Seven times the lethal dose
Greg de Villers had about seven times the lethal dose of fentanyl in his system.
It is not a drug most people kept in a medicine cabinet. It was a powerful painkiller. And it happened that the San Diego medical examiner’s office did not routinely test for it in autopsies. Kristin knew that. So did Robertson.
Fentanyl had gone missing from her lab, investigators found. A month after Greg’s death, both Kristin and Robertson were fired. She had been hiding her meth use. He had known about it and had not reported it. He later went home to Australia.
She was arrested on June 25, 2001, and charged with murder. She spent six months in jail before her parents posted $1.25 million bail.
It was still a circumstantial case. Nothing in the apartment showed how the drug had got into him. Her lawyer said Greg had drunk it, from a glass by the bed that police had never tested, and had got rid of everything else so that his wife would be blamed. He had found out she was leaving him. He wanted her to suffer. The petals were the last thing he ever did.
Who could prove that he had not scattered them himself?
Then, just before the trial, almost two years after Greg died, investigators found something from the Monday he died. It was a Vons supermarket record of what Kristin had bought that day. On it were soup and cold medicine.
There was one more item on it.
A single rose
Kristin Rossum had bought one rose.
On the day she said she came home to find her husband under a scatter of petals, she had paid for a rose at the supermarket.
To prosecutors, it was everything. She was not the woman who found the scene. She was the woman who built it.
Kristin had an answer. Yes, she had bought it, she said. But it was a yellow rose, and she had given it to Robertson.
The petals on Greg’s chest were red. The receipt did not list a color.
Her trial opened in October 2002. Cameras were banned from the courtroom, so they followed her in and out of the building instead. She testified for more than eight hours. She admitted to the drugs and to the affair. She denied murder.
Prosecutor Dan Goldstein told the jury that the bed was theater. She had got the idea from the movie and made a melodramatic suicide scene for a man who had never been suicidal. There was also a needle mark on Greg’s body that paramedics could not account for, he said, which might be where she had injected him.
He took seven and a half hours to close. The defense took less than two.
The jury took eight hours over two days. On November 12, 2002, it found her guilty of first-degree murder.
In December, she was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
The man in Brisbane
Prosecutors named Robertson as an unindicted co-conspirator. He has always denied any part in Greg’s death and says he does not believe she is capable of it.
In 2006, prosecutors quietly filed a complaint charging him with conspiracy to obstruct justice, the San Diego Reader reported years later. He has not faced trial. He stayed in Australia and went on working as a forensic toxicologist in Brisbane.
In 2014, he turned up in a Brisbane courtroom as an expert witness in another high-profile case. He was testifying for Gerard Baden-Clay, a man on trial for killing his wife.
Greg’s family sued. In 2006 a jury ordered Kristin to pay more than $100 million in punitive damages, mostly to make sure she could never profit by selling her story. A judge later cut that to $10 million. San Diego County was ordered to pay $1.5 million.
One more fight
In prison, Kristin has fought on.
Her lawyers argued that her trial attorneys should have tested the samples themselves. An expert she hired said the levels of fentanyl did not fit the rest of the evidence. In 2010, a three-judge federal panel agreed that the defense had made a mistake and ordered a hearing. For a moment it looked as though she might get a new look at the case.
Then, in 2011, after a new Supreme Court decision, the same panel took it back. In 2012 the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear her.
She is serving her sentence at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla.
She still says Greg did it himself.
The Vons record still says she bought a rose.
