But Jerome couldn’t wait for that. He wanted to know what happened, and he couldn’t understand why no one would tell him. He called the hospital again, and this time the nurse asked if the sheriff’s deputy had arrived. “No,” he said, so she put him on hold to talk to the deputy, who was coming to deliver the bad news in person. Marie, who was sitting by the window, saw a Ventura County sheriff’s cruiser pull up outside. The nurse got back on the line with Jerome, but he was so insistent that she went ahead and told him that Greg had “expired” before the deputy made it to the front door.
Jerome couldn’t believe it. How was this possible? He’d spoken to his brother only a few days earlier. Greg had called while Jerome was watching a DVD on Alaska, and he was too tired to talk, so he put Greg off and promised to call him back. Unfortunately, he never got around to it.
Marie was beside herself. A chronic smoker and an asthmatic since childhood, she’d had part of a lung removed, and now she was sobbing so hard she could barely breathe. Jerome was upset and he was scared. He didn’t want to lose his mother, too. Now the oldest of Marie’s sons, Jerome tried to comfort her while he called his other brother, Bertrand, and told him to meet them at their mother’s in Thousand Oaks. Bertrand, who lived about forty-five minutes south, near the University of California, Los Angeles, started crying and said he’d come as soon as he could. He was so emotional that his roommate decided to take the wheel and drive Bertrand to his mother’s.
When they arrived around 11 P.M., Marie and Jerome were still waiting for more definitive answers. But they never came. So, the family spent the night together, wracked with grief and confusion, asking each other questions and trying, unsuccessfully, to make sense of it all.
Jerome figured that now was the time to tell Marie that Kristin—the only one of her sons’ girlfriends she’d ever really accepted—was a former methamphetamine user. But when Jerome raised the question of whether Kristin might have had something to do with Greg’s death, Bertrand said he was talking crazy. Marie, who loved Kristin like a daughter, wouldn’t hear of it. There had to be a rational explanation.
UCSD Detective Sergeant Bob Jones met Kristin and Michael on the landing in front of her apartment when they returned from the hospital around 11:45 P.M. It was understood that Michael should stay outside while Jones picked up the interview with Kristin where his officers had left off. Sitting at the dining-room table, Jones asked Kristin to tell him what happened.
She told Jones that she and Greg had been fighting all weekend. It started on Thursday, she said, when she announced that she was moving out. They’d had dinner with her parents on Friday, spent Saturday night together, and then, on Sunday night, Greg, still upset, had taken some of her old prescriptions to help him sleep. He’d been sleeping all day on Monday, in fact. Her lab was only fifteen minutes away, so she came home a number of times to check on him. Each time she’d found him breathing—a little loudly at times—but otherwise he seemed fine.
Kristin said they’d had some soup together around lunchtime, and that’s when he told her he’d taken some of her old oxycodone and clonazepam. Oxycodone is a narcotic painkiller similar to Vicodin. Clonazepam, a sedative and also a narcotic, is classified as a date rape drug.
She told Jones she’d run some errands after work and then came home to take a long bath and a shower. She was about to get into bed sometime around nine o’clock, when she leaned over to kiss Greg. His forehead was cold, and he wasn’t breathing, so she called 911. The dispatcher told her to pull Greg off the bed and onto the floor, so that he was flat on his back and she could start doing CPR. Kristin wasn’t sure she’d be strong enough to get him off the bed by herself, but the dispatcher insisted. She pulled back the covers so she could turn him sideways, and that’s when she saw the rose petals all over his chest and their wedding photo under his pillow.
Jones asked her about the shredded letter he’d found in a plastic ziplock bag on the dining-room table. Kristin said Greg found it on Thursday and got angry, so she put it through the shredder, but he’d been trying to piece it back together with tape. Jones took the letter as evidence, along with a note in Kristin’s handwriting that one of his officers found in the kitchen. Signed with a heart and Kristin’s first initial, it said: “Hi, sleepy. Hope you feel better. I’m out to get a wedding gift,” and told him there were leftovers in the fridge. Jones didn’t take Kristin’s diary, which an officer found lying on the coffee table.
Ralph Rossum arrived at the apartment around midnight, after stopping first at the hospital, where the social worker notified him of Greg’s death. He joined his daughter and Jones at the dining-room table.
Angie Wagner, an investigator colleague of Kristin’s at the Medical Examiner’s Office, showed up around 1 A.M. By then, Kristin was sitting on the couch in the living room. Wagner didn’t know her very well. In fact, she hadn’t even known Kristin was married. Wagner asked Kristin her own series of questions for her report.
After all the interviews were over, Michael left, and Ralph helped his daughter into his car to start the difficult drive back to Claremont. Kristin’s hair was a mess, her face was puffy, and her eyes were swollen from crying all night.
“I’ve lost my Greggy,” she told him. “I’ve lost my best friend.”
It was about 1:40 A.M. The investigators saw no reason to disbelieve Kristin’s story. There were no broken doorjambs and no sign of a struggle. They left the apartment, thinking it was probably a suicide.
Stefan Gruenwald arrived at Orbigen on Tuesday around 9:45 A.M. and scanned the parking lot for Greg’s car. It wasn’t there, so he headed inside, intending to call Greg’s apartment first thing. But before Gruenwald even got to his desk, his assistant told him there was a phone call for him in his office.
“Who is it?” he asked.
“I don’t know—a Mike Robertson,” she said. “It’s about Greg.”
Michael Robertson introduced himself as Kristin’s boss and told Gruenwald that something had happened to Greg. He gave Gruenwald the Rossums’ phone number in Claremont and asked him to call them right away. Michael said he couldn’t answer any questions and deferred to the Rossums.
Gruenwald called the number and got Constance Rossum. She said Greg had passed away the night before.
“What happened?” he asked, in disbelief.
Constance said Greg had experienced flu-like symptoms over the weekend, so he started taking cough syrup with some other drugs on Saturday and continued on Sunday. He must have had an allergic reaction, she said.
That sounded odd to Gruenwald, who’d earned a medical degree and a Ph.D. back in Frankfurt, Germany, and had spent some time doing forensics work. If someone was going to have an allergic reaction, he thought, it would develop right away, not two days later. He didn’t say anything to Constance at the time, but he thought the story sounded suspicious. Gruenwald called back a few hours later so he could talk to Kristin directly.
“I can’t believe what happened,” he said. “He was such a good person.”
Kristin was crying. She agreed and said she couldn’t believe it, either. But from there, he said, the story changed. This time Kristin described Greg’s death as more of an overdose, perhaps an accidental one.
An overdose? Gruenwald had never seen Greg drunk, let alone under the influence of any drugs. He wouldn’t even go near the lab at Orbigen, which was used mostly for cancer research. Gruenwald had once asked Greg to help clean out the storage room, where they kept hundreds of containers of chemicals, but he refused, saying he didn’t want to touch them. Greg was much more comfortable with the business side of things. So, for Gruenwald, the idea of Greg dying from a drug overdose, even accidentally, just didn’t ring true.
Jerome de Villers felt the same way.