Elliott said.
After surfing, Elliott thought they could try roller-blading so Kristin could regain her self-esteem. At one point, they stopped skating, and for no apparent reason, she fell. On the way back to the car, she fell again. From there, they went to a party, and when the date was over, they didn’t speak to each other for two years.
That summer the sores on Kristin’s hands and face healed. Ralph saw no other signs that the drugs were back, and he thought she was over the worst of it. She was spending time with friends he and Constance liked, and they thought it would be good for her to live in the dorms the fall semester.
They didn’t sense anything unusual when they saw their daughter at Thanksgiving. In fact, they didn’t know anything was wrong until Kristin disappeared one day in December 1994.
Chapter 3
Kristin was nowhere to be found the day her mother and two brothers came to pick her up from the University of Redlands for Christmas vacation. There was no note in her dorm room and no clue as to her whereabouts. Only a ringing phone.
Constance Rossum picked it up.
“This is Patrick,” the man said. “Is Kristin there?”
Constance felt a surge of anger as she recognized the name of her daughter’s drug dealer.
“I know who you are, and I know what you’ve done. Now stop it,” Constance snapped and hung up.
All she wanted was for these predators to stop trying to persuade Kristin to buy crystal methamphetamine. Then, maybe Kristin could have a chance to get her life back on track, the family could return to its normal routine, and the nightmare of the past two years would end.
It was December 17, 1994. And that nightmare was far from over.
Kristin’s boyfriend, Teddy Maya, also came to the dorm that day to pick her up. When he found her room empty, he figured she’d already left with her parents.
It had been a regular routine that fall semester for him to make the drive from UCLA, where he was going to school, to Redlands on weekends. He would collect Kristin from her dorm, they would go out on a date, and he would drop her at her parents’ home in Claremont afterward.
They’d been dating since the summer, when they got reacquainted through Kristin’s friend Melissa Prager, whose parents knew the Rossums. She was dating a friend of Maya’s. Kristin’s parents liked Maya and Prager, and thought they were good influences on their daughter.
But Maya’s stepmother, Karen Greenbaum-Maya, a psychologist in Claremont, wasn’t so sure about Kristin. For one thing, Maya’s stepmother didn’t like the way Kristin always asked Maya to drive her places. Greenbaum-Maya held her tongue until Kristin asked Maya to shuttle her around while he was still heavily medicated from having his wisdom teeth removed.
“That finally got through to him,” she said. “…I really didn’t care for her calling on Teddy for everything. Even if you’re eighteen, that’s really just not a good relationship.”
She also didn’t like the fact that Kristin’s parents allowed Maya to transport her to and from school on weekends, which she saw as a parental duty.
Greenbaum-Maya repeatedly asked her stepson to bring Kristin by the house. The couple did stop by one Friday evening for a few minutes to pick up a jacket for Maya, but that didn’t allow for any meaningful conversation.
Greenbaum-Maya watched her stepson agonize over whether to wear a jacket or tie to Thanksgiving dinner at the Rossums’, where propriety seemed to be the order of the day. Apparently, Kristin had expressed concern that he might not dress up enough for the occasion.
“That seemed odd to me,” Greenbaum-Maya said.
Finally, Greenbaum-Maya, his parents, and Kristin all had breakfast together one Sunday. Greenbaum-Maya tried to get to know Kristin, but she didn’t open up much.
“She wasn’t going to let anything out,” Greenbaum-Maya said. “She wasn’t going to show us or tell us anything. She was guarded, and I couldn’t help but notice.”
The day after Maya’s failed attempt to pick up Kristin for Christmas vacation, Ralph Rossum called the house and Greenbaum-Maya answered the phone. Ralph demanded to know where his daughter was.
“I don’t know,” Greenbaum-Maya said. “We thought you or your wife had picked her up yesterday.”
Ralph’s voice softened, saying they, too, had gone to get her, but she wasn’t there. “We thought maybe—” he said, his voice trailing off.
Greenbaum-Maya didn’t much like Ralph’s tone and didn’t think she or her stepson had done anything to deserve it. But when Ralph asked if she would call him if she heard anything, she said yes.
Kristin left the Redlands campus that morning because she couldn’t face Teddy Maya or her mother. There would be hell to pay once her parents learned that she’d started smoking meth again. Plus, with an embarrassingly low grade point average of 1.67, Kristin had received a notice that she was on academic probation.
She’d gotten away from her druggie friends that spring, after her parents enrolled her at Redlands. She’d stayed clean over the summer, often double-dating with Melissa Prager and her boyfriend.
Kristin was pleased to have her parents’ approval again, and they, in turn, were thrilled to have their old Kristin back. So thrilled, they let her move into the dorm at Redlands, where she decided to take a full load of courses that fall. After struggling with a meth addiction since her junior year, it felt great to be drug free.
But that didn’t last long. Kristin ran into a student who’d been in her calculus class the previous semester and, unbeknownst to her, was a fellow meth user. The friend offered her some at a party, and she took it. The problem was, it left her wanting more. So, she started using again. Gradually at first, once a week, then maybe every few days. She figured she could handle smoking just enough to help her study harder, to earn the good grades she used to get, so she could please her parents and feel good about herself again. But the cravings grew stronger, and things began to snowball.
By midsemester, Kristin was using every day. As Christmas vacation approached, she knew she couldn’t let her parents see her like this again. They would be so disappointed. She knew it would upset them, but she decided she’d better go before her mother came to pick her up.
Kristin decided to go visit a male friend in Hemet. On Christmas Eve, her parents received a call from a family in Newport, telling them she was okay. Then, on Christmas night, she called Teddy Maya from a motel in Redlands and asked him to join her.
Kristin looked bad, nothing like her usual attractive self, and she seemed edgy after not sleeping in who knows how long. The next morning, Maya got out of the shower and found she’d emptied his wallet and left. Again, not even a note to say where she’d gone.
Kristin felt she still needed more time to get her act together. So she boarded an Amtrak train and got off at the end of the line in downtown San Diego. She transferred to the slow-rolling red trolley and continued south.
At the first trolley stop in Chula Vista, there was a Motel 6 to the east, and beyond it, across the parking lot, a Best Western. To the west, with the Pacific Ocean as a backdrop, was a
