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

  Two days later, in an e-mail to her brother Brent, Rossum said she was “hanging in there,” and that the anniversary had been “all right.” But she complained that although she had bought Greg a picture frame with her picture for his new desk, some silk boxer shorts and a cookbook, he didn’t even get her a card.

  Lloyd Amborn’s caution had done nothing to dampen her affair with Robertson. Within hours of their warning, Kristin told him he was the most important person in her life and meant the world to her.

  Despite Amborn’s concerns about improper behavior, the following week, Dr. Robertson was promoted to the position of chief toxicologist. He would now be in charge of all toxicology work at the San Diego County ME’s Office. Kristin was delighted, even hiding a congratulations card in his desk.

  Robertson then told her to go into his office while he was at his morning planning meeting. There, in a box under his desk, he had left her some roses with a love letter. After finding his gift, a delighted Kristin wrote him an impassioned e-mail, gushing over his “simple gesture of love” and declaring that her life finally made sense.

  “I love you Michael! Everything I ever imagined wanting in a lifelong companion, husband, best friend, is present in you. When I see you ... I see my future ...”

  Some months later she would discover that Dr. Robertson had been two-timing her, sleeping with other women as he proclaimed his everlasting love for her.

  After Robertson was appointed chief toxicologist, his cavalier attitude knew no bounds. He viewed the upcoming SOFT conference in Milwaukee, which he was helping to organize, as the perfect excuse for a long, passionate weekend with Kristin. Even better, the ME’s office would be paying for it. But in order to qualify for her flight and hotel expenses, Kristin would have to deliver a paper at the conference. Dr. Robertson offered to help her, writing up an abstract for the paper they had discussed delivering jointly, called “Death by Strychnine.”

  On Monday, June 19, with the deadline approaching, he e-mailed the co-chairman of the conference, Dr. Steve Wong.

  “Just a quick ‘am I too late to submit an abstract’ question.”

  A week later, Dr. Wong replied in an e-mail, inviting Robertson to submit the strychnine abstract as soon as possible. Delighted, Robertson forwarded it to Kristin, asking: “What do you think? Are you up for it?”

  For ambitious Kristin a chance to address SOFT delegates would provide her with an official entrée into the world of forensic toxicology. It also wouldn’t hurt that she was being groomed by one of the best known toxicologists in America.

  In late June, the San Diego County Medical Examiner, Dr. Brian Blackbourne, summoned his new chief toxicologist to a meeting in his office. When he arrived, he found Dr. Blackbourne with San Diego Homicide Detective Terry Torgersen, who explained that he was re-opening a case of a woman whose death had been ruled a drug overdose five years earlier. Now the detective had new information that she had really died of fentanyl poisoning, not routinely tested for at the San Diego ME’s Office.

  Dr. Robertson then arranged for the dead woman’s blood work to be sent to his old employer, National Medical Services, who later discovered that she had died from fentanyl.

  It would later be claimed that Kristin and Dr. Robertson made good use of the knowledge that their office did not screen for fentanyl.

  That spring, Kristin and Greg regularly visited Claremont on weekends. And while Greg played golf with Professor Rossum and his sons, Kristin would discuss her troubled marriage with her mother. But she never mentioned her affair with Dr. Robertson.

  “I felt I was in love,” Rossum would later testify. “I loved him very much. It was very romantic, very exciting, very passionate.”

  Right from the beginning of their affair, Kristin and Robertson exchanged different colored roses, which they saw as a symbol of their love. On one occasion Kristin gave him a red, a pink, a yellow and a white rose and handwrote notes with each explaining what each color represented to her. Roses would become a special language of love between them, each color signifying a different emotion.

  She would later complain to Homicide detectives that her husband was unromantic, never buying her roses because they were too expensive.

  “I really like romance,” she said. “I told Greg that I always wished that he was more romantic. How much is it just to [buy me] a flower now and again?”

  By the beginning of July, the lovers were sending each other ever more passionate e-mails and love notes, several times a day. They were also arranging secret trysts, either at Robertson’s apartment or in a quiet park near hers that they affectionately termed “the Willows.”

  Now under the influence of methamphetamine, Kristin secretly met her lover after work at the same time as she was preparing to go with Greg on their annual July Fourth trip to Mammoth Mountain.

  On the afternoon of June 20, she e-mailed Greg saying she would be late getting home as she was meeting her friend Rena at a Starbucks in La Jolla.

  A week later, after an extended coffee break with Robertson, she e-mailed Greg, saying she had won a spare ticket to a Natalie Merchant concert at SDSU in an office raffle, and asking permission to go with with Dr. Robertson. Ironically, although he had told Kristin that his wife Nicole had dropped out, he had initially bought the ticket for another girlfriend who had stood him up.

  “Would you mind if I went?” she asked her husband. “Let me know what you think so he can give it to the runner-up if you don’t want me to go.”

  Ultimately Kristin didn’t go to the concert—Greg didn’t want her to—and Robertson took someone else. Later, she would say she deliberately mentioned Dr. Robertson by name, wanting Greg to know exactly who she would be going with.

  On Thursday, June 29, Kristin and Greg drove to Mammoth for their annual trip, where they met up with Jerome and Bertrand and their girlfriends. They set up camp together and Greg appeared in good spirits and getting on well with Kristin.

  During the trip, they all climbed the mountain, which was 10,000 feet above sea level, and Greg reached the summit first.

  “We’d go pretty fast,” remembered Jerome. “He beat me to the top.”

  Another time the three brothers went fishing at their favorite spot on the deepest part of the lake, a place they called “the rock.” Over the years, they had discovered that this was the place to catch the biggest fish.

  On their return to camp a couple of hours later, Kristin was in tears, upset that Greg had been away so long.

  “Kristin was almost yelling at him,” Jerome would later testify. “I was kind of surprised.”

  But the couple soon made up, later spending the night together in their tent.

  While Kristin was away in Mammoth, Michael Robertson sent her a series of passionate e-mails he entitled, “Missing a Girl,” lamenting that she was with her husband and not him.

  “Hi beautiful,” he wrote on Friday evening. “I gather about now you’re all hot ‘n’ sweaty finishing up your hike ... Only problem is we’re way too far apart, but I am thinking of you and missing you like crazy.”

  He wrote of smelling her perfume every time he entered the office.

  “Well cutie ... only four days to go,” he signed off.

  By Sunday afternoon he sent another e-mail with a love poem, calling Kristin his “life’s partner and my destiny.” Saying he couldn’t wait to see her face again, he waxed lyrically that: “To have lived but not loved would be my greatest regret. Your beauty is unparalleled and my heart beats your beat for you.”

  The following afternoon he sent her an e-mail from his office, entitled, “4 down and 2 to go.”

  “Today wasn’t too bad here at work,” he wrote, “but it’s the nights I struggle with. I miss you so much and at night I wonder what you are doing ... I smell you in the pages and just cling to your words....”

  On July 5, her first day back, Kristin sent him a passionate e-mail, saying she couldn’t believe how her “heart continues to swell and my fee
lings for you continue to deepen with each passing day.”

  It was signed with their new secret code word, “ELE,” an acronym for “Eye Love Ewe.” And increasingly they would boldly use this signoff in professional e-mails to other colleagues in displays of bravado.

  When Dr. Robertson received her message, he immediately replied that there was more than his heart “throbbing” with feelings for her, crudely noting that he had a “rudey.”

  “Oh behave you bad boy!” came Kristin’s reply. “Or I will have to give you a spanking.”

  They were also busy that day working on Kristin’s upcoming SOFT presentation, which Robertson appeared to be writing.

  “Have a read and let me know of any changes,” he e-mailed her. “We should try and get it out today.”

  She sent it back, saying it was ready for printing on the submission form. Then Robertson e-mailed it to SOFT chairman, Dr. Steven Wong, with a c.c. to Kristin Rossum, saying he would send on three hard copies and a disk as required. He signed it “Michael (ELE),” and forwarded it to Kristin, knowing she would appreciate his inside joke.

  Then everything changed. Greg found one of Robertson’s love letters the weekend after they returned from Mammoth. He was furious, forcing Kristin to admit that she had “developed very strong feelings” for her boss, who Greg had briefly met a few weeks earlier at a social function. Greg made her give him Robertson’s phone number and called, warning him not to have “inappropriate contact” with his wife.

  He also threatened to call the medical examiner and reveal the affair, but, to Kristin’s relief, he never did. Later she would claim that she only told Greg about the relationship to spur him into marriage counseling, saying she wanted him to realize why she was seeking “an emotional attachment” outside the marriage.

  “He said, ‘I can’t live without you,’ ” she would later claim.

  Traumatized that Greg had found out about her affair, Kristin sought solace in her lover’s arms. Robertson seemed unfazed, offering her his support as a friend in whatever she decided to do in her marriage.

  “As you begin to head down the slippery slope,” he wrote the day after Greg had confronted him, “remember I will always be there for you ...”

  Now the only obstacles standing in the way of their being together and fulfilling their “destiny” were Gregory de Villers and Robertson’s wife, Nicole.

  For the rest of the summer, Kristin began looking for a new apartment, without telling Greg. Encouraged by Michael Robertson, who told her that once they put their “troubled times” behind them, they would be the “happiest couple in town,” Kristin signed up with an apartment rental service.

  She also confided in Tom Horn, a young student worker at the ME’s office whom she had trained. She told him in confidence that she and Dr. Robertson were having an affair, asking if he knew of available apartments in the Mission Hills area, where he lived.

  “She wasn’t happy in her marriage,” Horn remembered. “[She] was looking to move out of her current residence.”

  And Kristin also told Melissa Prager, her old high school friend, about Dr. Robertson one afternoon. They were walking in La Jolla after lunch and Prager had complimented Kristin on looking great and less stressed than usual. Suddenly Kristin announced that she had found a new love and wanted to leave Greg, telling her friend how she had finally found someone who respected her mind and appreciated her beauty.

  “She said it was Michael Robertson,” said Prager. “The man she was working with.”

  Kristin explained how she had told Greg about the affair and it had led to bitter arguments.

  “She wanted to somehow fix the arguing, either by moving out or by counseling. [She] asked if maybe I would consider moving down to San Diego and finding an apartment together.”

  But even if Kristin was telling friends and family she wanted out of the marriage, Greg was too proud to tell anyone that he was being cuckolded. He never mentioned a word about Kristin’s affair to his brothers or any of his friends. After his parents’ divorce, he was determined to make a success of his marriage, always believing that they could resolve their differences.

  During a day out at the San Diego Zoo with his old friend Bill Leger, he and Kristin acted like nothing was wrong.

  “We had a lovely time,” remembered Leger. “It was a lot of fun. I still have pictures on my fridge from that day.”

  During the rest of July and into August, Rossum and Robertson were planning for their future. Robertson again suggested they start a new life in Australia, and Kristin enthusiastically looked it up on the Internet to find out everything she could.

  On nights when Kristin couldn’t find an excuse to meet Robertson, he would send flowery e-mails lamenting how much he craved her body.

  “Oh, so we didn’t get to have caddles [sic] last night,” he wrote on July 19. “Nor were we able to make dinner, take a bath and make love while staring into each other’s eyes.... I love you Kristin!! I hope you have a wonderful day and I can’t wait for tonight, when I do get to cuddle you.”

  The following day, Kristin sent him an e-mail informing him, “My cheeks hurt!!!!”

  Although Kristin had squelched Greg’s dream of starting a family with her, she now talked of having Robertson’s children. On July 23, sitting in his desk at the ME’s office, the chief toxicologist wrote that she was his “perfect match,” and he could see her beside him “at the alter, at home, holding my children.”

  They were now sneaking off to make love at “the Willows” several times a week, scheduling their rendezvous by e-mail.

  “So at what time will you be visiting the Willows? ELE,” asked Kristin at 3:00 p.m. on Friday, August 4.

  “OK how does 4 sound,” was Robertson’s reply.

  The following week, they secretly met at the Willows three times for what they termed “quickie breaks.”

  And the lovesick couple were now living in the future when they could be together without their spouses.

  “Better to create a future we love than to endure one we don‘t,” Robertson would tell her.

  One morning in August, Dr. Michael Robertson asked his intern Tom Horn to go into the balance room and retrieve a manila envelope containing some fentanyl patches, which had been impounded some months earlier. Robertson gave him his key to the room, and Horn went in, finally finding the envelope, which was case #1591, and handing it to his boss.

  A few days later another member of the ME’s staff asked Horn to find Case #1591 and he went back into the balance room, but couldn’t find it. Suddenly remembering that he had earlier given it to Dr. Robertson, Horn went into his office and found the envelope containing the fentanyl lying on a small round table by Robertson’s desk.

  A blood sample from the envelope was then sent out for testing, but the fentanyl was left there. Three months later, during an audit, all the fentanyl patches from Case #1591 were missing and have never been recovered.

  Chapter 12

  Disintegration

  By the fall, Kristin Rossum and Dr. Michael Robertson were becoming increasingly frustrated in their respective relationships. Feeling trapped in an unhappy marriage with Greg, Kristin was taking more and more drugs to self-medicate. But she still managed to fool everybody around her, and her work performance never suffered, although she was now regularly smoking crystal methamphetamine at the ME’s office and at home.

  Kristin would later complain that Greg refused to discuss their disintegrating marriage, channeling all his energies into Orbigen. As licensing manager for the eight-employee company, Greg was now responsible for locating cutting-edge new biotechnologies being developed at universities, and then persuading those universities to grant Orbigen licenses. It was a highly demanding job with long hours, but Greg enjoyed it, viewing it as a great opportunity. He dreamed of Orbigen one day going public and making him rich.

  Every morning Greg would make the short drive to the company offices on Nancy Ridge Drive, Mira Mesa. There he spent
nearly all his time on his computer, or phoning people on his huge, 2000-name database, working 500 active leads at any one time. He impressed Dr. Gruenwald and his partner, Dr. Terry Huang, another former Pharmagen employee, with his tenacity and dedication.

  “He was excellent,” remembered Dr. Gruenwald. “He was very meticulous and very hard-working. A problem solver. A team player.”

  Greg never brought his marital problems into the office, where he was viewed as Orbigen’s most positive employee. He was usually the first to arrive in the morning and the last to leave, and Dr. Huang even gave him an iMac computer and a high speed cable modem, so he could work at home.

  “We were a very small company,” explained Dr. Huang. “Sometimes we worried about whether we can make it or not. [Greg was] usually very optimistic about what we [were] doing.”

  Every Friday, Greg was the driving force behind Orbigen’s morale-boosting T.G.I.F. afternoon get-togethers. He was also organizing a fishing trip to Mexico for staff, like the one at Pharmagen, several years earlier.

  Later, Kristin would portray her husband as dark and moody after he found out about Michael Robertson. But none of his colleagues ever saw that side of him.

  “There was a period where he basically went to bed for a couple of days and wouldn’t talk to me or anyone,” Kristin would later claim. “I was devastated, too. It was pretty painful to see someone you love hurt so much.”

  In mid-August, Greg and Kristin drove to Claremont for her parents’ twenty-eighth wedding anniversary. Kristin’s Aunt Marge had flown in from Indiana for a small family party, and it was the first time she’d seen the young married couple since the wedding.

  Her aunt had never approved of Greg, thinking him “wimpy” and “immature,” complaining that he “didn’t act like a man” after he once lost a shooting contest with Kristin’s brothers. At one point, she would later testify, she ended up alone with Greg in the kitchen and he asked her for a video of Kristin dancing The Nutcracker Suite at school. Then he went off to play it by himself in the living room.