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

  Chapter 6

  San Diego

  Kristin moved in with the brothers at La Jolla del Sol Apartments that night, changing the whole dynamic of their living situation. Jerome and Chris Wren were uneasy about having her live with them, but Greg insisted, saying he wanted to help her. So Wren moved out of Greg’s room and into Jerome’s—paying the same rent, as Kristin didn’t have any money.

  Within a week, Greg had declared his love for Kristin, asking her to be his live-in girlfriend. She eagerly agreed, saying that she felt the same way.

  “He fell for her hard,” said Jerome. “After they met, it was hard to see my brother without her.”

  A couple of weeks after she had moved in, Greg found a meth pipe in Kristin’s jacket pocket. He was unsure what it was. Greg disliked all drugs, disdaining even his roommates’ attempt to grow a pot plant. He asked them for their opinion.

  “I knew it wasn’t marijuana,” Jerome would later remember. “It had a whitish-yellow substance in it.”

  When Greg confronted Kristin about smoking crystal methamphetamine in their apartment, she readily admitted a drug problem. She tearfully told him that she was now trying to quit, as she couldn’t face her parents while she was tweaking. Greg was sympathetic and understanding, saying that he loved her and would help her give it up once and for all.

  “I raised my concern,” said Jerome. “I remember times when she was really twitchety[sic]. Really jerky.”

  Kristin also confessed her addiction to Chris Wren, saying she had run away from her family. She boasted of being at the top of her class, vowing to stay off drugs and straighten herself out.

  By mid-January 1995, Kristin felt confident enough to write to her parents, asking to come home. In the letter, which bore a San Diego postmark, but no address, she promised to call soon. A few days later, she telephoned her mother in Claremont and they had a highly emotional fifteen-minute conversation.

  “She wanted to come home and see us and see her brothers,” Constance would later testify. “She reported that she had begun to get herself together and didn’t want to come back until she could show us that she meant it this time. She said that she had met some nice people, and was staying with them.”

  She also telephoned Teddy Maya, claiming to have been kidnapped at gunpoint by white slavers and driven around Mexico in the trunk of a car before she escaped.

  “She was obviously pretty messed up,” he said. “That was not a rational story, and there were lots like that.”

  The following weekend, Greg lent Kristin his car while he and Jerome visited their mother in Palm Springs, and she drove up to Claremont to see her family for the first time in more than a month. Her anxious parents and brothers were waiting when Kristin arrived at the house for a tearful reunion. They all hugged and kissed, and Kristin said she had only run away to get off drugs and had now turned her life around. And she told them of Greg de Villers and how he had become her knight in shining armor, by helping her kick dope.

  “Mom, I have three jobs,” she declared enthusiastically. “I started at California Pizza Kitchen, I’m working at Monterey Pasta in La Jolla, and I’m teaching ballet to young children in the public school with a dance company called Twinkle Toes.”

  Her parents were delighted to have their wayward daughter back again, and instantly forgave her. They took her to church and then out for dinner, before buying her a California Pizza Kitchen uniform for her new job. As she was leaving, Kristin wrote down Greg’s address and telephone number so they could contact her there. And she promised to stay in close touch.

  “[There] were a lot of happy tears shed,” Kristin later recalled. “Very hopeful.”

  Then Kristin went to the Claremont train station to meet Teddy Maya. Although she had driven up in Greg’s car, she told him she had taken the train. They went to Nick’s Café, their old dating spot, where she repeated the story of being kidnapped by white slavers.

  “Kristin told me a lot of different stories about why she disappeared out of that hotel room,” he remembered. “She said she had met Greg in San Diego and was staying with him.

  “And I still wanted her back. After everything, I would have loved it to have worked out, to have it all turn around and be okay. I mean, I was young and in love. What did I know?”

  During her first few months in San Diego, Kristin was a hive of activity. Every morning she left Greg’s apartment early to go to work at one of her three jobs, returning late at night. But, before long, she found a new drug connection and began secretly using again. To pay for the drugs, she stole money by overcharging customers at the California Pizza Kitchen, and was subsequently fired. Years later she would maintain that she’d bought meth from her tips, and was dismissed for lateness and billing transaction errors.

  Although Greg might have been besotted with her, there was great tension in the apartment as things started going missing. One day, Greg complained to Jerome that his treasured gold ring bearing the de Villers family crest had disappeared, along with an expensive gold necklace. Two of Chris Wren’s bank checks also went missing while he was away on vacation.

  When Greg accused some of Jerome’s friends, his brother suggested that Kristin was responsible, leading to a big argument. Greg angrily insisted that that was impossible, but finally agreed to ask her.

  To his surprise, Kristin immediately confessed and burst into tears, admitting her drug relapse. Initially Greg was furious, but soon forgave her, again vowing to help her beat her addiction. He even found her a new job with him at Rush Legal Services, so he could keep a closer eye on her.

  “And then I realized how much I really did like Greg, and that he wanted to help me,” she would explain. “I did end up giving him back the checks. Later he explained that to his roommate.”

  Whenever Chris and Jerome questioned Kristin’s integrity, Greg would leap to her defense. He would become passionate, explaining how he was helping her beat drugs and that she was the love of his life.

  “We didn’t understand why Greg wouldn’t realize and wake up that things were missing from the apartment,” explained Wren. “She’s stealing money trying to support the addiction. It was an admirable thing he was trying to do, but ...”

  Kristin soon became a divisive influence on the brothers. And Chris Wren found himself in a difficult position as Jerome and Greg constantly argued over Kristin, and whether she should stay.

  “It was very apparent that she was separating the brothers,” said Wren, who decided to look for a new apartment when their lease ran out that summer.

  Over the next few months, Kristin’s behavior became even more disturbing. Chris Wren thought her “bipolar,” observing how her “quirkiness” came and went for no obvious reason. And he began to get suspicious that Kristin was cheating on Greg when he came home to find a strange man alone with her.

  But her bizarre behavior at a small party in their apartment made him even more uncomfortable. As they were welcoming guests, Kristin seemed to be under the influence of something. She sat on Wren’s lap and when somebody asked if they were a couple, she started to cry, saying she needed to talk to him outside on the balcony.

  “[She was] in one of these emotional states,” Wren remembered. “She felt I was meant to be with her and it wasn’t Greg.”

  In February, Kristin invited her parents to San Diego to meet Greg over a long lunch. The Rossums drove down and met Kristin and Greg in the parking lot of Sfuzzi Restaurant in the historic Gaslamp Quarter. It was a weekday, and Greg, who was working part-time at Rush Legal Services, came on his lunch hour. He was dressed casually, wearing a suede jacket and sunglasses, which he later removed in the restaurant. Constance Rossum was instantly struck by his “very kind eyes.”

  Professor Rossum felt awkward meeting this new man in his daughter’s life whom he had heard so much about. Besides, he was still smarting from how she had “thoroughly messed up” his Christmas season by running away.

  But after a couple of hours with Gr
eg, the professor was most impressed with his easy charm and good looks.

  “I thought Kristin had met a really good person,” he would later testify. “We liked him. We had a good time.”

  Kristin had carefully briefed Greg not to say they were living together, knowing that her parents would not approve of the arrangement. She had told them she was sharing an apartment with a female friend from Monterey Pasta Parlor.

  The Rossums returned to Claremont relieved that their daughter was safe and in good hands. And a month later, Professor Rossum arranged to deliver her furniture and possessions to where she said she was living, in Point Loma, by the U.S. Naval Station.

  Soon afterwards, her parents discovered she had been lying all along, when they kept calling and found her with Greg and never with her girlfriend. But they resigned themselves to the situation, considering it the lesser of two evils. At least she was not living in a crack house.

  “I consider myself a devout Episcopalian,” Professor Rossum would later explain. “I don’t approve of premarital sex. Greg and the life they had together was much better than the life she had been going through before.”

  That April, Ralph and Constance Rossum summoned Kristin to dinner to discuss her future. The professor still had lofty academic ambitions for his daughter, and had decided she should return to the university to complete her education.

  Kristin agreed to enroll at San Diego State University (SDSU) and her parents said they would pay her rent and tuition. They bought her a 1990 Toyota Cressida for $5,000, and her mother began looking for a new apartment for her. Constance called the superintendent at La Jolla del Sol Apartments, where Greg and Jerome were living, managing to secure an apartment for Kristin at a reasonable rent.

  Constance next obtained the forms to enroll Kristin in SDSU and filled them in herself, omitting any reference to her daughter flunking out of Redlands University.

  To ensure that Greg did not move into the new apartment with her daughter, Constance wrote to the complex’s super, insisting Kristin have no visitors.

  “I didn’t want to support Greg de Villers and have him move in with Kristin, since I was paying the bills,” she would later explain. “That changed when they said they were getting married, and we couldn’t control it.”

  In June, Greg proposed marriage to Kristin and she accepted. He asked her to move to Monaco where his father had his plastic surgery practice, saying they could study in France.

  Kristin’s parents were less than enthusiastic.

  “Ralph and I were very stern,” said Constance. “‘We can’t stop you from getting married. But we want you to go back to school, get a job and then get married.’ I asked them to wait.”

  Professor Rossum also weighed in, emphasizing the importance of getting a first-rate education if they were to make something of themselves. He told them they were young and should get their degrees before thinking about getting married.

  Greg and Kristin agreed to put their wedding plans on hold, but remained informally engaged.

  That summer, Kristin stayed away from drugs, enjoying her new clean and sober life with Greg. In July they moved into Apartment 204 at the La Jolla del Sol complex on Regents Road, near Greg’s old one on the UCSD campus. Jerome, who was “shocked” at hearing that his brother wanted to marry Kristin, had now transferred to the University of California in Santa Barbara to study economics. And Chris Wren found new roommates, relieved to be away from Kristin and the tension she had caused.

  The small $700-a-month one-bedroom apartment was perfect for a young couple working for their degrees. It had a balcony overlooking quiet Regents Road and plenty of room for Kristin and Greg to study. Constance Rossum personally furnished the apartment, buying a dining room table, four chairs, a TV and VCR and some new kitchen equipment. And over the next four years, the Rossums would estimate, they gave the couple almost $75,000

  Kristin started part-time at SDSU as a freshman, taking two courses in Biology. She still worked twenty hours a week at Rush Legal Services, serving subpoenas and copying documents. And Greg, who now worked full-time for the company, agreed to resume studies at UCSD, where he majored in Biology.

  Although Greg’s name was on the lease for the new apartment, Ralph Rossum paid the rent. He also gave Kristin spending money, paid for her tuition and books, and bought her clothes and gasoline and car insurance for her Toyota.

  “We’d send checks to Kristin and she would give them to Greg or however they divvied it up,” said her mother. “They would remind us if the rent check was late.”

  According to Constance, Greg now became part of their family, developing a very close relationship with her husband.

  “Greg loved Ralph,” she would later testify. “He looked at him as a surrogate father.”

  Over the next four-and-a-half years, the Rossums would see a lot of Greg. Once a month they would drive down to San Diego and take them to dinner, and Kristin and Greg would also regularly stop off in Claremont on their way to visit his mother in Palm Springs.

  Since kicking drugs, Kristin had started referring to Greg as “my angel,” and the Rossums were delighted that she was now studying hard and back on the straight-and-narrow.

  “They seemed a perfect couple,” Professor Rossum later remembered. “They seemed in love—very committed and concerned about each other. Greg was looking after a pretty girl.”

  Kristin later said that she and Greg became very close during this period, spending all their time together, apart from working.

  “We got along wonderfully from the time we met,” she would say. “He was basically my best friend. I really needed the steady support he was able to offer me.”

  That summer, Kristin’s best friend at Claremont High School, Melissa Prager, tracked her down and they renewed their friendship. The two had lost touch after Kristin’s disappearance. So when she telephoned, suggesting they meet for lunch in San Diego, Kristin was delighted. She invited Melissa to come over for dinner and spend the night.

  But according to Prager, the evening was a disaster, as the usually genial Greg uncharacteristically showed little interest in getting to know her.

  “[He didn’t] seem to want me there,” she would later say. “I was excited to finally share some time with Kristin, and he never left the room. I felt very uncomfortable.”

  In the summer of 1996, Kristin went to the south of France with her parents. It was the first time she had been apart from Greg since they had met eighteen months earlier. Although there was a nine-hour time difference between France and California, every day at a prearranged time, Greg dutifully called Kristin, who would be waiting by the phone.

  “[It was] kind of giddy and childish,” said her mother. “[Like] lovebirds.”

  That winter, Kristin switched her major to Chemistry and became a straight-A student. Studying under Professor Bill Tong, who would later call her one of the best undergraduate students he ever taught, she shone academically. Professor Tong was so impressed with his beautiful new student, he hand-picked her for his research group, where Kristin had to use lasers to study chemical reactions. Without the crippling distractions of crystal methamphetamine, Kristin was highly motivated and seemed capable of achieving anything she set her mind to.

  “I observed her to be a team player,” Tong would later remember. “She always [had a] positive attitude. She [had] all the qualities of a good research student.”

  Professor Tong actively encouraged Kristin to go to graduate school, believing she had the right stuff to become a “leading scientist” one day.

  Her parents were delighted when she was selected as the outstanding junior in the SDSU Chemistry Department that year. They closely monitored her academic progress, satisfying themselves that she could not be taking drugs, as her workload was so tough.

  “We just thought the drug issue was permanently and completely behind her,” said Professor Rossum.

  On Friday, October 25, 1996, Kristin turned twenty and Greg drove her dow
n the toll road to the Lobster Village in Puerto Nuevo, Mexico, to celebrate. When Kristin opened the glove compartment to put in the toll ticket, she glimpsed a jewelry box. After a romantic lobster dinner, they returned to the car, where Greg opened the glove box, gallantly bringing out an engagement ring and slipping it on her finger. Once again he asked Kristin to marry him and she gladly accepted.

  The following day, Kristin drove to Claremont to show her mother her engagement ring. She happily described Greg’s romantic Mexican proposal. But Constance Rossum told her she hoped it would be a long engagement.

  A couple of days later, Kristin’s Aunt Marge and her grandmother, who happened to be visiting from back East, came to San Diego with her parents for a small engagement party at a local restaurant. Kristin turned up late by herself, explaining that Greg couldn’t make it as he was in bed not feeling well.

  “We were very excited because we were going to meet him for the first time,” said her aunt. “But we didn’t get to meet him.”

  Chapter 7

  The Medical Examiner’s Office

  By summer 1997 Kristin and Greg had been together two-and-a-half years, and against the odds, they seemed to be making it. Their friends thought them a perfect young couple that was going places, and Kristin’s parents still considered Greg their daughter’s savior from drugs.

  On June 4, Kristin applied for one of two student intern positions at the San Diego Medical Examiner’s Office. She was interviewed by Frank Barnhart, the ME’s laboratory manager. He was impressed, and hired her on the spot. At the time, Kristin was reading Patricia Cornwall novels, and identified with Cornwall’s forensic pathologist heroine, Dr. Kay Scarpella.