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

  One Sunday, Teddy brought Kristin to his house to meet his parents at brunch. From their first meeting, his psychologist mother, Karen Maya, felt there was something strange about Kristin, and that she was not what she appeared to be.

  “I found her very guarded,” Karen recalled. “A very careful young woman. We probably spent an hour together and I thought, ‘Who is this girl?’ She was enigmatic and something about her troubled me.”

  On their dates, the young couple would often discuss politics, and Maya was surprised by Kristin’s ultra-conservative views.

  “She did buy into her parents’ mindset,” he said. “She was proud of her dad’s relationship with [Supreme Court Justice] Scalia, and that he was buying a new Lexus. Once, we got into an argument about welfare reform, which was the big issue of the day. And she was just talking about how horrible welfare is and how these homeless people are just lazy. I thought it was horrible that she believed the sort of traditional conservative, family value-type bullshit that her parents were feeding her.”

  In the fall semester, after her father’s year-long assignment had finished, Kristin became a full-time border at the University of Redlands, moving into the Grossmont Dormitory on campus. Every weekend Teddy Maya would drive to Redlands from UCLA, collect Kristin and then drive her back to Claremont.

  They would go for romantic dinners at T.G.I. Friday’s or see a movie, and she once persuaded him to go bungee-jumping with her. By this time, he was in love with Kristin and they were discussing marriage. When they weren’t together, they would talk on the telephone almost every night, discussing their future.

  “She was always telling me how much she wanted to see me,” he remembered. “But then at one point, she stopped answering the phone. I thought, ‘Why can’t I get hold of her? Where is she?’ ”

  A few weeks into the fall semester, Kristin relapsed into drugs after being offered crystal meth at a party by a fellow student in her Advanced Calculus class. Soon she was getting high every day and her grades plummeted.

  “I thought I could study harder, work better,” she would later explain to a jury. “[I was] not realizing my limitations and how quickly that would snowball into more regular use.”

  On Tuesday, October 25, 1994, Kristin celebrated her eighteenth birthday with a family outing, and once again, her parents had no idea she was back into drugs. Ironically, Professor Rossum was now working on a major article for the Pepperdine Law Review entitled, “Holding Juveniles Accountable: Reforming America’s ‘Juvenile Justice System.’ ” In the scathing article, published a year later, Rossum labeled the juvenile justice system as a complete failure.

  “The juvenile courts fail to teach juveniles that they will be held responsible for their criminal acts,” he wrote. “As a consequence, serious juvenile crime is soaring while the public’s confidence in juvenile justice is plummeting.”

  But even if the professor failed to spot his own juvenile criminal problem in his daughter, Teddy Maya suspected that some of the “pretty bad things” his Claremont friends had told him about Kristin might be true.

  “I got into a big fight with one of my friends and I would not believe the things he was telling me,” said Maya. “But at some point it became clear that these things were true.”

  Just before the Christmas holidays, Kristin was expelled from Redlands, after drugs were found in her room. But when Maya drove to Redlands on Friday, December 16, to spend the night, Kristin seemed upbeat, never mentioning that she had been asked to leave the university.

  The next morning, Professor Rossum’s birthday, Constance Rossum had arranged to drive to Redlands to bring Kristin back to Claremont for the Christmas vacation. But, too ashamed to tell her parents she had been kicked out, Kristin took her favorite brown leather jacket and ran away.

  At noon, Constance Rossum and her youngest son Pierce arrived at the dorm and found no sign of Kristin. While they were searching her room to see if she had left a note, the phone rang. Constance answered and was horrified to hear her daughter’s old Claremont drug dealer on the line, asking for Kristin.

  “I said, ‘I know who you are. I know what you have done. Now stop it!’ ” she would later testify.

  The university was deserted, as students had left for vacation, so Constance and her young son got in their car and drove back to Claremont. Ralph Rossum was livid when he heard his daughter was missing and that her old drug connection was still in the picture. Over the next few hours, he frantically called Teddy Maya and his mother, knowing that Teddy had seen Kristin the night before.

  “That was peculiar,” remembered Karen Maya. “I had never spoken with him or Mrs. Rossum before, and he seemed rather put out. His tone of voice was belligerent. I had no idea where she was, and neither did Teddy.”

  Nine days later, on December 26, Kristin called Teddy, asking him to meet her at Redlands. He dropped everything and drove to the campus, where she fell into his arms and asked him to get them a hotel room for the night. He was shocked at her haggard appearance. She was running a temperature of 104 degrees and was “pale and clammy” from days of taking crystal meth.

  “She must have been coming down from a long binge,” he said. “She was obviously really messed up and she told me she hadn’t slept for I don’t know how long.”

  That night, as they made love, Kristin opened up to him as never before. She told him she had been staying in nearby Hemet with a boy she knew, but swore she had remained faithful. She had then gone to Newport Beach to spend Christmas with another male student from Redlands and his family. Then they had driven her back to Redlands.

  But although Maya was suspicious that she had been playing around, he once again fell under her spell.

  “She was telling me I was great and saying whatever I wanted to hear,” he sadly remembered. “I mean, she was such a good liar that I think she basically believed her own lies.”

  While they were in bed, Kristin tearfully admitted that she had been expelled for drugs and was ashamed she had let her parents down again. She told Teddy about her problem with methamphetamine and how she had lied to him in the past. Now, she vowed, she would give up drugs once and for all so they could be together.

  “I was so young and naïve,” he would later admit. “I thought this person was the love of my life, and I wanted to get married. I told her she could come back to LA so we could be together. I had all these fantasies about how we can make things work and get an apartment. And she’s just, ‘Yeah, you’re so great.’ ”

  The next morning they got up and Kristin told Teddy to shower first. But when he.came out of the bathroom, she had disappeared from the hotel room without a trace, stealing $200 out of his wallet.

  Kristin’s parents had been frantic when there was no word from their daughter. They initially filed a missing persons report with the Redlands Police Department but then, on Christmas Eve—seven days after her disappearance—they received a mysterious call from a stranger, claiming that their daughter was alive and well.

  Two days later, when they discovered she had briefly resurfaced in Redlands with Maya before disappearing again, they called the Claremont Police Department and filed a second missing persons report. Professor Rossum told Officer George Dynes that his daughter was “depressed and suicidal,” and that he had tried everything to locate her. The official report describes Kristin as 5’2” with blonde, chin-length hair, green eyes and wearing a waist-length brown leather jacket.

  Constance Rossum would later say she feared that Kristin had been “harmed or kidnapped,” and was back on drugs. Over Christmas week, the Rossums received a series of hang-up calls that they were convinced were from Kristin.

  “I suspected because I heard mewing on the other end,” said her mother. “It was a very sad month.”

  After she abandoned Teddy Maya in the Redlands hotel room, Kristin smoked some meth and went to the Amtrak Station, buying a one-way ticket to San Diego. When she arrived at Central Station, she took a trolley to Chul
a Vista, near the Mexican border, checking into a cheap, run-down hotel. That night she took the trolley four stops south on the Blue Line to the Mexican border and literally ran into Gregory de Villers.

  Chapter 5

  Greg

  Gregory Tremolet de Villers was born in Chicago on November 12, 1973, the first of three sons. His parents Yves and Marie Tremolet de Villers were French and had emigrated a couple of years earlier, seeking a new life across the Atlantic.

  Yves de Villers had always been ambitious. As a high school student in Montpellier he had passed his French baccalaureate in Mathematics and Philosophy before going to Montpellier University to study medicine and the sciences. After graduating, he served his internship working in hospitals around Montpellier.

  In the early 1970s he fell in love with a beautiful young physical therapist named Marie. They married and then moved to America, which had better opportunities. They settled down in Chicago, where Dr. de Villers became a general surgeon at the Michael Resse Hospital and later an instructor of Surgery at the University of Illinois.

  In early 1973, Marie became pregnant with Greg, who was personally delivered by his father on the living room couch. Exactly two years later, after the family had moved to Palm Springs, CA, their second son, Jerome, was born, followed by their youngest son, Bertrand, in 1979.

  By the 1970s, Palm Springs was no longer the glamorous Hollywood playground it had once been, when it was a favorite of Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. Situated seventy-five miles east of Los Angeles, it had become run-down and would later be best known as the home of the Betty Ford Center.

  The de Villers family thrived in Southern California, appearing to be living out the American dream. Dr. de Villers became a successful plastic surgeon with a thriving practice in Palm Springs, while his wife worked as a physical therapist. He was also appointed an assistant clinical professor of plastic surgery and teacher at the UCLA School of Medicine.

  But in September 1981, one month before Greg’s eighth birthday, his parents had an ugly divorce, which affected him deeply. In the divorce papers, Marie accused her husband of beating her with a closed fist until she was black-and-blue. In her signed divorce petition, she said she was afraid of her husband and that he had threatened to disfigure her face.

  Twenty years later Marie would say she could not remember ever making these accusations.

  She was granted custody of the three young boys, and Dr. de Villers moved to live in Monaco on the fashionable French Riviera. There he started a new life among the jet set, reportedly performing plastic surgery on Princess Grace before her tragic death in 1982.

  Back in California, Marie de Villers struggled to bring up her three sons in a modest apartment, finding herself broke after legal fees for the divorce. She got a job as a physical therapist to make ends meet, always managing to feed and clothe her boys.

  “My mom worked,” said Jerome de Villers, “and my dad paid some child support.”

  Eventually, Dr. de Villers stopped supporting Marie and the children and they struggled to survive. But their many hardships only served to bring them far closer than most families. Years later, looking back at their childhood, Bertrand would acknowledge some resentment against their estranged father, but said that he and his brothers never stopped loving him.

  As the oldest son, Greg became a surrogate father to his two young brothers, taking care of them and dispensing help and advice.

  “He was special,” said Laurie Shriber, a neighbor in Palm Springs, who was very close to the de Villers boys growing up. “We would do everything together on the weekends: hiking, movies, playing in the pool. We got a chance to watch those boys grow up.”

  Greg was a good student at Palm Springs High School and had many friends. His kind, good-natured attitude and positive outlook on life made him popular, and his younger brothers worshipped him.

  “[We were] like normal brothers,” Jerome would later testify. “But the fact that we didn’t have any other family members in this country made us closer.”

  Bertrand said that Greg was like a father to him growing up, and always took care of the family.

  “We’d run into hardships, but we’d always get through them,” he remembered. “With my father gone, [Greg] was one of the providers for the household. He was very rational, calm and level-headed.”

  Christian Colantoni, who became good friends with Greg at Palm Springs High School, would later remember him as “happy, positive, outgoing.” Over the years they became very close, often taking trips together to go skiing.

  Another member of their close-knit high school group was Christian Maclean, who also stayed close friends with Greg after they graduated.

  “[He was] a terrific friend,” Maclean later remembered. “He was very outgoing, enjoyed his friends.”

  As a teenager, Greg wanted nothing to do with his father, blaming him for the divorce, which had taken a hard toll on his mother’s health. A heavy smoker since her teens in France, Marie was rushed to the hospital several times with collapsed lungs. In those emergencies, Greg would always be there to raise everyone’s spirits and nurse her back to health.

  In 1991, 18-year-old Greg graduated Palm Springs High School and spent two years at the College of the Desert (COD) in Palm Springs, building up enough credits to get into a better university. Founded in 1958 as a two-year junior college, COD had 3,000 students, of which only 500 were full-time.

  To put himself through college and get extra money to help support his family, Greg found a part-time job filling shelves at Longs Drugs in Rancho Mirage. Once again, Greg’s vibrant personality endeared him to everyone, and he made many lasting friendships at the store.

  “I grew up playing tennis with Jerome, Bert and Greg,” said fellow Longs employee William Leger. “We used to go hiking and skiing on the weekends.”

  Two years later, Greg was accepted into the prestigious University of California San Diego (UCSD) and moved out of the family home. Greg’s relationship with his father became even more strained when Dr. de Villers reportedly refused to pay his tuition. Always independent, Greg decided to go it alone, getting a student loan and working for Rush Legal Services to pay for his education.

  “I don’t think Greg was bitter towards my father,” Bertrand would later explain. “He decided that he was just fine on his own to succeed in life without help from my father.”

  By 20, Greg had blossomed into a handsome young man, standing 5’10” with curly brown hair. He had a ready smile that lit up his whole face and made people feel at ease. He had never had a long-term girlfriend and was somewhat inexperienced when it came to dating.

  A year later, Jerome won a scholarship to UCSD and moved in with Greg and another student named Christopher Wren, whom they’d met at campus orientation. The three students signed a one-year lease on an inexpensive two-bedroom apartment on campus. Greg shared one bedroom with Wren, while Jerome slept in the other.

  For a while, they lived the perfect student life, socializing together and hosting their many friends on weekends. But everything changed when the three de Villers brothers and their friend Aaron Waldo decided to have a fun night out in Tijuana.

  The day after Christmas, Kristin Rossum was still coming down from crystal when she caught the trolley from Chula Vista to San Ysidro, by the Mexican border. It was early evening and the light was fading as she walked through the turnstile at the border crossing and dropped her brown leather jacket.

  “I bent to pick it up and kind of bumped into Greg, literally,” she would later remember. “We hit it off from there.”

  Greg gallantly introduced himself, his brothers and Aaron Waldo in French, and Kristin happily responded in her schoolgirl French. She told them she had just arrived in San Diego and was living in a motel until she could find a job, as she knew nobody in town. So Greg suggested she hang out with them that night, and Kristin readily agreed.

  They all walked over the bridge into Mexico and hailed a taxi to Revoluci
ón Avenue, which Greg explained was the main drag for bars and clubs. From the moment they met, Greg seemed smitten with the beautiful blonde, giving her his full attention and hardly speaking to the rest of his party.

  When they arrived at Revolución, they went straight to a bar, ordering a round of beer with tequila shots. It was obvious to everyone that Greg only had eyes for Kristin, so they left them alone.

  As they moved from bar to bar, Jerome and Bertrand watched from the sidelines as Greg and Kristin got to know each other, discussing their lives. But, although Greg was very open about himself, Kristin was reticent, not mentioning at that point that she was a runaway.

  “She had these eyes that would stare at you in a flirtatious manner,” remembered Jerome. “[It was] mainly Greg, but if I tried to talk to her, she would give me similar eyes. I didn’t know what was going on.”

  At one bar, Greg swept Kristin onto the dance floor and the others watched, as they passionately gyrated to the loud Mexican music.

  It was the first time 14-year-old Bertrand had ever had alcohol, and he soon began to get drunk. At 2:00 a.m., they decided to go home. Greg asked Kristin where she was staying.

  “I had only explained a little about my situation,” Kristin would later testify. “I didn’t tell him much.”

  She sadly explained that she was sleeping in a cheap hotel in Chula Vista until she could get on her feet. Greg said that it wasn’t a safe neighborhood, suggesting she spend the night with him at his apartment. Kristin thanked him for his gallantry, saying she’d love to.

  That night they had sex for the first time, and from that moment on, Kristin and Greg would be inseparable.

  “My brother was pretty naive when it comes to girls,” Jerome would later say. “Kristin is an attractive girl and he was attracted to her. That’s not love at first sight.”