Poisoned Love (35 page)

Luckily, Hendren’s wife was very understanding when he was in trial mode. In fact, because she was about Kristin’s size and his tall, lean build was pretty similar to Greg’s, she even helped him reenact Kristin’s story about how she pulled Greg off the bed and onto the floor to start CPR. Hendren’s wife had to pull him by the arms to get him off, and it wasn’t easy.

It was somewhat unusual to have two prosecutors working a homicide case, but this one was complicated and high profile, and the records were still coming in. In mid-May, because of the tremendous volume of evidence, both sides agreed it would be better to delay the trial for several months. A new date of October 4 was set.

Goldstein and Hendren divvied up the witnesses and evidence by subject matter, but in such a way that each prosecutor’s role would be clear to the jury. Hendren got the computer documentation, the character witnesses, and issues related to the Medical Examiner’s Office, such as the drug inventories. Because of his medical background, Goldstein took the paramedics and the expert drug witnesses. They split up the Rossums, with Hendren taking Constance and Goldstein taking Ralph, his old nemesis. They figured the jury wouldn’t like it if Goldstein attacked both parents on cross-examination.

Kristin maintained her innocence during her first televised jailhouse interview, which was featured on
48 Hours
when it first aired in April 2002. It was updated and re-aired after the trial in February 2003.

“I ask myself every day, how did I go from the happy little girl to being in here, facing murder charges?” Kristin said in a childlike voice through tears to reporter Bill Lagattuta, who was on the other side of the glass, talking to her by phone. “I want to shout at the top of my lungs, ‘I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it.’”

Her worst fear, she said, was that she would spend the rest of her life in prison for a crime she didn’t commit.

As Kristin characterized her life with Greg, she repeated many of the same images and phrases her parents had been disseminating since her arrest. Not long into the marriage, she said, Greg became “very, very clingy” as she tried to pull away from him and find herself as an individual.

“He always wanted to keep tabs on me and stop me from having any independent life outside our marriage,” she said.

Kristin’s friend Melissa Prager was interviewed to back up her story.

“Kristin and Greg’s relationship was very unhealthy in that he was very controlling; he was very obsessed with her,” Prager said. “Kristin was becoming Greg’s project and less Kristin Rossum.”

The happiest Prager had ever seen Kristin was after she’d fallen for Michael. “It was an entirely different love, a love that was true and sincere and that she was discovering on her own,” Prager said.

Bill Leger spoke up in Greg’s memory, disputing the Rossums’ claim that his close friend had been a dark, moody person.

“He was just a straightforward, upfront, no-nonsense kind of guy, hardworking guy. Greg was very happy. He was looking forward to possibly purchasing a home.”

Asked about the rose petals, Kristin echoed her parents’ claim that Greg “had given me a dozen beautiful long-stemmed roses for my birthday a few weeks earlier. He was making a big deal of the last rose standing.” Greg may have scattered the petals over his chest, she said, to make a statement that he knew their relationship was over.

Kristin looked and sounded like she was crying, but her eyes were dry. “I don’t know if it was a cry for help or, or an intended suicide,” she said. “I, I really don’t know.”

Kristin dismissed what prosecutors cited as her motive—that she wanted to prevent Greg from carrying out his threat to report her affair and her drug use to her superiors.

“That’s just ridiculous,” she said. “Those certainly aren’t motives.”

She acknowledged that she hadn’t wanted her coworkers to know about her drug problem, but it wouldn’t have been “the end of the world.” Surely, her bosses would have worked with her on her drug problem and put her into counseling. She also acknowledged that she had access to fentanyl at the Medical Examiner’s Office, but so did everyone else who worked there.

“I certainly did not take any of it,” she said. “I’m not a murderer. I did not harm my husband.”

Goldstein was featured saying he didn’t think Kristin had told the truth in ten years and that the evidence against her was “immaculate.”

Loebig countered that it wasn’t such a stretch of the imagination that Greg committed suicide because he couldn’t live without Kristin. All he had to do, Loebig said, was empty an ampule of fentanyl into a water glass, throw away the ampule in one of the trash cans on the balcony, then get into bed and drink the contents of the glass.

48 Hours
traveled to Australia to interview Michael Robertson. This was apparently the only time he spoke to the American media.

Before Greg died, Michael said, Greg called him and told him to stay away from Kristin. But, Michael said, “Emotions sometimes rule…your better judgment.”

Michael said he didn’t have anything to do with Greg’s death, and he didn’t think Kristin was capable of murder.

“It was never an issue of homicide in my mind,” he said. “I don’t believe Kristin is the type of person that would even consider anything like this.”

Lagattuta quoted experts as saying that if Greg had injected the fentanyl into himself, he wouldn’t have had time to throw away the syringe because he would have been dead before he got to the bathroom.

Michael didn’t disagree.

“So it looks suspicious,” Lagattuta said.

Again, as uncomfortable as the comment appeared to make him, Michael had to concur.

“It can look suspicious, absolutely,” he said.

In his recusal motion, Loebig brought up Goldstein’s “immaculate” evidence comment as an example of “loaded” statements that could prejudice potential jurors, coming from a judge-elect. It was inevitable, he argued, that the public would learn of Goldstein’s new position because the “extremely newsworthy” case continued to hold the media’s attention. The jury pool would no longer view Goldstein as “an ordinary person,” but as someone with exceptional judgment.

Deputy District Attorney Jim Atkins countered that Goldstein’s status did not meet the legal standard to have him removed. The defense had to show reasonable doubt that Goldstein wouldn’t conduct himself in an “evenhanded manner.”

“It’s like trying to ram a square peg into a round hole,” Atkins said. “Being elected a judge is not a conflict of interest.”

Atkins noted that Goldstein got 178,694 votes, which represented only 8.5 percent of the pool of prospective jurors. That meant 1.9 million potential jurors did not vote for him, plenty to seat an objective panel.

Judge Julie Conger, from the Alameda County Superior Court, wrote an opinion for the Ethics Committee of the California Judges Association, stating that Goldstein had no conflict in this case.

“He has a duty to ensure continued competent representation of his clients, and while he is still licensed as an attorney, that duty is satisfied by uninterrupted and undelayed resolution of his pending cases,” she wrote.

Thompson denied the defense’s motion, saying he saw no evidence that Kristin wouldn’t get a fair trial.

The prosecutors wanted Bob Petrachek, the computer forensic examiner, to have “everything done yesterday.” So, he ended up working some weekends, when he also took calls from Hendren to answer questions. The prosecutors’ enthusiasm and dedication were contagious.

About midway through his work on the case, Petrachek came across a PowerPoint presentation on Michael’s laptop that had some very interesting similarities to Kristin’s case. The presentation, called “The Case of the Crooked Criminalist,” was based on a study published in the
Journal of Forensic Sciences
in July 1995 by four toxicologists and criminalists who worked at Michael’s former employer, National Medical Services. The case involved a state crime lab director who discovered that four fentanyl patches in foil pouches were missing from an evidence bag in the vault. Shortly after two chemists with access to the vault volunteered to be drug-tested using hair samples, one of them got his hair cut shorter than ever before. (The drug is fast acting and clears quickly from the body, so it wouldn’t necessarily turn up in blood or urine.) Hair tests revealed that the short-haired chemist was a chronic fentanyl abuser. Initially, he denied breaking into the evidence bag. Rather, he contended, he’d ingested 10 milligrams of fentanyl from a drug standard vial. According to the case study, that amount of fentanyl equated to two thousand fatal doses—one dose being 5 micrograms—over the course of about three months. This, his bosses decided, was “a highly improbable scenario.” Ultimately, the chemist pleaded no contest to larceny and possession of a regulated drug.

For Petrachek, finding this case on Michael’s laptop “was a hell of a coincidence. The parallel on it was just amazing.” Hendren and Goldstein thought so, too. Especially given the thirty-seven articles on fentanyl that police found in a large manila envelope in Michael’s office.

Since the Public Defender’s Office is part of the county government umbrella, Petrachek also assisted Kristin’s defense attorneys. Specifically, he searched three computers seized from a man in San Bernardino County who’d been arrested and jailed for selling fentanyl. Loebig and Eriksen were hoping to find a link between Greg and the man, who’d once lived near the Regents Road apartment. However, they were never able to find one.

As the trial was approaching, Petrachek finished organizing the most important e-mails by sender and recipient, that is, all but the ones that the county’s computer contractor could not seem to retrieve. Much to the chagrin of the prosecution, the company that handled the county’s information technology business tried but could not produce e-mails from Michael and some from Kristin at the most crucial period—right before and after Greg’s death.

Petrachek also made a timeline of Kristin’s, Greg’s, and Michael’s computer activities—such as which Web sites they visited, particularly between November 3 and 6—as well as of Kristin’s and Michael’s activities after Greg’s death.

Petrachek got a few surprises as he searched through the Medical Examiner’s records. For one, Petrachek learned that the death of Stan Berdan, a reserve police officer who’d worked at the Medical Examiner’s Office, wasn’t natural after all.

Goldstein had brought up Berdan’s case during the preliminary hearing because it had some rather interesting parallels with Kristin’s. There was, however, one important distinction, which Goldstein tied in to Kristin’s case: Dr. Harry Bonnell did the autopsy on Berdan’s body at the UCSD Medical Center because Berdan was an employee of the Medical Examiner’s Office, but his toxicology tests were done in-house by Russ Lowe. Goldstein said Kristin, who was a student worker at the time, had reason to believe that Greg’s toxicology tests would be handled the same way.

Berdan’s wife, Barbara, said she came home on the evening of February 8, 1999, to find her forty-five-year-old husband playing with their children. He said he’d already eaten some potato soup and didn’t need his wife to make dinner for him. He fell asleep, sitting up on the couch, and Barbara raised his feet so he was lying down. He didn’t wake up, but that wasn’t unusual, and he was snoring loudly. She checked on him at 2
A.M
. and again at 5
A.M
., and he was still snoring. She returned to bed to read, checking on him again before she took a shower. When she got out, she didn’t hear him snoring and found he wasn’t breathing. She called her son to help her, but they couldn’t rouse him. They pulled him to the floor and started doing CPR. He was turning blue. She was unaware that Stan had called the doctor from work the day before because he was still suffering from a migraine headache he’d had for three days.

His coworkers reported that he’d been acting and talking so strangely throughout the day that they relieved him of duty at a death scene and a colleague dropped him off at his parents’ house. His mother fixed him some soup, then his parents drove him home, where he arrived about ninety minutes before his wife came back. Berdan, who’d been to urgent care over the weekend because of the migraine, had been given a prescription for butalbital, a nonnarcotic sedative, and an injection of Demerol, a narcotic painkiller. His wife was unsure when he’d last taken any medication before he died.

Curiously, the lab did send a blood sample to the Pacific Toxicology Laboratories to test for fentanyl. It came up negative. So Bonnell ruled Berdan’s death an accident caused by the ingestion of two pain medications: butalbital and methadone, a narcotic.

Roger Meadows, one of Kristin’s attorneys in the civil case, filed court papers in February 2002, arguing that the one-year statute of limitations had expired by the time the de Villers family filed their wrongful death lawsuit.

The de Villerses’ lead attorney, Craig McClellan, repeated his previous explanation for the delay—that Kristin had initially termed Greg’s death a suicide, and the family had no tangible evidence that it was a murder until Kristin’s arrest on June 25, 2001. McClellan argued that the court had “impliedly” agreed by overruling Meadows’s objection to the lawsuit.

Meanwhile, Michael Robertson’s attorney attempted to stop McClellan from gathering information on Michael in the civil case. The attorney, Michael Gardiner, filed papers saying that his client had never been criminally charged in Greg’s death, yet “he lives every day under the threat that such a charge could be made at any time.”

On May 17, Superior Court Judge John S. Meyer granted Kristin’s request to temporarily block McClellan from gathering information against her—until the end of her criminal trial or until she waived her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, whichever came first.

Constance and Ralph argued that they were too busy with their daughter’s criminal defense to be deposed in the civil trial. The judge granted a delay, but their depositions were rescheduled for July.