When he called the Rossum house at 7:15 P.M., he told Constance that he was investigating a reported case of child abuse and made an appointment to meet with her and Ralph at home around 8 the next morning.
The Rossums lived in a white, two-story house at the end of a cul-de-sac on Weatherford Court, a short, quiet street with well-kept lawns and flowerbeds. In 2004 the house had red rose bushes growing in the front yard.
Horowitz talked with Constance and Ralph for about an hour in the family room off the kitchen, while Kristin stayed in her bedroom. He found the Rossums to be quite cooperative. After their anniversary cruise, Constance told him, she and Ralph learned that Kristin was using drugs, smoking cigarettes, and having parties for friends who stole checks and credit cards. The incident happened when they tried to confront her about all of this.
“Ralph got mad and did hit her in the arm,” Constance said. “I admit that I slapped her in the face, but she tried to hit me first.”
Constance explained how Kristin tried to cut her wrists, first with a knife and then with razor blades, but that she had made only superficial cuts, so they didn’t take her to see a doctor.
“I was afraid of what would happen if we took her to the hospital,” she told Horowitz. “We don’t know who to go to or what to do.”
Then it was Ralph’s turn. He said he found it unusual that Kristin had asked to use the car to go to the library because her driving privileges had been suspended due to “her actions while we were gone.” It was also unusual, he said, for her to carry a backpack. When he found the drug paraphernalia inside, he said, he began tugging on her arm, demanding to know the truth.
“I admit that I took my open hand and struck her three or four times on the upper arm,” he told Horowitz. “She told me what had been going on and apologized. Kristin was visibly upset and started talking about killing herself.”
After things had settled down later that evening, Ralph told him, they all agreed to work on the situation.
“I realize that there’s a lot going on and that we need some help,” Ralph said.
Horowitz saw a few discrepancies in the stories he’d heard. For one, Ralph said he hit Kristin with an open hand, while Kristin claimed it was a closed fist. Still, Horowitz didn’t see any basis for the child-abuse claim.
After the ordeal, Constance and Ralph took Kristin in for a full physical. They told the doctor about finding the glass pipe, and he gave her a good talking-to about using drugs. Then, life in the Rossum household seemed to calm down for a while.
“We thought we had the problem licked at that point,” Ralph said.
Like all the other seniors at Claremont High, Kristin went to a photo studio for her senior yearbook portrait. The boys posed in tuxedo shirts and bow ties, and the girls wore black, V-necked formal dresses. Kristin’s photo showed no sign of drug use. She seemed healthy, wearing a string of pearls, her hair long and very blond. She looked attractive and comfortable with herself, just like the model she was trained to be. Kristin also sang with the A Cappella Singers Choir that year, posing for the yearbook with the other students in a long dark dress, the pearls, and some tasteful makeup.
But that fall, her parents began to notice the unwelcome reminders of her troubled past: she was picking at her hands again, she was losing weight, and her grades weren’t as good. They definitely knew something was wrong when they saw that she was doing poorly in calculus. Kristin had always been so good at math.
It’s typical for parents to feel sad, frustrated, helpless, and angry when they can’t fix their child’s drug problem, and the Rossums appeared to follow the norm.
“All this beauty and talent and wasting it all on people who were unworthy of her,” Ralph later recalled thinking.
This would become a sad refrain throughout Kristin’s life.
On January 14, 1994, Kristin came home from school around 3 P.M., acting erratically. Constance suspected her daughter was using methamphetamine again and felt compelled to confront Kristin about it. But that only escalated the situation.
Kristin started to touch her tank top protectively, so Constance asked if she had drugs on her. Kristin became defensive and tried to run away. Constance grabbed her, reached into her shirt, and pulled a glass pipe out of her bra. She was horrified. She didn’t know what else to do but call the police and report that her daughter was under the influence of drugs. She’d hoped they were done with this mess.
Because Officer Horowitz had dealt with the Rossum family before, he took the call. When he arrived at the house on Weatherford Court, Constance seemed to be at her wit’s end as she handed him the pipe. She also handed him a few other things she’d found in Kristin’s belongings—some Ex-Lax, a small mirror, and some razor blades.
“Kristin has had a drug problem for the past several years,” she told him. “The episodes with her friends using the credit cards and the checks and taking the car have caused us to realize how extensive her involvement was. We have tried doctors and therapy, but nothing so far has worked. This incident is the last straw, and something needs to be done about this.”
After talking with a distraught Constance, the officer went upstairs, where the door to Kristin’s room was ajar. Kristin was inside, sobbing, her nose running and her eyes red from crying. He asked what was going on, but she didn’t answer him. The floor of the room was covered with papers and clothes strewn about. She was fidgety and obviously distressed, unable to complete a sentence or express a clear thought.
He did a quick physical examination, shining a penlight into her eyes, which did nothing to shrink her dilated pupils. She seemed dry-mouthed, and her pulse was going at a rate of 118 beats a minute. He asked if she’d smoked speed before going to school.
Yes, Kristin admitted, she’d gotten some drugs and the pipe from a boy the night before at Claremont High, where she’d gone to watch a performance of the musical Oklahoma.
“He owed me some money, so he paid me back with the drugs and pipe,” she told Horowitz.
Kristin said she’d smoked at the high school that night and again the next morning in her bedroom before going to school. She took the pipe and the remainder of the drugs with her to school and brought them home again. She told him she used the drugs to help her study and with “other activities.”
Horowitz placed Kristin under arrest for possession of paraphernalia and for being under the influence of a controlled substance. He snapped handcuffs on her wrists, read her her rights, and took her away in his squad car. He got the feeling that Kristin’s family was more concerned about the image problem her drug addiction caused than about the drug problem itself.
At the city jail, the seventeen-year-old was fingerprinted, booked, photographed and ordered to produce a urine sample. A marked contrast to the pretty pictures Kristin took as a child model, her first booking photo shows her with her eyes closed, grimacing and crying.
Since Kristin was still a minor, Horowitz had a choice of moving her to Juvenile Hall within six hours of the arrest or releasing her to her parents. He chose the latter. Kristin was placed in a holding cell for about two hours until her parents came to get her.
Generally, he explained later, juveniles are released to a parent or guardian unless they are habitual offenders or have committed a violent crime. He was unable to explain why nothing ever came of the arrest, saying that county probation officials had jurisdiction over her case. Perhaps, he said, it fell through the cracks because she was so close to turning eighteen. At the time, he’d hoped that the court would compel her to attend a drug rehab program and get some help.
“She had every resource and ability through her family to get through life…but again, methamphetamine is a very, very pernicious drug, and you don’t lose the taste once you cross that line,” he said.
This time the Rossums