| Kristin Rossum | |
|---|---|
| Born | October 25, 1976 Memphis, Tennessee |
| Charge(s) | First degree murder |
| Penalty | Life without parole |
| Status | Imprisoned |
| Occupation | Former Toxicologist |
| Spouse | Gregory deVillers (deceased) |
| Parents | Ralph and Constance Rossum |
Kristin Margrethe Rossum (born October 25, 1976), is currently serving a life sentence in California for poisoning her husband Greg deVillers with fentanyl she stole from her job and attempting to pass off his death as a suicide.
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Rossum grew up in Claremont, California; her parents, Ralph and Constance Rossum, were professors at Claremont McKenna College. She has two younger brothers, Brent (b. 1979) and Pierce (b. 1986) In the 1990s, throughout Kristin's high school years, she used illegal drugs; her favorite was methamphetamine. Her drug use caused considerable stress within the family. Rossum met her husband Greg in Tijuana, Mexico, and they married in 1999. After getting married, however, she had an affair with her Australian boss, Michael Robertson, beginning May or June 2000.
On November 6, 2000 at approximately 9:15 P.M., Kristin placed a call to 911. Paramedics walked into the apartment through the already open front door and saw Kristin on the phone in the middle of the living room. Greg was pronounced dead after paramedics took him to the hospital. To make his death look like a suicide, she sprinkled red rose petals over her husband's body and placed a wedding photo nearby. Ironically, this scene was similar to a scene from Rossum's favorite movie, American Beauty, and roses with baby's breath were also her favorite flowers. After Greg found out about her affair, he had threatened Kristin that he would expose her affair and her drug use to the Medical Examiner's Office if she did not quit her job. Michael learned of this threat before Greg was killed. Two weeks after her husband's death, Kristin was interrogated by the police. She told the detectives that her husband had been depressed before he died. Kristin's father stated that he seemed to be deeply distressed and that he drank wine and gin heavily that night. In a television interview months after her Greg's death, Rossum stated, "he was making a big deal of the last rose standing. I think he was just making a statement that he knew our relationship was over." She telephoned his office and told his employers that he would not be coming in to work the day of his murder.[1] During the investigation, outsourced toxicology tests showed fentanyl in Greg's body and investigators found a large amount of fentanyl missing at the Medical Examiner's Office. Police believed that she stole the drug from work. While the investigation continued police learned a secret about Kristin, she was a regular methamphetamine user. On June 25, 2001 seven months after Greg's death, Kristin was arrested and charged with murder. Her parents paid for her $1.25 million bail and picked her up from the San Diego jail.
At trial, Kristin’s attorneys tried to bolster their case by saying Greg was suicidal and poisoned himself. Kristin’s brother-in-law, Jerome de Villers, told the court it was hard to believe that his brother had committed suicide and that he hated drugs. The prosecution played the 911 tape and on the tape Kristin seems to have been administering CPR to Greg. According to the prosecution, Rossum killed her husband to keep him from telling her bosses that she was having an affair with the chief toxicologist, Robertson, and that she was using methamphetamine that she stole from the coroner's lab. According to Rossum's VONS card history, she had purchased a single rose herself. In November 2002, Kristin was found guilty of murder. On December 12, 2002 Kristin Rossum was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility for parole and was taken back to the San Diego jail before she could be transferred to the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla, the largest women's correctional facility in the United States. At her sentencing, the judge ordered Rossum to pay a $10,000 fine.
In 2006, Greg de Villers' family sued Rossum in a wrongful-death suit and asked a San Diego jury to grant millions in punitive damages. It was also because the family did not want Rossum to sell her story to producers or publishers. The jury awarded the de Villers' family more than $100 million in punitive damages, twice the amount the family had requested. John Gomez, the lawyer for the de Villers family, said that the punitive award may be the largest awarded in the state against an individual defendant.[2] A judge later reduced the punitive damages award from $104.5 million to $14.5 million.[3]
In September 2010 a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that Rossum’s lawyers bungled her defense at the trial by not challenging the prosecution’s contention that her husband died from an overdose of the drug. The judges said that the defense should have tested de Villers’ autopsy samples for metabolites of fentanyl, which the body produces when the liver processes the drug. If no metabolites were found, it would show de Villers had not ingested fentanyl before his death, refuting the core of the prosecution’s case, the judges wrote. Instead, it would have raised the possibility that the fentanyl in his system was the result of contamination at the San Diego County Medical Examiner’s Office, they said. An expert Rossum hired as she appealed her conviction said the extremely high levels of fentanyl in de Villers system were inconsistent with other evidence in the case. Two other drugs were also found in de Villiers at the time of his death, clonazepam and oxycodone. While they were not measured in amounts where each would be fatal, the judges said there was testimony during Rossum’s trial that when taken in combination the drugs multiply the effects of each other. If he didn’t ingest the fentanyl while he was alive, having the two other drugs in combination would provide an alternative explanation of de Villers’ death for the defense, the court said. All of Rossums appeals in state court failed so she then turned to the federal court.[4]
On September 13, 2011, the U.S. Court of Appeals withdrew its opinion and replaced it with a one-paragraph statement that under a new U.S. Supreme Court precedent Rossum's petition was denied.[5]
Rossum was featured in an episode of the Oxygen Channel true crime show, Snapped, in E! Entertainment's "Women Who Kill," on Investigation Discovery's "Deadly Women" and in CBS News 48 Hours TV series: American Beauty - Was It Murder Or Suicide?, Caitlin Rother, who was interviewed for the four shows, wrote Poisoned Love, a book about the case: ISBN 0786017147. Another book was also written on this case by John Glatt, Deadly American Beauty: ISBN 0312984197.