Poisoned Love

by Caitlin Rother

  “I told her, ‘Look, if you want out, it’s going to be complicated to tell Greg that you don’t want to marry him when you are actually already living with him. If you want, I’ll come down with a truck, and we’ll move you out right now to just make it easy,’” he recalled saying.

  But, he said, Kristin decided to come to Claremont and talk to her parents instead. To his surprise, she brought Greg. She talked with her mother while Ralph had his own conversation with Greg. Ralph said he’d also had some discussions with Greg about trying to reconcile with Yves, at the doctor’s request.

  Loebig asked if Greg ever shouted or acted out during these conversations about his father.

  “Yes, yes,” Ralph said. “…It was one issue that I really saw sort of passion and flaring anger.”

  In the spring of 2000, Ralph said, Constance told him Kristin’s marital doubts had resurfaced. Kristin was complaining that Greg was telling her “she should quit her job. She should not pursue a professional life.” Meanwhile, Ralph said he was giving his son-in-law career advice. Greg had a chance to be a manager at Rush Legal, but Ralph told him he should take advantage of his college degree in biology and go for the Fish and Game job. When Greg ended up at the biotech firm, Ralph thought it was a “good fit.”

  Asked about their last supper Friday night with Greg, Ralph repeated the same story about the last surviving red rose, this time inserting the word “melodrama” as he described Greg’s behavior. Twice during dinner, Ralph said, they had to tell Greg to “keep it down, he was making a scene” as he talked angrily about the fund-raiser he’d known since high school who had defaulted on his contract with Orbigen. Ralph said it was “not characteristic” for Greg to say the things he did, such as he was “going to ruin his life forever.”

  Later in the car, after they dropped off Greg and Kristin, Ralph said Constance told him about her chat with Kristin in the ladies’ room. Greg’s behavior made them so nervous that they agreed they should go look for a condo for their daughter the next day. He said they met with the agent and then drove around for about three hours looking at condos in the $200,000 range from a list she’d given them.

  Two nights later, Ralph said, they got the call from Kristin at the hospital, and he jumped in the car right away. On the drive back that night to Claremont, where they arrived around 4:15 A.M., he said, Kristin seemed to be sincerely mourning the loss of her husband, lapsing into “periods of just wailing and grief.”

  “It was the most unpleasant car trip I have ever had,” he recalled.

  Ralph said he got up around 7 A.M. to get his son to school and that’s when Sergeant Jones called.

  Goldstein started off his cross-examination with some light questions that seemed innocuous on their face, but it soon became obvious that he was trying to lead Ralph down the path of impeachment. As with the other defense witnesses, Goldstein’s strategy was to take a fact and build around it, forcing Ralph to come around to his premise, and getting him to concede to certain facts that he couldn’t deny. Goldstein also employed the same tactics that he had during the preliminary hearing—intentionally yelling at the professor and questioning him from behind, so that Ralph had to twist around in the witness stand to see his attacker. Goldstein wasn’t sure the jury liked his approach much, but he felt that his plan to undermine Ralph was working.

  Yes, Ralph replied, he had a very close relationship with his daughter, and it caused the family emotional turmoil to hear about Kristin’s drug use in 2000 and her affair with her boss. Yes, it was difficult to see her on trial for murder.

  Ralph wanted to protect his daughter, right? Goldstein asked.

  “Depends on what it means to protect my daughter,” Ralph answered carefully. “For example, I did participate in calling the police on her when we knew that there was this meth problem. So protecting her, in one sense, could be just to hide it. Protecting her in another way would be to do the right thing.”

  Goldstein moved on to Ralph’s earlier testimony about Greg’s description of the rose at Kristin’s apartment before dinner at the Prado, as he segued into one of the trial’s most crucial exchanges with a defense witness and trapped Ralph into contradicting himself.

  “In essence, anybody who came into the courtroom and had a different interpretation about Friday night, November 3rd, would be lying,” Goldstein said. “Isn’t that correct?”

  Loebig objected, saying the question was vague and irrelevant. Thompson sustained the objection only because Ralph had already essentially answered the question in the affirmative.

  Goldstein had blown up the transcript from Ralph’s 7 A.M. conversation with Jones, when the sergeant asked Ralph if he’d learned anything new from Kristin on the drive home. Goldstein put up the exhibit behind Ralph, where the jury could read it, and said he’d play the audiotape as well. He addressed his questions to Ralph using the title “doctor,” a title of respect used in academic circles for those who have earned a Ph.D. But his tone was anything but respectful.

  Starting with the way Ralph described that last Friday night, Goldstein asked, “Did you not utter the words, ‘We had a very pleasant evening’?”

  Yes, Ralph admitted.

  Goldstein read aloud Ralph’s response to Jones’s question about whether he’d seen the rose petals on the bedroom floor. Goldstein noted that Ralph had said yes, and explained that Greg bought Kristin a dozen roses for her birthday, which they’d talked about when they were in the apartment Friday night.

  “You said, ‘At this point, I think there were—I think two roses still on the kitchen table.’ Did you say that there were two roses still on the kitchen table?”

  “I said that,” Ralph said.

  “And you stated that ‘My wife commented on how beautiful the roses were.’ Is that true? Did you say that statement?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the remark was, ‘Yeah. And he bought them for my birthday, and here it’s a week later and they are still—they remain in such good shape.’ Did you say that?”

  “Yes.”

  “The person that said that, ‘And he bought them for my birthday, and it’s a week later, and they are still in such good shape,’ was your daughter Kristin Rossum, correct?”

  Ralph’s face went blank. He asked Goldstein to repeat the question.

  Essentially, Goldstein was showing Ralph that he’d told Jones something quite different from what he’d been telling the media and had just testified to the jury—that, in fact, it was Kristin, not Greg, who made the comment about the last surviving red rose.

  But Ralph didn’t seem to be getting it, so Goldstein approached the same point in different ways. Loebig objected, saying Goldstein was being argumentative. Goldstein went over the transcript with Ralph several times, hammering the point home for the jury.

  “You did not tell the detective that Greg de Villers had waxed poetically about a rose. Is that correct?”

  “No.”

  “When the detective was talking to you, you never said that Greg was acting bizarre on Friday night?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “And you knew that you were talking to a police officer who was asking you questions about your son-in-law’s death, correct?”

  “I thought this was a follow-up call where he was asking me what I had learned in the drive up the night before,” Ralph said. “That’s how he opened the interview.”

  Goldstein pointed out that Ralph had testified at the preliminary hearing that he thought he’d been talking to campus security, and that was why there was some “confusion about the statement.” He asked what difference it would have made to Ralph if he’d been talking to a San Diego police officer instead.

  Ralph said he “would have given much more fulsome and expansive responses. If the officer really wanted to interview me and get all that I knew, he wouldn’t have begun the interview knowing I had to leave to bring my son to school.”

  “So the officer did a poor interview of you?”

&nb
sp; Ralph retorted that the officer could have called back. But, no, he admitted, he didn’t call Jones back, either.

  “We thought that Greg had died of—of a combination of medications. It might have been intentional. It may have been a cry for help, inadvertent. I was fatigued. I had about an hour’s sleep. I had to bring my son to school. I assumed that this was a quick follow-up conversation because he’s saying that really what he wants to do is then get access to Kristin’s apartment…. I had no idea that this was anything more than an unfortunate death, and there was no need at that point to try to besmirch Greg’s reputation. He’s hardly dead, and I’m going to start speaking ill of him and how he’s behaved to somebody that I…”

  Goldstein continued along the same lines, finally asking if part of the reason Ralph gave a truncated answer was because he didn’t realize he was talking “to real police officers,” as Goldstein put it.

  Yes, Ralph said, that was true.

  To illustrate his point, Goldstein raised the level of drama in the courtroom to new heights. He asked the judge if he could be excused for ten seconds to get an exhibit. He went into the hallway outside the courtroom, and when he came back, he had a live one.

  He walked back in with Jones, dressed in a suit and tie, and two of the uniformed officers who had responded to Kristin’s 911 call. Officers McIntyre and Garcia, who wore badges on their shoulders that read “police” in capital letters, stood at attention in front of the partition between the gallery and the area where the defense attorneys and prosecutors sat. Goldstein reminded Ralph that he’d met these men in Kristin’s apartment the night Greg died.

  “They were in uniform, correct?”

  “Yes. I recall that.”

  “You saw the uniform,” Goldstein said. “They have guns on their belts. They have badges and patches. They looked like police officers, didn’t they?”

  “Lots of campus security people are armed and wear badges,” Ralph quipped.

  “When you saw them, they weren’t merely just fixtures in the apartment? They were doing things, correct?”

  “I cannot attest to what they were doing,” Ralph said. “That they were doing something, that makes sense.”

  When Goldstein asked Ralph about his conversation with Kristin about the rose petals that night, Ralph admitted that he asked Kristin in the car if the petals on the bedroom floor were the same ones from the rose they saw on Friday night. He said she replied, “I don’t know. I threw the roses away Sunday night. But they could have—I put them in the trash on Sunday night, but they could have been retrieved.”

  Ralph admitted he didn’t tell Jones any of this because he didn’t think it was relevant. Again, he said, he was half asleep when Jones called. Goldstein said the jury could make up its own mind when they heard his taped interview with Jones after the lunch break.

  Later in his testimony, Ralph admitted that he and Constance didn’t tell the real estate agent about any perceived problem between Greg and Kristin, only that they wanted to buy a place to be “near [their] daughter and son-in-law,” because that seemed like “an appropriate response” at the time.

  “You were saying you wanted to buy a second home, but that wasn’t true,” Goldstein said. “Is that correct?”

  “I saw no need to tell the real estate agent why we wanted a second home,” Ralph said.

  Ralph admitted that it was Kristin’s attorney, not Kristin herself, who told him after her arrest in January 2001 that she’d been using meth again.

  Goldstein asked Ralph about the comment he made to the Los Angeles Times that Kristin had not had a drug problem since high school. Ralph said he hesitated to say that newspapers always print the truth.

  “I may have said that, but I’m not certain…. It would have been put behind her until we knew that she had that problem in January. I think I was referencing at the time of Greg’s death.”

  Later, when Goldstein asked him about the article again, Ralph conceded that he made the statement even though he knew she’d used drugs in college.

  “People involved in meth do some dangerous things at times, correct?” Goldstein asked.

  Loebig objected. “Calls for speculation,” he said.

  Thompson said Ralph could answer the question as to his knowledge or opinion.

  “We have heard testimony in the trial concerning meth,” Ralph said. “I learned a lot about it sitting through this case. I never saw violent conduct by Kristin. I saw agitated and resistant conduct, but never aggression or violence toward anyone save herself.”

  Asked about the incident when Kristin grabbed a knife and then slashed at her wrists with razor blades, Ralph said they were superficial cuts, “superficial enough that it seemed not real suicide as much as melodramatic.”

  “Melodramatic and maybe a cry for help?” Goldstein asked.

  “Things were desperately wrong at that time,” Ralph said. “She did not go through with the act of suicide, did she, obviously?”

  “No,” Goldstein said. “So it’s fair to say it was a feigned attempt at suicide, correct?”

  “I would put it more an attempt at a feigned suicide,” Ralph said. “It didn’t strike me that it was a failed genuine effort. It was melodramatic.”

  Ralph admitted that yes, Kristin could be self-destructive while on drugs. Deceitful and uncontrollable, too. He also grudgingly conceded that threatening suicide with a knife or razor blades were violent acts by Kristin, but only against herself.

  On redirect, Loebig asked Ralph if he believed that Jones had been conducting a criminal investigation when they spoke on the morning after Greg’s death. No, Ralph said.

  “Have you made statements to various media interviewers that you thought were true that turned out later to be mistaken?” Loebig asked.

  “Absolutely,” Ralph said. “If I were to draft this document now, I would be in a better position.”

  After Constance and Ralph finished testifying, they appeared rattled, battered, and just plain tired. Eriksen attributed their reaction to anger and frustration from being grilled so mercilessly by the prosecution, particularly Goldstein. Loebig had no idea the two of them would get “so crossed-up on cross-examination.” If he’d known how they were going to fare, he would have advised them not to testify. But they had been determined to do so.

  The problem, Loebig said later, was that “they thought they were smarter than everyone else they were dealing with, including the DA…. They would not accept the significance of the evidence against her [Kristin].”

  Chapter 19

  Word had leaked out that Kristin was about to testify, so not knowing exactly how long her father would be on the stand, the reporters pulled in extra bodies to hold places in line outside the courtroom, which was as long, if not longer, than at the start of the trial.

  Finally, at 3 P.M. on Thursday, October 31, Loebig called Kristin to the stand. She took three deep breaths and stared imploringly into the row of reporters in the gallery behind the prosecution. Her eyes were already red and brimming with tears, her lips pulled tight with anxiety.

  Loebig, employing his calm and low-key demeanor, eased into his direct examination with simple questions about Kristin’s early memories. Kristin was so nervous, her voice shook as she spoke, but she soon began to relax and her tone evened out.

  Kristin cast her childhood and adolescence in a golden yellow light of happiness and success, repeatedly saying she “loved” this or that and characterizing various parts of her life as “wonderful.” Her tone changed and she started to cry, however, as she described the confrontation with her parents over her drug use in 1993. After they found the drugs in her backpack, she said, she remembered grabbing a knife in the kitchen and then a razor blade upstairs.

  “I felt devastated that my parents had known this,” she said. “…I didn’t know how to deal with the situation. I just—I wanted them to see how sorry I was.”

  Loebig asked if she’d made up her mind to get off drugs at the time, or if sh
e was planning to ignore her parents and keep using meth. Kristin said she wanted to stop and did so for at least a few months, maybe four or five, until just before her senior year started that fall.

  “I mean, you never want to get back into that kind of despair, hopelessness, helplessness,” she said.

  Loebig asked for more details about her relapses, though he skipped over the incident in 1994, when her mother called the police and Kristin was arrested. Instead, he had her describe the twelve-step program in Chino, how she started college at Redlands, and then how she began using meth again at a party during the fall semester.

  “At that party, did you buy meth, or were you offered it and you took it?” Loebig asked.

  “I was offered it, and I took it,” Kristin said.

  Asked how often she used meth after that, she said, “It might have been half a week, a week, a few days before I went to this person the next time. And before a big exam, I thought I could study harder, work better, not realizing my limitations and how quickly that would snowball into more regular use…. Probably by midsemester I was using everyday.”

  Loebig asked her why she ran away from Redlands when she knew it would cause her parents “immediate concern.” Kristin started crying again. Goldstein objected, saying Loebig was leading the witness. Thompson overruled his objection.

  Kristin’s voice rose to a high pitch as she answered Loebig’s questions. Stopping to blow her nose, she said she had a friend call her parents around Christmastime to tell them she was okay.

  “But you didn’t talk to your parents over Christmas?” Loebig asked.

  “I didn’t,” she said.

  Kristin said she took the train down to San Diego to get her “act together,” checked into a motel in Chula Vista, then took a two-minute trolley ride to the Mexican border, where she met Greg and his brothers. She said she and Greg spoke French to each other and “kind of hit it off from there.” When Greg offered to let her stay with him that night, she accepted.