Deadly American Beauty (St. Martin's True Crime Library) Read online

  In March 1993, Ralph and Constance Rossum celebrated their twenty-first wedding anniversary with a week-long Caribbean cruise, leaving their sixteen-year-old daughter in charge of her two younger brothers. They left cash in an envelope for pizza, and a list of numbers to call in an emergency.

  Soon after they had left, Kristin began inviting her friends, including her methamphetamine dealer, over to her house to party. She bought drugs from the dealer, using the money her parents had left for her brothers’ food. During the week her parents were away, she would put the boys to bed and then smoke crystal meth downstairs, staying up all night, talking to friends and listening to music.

  St. Patrick’s Day was Pierce’s birthday, so she threw a party for him. Word soon spread around Claremont High School that she was having a “rager” while her parents were away, and everyone was invited. It started quietly in the afternoon when some of her “good friends” came over to share a birthday cake and ice cream.

  But later that night, it turned into an open-house, as a procession of seniors and football players arrived with beer and drugs, leading to complaints from the neighbors. Some of her drug buddies also rifled through the house, stealing a video camera, her parents’ credit cards and a checkbook, which they later used. They also took the Rossum family car for a late night spin around Claremont.

  When Kristin’s parents returned the following Sunday, neighbors told them of the noisy party while they had been away. When they discovered the credit cards and checks missing, they confronted Kristin, who denied everything. But her parents were still suspicious and punished her by withdrawing her driving privileges. They also called Claremont police, filing a burglary report and giving names of their daughter’s friends whom they didn’t approve of.

  The following Tuesday evening, her brothers, alarmed by Kristin’s now-erratic behavior, searched her room. They found a glass crack pipe, a mirror, a razor blade and some Ex-Lax, and told their parents.

  The Rossums were furious and confronted her as she tried to walk out at 7:00 p.m. carrying her backpack. Kristin claimed she was on her way to the library to study for a class, but her parents were suspicious. Her father demanded to see what was in the backpack, snatching it from her when she refused to give it to him. On opening it, he found a white box inside and demanded to know what it was. Kristin burst into tears, claiming it was a present for her mother. But when Rossum insisted on looking inside and saw drug paraphernalia, he immediately realized what was going on.

  Then, frustrated by all her lies, he began smacking her on the arm as her mother looked on.

  “He grabbed me real hard by my left arm,” Kristin would later tell Claremont police. “He then started hitting me with his fist four or five times on my upper left arm.”

  Finally, according to Kristin’s account, Professor Rossum let go of his daughter, picked up one of her sandals and began hitting her on her buttocks, as her mother slapped her in the face, calling her a worthless slut.

  Hysterical, Kristin suddenly grabbed a kitchen knife, screaming that she was going to kill herself. Her father wrestled it away, and she ran upstairs, locking herself in the bathroom. When one of her brothers came down, saying that Kristin had some razor blades, Ralph Rossum dashed upstairs to discover her cutting her wrist in what he would later describe as a “melodramatic” suicide attempt.

  “[It was] nothing too serious,” Prof. Rossum later told police. “The razor blades were taken away from me.”

  Kristin eventually composed herself enough to come downstairs, where she tearfully admitted she had a drug problem, saying that she had taken crack three times. Feeling “mortified” and “devastated” that her parents had discovered she was on drugs, she promised to clean up.

  “We all agreed to work on the situation,” her father told police at the time.”

  The next morning, Kristin went to school and started acting strangely. She began pounding her fists against the school walls and lockers, threatening to kill herself. When her friends Melissa Yamaha and Kelly Jackson, who had been at her party, asked what was wrong, she told them her father had beaten her up, displaying her bruised arm.

  “Melissa and I were very worried about Kristin,” Kelly later told police. “She has really changed during the past week.”

  They were so concerned about Kristin’s welfare that they went to a school counselor, saying they feared Kristin’s parents were physically abusing her. The matter was then referred to the head teacher, Barbara Salyer, who summoned Kristin into her office to investigate. But Kristin refused to discuss what had happened.

  On Friday morning, Salyer called in Claremont police, as she was mandated to under California law. Officer Laurence Horowitz was assigned to investigate the child-beating allegations, interviewing Kristin and her two friends in the head teacher’s office.

  “Kristin seemed depressed,” Officer Horowitz later wrote in his report. “I observed that she had pulled all of her nails away. There were fresh wounds on her knuckles and she had appeared to have picked at old sores on the back of her hands.”

  Initially, Kristin refused to tell what had happened. But eventually she broke down in tears, telling him how her parents had beaten her after finding out about the party and that she had been using crack. She told him she had become so upset that she had considered cutting her wrists, but now things had improved at home.

  The officer then examined her left arm, taking photographs of her extensive bruising.

  “I think she minimized it significantly,” he would later say. “She didn’t want to get her mom and dad in trouble.”

  Officer Horowitz, a trained social worker who has worked with juvenile drug addicts, told Kristin to inform her parents about their interview, and that he would call them later that night.

  Back at the Claremont police station, he contacted the Child Abuse Hotline, writing a report which he telephoned in to Child Welfare Services.

  A few hours later, Kristin called the Claremont Police Department asking for Horowitz. She told him she wanted to fully explain what her father had done, claiming he had never hit her. She now said her heavy bruising had occurred when Professor Rossum had restrained her, after she had tried to flee the house. An hour later, Horowitz telephoned Constance Rossum, arranging to interview her and her husband at 8:00 a.m. the following morning.

  When the officer arrived at the Rossums’ plush Weatherford Court home, he immediately realized that Kristin was not the normal type of girl to be involved in hard drugs and family violence.

  “She came from a very privileged background,” he remembered. “The Rossums lived in a large, very upscale home in one of the more preferred necks of the woods. My guess is that they felt my involvement was not something they wanted.”

  Ralph and Constance Rossum were cordial, inviting the uniformed officer into their front room, where they explained how frustrated and angry they had become at the shock of finding their daughter involved with drugs.

  “Ralph got mad and did hit her on the arm,” Constance said. “I admit that I slapped her in the face, but she tried to hit me first.”

  She hadn’t taken her daughter to the hospital after she had cut her wrists, saying, “I was afraid of what would happen.”

  Her father also admitted striking Kristin “three or four times” for betraying his trust.

  “I realize that there is a lot going on and that we need some help,” he told Horowitz, going on to describe his work with the federal government developing its juvenile crime policy.

  Horowitz advised them that a Child Services worker would be in contact, later filing a second report to the Child Welfare Services. Apparently no further action in the matter was ever taken, but three months later, one of the stolen checks surfaced with Kristin’s name on it.

  Soon after Kristin’s run-in with Claremont police, her parents brought her to their family physician, Professor Richard Mabie, for a physical check-up, concerned about any damage from methamphetamine. They told the doctor they
had “found this drug stuff,” and, as Professor Mabie gave Kristin a full physical examination with her mother present, he delivered a stem lecture on drugs. He gave her a clean bill of health, assuring the Rossums that there had been no long-term damage.

  The Rossums also consulted several other doctors for advice on how to deal with Kristin’s drug problem, and Constance even called in the Betty Ford Clinic.

  “We had a representative from the Betty Ford Center come to our house and discuss an intervention,” Ralph Rossum would later testify. “We concluded that an intervention was not going to be helpful, first of all, because interventions work when people deny they have a problem. We all knew that Kristin knew and acknowledged that she was using meth.”

  He then enrolled Kristin in a Narcotics Anonymous twelve-step program in Chino, well away from Claremont so they wouldn’t be recognized. And for the next two months, Rossum attended the twice-weekly three-hour family meetings with Kristin, never missing a single one.

  “She knew how important I thought this was that we get that problem behind her,” said her father.

  After completing the program, Kristin seemed to be back to her old self, proudly declaring that drugs were now in her past. Her parents were convinced she was cured and that they could get on with their lives.

  Professor Rossum had now been made director of an annual week-long think-tank for fifteen federal judges, discussing the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. He was in charge of selecting the judges for the prestigious seminar at Claremont McKenna, chairing all the sessions.

  That summer, Kristin stayed clean. She went to summer school and got a job in a local video store to make extra money. She was also an enthusiastic member of her school’s a cappella choir, performing in several concerts.

  But that fall, in her senior year she ran into one of her old drug friends, asking him to hook her up with a dealer. Before long, she was back into crystal methamphetamine, scoring regularly from a boy at school.

  When her grades began to suffer, her father recognized the symptoms, immediately suspecting she had relapsed.

  “We started to see that kind of picking behavior on her knuckles that we had seen before,” he said. “I think we saw some weight loss. We were also getting progress reports in school. Kristin, who is brilliant when it comes to math, was doing very poorly in Calculus. That made no sense to us. So we knew there was a problem again.”

  For the rest of the year, there was tension in the Rossum household as her frustrated parents debated what to do. Kristin was now careful to keep her drugs and her paraphernalia well hidden, always vehemently denying that she was using and acting hurt that anyone would even question her about drugs.

  She and her parents also argued about her choice of friends. The strait-laced Rossums disapproved of many, and would try to prevent their daughter from seeing them. Kristin would staunchly defend them as good people, accusing her parents of trying to control her.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Rossum don’t like [us],” one of Kristin’s high school friends told police at the time. “She is very curt with us and will not allow Kristin to talk with us. They don’t seem like very friendly people.”

  On January 14, 1994, Kristin, now 17, went to see an evening performance of the musical Oklahoma! at Claremont High and was given some meth and a pipe from a male friend. After smoking some of the drug at the show, she took the rest home, getting high the following morning before going to school.

  That afternoon she came home wearing her brother Brent’s clothing, which Constance had warned her not to do.

  “Kristin seemed agitated,” her mother would tell police. “I began to suspect that she had been using speed again.”

  When Constance accused her daughter of using drugs, Kristin frantically grabbed her chest and tried to run away. But her mother restrained her, searched her bra and discovered a glass pipe. Then, at her wits’ end, she telephoned Claremont police, asking them to come over and deal with Kristin.

  By coincidence, Officer Laurence Horowitz got the call at 10:45 p.m., and drove to Weatherford Court with a female uniformed officer. His second encounter with the Rossums left such an impression, he could recall it vividly almost ten years later. As the father of three teenaged daughters who also went to Claremont High, he could easily relate to the Rossums’ situation.

  Horowitz was shocked at the sight of the drugged-out Kristin Rossum he saw that day. She seemed totally dif ferent from the polite, clean-cut girl he had interviewed at school nine months earlier.

  “They were two different people,” he recalled. “Agitated was about the only way I can describe her. Mom was also visibly distressed about the whole thing.”

  As soon as Horowitz arrived, Constance handed him Kristin’s crack pipe and a little plastic bindle of meth, accusing her daughter of having a two-year drug problem. The officer immediately noticed in the well-lit front room that Kristin seemed to be under the influence of drugs. Her pupils were visibly enlarged, she had a dry mouth and was unable to express a clear thought or form complete sentences. He then checked her pulse, which was racing at 118 beats a minute, and measured her pupils.

  Kristin then admitted she had smoked crystal in her bedroom that morning, even naming the Claremont High School boy who had supplied her.

  “I have not used any speed since this morning,” she declared. “I use the drugs to help me with school studies and other activities.”

  Then, as Horowitz arrested the tearful girl for possession of drug paraphernalia and being under the influence of a controlled substance, Constance Rossum voiced her frustration.

  “This incident is the last straw, and something needs to be done about this,” she told him. “My husband and I had first denied it. We have tried doctors and therapy, but nothing so far has worked.”

  After reading Kristin her rights, Horowitz handcuffed her and drove her to the Claremont police station, where she was photographed and gave a urine sample. Her mug shot reveals just how the beautiful teenager’s looks had been ravished by drugs. Her emaciated 5’2” body weighed just 105 pounds, and her eyes were red and swollen from crying.

  Later that night, Kristin was released into her parents’ custody. As she had no previous convictions, the case never went to juvenile court.

  When word got out at Claremont High School that Kristin had named names when she was arrested, she began to be harassed. Her life was threatened and her parents received telephone calls demanding money. One morning Professor Rossum went to his mailbox in front of his home and found a bag of methamphetamine, which he took straight to the police.

  By the end of January, Kristin’s parents decided to take her out of Claremont High School for a safer environment.

  Chapter 4

  Redlands

  The perfect opportunity to give Kristin a fresh start came when Professor Rossum was offered a year-long teaching position at the University of Redlands.

  Kristin had accumulated enough credits to graduate a semester early from Claremont High, and in February 1994, she enrolled at Redlands on a Presidential scholarship.

  “Redlands seemed like a good place for school,” Professor Rossum would later tell a jury. “Good school, good science program. [That semester] she just took two courses. She was getting herself ramped up to go full-time in the fall.”

  Situated thirty miles east of Claremont on I-10, the private liberal arts and sciences university was considered one of the best in America. It would also allow Professor Rossum, who had arranged for Kristin to take her two courses on the same days he was teaching, a chance to get re-acquainted with his daughter, as he drove her to and from classes.

  Her 1994 graduation photo in the Claremont High School Yearbook betrays no hint of Kristin’s drug problem. Dressed in an off-the-shoulder black gown with a simple string of pearls, she looks like the all-American graduate, with more than a passing resemblance to movie star Gwyneth Paltrow.

  But it was a tough first semester for Kristin, who came down with mumps, lat
er catching chickenpox on the day of her final exams. Despite having to postpone taking them, she still managed to get good grades. And during their three-times-a-week forty-five-minute drives to and from the campus, she and Professor Rossum enjoyed the kind of father-daughter talks they hadn’t had since her ballet days.

  That spring, Professor Rossum traveled to London to co-direct an international conference, comparing the English and American juvenile justice systems. For a few months, at least, family life in the Rossum household returned to normal; her parents were proud that Kristin had finally cleaned herself up.

  “We thought we had our Kristin back,” said her mother.

  During her summer vacation, Kristin stayed in Claremont, resuming her friendship with Melissa Prager, whom her parents approved of. Melissa was dating the lead guitarist of Fat Finger, a local garage band, and one day she took Kristin to hear them practice.

  Kristin was immediately attracted to the band’s bass guitarist, Teddy Maya, and a few nights later she went to see them play at a party. Afterwards, some of the guests went hot-tubbing together and she and Maya struck up a conversation. Kristin told him how she loved the Grateful Dead and reggae music, and he was struck by her beauty and intelligence.

  “She was sweet,” remembered Maya, who felt drawn to the beautiful hazel-eyed blonde. “She was an upbeat, incredibly cheery person to be around, and really pretty. We started dating.”

  Raised in Claremont, Maya had just finished his first year as a Political Science major at UCLA. When Kristin brought him home, Constance Rossum was impressed and encouraged the relationship.

  “Her parents were nice enough, but they were very conservative,” he remembered. “I think that their lifestyle reflected their conservatism, and they had a nice, big house—over a million dollars. It had even a second storey, and that’s pretty rare in Southern California.”

  Constance whipped up eggs Benedict for brunch, as she asked Maya about himself and his family. Maya remarked on numerous pictures of the Hamburglar proudly adorning the walls, and Constance explained how she had worked on the McDonald’s Chicken McNugget marketing account.