Poisoned Love

by Caitlin Rother

  In talking with jurors after the verdict, Loebig said he got the impression that they came to a guilty verdict because they simply didn’t believe Kristin was telling the truth. A couple of them said that if Michael had also been on trial, they would have found him guilty as well.

  Asked if he thought Kristin had lied to him, Loebig said, “Who knows?”

  He said he didn’t think Kristin would try to hurt herself in prison.

  “She’s intelligent enough to look at the half-full glass,” he said, and the first thing she planned to do once she got to state prison was to explore the educational programs.

  San Diego CityBEAT, a local alternative weekly paper, described the outcome of Kristin’s sentencing hearing as follows: “Convicted killer-tweaker-hottie Kristin Rossum, who’s just twenty-six, learned that she’ll be spending the rest of her life in prison alongside all manner of scary, nasty women.”

  After Kristin’s notoriety had died down at Las Colinas, she was moved out of protective custody in the A-2 housing unit and into the B unit, where three inmates shared each cell and slept in a triple-bunk bed. Because Kristin was about to be moved to the state prison system, jail officials saw no point in providing special protection to her anymore.

  Inmates in the B unit, where she spent six days before being transferred to the women’s prison in Chowchilla, were woken up at 4:30 each morning by a deputy’s voice over a loudspeaker and ate their meals in a large dining room of picnic tables. Here, those in for the most serious crimes received the most respect—and Kristin certainly got her share. Corporal Erika Frierson heard that inmates were asking Kristin for her autograph.

  “Here they brag about their charges and their case,” Frierson said.

  Kristin volunteered to do cleaning, sweeping, and mopping, which gave her special privileges to shower alone between the three regular shifts—8 to 10 A.M., 1 to 4 P.M., and 7 to 9 P.M. Frierson said some inmates—and she thought this was Rossum’s motivation—sought these privileges to get attention. The shower areas, which are hung with partial curtains, are visible to the deputies who monitor the B unit from their station in a centrally located glass room, and also to the inmates, who can watch through their cell door windows.

  “Long showers for some inmates are a big thing,” Frierson said.

  Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, one of the largest women’s prisons in the United States, is about four miles off the freeway on a two-lane road surrounded by almond groves. CCWF, as it’s called within the prison system, is also right across the street from another women’s prison, Valley State Prison for Women. CCWF was built in 1990 to house about two thousand inmates. But by 2004 the prison’s population had grown by nearly sixteen hundred inmates, and it housed more than it was designed to hold. All the women on California’s death row, of which there were fourteen when Kristin arrived, were housed separately from the rest of the population.

  Kristin was first taken to the reception center at CCWF, where she was held and evaluated for a couple of months.

  Unless her conviction was overturned, Kristin would spend the rest of her life being identified by a series of numbers. As inmate W97094, she slept in the upper bunk of Bed #3 in Room 2 of a one-story cinder-block building called 516.

  She shared her cell—a room 18 by 19.4 feet—with seven other high-security prisoners who had committed similar crimes. The dormlike room had two sinks, a toilet, and a shower, where inmates’ feet, necks, and heads were always visible to guards watching over them.

  The CCWF staff members were well aware that Kristin was coming. “We knew when we received her that she was high notoriety,” prison spokesman Greg Schoonard said soon after she arrived. “We have not had any problems with Ms. Rossum.”

  With no chance for parole, Kristin was placed in a highly restrictive unit and would be confined there for the next five years. The only educational or vocational training she could receive in that time would be through the mail because she wasn’t allowed to leave the unit, even to attend classes.

  “It’s going to be difficult for Kristin Rossum. She’s obviously a very intelligent person,” Schoonard said. “I mean, what kind of education program can a prison offer someone who already has a bachelor’s of science degree?”

  It isn’t common for women to come to prison with such degrees, he said, but Kristin could certainly pursue a second one through the prison’s Education Department. She, like the other inmates, had access to a full law library as well as a general library of books and magazines; any new books had to be sent directly from the vendor. The same went for television sets, which had to be made of clear plastic so the inmate couldn’t hide any drugs in them. Kristin was not allowed access to the Internet, and she would never be allowed conjugal visits—even if she got married.

  An inmate with a sentence of “life without [parole] is considered an escape risk,” Schoonard said. “That’s the reason we establish a very high custody level for them.”

  Kristin was initially assigned to a job as a porter—a prison term for janitor.

  “It gives her something to do, although it’s probably not what she’s used to doing,” Schoonard said. “…They really have to come up with a way to look at their life and find something positive to do with it, despite their circumstances.”

  Someday, he said, she might get a clerical or secretarial position, though there weren’t as many of those available. She also could be assigned to do kitchen cleanup, serve food, or join the yard crew, which maintained the grounds.

  “We’re not going to have her working in the lab here, that’s for sure,” he said.

  By May 2004 Kristin had been assigned to yard crew. Her disciplinary history included what one prison spokeswoman characterized as “a list of small-time infractions.” Because of privacy laws, prison officials said they were unable to discuss anything more about Kristin’s behavior, health, or other activities—including whether she was attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings, which are held twice a week in California prisons.

  Nearly three months after the sentencing, the investigation into Michael’s possible involvement in Greg’s murder was in high gear, so Hendren and Agnew flew to Melbourne with the hopes of interviewing Michael, his friends, and colleagues.

  They met up with Detective Inspector Chris Enright of the Victoria state police’s homicide unit, who was helping them try to gather enough evidence to charge Michael and start extradition proceedings. Hendren and Agnew interviewed a dozen of Michael’s friends, family members, and former coworkers and also explored his training as a toxicologist at various local institutions.

  But Michael wouldn’t talk to Hendren and Agnew, referring them to his attorney. He also put out the word that he’d rather his friends remain tight-lipped, so the investigators weren’t able to get enough information to charge him.

  At the time, Agnew and Hendren would not comment on the pending investigation, but Enright said Michael was working in Rowville, a suburb of Melbourne “for some food company or company that analyzes chemical components or testing for food or consumables…nothing to do with toxicology or medical issues.”

  By the fall of 2004, Agnew said Michael and Nicole had divorced in 2001. When she and Hendren went to Australia, she said, Michael was working in a lab, but not in a director’s position. She speculated that no reputable lab would hire him with the allegations still hanging over his head. Neither she nor Hendren would comment further.

  In April 2003, Jerome de Villers was recognized at the Citizens of Courage luncheon, which the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office put on at the U.S. Grant Hotel for about two hundred people. Originally billed as a luncheon for crime victims, the event had been renamed by the new district attorney, Bonnie Dumanis.

  Listed first among the seven recipients on the program, Jerome was given an award for seeking justice for his brother’s murder.

  “Trying to figure out what happened to Greg consumed my life for a long time,” Jerome said as he acc
epted the award. “It still does.”

  While Kristin was getting used to her new accommodations and the de Villers family was trying to move on with their lives, the case took an unexpected twist.

  John Varnell was talking to his friends at Sunny’s Donuts in Chula Vista one morning, when Kristin’s case came up in conversation. Varnell is the first to admit that his memory for dates and times isn’t so great, but when he retold the story in early 2004, he initially said he thought the conversation had occurred right after Kristin was sentenced. After several attempts to remember a more exact date, he couldn’t really say for sure.

  The Union-Tribune ran a foot-tall photo of Kristin on the front of the local section the day after her sentencing, with a headline that read “Rossum Gets Life” in big, black capital letters. The photo featured Kristin with her wrists handcuffed in front and linked to a thick silver chain around her waist, being led to the sheriff’s cruiser by Thompson’s bailiff, Frank Cordle. She looked pale, her eyes cast down at the sidewalk. Part of Yves’s statement from the sentencing was quoted in big letters above the headline: “You show no remorse and asked no repentance for any of your actions.”

  Varnell hadn’t been following the case in the newspaper or on TV, but he said he probably saw Kristin’s picture that day. He remembered talking with his friends about the case one morning and then walking out of the donut shop behind a young blond woman who resembled Kristin. The woman was about twenty-six, slender, and cute and wore a ponytail, just as Kristin had during the trial. He told her she looked like the young woman in the paper. She said she’d heard that before.

  “That little gal isn’t guilty,” he said.

  The woman asked him to explain, and he told her about a series of phone calls he’d gotten from a man whose wife was having an affair with someone at work. After hearing his friends discuss the case, Varnell said he’d become convinced that the caller had been Greg de Villers and that Kristin Rossum was innocent.

  “I talked him out of shooting that guy who was messing with his wife,” Varnell told her.

  Varnell’s wife, Betty, was a Pentecostal minister with the Country Church in Chula Vista. The two of them joined the church more than forty years earlier, when Varnell was in the Navy. After leaving the military, Varnell drove an eighteen-wheeler for twenty-two years, until he retired about twenty-five years ago.

  The Country Church was small, with fewer than one hundred members in the congregation, and the Varnells’ home phone number is posted on the church sign, in case somebody needs guidance. Varnell often talked to callers when his wife was out.

  The man called three days in a row, twice just before noon. The first time, Betty was at the store, so Varnell talked to him for about ten minutes. From the background noise, it sounded like the man was calling from a pay phone in a bar or restaurant.

  “Are you the pastor?” the man asked.

  “No, but my wife is,” Varnell said.

  The man asked if Varnell knew the Bible well, and after Varnell assured him he did, the man said his wife was messing around with some guy at work. The man said he had a gun, and he was going to “shoot the son of a bitch.”

  “Don’t shoot him,” Varnell recalled saying. “He’s not worth shooting. You’ll just go to jail, and he’ll still have your woman.”

  Varnell told him a lot of marriages don’t work. “You can’t make people stay with you,” he said.

  Career women don’t make good wives, the man said. The man seemed anxious to talk, but he didn’t want to give Varnell his name. He wanted to know what the Bible said about killing somebody and about people who commit suicide, whether they could still go to heaven.

  The man called again the next day and asked some of the same questions. This time, Varnell told him about how Judas betrayed Christ, how he threw down his money and hung himself. The man wanted to know what happened to Judas then.

  “There’s no guarantee Judas is in heaven,” Varnell recalled saying.

  “What if I just throw up a handful of rose petals and do myself in?” the man asked.

  “I told you yesterday that won’t cut it,” Varnell said. “Taking your own life is an unpardonable sin. Thou shalt not kill. It’s one of the Ten Commandments.”

  Varnell knew the man was crying out for help. Varnell could feel his pain.

  The third time the man called, Varnell wasn’t home, but he left a message on the answering machine. He said he appreciated Varnell’s efforts to help him out, but he’d decided what he was going to do. Varnell didn’t remember hearing any background noise on the message that last time. Just quiet.

  Sometime later, Varnell mentioned to his wife that the man had never called back. But he said he didn’t put the pieces together until he heard about Kristin’s case at the donut shop. Varnell remembered that the man sounded like he was in his thirties, and the details—especially the rose petals—seemed to fit this case to a tee. He was sure the man was Greg de Villers and felt guilty that he hadn’t been able to stop him from killing himself. He felt that he “kind of let him down.”

  “I really believe in my heart she didn’t kill him,” Varnell said. “She didn’t have no reason to kill him.”

  The young woman from the donut shop, whose name he couldn’t remember, told Varnell he ought to talk to Kristin’s attorneys.

  Eventually, two women came to his mobile home to take statements from him and his wife, and their statements became the basis of a writ of habeas corpus that Kristin’s appellate attorney, Lynda Romero, filed in October 2003, asking for a new trial.

  Romero wrote in the writ that in addition to this new evidence, Kristin also deserved a new trial because she had “in-effective assistance of counsel.” She faulted Kristin’s attorneys for a number of things, including failure to object to the prosecution’s introduction of “false and misleading evidence” from Kristin’s past. She also said the defense opened the door to “massive impeachment evidence” by calling Kristin’s parents to the stand, where the prosecution trounced them on cross-examination.

  “The defense called Mr. and Mrs. Rossum as witnesses, and they were thereafter literally converted into prosecution witnesses,” Romero wrote. “…It is painfully clear that they struggled to avoid portraying [Kristin] as a liar, thief, and drug user capable of committing acts of violence. However, the prosecution was relentless and later told the jury the parents, too, were liars…. Even trial counsel attacked the parents’ testimony when he said they were biased…. By the time [Kristin] took the stand, her credibility was completely demolished.”

  Romero also faulted the defense for failing to request a continuance when Eriksen got sick, which resulted in a closing argument by Loebig that “failed to discuss critical evidence and which contained statements that contained inferences [Kristin] was guilty,” she wrote.

  The court ruled that the writ would be consolidated with the criminal appeal, which was filed separately the same day.

  Although Varnell signed an affidavit saying the caller told him he planned to use poison to commit suicide, Varnell later said the man never said that. Varnell also noted that his affidavit erroneously said the man called only twice, when it was actually three times.

  Asked to use personal details from his life to better identify when the man called, Varnell tried but still couldn’t remember exactly when it was. Nonetheless, Varnell was absolutely convinced that the caller was Greg de Villers. Sometimes, he said, he just knew things.

  “I have no idea when it was, but I know it was him,” Varnell said. “There’s no doubt in my mind.”

  According to the writ, Varnell ran into the young blond woman at the donut shop on March 27, 2003, more than three months after the sentencing. And the woman’s name was Kathleen Spratt.

  The way Spratt told the story in the writ, she was leaving the shop when Varnell told her she looked just like a young woman who’d been convicted of murder. Because other people had told her she looked like Kristin Rossum, Spratt mentioned her name,
and Varnell confirmed that Kristin was whom he was talking about. Spratt told a slightly different version than Varnell about his conversations with the caller.

  “He was considering staging his suicide, poisoning himself, and throwing rose petals around his bed,” Spratt said in the writ.

  Later that morning Spratt felt compelled to e-mail Ralph Rossum at Claremont McKenna College.

  “Mr. Rossum: I am sorry to track you down like this; I don’t mean to invade your privacy. However, I had a very strange conversation this morning, and for reasons you will soon understand, I thought I should relate it to you,” she wrote.

  She explained that Varnell had received several calls from a man “who may have been Greg.” She gave Ralph the particulars, saying Greg had died two days after the calls. If she hadn’t known Varnell’s wife from church, she told him, she would have “dismissed it as just a story.”

  “It is probably way too late for this to come out, but I wanted to try,” she wrote, offering to help Ralph get in touch with Varnell.

  In her signed statement, dated April 26, 2003, Spratt said she was subsequently contacted by Romero but had never met or spoken to the Rossums.

  Kristin’s appeal asked for a reversal of her criminal conviction, contending that her due process rights had been violated.

  Romero argued that the jury was given certain instructions it shouldn’t have been, and not given others it should have been. For example, she said the jury should have been given a cautionary instruction that the extremely prejudicial evidence of Kristin’s “prior drug use, possible thefts, and alleged extramarital affairs” had limited relevance.

  She said the jury also shouldn’t have been allowed to hear the prosecution present its conspiracy theory or call Michael “an uncharged, unindicted coconspirator” because there was no evidence that Kristin and Michael conspired to kill Greg, only that they were having an affair. The prosecution’s claim that Kristin and Michael hatched their murder plan during a two-minute cell phone call the night before Greg died was “rank speculation” by the prosecution and “strains credibility,” Romero wrote. Michael’s denials about the affair to Lloyd Amborn “are not abnormal, do not constitute criminal behavior, and do not support a conspiracy.” No one heard Kristin and Michael plotting or planning at any time before Greg’s death, and all the notes, cards, and e-mails they wrote to each other reflected only their “heartfelt desires on the part of each other to be together.”