Poisoned Love

by Caitlin Rother

  She wrote him back, also on a sheet of Hyatt Hotel stationery, thanking him for the poem. “I would love to be your queen…. Love, life, passion. You are everything. You are my King.”

  Roses were a running theme in their cards and gifts to each other, and Kristin made sure to share with Michael the common code for the emotional significance of roses by color: “Yellow for friendship, pink for love, red for passion, and white for purity,” she wrote in one card.

  Another card Michael sent Kristin contained dried yellow rose petals, with a note sending her a “very warm hug…. As the days get tougher and the nights longer, our love, friendship, and support get stronger.”

  Zavala left Michael’s neighborhood after he finished the search, but an undercover team of five detectives stayed behind, each parked along the block in his own car, to watch what Michael would do next. One detective was set up as a “scribe,” to keep a log of events the other detectives dictated to him over the radio.

  Around 9:52 A.M., about half an hour after the search, Detective George “Randy” Alldredge saw Michael come out of his apartment, look up and down the street, and go back inside. He came out again about ten minutes later and paced up and down the block as he talked on a cell phone, continuing to monitor activity on the street and perhaps trying to determine whether he was being watched. Then he went back into his apartment.

  The next time he came out, he was holding a small white trash bag, which he placed in a dumpster at the side of the complex. He returned to his apartment and came out again to lift the lid on the left side of the dumpster. He pushed down some sort of tan paper object and put other trash on top of it.

  Finally satisfied, Michael came out one more time with something in his hand that Alldredge couldn’t make out, got into his car, and drove to Nicole’s apartment in University City, a fifteen-or twenty-minute drive. Alldredge stayed behind to retrieve whatever Michael had tossed in the dumpster. He put on gloves, pulled out the white bag and a tan envelope, then caught up with the rest of his team at Nicole’s. The bag and envelope contained cards and letters from Kristin, ripped into pieces.

  Alldredge and his team followed Michael and Nicole as they drove to the Torrey Pines state beach in Michael’s car. Alldredge could see from the couple’s body language that they were fighting as they walked north up the beach, out of his sight. Alldredge started to worry after quite a bit of time had elapsed and they still hadn’t come back, so he solicited the help of a lifeguard, who drove Alldredge in his jeep until he could see that the couple was just sitting and talking. Alldredge went back to his car to wait. Eventually, they walked back to the car, where Nicole beat Michael twice on the chest and slapped him twice in the face. Michael pushed her away.

  Alldredge had to make a quick decision: Should he try to stop the assault or maintain the integrity of his undercover surveillance? He figured he’d better hang back, but he snapped some photos just in case. Eventually, Michael drove off in his car and left Nicole standing at the side of the road. Alldredge followed him, not knowing how Nicole was going to get home.

  After reading Kristin’s first diary, Agnew noticed that the new one contained entries that were written within the same time frame as the ones in the latter part of the first diary. Although many of them were undated, they were obviously written shortly after Greg’s death.

  Kristin had filled only the front fifteen pages of this journal, a dark blue book of lined pages, before the police seized it.

  The diary started with an entry about going to church with her parents, where the reverend recounted a homily that seemed to speak directly to her. In the pages that followed, Kristin sounded increasingly like a victim of circumstance as she detailed how Greg’s death had caused such sweeping devastation in her life. She described how alone and hurt she felt by the way Greg’s family was treating her.

  “Why do they reject me and vilify my image to all of our (or rather Greg’s) friends?” she wrote. “…Everything is up in the air right now. I have suffered so much loss during the last month. My husband, my job, my career, my good name and reputation—practically everything.”

  People she thought were her friends were turning their backs on her and that hurt. “I don’t know what horrible stories or vicious tales are being circulated through the rumor mill,” she wrote. “All I know is that I’ve been shunned by virtually everyone. It is tremendously unfair and disheartening…. It is very surreal, like I’m stuck in a bad dream.”

  She also mentioned Michael by name for the first time, saying how much she loved him, “like I’ve never done and like I know I never will again. It is amazing. Words fail to do it justice. They can’t begin to convey the emotions and the feelings that swell in my heart.”

  She described how she was struggling with the holidays and prayed the investigation would wrap up before the new year. “I know that I have done nothing wrong, but I’m terrified that if the detectives are determined enough, they may pursue it further and call it a homicide, and base their case on circumstantial evidence,” she wrote. “I don’t know if I could handle that. I think I’m fairly maxed out emotionally right now.”

  Agnew and Goldstein believed that the first diary was initially written for Greg’s benefit and then left out for police to find as part of the elaborate suicide scene Kristin had concocted. She wrote in the second diary that she planned to use its pages to paint “a painfully true portrait of my spirit,” but they thought that it, too, was actually intended for others to read.

  On the morning of January 10, 2001, Valle and Agnew interviewed Michael for nearly two hours at the police station. His attorney, Chuck Goldberg, told the detectives that his client was doing the interview against his advice. Dan Goldstein, the prosecutor, was in another room, watching the interview on a closed-circuit television.

  Michael spent a good portion of the interview explaining how drugs were stored in the lab and how he’d tried to tighten the lax controls and modernize the operation. Three years earlier, he said, Kristin created some forms to record how much of a vial, known as a drug standard, was used by a toxicologist and when.

  Michael was the first one to bring up fentanyl as a drug that may have been involved in Greg’s death, saying a colleague had contacted him about it. Later in the interview, he explained that the colleague was his friend Dan Anderson, who had been contacted by a detective.

  Valle asked Michael what he could tell him about fentanyl and whether it was available at the lab.

  “I have no knowledge of whether we had fentanyl,” Michael said. “We did not do that analysis.” He explained that such testing required specialized equipment, which the lab didn’t have. He said he would’ve liked to start doing it in-house, though, because private testing was costly.

  If the toxicology tests in Greg’s case had been done in-house, Valle asked, did Michael think they would have detected the fentanyl?

  Michael said no, at least not initially. But then, he said, they would have ordered more rounds of specific tests.

  “Fentanyl isn’t something that we commonly look for,” he said. “It is something, however, that we wouldn’t rule out if we didn’t have anything else. So someone that knew the procedures would probably know that fentanyl would be found if nothing else was found.”

  Valle asked if Kristin would know that.

  “Kristin is very young in the field,” Michael said. “I don’t know.”

  Valle asked Michael to go over the events of Monday, November 6, and his interaction with Kristin in more detail.

  Michael said he’d suspected Kristin might be using methamphetamine again because he noticed she’d been taking a lot of breaks. So, on Sunday, November 5, he’d gone through her desk and found a bindle with a little white powder in it. He ran a quick test and found it was some sort of speed, so he planned to confront her the next morning.

  The timeline he gave for Kristin’s whereabouts and his interaction with her that Monday did not exactly jibe with what his coworkers, Kristin, and
other witnesses described. However, he remembered meeting with her in his office for about half an hour in the morning and speaking with her on the phone during the lunch hour. He said he’d asked her to call in and let him know whether she was going to return to finish any tests she’d started. He also remembered seeing her back at the lab and meeting with her outside the office that afternoon. But he insisted his primary focus throughout the day was to discuss her meth use.

  Michael said the two of them met on a “little grassy area not far from her house” around 4 P.M. for about an hour.

  “I wanted to know how long she’d been using, all kinds of things, where did she get it from,” Michael said.

  He said Kristin was upset, scared, and embarrassed about his reaction to her drug use. But she was also concerned about Greg’s welfare and said she needed to get home and check on him.

  Michael said he met his wife in Mission Valley for a counseling session from 5:30 to 6:15 P.M. After that, they went to a restaurant nearby for dinner, then parted ways to go to their respective apartments. He was at home, asleep, when Kristin called around 10:15 P.M. from the hospital. He described her as “very gibberish in her chatting.” He went to Scripps and was shocked to find out, forty-five minutes later, that Greg was dead.

  Valle redirected the interview back to drugs and told Michael that it appeared fentanyl might have killed Greg. Valle asked if Michael knew how fentanyl was commonly used.

  “Fentanyl, by the general population, is often used as a patch,” Michael said, tapping his upper arm to illustrate the typical placement. He wasn’t aware of any oral form of the drug but said it could also be injected at a hospital.

  Valle asked if there were any patches or injectable fentanyl stored in evidence envelopes collected at death scenes. Michael said he didn’t remember, but syringes and needles were commonly collected.

  Valle finally told Michael the whole truth, that investigators believed Greg died of a drug overdose and that fentanyl, clonazepam, and oxycodone were all found in his body. The fentanyl, he said, appeared to have been injected. Valle asked whether Michael would expect to see a syringe near Greg if he’d shot up with enough fentanyl to commit suicide. After hemming and hawing, Michael finally said yes.

  “You’d expect probably a syringe puncture mark and perhaps a syringe somewhere around,” he said.

  “Exactly,” Valle said, emphasizing that no such things were found. “…It appears that the dosage was extremely high…. No one believes that this guy would have time to make a sandwich, dispose of the paraphernalia, and then return to the site in which he was found.”

  “Right,” Michael said.

  “So it appears somebody had to have removed that evidence,” Valle said.

  “Uh huh,” Michael said.

  “Maybe somebody had to have injected him with the drug,” Valle said.

  In response to a series of rapid-fire questions by Valle, Michael said he never entered Kristin’s apartment until after Greg’s death. In Greg’s last days, he said, he never spoke to Greg, never took from the lab any syringes or the drugs found in Greg’s body, and never saw Kristin with any of those drugs.

  Valle asked Michael whether he’d ever seen Kristin with any methamphetamine. Michael said yes, at home, after Greg’s death, she had a pipe and a small amount of meth.

  “I told her to get rid of the stuff,” Michael said, adding that she smashed the pipe and dumped the meth down the sink.

  “Okay, so since you were not at her home at any time during that weekend…it couldn’t be you that removed syringes or needles, is that correct?” Valle asked.

  “That’s correct,” Michael said. “I wasn’t there.”

  Valle asked Michael again about Kristin’s understanding of their relationship and where it was going in the future.

  “My question is, did Kristin believe once…she’s rid of her husband, you’ve separated from your wife, which you eventually did, was it her thought that you and her were going to join up and become maybe one day husband and wife and live happily ever after?”

  In the beginning, Michael said, they discussed what-ifs, but they decided to resolve their respective marital issues separately. Before Christmas, he said, Kristin probably thought they would end up living together, trying to see if the relationship would work, and if it didn’t, that was okay, too.

  But at the moment, he said, he was trying to “repair the damage” with his wife, some of which was caused by police feeding information to her. He said he thought Kristin believed that their relationship was “probably finished,” and that he was going to try to work on his marriage.

  Valle handed Michael some cards and letters that Kristin had written to him.

  The detective asked if Michael knew where they’d gotten them. Michael was dumbstruck and mumbled something.

  “They were recovered from the trash outside,” Agnew said.

  “Apparently, somebody had—” Valle said.

  “Tore them up,” Agnew said, cutting in.

  “Really?” Michael said.

  “Yeah,” Valle said. “Do you know who tore them up and put them in your trash can?”

  “Um, I, I tore them,” Michael admitted.

  “Why did you get rid of them that way?” Agnew asked.

  “In all honesty, I didn’t want them in the house,” Michael said.

  Valle asked if he’d talked with Kristin since the search. Michael said Kristin had called him from jail, asking if he could bail her out, but he said no. Then she had called him the day before this interview and asked if he would meet her for coffee. Again, he said no.

  Valle asked if Michael had ended the relationship with Kristin. Yes, Michael said.

  “I said, ‘Look, we’re not having any more contact,’” Michael said.

  “Are you protecting her?” Valle asked.

  “I’m not protecting her,” Michael said.

  Michael insisted that he would give the detectives incriminating evidence against Kristin if he had it. Valle asked why he would do that at this point.

  “Because I’ve lost my job. I’ve lost my profession. I’m losing my wife. I want to get back with my wife. I don’t want to be a part of this…. This isn’t where I envisioned my life beginning in 2001—in the middle of a homicide investigation—and I want it over and done with,” he said.

  At the end of the interview, Valle asked if Michael would agree to take a polygraph test. Michael’s attorney said that it was his client’s decision, but that polygraphs were used as an interrogatory tool, not to determine the truth; and that he would continue to object to it as long as the police wouldn’t allow him to be in the room with Michael.

  “Okay, then, I have your answer,” Valle said.

  Among the cards and letters Michael ripped up was a three-page note that Kristin had written to him. It was undated but seemed to be written after Greg’s death, while the two lovers were taking some sort of time-out. The letter reflected Kristin’s typical flair for drama, though the tone was far more downbeat and apologetic than her usual missives.

  Kristin talked repeatedly about the need to heal, to be honest, and to control her impulses, even admitting that she was suffering “physical withdrawals from last week.” Things couldn’t get much worse, she wrote. Saying she’d “never been faced with such complete devastation, chaos, and uncertainty,” Kristin pleaded with Michael not to be upset with her or give up faith in what they had together. She wrote that she felt lonely and was having a hard time dealing with things all by herself, noting that “my family doesn’t know the entire situation just yet,” but she understood that Michael needed some time to “sort out” his life and his future.

  After sharing her “demons” with him, she wrote, “I have been able to accept my own problem and own up to it by telling you of my failings…. I never have been able to do this in the past. I would deny, deny, deny, deny, even to myself.” Still, she wrote, she didn’t want to be a part of his future “because of a feeling of obligation
or duty.”

  Based on questions the police started raising in November 2000, Amborn decided to conduct an audit of all drugs kept at the Medical Examiner’s Office.

  Once Agnew learned which drugs were found in Greg’s body, she met with Amborn once or twice and also talked to him by phone to outline more specifically what audit information she was looking for. She wanted to know, for example, if any drugs found in Greg’s body or that Kristin used personally were missing from the office, either from the lab or the evidence envelopes. Since Kristin was in charge of logging in for drug standards, Agnew also wanted to know which ones had been logged in and out and when.

  After Goldstein joined the investigation, he, too, wanted increasingly more specific information, so a series of audits, along with checks and rechecks, proved necessary. But by January, they at least knew the basics, that drugs related to the case—most importantly, fentanyl—were, in fact, missing. Goldstein saw no way Greg could have obtained the highly regulated narcotic that killed him. So the fact that it was missing from Kristin’s lab completed the nexus that turned his gut feeling into a certainty: Kristin had stolen the fentanyl and used it to poison her husband.

  But before Amborn could release any of the audit findings to the prosecution team, the county’s attorneys wanted to see a warrant specifically asking for them. So, on January 22, Agnew served one up.

  After watching Michael’s second police interrogation, Goldstein waited a month or two for the transcript to be drafted and then compared it with the one from the first interview. He saw dramatic differences between the two statements and picked up on some new information, such as Michael’s admission that he had gone through Kristin’s desk the day before Greg’s death and had found a bindle of meth. Previously, Michael had only admitted to knowing Kristin had a drug history. For Goldstein, that “rolling admission” pointed to Michael’s guilt.