Poisoned Love

by Caitlin Rother

  In 1999 Loebig won an acquittal for a Hawaiian surfer who worked as a sound technician for musicians and had been charged with voluntary manslaughter for shooting two men at a party in his backyard. Loebig had argued that his client acted in self-defense against two threatening members of a white supremacist gang.

  Eriksen, a somewhat soft-spoken redhead with freckles and an open, friendly manner, had been an attorney for twenty-four years. He spent twelve of those handling felony cases for the San Diego public defender. He’d been assigned to Loebig’s high-profile unit seven months earlier.

  Before he became a deputy public defender, Eriksen had his own criminal defense practice for ten years and had developed a methamphetamine addiction. He never crashed and burned enough to lose his license, but when he realized that his daily use was affecting his job and screwing up his life, he knew he needed to stop. He closed up shop in 1988, went through rehab, and then worked construction jobs.

  He ended up going to work for a former law associate of his brother in Tustin, doing civil law and some business cases, and decided to apply for a job with the public defender in San Diego. He enjoyed the work. Not just because it was intellectually challenging, but also because he felt he was doing something good for his clients and society at large. But looking back, he realized that getting that job was the best thing he could’ve done to help him stay off the stuff, because he got “daily reminders of the waste that methamphetamine could cause.”

  “I know what it does to your mind,” he said, specifically referring to the initial euphoria and then the paranoia and denial that meth causes. Kristin was unusual, he said, because she used meth alone. Most users like to be around other people, to party and enjoy meth’s effects in a social atmosphere. But then again, Kristin was different from his average clients in other ways as well. She was prettier, smarter, and more complicated.

  His past drug experience gave him insight into many of his clients, including Kristin, whom he told about his past. It also helped him understand her parents, who he felt had an extra dose of denial compared to most addicts’ parents, probably because they were so image conscious.

  “They’re such enablers,” he said later.

  With Loebig as lead counsel on the case, the two attorneys agreed on a division of labor. Loebig would question the defense and prosecution witnesses in the Rossum and de Villers families. He also would coordinate most of the media, focusing primarily on the high-profile, New York-based national television programs, which were calling him and the Rossums in the weeks after Kristin’s arrest. Constance and Ralph were adamant about getting Kristin’s story out—or their version of it—on a broad scale. Loebig went along with them, thinking it might help soften the minds of potential jurors. Dealing with national media was a task Eriksen was happy to avoid.

  “It’s tough to be working a case and trying to figure out what you can and can’t say outside of the courtroom,” he said.

  In turn, Eriksen took on the nuts and bolts of the discovery process, which was no small feat. He was responsible for combing through at least twenty-five thousand pages of evidence, highlighting key points, and deciding which leads were worth sending an investigator out to pursue and which areas he needed to question Kristin about. He found more than forty such leads, such as a local fentanyl dealer from whom Greg could have bought the fentanyl that killed him. Later in the case, Eriksen also prepared to question many of the defense witnesses and to cross-examine the majority of the prosecution’s. All told, Loebig estimated that Eriksen logged in twice as many hours as he did.

  Initially, Loebig and Eriksen each met separately with Kristin for about an hour at Las Colinas so she could become comfortable with them and understand the legal process she faced. Loebig knew nothing about the case before their first meeting other than what he’d read in the Union-Tribune, which had been running stories almost daily since Kristin’s arrest.

  Early on, Loebig spent more time with Kristin than Eriksen did, because she was feeling distraught and threatened by her new surroundings. She wanted to get out of jail as soon as possible. As time went on, Eriksen and Loebig met with her at least once a week, sometimes together, sometimes separately.

  Constance and Ralph urged the attorneys to do whatever they could to get bail set for Kristin. But with a possible death sentence hanging over her head, Kristin’s attorneys told them that freeing her on bail would be virtually impossible. Even if the district attorney decided not to seek a death sentence, Loebig and Eriksen thought Thompson would set bail so high as to be prohibitive. They were figuring on anywhere from $2 million to $5 million.

  As financially comfortable as the Rossums might have been—they had purchased a 4,000-square-foot home with a pool in Claremont for $692,000 in 1999, after selling two smaller ones for $202,000 and $350,000 earlier that year—they said they weren’t wealthy enough to put up that kind of money.

  On July 11, Ralph faxed out a press release with this headline: “Friends and Coworkers Rally to Defense of Kristin Rossum, Two Legal Defense Funds Merge.” The release described efforts by Claremont residents and two female faculty members from Claremont McKenna College, who had opened a bank account to help raise money for Kristin. “We have known Kristin and the family for years and know she could not have committed this crime,” the release quoted the women as saying.

  It also said that Richard Hogrefe, Kristin’s boss at TriLink, was cosponsoring the fund. “We want her back at TriLink as soon as possible,” he said in the release.

  The release went on to say: “While Kristin’s case is being handled by the Public Defender’s Office in San Diego County, friends were concerned about the additional funds that would be needed as Kristin faces a lengthy and arduous trial. The family remains hopeful of bail at a future date.”

  “We are blessed to have the support of such fine people who believe in Kristin’s innocence,” the release said, quoting the Rossum family, saying they’d “learned of the two independent efforts last week. Any funds remaining will be donated to nonprofits that work with inmates and their families.”

  The fund-raising campaign surprised some Claremont locals, especially given that Constance and Ralph Rossum both earned good salaries.

  “We didn’t understand how they expected the public to pay for it,” said Martin Weinberger, editor and publisher of the weekly Claremont Courier.

  Some, like Hogrefe, didn’t mind contributing financially to Kristin’s cause because they believed in her innocence. He visited her once a month in jail, wrote her letters, and defended her character to the media. After placing her on unpaid leave, he later asked her to help him write a scientific paper on some work she’d started in the lab. He said she was doing the work gratis to keep her mind occupied with something other than the murder case.

  “It is a shockingly sad story, but there is another side,” he told the Union-Tribune. “From our side it doesn’t fit. None of us believe [these charges have merit].”

  Hogrefe said Kristin’s job was safe as long she wasn’t convicted of any crime.

  “She was an excellent employee. In fact, she was a rising star,” he said. “She was the kind of person that when something needed to be done, she volunteered. She worked weekends. She would volunteer to do whatever is necessary to help the team.”

  He described her as an extremely social person who had recently joined the company softball team and was getting better and better. During one game, she got hit in the nose and fell to the ground. He went over to make sure she was okay, and she said to him softly, “It really hurts, Rick. I want to cry but I’m not going to.” Five minutes later, he said, she’d sucked it up, not wanting the team to know she was hurt.

  Hogrefe said he never saw any signs that Kristin was on drugs, but he seemed forgiving of her problem, of which he’d learned by reading the newspaper stories.

  “If she was having a drug problem, you do stupid things,” he said.

  At the same time the criminal investigators were putting
their case together against Kristin and possibly Michael, Marie and Yves de Villers hired the San Diego law firm of McClellan & Associates to file a wrongful death claim against the County of San Diego in Greg’s death.

  The claim, which is a necessary precursor to a civil lawsuit, was required to be filed against the county within six months of the date the claimant knew or should have known that the county did something wrong. If the county rejected the claim as having no merit, as it did in this case, the claimant had to file a lawsuit within six months of the date the county rejected the claim.

  The de Villers family’s claim, filed July 18, or eight and a half months after Greg’s death, stated that the filing was delayed based on “late discovery of the cause of injury.” The family didn’t know the “facts demonstrating the negligence and intentional conduct of the Office of the Medical Examiner and its employees in the death of Gregory de Villers” until after the search warrant affidavit for Kristin’s arrest on June 25 was released.

  The claim also said county officials and police denied numerous requests from the de Villers family for information and documents that were sealed because of the pending investigation. Meanwhile, prosecutor Dan Goldstein, who’d received a detailed letter from Jerome on February 21, outlining the findings of his own investigation, told Jerome he couldn’t discuss the case with him.

  Essentially, the de Villerses were accusing the county of hiring Kristin, a known drug abuser, without doing a background investigation and then putting her in charge of dangerous and illegal drugs, which she stole to get high and then to kill her husband. They said she also had “illicit sexual intercourse with her boss,” a relationship of which their superiors were well aware, and then Michael Robertson “failed, neglected and refused to supervise her, giving her free rein to the office and drug locker.”

  The county, they said, was also negligent in paying for the lovers to attend a conference where they learned about cases in which fentanyl overdoses resulted in unintentional death or suicide. They said Michael knew his lab did not routinely check for fentanyl in cases involving suspected drug overdoses. He and other employees were trained in the effects of narcotics and should have realized that Kristin was high on crystal methamphetamine.

  On or before November 6, 2000, they said, Kristin took fentanyl from the office with Michael’s knowledge, consent, and participation, and “during her working hours, she administered fatal doses to her unconscious, unknowing, and unsuspecting husband.” Then, “anticipating de Villers’s death, [she and Michael] spent several intimate hours together.”

  The de Villers family alleged that the Medical Examiner’s Office was further negligent, first, by allowing Kristin to donate Greg’s bones and tissues—“crucial evidentiary parts” that were needed to assess which drugs were ingested and the location of needle marks—and second, by doing a rushed autopsy. The office went along with the story that Greg’s death was a suicide and had intended to release the body to Kristin for immediate cremation. It was only due to a court order that the de Villerses were able to “put an end to what would have been a near-perfect crime,” the claim stated.

  After the county rejected the de Villers family’s claim, McClellan & Associates filed a civil complaint in Superior Court on November 14, 2001. The lawsuit made the same negligence and wrongful death allegations against the county, and named Kristin and Michael as codefendants.

  Senior Deputy County Counsel Deborah McCarthy later tried to argue that the de Villers family missed the filing deadline for the claim, so the lawsuit should not go to trial.

  When Vic Eriksen first met with Kristin, she had the “deer frozen in headlights” syndrome and cried a lot. He didn’t see what some others did—that Kristin used her tears to engender sympathy or to manipulate people into helping her—only a young woman who seemed, in many aspects, to be the same little girl her parents still saw when they looked at her.

  Eriksen was the one to confront her when they got new evidence. But from the way she whispered to Eriksen during court appearances, her face reflecting an intensity and a high level of trust, she seemed to have bonded more with him than with Loebig.

  Once Kristin was able to get past her emotions, she became an active participant in her own defense, giving her attorneys leads to pursue as they went through the stacks of discovery materials turned over by the prosecution. In the beginning, she spoke mostly in generalities. Only later, Loebig said, after the incriminating evidence continued to pile up and she’d had many discussions with her parents, trying to come up with consensus explanations, did Kristin start offering more specific ideas. Among the most important was a notion of where Greg could have obtained the fentanyl on his own.

  Because they saw no direct evidence that proved Kristin poisoned Greg with fentanyl, the defense strategy was to provide innocent explanations for the mounting circumstantial evidence. Loebig was hoping for an acquittal, or at least a hung jury, because some or all of the jurors had believed her story.

  Eriksen talked to one or both of Kristin’s parents at least three times a week during the fifteen months leading up to the trial, which started with jury selection on October 4, 2002. He and Loebig also met personally with them most every weekend, usually on a Saturday, before they visited Kristin in jail. Constance and Ralph wanted to play an integral part in shaping Kristin’s defense, so they, too, went through the evidence and suggested possible avenues for investigation.

  “The Rossums, being loving parents, did have an answer to almost every piece of incriminating evidence,” Eriksen recalled later. “Sometimes those answers were plausible, and some weren’t. I think it’s fair to say they were desperate, and they had to have answers for Kristin.”

  As time went on, however, Loebig became increasingly frustrated with Kristin’s parents. They were looking so hard for answers that they began disseminating information to the media that oftentimes didn’t ring true, and in some cases turned out to be downright false.

  In the weeks after Kristin’s arrest, Constance and Ralph Rossum contended they spent hours every day fielding calls from all types of print and broadcast reporters and producers, who wanted interviews with them and with Kristin.

  During this time, Constance and Ralph Rossum each gave lengthy telephone interviews to a reporter for The San Diego Union-Tribune, outlining their version of the events that led up to Greg’s death, based on their own observations and what Kristin had told them. They were convinced that Greg committed suicide.

  When they first met Greg, they said, they were delighted that he’d helped Kristin get off drugs. Their approach apparently hadn’t worked, and they were pleased that Greg’s methods, whatever they were, were more successful. So, to them, he was their “saving angel.” Greg promised them he would let them know if Kristin started using meth again, and he never said a word, so Constance was sure she was clean.

  “Kristin does not have a drug problem,” Ralph said, adding that they hadn’t seen symptoms of one for years.

  Even though Kristin wrote on her sheriff’s job application that she’d been arrested, they said, it wasn’t true. When she was in high school, Ralph said, Constance called the police to try to “put the fear of God” in Kristin. The cop confiscated meth paraphernalia, but Kristin only thought she’d been arrested. She was being “overly truthful” on her application.

  Together, Constance and Ralph painted a picture of Kristin as the innocent victim, wrongly accused, and Greg as a man who was destroying their daughter’s life posthumously. They said they’d watched Greg become increasingly possessive and obsessed with controlling her, and they saw sure signs that he was “spiraling down” into a deep depression as he watched his marriage crumble. He obviously didn’t want to go through the same kind of breakup as his parents.

  They said Kristin started complaining to them about feeling trapped and suffocated as early as January 2000. She told them Greg was clocking how long she’d take to drive home and would say things like “If you loved me, you’d want
to be with me every minute.” He’d tell Kristin he couldn’t go to sleep unless she was lying next to him, and he wouldn’t eat lunch unless she made it for him. He also had an anger problem and was volatile, they said, just like his father and his brother Jerome.

  “We’d call regularly, and she’d be crying,” Constance said. “We’d say, ‘What is it?’ and she’d say, ‘It’s Greg.’”

  “Mom,” she’d tell Constance, “I’m his whole life.”

  The complaints continued through the spring, when Constance told Kristin she had three choices: one, she could accept Greg’s personality, do her best, and maybe seek counseling; two, she could say she wanted a divorce and just leave; or three, she could ask for a trial separation and try to work it out by learning how to be two separate people with two separate identities. Kristin told Constance the trial separation sounded best.

  About a week or so after the couple’s one-year anniversary in June, the Rossums took Greg and Kristin to dinner. When Constance asked her how they’d celebrated the special day, Kristin got teary-eyed and said, “Greg wasn’t feeling well, so we’ll probably go out in a week or so for a nice dinner.”

  Greg had a weird grin on his face as Kristin spoke, Constance recalled, describing it as a “Cheshire cat” grin. Not happy, just strange. She remembered Greg saying, “Being romantic costs money,” and Kristin replying, “You could have gotten me a single rose.”

  In the late summer of 2000, the Rossums went for another visit to San Diego, and this time Kristin was more insistent.

  “Mom, I just have to end this,” Kristin told Constance.