Poisoned Love

by Caitlin Rother

  “I know it’s not my fault,” Kristin said. “But, yes, I feel like a certain responsibility, especially when his family treats me that way.”

  They took a break so Kristin could go to the bathroom. Agnew rejoined the interview, and Valle explained they’d been talking about Jerome.

  “He would rather believe some ludicrous conspiracy theory rather than his brother [killed himself],” Kristin said.

  “What kind of conspiracy theory?” Agnew asked.

  Kristin said Jerome thought someone might have entered the apartment while Kristin was taking a bath and drugged Greg.

  Agnew showed Kristin the letter Hamm had found in Michael’s office and told Kristin that someone had sent it to her. Kristin said she’d never seen it before. After scanning it, she said his other letters weren’t so sappy.

  “We were dreamers, I guess; it was a lovely romance,” Kristin said. “It really was, and I, I don’t know if or where it will lead.”

  Agnew decided to take a more blunt approach. “I don’t know you, and I didn’t know Greg,” she said flatly. “I don’t know Mike. I haven’t talked to Mike. I don’t know his wife. We have somebody that’s dead, and we have two people that wanted out of the marriage, and we have somebody that wants somebody by the holidays.”

  Agnew continued to pound on Kristin with more specific questions, while Kristin grew increasingly defensive about her relationship with Michael.

  “I love him,” she said matter-of-factly. “I do; I love him. I, I love him. He’s a very wonderful person. I, I love his character. I loved him as a person. He’s—very dear to me.”

  “Okay, maybe you loved him enough that you guys just had to get rid of Greg,” Agnew said.

  “Maybe, through a separation,” Kristin said, her brow creased with an expression of disbelief that Agnew could suggest such a thing. “That’s disgusting. That’s horrible.”

  “People do it,” Agnew said.

  “Not me,” Kristin said. “This is, that’s ludicrous…. He was such a sweet and good man.”

  “And he’s dead,” Agnew said.

  “I know,” Kristin said, raising her voice and crying. “I feel the responsibility for it, I really do, but I did not make him do what he did. I hurt him. Maybe I wasn’t the best wife, but I’d never hurt him.”

  Kristin laid her head on the table, sobbing.

  Later in the interview, Valle asked Kristin if she had access at work to all the drugs she’d been telling them about. They went over them one by one, and Kristin said, yes, she did. He also had her run through the procedures for logging in the drug standards and describe how the evidence envelopes were locked up.

  Valle explained that he was asking her all these questions because there were rumors going around that she may have had something to do with Greg’s death.

  “I don’t even know how to deal with that,” Kristin said, shaking her head.

  Kristin dismissed the rumored suggestion that she might have taken a drug from work and put it in Greg’s food or drink.

  “That is ridiculous,” she said, rolling her eyes and looking away.

  Valle asked if any of the drugs they’d been talking about came in a skin patch or in a form that could be injected intravenously.

  “No, they’re pills,” she said.

  “There was nothing at your home at the time that could’ve been taken with a needle or patches or anything else that had a hard and solid form?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Kristin said, sounding frustrated and despairing.

  Then Valle switched his attention to Kristin and her personal habits. “Look at me,” he told her. “You don’t have a drug habit at this time at all? Please don’t lie to me.”

  Kristin took a deep breath. “I do,” she said.

  Her voice broke as she admitted she’d bought some meth on the street from an acquaintance and relapsed. She was working with a counselor and taking it day by day. She’d slipped up a couple of times but hadn’t had any since the previous Saturday, four days earlier. She also admitted that she’d started using again two weeks before Greg’s death.

  “I was building up the courage to go through with this, and I, my escape,” she said, stumbling over her words.

  Kristin said she’d been spending about a hundred dollars at a time to buy drugs. She started out using a couple of times a day then trailed off to just sporadic use. In fact, she said, she was nervous when the investigators came to her apartment the night of Greg’s death because she had some hidden in a kitchen drawer under a towel, and she was scared they were going to find it.

  Valle asked if she’d ever given Greg any of her meth. “No,” Kristin replied.

  “Did you ever intentionally give [him] any of the other drugs that we’ve talked about?”

  “No, of course not,” she said.

  Valle, who’d been out of the room during the earlier rose petal discussion, asked Kristin where they came from. The number of roses Greg bought her changed again, this time to eighteen. She said four of them lasted until the Friday night before he died, and she thought she threw them away Sunday night.

  Valle asked if the petals she found on Greg looked like they were from the birthday batch.

  “I don’t know if they were from the same batch,” she said, “but they were the same, I mean, it was a beautiful….”

  “The colors were the same?” Valle asked.

  Yes, Kristin said, they were “beautiful red roses.”

  Kristin cried some more as the two detectives wound up the interview. Agnew asked whether Greg had known that Kristin had relapsed.

  “He confronted me and I denied it,” Kristin said. He got very upset about it, she added. In fact, he threatened to tell her superiors, not just that she had a drug history, but that she was using again.

  Finally, Valle said it would be helpful if they could read her journal, the one that was lying on the coffee table in the living room when the campus police arrived at her apartment the night Greg died.

  “It’s nothing that’s going to be exposed to anybody at your workplace,” he said.

  Kristin agreed.

  “The last thing we want to see is you go off into that kind of hell again, because you know what you went through to get away from [the meth],” Agnew said. “…But we do have to look at things.”

  Agnew walked Kristin out into the hallway and suggested for the second time that day that Kristin take a polygraph test. At the very least, Agnew told her, it could get the de Villers family off her back. Agnew could tell that it was finally starting to sink in with Kristin that the police were seriously looking at her as a suspect in her husband’s death. Despite all the crying faces and sobbing noises Kristin had made, this was the first time Agnew saw actual tears in her eyes.

  “You guys actually think I might have done this?” Kristin asked.

  Now that they thought Kristin wasn’t playacting, Valle became concerned about letting her drive home alone to get the diary in case she crashed her car. He and Agnew offered to drive her home in their police car, but she refused. So, Valle suggested that Agnew drive them both to the University City apartment in Kristin’s white Toyota. Again, Kristin said no.

  Kristin finally agreed to let Agnew ride with her in the Toyota, but said she had to drive because the car had some mechanical problems. Valle said he would follow behind in his unmarked vehicle, so he could bring Agnew and the diary back to the station. Agnew felt uncomfortable with the whole idea but went along because she was the junior partner.

  For the first five or ten minutes, Kristin kept trying to talk to Agnew about the case, repeatedly asking why they would think she had something to do with Greg’s death. Agnew tried to steer the conversation toward more neutral topics. With Kristin crying and so agitated, she was scared for their safety. She also knew that without a tape recorder running, whatever Kristin said would be virtually useless in court. When the ride was over, Agnew vowed never to take another one like it.

  The cover
of Kristin’s diary was dark purple and decorated with an overlay of pale dried leaves. Agnew opened up the book to find that it was actually a small three-ring binder holding a short stack of lined pages that were filled with Kristin’s handwriting.

  The first entry was dated September 8. Many of the subsequent entries weren’t dated, but they contained time references, such as “October is coming to a close.”

  Curiously, Kristin had written three separate entries dated November 7, the day after Greg died, and their content overlapped somewhat. Two of them were written as sorrowful letters to Greg, starting “My Dearest Gregie” and detailing how much she missed him. She could still hear his voice and see his blue eyes gazing at her lovingly. “I can feel your warm body wrapped around mine, lying like spoons,” she wrote. “I keep expecting you to enter the front door at any minute, saying that it was just a terrible dream all along.”

  In the third entry dated November 7, she talked about how Greg’s death had helped underscore what was most important, pushing her to get out and explore her world and helping to rekindle her “appreciation and passion for life…I want to get out and get dirty—wander, investigate, and reflect. Carpe Diem!”

  Two days after interviewing Kristin, Agnew and Valle went to the apartment Michael shared with Nicole to question him. The interview lasted about ninety minutes. Not knowing the details of Greg’s death, Nicole had gone on a prearranged vacation with her sister to England and was due back later that day. Michael was there, getting the apartment ready for her.

  Michael said Kristin came to work on Monday, November 6, “concerned about [Greg’s] well-being.”

  He repeated the basic timeline Kristin had given to police, noting that he and his wife had gone to a counseling session after he spoke with Kristin that afternoon. After meeting Kristin at the hospital and going back with her to her apartment, he said, he talked to investigator Angie Wagner the next morning. She told him “this appeared to be a drug-related death of unknown identity.”

  Valle asked whether Kristin told him why Greg took the clonazepam and oxycodone. But as he continued to do throughout the interview, Michael didn’t really answer the question directly. He suggested that Greg took the drugs because he was “trying to show her something,” or to help him sleep, but “the effects on him suggest to me that he took more than just to get some sleep. It may have been related to the relationship issues.”

  But Valle said, “For an individual who says he can’t live without her and to find him dead the next…day or two is one of two or three things. Either he committed suicide, accidentally overdosed, or someone just got tired of dealing with this individual.”

  Michael said he still wasn’t clear whether this was “a scare tactic that went wrong.” Based on what Kristin told him, he said, the couple had been having marital problems for several months, and about two or three weeks before he died, Kristin asked Greg for “some space, some separation.”

  Previously, Michael said, Kristin had tried to get Greg into counseling, but he didn’t feel they needed help to deal with their issues.

  “She had verbally communicated to me that she was concerned for his well-being, if she decided to separate,” he said.

  Michael said his “personal relationship” with Kristin began about a month after he started working at the Medical Examiner’s Office. He quickly clarified that he meant the two of them were confidants, sharing personal information. Michael appeared to be very careful in his answers, saying as little as possible to the detectives, so Valle told him that Kristin had already disclosed the true nature of her relationship with him. Still, Michael continued to give measured responses.

  Like Kristin, he initially talked about her drug problem as if it were in the past, though he eventually acknowledged that Greg had found a pipe in the apartment and suspected Kristin was using again. Kristin told Michael all about it on the afternoon of November 6, he said.

  “My assumption is that perhaps she was…using [methamphetamine] again,” Michael said.

  “Being a close friend of Kristin, also in a relationship with Kristin, did she tell you that she was or wasn’t?” Valle asked.

  Michael stumbled as he answered. He asked her that question, and “she conceded that she had used recently in the past,” he said, sighing. “Two or three weeks before his death, she had begun using again because of the…difficulty she was having with the relationship.”

  Michael said she told him she was getting the meth in the southern part of San Diego County, near the border. He said he was very upset and disappointed to hear that but didn’t want to pry.

  Valle, knowing full well that Greg died of a fentanyl overdose, discreetly tried to determine whether that information had been leaked to Michael or Kristin by one of their colleagues. But Michael insisted he knew nothing of the toxicology results. Michael said Kristin believed Greg’s death was drug related, but she still wasn’t sure what Greg might have taken. From reading the investigative report and talking to Kristin and Dr. Blackbourne, Michael said, his only conclusion was that Greg died of a combination of aspirin and possibly the prescription cough medicine found in the apartment.

  Valle asked him repeatedly if Kristin was the reason that he and his wife had separated. But Michael kept insisting that he and Nicole weren’t separated, that she was just away on vacation.

  “We’re still in counseling. We’re still together,” Michael said.

  Valle asked if Michael and Kristin had discussed leaving their spouses for each other.

  “I told Kristin that if my wife and I separate, then I would certainly look to pursue a relationship with her, if she was also separating,” he said.

  Valle asked Michael if he’d heard the rumors going around that Kristin may have had something to do with Greg’s death. Yes, Michael said, and apparently unknowingly contradicted Kristin’s claim that Lloyd Amborn had told him to stay away from Kristin. Michael said he’d initially told Amborn that rumors of his relationship with Kristin were untrue, but he’d since told the operations manager the “full story” so that he wouldn’t find out “from other people.”

  “Did that include her recent involvement in drugs?” Valle asked.

  “No, it didn’t,” Michael said. Asked why, Michael said he felt that information was unrelated to their relationship and was Kristin’s private business. After Valle pushed harder, Michael conceded that Kristin’s drug problem absolutely went to “the core of what we do and…someone that is a drug abuser or misuser is absolutely a problem to the lab.” He said he made that clear to Kristin.

  When Valle redirected his questions to the security of drugs kept in the lab, Michael acknowledged it was “a poor system.”

  “So, it’s easy for anyone, not just Kristin and not just for you, but anybody to go in there, take drugs, take it out, and no one [would] ever know the difference,” Valle asked, rhetorically. Michael had to agree.

  Asked directly whether he and Kristin were ever sexually active, Michael said no. He admitted that he’d spent three or four nights at her place after Greg’s death but said he hadn’t had relations with her. “Simply comforting,” he said.

  Valle told Michael it was also rumored that he was somehow involved in Greg’s death. “Has she ever asked you to get her any drugs?” he asked.

  “No, she has not,” Michael said.

  “If she had asked, you would tell us?”

  “I would,” Michael said.

  “Why? You’d get in trouble.”

  “This is of greater importance than me getting in trouble,” Michael said.

  Valle asked if it would surprise Michael to find out that Kristin did have something to do with her husband’s death. Michael said yes, absolutely.

  “I don’t believe she…has the ability to do it, ability as in she’s a sweet, caring, loving individual,” Michael said. “And right up until his death, she was a sweet, caring, loving individual. Could she be fooling me? I guess.”

  Valle pointed out that she alre
ady had fooled him into thinking she’d stayed clean and off drugs before she told him she was using again. Valle asked if it would surprise him that Kristin said Michael knew about her involvement in Greg’s death. After stumbling and stuttering, Michael cleared his throat and said, “I’m not aware of anything that she has done.”

  The interview tape ran out shortly after this exchange, but Agnew later said that Michael finally let it slip that he had an apartment in Hillcrest. She said he didn’t own up to being separated from Nicole until Agnew pressed the issue several times, telling him that Kristin said he’d left the Costa Verde apartment four or five weeks earlier. But even then, he still tried to cover his tracks. He said he and Nicole weren’t legally separated and they didn’t have an attorney, and that’s what he thought Agnew was asking.

  The next step was for Agnew to meet with Kristin a second time so she could confront her about the fentanyl. But when Agnew called her, Kristin said she’d been advised by her attorney not to say anything more.

  After Kristin’s interview with Agnew, she and her parents had retained attorney Michael Pancer, a well-known criminal defense lawyer in town. Pancer agreed to meet with Agnew but ended up telling her he saw no benefit to allowing Kristin to speak with detectives again.

  “It was a calculated risk” not to confront Kristin during the first session about finding fentanyl in Greg’s body, Agnew said. “It didn’t pan out.”

  In the first few weeks after she got the case, Agnew went back and forth in her mind about whether Greg’s death was a suicide or a homicide, and the confusion only continued as the investigation progressed. Kristin said it was a suicide, and Jerome said it wasn’t. He-said she-said cases are never easy.

  But this one proved to be unique and more challenging than most. An outside police agency had launched the investigation, gathered evidence from the crime scene, and initially thought Greg’s death was a suicide, as did the Medical Examiner’s Office. And although Agnew credited Jerome with helping to spur authorities to investigate further, he also made her job more difficult by repeatedly calling her, sometimes half a dozen times a day. It got to the point where she asked her sergeant, who normally dealt with victims’ families, to handle some of Jerome’s calls. It seemed that Jerome not only wanted the investigation to proceed, he wanted it to proceed in a timely manner. He also wasn’t shy about telling her how and what he thought she should investigate. A couple of times she grew so frustrated with him, she had to tell him to “back off a little bit.” This was a police investigation, and if she wasn’t careful about keeping new or important findings under wraps, she was worried they might get back to Kristin and Michael—or the media—and ruin the investigation.