Poisoned Love. Caitlin Rother
store this afternoon. Any requests?” she wrote on February 22. “…Your wish is my command.”
Kristin made lunches and tins of biscotti for Greg to take to work, often checking with him about what he wanted to eat for dinner and offering him a choice of entrees. She obviously liked to cook them nice meals, anything from salmon to stir-fried chicken, sun-dried tomato cream pasta with steamed artichokes, shrimp, pork tenderloin, or steak.
Frequently, they’d discuss renting a video or two to watch the same night. American Beauty was one of Kristin’s favorites, and she’d seen it three or four times. Greg liked basic guy movies, but he also enjoyed more thoughtful films, such as A River Runs Through it, Legends of the Fall, or Shakespeare in Love.
The e-mails they exchanged rarely had sexual overtones, although Kristin and Greg often said “I love you” and gave each other pet names like “Mr. Big,” “Sweetie,” “Dolling,” “Gregie,” “Wifey, “Bunny Kristin,” and “Kristinie.”
But, in general, the gist of most of their messages was pretty mundane. They discussed emptying the dishwasher, dropping off the rent check, getting the car fixed, or planning a trip to visit the in-laws. The only notable exception was a series of quick notes that Kristin started on February 2, sending Greg a “giant, wet, slobbery kiss” and telling him she loved him. Greg said he didn’t usually like those wet kisses, but by e-mail, it wasn’t that bad. Kristin offered a “soft, tender, gentle” kiss instead, and Greg said he especially liked those kinds of kisses.
Like best friends, they shared their good news with each other and celebrated one another’s successes. While Kristin was waiting to hear whether she’d get a permanent job as a county toxicologist, she explored other career options, including the Navy’s engineering officer program. But on March 1, Kristin got her dream job. She sent an e-mail to Greg—written in capital letters with two lines of exclamation points—to tell him how excited she was to get a job offer as a permanent toxicologist at the Medical Examiner’s Office.
“Yippee for me!” Kristin wrote.
“See, you are the best!” Greg replied.
A letter from Lloyd Amborn said her new job would officially start March 17, as long as she passed a law enforcement background investigation and a medical screening. The starting annual salary was $32,448, with a 3 percent raise scheduled to go into effect in July. If county officials ever did that background check, they wouldn’t have had access to her arrest in 1994 because she was under eighteen when it happened.
On May 22, when Greg was winding down at Pharmingen, Kristin wished him a good day in his last week before starting his new job at Orbigen.
“I’m so proud of you,” she wrote.
Many of Greg’s e-mails supported Constance’s claim that he was not in the best of health. He repeatedly mentioned feeling tired and sluggish, having a hard time getting out of bed, and being plagued by headaches.
“I hope my head is not pounding by the end of the day, though! Still feeling achy and sore in my muscles! I just need to get more rest,” he wrote on April 24.
Greg’s ailments continued throughout the summer. “I did not feel well this morning,” he wrote Kristin on the morning of July 7. “Feeling a little dizzy with a bad headache and also just feeling sick. It was something that seemed to hit me yesterday evening.”
Nonetheless, Greg usually tried to rally after work so he could go with Kristin to swing dance lessons or yoga class or to watch her take a ballet class.
At the same time Kristin was sending her husband these e-mails, she was also corresponding with other men.
Joe Rizzo had worked with Kristin at the Medical Examiner’s Office as an accounting clerk while he was attending law school but then moved to the East Coast to work for a law firm.
“I really can’t wait to see you, too,” he e-mailed Kristin on June 18, 1999, just two weeks after her wedding. He was coming to town that August and promised to call when he had a firm arrival date. “I was really worried you didn’t love me anymore.”
In mid-December, he wished her a Merry Christmas. “I miss you terribly and think of you all the time,” he wrote. “I am truly sorry we have grown apart over this time.”
By the spring of 2000, the tone of the e-mails had grown more urgent. Rizzo contacted Kristin on March 27, starting off a volley of increasingly intimate messages.
“Oh my God!” she replied. “I’ve been thinking about you so much lately…. So when are you going to be visiting? Miss you terribly.”
Rizzo must have taken Kristin’s welcoming reception to heart, because he invited her on an all-expenses-paid weekend in New York. “I am going to be all alone, and I thought immediately of you,” he wrote.
Kristin said such a trip might be hard to explain to her husband, “but, hey, a girl can dream, can’t she?”
Rizzo urged her to make it happen. “I don’t want to just imagine anymore,” he wrote.
Kristin seemed open to the idea, saying they’d have to give it “some serious consideration.”
Rizzo explained in some detail how he was getting physically excited at the prospect of seeing her again. “Those old feelings are back,” he said.
Dan Dewall, whom she’d met in a plant physiology class at SDSU, sent her several e-mails at the lab. One invited her to meet at “that park” around noon. Another recounted the contents of an e-mail he’d sent after they’d last seen each other, which he thought might have gotten lost in cyberspace: “I like you a lot, etc., etc., etc…. I promise that the next time you tell me you are tired, I will slow the pace and hold you a while so you can rest.”
In early March, a handsome, athletic Australian toxicologist named Michael Robertson started working as the lab’s unofficial manager, a title that would become official once his work visa issues were resolved. There was an immediate attraction between Kristin and her soon-to-be boss, a married man in his early thirties who came with a Ph.D. and an impressive resume.
She later wrote in her diary that she’d had a teenage fantasy about falling in love at first sight, knowing immediately that she’d found “the one.” Well, she wrote, she wasn’t sure if that’s what had happened, but when she and Michael made eye contact, “My legs got weak and my tummy was full of butterflies.”
Michael, who went by Mic or Robbo, had been offered the job of lab manager on December 1, 1999, but his visa issues were taking so long to resolve that he and Lloyd Amborn, the office administrator, negotiated a deal whereby Michael could start in early March as a “visitor.” That way, he could get familiar with how they did things in the lab until he could legally take over. In the meantime, Donald “Russ” Lowe continued as acting lab manager. Michael didn’t officially assume the position until June 12.
Michael had been a forensic toxicologist at National Medical Services (NMS) in Pennsylvania since April 1996, performing, supervising, and certifying toxicology test results that were going to be used in court. He also testified as an expert witness.
He testified, for example, in a highly publicized case involving several teenage boys who were charged with fatally drugging fifteen-year-old Samantha Reid of Lansing, Michigan, by putting gamma hydroxybutyrate—the date-rape drug known on the street as GHB, Liquid X, or Liquid Ecstasy—in her Mountain Dew. Reid’s death on January 17, 1999, led to the passage of the Hillory J. Farias and Samantha Reid Date-Rape Drug Prohibition Act of 2000, which added GHB to the list of drugs that are unlawful to manufacture, distribute, or dispense unless authorized by the federal government.
Michael started at NMS as a postdoctoral fellow and trainee, using the High Pressure Liquid Chromatograph, or HPLC, machine for toxicology testing. He also taught classes at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. He got the job at NMS after his teacher, Olaf Drummer, called the company head, Dr. Fredric Rieders, to recommend him for an internship. Rieders, who was originally from Austria, found the Australian