. She took note of a quarter-full bottle of aspirin on the nightstand and two plastic cups of a clear liquid that looked and smelled like water.

  She explored the drawers and cupboards, looked behind the mattress and under the pillows, but found no drug vials or containers. Wagner collected a nearly empty and uncapped bottle of prescription cough syrup, which contained a generic form of Vicodin, from the bathroom counter as evidence. She didn’t go out on the balcony, so she didn’t notice the two trash cans out there.

  After Jones was done with his interview, Wagner asked Kristin her own questions as they sat on the couch in the living room. Either Wagner’s investigative report was more detailed than that of the campus police, or Kristin told her a more in-depth account of the past few days.