Poisoned Love (2 page)

“My husband is not breathing,” Kristin told the dispatcher.

The UCSD dispatcher transferred Kristin to the city of San Diego’s fire-medical dispatcher, who stayed on the phone with her until the paramedics were inside her apartment. The Del Sol security guard was also alerted about the 911 call, so he’d already opened the gate for Jordan and Butler by the time they pulled up to the red-tiled driveway.

Balconies with gray railings lined the mocha-colored buildings of Del Sol, which blended into the sea of residential towers in north University City, a densely populated neighborhood of college students and young professionals who worked at UCSD or the biotech, high-tech, and finance companies nearby. The area, dubbed “the Golden Triangle” because it was contained by three intersecting freeways, had grown up first around the university and then, during the late 1970s, around University Towne Center, a shopping mall. Apartment or condo complexes sprang up and filled up, followed by office and medical buildings, restaurants, bars, and gyms, until virtually every lot was developed. Many of the local professors, doctors, lawyers, and real estate developers lived a couple of miles to the west in the older and more affluent coastal community of La Jolla.

Jordan and Butler carried their gear up the stairs to the second-floor apartment, where they found Kristin standing in the living room, crying and talking to the dispatcher on a cordless phone. She motioned them to the bedroom, where Greg was lying on the floor, flat on his back and framed by an unmade queen-size bed to the left, a chest of three long drawers to the right, and a taller six-drawer bureau above his head. His slim, six-foot, 160-pound body was dressed in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. His skin was pale, and his lips were blue around the edges. Red rose petals were scattered on the carpet around his upper torso, with a single stem and stamen lying between his head, the bureau, and a princess phone. Jordan started setting up next to Greg’s left arm. Butler tripped over the comforter as she squeezed into position between Greg’s head and the bureau, setting aside an unframed wedding photo of the couple, which had been propped up against the base of the bureau, as if someone had positioned it just so.

Greg looked a little nervous in the photo. He smiled for the camera with a quiet contentment, all dressed up in his tuxedo and striped cravat, his dark brown hair slicked back and his blue eyes shining. Kristin looked radiant, her shiny blond locks pulled up under a white-flowered tiara and a veil trailing down her back. She wore a string of pearls with her white dress, which had short lace sleeves that covered her shoulders, and she held a bouquet of pink and white flowers tied with bows of ribbon. They both seemed so very happy as Greg declared his supreme devotion to her in front of their friends and family.

In all the commotion, the wedding photo got moved to the top of the chest on Greg’s right side, next to a blue plastic cup of clear, odorless liquid that looked like water. An open bottle of aspirin that contained about a quarter of its original two hundred tablets sat atop the bureau behind Butler. And a yellow cup, also containing clear, odorless liquid, rested on a nightstand on the opposite side of the bed.

Several campus police officers arrived just before paramedic Joe Preciado rode up on a fire engine and joined Butler and Jordan in trying to resuscitate Greg. Apart from the fact that their twenty-six-year-old patient looked too young and healthy to have a heart attack from natural causes, something else seemed odd to Preciado. Initially, he thought the red blotches on the beige carpet were smudges of wet blood. But when he kneeled down on Greg’s right side, the smudges moved. He was dumbfounded. What were red rose petals doing all over the floor?

It was a scene right out of that movie
American Beauty,
where Kevin Spacey is lying on his back in bed, fantasizing in a dreamlike state, and red rose petals slowly float down from the ceiling and cover his body.

Jordan checked for a pulse but found none. Greg felt warm to the touch, as if he’d recently taken his last breath. Jordan took a quick scan of the bedroom, looking for clues to explain what Greg might have taken. But he saw no prescription pill vials, no syringes, no sign of illegal drug use, nothing that looked out of place, and no suicide note. He and Preciado asked Kristin if her husband had any medical problems or was taking any medications.

“Not that I know of,” she told them, though at one point she brought out a bottle of Vicodin from the bathroom.

Greg’s pupils were fixed and dilated, but Jordan was determined to make every effort to bring him back. Jordan intubated Greg, then Butler hooked up the breathing bag and rhythmically squeezed air into his lungs. The heart monitor registered a flat line. With Greg’s heart refusing to pump blood through his veins, Preciado tried but found it virtually impossible to get a needle into Greg’s right arm. Jordan had more luck with the other arm, though he had to try a couple times before he got the needle in.

Jordan tried everything in his drug box that might get Greg’s heart beating again. Atropine. Epinephrine. A pure sugar substance usually given to diabetics. And finally, 2 mg of Narcan, which reverses the effects of opiates, just in case Greg had overdosed on one. But nothing worked.

Jordan rolled Greg’s body over to slide him onto a backboard for transport to the nearest hospital. That was when he saw the purple marks of lividity on Greg’s back and buttocks, a sign that the heart had ceased to beat and gravity was causing blood to pool in areas closest to the ground. There were no rose petals under his body.

At 10:03
P.M
., Jordan and Butler carried their patient down the stairs to their ambulance and drove him to Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla, about four minutes away. One of the campus police officers followed, with Kristin in his cruiser. The emergency room doctor tried again to revive Greg, but he was gone. Greg was officially declared dead at 10:19
P.M
., six days before his twenty-seventh birthday.

Kristin called her boss, a handsome, thirty-one-year-old Australian toxicologist, as soon as she got to the hospital and asked him to join her there. Two minutes later, she called her parents, crying. Her father answered the phone.

“Daddy, Greg stopped breathing,” she said. “I’m so scared.”

Ralph Rossum said he would meet her at the hospital as quickly as he could, handed the phone to his wife, Constance, and ran out to the car. Kristin spoke briefly to her mother, explaining that Greg was in intensive care.

Kristin’s boss, Michael Robertson, arrived at the hospital about fifteen minutes later. While they were in the waiting area together, he put his arm around her, comforted her, and held her hand. The nurses thought he seemed like a very supportive supervisor.

Kristin was still crying, but she was able to answer the ER nurse’s questions about Greg’s medical history and what drugs he might have taken. Kristin said he might have used some old prescriptions she’d purchased in Tijuana five years earlier, when she’d been trying to get off crystal methamphetamine. Then, the nurse told her the bad news. They’d tried again to resuscitate her husband, but they couldn’t get him back.

Kristin’s mother got a call at 10:49
P.M
. from Michael, who introduced himself as Kristin’s boss, and they talked for about ten minutes. He said Kristin was cold standing there in her pajamas, and he wondered what to do. Constance thanked him and suggested he drive Kristin back to the apartment. Kristin’s father was on his way down to meet her at the hospital, but he would figure out where to go.

After allowing the news of Greg’s death to settle in, a social worker approached Kristin about tissue donation. Greg had decided to join Kristin as an organ and tissue donor about two weeks earlier, when he’d renewed his driver’s license, but because his heart had already stopped, his organs couldn’t be harvested. However, some of his skin could be used to help burn victims; his corneas, veins, and heart valves could be transplanted into needy recipients; and some of his bones could be saved as well. At 11:30
P.M
., Kristin signed the necessary paperwork and then headed home with her boss.

Earlier that night, Constance phoned Greg’s mother, Marie, to tell her Greg was being taken to the emergency room after having a bad reaction to cough syrup and some other medication.

Marie called the hospital to see if she could learn more. But since Marie was home alone, the nurse said she’d have to call her back. Marie immediately called Jerome, the oldest of Greg’s younger brothers, with the upsetting news.

Jerome tried calling Scripps himself, but he, too, was home alone, so the nurse told him to go to his mother’s and call back from there. Why wouldn’t she just tell him what was going on? Jerome drove to Marie’s condo in Thousand Oaks and called Constance to see if he could get some better information. She didn’t know anything more and promised that Ralph would call them from the hospital with any new developments.

But Jerome couldn’t wait for that. He wanted to know what happened, and he couldn’t understand why no one would tell him. He called the hospital again, and this time the nurse asked if the sheriff’s deputy had arrived. “No,” he said, so she put him on hold to talk to the deputy, who was coming to deliver the bad news in person. Marie, who was sitting by the window, saw a Ventura County sheriff’s cruiser pull up outside. The nurse got back on the line with Jerome, but he was so insistent that she went ahead and told him that Greg had “expired” before the deputy made it to the front door.

Jerome couldn’t believe it. How was this possible? He’d spoken to his brother only a few days earlier. Greg had called while Jerome was watching a DVD on Alaska, and he was too tired to talk, so he put Greg off and promised to call him back. Unfortunately, he never got around to it.

Marie was beside herself. A chronic smoker and an asthmatic since childhood, she’d had part of a lung removed, and now she was sobbing so hard she could barely breathe. Jerome was upset and he was scared. He didn’t want to lose his mother, too. Now the oldest of Marie’s sons, Jerome tried to comfort her while he called his other brother, Bertrand, and told him to meet them at their mother’s in Thousand Oaks. Bertrand, who lived about forty-five minutes south, near the University of California, Los Angeles, started crying and said he’d come as soon as he could. He was so emotional that his roommate decided to take the wheel and drive Bertrand to his mother’s.

When they arrived around 11
P.M
., Marie and Jerome were still waiting for more definitive answers. But they never came. So, the family spent the night together, wracked with grief and confusion, asking each other questions and trying, unsuccessfully, to make sense of it all.

Jerome figured that now was the time to tell Marie that Kristin—the only one of her sons’ girlfriends she’d ever really accepted—was a former methamphetamine user. But when Jerome raised the question of whether Kristin might have had something to do with Greg’s death, Bertrand said he was talking crazy. Marie, who loved Kristin like a daughter, wouldn’t hear of it. There had to be a rational explanation.

UCSD Detective Sergeant Bob Jones met Kristin and Michael on the landing in front of her apartment when they returned from the hospital around 11:45
P.M
. It was understood that Michael should stay outside while Jones picked up the interview with Kristin where his officers had left off. Sitting at the dining-room table, Jones asked Kristin to tell him what happened.

She told Jones that she and Greg had been fighting all weekend. It started on Thursday, she said, when she announced that she was moving out. They’d had dinner with her parents on Friday, spent Saturday night together, and then, on Sunday night, Greg, still upset, had taken some of her old prescriptions to help him sleep. He’d been sleeping all day on Monday, in fact. Her lab was only fifteen minutes away, so she came home a number of times to check on him. Each time she’d found him breathing—a little loudly at times—but otherwise he seemed fine.

Kristin said they’d had some soup together around lunchtime, and that’s when he told her he’d taken some of her old oxycodone and clonazepam. Oxycodone is a narcotic painkiller similar to Vicodin. Clonazepam, a sedative and also a narcotic, is classified as a date rape drug.

She told Jones she’d run some errands after work and then came home to take a long bath and a shower. She was about to get into bed sometime around nine o’clock, when she leaned over to kiss Greg. His forehead was cold, and he wasn’t breathing, so she called 911. The dispatcher told her to pull Greg off the bed and onto the floor, so that he was flat on his back and she could start doing CPR. Kristin wasn’t sure she’d be strong enough to get him off the bed by herself, but the dispatcher insisted. She pulled back the covers so she could turn him sideways, and that’s when she saw the rose petals all over his chest and their wedding photo under his pillow.

Jones asked her about the shredded letter he’d found in a plastic ziplock bag on the dining-room table. Kristin said Greg found it on Thursday and got angry, so she put it through the shredder, but he’d been trying to piece it back together with tape. Jones took the letter as evidence, along with a note in Kristin’s handwriting that one of his officers found in the kitchen. Signed with a heart and Kristin’s first initial, it said: “Hi, sleepy. Hope you feel better. I’m out to get a wedding gift,” and told him there were leftovers in the fridge. Jones didn’t take Kristin’s diary, which an officer found lying on the coffee table.

Ralph Rossum arrived at the apartment around midnight, after stopping first at the hospital, where the social worker notified him of Greg’s death. He joined his daughter and Jones at the dining-room table.

Angie Wagner, an investigator colleague of Kristin’s at the Medical Examiner’s Office, showed up around 1
A.M
. By then, Kristin was sitting on the couch in the living room. Wagner didn’t know her very well. In fact, she hadn’t even known Kristin was married. Wagner asked Kristin her own series of questions for her report.