Poisoned Love. Caitlin Rother
saying she was very sorry for running away like she did. The letter had no return address or phone number but carried a San Diego postmark. Soon afterwards, Kristin called her parents.
“Thank God you’re safe,” Constance told her.
Kristin said she’d been staying with some nice people in San Diego. She hadn’t wanted to call until she was ready to prove that she was serious about getting herself together. If the family wanted to see her, she wanted to come home for a visit.
“Mom, I have three jobs. I’m starting to turn my life around,” she said.
Her parents were thrilled to hear that Kristin was okay and that she was trying to get better. Borrowing Greg’s car, she drove up to Claremont on a Sunday to see her family and to collect some belongings.
“There was a little bit of the prodigal son kind of feeling,” Ralph recalled later.
Over a tearful but happy reunion lunch, Kristin shared how she’d driven up in the car that her friend Greg de Villers loaned her. Seemingly clearheaded, she told them that she was teaching ballet classes and working at a pasta restaurant and that she had also landed a third job, at California Pizza Kitchen. It seemed important to her that they believe she’d turned the corner. They were happy to buy in and got her the uniform she needed for the pizza place. They also managed to squeeze a church service into her visit.
Constance and Ralph were eager to meet Greg, so they arranged to come down to San Diego in a few weeks. Greg wanted to take them all out to lunch.
They met in a parking lot in the Gaslamp District in downtown San Diego, an area lined with bars and restaurants that are teeming with people on weekend nights. Greg was wearing sunglasses and a suede jacket.
When he took off his glasses, Constance noticed that he had kind eyes. Ralph thought he was charming and good-looking.
“I thought Kristin had met a really good person,” Ralph said.
Kristin spoke with Teddy Maya at one point in January about her sudden disappearance, telling him she’d been kidnapped at gunpoint and driven around Mexico in the trunk of a car.
About a month after the Rossums’ lunch with Greg, Kristin told her parents she was renting a van and moving in with a young female coworker from the pizza restaurant. In reality, however, she was still living with Greg.
The Rossums eventually figured this out. As devout Episcopalians, Constance and Ralph disapproved of premarital sex. But at the same time, they were relieved. Kristin seemed to be in such good hands with Greg, who obviously had her best interests at heart. And if he could do what they couldn’t—get her off drugs—then so be it. Her previous lifestyle was certainly worse than this.
To them, Greg was their “saving angel.”
Meanwhile, back in the La Jolla Del Sol apartment, it wasn’t long before tensions began to rise. Not only was Jerome being forced to share his bedroom, but the rent was still being divided only three ways. He also wasn’t thrilled when Greg started letting Kristin drive to work in the car that he and Greg had been sharing.
To make matters worse, some of Greg’s jewelry—a gold ring with the family crest and a gold necklace—went missing from the bathroom, and Greg blamed Jerome’s friends for taking it. Jerome said it was more likely Kristin. But Greg didn’t want to believe it.
Jerome called Christian MacLean, a friend of theirs from high school, and expressed his frustration.
“There’s this girl staying with us,” Jerome told him. “She’s weird.”
After meeting her, MacLean came to agree. He noticed Kristin didn’t really connect with the people around her. To him, she seemed like a nerdy, serious bookworm who didn’t really get the joke.
“She’s just kind of off,” he said.
Chris Wren felt that Kristin was kind of quirky, which in his mind wasn’t necessarily a bad trait, at least in most people. But in her, he saw something else, something he didn’t recognize or understand. She acted erratically, swinging from one extreme emotion to the next. One afternoon he walked into the apartment and found her alone with a strange man. Kristin didn’t introduce them.
About a week after Greg’s jewelry disappeared, Wren discovered that some of his personal checks were missing. Greg admitted that Kristin had taken them. He also said he’d torn them up so she couldn’t use them.
“You can’t use someone else’s checks, anyway,” Kristin said later, trying to dismiss the act and claim she wasn’t intending to use them to buy drugs.
When Greg found a glass tube containing a whitish yellow substance in Kristin’s jacket pocket, he showed it to Wren and asked if he’d ever seen anything like it. No, Wren said, he hadn’t. But it certainly helped explain Kristin’s nervousness and what Jerome described as her “twidgety” behavior. She was smoking drugs, and it sure wasn’t marijuana.
Jerome wanted her out of the apartment, but Greg wouldn’t listen. Kristin was going through some rough times, he said. She was trying to stop using drugs, and he was trying to help her do it. He’d fallen in love and he’d fallen hard.
Other than Kristin’s problem, drugs weren’t a part of Greg’s life. He didn’t drink much alcohol or do recreational drugs. His friends couldn’t even remember him using over-the-counter cold remedies. Greg made it clear he didn’t like Jerome smoking pot and told him he’d have more motivation if he didn’t. Greg also didn’t approve of the couple of marijuana plants that Jerome and Wren tried unsuccessfully to grow in the apartment as an experiment.
Greg and Jerome had always been close, but things had become strained between them since Kristin arrived. Jerome was doing laundry in the apartment one day and put his clothes in the dryer before he went out. When he came back, he found his clothes—still damp—heaped on top of the dryer and Greg’s clothes tumbling inside. Jerome was so angry, he and Greg started fighting over the insult. The two brothers had always roughhoused and wrestled, pinning each other and putting the other in a headlock or a choke hold. Only this time, things got so rough that Jerome thought they might really hurt each other. Luckily, Wren came home and broke them apart.
Kristin never really confided in Jerome, but she did feel comfortable talking with Wren. She told him she’d run away from home because things weren’t going well with her parents, and she admitted to having a problem with crystal meth.
“She was looking for acceptance, and when you have a problem, you need to talk about it,” Wren said.
Two or three months after she’d moved in, the roommates decided to have a party. Kristin sat on Wren’s lap as the guests began to arrive. At one point, she told Wren she felt she was meant to be with him, not Greg, and started to cry.
Ralph and Constance took Greg and Kristin to dinner one night and expressed their concern that neither of them was back in school, informing them that education was important for their futures. Since he’d stopped taking courses at UCSD, Greg had been supporting himself by working at Rush Legal, where he’d also helped Kristin get a job, but it didn’t provide health benefits. Kristin decided to enroll at San Diego State University (SDSU) in the fall, and Greg planned to return to UCSD.
Constance filled out Kristin’s SDSU application for her, purposely omitting her two lousy quarters at Redlands, even though the form required a listing of all previous coursework. She thought her daughter should have a fresh start, and that was that.
When the lease to Greg’s apartment ran out in June 1995, Wren moved to Solana Beach. He still played tennis with Greg and came by the apartment, but they saw less and less of each other. Wren had always admired Greg for believing that if things weren’t going well, he could turn them around. He figured it was Greg’s optimism that made him want to help Kristin. And perhaps a little gullibility as well.
“That’s what made him honest,” Wren said.
Jerome moved out that summer, too. He’d been studying chemistry at UCSD, but he