Poisoned Love. Caitlin Rother
school friend Melissa Prager grew apart once they went away to college, but they became friends again after Kristin moved to San Diego and enrolled at SDSU. Prager, who came home from college in Ohio during the summer, spent weekends with her parents at their house in Encinitas, a small coastal city just north of San Diego. Prager tried to get together with Kristin while she was in the area.
The problem was that she never got to see Kristin alone. The first time she came over to visit Kristin at the apartment, Greg wouldn’t make eye contact with Prager. She thought he seemed standoffish and not very interested in her, but he simply wouldn’t leave the room. She wondered if he felt threatened by their friendship. Prager also found him too possessive and controlling of her friend, who had always seemed so strong-willed and independent. Prager recalled that when she asked Kristin to meet for lunch, Kristin would say things like, “Greg and I, um, think it would be better if you came to the house.”
Kristin described Greg as some sort of “savior” and said she was happy he was “keeping her on track.” Prager often wondered why Kristin had done drugs but had never gotten a good explanation.
“I’ve never been able to talk to her about it,” she said later.
Back when they were in high school together, Prager wondered if Kristin was doing drugs, because she wouldn’t eat anything at dinner, she’d breathe heavily, she looked nervous, and something in her voice sounded “really fake.” But when Prager asked Kristin if she was doing drugs, she said no.
Since Kristin’s parents were such a strong influence in her life, Prager said, perhaps Kristin did drugs to have “something of her own,” a part of her life in which she wasn’t trying to please them or anyone else.
“Her parents put a lot of academic pressure on her, a lot of pressure in general,” she said.
When it came time to get married, Prager thought Kristin was succumbing to a different kind of pressure, and this time it was coming from Greg. It was as if she felt obligated to Greg because he’d helped her get off drugs. Prager thought Kristin loved him, felt loved by him, and had convinced herself that she should marry him. But she never got the impression that Kristin was in love with Greg. Prager thought Kristin was also motivated by a sense that her parents viewed proceeding with the wedding as the right thing to do.
“They completely inserted themselves” into Kristin’s life, she said.
Kristin asked Prager to be her maid of honor, but Prager felt uncomfortable about accepting the offer.
“I was hesitant to be in it because I wasn’t that supportive of it,” she said.
When Prager found out that her brother was getting married in Israel in early July, she told Kristin she couldn’t attend her wedding and was going to her brother’s instead.
Apparently, Kristin wasn’t too sure about her marriage plans, either, because she kept saying she wasn’t certain the wedding was going to happen.
Jan Genovese, who was a Chemistry Department secretary at SDSU while Kristin was a student there, got to know her after she was honored for being the Most Outstanding Chemistry Student in 1998. Kristin would come into the office, and the two of them would chat. Kristin made quite an impression on Genovese.
“She was so magnetic, especially to men,” Genovese said. “There weren’t a lot of beautiful chemistry students.”
Genovese thought Kristin played to her professors a bit, presenting herself in the best way possible for advancement. But, at the same time, Kristin seemed extremely needy.
In May 1999, Genovese ran into Kristin and a male student in the hallway, as she often did. The student, who lived near Kristin and Greg, had gotten to know Kristin in class and was about to graduate. He was a tall, athletic, premed student with chiseled features, nice parents, and a good background, just Kristin’s type.
That day in the hallway, Kristin announced she was getting married. Her comment caught Genovese by surprise, but apparently not as much as the student. An expression of shock crossed his face. Genovese got the impression that Kristin was, frankly, bored by the prospect of marriage.
“What?” Genovese asked in disbelief. “You’re getting married?”
The male student remained silent. As they watched Kristin walk away, Genovese recalled him saying, “Well, she’s sure hot to trot for someone who’s engaged.”
Genovese and the student had become friendly over the years, so she felt comfortable telling him what she thought. Kristin seemed so ambivalent that Genovese thought she would call off the wedding. Genovese also thought that Kristin and the student would continue the close relationship that was apparent to her whenever she saw them together.
“You could do worse,” she told him.
But the student dismissed the idea. He told her he didn’t want to have anything to do with Kristin. He was going to medical school, he told Genovese, and he wasn’t going to let a flirtatious girl derail him.
Genovese didn’t get the sense that Kristin loved Greg. As Kristin walked away from her down the hall that day, Genovese remembered thinking, “I don’t even know her.”
The Rossums wanted an outdoor June ceremony for their daughter. They also wanted to invite a hundred people. Greg didn’t like the idea of wearing a suit and tie in the summer sun, and he really didn’t want a big wedding.
Kristin had her own reservations about the wedding, but they were more emotional in nature. She told her mother she couldn’t decide whether Greg was the right man for her. He’d helped her so much over the years, getting her off drugs and supporting her as she put her life together, so she felt obligated to him. She even loved him. But she wasn’t sure she felt as deeply passionate about him as she was supposed to. Kristin told her that Greg wanted to be with her all the time. He didn’t seem to want her to have her own friends.
“Mom, I’ve made mistakes in my life, and I want to make sure I don’t make another one,” Constance recalled Kristin saying. “I want to make sure they’re the right reasons. Every time I look at him, he reminds me of my past.”
Constance suggested that both of them needed to develop their own sense of self, so they could continue to grow as individuals. She also said that wedding jitters were common.
“Remember,” she told Kristin, “you’ve been talking about getting married since you were eighteen.”
A year or so later, Kristin wrote in her diary that she thought she had “valid points and a deep-rooted reservation,” but she didn’t listen to the “inner voice” that told her to run away. Instead, she decided it was too late to break her commitment to Greg. She wished her mother had been more understanding and supportive, insistent, in fact, that they put off—or even call off—the wedding. If her own daughter didn’t want to go through with her wedding, Kristin wrote, she “would take her hand and drive her away to safety. I certainly wouldn’t imply that she had poor timing, and I wouldn’t ever give the idea that it is a tragedy that my planning and hard work was all put to waste.”
Finally, a couple of weeks before the wedding, Kristin called her mother and said she’d decided to go through with it. But the drama didn’t end there.
In the days before the ceremony, Constance said, Greg almost called off the wedding when he found out his father had been invited and had already flown in from Monte Carlo. Constance said she apologized to Greg for not being more sensitive to his feelings about his father.
The Rossums and Marie had invited Yves de Villers to the wedding after meeting with him for an introductory lunch during Lent. They were hoping to arrange a reconciliation between Greg and his father, at the very least for the sake of their future grandchildren. Greg was not pleased when he found out about the lunch, complaining that his mother and in-laws had gone behind his back.
Yves arrived a couple of days before the wedding and went with Marie to order a rented tuxedo. Greg got upset when he heard that Yves was in town. He hadn’t seen his father in quite