Poisoned Love

by Caitlin Rother

  Hendren whittled away some more at Christianson’s credibility in his closing questions, creating the inference that she and Kristin had talked about what she should or would say on the stand.

  “When was the last time you saw her before court?” Hendren asked.

  “Last Thursday.”

  “Where was that at?”

  “We had dinner.”

  “Who else was present?”

  “Just the two of us.”

  “And you knew at that time that you were going to be a witness here today, right?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  Pressed further, Christianson admitted that, yes, she had filled out a form for the defense attorneys and knew she might be called as a witness.

  “Okay,” Hendren said. “So you knew it was a possibility.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  “Yes.”

  Kathy Vanella, whose daughter, Jessica, knew Kristin from TriLink, testified in her gravelly voice that Kristin lived with them after she was released on bail. Kristin smiled at her while Vanella testified, explaining that she first met Kristin at a softball game soon after Jessica started working at the biotech company.

  “This little voice in the crowd asked everybody to please not swear, and it was Kristin,” she said.

  Vanella said Jessica met Kristin several months before she went to jail, where Jessica visited her every other Sunday. After Kristin got out, she was working at TriLink only a few days a week, so she’d stay two nights at the Vanellas’ house and then drive home to Claremont. This went on for about four months. Vanella said she never asked Kristin about the case, nor did she read anything about it in the newspaper because she considered it Kristin’s personal business. She wanted Kristin to feel safe with her and free from the judgment of others. Kristin, in turn, never volunteered any information.

  On Thursday nights, Vanella said, a bunch of friends raced cars around a track on her forty-acre property. Everyone liked Kristin.

  “She’s always gracious and pleasant and friendly and eager to talk to everybody,” Vanella said.

  Like Christianson, Vanella expressed her very firm belief that Kristin was a peaceful, good, and honest person who would never hurt anyone. On cross-examination, Hendren tried to chip away at this perception, asking whether Vanella’s position would change if she knew Kristin had repeatedly lied.

  “Would it affect your opinion of her truthfulness if the defendant had lied to homicide detectives from the San Diego Police Department during an interview regarding what her relationship was with a man named Michael Robertson?”

  “No,” Vanella said.

  But no matter what example he offered, Vanella would not be moved. The same went for a series of questions about Kristin’s methamphetamine use. Hendren asked if her perception would change if she knew Kristin had been hiding methamphetamine in her apartment or had been smoking it at the Medical Examiner’s Office. No, no, and no, Vanella said. When he was finished, Hendren left the impression that Vanella would cling to that mindset, regardless of any evidence presented to her.

  On redirect, Eriksen tried to maintain his witness’s credibility by asking her to recall a recent conversation they’d had in his office.

  “Did I tell you some of the lies or supposed lies that have been attributed to Ms. Rossum?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Did we tell you that all of those supposed lies that are attributed to Ms. Rossum are disputed in this case?”

  Hendren objected. “Hearsay,” he said.

  “Sustained,” Thompson said.

  “Nothing else,” Eriksen said.

  Hendren attempted several times to follow up with questions to show that Vanella would stick to her beliefs even in the face of proof—such as Kristin’s videotaped interview and e-mails—but Eriksen continued to object. Finally, Thompson let the question go, and Vanella said, no, her position would not waver.

  “I’m not her judge,” Vanella said.

  “That’s why your opinion is—you are not going to judge her, right?” Hendren asked.

  “I have opinions about that, and I’m sure that you don’t necessarily want to hear them,” she said.

  “Thank you,” Hendren said.

  Not all of Kristin’s loyal followers were men.

  When Jessica Vanella took the stand, Kristin smiled up at her as well. If Thompson noticed Kristin’s interaction with the defense witnesses, he did nothing about it.

  Jessica said Kristin stayed with her and her mom Wednesday, Thursday, and sometimes Friday nights, too. During their evenings out together, whether they played company softball, or went bowling, dancing, to a movie, or for a picnic at the beach, Jessica saw no mean streak in Kristin.

  On cross-examination by Hendren, Jessica said the only time she knew Kristin had lied concerned her termination from the Medical Examiner’s Office. Hendren asked Jessica to recall a form she filled out for the defense, which included a section about Kristin’s honesty and truthfulness.

  “What you said was, ‘The majority of people I have talked to have doubts about her honesty and truthfulness’?” Hendren asked.

  “Yes, I did say that,” she said.

  When it came to Kristin’s methamphetamine use, Jessica echoed her mother’s sentiment.

  “Have you talked to her about her methamphetamine use?” Hendren asked.

  “No, it’s none of my business,” she said.

  Hendren asked Jessica a similar series of questions, such as whether knowing that Kristin was hiding meth in her apartment on the day Greg died would change her opinion about Kristin being peaceful.

  “Taking drugs has nothing to do with being peaceful or not peaceful,” she said. Jessica acknowledged that some drugs could make a person paranoid or violent but said, “I think that you have to be violent for the drugs to bring out violence in you.”

  Like her mother, Jessica said she wouldn’t change her opinion of Kristin, even if she knew Kristin had tested positive for meth the day she was arrested on suspicion of murdering Greg.

  Finally, Hendren asked Jessica about her contact with Kristin and Michael and Kristin’s comments about their perfect relationship. Yes, Jessica said, Kristin told her they were going to be together once Michael got divorced. Jessica also said that more recently, Kristin had started seeing a man “other than Michael Robertson.”

  The next character witness was Professor William Tong, who characterized Kristin as “one of the best undergraduate students [he’d] ever met.” He said she was a team player who worked well with others and never missed any classes or appeared to be under the influence of drugs.

  On cross-examination, Hendren introduced an ethical issue that would become a focus during his questioning of Constance Rossum: the basis of Kristin’s cumulative grade point average, which led to her graduating summa cum laude, and the fact that her very poor grades from Redlands were not included on her application to SDSU. After a few rounds of objections by Eriksen, Hendren was finally able to get his question in.

  “Would you consider it dishonest if somebody completed [their college] application and did not list their prior educational institution attended?” Hendren asked.

  “Yes,” Tong said.

  Eriksen led Melissa Prager through the chronology of her friendship with Kristin, whom she described as “my dear friend.” She stated as fact the story about how Kristin met Greg and about how he had “kind of taken her out of her misery that she was in in Mexico.”

  Prager said that when she first met Greg, he seemed controlling and possessive of Kristin. Then, later, after he and Kristin were married, she recounted how Kristin confided that she’d fallen in love with Michael, and she wanted to move out of her apartment and leave Greg.

  On cross-examination, Goldstein pounded on the fact that Kristin never did leave Greg, not in August, September, October, or November.

  “The relationship ended because Greg had died, correct?” he asked.
<
br />   “Correct,” she said.

  “There wasn’t anything physically preventing her from leaving, was there?”

  “Not that I know of,” Prager said.

  Prager also talked about watching Kristin’s appearance go from better than she’d ever seen her to the other end of the spectrum—very thin, with black circles under her eyes—all within the five months leading up to January 2001.

  Goldstein had Prager answer a number of questions that revealed that she, who’d known Kristin much longer than the other character witnesses, wasn’t all that close to Kristin, either. He underscored that point by noting that Kristin never tried to call Prager before she ran away from school in Redlands.

  “She didn’t pick up the phone and call you and say, ‘Listen I’m having a lot of trouble; I’m out of here’?” Goldstein asked.

  No, Prager admitted, she and Kristin didn’t have the type of relationship where Kristin shared very personal things with her.

  Goldstein reinforced the point by showing that Prager had accepted on its face the story she’d heard from her own parents, through the Rossums, that Kristin had disappeared into Mexico for some length of time.

  “How long was she in Mexico for?” Goldstein asked.

  “It was a long enough period of time where—I think it was a few months. Might have been a—sometime between three and six months, I think, from what I understand.”

  “Was she going to school down there?”

  “I have no idea,” Prager said. “It was during the time—she was gone. I didn’t know where she was.”

  Goldstein pointed out that Prager had testified earlier that she couldn’t think of an instance where Kristin had lied to her. So Goldstein reminded her that she’d also testified that she’d tried to confront Kristin about her apparent drug use.

  “So, when you had confronted the defendant and said, ‘Are you doing drugs?’ and she said, ‘No,’ that was her response, correct?”

  “Right.”

  “You didn’t believe her, did you?”

  “I didn’t know,” Prager said. “…I could never tell when she was using drugs.”

  Loebig walked Constance Rossum through Kristin’s childhood and how it all started going bad when Kristin began using drugs. Constance admitted that initially, she wouldn’t have known a drug if she “fell over one,” but over time she became more aware of what was going on and realized she needed to intervene. The problem was, she said, there “wasn’t much help available,” so she talked to a counselor and took Kristin to her pediatrician for a physical.

  “At some point did you contact the Betty Ford Center in the Palm Springs area?” Loebig asked.

  “Yes, I did,” she said. “That was later.”

  But Constance said she never enrolled Kristin in that program or took her to a drug counselor. Instead, she and Ralph decided to have Kristin graduate high school early and enroll at the University of Redlands. Things were fine until “the same people who had given her problems at Claremont revisited her at Redlands,” she said.

  “By ‘revisited,’ what do you mean?” Loebig asked.

  “I meant tried to sell her drugs—sold her drugs,” Constance said.

  “Let’s not blame everybody else here,” Loebig said.

  Again, Loebig asked Constance if she and her husband tried to do something to help Kristin. Constance didn’t answer the question directly, saying they only suspected Kristin was using again but had no hard evidence.

  As Constance described Kristin’s first call home after running away, she started crying and wiped her eyes with a tissue. Her voice broke again as she talked about the family’s reunion with Kristin in January 1995. She paused and apologized before continuing. When the afternoon session ended a few minutes later and Thompson excused the jury, Constance asked if she could stay in the witness box to compose herself. Thompson agreed.

  The next morning Loebig picked up where he left off, with Kristin trying to get her life back together.

  Constance said Kristin moved into an apartment in Point Loma with a female coworker she’d met at California Pizza Kitchen, one of three jobs she held over the summer before enrolling at SDSU that fall. In May 1995, Constance said, she called the apartment complex where Greg lived, La Jolla Del Sol, and got Kristin a lease for an apartment she moved into in June. Greg moved in with Kristin in October, she said, and the lease was switched over to his name.

  Constance said she and Ralph decided they wanted to help the couple financially because Kristin loved Greg. Loebig submitted as evidence three pages detailing the estimated $74,425 worth of rent, tuition, furniture, and gifts, including wedding presents, the Rossums spent on the couple over the years.

  “Did Greg or Kristin come to you and ask you specifically for each of these monies, or were they given on your and Ralph’s initiative?” Loebig asked.

  “It was our initiative,” Constance said. “They would remind us if the rent check was late.”

  Meanwhile, Constance said, Greg explored different job options, looking to Ralph for advice as a “surrogate father.” She noted that Greg failed his entrance exam for a job with the state Department of Fish and Game before he finally got a job with Pharmingen.

  To back up her claim that Greg had a bad temper, Constance described an argument over wedding invitations that broke out between him and his mother one Thanksgiving at the Rossums.

  “She wanted to be listed as Dr. and Mrs. Yves R. Tremolet de Villers. Greg started shouting at us,” she said. “He didn’t want his father at the wedding. He wanted nothing to do with him.” She said they told him it was Marie’s decision and asked him “to at least be civil” to Yves.

  Then, a month before the wedding, Kristin came home crying and said she wanted to cancel it.

  “I gave her the wrong counsel, I’m afraid. I thought it was best at the time,” Constance said. “I thought she had wedding jitters because for five years, we’d been saying, ‘Kristin, is this wise?’”

  Two days before the ceremony, Constance said, Greg threw a fit when he heard that his father was planning to attend the rehearsal dinner and wedding.

  “He went into a rage and started shouting at me, saying, ‘Let’s call the whole thing off,’” she said.

  Constance said she tried to calm him down. “I just said, ‘I’m so sorry. I should’ve been more sensitive.’”

  Constance gushed as she talked about Kristin’s graduation and her being honored as most outstanding chemistry student. Greg was there, too, and so proud of his wife, although she recalled that he seemed a little sad and mentioned that Kristin was “so much smarter” than him.

  Just after New Year’s Day in 2000, Constance said, Kristin reiterated the same old concerns about her relationship with Greg and said she thought she’d made a mistake by marrying him.

  Soon after Kristin returned from a camping trip to the Grand Canyon with Greg, Kristin told her that she’d applied for a job with the Sheriff’s Department. Constance noted that Kristin had done this without talking to her and Ralph. As a result, she said, Kristin wrote on the application that she’d been arrested. Kristin “went overboard in her honesty,” because she’d never actually been arrested, Constance said.

  “So the incident that you had back in high school where the police were called didn’t result in Kristin being formally arrested?” Loebig asked.

  “Not at all,” Constance said.

  In September, she said, Kristin’s marital problems came up again when the two of them were having lunch in La Jolla.

  “She was definitely leaving Greg, though she described how hard it was given the problems he was having with his family—his mother’s eviction, her ill health, and all these other things—and wanted to do it in a way that would not hurt him,” Constance said, recalling that she told Kristin, “‘You can’t stay with a man simply because you don’t want to hurt his mother’s feelings. That’s very kind of you.’”

  Constance said she was concerned about how Greg wou
ld react to Kristin moving out, but she wanted Kristin to leave, nonetheless.

  “We said, ‘We can move you out today’,” Constance said, but Kristin wouldn’t have it. Quoting Kristin, she said, “‘Mom, I’m his whole life. I’ve been with him five years. I can’t say, “Goodbye, have a nice life”.’”

  Constance described the last Friday night when she, Ralph, Greg, and Kristin had dinner together, saying Greg’s voice quavered as he talked about the single red rose in the apartment.

  Greg’s demeanor “was strange and scary,” she said. “He was facing me. He said, ‘Of all the roses, that single rose survived.’ Ralph and I looked at each other. We thought, ‘Wow, you are waxing poetic there.’”

  “Was Greg animated when he said that, like you just demonstrated?” Loebig asked.

  “Oh, yes. Greg was very proud of a B+ he had in acting class at UCSD,” Constance said.

  During dinner at the Prado, she said, Greg shouted at them as he complained that his mother still had not received copies of the wedding photos and that he wanted a consultant he’d hired at Orbigen “to burn in Hell.” She said she had to “shush” him to keep his voice down and then kicked Kristin under the table so they could talk about Greg’s odd behavior in the ladies’ room.

  “It’s really bad,” she recalled Kristin telling her. “I’m going to be leaving him next week.”

  Constance said she offered to take Kristin away with her and Ralph that night. “Please let us be there when you leave,” she told Kristin. She then asked Kristin if she had any objection to them looking for a place she could rent from them, and Kristin said no. She said they ended the evening with a walk in Balboa Park because they didn’t want Greg “to feel abandoned.”

  The day after Greg died, she said, the de Villers family came to their house to discuss arrangements for his body. Asked if a consensus decision was made at the breakfast table about whether to bury or cremate Greg’s remains, Constance said, “Marie asked that he be cremated because of the ashes going to heaven.”