Poisoned Love (39 page)

Shortly after the hospital called the time of Greg’s death, he said, his office gave the go-ahead for the organ and tissue donation to proceed because “at the time we didn’t think it was an issue.” He conceded that he was unable to do a complete autopsy since many of the tissues, bones, and other body parts had been removed.

Blackbourne went over his findings in more detail than at the preliminary hearing, explaining that Greg’s lungs were two to three times heavier with congestion than normal, with some pneumonia and blood—all symptoms that he hadn’t been breathing properly for a minimum of six to twelve hours. He said Greg also had 550 milliliters, or 18 ounces, of urine in his bladder, which would have felt “very uncomfortable.” This was another sign that he’d been semiconscious or unconscious in the minimum six-to twelve-hour range. And yes, he said, the lividity that the paramedics saw when they put him on the board meant he’d probably been dead for about an hour by the time they arrived, so Greg could have been down for as long as fourteen hours, or since around 7:30
A.M
.

The delay in getting the blood, urine, and stomach content samples from the Medical Examiner’s Office to the sheriff’s crime lab, Blackbourne explained, was because Barnhart wanted to maintain the chain of evidence. And because Barnhart wasn’t working until November 9, there was a thirty-six-hour wait before they could make the face-to-face transfer. Barnhart, Kristin’s mentor and friend, was noticeably absent from the prosecution’s list of witnesses at trial.

Asked how he thought the fentanyl got into Greg’s body, Blackbourne answered a slightly different question, which was how such a large amount could have ended up in Greg’s stomach. One way was by ingestion, he said, and another way was directly into the bloodstream and then through secretions into the stomach. But Blackbourne said, no, he hadn’t been able “with any degree of reasonable medical certainty” to determine how the fentanyl had gotten into Greg’s body.

On the morning of day three, the jurors who glanced over at Kristin as they filed into the courtroom to take their seats saw she was wearing a green pantsuit and a woeful expression.

Under questioning by Goldstein, Dr. Theodore Stanley, a fentanyl expert, gave the jury a detailed lesson on the drug.

Fentanyl, Stanley testified, is a synthetic morphine-like opiate. Morphine comes from plants, but fentanyl is made in the lab and is one hundred to one hundred fifty times more potent. Introduced into the United States in 1968 as an anesthetic to produce unconsciousness and supreme pain relief, fentanyl has one serious side effect: it can cause a person to stop breathing.

Stanley, the board chairman of a company working on a more sophisticated fentanyl skin patch, said this was his second foray into fentanyl products. His first company produced the fentanyl lollipop. Because fentanyl is a Class 2 narcotic, highly regulated by the federal Drug Enforcement Agency, he said, these lollipops are available only in hospitals, and the patches only by prescription.

Stanley said fentanyl is odorless and doesn’t have a taste “until you use huge amounts of it,” such as more than 10 milligrams. When it’s swallowed, he said, 65 percent of the drug gets destroyed, so that only 35 percent is absorbed into the bloodstream. There are ways to “fight off” the effects of a fentanyl overdose—shaking a person, yelling at him, or hitting or exciting him would stimulate the brain and central nervous system enough to counteract the depressant effects. Also, if a person has never had fentanyl, he said, he would need less than a regular user to experience the same effects.

For example, Stanley said, if he gave a dose of 4 nanograms per milliliter to people in the courtroom, half of them would be breathing very slowly or not breathing at all.

“What about somebody that had 57 nanograms per milliliter in their blood?” Goldstein asked, referring to the highest level measured in Greg’s body, from his heart blood.

“If they were opiate naïve, there would not be anybody in this room who would be conscious, let alone breathing,” Stanley said.

Under the law, both sides were required to ask Stanley questions about Greg’s blood levels in theoretical scenarios so they didn’t have to argue the facts of the case—especially since no one could prove exactly how the drugs got into Greg’s body.

After hearing all the different levels of fentanyl in Greg’s blood, urine, and stomach identified by the different labs, Stanley summed them up as “a whole lot of fentanyl.” In fact, he said he’d never seen such high amounts in a person. He also noted that with fentanyl, blood levels can go up by 20 percent after death.

Based on the high levels of fentanyl found in the stomach, Stanley said, the drug likely was administered in more than one form, possibly through the stomach but also through the bloodstream or skin. He explained how effects of the different forms of administration vary, with injections being fast acting, ingestion less so, and skin patches even less so. Based on the time that Greg was unconscious, Stanley’s testimony indicated that he may have had multiple doses of fentanyl over a long period of time before it killed him. The fentanyl, clonazepam, and oxycodone would have compounded each other.

One fentanyl patch alone can take sixteen hours to reach a peak effect, he said, which compares to about five minutes with an injection into the blood, fifteen to twenty minutes for an injection into muscle tissue, and somewhere in between for eating or drinking something containing fentanyl. Stanley said it would take multiple patches to reach the levels found in Greg’s blood.

On cross-examination, Eriksen asked Stanley if he was aware that the
Physicians’ Desk Reference
said fentanyl has a bitter taste. Stanley said no, pointing out that volunteers given 10 milligrams in his clinical studies for the lollipop did not taste anything.

Quizzed on the properties of succinylcholine, the doctor said the drug was metabolized by the body in five minutes and then was gone without a trace, rendering it undetectable.

Asked how fentanyl could be extracted from a patch and ingested, Stanley said the gel could be squeezed out of the patch and then dissolved in a cup of alcohol. In a powder form, he said, fentanyl citrate could be dissolved in water. In all but 5 to 10 percent of people, he said, a patch didn’t leave a mark on the skin after it was removed. After three days, a patch could leave an irritation or red mark on those 5 to 10 percent.

Dr. Jack Stump, an emergency room doctor from Vancouver, Washington, testified on Friday morning of day four. He had a specialty in pharmacology, methamphetamine abuse in particular, and had done clinical research for the Department of Justice that involved the regular observation of addicts.

Methamphetamine, he explained, is in a group of drugs called amphetamines but has a molecular shape that allows it to cause more psychological and physiological effects than most other drugs in that family. Meth causes the heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure to increase, while decreasing the appetite and making users seem jittery, nervous, and anxious. Large quantities can push blood pressure levels to 250. The drug can also cause malnutrition, resulting in dental and skin problems.

But, he said, “in the first two weeks or so of regular use…what methamphetamine does for you is give you what’s called supernatural pleasure, a pleasure you could not obtain anywhere else in nature. There aren’t enough vacations, aren’t enough births of babies, not enough pleasant events in life to get remotely close to what methamphetamine can do for you.”

After a few weeks of use, however, people no longer get as high as they did at first. Those who try to attain that feeling by using more of the drug find they need that much more just to feel close to normal again. In fact, if they don’t use the drug, they will crash and feel depressed. They will also have problems thinking clearly. Chemically, methamphetamine resembles adrenaline, he said, so it causes the same “fight or flight” symptoms, such as dilated pupils, dry mouth, and bad breath.

Typically, a high will last four to six hours in the one-time recreational user and three to five days in someone who is trying to maintain the high with repetitive use. When heavy users come down, they might sleep for two days while their bodies and minds recover. But unlike drugs such as marijuana, heroin, and cocaine, where the body returns to its usual state, methamphetamine changes the brain chemistry.

“People who use, especially repetitive use, don’t always return to the person they were before,” Stump said.

He said even light users might have trouble learning, demonstrate poor judgment, or experience extreme paranoia, the latter of which can cause hallucinations. In the 1950s, the military fed methamphetamine to bomber pilots to keep them awake, but they found that even these healthy, bright, mentally stable, and physically fit men became paranoid. Also, Stump said, because of tighter government controls on ingredients used to manufacture methamphetamine, makers of the illegal drug have resorted to more toxic chemicals, such as jet fuel, that are less regulated and more available. That is contributing to worsened physical problems, such as enlarged hearts, liver and kidney failure, and brain damage. Facial sores, a common symptom of meth use, are caused when the user scratches an itchy area until he digs a hole in the skin, a symptom known as “meth bugs.” Stump said meth users often use other narcotics, such as sedatives or muscle relaxants, to combat such symptoms.

On cross-examination by Eriksen, Stump said low-level users can go unnoticed by coworkers for years at a time, but once the level increases, they often begin to show up late, make mistakes, and let their appearance go.

“Would it strike you as unusual that a heavy meth user would be able to graduate with a B.S. degree in chemistry at the
summa cum laude
level?” Eriksen asked.

“Yes,” Stump said, “it would.”

When UCSD police Sergeant Bob Jones took the stand later that morning, Goldstein ran him through the items he found in the apartment to establish the chain of evidence, noting the red swipes on the bedsheet and smudges on the carpet—signs that the rose petals were fresh.

Jones said he returned to the apartment the next morning with two officers to make a videotape because he “had some unanswered questions.” As Goldstein played the tape for the jury, an eerie silence fell over the courtroom as the camera panned over the empty apartment where the paramedics had tried to bring life back to the body of a young man the night before.

Despite all of his questions, Jones said it wasn’t until after Russ Lowe’s phone call on November 8 that he finally decided to call in the SDPD’s homicide unit for help.

“At the moment I received the telephone call, it caused me to believe this might be something other than what it had appeared earlier and that San Diego probably [should] be brought into the loop,” Jones said.

As he did during the preliminary hearing, Eriksen grilled the sergeant to underscore his investigative failures for the jury. Jones repeatedly said he didn’t collect the various items of evidence Eriksen listed, including Kristin’s diary, because he didn’t think they had any “evidentiary value” at the time. He said he left the apartment thinking the death was “equivocal,” or uncertain.

Eriksen went on the offensive. “Normally,” he said, “when you are investigating an open-ended question like that as to the death of a human being, wouldn’t you consider everything around…where that person is found to be potentially relevant as evidence?”

“Potentially, yes,” Jones replied.

But, no, Jones acknowledged, he did not check whether the phones worked, did not look through the kitchen cabinets, did not inventory the balcony trash cans’ contents, did not collect the contents of the plastic cups in the bedroom, did not do any fingerprint analysis, and did not secure the apartment as a crime scene. Jones said he saw no sign in the apartment or trash cans of any baby’s breath or cellophane wrapping that would come with a single rose purchased at the supermarket.

Eriksen also pointed out that Jones had changed his description of Kristin’s appearance. In Jones’s initial report, he said, the sergeant wrote that she “had no visible injuries,” that she was “visibly shaking” and “her display of emotions seemed genuine.” Yet, Jones had testified that Kristin looked “haggard, disheveled, did not look well, did not look healthy.”

Then, in testimony some described as revisionist history at its best, Jones described his initial impressions of the crime scene.

“The apartment was clearly, at least in my estimation…staged to look like suicide,” he said. “The fact that Ms. Rossum and Mr. Robertson were having an affair entered into the equation that there might be a motive for something other than just a suicide. That’s what prompted the call [to San Diego police].”

But Eriksen wasn’t going to let him get away with that. “So, after doing your walk-through, your talking to fellow officers, your talking to the Medical Examiner’s investigator on the night of November 6 and the early morning hours of November 7, and having returned seven hours later and having done a videotaping session for approximately an hour, your impression was this was a suicide,” Eriksen said. “Is that correct?”

“It was still an equivocal death investigation,” Jones said. “I wasn’t certain that it was a suicide, no, sir.”

On redirect, Goldstein had the detective run through all the reasons why he hadn’t taken all the measures that Eriksen suggested. They all boiled down to the same excuse: Kristin Rossum had lied to him. If he’d known Kristin had hidden meth in the kitchen, he said, that she was having an affair with the man standing outside on the landing, and that she’d bought a red rose at Vons that afternoon, his actions would have been completely different.

“That would have been…concrete information that I could’ve shared with San Diego [Homicide] and would’ve called them immediately that evening,” he said.

Following up on Eriksen’s question about the cellophane wrapping, Goldstein called Jones’s attention to some plastic wrap in one of the photographs of the balcony trash cans and asked him to describe what he saw. From where the jury was sitting, the plastic looked like it could have been the kind of wrapping a single rose would come in. But on closer inspection, it was not so clear.