Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
On the night of Monday, November 6, 2000, a young woman called 911 from an apartment near the University of California San Diego.
Her husband was not breathing, she said. He was cold. She told the operator she was trying CPR.
The paramedics found him on the couple’s bed. Greg de Villers was 26. They worked on him, and he was pronounced dead at the hospital.
There were red rose petals on the bed.
His wife, Kristin Rossum, told them her husband had killed himself.
A beautiful young scientist
She was 24, blonde and very bright. She had been a child model and a ballet dancer. Her father was a college president. She had graduated summa cum laude in chemistry from San Diego State, and now she worked as a toxicologist at the San Diego County medical examiner’s office, testing the blood of the county’s dead.
Very few people knew the rest. She had started using methamphetamine as a teenager. She met Greg in her late teens, while she was still using, on a trip to Tijuana. He stuck with her, and he helped her get clean. He had a good job at a biotech company and he hated drugs. They married on June 5, 1999, after five years together.
By her own account, it did not last long. “About a year into our marriage, Greg became very, very clingy to me,” she later said.
She had a new supervisor in the toxicology lab: Dr. Michael Robertson, a married Australian. In the summer of 2000, according to court records, they began an affair. That autumn, she started using meth again. She took it from the lab, prosecutors said, from the evidence she was there to test.
Around November 2, Greg found out about it all, or nearly all of it. He gave her a choice. She could quit her job, or he would tell the medical examiner about the drugs and the affair.
She had a few days.
The last Monday
This is the account Kristin gave of what came next.
Over the weekend of November 5, she said, she told Greg the marriage was over. He took it hard. On Monday morning he would not get up. He was sluggish and his voice was slurred. She called his work to say he would not be in, and went to her job at the medical examiner’s office.
She came home around lunchtime and gave him a bowl of soup. He told her he had taken some pills, she said. She went back to work.
That day, witnesses saw her and Robertson together several times, in and out of the office, in what they described as emotional conversations.
She got home around 7 p.m. and took a shower. She shaved her legs. Then she went into the bedroom and found that he was not breathing.
She called 911 a little after 9 p.m.
As she tried to pull him to the floor, she said, she made a chilling discovery. “I pulled the bedspread back, and his chest was covered in rose petals. Red rose petals. And he had a picture of our wedding photos in bed with him.”
He had given her a dozen long-stemmed roses for her birthday, she said. “I think he was just making a statement that he knew our relationship was over.”
The petals made everyone think of the same thing. American Beauty, the film that had won best picture that year, had a famous image of a girl lying under a shower of rose petals. It was one of Kristin’s favorites.
“He hated drugs”
Greg’s family did not believe a word of it. His brother Jerome said Greg would never have done this to himself. He hated drugs. He had spent years pulling his wife away from them.
San Diego police were reluctant to open a case. A grieving widow who worked for the county said it was suicide. There was no note, but people do not always leave one. The family kept pushing.
There was an awkward problem. Kristin worked in the very office that would normally test Greg’s body, and Robertson was her supervisor. So the samples were sent to an outside lab in Los Angeles.
When the report came back, the grieving widow was suddenly the only suspect.
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