Poisoned Love (9 page)

In 1992 and 1993, Greg and Jerome went to stay with their father in Monaco for the summer. Bertrand and Marie came over and joined them later. Both years, Greg got an internship there at the International Atomic Energy Agency Marine Environment Laboratory, where he used his computer skills to analyze data related to marine radioactivity and pollution levels in the Mediterranean Sea.

As his sons got older, Yves wasn’t around as much, but when he was, the boys increasingly felt he overexerted his role as an authority figure. Yves could be a very sweet man, but he seemed elusive to his sons.

“It’s hard to know who he is exactly,” Jerome said. “He’s a real smart guy. He likes having his own space.”

Yves was very particular about his belongings. When the boys were young and he came back from a trip, he would know if one of them had moved something in his room. He kept a detailed journal, recording everything from expenditures to details of conversations. Jerome adopted these practices and employed them years later as he investigated Greg’s death. Bertrand, who later went on to pursue a Ph.D. in physical chemistry, believed he inherited his father’s academic drive.

After Greg returned from Monaco in the fall of 1993, he started classes at the University of California, San Diego, where his grades were less than stellar.

During his first quarter, he earned an F in organic chemistry, a D in a European Renaissance humanities class, and a C in physics, which gave him a D grade point average for the quarter. The next quarter, he did slightly better, raising his average to a C by earning a B+ in an introduction to acting class. In the spring of 1994, he continued to struggle with organic chemistry and physics.

Jerome joined him at UCSD that fall, and they shared a two-bedroom apartment in the La Jolla Del Sol complex with a third roommate, Chris Wren.

Greg and his father did not get along, and over the years, their relationship grew progressively stormier, until Greg and he became estranged.

Yves had a way of causing mental turmoil, which made communication with his sons difficult, so Greg—and sometimes Jerome—felt it was easier to live independently with little or no contact with him. Yves said he believed the conflict between him and Greg developed “because he was too young for the kind of responsibilities his mother gave him and the resentment she could not completely hide.”

But others saw it differently, saying that Greg resented Yves for not helping their mother more financially. Then, later, when Greg said he couldn’t afford to pay for college and wanted to take a break, Yves told him to stay in school and assured him that he would cover the costs, but the money never came. Yves denied this version of events but did not elaborate.

Memories differ on the breaking point for Greg and his father. Jerome remembered it coming during a family trip to Mammoth, when Greg left abruptly and returned to San Diego. Yves remembered that Greg left abruptly one year because he wanted to go home to try to make money selling vitamins, a job Yves didn’t think was worthy of him, but he said that wasn’t the breaking point for him and his son. He did not elaborate.

Greg withdrew from classes at UCSD partway through the quarter in October 1994 and started working at Rush Legal Services. The firm offered an array of copying, researching, process serving, notary, delivery, and other services.

Greg returned to classes at UCSD in the fall of 1995, about nine months after meeting Kristin. By the following summer, he was able to focus his energies on just one organic chemistry course, and his grades began to improve. He earned a B+ in that course, and by the winter quarter of 1997, he was earning all A’s and B’s. In his last quarter before graduating in 1997, he brought his grade point average up to a 3.85 even while taking biomedicine/cancer and developmental neurobiology.

After Bertrand graduated high school in 1997, he came to San Diego for the summer. He lived in Solana Beach, a small coastal town just north of San Diego, where he learned to surf with his brothers. Greg got Bertrand a job at Rush Legal, delivering subpoenas for the firm in the northern part of the county. Later that summer, Bertrand was transferred to the downtown office where Greg worked. He left to start classes at UCLA that fall.

“I always felt a strong tie to my brothers,” Bertrand said. “We were always there for each other.”

The brothers remained close, even when they lived apart. Jerome transferred to the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1995, and after graduation, he worked as a hotel valet until he could decide what to do next. Greg called him almost every day, encouraging Jerome to do more with his life.

“More than my parents, he was there to help me out, and I remember he had a real influence on me,” Jerome said. “Greg could always figure something out.”

Before staying out late drinking, for example, Jerome would stop and think about what he was doing, not wanting to worry Greg.

“In a sense, he helped keep me in check without really saying anything,” Jerome said. “I wouldn’t want him to be disappointed. I just thought he had it together.”

In between visits, the brothers stayed in touch by phone. But like most young men, their conversations didn’t delve much into the personal realm. Mostly, they discussed movies or the fishing, camping, hiking, or snowboard trips they took together on a regular basis. Intimate feelings and relationship issues just didn’t come up.

Chapter 5

One activity that Greg and Kristin both viewed as important was spending time with family. As their relationship progressed, their two families began to integrate.

The couple often spent time with Marie de Villers or went on camping, hiking, or skiing trips with Jerome, Bertrand, and the occasional friend Greg had known since high school. In turn, Kristin frequently took Greg to her parents’ house, where he would play video games with her youngest brother, Pierce, or hit the golf course with Pierce and her other brother, Brent, followed by dinner with her parents.

When Bertrand was still in high school, he started playing soccer more seriously and joined a traveling squad that competed regionally with teams such as Claremont’s. He even played for a while on Brent’s team in Claremont. At practice one afternoon during his senior year, he remembers Brent mentioning that his sister was dating Bertrand’s brother. Bertrand, who never felt like he fit in with all the rich kids on that team, didn’t play on it for long, so he and Brent never got that close.

The Rossums invited Greg and Marie to their house for Thanksgiving dinner, and in subsequent years, Greg’s brothers came, too. Everyone seemed to get along well. Ralph and Constance thought it would be good for Greg if they could reunite him with his estranged father. But Greg wasn’t interested.

Once she got clean, Kristin was able to focus on her schoolwork. And it paid off.

She started off slowly, taking only two courses her first semester at SDSU, in the fall of 1995, while she continued to work with Greg at Rush Legal. On her application to the Medical Examiner’s Office two years later, she stretched the time she’d worked at Rush, claiming she’d started in June 1994 and worked as assistant office manager through December 1995.

Kristin earned a B+ in probability and an A in the principles of physics that semester. By the spring of 1996, she was taking a full load, earning an A in chemistry, an A-in philosophy, a B+ in biology, and a B-in physics. That summer she took two more courses, getting an A in calculus and an A-in oral communication.

Kristin impressed her chemistry professors at SDSU as being one of their best and brightest. Professor Dale Chatfield, chairman of the Chemistry Department, had Kristin in several of his classes.

“She excelled at everything she did,” he recalled. “She was really a perfectionist, as far as I can tell.”

When she worked in groups of three, he noticed that she “took over and told everyone else what to do,” which he attributed to her higher level of experience. Nonetheless, he noted, she still got along well with the other students. She was meticulous and thorough.

Kristin studied forensics, which included such topics as how to identify mysterious white powders at crime scenes. This was not an uncommon sight at crime scenes in San Diego County at the time, when the region was known as the meth capital of the world.

In forensics classes, Chatfield explained, “You’re trying to recreate any evidence you can from the scene of a crime. So you go into a place. You collect fingerprints. You collect dust. Sherlock Holmes business.”

Kristin was also in Professor Bill Tong’s chemistry lab.

“She was one of the best students we’ve ever seen,” said Tong, who served as a mentor to Kristin.

From the fall of 1996 until she finished her coursework about three years later, Kristin earned almost all A’s or A-’s. When she was awarded her bachelor’s degree with a distinction in chemistry on December 29, 1999, her transcript showed a cumulative grade point average of 3.83. That average would have been lower if the Redlands coursework had been included as required. An average of 3.8 is required to graduate
summa cum laude
from SDSU.

Greg’s academic performance at UCSD wasn’t nearly as good as Kristin’s. When he graduated with a degree in biology in 1997, his overall grade point average was 2.47. The Rossums didn’t attend Greg’s graduation, but they took him and Kristin out to dinner to celebrate.

In the weeks after the ceremony, Greg spent hours on the phone talking with the Rossums about his career options. The Rossums saw themselves as surrogate parents to Greg, and they bought him his first business suit.

It is unclear when, but Greg returned to work at the legal services company, which changed its name from Rush Legal to XL, until he got a lab assistant position at a pharmaceutical drug research firm, Biophysica, Inc. Greg told Constance that he found the lab environment boring and smelly. He wanted to work outdoors. Constance told him to follow his heart, so Greg applied for a position with the California Department of Fish and Game in the summer of 1997. Five months later, he received a notice that he failed the qualifying exam.

In August 1998, Greg was hired by BD Pharmingen, a company with four hundred employees. Tina Jones, the human relations executive who gave him the job, later described him as “an extremely nice young man…. He had a very bright future ahead of him.”

Greg started as an administrative assistant to Stefan Gruenwald, the vice president of research and development. Greg was so driven, intelligent, and organized, he exceeded all of Gruenwald’s expectations. He was promoted to a position where he issued licenses for medical research products the company developed and sold.

Greg was also well liked by his coworkers, who saw him as an even-tempered, low-key, and friendly guy.

“This was a very well-thought-out, well-balanced, got-it-together type of a fellow,” said one colleague, Eldon Horn.

When Gruenwald left Pharmingen to form Orbigen, he and Greg stayed in touch by phone and e-mail.

In June 1997, Kristin answered an ad at SDSU for a student worker in the county Medical Examiner’s Office’s toxicology lab.

Kristin interviewed with Frank Barnhart, the supervising toxicologist. He’d started working there twenty-nine years earlier, doing urine drug screens, and inched his way up the ladder to help run the lab. Barnhart had testified in court many times to validate his lab’s test results and was somewhat of a meth expert. But since the office didn’t run any type of background check on applicants, he had no reason to ask Kristin about her drug history. If he had known about it, he said later, he never would have hired her.

That’s because forensic toxicologists’ jobs revolve around drugs, including those that cause death, alone or in combination, and are difficult to detect. While Kristin worked at the Medical Examiner’s Office, the lab’s shelves were filled with bottles and vials known as drug standards, which were purchased in a synthetic form for testing purposes. She and the other employees also had access to illegal street drugs and paraphernalia that Medical Examiner’s investigators impounded from death scenes to help identify the cause of death.

The investigators often collected prescription drug vials and bags of unidentified white powder, which, in San Diego, generally turned out to be methamphetamine or cocaine. They also removed glass pipes, straws, syringes, and any other medications that family members said they didn’t need anymore. Unidentified white powder wasn’t tested, but if the cause of death was later determined to be a methamphetamine or cocaine overdose, a toxicologist could call up the case number on a computer to see what was impounded.

Investigators placed the impounded items in evidence envelopes, which were dropped through a slot in a locked box back at the office. When the box got too full, someone could have theoretically reached into the open slot and pulled out an envelope.

But the easiest point of access came when the contents of the box were emptied into a large plastic bag and then moved to the toxicology lab’s Balance Room, which was left open during the day. The room was locked at night, but all the toxicologists knew where the keys were kept, and the office had no electronic system to monitor employees’ comings and goings. Eventually, the envelopes were transferred to lockers, from which the controlled narcotics were removed and sent to the Sheriff’s Department to be destroyed.

Barnhart was impressed by Kristin’s resume and transcript from SDSU, which showed she had not only taken many chemistry classes, but had done very well in them. He recommended she be hired, and she got the job. Of all the interns Barnhart had worked with over the years, Kristin turned out to be his favorite.

“In that twenty-nine years, we had some incredibly talented people, but Kristin was the best,” he said. “She stood out in terms of her ability to understand what you needed.”

He became a mentor to her and considered her a close friend, nicknaming her “Lil Bandit” because she did her work so well and so fast.

By 1999 Barnhart wasn’t happy working at the Medical Examiner’s Office. He’d felt compelled to express his disapproval to Dr. Brian Blackbourne, the chief medical examiner, for hiring Blackbourne’s girlfriend as the office operations manager, and Barnhart felt his remarks ended up costing him a promotion to head up the lab. After Blackbourne appointed someone else, Barnhart grew even more frustrated because the new guy kept asking him how to do things.