Poisoned Love Page 3

  One resident once likened Claremont to the community depicted in the movie Pleasantville, where residents live a 1950s lifestyle in black and white until two modern teenagers introduce art, literature, sex, independent thought, and a symbolic sense of color to a town previously unaware that life existed beyond its boundaries.

  “People feel reasonably safe here,” said Lieutenant Stan Van Horn, who headed the Claremont Police Department’s detective bureau in 2004.

  Van Horn said the city’s crime rate was pretty low, averaging one homicide every four or five years, which left police officers with plenty of time to deal with low-level crimes like vandalism and high school kids partying on weekends. His department’s philosophy on crime fighting was as follows: “If you can take care of the small stuff, it doesn’t develop into larger problems.”

  Kristin’s parents passed their work ethic onto their children and drew them into the academic world early on.

  In the summer of 1988, Kristin posed with her professor father for the cover of Claremont McKenna’s campus magazine, Profile. With their heads together and her arms wrapped around his neck, they looked happy, almost serene. But unlike his daughter, Ralph did not grow up around parents with such academic drive, let alone the money to pay for it.

  Raised on a small dairy farm in Alexandria, Minnesota, Ralph was the only member of his extended family to graduate from college. His father’s education ended with the eighth grade, and his mother’s with high school. Since his parents weren’t able to pay his tuition, he had to qualify for scholarships and work to make up the difference. In 1968, he graduated summa cum laude from Concordia College, a four-year liberal arts institution in Minnesota associated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

  The first academic job listed on his ten-page curriculum vitae is instructor of behavioral sciences in the City Colleges of Chicago’s Department of Police Academy Services, where he started working in 1970. He earned his master’s degree from the University of Chicago in 1971, married Constance in 1972, and by 1973 had obtained his Ph.D. Over the course of his career, he held high-ranking academic and administrative positions in California, Louisiana, Iowa, Illinois, Virginia, and Tennessee.

  In 2004 Ralph was still a professor of political philosophy and American constitutionalism at Claremont McKenna, where he also served as director of its Rose Institute of State and Local Government.

  Ralph appears to have taken the academic community’s motto—“publish or perish”—to heart. In 2004, his curriculum vitae included seven books he wrote or coauthored, as well as dozens of articles and book chapters. A number of his writings focus on the jurisprudence of Antonin Scalia, a conservative Republican on the U.S. Supreme Court and a Reagan appointee. Ralph team-taught a class with Scalia at the University of Aix-Marseille III Law School in Aix-en-Provence, France.

  Constance, who was raised in Indiana, was no slouch herself. She studied radio and television journalism as an undergraduate and journalism again in graduate school at Indiana University in Bloomington. She earned a master’s degree in management from Claremont Graduate University, where she went on to earn her Ph.D. in education and management.

  With her background, Constance was able to straddle the worlds of academia and business, starting her own consulting firm, Management Directives, in 1991, after working twenty years in advertising, marketing/management, and consumer research for major companies, such as Procter & Gamble, United Airlines, McDonald’s, and the Marriott Corporation. She has taught at various public and private colleges, including Azusa Pacific University; the University of California, Riverside; and California State University at San Bernardino. She also has been involved with a New York–based group called the Leader to Leader Institute, which helps nonprofit groups perform effectively. She and her husband have coauthored books and articles on topics such as constitutional law.

  By the time Kristin was nine or ten, she was taking her dance classes seriously. As the years went on, she split her after-school time between ballet and homework, earning straight A’s.

  Her bent toward perfectionism also influenced her dancing. She wrote in her diary years later that at twelve or thirteen, she began to feel “hypercritical” of her abilities, her technique, and her own physical limitations. “I wanted so badly to be the best—the prima ballerina,” she wrote. “The girls with high arches, long legs, and a flexible back…[They] had physical traits I so desperately wanted.”

  She’d just turned fourteen and was a freshman in high school when her talents had progressed enough to land her a coveted role in The Nutcracker with the Forum Dance Ensemble in neighboring Orange County. She was supposed to be an understudy, but when the star ballerina got sick, Kristin ended up with the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy, dancing with a professional cavalier from the Houston Ballet.

  Her father drove her to and from rehearsals in Anaheim every afternoon, a thirty-two-mile drive each way. Kristin sensed that Ralph got a little frustrated when the hours-long sessions ran late, as they often did, but he remained supportive of her efforts. He felt a deep pride when he watched her dance. She had such a passion for it.

  Kristin was popular at Claremont High School, where her dancing skills were well known among her classmates. Her fellow students thought Kristin, who always seemed to be smiling, had a sweet nature. She was the model student.

  As a freshman, Kristin briefly dated a junior named Chris Elliott, the son of family friends who used to baby-sit her little brothers while Kristin was at ballet practice. Chris’s father also taught at Claremont McKenna. The two teenagers first met when Kristin was thirteen and Chris was seventeen. Chris was impressed that Kristin was such a high achiever, dancing even when she had a 102-degree fever and focusing so intensely on her ballet rather than just hanging out after school. All her friends were “bunheads,” as her mother called them—dancers who wore their hair up in a bun.

  In 1991 Kristin auditioned for a spot in a prestigious summer program with the Boston Ballet. She got it and spent the summer back east.

  That fall, Ralph took a job as president of Hampden-Sydney College, a private liberal arts school in southern Virginia. Kristin enrolled at an Episcopalian boarding school for girls about sixty miles away so she could dance with a troupe in Richmond. She and Chris wrote letters to each other while she was away. She took a bad fall that year, when a fellow dancer dropped her. She tore several ligaments and had to wear an ankle cast for nearly two months. She reinjured her leg a few months later, and by the time she healed, she’d lost the calluses on her toes that allowed her to go en pointe. She also developed a stress fracture that wouldn’t heal. She grew frustrated and quit.

  Kristin began experimenting with drugs and alcohol around that time—mostly beer and marijuana, though she didn’t much care for pot because “it didn’t do anything.” She also developed a fondness for cigarettes and would turn to them again later in life when under stress.

  Her father remembered Kristin leaving Claremont as a girl in 1991 and returning from Virginia as a woman, just before the start of her junior year in 1992.

  Ralph returned to Claremont McKenna to teach constitutional law, and Constance transferred within Marriott to a job as director of marketing. The family was happy and healthy, and everything seemed to be going along swimmingly.

  “Frankly, we thought we were blessed with three lovely children,” Constance said.

  Although ballerinas typically are self-conscious about their bodies, Kristin, who usually weighed between 100 and 110 pounds, took this concern to a new level, often taking laxatives and diet pills to make her small frame look even smaller.

  “For some reason, she thought she was fat,” Constance said. “I don’t understand that.”

  After Kristin stopped dancing, Constance noticed a sadness in her daughter that she didn’t recognize.

  “She just didn’t seem like our Kristin,” she said. “I thought it was the sixteen-year-old teenage angst…. Her grades were still very good.” />
  Kristin’s brothers also started noticing that something was different. She was exhibiting strange behavior and staying up late at night. One day they found a pipe and a small mirror in the house and showed them to Constance. Naïve and unaware that these items were drug paraphernalia, Constance had no clue what her daughter was up to.

  Kristin had always excelled in school, so when she began turning in her homework late, her parents felt something must be wrong. When they asked what was going on, she told them everything was fine. She’d do better next time. Ralph encouraged Constance to give their daughter some space. Surely, her behavior would improve. But it didn’t. It got worse, and her parents grew increasingly anxious.

  Kristin’s parents made a point of getting to know their children’s friends. What they didn’t know was that Kristin had forged a new relationship she knew her parents would never condone, a relationship with crystal methamphetamine.

  Kristin’s close friend since the third grade had moved to England. So Kristin filled the void with a new set of friends, a more social group that liked to party. Before the big Home-coming game, a girlfriend pulled out a bindle of white powder while they were sitting in a car in the parking lot. The girl said it was speed and drew them some lines. Kristin inhaled the powder and felt a burning sensation. After the burn came a rush. She felt revved up. Positively euphoric.

  She knew the stuff was illegal, but she liked it so much that she wanted to do it again. Only crystal meth wasn’t a very socially acceptable drug. Their other friends gave them flack about using it, and her girlfriend didn’t make a habit of it, so Kristin decided to pursue a buy on her own.

  Two weeks later, Kristin approached the dealer who’d sold the meth to her friend. It was easy. She bought some, and little by little, she began using it more frequently, smoking it, and always alone. Soon, Kristin was spending less time with her friends. She lost a few pounds, and her grades began to suffer. She couldn’t focus as easily on her schoolwork, and during her second semester, her usual A’s fell to B’s.

  The first family crisis Kristin caused occurred in early 1993, after Ralph and Constance went on an anniversary cruise in the Caribbean. The Rossums asked some adult friends to check on the children during the day, but they left Kristin in charge overnight. They also left Kristin some money for pizza or any emergency. Instead, she used it to buy drugs. She threw a surprise birthday party for Pierce on St. Patrick’s Day, but word leaked out at the high school that Kristin was having “a rager.” Older kids started showing up. Seniors and football players. With beer.

  “It kind of got out of control for a little bit,” Kristin admitted later, saying she didn’t remember whether she’d used meth that night, but it was possible. Kristin let a group of girlfriends stay over, and sometime during the same week, Kristin’s dealer came by with some friends.

  A couple of weeks after her parents returned from their cruise, they discovered that some credit cards, personal checks, and a video camera were missing. On March 21, they called the police and reported a burglary. Constance also found a suspicious package of white powder in the mailbox. When she asked Kristin about it, her daughter said she had no idea where it came from, so Constance turned it over to the police. The lies were starting to pile up, and Kristin’s parents began to think the worst: Their daughter was using drugs.

  Kristin knew she had a problem. She felt tired and worn out, but she couldn’t stop using. In the beginning, she’d smoked crystal because it made her feel so good. But it had become a necessity. She needed it just to feel like herself.

  Methamphetamine is classified as a psychostimulant, just like amphetamine and cocaine. Methamphetamine and cocaine are structurally quite different, but both result in an accumulation of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that produces an unnatural level of euphoria in the brain. While cocaine is quickly metabolized by the body, methamphetamine stays in the system twelve times longer, and so it creates more lasting effects. Meth can produce a high that lasts eight to twenty-four hours, compared to a rush of twenty to thirty minutes with cocaine. Even in small doses, meth can decrease the appetite and keep people awake for hours. High doses can raise the body temperature to dangerous levels and cause convulsions.

  On the street, methamphetamine has many names, including speed, meth, crank, ice, crystal, and glass. It can be inhaled, smoked, snorted, or injected. Chronic users can have episodes of violent behavior, anxiety, confusion, insomnia, hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia that can result in homicidal and suicidal thoughts. Psychosis can persist for months or years after a person stops using the drug. Experts say the continued use of the drug also tends to heighten the desire for sexual gratification and prompts users to seek increasingly high levels of sexual stimulation.

  On March 30, 1993, around 7 P.M., Kristin said she had to go to the library to study for a class. Her parents, who’d been making calls to try to figure out what happened to their credit cards and checks, decided they needed to settle a few things with Kristin before she went anywhere.

  Kristin decided otherwise and tried to leave. Ralph told her he wanted to look in her backpack, but she refused. Ralph tugged the pack away from her and unzipped it. He pulled out a white box and demanded to know what was in it. Kristin said it was a present for her mother. But when Ralph opened the box, he found a glass pipe, a plastic pen casing, and some razor blades inside. He demanded to know how she could have lied to him like this. She had betrayed his trust.

  Ralph became enraged and started yelling as he hit her repeatedly on the upper arm, hard enough to leave a bruise. Then he grabbed one of her sandals off her bedroom floor and hit her on the butt with it. Constance yelled at him to stop, but she did nothing to pull him away. At some point, Constance slapped Kristin in the face.

  Kristin ran into the kitchen, picked up a knife, and tried to cut her wrists with it until Ralph wrestled it out of her hands. She turned and ran back upstairs, where she locked herself in the bathroom and made superficial cuts in her wrists with a razor blade.

  “I’m worthless,” she cried through the door. “You’d be better off without me.”

  Because the cuts weren’t deep, Constance and Ralph determined she didn’t need medical treatment.

  Sometime in the next few days, Kristin showed the bruise on her arm to a couple of girls at school and told them her parents had “beaten on her” during an argument. She started banging on the lockers and talking about committing suicide.

  The two girls, concerned about Kristin’s recent odd behavior, went to the office to talk to a counselor, Leopoldina Abreu, a Cuban mother and grandmother to whom the high school yearbook staff dedicated their 1993 edition. School officials immediately reported a potential case of child abuse to the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services and to the Claremont Police Department.

  Larry Horowitz, a police officer who was working on a master’s degree in social work at the time, got the call around lunchtime on April 2, while he was out on patrol. When he arrived at the high school, Kristin and her two girlfriends were sitting outside the office of Barbara Salyer, the dean of discipline, waiting for him. Horowitz went into Salyer’s office and closed the door. Given the bruise and Kristin’s lack of disciplinary problems, Salyer was concerned her story might be true. Horowitz called the girls in one at a time and interviewed them.

  The first girl told him that she and her friend had grown very worried about Kristin because her behavior had changed so much over the past week. So they talked to their counselor about it, and she decided to bring Kristin in for some help.

  Kristin’s parents didn’t like the two girls, one of them told Horowitz. Describing Constance as “very curt” with them, she said that Constance wouldn’t “allow Kristin to talk with us or do anything with us. They don’t seem like very friendly people.”

  Horowitz sent the two girlfriends on their way and spent the next forty-five minutes talking to Kristin. She seemed flat, numb, and depressed. She wouldn’t look him i
n the eye, and he had a hard time establishing a rapport with her. To him, all of these indicators pointed to a problem at home. He spent a few minutes asking for basic information, such as which grade she was in and where she lived, before proceeding to the hard questions.

  Kristin told him that she had confided in her girlfriends, but she said, “I guess they wanted me to get into trouble, so they went to Mrs. Abreu and told her what was going on. I was brought into the office, but I didn’t want to bring up family matters with the school.”

  This was the first time her father had hit her, she said. Most of the problems with her parents stemmed from their complaining about her friends. But this time, she said, it went further than usual, and her mother called her “worthless” and “a slut.” She said she didn’t want to see her parents get into trouble over their fight; she thought they could work the whole thing out over spring break.

  Horowitz examined her arm and wrote in his notes that she had “pronounced bruising to the upper arm.” He took photos of the area but decided the injury wasn’t serious. He did notice, however, that she had fresh wounds on her knuckles—apparently from punching the lockers—and appeared to have picked at sores on the back of her hands. He figured drugs were involved.

  She told him she felt safe going home because things had already improved.

  “My dad even welcomed me back into the family on Thursday night,” Kristin told him.