Deadly American Beauty (St. Martin's True Crime Library) Page 6

  Now in addition to her studies at SDSU, Kristin spent a couple of days a week at the ME’s office, seven miles west of her apartment. As a lowly student intern among the fifty employees, she worked in the toxicology section, doing menial lab work, like keeping the glass equipment clean, logging in specimens and later preparing them. But within a few months, she was given the additional responsibilities of drug screening, sending drugs out for analysis and sample preparation. She worked with five pathologists and two other student workers, and she loved the informal atmosphere of the office. Kristin decided that her future lay in forensic pathology.

  “She was an excellent student worker,” remembered toxicologist Catherine Hamm, who had worked at the ME’s office for twelve years.

  Kristin’s early reviews from laboratory manager Dwight Reed were enthusiastic. She was seen as a very bright, hard worker who learned fast and was dependable. But as there had been no background checks when she applied for the job, no one at the ME’s office knew of her former drug addiction. She was given free access to the samples of hard drugs, including methamphetamine and heroin, often found at scenes of accidental death. For a while she was content to do her job and merely log the drugs into her computer. But that would soon change.

  The same month, Greg graduated from UCSD and began looking for work. Kristin attended his graduation ceremony, and a few days later, the Rossums came to San Diego for a celebratory dinner. Greg had recently been offered the position of manager at Rush Legal Services, but was also interested in a career in fish farming, as he liked the outdoors. Professor Rossum took his future son-in-law in hand, counseling him to aim far higher and utilize his Biology major.

  “I told him, ‘Look,’ ” Professor Rossum would later testify, “ ‘you are not taking advantage of your educational experience.’ ”

  So the Rossums introduced Greg to a friend who had good contacts in the gaming industry. The friend arranged for Greg to take a basic examination with the Department of Fish and Game. But just two days after Kristin started at the ME’s office, Greg heard he had failed the exam. He was crestfallen.

  Over the July Fourth weekend, Kristin joined Greg and his youngest brother on the first of three family backpacking trips to Mammoth Lake. She and Greg drove four hundred miles to the popular Northern California ski resort to meet Bertrand, who had just been accepted into UCLA.

  “I considered Kristin a sister,” Bertrand would later remember. “She was part of the group.”

  Greg and his two brothers had been hiking in Mammoth for years and knew the trails well. They immediately headed to Duck Lake, where they made camp, before setting off on a six-mile hike up the mountain. Kristin was out of condition, finding the hike difficult, but Greg, a seasoned hiker, soon came to her rescue.

  “Greg had to pay a lot of attention to her,” said Bertrand. “I remember it was quite a struggle for her.”

  Bertrand observed the couple’s interaction for the first time since they had met in Tijuana. He thought they seemed devoted to each other, and was happy the relationship appeared to be going so well.

  Over the long weekend, the brothers also made a point of spending quality time together. They discussed their mother Marie, who had been ill lately, and who was moving to Thousand Oaks in the fall. Jerome, who would soon graduate from the University of Santa Barbara, planned to move there too, so he could be near her. Their father was also back in the picture: having launched a successful plastic surgery and liposuction practice in Thousand Oaks, he was now splitting his time between Southern California and Monaco.

  Toward the end of 1997 Greg interviewed for a job at an up-and-coming San Diego biotech company called Pharmagen, and was hired. The company’s vice president of research and development, Dr. Stefan Gruenwald, made him his assistant and office manager. The German-born doctor liked Greg from the beginning, taking him under his wing and becoming his mentor.

  Apart from assisting Dr. Gruenwald, Greg did general office work, including filing and preparing computer databases. And over the next few months, Greg worked hard to prove himself, developing a sterling reputation as a reliable and tenacious worker. He was soon promoted to licensing manager, but Dr. Gruenwald had his eye on Greg for much bigger things.

  On October 3, 1997, Kristin Rossum logged in a vial of ten milligrams of fentanyl citrate, a toxic poison almost a hundred times more powerful than morphine. It was the first time she had ever come into contact with the drug, which is highly restricted.

  Later, during the course of her work, she would learn how fentanyl was first introduced in 1968 by a Belgian pharmaceutical company as an anesthetic in surgery because of its minimal effects on the heart. Later, doctors found it useful in treating chronic pain.

  But in the 1980s, illegal laboratories began producing fentanyl derivatives, which produced similar effects to heroin and morphine. They were soon sold on the streets of Los Angeles under the names of “China White,” “Good-fellow,” and “Tango & Cash.”

  At one time, the San Diego ME’s Office had routinely tested bodies for fentanyl, but that had stopped in the early 1990s. Not only was it was too expensive, finding instances of the drug was almost unheard of, as pharmaceutical fentanyl was only available in hospitals and in the offices of medical examiners.

  Throughout 1998, Kristin and Greg worked long hours at their various jobs and studies. They settled into a routine, with Kristin playing the part of the dutiful wife while she studied hard at SDSU and made her mark at the medical examiner’s office. She appeared to be content with her busy life in San Diego, telling old friends how happy she was to have found Greg, and how he’d saved her in her time of need.

  But secretly she was growing restless with her new stability, looking for adventure outside the relationship. Since her drug days had ended, her natural beauty had reappeared, and she turned heads wherever she went.

  That winter, Kristin embarked on a passionate affair with a fellow worker at the ME’s office named Dick Henderson (not his real name). They started taking long lunches together and began a physical relationship, meeting wherever and whenever they could. It would be the first of several secret love affairs over the next couple of years of which her fiancé would know nothing.

  At Thanksgiving, Ralph and Constance Rossum invited the de Villers family to Claremont to discuss arrangements for Kristin and Greg’s upcoming nuptials. Her parents had finally given their blessing—Greg was now working and their daughter was one semester away from graduating—and a wedding date had been set for June 5, 1999.

  “We were perfectly happy,” said Professor Rossum, “delighted to give our blessing to their future marriage.”

  Greg, his mother Marie, and two brothers, Jerome and Bertrand, sat around the Rossums’ dinner table to finalize details for the wedding. Constance Rossum was making all the arrangements, and had already booked Claremont College’s prestigious Padua Hills Theater for the private ceremony and reception.

  Marie de Villers said she wished to be listed on the official wedding invitation as “Dr. and Mrs. Yves R. Tremolet-de Villers. But Greg became furious to find his estranged father’s name on the invitation list.

  “Greg started shouting at us,” Constance would later testify. “He didn’t want his father at the wedding. He wanted nothing to do with him.”

  Constance told her future son-in-law to be “civil,” and that it was his mother’s decision. Greg then grudgingly backed down, but stayed unusually silent for the rest of the meal.

  Things were working out well for Greg in his new job at Pharmagen. By Christmas, he had been promoted, and invited Kristin to the staff Christmas party. Kristin looked radiant, as her proud fiance introduced her to his boss, Dr. Gruenwald, and the rest of his new colleagues.

  At the party, Greg and Kristin happily discussed their impending marriage with everyone. They seemed the perfect young San Diego couple who both seemed destined for success. And although Greg didn’t know it yet, Dr. Gruenwald had already hatched a plan to start a
new company with his ambitious young assistant playing a key role.

  In early January 1999, Kristin went with Greg to his dentist, Dr. Milder, for treatment for a painful wisdom tooth. In his office, she heard the doctor tell Greg he would have to remove the tooth, and would use a powerful painkiller called fentanyl to dull the pain. On January 8, Dr. Milder sedated Greg with fentanyl via an IV for the successful procedure. Then Kristin took him home.

  A month later, a middle-aged investigator at the county medical examiner’s office, Stan Berdan, suddenly died. His untimely death caused a stir at the ME’s office and was the topic of much discussion.

  To avoid any possible conflicts of interest, and in line with the ME’s policy, Berdan’s body was sent to the UCSD for autopsy, but all the toxicology work stayed in-house at the ME’s office.

  As a student intern, Kristin had occasionally rubbed shoulders with Berdan and was aware of the ME’s policy of dealing with deaths of staff members or their close families. She would eventually utilize this knowledge, prosecutors would later contend, with fatal consequences.

  Since the Rossum and de Villers family meeting at Thanksgiving, Kristin and her mother spoke almost daily, fine-tuning the wedding arrangements. Together they contacted caterers, worked on the invitation list, and began looking for wedding dresses so Kristin could look her best on her wedding day. Constance Rossum planned the day with almost military precision, hoping it would be the Claremont society wedding of the year.

  In April, two months before the wedding, Constance organized a secret lunch in Claremont to meet Greg’s father for the first time. Dr. de Villers, who was in California on business, attended with his ex-wife Marie, but Greg was not told, as they feared he would cause a scene.

  “It was a very nice lunch,” Constance would later remember. “Yves is very charming and learned. He’s very formal and flowery.”

  Dr. de Villers asked Professor Rossum to mediate a reconciliation with Greg. But when he tried to do so, Greg was adamant that his father not attend the wedding.

  “It was the one issue [where] I really saw passion and flaring anger,” said Professor Rossum. “Real passion.”

  A few weeks later, Greg discovered that his father had secretly met his future in-laws.

  “He was irate,” Kristin would later testify. “He did not want me to have any contact with his father whatsoever. But I wanted to make sure I know both in-laws before proceeding with the wedding.”

  Two years later, Kristin would tell police that she had wanted Greg to be a “bigger man” and reconcile with his father.

  “He had no desire whatsoever,” she said. “He said ‘No, my life is better off without him.’ ”

  Even while finalizing her wedding plans, Kristin was carrying on her affair with Dick Henderson, and exchanging passionate e-mails. In April 1999, Henderson left San Diego for a law job in New York and e-mailed Kristin at her SDSU address, saying, “Hey, Gorgeous. Miss Me?”

  A month later, he e-mailed again, asking: “Hey, how are you? I was a little worried about the last time we spoke.”

  Now, a few weeks away from graduation and marriage, Kristin began to have second thoughts, suddenly realizing that her life would change forever. And as she had always done, she looked to her parents for support and advice.

  Professor Rossum was supportive when he received an emotional phone call from his daughter, saying that she was seriously considering cancelling the wedding, even though the invitations had all gone out.

  Said Professor Rossum: “I told her, ‘Look, if you want out, it’s going to be complicated to tell Greg that you don’t want to marry him when you are actually already living with him.’ ”

  He even offered to hire a truck and drive to San Diego to help her move out of the apartment and come back to Claremont. Kristin refused, saying she would come and see them soon to talk it out.

  Later she would claim to have been having “doubts and reservations” about marrying Greg for months.

  “I was getting very nervous about the wedding,” she said.

  When she went to see her parents to talk out her “wedding jitters,” Greg insisted on coming too. Constance took her daughter to a nearby park so they could be alone while Professor Rossum had a heart-to-heart talk with Greg in the front room.

  Breaking down in tears, Kristin told her mother she was “really scared.” Although she loved Greg, she explained, she wasn’t sure that she was in love with him.

  “I was afraid,” Kristin would explain. “I didn’t know if I was doing the right thing.”

  Constance Rossum questioned the wisdom of cancelling the wedding at the last minute.

  “We decided the wedding should go on,” Kristin said. “I decided that day that it must be cold feet.”

  On May 20, 1999, Kristin was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society, joining the likes of Presidents Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush and six current Supreme Court justices, including Professor Rossum’s friend Antonin Scalia. Founded a few months after the Revolutionary War, Phi Beta Kappa is the nation’s oldest honor society and the most prestigious. Its SDSU chapter was established in 1974 for the most distinguished students in the arts and sciences.

  Professor Rossum was there for her initiation, especially proud after all the troubles she had put the family through. Drugs now seemed to belong to Kristin’s past, and he looked forward to her following in his footsteps and making her mark on the academic world.

  A few days later, Kristin attended her first professional toxicology conference, a sign that the young intern was a shoo-in for a permanent job at the ME’s office. That year the California Association of Toxicologists (CAT) held their annual conference in San Diego and Kristin was one of several ME’s office employees selected to go.

  She was introduced to some of the leading forensic toxicologists, and her flirtatious smile and good looks impressed many. Brimming with confidence, Kristin made easy conversation with the other delegates, telling them how she longed for a career in toxicology.

  “She was still an intern at that time,” remembered Dr. Daniel Anderson, a supervising toxicologist with the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office, who said she was overly friendly with the delegates, both male and female. “Obviously she’s striking in her appearance, and I got to know her a little bit. I remember she flirted with everyone ... kisse[d] the women also.

  “She’s a manipulator, and knew just how to get what she wants in life.”

  Chapter 8

  A Blushing June Bride

  On Saturday, June 5, 1999, Kristin and Greg were married in a beautiful outdoor ceremony on the grounds of the Colleges of Claremont. It was a perfect sunny day and more than one hundred family and friends were there to help them celebrate. But few guests knew that the wedding had almost been cancelled the night before.

  As the wedding party gathered at the Rossum house prior to the rehearsal dinner, the twenty-five-year-old groom was furious, discovering that his father had been invited to the wedding.

  According to the Rossums, Greg flew into “a rage,” and started shouting about calling off the wedding. Constance Rossum apologized for not telling him that Dr. de Villers had been invited, saying she should have been more sensitive. Then her husband took Greg to one side for a man-to-man talk.

  “Look, if you don’t want to marry Kristin,” Ralph told him, “don’t marry Kristin because you don’t want to marry Kristin. Not because your father is in town.”

  Finally Greg calmed down and went back to his motel before joining the wedding party at a local restaurant for the rehearsal dinner, which went off without a hitch. Kristin left to spend the night at her parents’ home, while Greg and his brothers went back to his motel for a few drinks, celebrating his last night as a bachelor. Back in their motel room, somebody rolled a marijuana joint and passed it around. Greg took a hit, surprising his brothers and their friend William Leger.

  “He acted like he was high on marijuana,” remembered his brother Bertrand. “I thin
k he felt like he shouldn’t have done that. He didn’t really like it.”

  The next morning, Greg was nervous when he arrived for the 11:00 a.m. outdoor ceremony at Mount Baldy, with his best man, Jerome. Immaculately dressed in his morning coat, his spiky dark hair brushed back neatly, he seemed awkward and uncomfortable.

  After the scene the night before, Professor Rossum had asked Dr. de Villers not to show up at the wedding to save further embarrassment. Rossum even warned the priest, caterer and few select family friends to expect trouble if Greg’s father came.

  “We wanted people to be on guard in case that happened,” explained Professor Rossum. Dr. de Villers diplomatically did not attend after being warned there might be a scene, although he had contributed $1,500 for the liquor.

  Constance Rossum supervised her daughter’s wedding preparations at the house, where a hairdresser and florist were making sure she looked her best.

  “She seemed happy,” remembered her mother. “She had decided to marry Greg.”

  Greg’s childhood friend Laurie Shriber remembers the groom being “delighted” and “very much in love.”

  By 10:30 p.m. the one hundred invited guests started arriving for the wedding, which had a rustic theme. Many of Greg’s high school and college friends turned up; Jerome de Villers was surprised that none of Kristin’s were there and that there were no bridesmaids to attend her. But whatever she lacked in friends, she made up for in family. For the Rossums far outnumbered the de Villerses, who all lived in France. And many of Professor Rossum’s Claremont academic colleagues had been invited to the prestigious social event.

  To capture the joyous day, the Rossums had hired a video production company as well as a still photographer.