Poisoned Love Read online

  Barnhart was shocked. He had no idea. He couldn’t believe she never said anything before they went through the application process. He felt embarrassed that he had to tell his supervisor and colleagues she’d failed the background check. He also felt as though she’d betrayed their friendship a little. But true friends stick together through the good and the bad, and he decided not to give up on Kristin. If she’d used drugs only a couple of times and it was so many years ago, he thought, she might still qualify for an entry-level criminalist position. So some months later, he suggested that Kristin apply for one. He offered to look at the application—before she submitted it, this time—so she brought it over to his house with Greg in tow.

  To him, Greg seemed like a really nice kid, but overly protective of Kristin—so much so that it made Barnhart uncomfortable. They all started off in the living room, watching some TV, then Barnhart took Kristin into his home office. They weren’t gone for more than a couple of minutes when Greg joined them. Barnhart didn’t understand why Greg was so worried about leaving Kristin alone with him.

  This time she scored a ninety-five on her application. Later Barnhart said she must not have disclosed her previous drug use on that form or she wouldn’t have scored so high. She didn’t get that job, either. The supervisor of controlled substances, who reviewed the application, told him he found out why she’d failed the original background check and decided that the Sheriff’s Department wouldn’t be an appropriate environment for her.

  Even though the Sheriff’s Department and the Medical Examiner’s Office were sister county agencies, the sheriff’s staff didn’t share any of this information with Kristin’s superiors.

  Kristin and her high school friend Melissa Prager grew apart once they went away to college, but they became friends again after Kristin moved to San Diego and enrolled at SDSU. Prager, who came home from college in Ohio during the summer, spent weekends with her parents at their house in Encinitas, a small coastal city just north of San Diego. Prager tried to get together with Kristin while she was in the area.

  The problem was that she never got to see Kristin alone. The first time she came over to visit Kristin at the apartment, Greg wouldn’t make eye contact with Prager. She thought he seemed standoffish and not very interested in her, but he simply wouldn’t leave the room. She wondered if he felt threatened by their friendship. Prager also found him too possessive and controlling of her friend, who had always seemed so strong-willed and independent. Prager recalled that when she asked Kristin to meet for lunch, Kristin would say things like, “Greg and I, um, think it would be better if you came to the house.”

  Kristin described Greg as some sort of “savior” and said she was happy he was “keeping her on track.” Prager often wondered why Kristin had done drugs but had never gotten a good explanation.

  “I’ve never been able to talk to her about it,” she said later.

  Back when they were in high school together, Prager wondered if Kristin was doing drugs, because she wouldn’t eat anything at dinner, she’d breathe heavily, she looked nervous, and something in her voice sounded “really fake.” But when Prager asked Kristin if she was doing drugs, she said no.

  Since Kristin’s parents were such a strong influence in her life, Prager said, perhaps Kristin did drugs to have “something of her own,” a part of her life in which she wasn’t trying to please them or anyone else.

  “Her parents put a lot of academic pressure on her, a lot of pressure in general,” she said.

  When it came time to get married, Prager thought Kristin was succumbing to a different kind of pressure, and this time it was coming from Greg. It was as if she felt obligated to Greg because he’d helped her get off drugs. Prager thought Kristin loved him, felt loved by him, and had convinced herself that she should marry him. But she never got the impression that Kristin was in love with Greg. Prager thought Kristin was also motivated by a sense that her parents viewed proceeding with the wedding as the right thing to do.

  “They completely inserted themselves” into Kristin’s life, she said.

  Kristin asked Prager to be her maid of honor, but Prager felt uncomfortable about accepting the offer.

  “I was hesitant to be in it because I wasn’t that supportive of it,” she said.

  When Prager found out that her brother was getting married in Israel in early July, she told Kristin she couldn’t attend her wedding and was going to her brother’s instead.

  Apparently, Kristin wasn’t too sure about her marriage plans, either, because she kept saying she wasn’t certain the wedding was going to happen.

  Jan Genovese, who was a Chemistry Department secretary at SDSU while Kristin was a student there, got to know her after she was honored for being the Most Outstanding Chemistry Student in 1998. Kristin would come into the office, and the two of them would chat. Kristin made quite an impression on Genovese.

  “She was so magnetic, especially to men,” Genovese said. “There weren’t a lot of beautiful chemistry students.”

  Genovese thought Kristin played to her professors a bit, presenting herself in the best way possible for advancement. But, at the same time, Kristin seemed extremely needy.

  In May 1999, Genovese ran into Kristin and a male student in the hallway, as she often did. The student, who lived near Kristin and Greg, had gotten to know Kristin in class and was about to graduate. He was a tall, athletic, premed student with chiseled features, nice parents, and a good background, just Kristin’s type.

  That day in the hallway, Kristin announced she was getting married. Her comment caught Genovese by surprise, but apparently not as much as the student. An expression of shock crossed his face. Genovese got the impression that Kristin was, frankly, bored by the prospect of marriage.

  “What?” Genovese asked in disbelief. “You’re getting married?”

  The male student remained silent. As they watched Kristin walk away, Genovese recalled him saying, “Well, she’s sure hot to trot for someone who’s engaged.”

  Genovese and the student had become friendly over the years, so she felt comfortable telling him what she thought. Kristin seemed so ambivalent that Genovese thought she would call off the wedding. Genovese also thought that Kristin and the student would continue the close relationship that was apparent to her whenever she saw them together.

  “You could do worse,” she told him.

  But the student dismissed the idea. He told her he didn’t want to have anything to do with Kristin. He was going to medical school, he told Genovese, and he wasn’t going to let a flirtatious girl derail him.

  Genovese didn’t get the sense that Kristin loved Greg. As Kristin walked away from her down the hall that day, Genovese remembered thinking, “I don’t even know her.”

  The Rossums wanted an outdoor June ceremony for their daughter. They also wanted to invite a hundred people. Greg didn’t like the idea of wearing a suit and tie in the summer sun, and he really didn’t want a big wedding.

  Kristin had her own reservations about the wedding, but they were more emotional in nature. She told her mother she couldn’t decide whether Greg was the right man for her. He’d helped her so much over the years, getting her off drugs and supporting her as she put her life together, so she felt obligated to him. She even loved him. But she wasn’t sure she felt as deeply passionate about him as she was supposed to. Kristin told her that Greg wanted to be with her all the time. He didn’t seem to want her to have her own friends.

  “Mom, I’ve made mistakes in my life, and I want to make sure I don’t make another one,” Constance recalled Kristin saying. “I want to make sure they’re the right reasons. Every time I look at him, he reminds me of my past.”

  Constance suggested that both of them needed to develop their own sense of self, so they could continue to grow as individuals. She also said that wedding jitters were common.

  “Remember,” she told Kristin, “you’ve been talking about getting married since you were eighteen.”

&n
bsp; A year or so later, Kristin wrote in her diary that she thought she had “valid points and a deep-rooted reservation,” but she didn’t listen to the “inner voice” that told her to run away. Instead, she decided it was too late to break her commitment to Greg. She wished her mother had been more understanding and supportive, insistent, in fact, that they put off—or even call off—the wedding. If her own daughter didn’t want to go through with her wedding, Kristin wrote, she “would take her hand and drive her away to safety. I certainly wouldn’t imply that she had poor timing, and I wouldn’t ever give the idea that it is a tragedy that my planning and hard work was all put to waste.”

  Finally, a couple of weeks before the wedding, Kristin called her mother and said she’d decided to go through with it. But the drama didn’t end there.

  In the days before the ceremony, Constance said, Greg almost called off the wedding when he found out his father had been invited and had already flown in from Monte Carlo. Constance said she apologized to Greg for not being more sensitive to his feelings about his father.

  The Rossums and Marie had invited Yves de Villers to the wedding after meeting with him for an introductory lunch during Lent. They were hoping to arrange a reconciliation between Greg and his father, at the very least for the sake of their future grandchildren. Greg was not pleased when he found out about the lunch, complaining that his mother and in-laws had gone behind his back.

  Yves arrived a couple of days before the wedding and went with Marie to order a rented tuxedo. Greg got upset when he heard that Yves was in town. He hadn’t seen his father in quite some time, and he didn’t want that kind of distraction at his wedding. He wanted it to be a day of celebration. So he called Jerome and told him as much.

  “I don’t want him messing anything up,” Greg said.

  Jerome passed that sentiment on to their father.

  The day of the rehearsal dinner, Bertrand and Yves ran some errands in Thousand Oaks and picked up the tuxedo that had been altered to fit Yves. Yves wanted to reestablish contact with Greg, but he was torn as to whether this was the best time to do so, especially given what Jerome had just told him. Yves said he forgot something back at the house, but Bertrand said they didn’t have time to go back because they were late. So, Yves asked to be let out of the car to take a walk. Ultimately, he decided not to attend.

  June 5 was the perfect sunny day for a wedding, albeit a little humid. Because of the good weather, the ceremony was held under the larger of two gazebos in the olive tree–lined courtyard of the Padua Hills Theatre, an historic Spanish Colonial building nestled in the Mt. San Antonio foothills of northern Claremont.

  As the guests assembled to watch Greg and Kristin exchange vows, a little blond girl handed out white roses to the women, while a string quartet performed a selection of Bach pieces.

  Ralph walked his daughter up the aisle as she carried a bouquet of flowers that, from the photos, look like roses. She was beaming, as if she felt she’d made the right decision.

  Because Kristin had no bridesmaids or maid of honor, Greg had two best men, his brother Jerome and Kristin’s brother Brent. Bertrand was the only groomsman.

  The minister delivered a ceremony that was peppered with religious references as he spoke to the couple under the gazebo, with family and friends looking on from folding chairs.

  “Marriage is not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently, deliberately, and in accordance with the purposes for which it was instituted by God,” the minister said.

  He asked Kristin and Greg the usual questions, starting with the bride: “Kristin, will you have this man to be your husband, to live together in the covenant of marriage? Will you love him, comfort him, honor and keep him in sickness and in health and, forsaking all others, be faithful to him as long as you both shall live?”

  “I will,” Kristin said sweetly, making a vow that would echo with irony in a matter of months. Greg made the same promise, repeating the words softly and with meaning. Then the minister led the guests in prayer and guided the couple through their final vows.

  After the ceremony, the guests moved inside to the intimate dining room, which had once been used for dinner theater. There, amid the tables on the hardwood dance floor, Ralph welcomed Greg to the family. He noted that this was an international event that Marie’s sister, Marie-Paul, had come all the way from France to attend. The Rossums’ relatives, he noted, had flooded in from all over: Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Texas, Arizona, Utah, California, and Minnesota.

  Jerome gave an awkward but heartfelt speech, eliciting laughter as he admitted that marriage was almost a foreign concept to him, so much so that he was shocked when Greg called him one day at his dorm and told him he’d asked Kristin to marry him.

  “My brother has never hesitated on this marriage, and I’m just really proud of him,” he said. “I know relationships are a lot of hard work. It takes patience, just a lot of compromise.”

  Greg had told him and showed him that “the rewards were all worth it. So, I guess,” he said, pausing to raise his glass, “Cheers.”

  Brent Rossum made a short toast, making way for his father to stand up once more to share his feelings of pride about his daughter. He’d felt it while watching her physically conquer the role of the sugar plum fairy to such beautiful music, dancing with a professional in The Nutcracker all those years ago. A few weeks earlier, she was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa at SDSU. And with her marriage on this glorious sunny day, he said, she’d done it again.

  Ralph said he also was proud of his new son-in-law and his expanded family, wishing the couple “a life of love, happiness, health, and success.”

  Greg, the only one to take the floor and make a toast without a drink in his hand, introduced his mother and his aunt, then thanked Constance and Ralph for making the day, including the weather, so perfect.

  “Kristin is the most wonderful person I’ve ever met,” he said. “She’s incredible in so many ways, in everything she does. She’s a perfectionist. She’s so intelligent. She’s so kind and caring and sharing.”

  Greg’s closing words came slowly, his voice thick with emotion. “I just can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with her.”

  Finally, Bertrand, who’d had a bit too much champagne, gave the final touching toast featured on the homemade wedding video.

  “Kristin is a beautiful woman inside and out, and I couldn’t think of a better person to have with my brother. I’m so proud to have you as a sister now and to have an extension of our family here in the United States. It’s wonderful.”

  Bertrand, turning to Greg, teased his older brother about the deep and sincere feelings he had for Kristin, admitting that when he and Jerome ribbed Greg about the relationship, it was only out of love.

  “Sometimes we just think we’re losing you,” he said. “I can only hope that I’m so in love with a girl like you are when I get married, because it’s really beautiful, and I can tell you’re totally infatuated. As much as we give you a hard time about it, we really think it’s beautiful…. I don’t know if you understand how well you complement each other. No one’s perfect individually, but, Greg, you do such a good job of bringing out the best in Kristin, and she does a wonderful job [of doing the same with you]…. May God bless your relationship forever and ever.”

  Chapter 6

  During the next six months, Greg and Kristin seemed happy. As a wedding gift, Greg’s family paid for them to honeymoon at Whistler-Blackcomb Mountains, a vacation area north of Vancouver. The newlyweds started talking about having children.

  “Mom, I’m going off birth control,” Constance recalled Kristin telling her, “and what happens will happen.”

  Greg had already come up with a name for the baby if they had a girl: Isabelle. Constance suggested Marie Isabelle, after Greg’s mother.

  But the marital bliss didn’t last long.

  In January 2000, Kristin started complaining to Constance during their phone conversations and shopping tri
ps that Greg was getting more clingy and controlling, and that she felt like a bird in a cage. Kristin wrote in her diary about one such shopping excursion in La Jolla, where she and Constance engaged in some heart-to-heart “mother-daughter bonding.” She wrote that she never felt very close to her mother, but she was trying to get closer. It was a very emotional afternoon.

  One night, when her parents came down to San Diego to visit, Kristin showed up alone, saying she’d left Greg home in bed because he wasn’t feeling well.

  “He seemed…not robust,” Constance said, “though he’d never really been robust.”

  At one point, Constance said, Greg wondered if he might have chronic fatigue syndrome. However, he never mentioned any such thing to his own family, who thought he was quite healthy.

  None of the negative sentiments Kristin confided to Constance showed up in the e-mails she regularly exchanged with Greg. Oftentimes, Greg would make a suggestion and ask her what she wanted to do for lunch, dinner, or the weekend. He didn’t dictate what they were doing. In turn, she would often ask him to make decisions for them.

  On January 14, 2000, for example, she told him she’d picked up her transcript from SDSU and was excited to learn she was graduating summa cum laude with distinction in chemistry. She suggested going out for a celebratory beer or renting some movies, but asked him to choose their activities for the evening. She ended with, “Let me know the plans. Love you with all my heart, Wifey.”

  It was apparent from the e-mails that Greg liked to spend his spare time with her and to plan different activities for them. And it appeared to be mutual. Kristin seemed to be trying hard to please him as well.

  “I’m going to go to the grocery store this afternoon. Any requests?” she wrote on February 22. “…Your wish is my command.”

  Kristin made lunches and tins of biscotti for Greg to take to work, often checking with him about what he wanted to eat for dinner and offering him a choice of entrees. She obviously liked to cook them nice meals, anything from salmon to stir-fried chicken, sun-dried tomato cream pasta with steamed artichokes, shrimp, pork tenderloin, or steak.