Poisoned Love (3 page)

After all the interviews were over, Michael left, and Ralph helped his daughter into his car to start the difficult drive back to Claremont. Kristin’s hair was a mess, her face was puffy, and her eyes were swollen from crying all night.

“I’ve lost my Greggy,” she told him. “I’ve lost my best friend.”

It was about 1:40
A.M
. The investigators saw no reason to disbelieve Kristin’s story. There were no broken doorjambs and no sign of a struggle. They left the apartment, thinking it was probably a suicide.

Stefan Gruenwald arrived at Orbigen on Tuesday around 9:45
A.M
. and scanned the parking lot for Greg’s car. It wasn’t there, so he headed inside, intending to call Greg’s apartment first thing. But before Gruenwald even got to his desk, his assistant told him there was a phone call for him in his office.

“Who is it?” he asked.

“I don’t know—a Mike Robertson,” she said. “It’s about Greg.”

Michael Robertson introduced himself as Kristin’s boss and told Gruenwald that something had happened to Greg. He gave Gruenwald the Rossums’ phone number in Claremont and asked him to call them right away. Michael said he couldn’t answer any questions and deferred to the Rossums.

Gruenwald called the number and got Constance Rossum. She said Greg had passed away the night before.

“What happened?” he asked, in disbelief.

Constance said Greg had experienced flu-like symptoms over the weekend, so he started taking cough syrup with some other drugs on Saturday and continued on Sunday. He must have had an allergic reaction, she said.

That sounded odd to Gruenwald, who’d earned a medical degree and a Ph.D. back in Frankfurt, Germany, and had spent some time doing forensics work. If someone was going to have an allergic reaction, he thought, it would develop right away, not two days later. He didn’t say anything to Constance at the time, but he thought the story sounded suspicious. Gruenwald called back a few hours later so he could talk to Kristin directly.

“I can’t believe what happened,” he said. “He was such a good person.”

Kristin was crying. She agreed and said she couldn’t believe it, either. But from there, he said, the story changed. This time Kristin described Greg’s death as more of an overdose, perhaps an accidental one.

An overdose?
Gruenwald had never seen Greg drunk, let alone under the influence of any drugs. He wouldn’t even go near the lab at Orbigen, which was used mostly for cancer research. Gruenwald had once asked Greg to help clean out the storage room, where they kept hundreds of containers of chemicals, but he refused, saying he didn’t want to touch them. Greg was much more comfortable with the business side of things. So, for Gruenwald, the idea of Greg dying from a drug overdose, even accidentally, just didn’t ring true.

Jerome de Villers felt the same way. Greg wasn’t the kind of guy to do or take too much of anything, and now he was dead. It just didn’t make sense. His head was jumbled with questions: Where did Greg get the medication that killed him? Did Kristin give it to him? Did Kristin have drugs in the apartment? Were they were doing drugs together and something went wrong?

He dismissed the last scenario because he remembered it wasn’t that long ago that Greg wouldn’t even take the anti-histamines Marie offered him for his stuffy nose. Jerome, an insurance investigator, was determined to find out from Kristin—and whomever else he had to ask—exactly what happened to his brother and why.

Chapter 2

Kristin Margrethe Rossum, the eldest child of two driven and accomplished Midwestern parents, was raised with the pressures to perform and to succeed, almost from the very start. At an early age, they instilled in her the importance of image and appearances, which no doubt contributed to the perfectionism she described in her diary years later.

“It was always obvious to me that I was expected to do well in school,” she wrote. “I wanted to make my parents proud of me. I wanted to be the best in everything I did. I wanted to be perfect. For the most part, I excelled at everything I tried.”

But this sense of self-confidence was vulnerable to other forces at work in her psyche. At times, she wrote, she found herself “torn between sound, logical ideas and unreasonable, unattainable ideals. It’s an interesting internal conflict.”

That conflict was perpetuated by a persistent inner voice that criticized the way she looked in the mirror. She thought her legs and arms were strong and she had an attractive face. But her butt was rounder than she liked, her inner thighs were a little too flabby, her stomach wasn’t flat enough, and her arms could be more toned. “At 5 feet, 2 ¼ inches tall,” she wrote, she was “vertically challenged. OK, SHORT!!!”

“I continue to feel dissatisfied with my body, because I don’t think it’s perfect,” she wrote. But, she added, “I guess that my belief is that it is within my power to control the shape of my body. Therefore, if I am dissatisfied with my body, it is only the result of my own failings.”

It’s possible that this drive to be perfect grew so overwhelming at times that her only relief came from getting high. One friend said Kristin’s addictive relationship with methamphetamine may have been the only part of her life that Kristin saw as her own, separate from the parents who had such a strong influence on her. And people high on meth don’t think or act rationally.

Kristin came into the world on October 25, 1976, in Memphis, Tennessee, where her father was a political science professor and her mother was a marketing researcher. Kristin’s brother Brent was born in nearby Germantown about three years later, and Pierce, the youngest, about four years after that.

As Kristin and her brothers were growing up, they moved around the country as their parents’ careers progressed. Sometimes, Kristin said, her mother “would hold down the fort” when her father had to leave town for a professional opportunity elsewhere.

When Kristin was four or five, the Rossums moved to Wilmette, a suburb on the north shore of Chicago, where she saw a lot of her extended family. She and her mother would take the train into the city to watch a performance of
The Nutcracker
or go Christmas shopping at Marshall Field’s.

The focus on her outward appearance started when she was very young. When she was four, her parents arranged for Kristin to have a commercial head shot taken. The photographer sat her at the piano, laid one of her little hands on the keys, and told her to turn and smile. Her straight, shoulder-length blond hair was pulled back with a barrette, and she wore a tent dress with a tiny white collar and embroidered flowers that covered her legs. She was three feet three inches tall, weighed thirty-four pounds, and wore a size 4 to 4T dress.

In a head shot taken two years later, in December 1982, she’d grown in confidence and dress size. This time her big, hypnotic green eyes stared straight into the camera. She was simply beguiling.

On the back of the photo, along with her particulars, she was featured in five different poses, illustrating her versatility and ability to switch from mood to mood and from one outfit to another. She was goofy in one, serious or playful in the others, wearing a dark leotard and white tights, a sailor suit, or a button-up shirt with a sweater tied around her neck, clutching a handful of daises or holding a balloon on a string. In one shot, she feigned surprise as she pretended to read one of the
Madeline
children’s books, glasses perched on her head, her mouth and eyes agape.

The pretty, towheaded girl worked as a model for Marshall Field’s, Sears, McDonald’s, and Montgomery Ward. She was a natural. She wore a standard size 6X dress, and the camera loved her.

Kristin gave up modeling for ballet the following year, when the family moved to Bethesda, Maryland, and her father took a job as a deputy director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice. He worked for the Bureau—the national repository for crime statistics collected by government and law enforcement agencies—in 1983 and 1984, during the Reagan administration.

Six-year-old Kristin began training at the Maryland Youth Ballet Academy, where she proved to be quite a talented little dancer. She was chosen for a walk-on role as a page in the Joffrey Ballet’s performance of
Romeo and Juliet,
reveling in the honor of being backstage at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Years later she wrote in her diary that the powerful Prokofiev score touched her to the core and remained one of her favorites.

“There is so much passion in his notes,” she wrote.

Around that time, she also began to discover a love for science. And the academic pressures soon began to mount.

Ralph Rossum relocated to Claremont, California, in 1984, when he was granted tenure as a faculty member at Claremont McKenna College. He stayed for one semester, then spent some time working on a grant in Washington, D.C., where his wife, Constance, was a marketing manager for the Marriott Corporation. By June 1985, the family had reunited in Claremont, a small enclave of primarily white, highly educated residents. This community would serve as the family’s base in the years to come.

The fourteen-square-mile city is located about thirty miles east of downtown Los Angeles. In 2000 it had a population of 34,000 and a median income of about $70,000. Known for its tree-lined streets and small-town feel, Claremont generally houses about five thousand students and professors associated with the eight institutions of higher learning in the area. Of those, seven are within the city’s limits and are collectively its largest employer: Claremont McKenna College, Pomona College, Pitzer College, Scripps College, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont Graduate University, and the Claremont School of Theology. Azusa Pacific University, a small evangelical Christian university where Constance Rossum was director of nonprofit graduate programs and a professor of marketing and management, is ten miles away.

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.