Finally, for purposes of full disclosure, I want to tell readers why I have had such a strong interest in this story and why I believe I was able to bring a unique insight to it. First, I know what it’s like to grow up in a family of academics, with all the pressures that entails. Like Kristin, I consider myself a perfectionist. Both of my parents have Ph.D.s and worked at San Diego State University while I was growing up, my father as an English professor and my mother as an administrator, eventually rising to dean of undergraduate affairs.
But perhaps more importantly, I was married to an alcoholic. My late husband, who died in April 1999, was a talented pension fund investment executive who, like Kristin, worked for the County of San Diego. He was an ambitious and emotional man, who, again like Kristin, seemed to have a bright future ahead of him. He managed to keep his alcoholism hidden from me and many other people before we got married. But his lies and his addiction, coupled with depression and the shame he felt about it all, cost him at least two jobs, three marriages, and ultimately, his own life. He committed suicide in a hotel room in Mexico a few days after I told him our relationship was over. I was scared of him and his demons when he drank, and I didn’t want to become one of those murder-suicide statistics I’d read about so often in my own newspaper. Still, when I tried to help get him back into treatment one last time, he refused and ran away. He’d threatened to kill himself in the past and told me at least once that I’d helped stop him with stories I’d written about others’ suicides, one of which earned me a Pulitzer Prize nomination. I was not surprised to learn that he’d finally carried out his threat. In fact, I was expecting the call, but that didn’t make it any less traumatic when it finally came.
Yes, this book is a sexy story about a fatal love triangle, illicit drugs, adultery, addiction, and murder. But I hope people will also see it as a cautionary tale about how drugs can destroy not just one life, but many others in the process.
Marie-France T. de Villers shows off baby Bertrand to his brothers, Greg and Jerome, while their father, Yves, looks on.
(Photo courtesy of the de Villers family)
Kristin helps Greg celebrate his graduation from the University of California, San Diego in 1997.
(Photo courtesy of the de Villers family)
Kristin and Greg are married on June 5, 1999, at the historic Padua Hills Theatre in Claremont, California.
(Photo courtesy of Jacinta Jarrell)
In 1997, Kristin was hired as a student worker in the toxicology lab at the San Diego County Medical Examiner’s Office while she was attending San Diego State University. (Author photo)
Michael Robertson out with his buddies from his Australian football club, the San Diego Lions. (Photo courtesy of Rob Liwanag)
Kristin and Michael met after work at this spot, which they nicknamed “the Willows,” on a dead-end street in the neighborhood of University City, where they lived within a mile of each other. (Author photo)
Michael gave Kristin these love note–IOUs, promising massages and dinners out. A coworker saw a box of them on her desk at the lab.
(Photo courtesy of John McCutchen)
Michael ripped up these cards he exchanged with Kristin and threw them in his trash after police searched his apartment on January 4, 2001. Police retrieved them, taped them back together, and used them to confront him during an interview a week later.
(Photo courtesy of John McCutchen)
Michael gave this card to Kristin with dried rose petals in it. Prosecutors used it as an exhibit during the trial to show the couple’s fascination with roses.
(Photo courtesy of John McCutchen)
Police seized these candy hearts, along with cards, letters, a sex manual, and poetry books, when they searched Michael’s apartment. (Photo courtesy of John McCutchen)
Kristin was a signed witness to Greg’s becoming an organ donor when he renewed his driver’s license about two weeks before he died. (Photo courtesy of John McCutchen)
Kristin Rossum and Greg de Villers attended a wedding and reception in Palm Springs for one of Greg’s friends in October 2000, a few weeks before Greg died. (Photo courtesy of Jacinta Jarrell)
Kristin and Greg lived in this gated apartment complex, owned by UCSD, on Regents Road in University City. (Author photo)
This trial exhibit illustrates the layout of Greg and Kristin’s apartment. (Photo courtesy of John McCutchen)
This trio of crime scene photos shows the bed where Kristin said she found Greg, covered in rose petals with a wedding photo tucked under the pillow. Following the 911 dispatcher’s instructions, she said she pulled him off the right side of the bed to the floor to do CPR. (Photos courtesy of the UCSD Police Department and John McCutchen)
UCSD campus police seized this shredded love letter in a Ziploc plastic bag from Kristin’s dining room table the night Greg died. Kristin said Greg had been trying to piece it back together with tape. (Image courtesy of the San Diego Police Department and John McCutchen)
This crime scene photo shows one of two thirty-gallon trash cans on the apartment balcony that UCSD police did not fully search. Sergeant Bob Jones stopped looking once he found the soup can that corroborated part of Kristin’s suicide story.
(Photo courtesy of the UCSD Police Department and John McCutchen)
Sgt. Jones returned to Kristin’s apartment the morning after Greg’s death to record a 10-minute videotape of the crime scene. This shot focuses on the red rose petals on the carpet next to the bed.
(Photo courtesy of the UCSD Police Department and John McCutchen)
UCSD police Sergeant Bob Jones in his office on the La Jolla campus. (Author photo)
Greg’s brother, Jerome de Villers, is widely credited for dogging authorities to pursue his brother’s death as a homicide, not a suicide. (Author photo)
Detective Laurie Agnew, a homicide detective with the San Diego Police Department, opened a special investigation and took over the case from the UCSD campus police three days after Greg’s death. (Author photo)
Detective Agnew interviews a distraught Kristin on the afternoon of November 22, 2000, the only interview Kristin gave to police before she was arrested on June 25, 2001. (Photo courtesy of the San Diego Police Department and John McCutchen)
During the trial, prosecutors repeatedly showed Kristin’s booking photo, taken when she was arrested on January 4, 2001 for being under the influence of methamphetamines and possession of the drug.
(Photo courtesy of John McCutchen)
This bottle of Somacid, a muscle relaxant Kristin purchased in Tijuana, was found in her desk at the Medical Examiner’s Office after she was fired on December 4, 2000 for using drugs.
(Photo courtesy of John McCutchen)
This glass pipe was found in Kristin’s apartment during the police search on January 4, 2001.
(Photo courtesy of John McCutchen)
Kristin wrote in three different diaries which police collected during their investigation, including three separate entries for the day after Greg’s death. Prosecutors said she wrote in the diaries as part of her staged suicide scheme, to be read first by her husband and later by police. (Photo courtesy of John McCutchen)
Michael gave two interviews to police, one on November 24, 2000, and this one on January 10, 2001, denying that he and Kristin were having a sexually intimate relationship. (Photo courtesy of the San Diego Police Department and John McCutchen)
Drug audits at the Medical Examiner’s Office found that this 10 mg vial of fentanyl, which was purchased for testing purposes, was empty. Fentanyl is the drug that killed Greg. The ME’s office had not run any tests using the vial since it was purchased in 1997. (Photo courtesy of John McCutchen)
Kristin was coming down off methamphetamine, her face awash with emotion, during her arraignment July 2, 2001 on charges of first-degree murder with the “special circumstances” of using poison to kill her husband. (Photo courtesy of The San Diego Union-Tribune/Ernie Grafton)
Deputy Public Defender Al
ex Loebig was Kristin’s lead defense attorney. (Photo courtesy of Joe Klein)
Deputy Public Defender Vic Eriksen worked with Loebig to represent Kristin. (Author photo)
Deputy District Attorneys Dan Goldstein and Dave Hendren prosecuted Kristin’s case. (Photo courtesy of Joe Klein)
Kristin, her brother Pierce (left), father Ralph (behind) and mother Constance (right) walk out of the Las Colinas Detention Facility after she is released on $1.25 million bail on January 4, 2002, nine months before the trial. (Photo courtesy of The San Diego Union-Tribune/John Gastaldo)
Kristin is pursued by news cameras during the trial outside the courthouse in October 2002. Judge John Thompson wouldn’t allow cameras in his courtroom. (Photo courtesy of The San Diego Union-Tribune/Dan Trevan)
On November 12, 2002, the day of the verdict and Greg’s birthday, Kristin’s parents and aunt, Marguerite Zandstra (behind), accompany her to the courtroom. (Photo courtesy of The San Diego Union-Tribune/K.C. Alfred)
Kristin is led to a sheriff’s cruiser that will take her back to Las Colinas Detention Facility after the jury found her guilty. (Photo courtesy of The San Diego Union-Tribune/K.C. Alfred)
This cartoon by Pulitzer Prize winner Steve Breen was published in The San Diego Union-Tribune’s editorial pages the day after the verdict.
(Image courtesy of Steve Breen/Copley News Service)
On December 12, 2002, Kristin is sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Here, sheriff’s deputy Frank Cordle escorts her out of the courthouse to a vehicle that will return her to Las Colinas until she can be transferred to Chowchilla women’s prison. (Photo courtesy of The San Diego Union-Tribune/K.C. Alfred)
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Copyright © 2005 by Caitlin Rother
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ISBN: 978-0-7860-2427-8
Table of Contents
Praise
Title Page
Cast of Characters
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
Photographic Insert
Copyright
Poisoned Love Page 44