Poisoned Love (49 page)

After Marie stepped down, Thompson explained to the jurors that they had heard all the evidence in the case. The law required him to meet with the attorneys for an hour or so after lunch to discuss jury instructions, which he would deliver that afternoon. Closing arguments were to begin the next morning, and he expected the case to go to the jury by the end of the week, though he would let the panel decide if it wanted to deliberate on Friday afternoon. Since Monday was a court holiday, deliberations would continue the following Tuesday.

Midway through Kristin’s testimony, Eriksen could feel himself getting sick, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He’d been so busy with the case, he’d forgotten to get a flu shot. And now, with his immune system strained by the long hours and stress of the trial, he’d gone and caught a nasty flu bug.

He and Loebig discussed asking the judge for a delay in their closing argument so Eriksen could give the statement he’d worked so long to prepare, but Loebig wanted to move ahead. He thought Thompson might not allow a delay because there were two defense attorneys. The jurors had been coming every day for a month, and Loebig didn’t think it was a good idea to make them wait for the defense’s closing; they might feel irritated or inconvenienced. And finally, he thought the jury might view a delay caused by Eriksen’s absence as an indication that he had no confidence in the defense’s case.

Eriksen didn’t argue. His nose and eyes were running, and he couldn’t even think straight. Before going home to collapse, he stayed late at the office to finish typing up the ten single-spaced pages of information he’d been planning to relay to the jury. And he left it up to Loebig to do the rest.

It was pretty unusual for an attorney to call in sick for a closing, and it was also unusual for there to be two attorneys on a case, so it was even more rare for those two phenomena to coincide. Eriksen apologized to the Rossums right before the verdict, but he said later that the fact that Loebig’s closing argument was shorter than they would have liked seemed to bother them more than Eriksen’s absence.

Once Eriksen recovered, he felt terrible about not being able to be there to finish the job that he’d started.

“I’d put so much into the trial and the case and then was unavailable at the attorney’s time to shine,” he said.

The jury was excused while Judge Thompson listened to what attorneys from both sides had to say about which instructions the panel should be given. Goldstein did not participate in the discussion so that he could put the finishing touches on his closing argument back in his office. Loebig announced that Eriksen had gone home sick.

Hendren argued that the jury should hear a series of instructions concerning conspiracies.

“It’s the people’s position that Michael Robertson is an uncharged, unindicted coconspirator in this case,” he said. “Theoretically, some of the jurors could conclude that Michael Robertson may have administered the lethal amount of fentanyl to the victim. If he did so, it’s the people’s contention that he did so in conjunction with Ms. Rossum as part of a conspiracy to kill her husband. They both had the same motive.”

Loebig strongly objected, but Thompson said there was “sufficient evidence to suggest that a conspiracy could be presumed.”

While the discussion was going on, Hendren spoke to Goldstein on the phone in the courtroom about a matter that had come up over the lunch break. Goldstein was so angry, he was about ready to dismiss the case, and he could be heard yelling on the other end of the phone. Thompson said he’d better come over to the courthouse.

Once Goldstein arrived, Thompson explained for the record that the court had just received a date-stamped copy of Marie de Villers’s divorce papers from 1981, which “completely contradicted” her brief testimony that Yves had never physically abused her. Kristin’s attorneys wanted a chance to present this information to the jury before the panel got its instructions. Thompson said he’d allow both sides to argue their positions.

Goldstein now regretted that they’d called Marie to testify. He’d made his career out of prosecuting domestic violence cases, and he knew victims often recanted. Now that he was about to leave the District Attorney’s Office to become a judge, the irony was not lost on him that the last witness he would ever call to the stand was a woman who claimed abuse and then recanted.

Goldstein told Thompson that Eriksen and Loebig were the most honest defense attorneys he’d ever dealt with, but they’d never turned over Marie’s divorce papers as part of discovery.

“He had his chance to cross[-examine] her, and they rested,” Goldstein said. “[Loebig]’s been an attorney for twenty-five years. Why give him a chance to reopen?”

Loebig said he was led to believe that Marie wasn’t going to be called as a witness, so he didn’t bring the divorce papers with him for the prosecution to examine.

“When she was called, we were surprised,” he said. Loebig had reviewed the documents during the lunch hour to confirm that they contradicted her testimony and then notified the court.

“I had no intention of impeaching this poor woman,” Loebig said, but he also had no idea she would say what she did. “I have never seen such clear evidence of perjury in such short testimony.” He noted that no one wanted the jury to consider such evidence, which he called “poison to the system.”

Thompson said it would be “naïve to conclude” that statements made in petitions to obtain restraining orders “are always completely accurate.” It was possible, he said, that her attorney typed up the petition, and she, still new to this country and its language, just signed it.

The judge gave the attorneys a choice: the defense could recall Marie and question her about her testimony, both sides could stipulate that she signed court papers stating that the abuse occurred, or they could strike her testimony. The attorneys agreed on the first option.

With Eriksen home sick, Loebig asked Thompson if it would be okay for the court to recess after Goldstein’s closing argument on Wednesday, and then if Eriksen was feeling better on Thursday, he could deliver the closing, which the two defense attorneys had intended to split. If Eriksen was still sick, Loebig said he would do the entire closing on Thursday as scheduled.

Goldstein asked Thompson if he could be excused to get back to polishing up his closing, so he could be “artful.” Thompson jokingly said that Goldstein had plenty of time to work on it.

“Shit, damn near eighteen hours,” Thompson said, laughing.

After the break, Marie was recalled to the stand, and Loebig showed her the divorce papers she’d filed, with her signature, in 1981. She said she recognized her signature but said she did not remember making the statement about Yves hitting her in the face. And that was that.

Thompson read the jury its instructions, then excused the panel until the morning.

Afterward, Marie told her civil attorney, Craig McClellan, that Yves never hit her and that she never told her divorce attorney that he did.

Goldstein gave his closing argument on November 6, two years to the day after Greg died in the couple’s apartment. The prosecutor reviewed the timeline of the events leading up to Greg’s death, summarized the prosecution’s most incriminating evidence against Kristin, and then tried to punch holes through her explanations, one by one.

First of all, he said, there aren’t always two sides to every story, but the truth always makes sense.

“Either Greg de Villers killed himself or he was murdered,” he said. “There is no ambiguity,…it wasn’t a cry for help,” and Greg wasn’t trying to frame Kristin.

The defense, he said, portrayed Greg’s behavior as bizarre and as a motive for suicide, but in reality it was just the opposite. Greg was a regular, steady, nice guy who worked really hard, came home to his wife, and didn’t do drugs. Kristin, on the other hand, had a history of doing drugs, lying, stealing, and cheating on the men in her life, behavior the defense used as an explanation for her conduct, when, in fact, it was illegal, immoral, and led to murder.

Kristin Rossum, he said, destroyed two families, the Medical Examiner’s Office, and “a great guy” named Greg de Villers.

“Both families have suffered at the hands of the defendant and her narcissism and her self-centered behavior,” he said.

Goldstein did not try to describe a specific scenario for how Kristin poisoned Greg, suggesting only that she could have administered the fentanyl by using patches or a syringe or hiding it in something he ate or drank.

“Who knows,” he said. “She’s the expert. He didn’t just die and fade away…. The defendant chose to play God.”

Flashing Greg’s photo up on the screen, the prosecutor described the young man’s death as untimely and most unpleasant. On this day two years ago, he said, Greg was breathing shallowly, and his bladder and lungs were filling up with fluid. He was so drugged that he couldn’t even reach down to pick up the phone right next to his bed. Meanwhile, in Michael Robertson’s office, Kristin was crying and “they’re talking about what she’s doing to Greg de Villers…. She’s stressed out of her mind. Her world is collapsing.” Kristin and Michael left the office and were unaccounted for for at least two hours that afternoon.

Goldstein spun around and pointed to the empty chair behind Kristin and her attorneys, saying Michael Robertson might as well be sitting there because he and Kristin were working together and they wanted Greg dead.

The truth makes sense, he said, but Kristin’s story doesn’t. Kristin’s motive for killing Greg was to prevent him from exposing her affair and her drug use. And, if that didn’t seem like a strong enough motive for murder, he said to the jury, “I’d ask you—when is a motive good enough for murder?…There’s never a good reason to kill…. This is the oldest one in the book—killing for love…killing for drugs.”

Kristin lied to the police about her drug use and her affair, he said, she and her boyfriend hid evidence, and she used the tools of her trade as a toxicologist to kill Greg. The drugs she used recreationally and to murder her husband were later found missing from the Medical Examiner’s Office.

“Coincidence?” he asked. “No, theft.”

Goldstein said Kristin’s parents were “pretty good people…[who] did a lot for their daughter,” but at points during the trial, “it would be fair to say they have been untruthful.”

Kristin uses stimulants as a crutch when she gets into trouble, he said. She manipulates people and situations, she’s deceitful, and she staged her own suicide as a teenager. She picks at her knuckles until they bleed and pulls her own nails off.

“That’s the power of methamphetamine,” he said.

Don’t let the irony of this case escape you, he warned the jury. Greg’s “detestation for drugs” is what ended up killing him.

Kristin’s journal was staged, too, he said. She left it on the coffee table to send a message, first to Greg, then to police.

“Why would you lie in your own diary?” he asked the jury rhetorically.

Goldstein suggested that Kristin did not bring the love note home on Thursday, November 2, as she’d claimed, but much later, so she could try to make it look like Greg had been trying to piece it back together—a task that a police detective took six weeks to do, even on a computer. What really happened that Thursday, he said, was that Greg came home, “saw that she was tweaking,” and told her he would turn her in if she didn’t clean up her act. The next night Greg may have been upset about the consultant he hired at work, but otherwise he was fine. Why else would Kristin and her father describe the evening as fun or very pleasant?

Goldstein submitted to the jury that the murder was set in motion with Kristin’s cell phone call to Michael, her lover the fentanyl expert, at 9:02
P.M
. on Sunday night. Greg was snoring that night. Something was in his system. Clonazepam could have been used to immobilize Greg, which enabled Kristin to administer massive doses of fentanyl. Why else did Kristin feel safe enough to call her drug dealer four times from home for the first time the next morning? Because the threat was gone, Goldstein said. Greg was unconscious, and he was going to die. When she called in sick for him, Goldstein said, she called his own voice mail, even though she had Stefan Gruenwald’s and Terry Huang’s numbers right there in her address book.

“She had numbers. She could have easily notified people that Greg was sick,” Goldstein said. “She didn’t want to…. Why? Because he was going to die. That’s at 7:42 [
A.M
.]”

Kristin went to Vons, he said. Why? To buy soups, cold medicine, and a rose. But, of course, she wasn’t going to admit that the rose was red.

“They know we can’t prove what color it is by the receipt,” he said.

She is the one obsessed with roses, and whose favorite movie is
American Beauty,
he added.

“That’s not Greg de Villers’s gig,” he said. “She bought a rose. She bought a red rose.”

Goldstein told the jurors that they couldn’t really believe anything Kristin said. “I’d submit she’s been impeached to a degree that it would be very difficult to trust anything this defendant had to say about any subject.”

She also didn’t take a bath that night, he said, because she was busy staging a suicide scene. On the 911 tape, she did sound hysterical, because it must have been very hard for her to try to pretend to do CPR on Greg and talk on the phone at the same time.

“How was she doing all that and doing real CPR at the same time? You can’t,” he said.

Why was the wedding photo propped up at the base of the chest? That photo didn’t just fall off the bed and stand up by itself, he said. Kristin wasn’t expecting the dispatcher to tell her to put Greg on the floor, so she had to sweep all the petals off the bed and move the photo from under the pillow to the floor, where the paramedics found it.

“She had to reset the crime scene,” he said. “She didn’t do a very good job of it.”

Goldstein dismissed the defense’s theory that Greg drank fentanyl from one of the cups in the bedroom that went untested, calling it “a red herring.”