Poisoned Love

by Caitlin Rother

  “This is just so scary,” she said. “This has taken over all parts of my life. I have nothing left. The career that I loved, the husband that was wonderful…. I made mistakes, I did. I regret that our last days together were spent arguing. I regret that I decided to freakin’ take a long bath and then read a political poll [for the next day’s election] before going in and going to bed. Otherwise, he might have been okay…. Don’t make me bear more than is mine. I don’t know either why he did this.”

  Jerome came back to the affair, asking why Greg was so upset if it had truly ended. How did he even know about it? Kristin said she’d told him. She’d sat him down and told him how unhappy she was, that she’d met someone else who made her happy. They drank a lot of wine, and they ended up arguing.

  After that, she said, “he was literally in bed for two days. He didn’t get up at all. Then, on Monday, he went to work, came home at five, had chips and salsa and a beer, and went to bed. He did the same thing the next day, too. Didn’t talk to me at all.”

  She said they agreed to work on the relationship, and he was going to try to show her that it was the right thing for her, that she “was just looking for things that were fantasy.”

  Then she skipped to the Friday night before Greg died. “Friday night was fun. We were with my parents, and we were being friendly. It was a big night. He wanted things to look good for my parents.”

  Kristin’s timeline ran one day into the next, and she told them about eating some steaks one of her brother’s had sent her. They drank beer and wine, she recalled, and said things they shouldn’t have.

  “He got sick,” she said. “And the next day [Sunday], we picked up where we left off.”

  Greg went to bed early, she said, and around 11:30 P.M., he got up with a headache and said he couldn’t sleep. Then he went back to bed and snored for the rest of the night.

  “On Monday morning,” she said, “his speech was slurry. He sounded like he was drunk…. It was unusual. I didn’t know till later that he had taken some pills.”

  “Did you ask him what he took?” Bertrand asked.

  Greg told her he’d taken some clonazepam, Kristin said. But no, she didn’t ask how many he’d taken, and he didn’t volunteer that information.

  “Didn’t it scare you?” Bertrand asked.

  “Of course, it did,” she said. “So what did I do? I called in sick for him.”

  Jerome wanted to know if Greg asked her to call in for him. No, Kristin said, it was her decision. She thought he just needed to sleep.

  Bertrand and Jerome tried to pin Kristin down on when she thought he’d taken the pills.

  “You told me that Greg had thrown away these pills,” Jerome said.

  “He did,” she said. “I saw him throw away the prescription bottle, and you always throw away the prescription bottle and the drugs in separate places.”

  Jerome wouldn’t let up. “Kristin, you told me on Tuesday that ‘Greg took all of them.’”

  “All of them, yes, but that’s not how many,” she said. “He didn’t say how many.”

  When she came back at noon, or maybe 11:30 A.M., she said, he got up, and his speech still sounded a little slurred so she asked him not to take any more pills. That’s when he said, “There aren’t any more.”

  “So, at that point, if he took more, I don’t know what happened,” she said.

  She said she made him some soup, but he didn’t eat much. He mostly pushed it around. He still seemed upset at her, so she went back to work. She said she shared her concerns about Greg with Michael, and the two of them left work around 3 P.M. to talk some more.

  They stopped at the grocery store to pick up “some more soups and stuff,” she said, then they parted ways, and she went home to check on Greg again around 5:00 or 5:15 P.M. He was lying on his back, still sleeping and snoring.

  “There’s no way,” Jerome said. “You don’t know for sure if he was sleeping? Did he say something?”

  “Did he grunt?” Bertrand asked.

  Greg did give her some sort of acknowledgment, she said. She was frustrated he wasn’t more responsive but figured he was still mad at her. So she went back to work around 6:30 P.M. because she wasn’t sure if she’d shut down her equipment properly.

  When she got home, she took a bath and a shower. And when she got out, Greg was cold and not breathing.

  “I called 911, hysterical, and turned on the light, and he was white, and I had to take him off the bed and onto the floor,” she said. “[He was] dead weight, and I was struggling. I couldn’t keep the phone in my ear, and he was flopping. Do you know what that’s like? When you pull someone and they just clunk?”

  No, Jerome said. He didn’t.

  “It’s the worst experience ever, and you try to breathe life into a lifeless body,” she said. “I looked at him, and he’s the color that he is and I know…that’s what they look like when they come in to work. That was the scariest thing I have ever witnessed. The paramedics came here and worked on him so much, and the officer is going to call me back with their names because I want to write them a letter…. His color was coming back, and they even detected a little heartbeat thing. I feel haunted by knowing that I was here the whole time.”

  Jerome said he couldn’t relate to the pain of going through something like that.

  “God, I miss my Greg, my husband,” she said. “I go over in my head wondering, wishing I could’ve done more, wishing I knew it was like that. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”

  The irony of the situation, she said, was that the pills were hers. He’d taken them away from her so she wouldn’t use them. It was an unfortunate situation, she said, and it was unlike him to take pills, but he was depressed.

  “Greg is a wonderful, wonderful person, but he does have a streak of both stubbornness and wanting to get back at people,” she said. “Your father, for instance. He decided his life was better without him and that it would hurt his father that he was no longer in his life, and he told me that time and time again.”

  That was Greg’s pride, Jerome said. “He didn’t want to break first.”

  Kristin said Greg definitely had a problem dealing with his anger.

  “I think he was trying to get back at me,” she said.

  Jerome said he still couldn’t understand why Kristin would want to come right back to the apartment.

  “I’m here because I’m visiting mortuaries, deciding where we’re going to celebrate him. I’m here to feel like I’m kind of home, because I miss him and I’m surrounded by him here.”

  Jerome said it was all such a shock. He didn’t know how to deal with it. Kristin said she was barely holding on and started crying. She said she wished she could share her pain with Greg’s family, so they could grieve together.

  “All I can think of is, my God, what did I think I was looking for in life. I had it. I miss him so much. I keep getting calls from everybody who loves him and worked with him, saying that they are so sorry, and what a good man he was, and he was such a great man.”

  “He just seemed happy to me,” Jerome said.

  He was happy, Kristin said, when he thought things were going well between them. “You hear people say things like, I couldn’t live without you. You make me so happy. I don’t want to be with anyone else but you because you make me happy.”

  Kristin said she hadn’t dated anybody during college and wondered how she could’ve “been so fortunate to have met the right person under those circumstances…. But now I realize, you know what, it was fate that brought us together. He was sent to me. It wasn’t fair for him or for me to be questioning things like this, and I wanted to find out before we were married for five years with two children…. I just needed a little space.”

  Jerome said he was still bothered by the same questions: Did she give him the drugs, and if not, how did he get them? Greg didn’t take drugs, he said. None of this made any sense.

  “I’m afraid that the death certificate is going to say suicide,
and I don’t want that, and that’s why I’m doing my hardest to rule out any possibilities,” he said. “…He was happy and paying off his debt. He was happy about work.”

  Kristin said their debts were always an emotional issue for Greg. For a long time he would bring up the subject every day, repeatedly. When they first got married, she was only working part time, and so she racked up even more bills. He was upset about his mother’s money problems, too.

  “He had a lot weighing down on him,” she said.

  After they’d finished talking, Jerome went into the bathroom for a few minutes. He saw cigarette ashes in the sink and around the toilet. He had no idea Kristin smoked.

  “Wow,” he thought. “I really don’t know this girl.”

  He opened the medicine cabinet to see what other unknowns he might discover but found nothing of note. As he was leaving, Kristin tried to give him a hug, and he felt himself stiffen. He didn’t want to hug her.

  Dan Anderson came down to San Diego on Friday, November 10, to attend a CAT conference at the same Shelter Island hotel as the previous year’s. Anderson hoped that Michael’s affair with Kristin had ended, and that he and his buddy could play a bit over the weekend.

  When Anderson didn’t see Michael there that morning, he asked his friend’s coworkers where he was. Michael was coming later, they said, and you won’t believe what happened: Kristin Rossum’s husband is dead.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Anderson said, shocked. “How?”

  Suicide, they said. The first thing Anderson wondered was whether Kristin’s husband killed himself over her affair with Michael.

  Michael seemed in fairly normal spirits when he showed up that afternoon, although Anderson noticed that he talked on his cell phone quite a bit, away from everyone else. When the two of them finally chatted, neither one mentioned the affair.

  Later that week, the de Villers family hired an attorney to file a petition in probate court, attempting to gain some control over the case. They asked the court to appoint Jerome as special administrator of his brother’s body so that the organ and tissue specimens could be turned over to him, and he could hire an independent pathologist to perform a second autopsy.

  Because Kristin worked at the Medical Examiner’s Office and was having a “possible relationship” with her supervisor, the de Villers family told the court they didn’t believe the county’s autopsy results were trustworthy. “The family members do not believe the decedent committed suicide, but rather that Ms. Rossum may have poisoned him,” their petition stated.

  “Ms. Rossum has informed the family of her intention to have decedent’s body cremated as soon as she has custody of the body. The immediate family members do not want the body to be cremated at the conclusion of the [San Diego Police Department] investigation.”

  A probate judge approved the petition on November 15, but after talking again with Blackbourne, Yves decided a second autopsy wouldn’t be necessary.

  Greg’s old friend Bill Leger got a call from Kristin on Tuesday evening, November 7, to let him know that Greg had overdosed by taking some of her old prescription drugs. She sounded upset, like she was crying. It was tough to hear her through his own tears.

  Kristin told him he was the second person she’d called. He said he’d come down to San Diego as soon as he could get on a plane, hoping to provide some comfort to the grieving widow of one of his closest friends.

  Leger got to her apartment in the early evening that Friday, and they ordered a large pizza around eight o’clock. He ate two pieces, and Kristin, who looked withdrawn and a little distraught, barely made it through half a piece. Kristin informed Leger that she’d been to a conference with her boss. She’d had too much to drink one night while she was at the conference, she said, and she and Greg got into an argument over the phone. Greg was very jealous and was wondering why she’d gotten drunk at a professional conference with her boss.

  Kristin also told Leger she was starting to have feelings for her boss, an announcement that didn’t sit very well with him so soon after Greg’s death. Michael had called, she said, and he might come over, if Leger didn’t mind. Leger was hesitant but agreed that it would be okay.

  Sometime around 10 P.M., Kristin said she was getting tired. She wanted to take a bath, be by herself, and go to bed.

  Kristin seemed to be in better spirits and a little more energetic when Leger arrived with his parents around 8:00 or 9:00 the next morning. He opened the fridge to store the platters of food his mother made for Greg’s memorial service on Sunday and noticed there was only one piece of pizza left in the fridge. That was odd, he thought, because he’d wrapped up six or seven before he’d left. Leger assumed that Michael must have come over, but he didn’t ask.

  After that, Leger and Kristin spoke only once more by phone. He didn’t like the way she’d rushed him out of the apartment, and he could tell she was back on the meth. She’d made several trips to the bathroom, and when she came out, she was all jumpy and weird.

  “Plus,” Leger said, “telling me she had feelings for another guy four days after her husband died really bugged me.”

  The memorial service, held on Greg’s birthday, November 12, was just for family. Yves de Villers read part of the Bible, and Ralph Rossum said a few words. Since there was still a hold on the body, the de Villers family had to leave without their son’s ashes.

  Greg’s body wasn’t released from the Medical Examiner’s Office until December 4, so he wasn’t cremated until December 8. Kristin picked up the ashes and gave them to her parents to keep. It wasn’t until April that a friend of the de Villers family came to pick them up, along with Greg’s other personal belongings, including a fishing pole and a high school yearbook. When his brothers went through the items, Jerome noticed that Greg’s more expensive fishing and camping gear was not among them.

  For many nights, Jerome spent hours lying awake in bed, his mind spinning with questions. When he finally could let go and drift off, Greg showed up in his dreams. One night Jerome dreamed that he and Greg were fighting at the grocery store.

  “Why did you let Kristin do this to you?” Jerome asked him.

  Once Greg’s family finally got the ashes back from the Rossums, they planned to scatter them around Duck Lake at Mammoth, one of Greg’s favorite places in the mountains, a special spot they’d discovered when the boys were growing up.

  Chapter 10

  About a week after Greg’s death, toxicologist Cathy Hamm was using the phone in Michael’s office one night after he’d left the lab. She was making arrangements to go to Joshua Tree, and Michael’s phone was the only one in the lab where she could sit down and take notes. She grabbed a yellow notepad on his desk and was flipping through it to find a blank page when she came across a letter he’d written to Kristin. She couldn’t believe what she was reading. She was so shocked, she started shaking inside. All this time she’d suspected the affair, and they had denied it. But here was proof. Validation.

  Michael had written the letter on Thursday night, October 26, right after the Yankees won the World Series and about two weeks after he and Kristin had gone to the SOFT conference together. He was missing her.

  He told her how much he loved her and felt loved, and how he was looking forward to the day he could display his affection more publicly. He laid out the details of how they’d met eight months earlier. Perhaps it was comforting to put them on paper as he sat at his desk, fantasizing about the day they would finally be together. But for Hamm, it only confirmed what she’d felt in her gut all along.

  “You and I played out what some may call fate, others destiny,” he wrote.

  Even though they were both married, Michael said, he was still excited about the prospect of spending the rest of his life with her. He’d never felt this way about anyone before. Then he began to get maudlin. He told himself that she was “progressing,” but now that he was “alone,” it was getting harder and harder to wait for her to leave Greg.

 
“Now as I sit here, time slows down,” he wrote. “The days pass and another night drags on and I tell myself it’s okay, not many to go now. Then days become weeks and weeks months….”

  Michael said he felt himself building emotional barriers to protect himself and his pride, frustrated that their time together was spent with her watching the clock “for fear of letting Greg down.” He felt most “vulnerable” at times like her birthday, when she was at Greg’s side, not his. And now he was thinking about the holidays, and he was still unsure whether she would actually leave her husband by then.

  Hamm immediately called her coworker, Ray Gary, to tell him about the letter, and he told her to make a copy of it. Then they tried to figure out what to do with it in light of Greg’s death. Hamm called her defense attorney friend to ask for advice and was told to take it immediately to the police. Hamm agreed that the police should have the letter but decided to leave that uncomfortable task to another coworker.

  Within a few weeks of the toxicology conference in San Diego, Dan Anderson got a call from an investigator who asked a bunch of questions about fentanyl and the paper that Anderson had published about fentanyl patches. The investigator had no clue that Anderson was a friend of Michael’s or that he was going on some wrong information. He thought Anderson had presented the fentanyl paper at the SOFT conference in Milwaukee, when, in fact, it had been a year earlier in Puerto Rico. Anderson tried asking some of his own questions, but the investigator wouldn’t disclose why he was calling. After he hung up, Anderson told his colleagues about the call and asked if they thought the death of Kristin Rossum’s husband was related to fentanyl.

  Anderson e-mailed Michael to tell him about the strange call and asked what was going on in San Diego concerning fentanyl. Michael wrote back, saying he didn’t know.

  Anderson received a subsequent call from yet another investigator, who also didn’t know that Anderson was a friend of Michael’s. The investigator asked whether it was typical for a toxicologist to keep articles on fentanyl in his office. Anderson said yes, in fact, he probably had twenty-five to thirty articles about the drug in his own desk. That’s part of what forensic toxicologists do for a living, he said, they study drugs and how much can be fatal.