Poisoned Love Read online

  Anderson informed the investigator of his relationship with Michael, telling him that the toxicology community was very close-knit. At that point, Anderson said, the conversation became more of an interrogation, and Anderson began to worry that he might accidentally or unknowingly say something that would get his friend in trouble.

  On November 9, Barnhart called Pacific Toxicology Laboratories in Woodland Hills, which had all the sophisticated testing equipment needed to figure out what killed Greg. Barnhart told the director, Michael Henson, that he wanted the lab to do some testing on a case because he knew the people involved and didn’t feel comfortable doing it himself. Barnhart followed up with a letter, along with samples of Greg’s stomach contents, urine, and blood. He also did a “quick and dirty” screening of his own to see what, if any, drugs might turn up, but found nothing. The equipment at the sheriff’s crime lab wasn’t sensitive enough.

  About a week later, Barnhart got a call from Henson to say they got a few hits with the comprehensive urine screen, which tests for several hundred different compounds. They found fentanyl, along with clonazepam and oxycodone.

  “Oh, shit,” Barnhart said.

  Barnhart had no idea where Greg would’ve gotten his hands on fentanyl. It wasn’t the kind of drug you could just go out and buy on the street. A Schedule II narcotic regulated by the Drug Enforcement Agency, it was usually kept under lock and key in labs or hospitals, where it’s known as a drug of abuse among medical staff because of the sense of euphoria it creates. Barnhart called Blackbourne to tell him the news.

  Barnhart called Henson again to ask him to determine the amount of each drug in Greg’s body, and Henson called back with those results on November 20. There was a lethal level of fentanyl, a high but still therapeutic dose of clonazepam, and a trace amount of oxycodone. Barnhart notified Blackbourne of the findings, which were written up in the lab’s first official report on November 21.

  The tests showed 53.5 nanograms per milliliter of fentanyl in blood taken from the leg during the autopsy and 57.3 nanograms per milliliter in blood from the heart. These compared with much lower levels in the blood taken earlier at Scripps Memorial Hospital. At that time the blood taken from the upper leg measured fentanyl at 11.22 nanograms per milliliter. No one knew what to make of results from a tissue sample Blackbourne took from Greg’s bruised right arm, which showed 21.3 nanograms per gram.

  Fentanyl differs from other drugs in the way it distributes in the body after a person dies. For example, the longer the stretch of time between death and the autopsy, when a blood sample is taken, the higher the fentanyl level will rise in the blood within the heart chamber as compared to an arm or a leg.

  Michael tried to be Kristin’s advocate, both socially and professionally, while she was on bereavement leave.

  On November 17, he e-mailed Amborn to ask if he would give Kristin the option of taking an upcoming seminar on the HPLC machine, which she’d been looking forward to attending. He said he thought it would be good to help “take her mind off other issues.” Amborn wrote back, saying he was unsure whether Kristin was in any kind of emotional state to benefit from such training, but he would reevaluate his decision when he returned from a week’s vacation.

  Kristin, like Michael, already knew how to use this machine, which tests for the presence of benzodiazepines, such as clonazepam.

  That same day Michael also e-mailed all his toxicologists, asking them to pull together some paperwork so that Kristin could work on something from home. “This will relieve the burden on [you] and enable her to do something productive,” he wrote.

  A few days later, Michael organized a small get-together for Kristin after work. He invited Angie Wagner, the investigator who worked on Greg’s case, and a few other people from the lab, to meet at the 94th Aero Squadron around 4:15 P.M. for a couple of hours. Kristin showed up about an hour into the gathering, looking shaken up and sad. She was nervous and fidgety and had sores on her hands and face.

  On November 20, Jerome had returned from the mall to the town house his father rented in Thousand Oaks, where his mother lived, when Bertrand told him that Yves had just hung up with Dr. Blackbourne. Blackbourne, he said, called to tell them that fentanyl was the drug that killed Greg.

  Jerome and Bertrand had never heard of fentanyl. Yves said it was used as an anesthetic during surgery and also by veterinarians to put animals to sleep. Yves was surprised, though. Even Blackbourne had mentioned that it was a rare drug.

  The brothers sat with their parents at the dining-room table and brainstormed where the fentanyl might have come from and how it could have gotten into Greg’s body. Jerome asked Yves why, if Greg had wanted to commit suicide, would he have used such an obscure drug? Why not something more common and available like strychnine, GHB, or some other drug he could’ve bought on the street? Could Greg have gotten the fentanyl from Orbigen?

  Jerome and Bertrand looked up fentanyl in Yves’s physicians’ reference book, and Jerome stayed up late searching the Internet to learn more about it. Maybe Kristin had purchased the drug in Mexico, he thought, or maybe she’d taken it from work.

  Jerome spoke with Blackbourne a couple weeks later and asked if the Medical Examiner’s Office kept fentanyl. Blackbourne seemed hesitant to talk to Jerome about this, but he admitted that some drugs were missing from the lab. He wouldn’t say which ones because he didn’t want to jeopardize the ongoing police investigation.

  Meanwhile, Marie kept telling Jerome to let the police handle the investigation. He would try to tell her what he’d learned, but she just didn’t want to deal with it. So he confided in Bertrand, and he also e-mailed information to his father.

  Marie couldn’t understand why Jerome needed to get so involved in the police’s business. Jerome needed to know everything right away. More, more, more. Why couldn’t he be more patient?

  Marie couldn’t even fathom the idea that Kristin might have had something to do with Greg’s death. She loved Kristin like a daughter. She was the first girl to come into the family, the wife of her oldest son. Kristin would call and give her recipes. She seemed like such a sweet girl.

  Nonetheless, Marie wanted to know what happened to Greg. If he committed suicide, as painful and unbelievable as that thought might be, she wanted to understand how and why. She tried to call Kristin every day, just to check in and see how she was doing. She remembered the last time she saw Kristin and Greg together. It was on her birthday, September 2. They’d come up to visit and take her to a nice dinner. Kristin looked more womanly, and Marie had thought she might be pregnant. But she later learned that her maternal instinct was wrong.

  After spending a week away in Sacramento on business, Detective Agnew came to work on November 22 and started catching up on the de Villers case. The toxicology results had come in, so she and her team met with Blackbourne to go over the findings of Greg’s autopsy and his opinion on the cause of death.

  Agnew recalled Blackbourne telling them that based on the amount of urine in Greg’s bladder and the bronchial pneumonia in his lungs, he was probably in a coma for at least six to twelve hours. He said Greg had clonazepam, oxycodone, and fentanyl in his body, but only the fentanyl dose was lethal. The clonazepam, a date-rape drug, could have rendered him comatose, he said, and that’s probably when the fentanyl was administered.

  Agnew had never heard of fentanyl, so Blackbourne gave her and her team a quick lesson. It was one hundred times stronger than morphine, he said, and between 2 and 4 nanograms per milliliter was considered a lethal dose. It was a fast-acting drug whose effects lasted only a short time.

  The detectives asked if Greg, while under the influence of these drugs, could’ve gotten out of bed, thrown away any containers or whatever was used to administer the drugs, and get back into bed. Blackbourne said no.

  Blackbourne told them he thought Greg couldn’t have lived all day with such a large amount of fentanyl in his system, but he was going to send the blood samples to a buddy at the Ventu
ra County Medical Examiner’s Office to get another opinion. Blackbourne’s buddy concurred.

  With the knowledge that Greg died from a hefty dose of fentanyl—a drug Kristin never mentioned to anyone—Agnew and her team decided it was time to have the young toxicologist come down to the station for an interview. Agnew called her around noon and arranged for her to come in at 1:30 P.M. Thinking they would get a second interview, she and Detective Jimmy Valle decided they wouldn’t bring up the fentanyl in their initial questioning.

  When Kristin walked into the station, Agnew and Valle looked at each other knowingly. It was obvious from her appearance, particularly the sores on her face, that she was using meth. Kristin had already admitted to using meth in the past. Partway through the interview, Agnew scribbled a note on her pad to Valle, suggesting he ask Kristin whether she was using again.

  Agnew, a tall blonde, started off the interview with the petite blonde by asking simple questions: Kristin’s age, how long she’d been married to Greg, and why she was still using her maiden name. Kristin said she’d been in the process of changing it, but there was so much paperwork, she’d gotten a little overwhelmed.

  Kristin’s answers were rambling. She’d start and stop sentences, jumping from one subject to another. She was very fidgety, wiping her nose, scratching her shoulder, wadding and unwadding a tissue in her hands.

  As she described first meeting Greg, her voice broke, and she put her hand to her face.

  “He was my angel and I clung to him and he was the only person I knew and he helped me through [that period of] my life. And I needed him, and he really needed me, too.”

  After getting over her initial reservations about getting married, she said, she went through with the wedding but started questioning their relationship again six months later. Her mother suggested a separation, so she built up the courage to ask for one. She and Greg started arguing about it on Saturday, two days before he died.

  But Greg couldn’t handle such emotional discussions, she said, and he acted just as he had in the past. “He blows up, gets irate, and then sinks in and won’t talk to me and goes and hides himself in, in our bed, lights off, won’t talk to me, will not respond to me…[for several days before he can] deal with what’s going on. So he did that. He turned in[ward], and I thought it was just normal.”

  Throughout the interview, Agnew forced Kristin to go into more and more detail about certain aspects of her story as the detective looked for discrepancies. On Kristin’s first reference to Michael, she stumbled over how to identify him.

  “I needed to talk to Michael, Dr. Robertson, about, um, some personal things. So, I left work early, and he also left early, and I, I spoke to him for about probably an hour and a half in the afternoon, before going home at about five fifteen, five o’clock.”

  When she described finding Greg cold and not breathing that night, she broke down into a dramatic display of grief, her body racked with sobbing, her voice rising to a high pitch. She put her head on the table, then wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

  Agnew redirected the questions to Greg’s family, which seemed to calm Kristin down. Describing Jerome as “the angry middle child,” Kristin said they never got along, because she was scared of him. She described Yves as “a loose cannon” who was stubborn and had a volatile temper. The de Villerses were a strange family, she said. She never heard Greg tell his mother he loved her.

  She described Greg as clingy, overly possessive, and unable to spend time away from her, saying he even tried to “put a guilt trip” on her for wanting to go to a professional conference in Milwaukee.

  “He actually told me when I got back that he was upset because he didn’t want me to go…. He wanted to hear me say that I wouldn’t go for him,” she said.

  She said she and Greg talked about the separation again early Sunday evening. This time he cried, told her to go away, and went to bed. A couple of hours later, he got up and said he couldn’t sleep. She asked if he was hungry. He said no and got “some water or something.”

  Kristin said Greg didn’t tell her he’d taken anything until she came home for lunch the next morning around 11:30 or so, when he said “he had taken those little prescriptions of mine. I was so mad about that.”

  Kristin said Greg had taken something to help him sleep several times in the past—Vicodin from when he had his wisdom teeth out or “some of this cough syrup stuff,” which had hydrocodone or oxycodone in it. But overall, he was not one to take drugs. That was more her problem, she said, but that was in the past.

  “I ran away because I had a problem with drugs. So he met me, and he got me cleaned up. I got myself cleaned up. He was just there for me…. It’s not in his normal behavior to [take drugs], but I do understand the need for escape.”

  Kristin explained that she’d gotten the oxycodone and clonazepam in Mexico more than five and a half years ago to try to help her get off methamphetamine.

  “Greg was not amused at my logic in that,” she said, laughing nervously.

  Then, about five years ago, she said, he announced that he was getting rid of them, and she saw him throw away the containers.

  “I said, ‘Well, you do need to dispose of the drugs in a separate place,’ and he said, ‘Okay, I’ll take care of it,’…but I guess he never did,” she said.

  Kristin said she was able to clean up her life, get back to school, and graduate with the highest honors in chemistry. When she got the toxicologist’s job, she fell in love with it.

  “It was something I was really close to—probably too close,” she said.

  Agnew asked if Kristin ever took oxycodone and clonazepam together. Kristin said no, she wouldn’t recommend it. She didn’t like oxycodone because it upset her stomach, but she’d taken some clonazepam for anxiety in her “attempts at self-medication.”

  Later in the interview, Agnew asked whether Kristin was surprised to find all those rose petals on Greg’s body, and whether he was the type to make such a melodramatic gesture.

  “I didn’t even see them until I was on the phone with the paramedics,” Kristin said. “They said, ‘Okay pull him onto the floor.’ I pull back the comforter, and I see a wedding picture just under the pillow and this rose torn to shreds and, um, I had always, it seems so selfish now that I was always wanting him to be more romantic and more emotional and tell me what he’s feeling, and it made me mad, but I, I, I opened it and I saw the red and the petals and…his body just thumped and it hit hard…. He’s never really done anything like that, but it seemed to me like he was just crying for help, saying, ‘You know, I really do need you.’”

  Next, Agnew asked Kristin about the shredded letter. Kristin laughed nervously again, saying she assumed they would keep what she was saying in confidence. She said she’d met someone at work who was in a similar marital situation, and they’d developed “a very close relationship.”

  Kristin said she told Greg in July that she’d developed feelings for this other man, but “it wasn’t physical at all.” Nonetheless, her announcement sent Greg to bed for a couple of days. He also called the man at home, furious. When Greg recovered, he said he would prove to her that the marriage was worth working on.

  This close friend of hers had written her “a very sweet letter,” she said, which Greg found the Thursday before he died.

  “I had it at work, and I had brought it home,” Kristin said, smiling at Agnew, “and I was reading it, to put in my keep-sake box. You know how women are cheap and sentimental sometimes. I was reading it when he came home, and I couldn’t refold it up in my pocket, and he basically wrestled me to the ground and read it. He was really upset. He got irate.”

  So, she said, she put the letter through a shredder they kept in the apartment, and that’s when he gave her an ultimatum: “Either you quit your job,” she said, pausing, “or I will inform him or them of your, um, drug history.”

  That ultimatum, she said, was the personal issue she and Michael talked about that Monday afternoon—what
to do if Greg carried out his threat. Michael, she told Agnew, was her boss, the man she’d been seeing. And she’d opened up to him that day about her drug history.

  Agnew asked how Michael responded. Kristin said he admired how she’d regained her life, and he was sorry she was in so much pain. He was very supportive and said it wouldn’t affect his faith in her as a toxicologist.

  “What did he say would happen if your husband had gone to your place of employment?” Agnew asked. “Would that have caused a problem?”

  It would have made her uncomfortable if it affected everyone’s impression of her, Kristin said, but “I don’t think it would have caused me to lose my job.”

  Kristin said she knew Agnew would be in contact with the Medical Examiner’s Office, and she would appreciate it if she “left some of this out.”

  Agnew asked if anyone at the office knew about her relationship with her boss. Kristin said Lloyd Amborn, a retired Navy captain who was their “administrative head honcho,” confronted her and Michael over the summer, but they both denied the rumors that were going around the office. She said it was all “a null issue” now, though, because they’d only been meeting for coffee while they tried to sort out their respective marital issues.

  Kristin told Agnew that Michael was separated from his wife and they were in counseling. She said she wanted to be there for him, to support him in whatever he decided to do, but Amborn had told Michael not to have any contact with Kristin for the moment.

  A little more than halfway through the interview, Agnew excused herself and let Detective Valle take over. He picked up where Agnew left off, but he took the interview in a more confrontational direction, asking why Greg’s family believed Kristin might have had something to do with Greg’s death. Then he backed off a bit and assumed a more sympathetic tone, telling Kristin she shouldn’t be so hard on herself about her attempted breakup with Greg.