Poisoned Love

by Caitlin Rother

  Sometimes, Agnew would get new information that convinced her she finally felt sure about what kind of death it was, but then, minutes later, she would find another piece of evidence that made her think the exact opposite. The last thing she wanted to do was put an innocent person behind bars for a crime he or she didn’t commit.

  Agnew was working long hours and often had to call a neighbor to feed her cat and two dogs. She also wasn’t sleeping well. Typically, she was able to leave her work at the office, but this case followed her home. Even while she was jogging or bicycling, which usually helped to “clear out the cobwebs” in her head, the details coursed through her mind. And when she woke up in the morning, she felt as if her brain had been working all night to sort through the evidence in the case, as if she were trying to piece together a jigsaw puzzle.

  So, to help her sift through and interpret the facts, she created a chart with two columns. One was for the evidence that supported suicide, the other homicide. Many mornings she and another detective on her team, Lynn Rydalch, would go into an office, close the door, and debate how certain information should be interpreted and into which column it should go. Rydalch played devil’s advocate, so the discussions could get quite fiery, but never personal. Agnew continued to rely on Rydalch as a sounding board for the next year or so.

  Take the letter from the Orbigen employees, for example. Yes, Gruenwald and his staff said Greg wasn’t the type to commit suicide, but that was their opinion, not a fact. Sometimes the friends or relatives of someone who killed himself can’t or don’t want to accept reality. So Agnew ended up putting the letter in a third “nice to know, but it really doesn’t get me anywhere” column.

  Then there was the fact that police found no pill containers, no syringes, no fentanyl skin patches, and no foil packages the patches could have come in. Pills didn’t have to be kept in a plastic vial. They could be stored in a bag or something else, like Kristin claimed. But since fentanyl didn’t come in pill form, it had to be in some type of container, especially if it were in a liquid form. And if it were a liquid, there also should have been a syringe. That definitely went into the homicide column.

  The rose petals were another piece of evidence that didn’t fit with the suicide theory. None of the people Agnew interviewed said Greg was feminine or melodramatic. She asked Rydalch to name one straight man he knew who would make that kind of suicide gesture. She couldn’t. Plus, the petals were scattered around Greg’s body, not underneath him. Kristin said she’d found them under the covers, and when she moved him, they went everywhere. Yet none was found in the bed.

  The shredded note, the diary, the wedding photo under the pillow, the rose petals, and other elements of the “suicide scene” all pointed Agnew toward homicide.

  “It all was so hokey in my opinion,” Agnew said. “Somebody who would go to this extent would leave a frigging letter.”

  On November 28, Detective Felix Zavala went to the Medical Examiner’s Office and met with Amborn to discuss how drugs were used and stored there. Agnew and her team members had several subsequent meetings with the Medical Examiner’s staff to learn more about the synthetic drug standards used in testing and the evidence envelopes of street drugs, white powder, and paraphernalia.

  They learned that as a student worker, Kristin cleaned glassware and was taught to use some of the more complicated testing equipment. She also logged in the drug standards, which she used to do basic screenings of blood samples. In August 1997, for example, she logged in a new 100-milligram vial of amphetamine; in September, a 100-milligram vial of methamphetamine; and in October, a 10-milligram vial of fentanyl citrate.

  The fentanyl vial was about 1 ½ inches tall, much larger than needed to hold 10-milligram of the powder and equivalent to a tiny portion of a packet of artificial sweetener. It was a teeny amount, but plenty potent to kill a person if it was dissolved in liquid and injected. At that time, the office didn’t run tests for fentanyl, but the toxicologists bought the standard because they were hoping to set up a screening procedure sometime in the future. That procedure was never put into place while Kristin worked there.

  By December, Agnew was sure she had a murder on her hands, but she thought it was going to be difficult, if not impossible, to prove in court. If she could just get the District Attorney’s Office to look at the case, she thought, she’d have done her job, and she could tell Jerome she’d taken it as far as she could.

  Agnew and her boss gave a three-hour presentation to the chief and assistant chief of the DA’s Family Protection Division. When the detectives asked if they thought they had enough to prosecute, the answer was yes.

  The two division heads tried to brief Dan Goldstein, a deputy district attorney in that unit, but it was such an obscure and complicated story, chock-full of third-level hearsay, that Goldstein figured he’d better get it straight from the lead detective. So, within the next few days, Goldstein called Agnew, who came in with Rydalch and gave him the same presentation.

  Goldstein, who’d worked as a paramedic for eleven years before becoming a lawyer, was the only one among them who’d ever heard of fentanyl. He felt in his gut that the evidence gathered so far pointed toward a staged suicide scene. The question was why Kristin would create such a scene. Goldstein found the case intriguing and thought it warranted a full investigation.

  Sometime after Greg’s death, possibly in late November, Kristin wrote Michael a letter on light blue parchment paper before she went to bed. She said she was trying to work through some of the “overwhelming” feelings that were running through her heart and mind.

  She acknowledged that the past few weeks had been awful for both of them. They were lucky to have their love, their “only weapon” to help them through it.

  “I have come out of this (so far) with a reaffirmation of self and a rededication to my own self-development, my own commitment to overcome my deamons [sic] for good,” she wrote.

  But amid all the turmoil, she said, she was coming to terms with what she needed to do. She promised to deal with her issues and strive to be the best person she could for him.

  “You deserve nothing less,” she wrote, especially when he’d stood by her even after her “repeated failings” and “a self-destructive act of my own.” She was sorry for hurting him.

  Knowing that he’d seen the “darkest corners of [her] soul” and still loved her unconditionally gave her strength and helped her look to the future—to their future together. Kristin believed that the recent events and emotions they’d shared would fortify their bond even further. She thanked him for his loyalty and for teaching her how to love so deeply. She hoped that over time their wounded relationship would heal, and she could regain his “absolute trust and confidence.”

  And, as if she couldn’t say it enough, she told him again that she loved him.

  “Truth and honesty will drive our lives,” she wrote.

  Right after Kristin’s police interview, Agnew reported Kristin’s admission that she was using drugs to upper management at the Medical Examiner’s Office.

  Amborn called Kristin in for a meeting on November 29. She seemed emotional and didn’t look well. Initially, she’d been placed on bereavement leave, allowing her to work from home. But based on the ongoing drug audits and police investigation, Amborn decided it would be best to restrict her access to the office. So he switched her to administrative leave and asked her to turn in her keys so she couldn’t go into the building unrestricted. At the request of the police, he also researched whether Kristin had her paychecks deposited directly into her checking account. She did.

  Amborn placed Michael on administrative leave around the same time. On December 4, Amborn called Michael in for a meeting and, with Blackbourne and police detective Paul Torres in the room, told him he was fired. Amborn gave him a letter, making it official, but saying only that he’d failed to meet the requirements of the job he’d assumed on June 12, 2000.

  “Your performance as a manager has not met
an essential reporting expectation of this department’s senior executives by your failure to inform us of a key personnel issue with serious operational implications,” Amborn wrote. “Accordingly, you have lost sufficient confidence of your superiors such that you can no longer be effective as forensic toxicology laboratory manager.” The key personnel issue, of course, was his failure to tell his superiors that Kristin was abusing illegal drugs.

  Amborn told Kristin on December 1 that he wanted to review her job status. He met with her after Michael on December 4, with his secretary and Detective Torres present, and told her she was fired. She wore no makeup and looked even worse this time, drawn and as if she’d been crying. He gave her one letter that said her leave had been terminated and a second one that said she was being terminated for failing to meet the requirements of her twelve-month probationary period, which had started on March 10, 2000. But again, the real reason for Kristin’s termination was her drug problem.

  Word that the two toxicologists had been fired leaked out two days later. Television reporter Kevin Cox aired a story saying the two had left the Medical Examiner’s Office, but county officials wouldn’t confirm whether it had anything to do with the police investigation into Greg de Villers’s death. County officials also wouldn’t say whether Kristin and Michael had some sort of relationship outside the office.

  Police, however, did confirm publicly for the first time that they’d opened a special investigation to look into whether Greg had, in fact, committed suicide. Kristin refused to be interviewed on camera for the story, but Cox quoted her as saying “the truth will come out.”

  Twelve days later, Cox did another story, giving more details about the case. Investigators had learned that Kristin was having an affair with her boss, he said, and none of Greg’s coworkers believed he had committed suicide. Cox interviewed Stefan Gruenwald, who’d been doing some Internet research on Michael, and said the toxicologist was an expert on drugs that weren’t easily detected in the body. Kristin declined to be interviewed once again.

  Cathy Hamm found some interesting items when she cleaned out Kristin’s and Michael’s desks. In Kristin’s bottom drawer, behind the hanging files, she found the bottle of Somacid muscle relaxants that Kristin had gotten in Mexico. In one of the files, she found two prescriptions written in Spanish, one for the Somacid and one for the Asenlix diet pills. She also found Armando Garcia’s business card for Tijuana taxi service. When she pulled out the pencil tray from the top drawer, she found some dried reddish orange rose petals and a little note card from Michael, expressing his love.

  In Michael’s desk, she found Dan Anderson’s case study on deaths involving fentanyl patches.

  Goldstein became engrossed in the case fairly quickly. As soon as he heard the tape of Kristin’s 911 call, he felt that something didn’t ring true. Based on his experience as a paramedic, it sounded like Kristin was only pretending to try to resuscitate Greg. He saw no way that she could hold a cordless phone in the crook of her neck while pushing on Greg’s chest, breathing into his mouth, and counting into the phone for the dispatcher. The diary entries didn’t ring true, either.

  Later on, as Kristin’s, Greg’s, and Michael’s e-mails trickled in, he cross-checked them against the diary entries and each other. He eventually concluded that the entries were fabricated, written for others to read, specifically Greg. Goldstein saw the diary as a prosecutorial gold mine.

  Goldstein was known for having a strong personality and exuding confidence. He was smart and dynamic in a courtroom, but he could get a little myopic. Sometimes, he would call Agnew in the morning and go off on whatever topic held his attention at that moment. Agnew liked to lighten the mood by stopping him and saying, “Hi, Dan, good morning. How are you?”

  One of San Diego’s top prosecutors, Goldstein was already working two other cases when he got this one. For him, weekend relaxation was an oxymoron. But Goldstein didn’t mind. He was on a victory streak. He’d handled—and won—more high-profile cases during the 1990s than virtually anyone else in the District Attorney’s Office.

  In April 1996, he persuaded a jury to send away the bodybuilding wife of Mr. California, bodybuilding champion Raymond McNeil. Sally McNeil, a former Marine, got a sentence of nineteen years to life for the fatal Valentine’s Day shooting of her husband, who’d been about to leave her.

  After three trials in a two-year period ending in 1998, Goldstein won the conviction of Ivan and Veronica Gonzales, California’s first husband and wife to be sent to death row, for torturing and fatally scalding their four-year-old niece in a bathtub. Both of them were methamphetamine addicts.

  In June 1999, Goldstein prosecuted a child-care operator who was accused of shaking a toddler to death because he’d refused to come to her to get his diaper changed. She got a life sentence.

  In November 2000, he won a case against a businessman accused of bludgeoning his wife to death with a fireplace poker to collect pension and life insurance benefits. The county Medical Examiner’s office said the woman died after she was hit at least twenty times in the head and twenty more times elsewhere on her body with a heavy, blunt object.

  One of the cases he was working simultaneously with Kristin’s was also based on circumstantial evidence. James Dailey was accused of killing his estranged wife because she was divorcing him. Goldstein won a conviction against him in August 2001—without a body or a murder weapon—and Dailey got twenty-five years to life.

  A national television audience got a chance to watch Goldstein’s prosecutorial skills during the Dailey trial, which was featured on NBC’s courtroom reality show Crime and Punishment in June 2002.

  The prosecutor said he was initially opposed to having cameras follow him around, but once he got into presenting his case, he didn’t even notice they were there. Putting cameras in the courtroom served an important educational purpose for the public, he said, and it let the evidence speak for itself.

  “I thought it was a great process,” Goldstein told The San Diego Union-Tribune. “The public gets to see what prosecutors really do and that it’s an honorable profession. They’ll see that it takes a lot of hard work and dedication to convict these people accused of some of the most serious crimes in our society.”

  In the early months of the Rossum investigation, Agnew found Goldstein’s medical background invaluable to the case they were building together. He knew what items paramedics might bring on a call, for example. So when they were following up on a point in Jones’s report, where he said an officer had seen but not collected a syringe cap on the floor of Kristin’s apartment, Goldstein knew to ask the paramedics which color-capped syringes they’d used that night. Goldstein was able to determine that one of the paramedics had dropped it, rather than trying to chase down a false, time-consuming lead that it may have been Kristin’s.

  “Having Dan on board really made the case,” Agnew said.

  Goldstein felt the same level of respect for Agnew. She was one of the best detectives he’d ever worked with. And because both were very aggressive and detail-oriented, their styles complemented each other. The tenacious prosecutor needed to feel like he had a complete grip on everything that happened before heading into trial.

  “It was a really good marriage with us,” Agnew said.

  It was unusual to have a prosecutor assigned months before a homicide suspect was arrested, let alone a DA investigator as well. But the prosecution team saw this case as having the potential to be San Diego’s most high-profile case ever. Agnew also thought the case was so complex that if she didn’t brief Goldstein on the evidence from the beginning, he’d miss the important subtleties. Although Goldstein and his investigator, Frank Eaton, were also working the other two cases, the prosecutor still managed to deal with some aspect of the Rossum case every day, even when he was in trial.

  Initially, Goldstein called Frank Barnhart to test his various theories and to help him understand the toxicology results. At the time Goldstein had no idea Barnhart was
socializing with the prime suspect of his murder investigation, so he asked if Barnhart could identify any particular food or other substance in Greg’s stomach contents. Barnhart said he didn’t find anything but blood. Some of Barnhart’s criminalist coworkers, who thought it inappropriate for him to be examining Greg’s stomach contents, called in a tip to a local television station.

  Then, one day, Goldstein got a call on his direct line from an FBI toxicologist. The man tried to assure him that Michael Robertson was a good guy and had nothing to do with Greg’s death. Lights and sirens went off in Goldstein’s head. Something definitely wasn’t right.

  To be safe, Goldstein decided to send a set of biological samples to a second lab to verify Pacific Toxicology’s work and to make sure there were no false-positive results. Associated Pathology Laboratory in Las Vegas did the second round of testing and came back with high but different fentanyl levels.

  When Goldstein finally learned about Barnhart’s ties to Kristin, he feared that a cover-up was underway and that all the toxicology testing Barnhart had overseen could be tainted, or at least be vulnerable to that allegation. So, Goldstein had all the remaining biological samples impounded from the sheriff’s crime lab and transferred to the Police Department so they could be sent out for yet another round of retesting. Because the American toxicology community was so closely tied, Goldstein decided to send out one last set of samples to a lab far, far away. He decided on a Medical Examiner’s Office in the Canadian city of Edmonton, which found an even higher level of fentanyl in Greg’s stomach contents than the Las Vegas lab.