Poisoned Love

by Caitlin Rother

  Loebig ended with a dramatic finish. “Had your relationship with Michael Robertson become so intense, so overwhelming that you agreed with him or took it upon yourself to kill Greg?” he asked.

  “Absolutely not,” Kristin said.

  “As you sit here today and testify, what are your feelings toward Greg?”

  “Objection, irrelevant,” Goldstein said.

  “Overruled,” Thompson said. “She can answer that.”

  “I still love him and miss him a lot,” Kristin said.

  “Nothing further, Your Honor,” Loebig said.

  As she had during her practice session, Kristin came off as largely believable, and she held her composure well during direct examination. But there would be no more softball questions for this defendant. Since it was 11:57 A.M., with only three minutes until Thompson would call a recess for the weekend, Goldstein chose not to start questioning Kristin until the following Monday morning.

  Skipping the introductory pleasantries he’d extended to other witnesses, Goldstein immediately went on the offensive, firing off a question that would show the jury from the very start that he had insight into Kristin’s psyche.

  “Have you taken any drugs within the past ninety-six hours?” Goldstein asked antagonistically.

  “Yes,” Kristin said.

  Goldstein asked what drugs she was taking, if they were prescribed medications, and if so, by whom.

  “I took last night a sleeping pill to help me sleep,” she said, adding that it was called Sonata and was prescribed by her primary care physician, Dr. Gary Bloom.

  “What other medications have you taken in the last ninety-six hours?” Goldstein asked.

  “This morning I also took a half a Xanax, also prescribed to me by Dr. Gary Bloom,” she said.

  “Did Dr. Gary Bloom tell you to take a Xanax before you came to court today?” Goldstein demanded.

  “No, he said when I was particularly anxious or nervous, that that might help.”

  “So you have taken medication, Xanax, which is some type of mood elevator, before you testified?” Goldstein asked.

  “It’s not a mood elevator,” Kristin said.

  “Something to keep you calm?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “What other drugs have you taken in the last ninety-six hours?”

  “Nothing else besides Ibuprofen.”

  From there, Goldstein engaged in a duel of semantics with Kristin as he got her to admit that Greg’s character was largely good, and that he was a nice, honest person who didn’t do drugs. Then, for the next two days, he proceeded to elicit details about her own character that were in extreme contrast to her husband’s. He continued to trap her into admitting to bad behavior and a series of lies, large and small, that wove through her personal and professional lives.

  Kristin resorted to a number of different responses when Goldstein was about to catch her in a lie or asked her to explain how she’d gotten into trouble in the past. Sometimes she said she’d been confused, ashamed, or embarrassed. Sometimes she apologized for misstating the facts or telling partial truths. Sometimes she just changed her story and contended that the new version was true. And sometimes she tried to answer a different question entirely, a tactic to which Goldstein repeatedly objected as “nonresponsive.”

  Asked if Greg was honest, Kristin said, “In many respects, yes.”

  “Is that a yes?” Goldstein asked.

  “There were times when he wasn’t, and more times than [not], he was,” she said.

  No, she said, she never told Detective Agnew that Greg was dishonest, because she didn’t feel it was appropriate to say harsh things about the dead, but she had “learned things since that [she] didn’t know then.”

  So, Goldstein asked, was she saying he wasn’t an honest person? And didn’t she describe Greg’s family to Agnew, using the unflattering term “dysfunctional”?

  Kristin said he wasn’t always honest with her, but yes, she’d said his family was dysfunctional. She also said, yes, Greg was “fairly steady” and, yes, he was “a very good human being.”

  Kristin acknowledged that when she came to San Diego and stayed the night with Greg, she had not broken up with her boyfriend, Teddy Maya.

  “Didn’t you tell Teddy Maya you were in a trunk of a car in Mexico being driven around?”

  “No,” she said. “That misstates what I said.”

  “So, if Teddy Maya gets on the stand and says that, he’s lying, correct?”

  “Argumentative, Your Honor,” Loebig said.

  Thompson sustained Loebig’s objection.

  Goldstein hammered on the point that Greg helped Kristin get off drugs because he didn’t do drugs. Then he asked about her claim that she saw Greg throw away the containers for her oxycodone and clonazepam five and a half years before he died.

  She said he got rid of the drugs because “he didn’t think it was appropriate for me to ration drugs to myself to kick another drug habit.” She added that he also didn’t like her using those drugs to get off methamphetamine, and was worried she would merely switch addictions from one substance to another. Greg didn’t like her using the diet pills, which she called “fat burners,” either, because he thought they were too much like meth and she didn’t need to use them, anyway.

  She also admitted that when she’d gone to Tijuana in September to buy some diet pills, which she described as a “milder alternative” to meth, that she “was beginning to fall off the wagon and beginning to relapse.” When she bought meth from Armando Garcia in Tijuana, she said, she took a long lunch, then smoked it at home one night when Greg was working late.

  In one of the trial’s more telling moments, Goldstein asked Kristin to explain to the jury how she smoked meth. Kristin showed how she smoked it in a pipe or piece of foil shaped like one, holding a Bic lighter or candle underneath until the meth melted and produced some smoke, which she’d inhale. She said she kept her pipe in a kitchen drawer at home, a location she thought would be “inconspicuous” because she did all the cooking.

  She said she never saw the oxycodone or clonazepam after Greg supposedly threw the pills away, not even when they moved to other apartments or when she was looking for a place to hide her meth.

  Wasn’t she concerned, Goldstein asked, when Greg, “a rookie drug user,” told her over lunch that he’d taken the pills? Yes, Kristin said, but “if he wanted to call 911, he could have reached down and dialed it, and they would have showed up regardless if he said anything. I was just trying to protect his image…. He told me there weren’t any more left. I saw that he was improving. He was up and about.”

  Later in her testimony, Goldstein prodded her again about why she hadn’t called for help after hearing Greg’s labored breathing all day.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t call,” she said. “I wish every day that I had…I was just thinking, poor thing. This must be really hard on you…. It didn’t occur to me that he might have taken something else.”

  Goldstein confronted Kristin about her earlier testimony that she’d stored the glass pipe in the HPLC room on Thursday, November 2. Yes, she said, she’d used meth that morning. But not in the lab. She’d smoked it in a restroom on the way to work.

  Goldstein asked if anything stopped her from going to Dr. Blackbourne or Lloyd Amborn and telling them about her drug use or affair with Michael before Greg carried out his threat to do so. No, she said, there wasn’t.

  “But you went to work Friday and never brought any of that up, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t. I figured I’d resign from the job before…”

  Goldstein objected. “That’s nonresponsive after ‘No,’” he said.

  Thompson sustained the objection, striking the last part of her statement.

  “He also threatened to expose the affair back in July, and he hadn’t gone through with it, so I believed him to be making idle threats. I wanted to be prepared,” she said, referring to her attempts to clean up.

  Kris
tin confirmed that, yes, she’d told 48 Hours that Greg could have taken the drugs to frame her, that he could have wanted to harm and blame her, “and in so doing, destroy [her] life along with his.”

  She also acknowledged there were no physical barriers preventing her from getting divorced. However, she said, “I cared about Greg a great deal. That alone presents a reason not to consider divorce.”

  “Is it fair to say that you didn’t want to leave Greg because you were aware that Robertson was having affairs also?”

  “I didn’t know that, actually,” she said. “…Until I read the e-mails, I had no idea.”

  She admitted that she’d told Agnew during her interview that she didn’t think Greg committed suicide.

  “At that point in time,” she said, “I wanted to believe it was accidental…because I was feeling so guilty.”

  She also admitted that the book American Suicide by Howard I. Kushner, which police found in their apartment, was hers, not Greg’s.

  Asked about her application to SDSU, Kristin acknowledged that her mother had helped fill it out for her, and they had purposely omitted the information about her poor academic record at Redlands. She also acknowledged that she’d signed a separate document, certifying under penalty of perjury that the answers on her application were accurate and complete.

  So, Goldstein asked, if she factored in all the grades from the University of Redlands, she wouldn’t have graduated summa cum laude or Phi Beta Kappa, would she? No, Kristin said.

  “You would have been disciplined for academic dishonesty, wouldn’t you?” Goldstein asked.

  Kristin said she didn’t understand his question, so Goldstein explained that she’d signed the SDSU application, swearing under penalty of perjury that it was complete and accurate. Kristin replied that she “misunderstood the initial application” and assumed she didn’t have to disclose the coursework if she wasn’t transferring credits.

  “What does perjury mean to you?” Goldstein asked.

  “That means lying…under oath,” she said.

  Goldstein switched gears and got Kristin to admit that she’d lied to Greg when he’d confronted her on Thursday, November 2, about doing drugs again. Goldstein also forced her to admit that she’d lied to Detective Agnew during her interview about her drug use.

  Goldstein asked Kristin why she’d been storing meth at work.

  “I had it there because I knew—” she said, pausing.

  “Go ahead. Finish your response. You knew Greg was looking for it, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Asked why Michael would have searched her desk on Sunday, November 5, Kristin said he’d noticed that her behavior had changed over the past ten days. Hadn’t Michael found a meth pipe three weeks earlier, confronted her, and then broken it? Goldstein asked.

  “I know nothing of that,” Kristin said.

  When Michael flushed the contents of the bindle in her desk that Sunday, Goldstein suggested that he was covering for Kristin.

  “I guess you could say that,” Kristin said, adding, however, that the bindle was empty. “I think his primary motivation was concern.” And yes, she said, Michael used county equipment to test the bindle for methamphetamine.

  “You resort to methamphetamine when your life gets stressed out, don’t you?” Goldstein asked.

  “It has happened before,” she said. “It’s not my only response to stress.”

  Goldstein had Kristin read aloud the e-mail she’d written to Greg on the morning of October 9—detailing the different pills she was taking. She said she’d written the e-mail after he’d searched her purse and they’d argued about the diuretic, aspirin, and dietary supplements he found. She said the prescription pills she described in the e-mail “didn’t actually exist. I was sending him on a wild goose chase to show how wrong he was.”

  “So not only are you lying about the drug, but you are lying about the reason why you are taking the drug, correct?” Goldstein asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “I was upset he was violating my trust.”

  She said she called Armando Garcia on the morning of November 6 to set up a buy “because it was certainly a stressful situation, leaving Greg,” and her home and work supplies were gone or thereabouts.

  She said she stayed clean for six months after police arrested her for drugs in January 2001, because she’d been told that she could be arrested for murder any day. Her attorney, who went out of town toward the end of June, told her he had a verbal agreement with police that they wouldn’t arrest her in his absence, so she’d bought some meth on June 24, thinking she’d have a week to detox.

  “It was one of the most stressful times of my life,” she said.

  “So you resort to meth when you are stressed out?” Goldstein asked again.

  “On that particular instance, I did.”

  “It’s not just that particular instance, is it?”

  Goldstein confronted her about hiding the meth pipe in the room where she used the HPLC machine.

  “You smoked in that room, didn’t you?”

  “Never,” she said, contending that she just hid the pipe in there. She described a bizarre rationale of hiding love letters, drugs, and pipes in different places at home and at work so that no one, particularly Greg, would find them. When she’d pulled away from him in the past, she said, Greg had searched through her things. But, she said, she did not hide the evidence envelope for case #377, which once contained methamphetamine and was found in the HPLC room after she was fired.

  “While you were at the Medical Examiner’s Office, did you ever see any other employees smoking meth?”

  “No,” she said. “Nobody knew about my drug use at the time. I didn’t know about anybody else’s.”

  Goldstein asked her to elaborate on the “billing inaccuracies” that led to her firing from California Pizza Kitchen.

  “I think I swapped some credit [cards],” she said.

  “You were using—running a little scam there, weren’t you?” Goldstein asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “Tell us, when you say that there’s billing discrepancies, you had pocketed money with these credit cards that people would purchase their meals with, correct?”

  “Not intentionally, no.”

  Goldstein asked if she was claiming to have had trouble adding up people’s bills properly.

  “No, I mixed up some people’s information,” she said. “…I charged some people’s credit cards for two meals instead of one.”

  “Weren’t you stealing from the customers?”

  “In a sense, yes,” she said, “…not intentionally. But it ended up being that.”

  Goldstein got her to admit that one of her favorite subjects was math, and, yes, she had taken calculus. But, she said, because of her meth use “a lot of errors in both judgment and accuracy, I’m sure, were at play.”

  Goldstein also got Kristin to admit that she didn’t always tell the truth to her parents and refrained from telling them about her relationship with Michael until after police searched her apartment and she was arrested for drugs in January 2001.

  “I was embarrassed and ashamed to be having an affair,” she said.

  “So, when you’re embarrassed and ashamed, you lie?” he asked.

  When Kristin would not answer the question directly, Goldstein objected to her answer as nonresponsive. Thompson agreed.

  When Goldstein confronted her about her false statement to Detective Agnew that she was having only an emotional relationship with Michael, Kristin apologized.

  “I’m very sorry I wasn’t more forthcoming with that information,” she said.

  Kristin acknowledged that she lied to Jerome and Bertrand on November 9 and said she must have “misspoken” when she told them she’d gone to Vons with Michael between 3 and 5 P.M. the day Greg died.

  “You felt it was necessary to meet Michael Robertson close to the apartment?” Goldstein asked.

  No, Kristin said, they
always met at the Willows, which happened to be nearby.

  She also admitted that she lied to Greg about a raffle at work for Natalie Merchant tickets because she wanted to create an excuse to go to the concert.

  When Goldstein tried to pin Kristin down on one of her latest claims—that Greg had accompanied her to the lab numerous times in her off-hours—Kristin admitted that no one from work ever saw them there together. But, she said, Greg had insisted on coming with her five or six times at night and on weekends after she told him about her feelings for Michael, including two visits in October—once before the SOFT conference and once on their way to buy Halloween costumes for the party they went to.

  “Greg wouldn’t let me go alone, and I had work to do,” Kristin said, adding that she didn’t know what he was doing while she was in the HPLC room.

  Wasn’t she worried, Goldstein asked, that Greg might sit at her desk and find all the cards, letters, rose petals, and birthday truffles Michael had given her? Kristin said that’s why she tried to remove all the rose petals from her desk, but apparently she’d left a few.

  The next day, November 5, the sixteenth day of the trial, Goldstein continued to pound on Kristin, getting her to admit many other instances where she’d lied before the trial. And now that she’d made certain incriminating statements on the stand, he could point out to the jurors that she’d lied to them as well.

  Goldstein confronted her about the conflicts between her diary, her earlier testimony, and the e-mails Michael sent to her and their colleagues about the SOFT conference—none of which indicated that he’d ever considered not going.

  “Are you telling us that you didn’t lie in your journal?”

  Kristin explained that the journal had a dual purpose, to express her feelings and to help Greg understand them if he happened to read it.

  “You wrote this diary, this alleged diary, didn’t you, for Greg to read?” Goldstein asked.

  “No, that wasn’t the sole purpose,” she said.

  “Your whole attempt was to deceive Greg de Villers, was it not?”

  “That’s not true.”

  But, asked again about the contents of the October 9 e-mail she’d already admitted to concocting, she had to acknowledge that she’d written other things to deceive him in the past.