Poisoned Love

by Caitlin Rother

  In what the media saw as a punitive measure, Thompson decided that all reporters would have to compete with every other court watcher for one of the fifty seats in his courtroom. Thompson also reiterated his threat to punish reporters who violated his order about interviewing jurors, saying he’d been told that two reporters and a television photographer had already tried to do so.

  Over the next three days, Goldstein and Loebig queried the jurors whose written answers elicited more questions. Both sides mutually agreed to dismiss a number of jurors because they’d formed an opinion after reading about the case in the newspaper or had drug use in their family.

  The defense attorneys, who hired a consultant to advise them during the jury selection process, were looking for panelists who would be skeptical of a circumstantial case that had, in their view, little or no direct evidence tying Kristin to Greg’s death. They were also looking for a cross section of the community, with as big a spread of ages and backgrounds as possible, hoping that a diverse panel would give rise to more questions in the jury room.

  The prosecutors were looking for commonsense people who could process all the complicated circumstantial evidence and connect the dots. They also wanted jurors who could work as a group, knew how to listen, could communicate without offending others, and had a stake in the community. They tried to stay away from choosing young men who might not be capable of being objective about the pretty young woman’s guilt.

  Goldstein repeatedly reminded jurors that they should assess witnesses’ credibility, often an important factor in deciding circumstantial cases. He asked one woman, who appeared to be in her thirties, if she had an image in her mind of what a murderer looked like.

  “No, not really,” she said.

  “Have you ever heard the phrase, ‘You can’t judge a book by its cover?’” Goldstein asked. “Is there anything about the way the defendant looks that would prevent you from convicting her for murder?”

  “No,” one woman promised. “I wouldn’t judge a murder case by the way she looks.”

  The attorneys went through more than 120 potential jurors before they were able to agree on a panel of twelve, most of whom were white professionals whose ages appeared to range from their twenties to their sixties. The jury was made up of five women and seven men. No juror seemed to have strong opinions about anything—all of those who seemed to have too much interest in this or any other court case were rejected along with those who said they leaned toward the prosecution or expressed frustrations with the criminal justice system. The attorneys also picked four alternates, two men and two women.

  The jurors included:

  A cryptologist, a white man who had worked primarily with classified information for twenty-two years; who had fathered three children, ages eight to sixteen; and who had volunteered for a Catholic service agency.

  A woman who appeared to be of mixed race and in her early forties, and wrote on her questionnaire that the criminal justice system was designed to give the defendant a fair trial. She told Goldstein that yes, she’d agree that the people, represented by the district attorney, were also entitled to a fair trial.

  A white woman who was a software engineer and looked close to Kristin’s age.

  A Neighborhood Watch captain, a married white man in his early fifties who was a supervisor at his job.

  A public relations manager, a white woman in her thirties, who said she heard the charges, looked at Kristin, and thought, “Whoa, this is serious.”

  A high school umpire, a white man whose son was a fire medic, who said he’d been on a jury in a personal injury trial and learned that “some people will actually take an oath and not tell the truth.”

  A retired travel agent, a white man with white hair, who said he’d read about the case, but nothing had really stuck with him.

  A military housing manager who had served nine years in the Navy and said he had a fairly small staff at work and would prefer not to be chosen.

  A black man who said his brother used crystal meth, pot, and PCP back in the 1970s, when he’d been a gang member and drug dealer until law enforcement got involved. “We kept him in line around the house,” he said. “I think he learned from his mistake. He’s a much better person now.”

  Once the jury was sworn in, Thompson told the panelists to keep an open mind. He said they shouldn’t consider the content of questions as evidence, independently research facts presented at trial, visit the scene for more information, or watch or read any news stories on the case.

  “You will in essence be the judges of the facts…[and] believability of the witnesses,” he said.

  Then, as promised, Thompson considered the defense’s motion for a change of venue. Eriksen pointed out that the jury included people who had “read, seen or heard something about the case,” and this still concerned the defense. But Thompson denied the motion.

  Chapter 17

  The line outside Judge Thompson’s courtroom was trailing down the hall long before the bailiff opened the doors on October 15, when Goldstein would give his opening statement.

  Some local reporters got to the courthouse as soon as it opened at 7 A.M.—nearly two hours early—to ensure they got a seat. With such a high-profile case, there would be hell to pay if they missed any of this story. Friends of the Rossums and of the de Villers family had to wait in line like everybody else, including the de Villerses’ civil attorneys, Craig McClellan and Cindy Lane. This was the first time anyone could remember that even paralegals for the DA’s office had no guaranteed seats.

  But what no one understood until the first break, midway through the morning session, was that the bailiffs were going to empty the courtroom at every break, forcing people to wait in line four times a day to get a seat. If they didn’t get out of the courtroom fast enough to get a spot near the front of the line, they could miss the next session.

  This made for excruciatingly long and stressful days for the reporters, who had to rush to the bathroom or call in updates before the line started moving again, and then produce a story on deadline that night. Most of the news organizations hired someone or sent over an intern or second reporter to hold the main reporter’s place in line, but writers from out of town had to rough it, leaving a jacket or briefcase as a placeholder.

  Alliances were formed to save the prime seats in the front row of the gallery behind the prosecution table. The two closest to the aisle had small fold-up desktops that made it easier to take notes and also provided the best view for monitoring Kristin’s reactions at the defense table. TV reporters sent updates from the courtroom by handheld computer or scribbled sound bites to dictate during the next break.

  Thompson’s no-camera rule meant that news photographers generally had to hang around on the sidewalk outside the courthouse, waiting for Kristin, her parents, and her attorneys to walk in and out. Kristin usually wore dark glasses, her head held high, chest out, and ponytail bobbing. People told Loebig his client looked arrogant.

  Thompson’s bailiff, Frank Cordle, would allow the Rossums and the de Villers family into the courtroom to take their seats a few minutes before the public. The Rossums always sat on the left side of the gallery a couple of rows behind the defense table. The de Villers family sat on the opposite side, behind the prosecution table, usually a row further back and out of the Rossums’ line of sight. The families that used to share Thanksgiving dinners did not speak to each other during the trial, even the several times they ended up in the same restaurant.

  Young men who’d met Kristin or had seen her picture in the newspaper came alone to the trial, hoping to catch her eye or perhaps just a glimpse of the local celebrity. Some of them e-mailed reporters, asking, “Do you think she did it?”

  Meanwhile, the “Trial of Kristin Rossum” forum on the Union-Tribune’s Web site was full of spirited debate as readers weighed in on the latest evidence. One defender called Kristin a “notorious hottie” and, like many others, joked about wanting to date her. The forum, which was init
iated just before jury selection began and continued long after trial was over, had drawn more than sixty-seven thousand hits by the summer of 2004.

  As it had from the beginning, the case provided ample fodder for cocktail and water-cooler conversation.

  Goldstein took four weeks to write his opening statement. He delivered it to the jury in a jam-packed four hours, previewing the case he would roll out over the next two weeks. The dynamic prosecutor was entertaining to watch as he unveiled new evidence and tied it all together for the jury, reading intimate e-mails, playing incriminating audiotapes, showing photos, and using other props to capture and hold the panel’s attention.

  Goldstein painted Kristin as a young woman who used lies and drama to manipulate the people in her life, had a history of stealing to feed her drug habit, and exhibited a constant need for attention, love, and approval. Image was everything to her and her family. Time after time, he used Kristin’s parents’ own words against her, illustrating how she wreaked havoc on their quiet, suburban lives.

  Essentially, he said, Kristin killed Greg to protect two relationships: her long-standing affair with methamphetamine and her more recent affair with her boss, Michael Robertson. But the power the drugs had over her was stronger than any romantic love, and it poisoned every other part of her life—past, present, and future.

  “Robertson will never be in this courtroom, but he will be an integral part of this homicide,” Goldstein said. “He’s part of the motive. He’s part of who protected Rossum. He protected her methamphetamine abuse. He protected the way she stole methamphetamine from the Medical Examiner’s Office. He protected her in every way, including trying to cover up this homicide. He was with Rossum throughout the day of the murder…. His involvement is inextricably wound into this case.”

  As their affair intensified, Goldstein said, Michael increased the pressure on Kristin to leave Greg. He wrote her a letter the night after the Yankees won the World Series on October 26, 2000, saying it was getting increasingly difficult to spend so many long nights waiting for her.

  “Not many to go now,” Goldstein said, quoting Michael’s letter. Goldstein said the relationship “reached critical mass,” and two weeks later, Kristin’s psyche buckled under all the stress. She used the “tools of her trade” to kill Greg, stealing her weapon of choice from “a veritable candy store of drugs” at the Medical Examiner’s Office. Then she lied and staged a suicide scene to try to cover up her crime.

  The irony of this case, he said, was that Greg didn’t use drugs. He hated drugs. In fact, Greg was the one that helped Kristin kick her meth habit and threw away her old prescriptions. Kristin killed Greg, he said, because he found out she was using again and threatened to report her renewed habit to her superiors if she didn’t quit her job. As a result, he became the victim of a fatal love triangle. He left no evidence that he committed suicide, no note or pill containers, no syringes or any other sign to explain how the cocktail of narcotics got into his body. Drugs were a part of Kristin’s life, not his.

  Like a drumbeat that would sound throughout the trial, Goldstein repeatedly flashed on a screen the shadowy booking photo from Kristin’s drug arrest two months after Greg’s death—lest the panel forget that the clean and healthy-looking blond woman sitting at the defense table was once a gaunt tweaker, her face covered with sores. That she was a drug addict with the state of mind to kill her husband. And that she, without a reasonable doubt, could have easily poisoned Gregory de Villers while he lay in bed, unable to answer his concerned coworkers’ calls on the princess phone nearby.

  “Greg is in a state of near coma,” Goldstein said. “He’s unable to get to a phone, unable to call in sick for himself. His lungs are filling up with fluids, his bladder is no longer working, and he’s dying.”

  Greg must have already been out of it early that morning, he said, because for the first time ever, Kristin used her home phone to call Armando Ruelas Garcia, her drug dealer in Tijuana. Not once, but four times in quick succession, from 7:16 to 7:33 A.M. With Greg unconscious, he said, she felt it was finally safe to call the man whose business card she kept in her desk at work. Over the next two months, Kristin’s phone records showed that she called Garcia thirty-two times. These calls were followed within a day or two by ATM withdrawals of $300 to $400—eleven of them—starting the day Greg died and ending just days before she was arrested for drug possession.

  Goldstein said Kristin and Michael were infatuated with roses. They exchanged them and wrote to each other on cards embossed with them. And it was a rose that did her in.

  Goldstein held up a gray Vons card for the jury and showed a blown-up version of the receipt from purchases she made at her neighborhood supermarket on November 6. Kristin told Jerome that she and Michael had gone to Vons to buy some soup between 3 and 5 P.M. that day. But this receipt proved she was lying.

  “The defendant, on the day Greg was dying, at about 12:41 P.M., went to Vons. How do we know that? She was trying to get her discount,” he said. She swiped her Vons card just as she always did, and it recorded her purchases on the Vons central computer.

  “Rose, single, with baby’s breath bouquet,” he said, reading the receipt.

  “She bought a rose,” he said as he held up a long-stemmed red rose, turned dramatically, and pointed at Kristin. “What was on scene was one stem, and there were rose petals all over Greg’s body, on the floor, not in the bed.”

  Moving on to the shredded letter, Goldstein told the jury that Kristin told different stories to Jerome and the police about how Greg found the love note. She told police that Greg caught her reading it when he came home, wrestled her to the ground, and got it away from her. She told Jerome that Greg found it after searching her and her purse. Goldstein explained that a police officer spent six weeks at the computer, reconstructing the note, which was written on a notepad taken from the Westin Rio Mar Beach Golf Resort & Spa in Puerto Rico.

  Goldstein read from Kristin’s diary to show that she’d even lied in her own writings, fabricating thoughts that were written purposely for Greg to read. There she was, ten days before the SOFT conference in Milwaukee, complaining that she was exasperated with Greg for being obsessed with whether Michael was going to go, too.

  “‘As far as I knew, he’s not,’” Goldstein said, reading from the journal. “‘I’m not going to change my plans if he goes…. Regardless of who ends up attending the conference, if [Greg] doesn’t believe in me…then what do we have?’”

  But Kristin, Goldstein said, knew very well that Michael was going to the conference. Their e-mails proved that they’d been planning to go away together since June.

  “The whole crime scene, the journal, the shredded note, it was a staged scene to mislead authorities,” Goldstein said. “She had motive to kill Greg de Villers. She was out of control, using dangerous drugs. She had an affair that had reached an apocalypse. [Greg] was going to turn her in for an affair and using meth. She knew that she would lose her job, and she knew that Michael Robertson would lose his work visa and he would be out of the country, and he is. The numerous lies that the defendant went through in the staging…[of] her husband’s death, her drug use, her affair…are tantamount to a confession. The defendant is guilty of murdering Greg de Villers. We are going to prove that in about the next month.”

  Goldstein finished around 2:30 P.M., leaving only a couple of hours in the afternoon session, but Loebig said he didn’t need nearly as long as the prosecution to make his opening statement. He took only ninety minutes to outline his case for the jury in a laid-back manner that posed a stark contrast to Goldstein’s aggressive delivery.

  Loebig spoke slowly, deliberately, and calmly as he reminded jurors of their promise to keep an open mind and reserve judgment of his client, who he promised would testify. He came across as the more compassionate attorney, attempting to establish a connection with the jury through empathy. He said, for example, that he felt saddened by the number of potential jurors who wrote in th
eir questionnaires that they’d suffered a suicide in their family.

  “Sitting here today, for the first time it dawned on me that almost any suicide is a surprise, otherwise any of us would intervene,” he said. “We’d help. Get counseling. We might change the way we are living our lives. We might abandon an old relationship or even a new one that we have taken up. We’d probably do about anything we could do, even for a friend, let alone a lover or husband or wife.”

  He characterized Kristin and her parents in a far more sympathetic light than Goldstein had. They weren’t the rich family that the prosecution made them out to be, he said. Constance and Ralph had modest, Midwestern roots, and Kristin was just a bright young girl who made some bad choices, disappointed her family, and then tried to make things right.

  “This is not a blue blood family with a black sheep in it,” he said.

  Loebig didn’t try to sugarcoat Kristin’s moral choices, such as sleeping with Greg the night they met and having an affair with her boss.

  “We are all adults here,” he told the jury. “…We are not here, at least I’m not, as some big moral judge, mortal sin, whatever. We all deal with our set of beliefs and values. It’s not too unusual—I think 50 percent of marriages end in divorce. It’s not too unusual for somebody to fall out of love, if, in fact, they were in love to begin with.”

  Loebig ran through Kristin’s life with Greg, how he helped her kick the drugs, how they got engaged, and how Kristin had reservations about whether Greg was the right man for her. And, how, when her parents encouraged her to go through with the wedding, she did.

  Loebig emphasized that he wasn’t going to make disparaging comments about Greg, although he described Greg’s family life, his parents’ divorce, and the emotional baggage that came with it. He talked about how much Greg adored Kristin and how, when Kristin suggested counseling and a trial separation, Greg went into his typical brooding mode.