Deadly Dose

APRIL 2003

When the body of Greg de Villiers is found by his wife, it is strangely covered with rose petals.

The call reached the emergency operator a little after 9pm. A woman, sounding desperate, pleaded that she couldn’t wake her husband. Only a few minutes later, a paramedic bounded up the stairs to a second floor, one-bedroom apartment near the campus of the University of California San Diego. There, he found the door partially ajar, and pushing it open, saw Kristin Rossum, 24, weeping into a cordless phone. She pointed to the bedroom.

The paramedic rushed into a small off- white room crammed with a computer station, two dressers and a queen-size bed, its blue and white striped doona crumpled in a heap. On the carpet between the bed and a dresser lay Greg de Villers, 26, Kristin’s husband of just 17 months. Beside him was their wedding photo, and on a bedside table was a glass half-full of what appeared to be water. Sprinkled on the floor around the young man were red rose petals.

The emergency medical crew that responded on the night of November 6, 2000, had arrived too late. Kristin’s personal saviour, the man who had rescued her from self-destruction in the years before, was dead.

KRISTIN HAD MET GREG six years earlier when she was just 18, a petite hazel-eyed blonde with sinewy legs that had once propelled her across the stage in an amateur production of The Nutcracker. She had been blessed with beauty, an intellectual pedigree and an influential upbringing in Los Angeles. It seemed the world was hers to conquer.

It hadn’t worked out that way. For two years, since a ‘friend’ introduced her to the powerful and addictive stimulant crystal methamphetamine, she had battled the demons of drug abuse. Her grades tumbled, and her relationship with her parents eroded badly.

Still, she managed to finish high school and enrol at a nearby university. But on the night she met Greg, in December 1994, she was on the run – not from the law, but from herself. She couldn’t shake her habit and was failing at university.

Rather than face her parents, Kristin caught a train south, checked into a motel and hopped on a tram to the Mexican-border town of Chula Vista. There, she headed for the pedestrian bridge crossing into Tijuana. “I don’t know what my motivation was,” she would later say of her flight towards Mexico.

But on that bridge, something wonderful happened. She dropped her jacket and a young knight scooped it up. “I trusted him from the very moment I met him,” Kristin said.

Gregory de Villers, then 21, originally from Palm Springs, was the eldest son of Marie and Yves Tremolet de Villers, a French plastic surgeon from Monaco. Out on the town with his two brothers, Greg took pity on the clearly distraught Kristin and invited her along. Kristin went home with him that night. “It felt safe,” she recalled. “And I didn’t want to feel alone.”

She never left. He adored her. Perhaps more importantly, he offered her hope. Greg hated drugs – even over-the-counter remedies – and was determined to help her shake her addiction. It worked. While he finished his biology degree at the University of California at San Diego, she enrolled at San Diego State University. In June 1999 they wed, six months before Kristin graduated with honours in biochemistry. Finally, she had control of her life, and to this day she credits that triumph to her husband.

HER TRAGICALLY MELODRAMATIC THEORY SEEMED CONVINCING. AT FIRST

BUT WITH GREG’S DEATH, the reverie was over. Suicide. That’s what authorities suspected. A cursory search of the apartment turned up a shredded love note to Kristin from another man. She explained to investigators that she had told Greg just a few days before that she was moving out. She said he had got angry, then drunk, and that very day had taken some of her old prescription drugs to help him sleep. Maybe, she guessed, he had taken too many.

And the rose petals? She wasn’t sure. Greg had given her roses a couple of weeks before for her 24th birthday. They had withered, and she said she had thrown them away. Maybe he had retrieved them. Perhaps, she later theorised, the dead petals where his way of symbolising the end of their relationship, and his own life.

Her tragically melodramatic theory seemed convincing. At first. But on June 25 the following year, police arrested Kristin for murder.

To those who knew them, it was unthinkable that Kristin could kill the man who’d done so much for her. And the couple seemed content. They were both embarking on promising careers they loved; Greg was working as a development manager at a biotech company and Kristin as a toxicologist for the San Diego County Medical Examiner’s Office.

Still, just weeks before the wedding, Kristin had confessed to her mother and friends that she was apprehensive. She was too young to marry, she said, and Greg was obsessively protective.

Then, in early 2000, Kristin met the man of her dreams: Michael Robertson, a widely published Australian forensic toxicologist who was hired as her new supervisor. Michael, though married, wooed Kristin with emails and gifts, and she saw in him a soulmate she had never found in Greg.

“Greg said being romantic is expensive,” Kristin would later testify in court. “I said, ‘It doesn’t cost much for a single rose.’”

Although Greg had bought roses for her birthday, Kristin and Michael exchanged roses several times, and the emotional bond was deeper: “I once gave him a red, a pink, a yellow and a white rose, and I wrote a note explaining what each of the colours means to me.”

Kristin confessed to Greg in June or July that she had feelings for another man. Outraged, Greg called Michael and warned him to stay clear of his wife. Kristin claims Greg then took emotional refuge in bed for an entire weekend. Michael’s boss, having got wind that something was up with his two employees, also urged him to cut things off. But when Michael and Kristin went off to a week-long toxicology conference in early October, they seemed to some almost to flaunt the fact that they were an item.

Shortly afterwards, Kristin began using methamphetamine again, driven, she would say, by the pressures of her failing marriage. Precisely what happened in the days before Greg’s death is still disputed.

PRECISELY WHAT HAPPENED IN THE DAYS BEFORE HIS DEATH IS STILL DISPUTED

BY KRISTIN’S TELLING, her relationship with Greg hit bottom on November 2. She was in the living room reading a love letter from Michael when Greg suddenly entered the apartment. She tried to hide the note but claims Greg, demanding to know what she was keeping from him, grabbed her, shoved her to the floor and raised a hand as if to hit her. Then he backed off, unnerved by his own near violence.

She later shredded the note, but said Greg found the strips of paper and spent hours trying to piece them back together.

Three days later, according to Kristin, Greg ordered her to resign from her job or he would report to the head of the examiner’s office that she was sleeping with her boss and that she

had a meth problem. The following evening, Greg was dead.

Kristin says Greg woke that morning slurring his speech, so she phoned his office to tell them he wouldn’t be in. She arrived at work to be confronted by Michael. They argued – she says he was enraged to have found drug paraphernalia in her desk. She went home to compose herself, found Greg asleep, and then returned to work.

Later in the morning, she drove home to make lunch for Greg, who, she says, roused himself long enough to poke at some soup and confess that in order to sleep he’d taken some of her old prescription drugs – the painkiller oxycodone and clonazepam, an antiseizure medication also known for its sedating effects. She returned to the office, then left before three, when Michael left. She says the two met near her apartment and talked about their future. She apologised for the relapse and vowed to stop using drugs.

Greg was still dozing when she arrived after five. She made a stir-fry dinner, left some in the fridge for Greg, went shopping, came home and kissed her sleeping husband before settling into a long, hot bath. Emerging a little after 9pm, she then found Greg cold and pale. Instantly, she claims, she phoned emergency.

A routine autopsy confirmed police suspicions that Greg had taken an overdose, and Kristin signed the release to cremate the body.

Then came the questions. Greg’s colleagues told investigators that he was a rising star and had no reason to kill himself. And spurred by Greg’s younger brothers, who said he was looking forward to upcoming birthday plans, police halted the cremation so that more tests could be done.

Fluids from Greg’s body contained, as expected, modest amounts of oxycodone and clonazepam, drugs Kristin said she was told years before could help her kick her meth habit. But the tests also detected fentanyl, a narcotic used in surgery and sparingly for debilitating pain. Colourless and odourless, it is at least 50 times more potent than morphine. It is difficult to obtain legally – even in small quantities. And Greg’s corpse was swimming in it.

To the de Villers family and police, there seemed to be only one reasonable explanation. Gregory de Villers had not committed suicide. He’d been murdered. And his wife was the most likely suspect.

Yet criminal investigators would have a tough time making the case. Police could not – and never did – determine how the fentanyl, the murder weapon, was administered. No syringes, drug-delivery patches or paraphernalia had been left at the scene. And because police failed to test the glass with a fluid by the bed, the scenario, though remote, that Greg had got some fentanyl and swallowed it himself remained a strong possibility.

Another challenge: determining where the fentanyl came from. The medical examiner’s off ice where Kristin worked had not conducted an internal audit for a long time, but quickly ordered one done.

The results were stunning. In seven of eight recent cases in which meth was gathered as evidence for testing in the laboratory, some or all of the samples were missing – as were small quantities of oxycodone and clonazepam. Fifteen conf iscated fentanyl patches were also gone, and a ten-milligram vial of fentanyl was empty.

On December 4, about a week after Kristin admitted to police in a voluntary interview that she had a drug problem, she was fired. Michael was also sacked for failing to report her. Subsequent searches of the work station uncovered an empty drug evidence envelope and a meth pipe with her DNA on the stem. Colleagues found love notes and rose petals in Kristin’s desk and, in Michael’s office, more than 30 articles explaining how to use and to detect fentanyl.

MICHAEL, WHO CONTENDS that he played no role in Greg’s death, returned to Australia in May 2001, one month before Kristin’s arrest. At Kristin’s murder trial in November 2002, a jury assessed the evidence and handed down its verdict: guilty.

Kristin gripped the defence table to steady herself, and turned to her family with a shattered expression. At a December 12 hearing, the 26 year old received a mandatory sentence of life without parole.

A vital part of Kristin’s undoing was the rose petals. Prosecutors made a great deal of her telling a friend that one of her favourite films was American Beauty, in which actor Kevin Spacey, who is slain at the end, lusts for a young woman he envisions sprinkling with rose petals. They also homed in on her claim that when she found Greg cold and unresponsive, she tore back the bed covers and saw his body covered with petals.

Following instructions from the emergency operator, she tugged him to the floor to attempt CPR. Yet there wasn’t a single petal remaining on the mattress and none under his body, where prosecutors said they would have fallen as she yanked him from the bed. At the scene, police found one stem – and what appeared to be fresh petals – next to Greg.

On the day Greg died, Krist in used a supermarket card to pay for some purchases. The computerised record was logged in at exact ly 12.41. Along with soup, cold medicine and a Bic lighter, the receipt shows a single rose.

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