He dismissed the last scenario because he remembered it wasn’t that long ago that Greg wouldn’t even take the anti-histamines Marie offered him for his stuffy nose. Jerome, an insurance investigator, was determined to find out from Kristin—and whomever else he had to ask—exactly what happened to his brother and why.
Chapter 2
Kristin Margrethe Rossum, the eldest child of two driven and accomplished Midwestern parents, was raised with the pressures to perform and to succeed, almost from the very start. At an early age, they instilled in her the importance of image and appearances, which no doubt contributed to the perfectionism she described in her diary years later.
“It was always obvious to me that I was expected to do well in school,” she wrote. “I wanted to make my parents proud of me. I wanted to be the best in everything I did. I wanted to be perfect. For the most part, I excelled at everything I tried.”
But this sense of self-confidence was vulnerable to other forces at work in her psyche. At times, she wrote, she found herself “torn between sound, logical ideas and unreasonable, unattainable ideals. It’s an interesting internal conflict.”
That conflict was perpetuated by a persistent inner voice that criticized the way she looked in the mirror. She thought her legs and arms were strong and she had an attractive face. But her butt was rounder than she liked, her inner thighs were a little too flabby, her stomach wasn’t flat enough, and her arms could be more toned. “At 5 feet, 2 ¼ inches tall,” she wrote, she was “vertically challenged. OK, SHORT!!!”
“I continue to feel dissatisfied with my body, because I don’t think it’s perfect,” she wrote. But, she added, “I guess that my belief is that it is within my power to control the shape of my body. Therefore, if I am dissatisfied with my body, it is only the result of my own failings.”
It’s possible that this drive to be perfect grew so overwhelming at times that her only relief came from getting high. One friend said Kristin’s addictive relationship with methamphetamine may have been the only part of her life that Kristin saw as her own, separate from the parents who had such a strong influence on her. And people high on meth don’t think or act rationally.
Kristin came into the world on October 25, 1976, in Memphis, Tennessee, where her father was a political science professor and her mother was a marketing researcher. Kristin’s brother Brent was born in nearby Germantown about three years later, and Pierce, the youngest, about four years after that.
As Kristin and her brothers were growing up, they moved around the country as their parents’ careers progressed. Sometimes, Kristin said, her mother “would hold down the fort” when her father had to leave town for a professional opportunity elsewhere.
When Kristin was four or five, the Rossums moved to Wilmette, a suburb on the north shore of Chicago, where she saw a lot of her extended family. She and her mother would take the train into the city to watch a performance of The Nutcracker or go Christmas shopping at Marshall Field’s.
The focus on her outward appearance started when she was very young. When she was four, her parents arranged for Kristin to have a commercial head shot taken. The photographer sat her at the piano, laid one of her little hands on the keys, and told her to turn and smile. Her straight, shoulder-length blond hair was pulled back with a barrette, and she wore a tent dress with a tiny white collar and embroidered flowers that covered her legs. She was three feet three inches tall, weighed thirty-four pounds, and wore a size 4 to 4T dress.
In a head shot taken two years later, in December 1982, she’d grown in confidence and dress size. This time her big, hypnotic green eyes stared straight into the camera. She was simply beguiling.
On the back of the photo, along with her particulars, she was featured in five different poses, illustrating her versatility and ability to switch from mood to mood and from one outfit to another. She was goofy in one, serious or playful in the others, wearing a dark leotard and white tights, a sailor suit, or a button-up shirt with a sweater tied around her neck, clutching a handful of daises or holding a balloon on a string. In one shot, she feigned surprise as she pretended to read one of the Madeline children’s books, glasses perched on her head, her mouth and eyes agape.
The pretty, towheaded girl worked as a model for Marshall Field’s, Sears, McDonald’s, and Montgomery Ward. She was a natural. She wore a standard size 6X dress, and the camera loved her.
Kristin gave up modeling for ballet the following year, when the family moved to Bethesda, Maryland, and her father took a job as a deputy director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice. He worked for the Bureau—the national repository for crime statistics collected by government and law enforcement agencies—in 1983 and 1984, during the Reagan administration.
Six-year-old Kristin began training at the Maryland Youth Ballet Academy, where she proved to be quite a talented little dancer. She was chosen for a walk-on role as a page in the Joffrey Ballet’s performance of Romeo and Juliet, reveling in the honor of being backstage at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Years later she wrote in her diary that the powerful Prokofiev score touched her to the core and remained one of her favorites.
“There is so much passion in his notes,” she wrote.
Around that time, she also began to discover a love for science. And the academic pressures soon began to mount.
Ralph Rossum relocated to Claremont, California, in 1984, when he was granted tenure as a faculty member at Claremont McKenna College. He stayed for one semester, then spent some time working on a grant in Washington, D.C., where his wife, Constance, was a marketing manager for the Marriott Corporation. By June 1985, the family had reunited in Claremont, a small enclave of primarily white, highly educated residents. This community would serve as the family’s base in the years to come.
The fourteen-square-mile city is located about thirty miles east of downtown Los Angeles. In 2000 it had a population of 34,000 and a median income of about $70,000. Known for its tree-lined streets and small-town feel, Claremont generally houses about five thousand students and professors associated with the eight institutions of higher learning in the area. Of those, seven are within the city’s limits and are collectively its largest employer: Claremont McKenna College, Pomona College, Pitzer College, Scripps College, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont Graduate University, and the Claremont School of Theology. Azusa Pacific University, a small evangelical Christian university where Constance Rossum was director of nonprofit graduate programs and a professor of marketing and management, is ten miles away.
One resident once likened Claremont to the community depicted in the movie Pleasantville, where residents live a 1950s lifestyle in black and white until two modern teenagers introduce art, literature, sex, independent thought, and a symbolic sense of color to a town previously unaware that life existed beyond its boundaries.
“People feel reasonably safe here,” said Lieutenant Stan Van Horn, who headed the Claremont Police Department’s detective bureau in 2004.
Van Horn said the city’s crime rate was pretty low, averaging one homicide every four or five years, which left police officers with plenty of time to deal with low-level crimes like vandalism and high school kids partying on weekends. His department’s philosophy on crime fighting was as follows: “If you can take care of the small stuff, it doesn’t develop into larger problems.”
Kristin’s parents passed their work ethic onto their children and drew them into the academic world early on.
In the summer of 1988, Kristin posed with her professor father for the cover of Claremont McKenna’s campus magazine, Profile. With their heads together and her arms wrapped around his neck, they looked happy, almost serene. But unlike his daughter, Ralph did not grow up around parents with such academic drive, let alone the money to pay for it.
Raised on a small dairy