Poisoned Love (6 page)

“I don’t know,” Greenbaum-Maya said. “We thought you or your wife had picked her up yesterday.”

Ralph’s voice softened, saying they, too, had gone to get her, but she wasn’t there. “We thought maybe—” he said, his voice trailing off.

Greenbaum-Maya didn’t much like Ralph’s tone and didn’t think she or her stepson had done anything to deserve it. But when Ralph asked if she would call him if she heard anything, she said yes.

Kristin left the Redlands campus that morning because she couldn’t face Teddy Maya or her mother. There would be hell to pay once her parents learned that she’d started smoking meth again. Plus, with an embarrassingly low grade point average of 1.67, Kristin had received a notice that she was on academic probation.

She’d gotten away from her druggie friends that spring, after her parents enrolled her at Redlands. She’d stayed clean over the summer, often double-dating with Melissa Prager and her boyfriend.

Kristin was pleased to have her parents’ approval again, and they, in turn, were thrilled to have their old Kristin back. So thrilled, they let her move into the dorm at Redlands, where she decided to take a full load of courses that fall. After struggling with a meth addiction since her junior year, it felt great to be drug free.

But that didn’t last long. Kristin ran into a student who’d been in her calculus class the previous semester and, unbeknownst to her, was a fellow meth user. The friend offered her some at a party, and she took it. The problem was, it left her wanting more. So, she started using again. Gradually at first, once a week, then maybe every few days. She figured she could handle smoking just enough to help her study harder, to earn the good grades she used to get, so she could please her parents and feel good about herself again. But the cravings grew stronger, and things began to snowball.

By midsemester, Kristin was using every day. As Christmas vacation approached, she knew she couldn’t let her parents see her like this again. They would be so disappointed. She knew it would upset them, but she decided she’d better go before her mother came to pick her up.

Kristin decided to go visit a male friend in Hemet. On Christmas Eve, her parents received a call from a family in Newport, telling them she was okay. Then, on Christmas night, she called Teddy Maya from a motel in Redlands and asked him to join her.

Kristin looked bad, nothing like her usual attractive self, and she seemed edgy after not sleeping in who knows how long. The next morning, Maya got out of the shower and found she’d emptied his wallet and left. Again, not even a note to say where she’d gone.

Kristin felt she still needed more time to get her act together. So she boarded an Amtrak train and got off at the end of the line in downtown San Diego. She transferred to the slow-rolling red trolley and continued south.

At the first trolley stop in Chula Vista, there was a Motel 6 to the east, and beyond it, across the parking lot, a Best Western. To the west, with the Pacific Ocean as a backdrop, was a Good Nite Inn. It’s unclear which motel she chose, but with only $200 in her pocket, Kristin likely rented the cheapest room she could find.

But, after smoking some meth that morning, she was in no mood to sit around the room. She’d heard that Tijuana, the first town across the border into Mexico, was a fun place for college students to party. And, since she’d just turned eighteen, she could drink legally—all night if she wanted to. So she hopped back on the trolley and took it to San Ysidro, the last stop on the U.S. side of the border. She followed the signs to the pedestrian crossing and joined the throng of people walking over the bridge, their noses stinging from the fumes that emanated from the long lines of stop-and-go traffic heading into Mexico. It would be only a few minutes before she could lose herself in another country, another culture, another reality.

Greg de Villers, his brothers Jerome and Bertrand, and Aaron Wallo were walking across the bridge that same evening. Their trip to “TJ” was intended to be a rite of passage for Bertrand, who came down with Wallo from Palm Springs to visit. At fourteen, Bertrand had never been drunk before.

Night had fallen by the time the de Villers crew was walking along the dirty sidewalk leading to the intertwining metal bars that made up the first of two turnstiles at the border crossing. A loud clanking sounded repeatedly as a stream of tourists and Mexican day laborers pushed through the worn gate.

Kristin was walking sideways near the turnstile when she bumped into Greg. She dropped her brown leather jacket, and they both went to pick it up, which sparked a conversation. Since Kristin was alone, she was happy to tag along with his group, and Greg was happy to have her. She thought Greg seemed like a really nice guy, and it was obvious that he was attracted to her. They walked along the dimly lit sidewalk, past a long mural caked with the same dark layer of car-exhaust dust that seems to cover much of Tijuana.

They passed the money exchange booth as they approached the second turnstile and the bright yellow taxi sign, its edges lined with the same tiny blinking lights found on strip-club marquees. As soon as they pushed through the turnstile, they were surrounded by taxi drivers offering to take them into the city. They got into one of the cabs and asked to be dropped off at the most popular tourist destination, a street called
Avenida Revolución,
which is lined with bars and dance clubs. The taxi driver drove fast, which was a little nerve-wracking given that there were no seat belts in his car.

For some Americans, Tijuana is a place to stock up on prescription drugs, which are far cheaper and easier to obtain without a prescription than in the United States. It’s as easy as walking into a pharmacy and asking the clerk behind the counter for a drug of choice. The clerks don’t ask for a prescription, nor do they tell buyers that purchasing medications without one could get them arrested at the border. Kristin would take advantage of this opportunity in the years to come, buying muscle relaxants, diet pills, and other drugs.

For students or young members of the U.S. military stationed in San Diego, Tijuana is more of an escape destination, where they can act crazier than is acceptable back home. In essence, Tijuana is a bombardment of the senses. Everything is bright, loud, aggressive, and sometimes a little surreal. The neon lights flash across buildings so rapidly a person can almost hear them, making him feel as if he were starring in his own cartoon.

As tourists walk down
Avenida Revolución,
they are accosted every few feet by vendors whose arms are covered with hanging necklaces. Barefoot children with grimy faces thrust out empty paper cups, begging for money. Or they sell small, individually wrapped packets of chewing gum squares, eight for $1. Mothers with two or three toddlers in tow sell handwoven bracelets or crepe-paper flowers in brilliant colors. Men sitting on benches call out “something else,” code words for drugs.

Over the years, the stores that line
Avenida Revolución
have offered little variation in the goods they sell: hand-carved onyx chess sets, velvet paintings, ceramic pots, figurines, leather wallets and belts, pocket knives, and white cotton dresses with floral embroidery.

Outside the nightclubs, clusters of young men hand out free drink tickets, trying to entice passersby to enter their steep black stairwells. “This is the place,” they say. “Come inside.”

The de Villers crew strolled along
Avenida Revolución
and went into several of these bars that night, at least one of which had a second-floor balcony overlooking the street. They ordered tequila shots and beers, while the bass beat of the dance music pounded the night air, and smoke machines belched out streams of gray fog. It soon became clear that Greg and Kristin were together.

Sometime between midnight and 2
A.M
., the group walked back over the pedestrian bridge to San Ysidro and their car. Greg invited Kristin to stay with him and his crew at the two-bedroom apartment he shared with Jerome and a roommate in the La Jolla Del Sol complex. Kristin felt safe with Greg. She sensed no permanence in the situation, and she didn’t want to go back to an empty motel room. So she accepted his offer.

Greg and Kristin shared the same bed, and they had sex. There was no mention of Teddy Maya. Greg was smitten, and it appeared to be mutual.

“Greg wasn’t the type to bring women home for one-night stands,” said Chris Wren, Greg’s roommate.

The next morning, Bertrand woke up on the couch with a plastic trash bin next to him in case he got sick. The whole crew got up late and went out for something to eat before Bertrand and Wallo drove back to Palm Springs.

Then Greg asked Wren to move out of the bedroom they shared and into the other bedroom with Jerome. Kristin was going to stay for a while.

Kristin’s parents checked in with her teachers and learned that she’d missed her finals. When she hadn’t turned up by the day after Christmas, they filed a missing person’s report with the campus police. They also contacted the Claremont Police Department.

George Dynes, a Claremont police officer, wrote in his report that Maya had seen Kristin on the morning of December 26. She had a 104-degree fever and “was depressed and suicidal.” Ralph Rossum told Dynes that his daughter might “try and hurt or kill herself.”

“The parents are worried about the safety of their eighteen-year-old daughter. According to people that the parents have contacted, their daughter has been very depressed lately,” Dynes wrote.

Dynes also filled out another form, recording the Rossums’ report of a “voluntary missing adult.” He put Kristin in the “at risk” category, stating she was “depressed and suicidal,” with a destination unknown. He described her as being five feet two inches, 105 pounds, with green eyes and chin-length blond hair, wearing a brown leather jacket.

Constance feared that Kristin might have fallen prey to foul play. She and Ralph were both devastated by the cold fact that their daughter likely had relapsed. When Kristin was on drugs, she became self-destructive. And this time, they had no idea where she’d gone or what she was doing.

A couple of times in the weeks after Kristin ran away, Constance answered the phone and heard a mewing on the other end of the line. She figured it was Kristin making those quiet sobbing sounds, but her daughter wouldn’t say anything. She would just hang up. She knew she’d ruined her family’s Christmas.

In early January, Kristin sent her parents a letter saying she was very sorry for running away like she did. The letter had no return address or phone number but carried a San Diego postmark. Soon afterwards, Kristin called her parents.

“Thank God you’re safe,” Constance told her.

Kristin said she’d been staying with some nice people in San Diego. She hadn’t wanted to call until she was ready to prove that she was serious about getting herself together. If the family wanted to see her, she wanted to come home for a visit.

“Mom, I have three jobs. I’m starting to turn my life around,” she said.

Her parents were thrilled to hear that Kristin was okay and that she was trying to get better. Borrowing Greg’s car, she drove up to Claremont on a Sunday to see her family and to collect some belongings.

“There was a little bit of the prodigal son kind of feeling,” Ralph recalled later.

Over a tearful but happy reunion lunch, Kristin shared how she’d driven up in the car that her friend Greg de Villers loaned her. Seemingly clearheaded, she told them that she was teaching ballet classes and working at a pasta restaurant and that she had also landed a third job, at California Pizza Kitchen. It seemed important to her that they believe she’d turned the corner. They were happy to buy in and got her the uniform she needed for the pizza place. They also managed to squeeze a church service into her visit.

Constance and Ralph were eager to meet Greg, so they arranged to come down to San Diego in a few weeks. Greg wanted to take them all out to lunch.

They met in a parking lot in the Gaslamp District in downtown San Diego, an area lined with bars and restaurants that are teeming with people on weekend nights. Greg was wearing sunglasses and a suede jacket.

When he took off his glasses, Constance noticed that he had kind eyes. Ralph thought he was charming and good-looking.

“I thought Kristin had met a really good person,” Ralph said.

Kristin spoke with Teddy Maya at one point in January about her sudden disappearance, telling him she’d been kidnapped at gunpoint and driven around Mexico in the trunk of a car.

About a month after the Rossums’ lunch with Greg, Kristin told her parents she was renting a van and moving in with a young female coworker from the pizza restaurant. In reality, however, she was still living with Greg.

The Rossums eventually figured this out. As devout Episcopalians, Constance and Ralph disapproved of premarital sex. But at the same time, they were relieved. Kristin seemed to be in such good hands with Greg, who obviously had her best interests at heart. And if he could do what they couldn’t—get her off drugs—then so be it. Her previous lifestyle was certainly worse than this.

To them, Greg was their “saving angel.”

Meanwhile, back in the La Jolla Del Sol apartment, it wasn’t long before tensions began to rise. Not only was Jerome being forced to share his bedroom, but the rent was still being divided only three ways. He also wasn’t thrilled when Greg started letting Kristin drive to work in the car that he and Greg had been sharing.

To make matters worse, some of Greg’s jewelry—a gold ring with the family crest and a gold necklace—went missing from the bathroom, and Greg blamed Jerome’s friends for taking it. Jerome said it was more likely Kristin. But Greg didn’t want to believe it.

Jerome called Christian MacLean, a friend of theirs from high school, and expressed his frustration.

“There’s this girl staying with us,” Jerome told him. “She’s weird.”

After meeting her, MacLean came to agree. He noticed Kristin didn’t really connect with the people around her. To him, she seemed like a nerdy, serious bookworm who didn’t really get the joke.