Poisoned Love (7 page)

“She’s just kind of off,” he said.

Chris Wren felt that Kristin was kind of quirky, which in his mind wasn’t necessarily a bad trait, at least in most people. But in her, he saw something else, something he didn’t recognize or understand. She acted erratically, swinging from one extreme emotion to the next. One afternoon he walked into the apartment and found her alone with a strange man. Kristin didn’t introduce them.

About a week after Greg’s jewelry disappeared, Wren discovered that some of his personal checks were missing. Greg admitted that Kristin had taken them. He also said he’d torn them up so she couldn’t use them.

“You can’t use someone else’s checks, anyway,” Kristin said later, trying to dismiss the act and claim she wasn’t intending to use them to buy drugs.

When Greg found a glass tube containing a whitish yellow substance in Kristin’s jacket pocket, he showed it to Wren and asked if he’d ever seen anything like it. No, Wren said, he hadn’t. But it certainly helped explain Kristin’s nervousness and what Jerome described as her “twidgety” behavior. She was smoking drugs, and it sure wasn’t marijuana.

Jerome wanted her out of the apartment, but Greg wouldn’t listen. Kristin was going through some rough times, he said. She was trying to stop using drugs, and he was trying to help her do it. He’d fallen in love and he’d fallen hard.

Other than Kristin’s problem, drugs weren’t a part of Greg’s life. He didn’t drink much alcohol or do recreational drugs. His friends couldn’t even remember him using over-the-counter cold remedies. Greg made it clear he didn’t like Jerome smoking pot and told him he’d have more motivation if he didn’t. Greg also didn’t approve of the couple of marijuana plants that Jerome and Wren tried unsuccessfully to grow in the apartment as an experiment.

Greg and Jerome had always been close, but things had become strained between them since Kristin arrived. Jerome was doing laundry in the apartment one day and put his clothes in the dryer before he went out. When he came back, he found his clothes—still damp—heaped on top of the dryer and Greg’s clothes tumbling inside. Jerome was so angry, he and Greg started fighting over the insult. The two brothers had always roughhoused and wrestled, pinning each other and putting the other in a headlock or a choke hold. Only this time, things got so rough that Jerome thought they might really hurt each other. Luckily, Wren came home and broke them apart.

Kristin never really confided in Jerome, but she did feel comfortable talking with Wren. She told him she’d run away from home because things weren’t going well with her parents, and she admitted to having a problem with crystal meth.

“She was looking for acceptance, and when you have a problem, you need to talk about it,” Wren said.

Two or three months after she’d moved in, the roommates decided to have a party. Kristin sat on Wren’s lap as the guests began to arrive. At one point, she told Wren she felt she was meant to be with him, not Greg, and started to cry.

Ralph and Constance took Greg and Kristin to dinner one night and expressed their concern that neither of them was back in school, informing them that education was important for their futures. Since he’d stopped taking courses at UCSD, Greg had been supporting himself by working at Rush Legal, where he’d also helped Kristin get a job, but it didn’t provide health benefits. Kristin decided to enroll at San Diego State University (SDSU) in the fall, and Greg planned to return to UCSD.

Constance filled out Kristin’s SDSU application for her, purposely omitting her two lousy quarters at Redlands, even though the form required a listing of all previous coursework. She thought her daughter should have a fresh start, and that was that.

When the lease to Greg’s apartment ran out in June 1995, Wren moved to Solana Beach. He still played tennis with Greg and came by the apartment, but they saw less and less of each other. Wren had always admired Greg for believing that if things weren’t going well, he could turn them around. He figured it was Greg’s optimism that made him want to help Kristin. And perhaps a little gullibility as well.

“That’s what made him honest,” Wren said.

Jerome moved out that summer, too. He’d been studying chemistry at UCSD, but he decided to transfer to the University of California, Santa Barbara, which offered better economics courses. His girlfriend and another good friend were also thinking of transferring there, so he was guaranteed a roommate.

Wren and Jerome kept wondering when Greg was going to wake up and see Kristin for what she really was.

That summer Greg told Kristin’s father that he wanted to marry her. But Ralph told Greg he needed to finish college first, so Greg and Kristin settled on getting informally engaged. As much as the Rossums didn’t approve of the couple’s living arrangement, they decided to acknowledge the situation and allowed them to move into another apartment together.

“Kristin loved Greg, and we wanted to help them both to the extent that we could,” Constance recalled.

So, they agreed to pay the rent. They also bought furniture for the couple and a white 1990 Toyota Cressida for Kristin. They were proud of both young people and so pleased that Kristin seemed like her old self again that they happily paid for her tuition, books, clothes, and car insurance. They even threw in a little extra spending money.

Constance took Greg aside and made him promise to tell them if he saw any signs that Kristin was back on drugs. He told her not to worry; he knew what to do. His father was a doctor.

By all accounts, the couple seemed giddy with love, sitting close on the couch and holding hands all the time. Marie, Greg’s mother, described them as lovebirds.

That summer Kristin went with her family for a vacation in the south of France. Every day she would wait by the phone for Greg to call at a prearranged time, and he would follow through, no matter where he was.

Greg waited as best he could to formally propose marriage. Then, on October 25, 1996, he couldn’t wait any longer. The two of them were driving down to Puerto Nuevo, Mexico, to celebrate Kristin’s twentieth birthday with dinner at Lobster Village. As they were driving down the toll road, Kristin opened the glove compartment to store the toll ticket and thought she saw a jewelry box. She was right. After dinner Greg opened the compartment, pulled out an engagement ring, and popped the question. She said yes.

The next day, Kristin drove to her parents’ house in Claremont to show off the ring. The Rossums were happy—cautiously happy—and said they hoped it would be a long engagement.

Chapter 4

Greg, like Kristin, came from a well educated, suburban family. Although their childhoods and teenage years were quite different, experiences in their formative years groomed them to come together as a codependent couple, with strengths and needs that complemented each other.

Greg’s family life trained him early and often to be a protector, an adviser, and a caretaker. As the oldest son in a single-parent household, Greg shouldered the responsibility for the welfare of his two brothers and their mother, whose respiratory problems put her in the hospital starting when they were in elementary school. It is not uncommon for children of parents who are chronically ill or addicted to drugs or alcohol to end up in a romantic relationship with a substance abuser.

Through all of this, Greg somehow learned how to stay positive, or at least to maintain the appearance that everything was fine. And if it wasn’t, then he’d do his damnedest to make it better.

When Greg met Kristin in late 1994, she was eighteen and addicted to crystal meth. At twenty-one, with little experience in the girlfriend department, Greg was determined to be her savior and get her off drugs. His efforts were successful. Their troubles developed in the next few years, as Kristin increasingly wanted her independence. In turn, Greg displayed the typical behavior of someone involved with an addict—he tried to control and protect Kristin and their relationship, even more so when he saw signs that she’d relapsed. The knowledge that she was having an affair and that their marriage was falling apart—especially after living through his parents’ acrimonious divorce—undoubtedly fueled the dynamic.

Gregory Bernard Paul Yvon Tremolet de Villers was the first of three American sons born to Yves and Marie-France Tremolet de Villers. Greg and his brothers grew up in Southern California, across the globe from France, their parents’ native country. But because their mother always felt more comfortable speaking in her native tongue, all three were fluent in it.

Marie-France was born in 1943 in Gaillac, a small town near the Pyrenees. When she was a child, her mother would spread hot vapor rub on her chest to help her asthmatic breathing. Her father’s military career exposed her and her younger sister, Marie-Paul, at an early age to African cultures in Algeria, Morocco, the Ivory Coast, and the Congo. Marie-France was in her twenties, working as a physical therapist, when she met Yves in Mende, a town in the south of France, where her parents had settled. Yves, who was eight years her senior, worked in a hospital there.

Yves lost his father when he was eleven, so his mother raised him and his sisters with the help of two uncles, both members of the French Parliament. When their town of Montpellier was bombed during World War II, Yves’ family hid in a vaulted basement across the street from their home, biting on pieces of wood to keep their mouths open and prevent their eardrums from rupturing. The next morning they learned that thousands had died in the night. Yves saw people gunned down in the street and was awakened one night at 2
A.M
. by the Gestapo, who were looking for one of his uncles.

Ambitious and intelligent, Yves started medical school in Montpellier in 1953. He also studied medicine at a university in Marseilles. He trained in surgery and anesthesiology and also interned at a hospital in Nice.

Yves and Marie moved to the Chicago area in 1970 so he could continue his medical studies, and they were married there in 1972. Greg was born the following year, on November 12. Yves did a residency in hand surgery at Northwestern University, one in general surgery at Michael Reese Hospital, and one in plastic surgery at the University of Illinois, where he also taught classes. In 1974 he opened a surgical practice in Monte Carlo, which is in the tiny country of Monaco, on the Mediterranean Sea near the French and Italian borders. A resort area, Monte Carlo has a population of about thirty-two thousand, is a vacation spot for the rich, and is known for its casinos and for being home to the late Grace Kelly after she married its chief of state, Prince Rainier III.

In 1975, two years and three days after Greg was born, Marie gave birth to Jerome Henri Vincent Louis Tremolet de Villers, continuing the tradition of naming their sons after three relatives. The family soon moved to Westlake Village in California, a community that straddles Ventura and Los Angeles Counties. They bought a modest condominium there that December, and Yves opened a second plastic surgery practice, this time with a partner in the neighboring city of Thousand Oaks, a mostly white, family-oriented city of about 117,000 people in Ventura County.

The third de Villers son, Charles Bertrand Jean Francois, who went by Bertrand, or Bert to his friends, was born on March 10, 1979, in a hospital across the street from the family’s condo.

Over the years, Yves would travel back and forth between his dual practices in Thousand Oaks and Monte Carlo. Yves worked as a surgeon at L’Hospital Complex Princess Grace. Back in California, Bertrand remembered that Yves did some work on Walt Disney to fix a broken nose, and that he brought home a Mickey Mouse watch as a token of appreciation.

But pure medicine was never enough for Yves, who had a very active mind. He went on to coauthor a textbook titled
Body Sculpturing by Lipoplasty
in 1989. A student for life, he also received a master’s degree in business administration, finance, and marketing from the University of Southern Europe in Monaco in 1998.

Two months after Bertrand was born, the family moved to a more upscale neighborhood a couple of miles away, where Yves and Marie bought a two-story house on Silver Springs Drive. Lined with tall, thin conifers, an olive tree, jasmine, and rose bushes, the house looked onto a soccer field that was part of a K-8 school that Greg and Jerome attended across the street. With a pool and a hot tub in the backyard, this was suburbia at its best.

But before long, Yves and Marie’s marriage went sour. Greg and Jerome were rousted out of bed by doors slamming or Yves yelling at their mother. They would climb to the top of the stairs outside the master bedroom, trying to figure out what the ruckus was about. It scared them and made them cry to hear their parents fight.

Yves filed papers to dissolve the union on September 2, 1981, when Bertrand was two and Greg almost eight.

A month later Yves filed papers asking the court to stop Marie from selling their community property and to award him custody of the boys. Upon returning from Europe, he claimed, he discovered that Marie had sold their 1973 Volkswagen and a “very expensive gun” without his consent. Given his wife’s “emotional state,” he was worried that she’d run off with the boys to their house in Monte Carlo.

“I feel I am qualified to make the statement, as I am a medical doctor,” he wrote. He also asked the court to restrain Marie’s “personal conduct,” so she would not be allowed to “contact, molest, attack, strike, threaten, sexually assault, batter, telephone or otherwise disturb” his peace.

Marie filed her own set of divorce papers on October 1, asking for the same restraint on Yves’s conduct.

Each parent gave a dramatically different version of the events that contributed to the split. But one thing was obvious to any neutral party: Even though Yves moved back into the house for a time, the high drama reflected in four years of divorce filings must have created an emotionally volatile environment for Greg and his brothers, one in which money was always an issue. Each parent went through several attorneys.

In Marie’s initial filing, she asked the court to award her custody of the boys, along with $1,500 in child support and $4,000 in alimony, monthly. She asked that Yves, who wasn’t living at home at the time, be forced to stay at least one hundred yards away from her.