was taking a full load, earning an A in chemistry, an A-in philosophy, a B+ in biology, and a B-in physics. That summer she took two more courses, getting an A in calculus and an A-in oral communication.
Kristin impressed her chemistry professors at SDSU as being one of their best and brightest. Professor Dale Chatfield, chairman of the Chemistry Department, had Kristin in several of his classes.
“She excelled at everything she did,” he recalled. “She was really a perfectionist, as far as I can tell.”
When she worked in groups of three, he noticed that she “took over and told everyone else what to do,” which he attributed to her higher level of experience. Nonetheless, he noted, she still got along well with the other students. She was meticulous and thorough.
Kristin studied forensics, which included such topics as how to identify mysterious white powders at crime scenes. This was not an uncommon sight at crime scenes in San Diego County at the time, when the region was known as the meth capital of the world.
In forensics classes, Chatfield explained, “You’re trying to recreate any evidence you can from the scene of a crime. So you go into a place. You collect fingerprints. You collect dust. Sherlock Holmes business.”
Kristin was also in Professor Bill Tong’s chemistry lab.
“She was one of the best students we’ve ever seen,” said Tong, who served as a mentor to Kristin.
From the fall of 1996 until she finished her coursework about three years later, Kristin earned almost all A’s or A-’s. When she was awarded her bachelor’s degree with a distinction in chemistry on December 29, 1999, her transcript showed a cumulative grade point average of 3.83. That average would have been lower if the Redlands coursework had been included as required. An average of 3.8 is required to graduate summa cum laude from SDSU.
Greg’s academic performance at UCSD wasn’t nearly as good as Kristin’s. When he graduated with a degree in biology in 1997, his overall grade point average was 2.47. The Rossums didn’t attend Greg’s graduation, but they took him and Kristin out to dinner to celebrate.
In the weeks after the ceremony, Greg spent hours on the phone talking with the Rossums about his career options. The Rossums saw themselves as surrogate parents to Greg, and they bought him his first business suit.
It is unclear when, but Greg returned to work at the legal services company, which changed its name from Rush Legal to XL, until he got a lab assistant position at a pharmaceutical drug research firm, Biophysica, Inc. Greg told Constance that he found the lab environment boring and smelly. He wanted to work outdoors. Constance told him to follow his heart, so Greg applied for a position with the California Department of Fish and Game in the summer of 1997. Five months later, he received a notice that he failed the qualifying exam.
In August 1998, Greg was hired by BD Pharmingen, a company with four hundred employees. Tina Jones, the human relations executive who gave him the job, later described him as “an extremely nice young man…. He had a very bright future ahead of him.”
Greg started as an administrative assistant to Stefan Gruenwald, the vice president of research and development. Greg was so driven, intelligent, and organized, he exceeded all of Gruenwald’s expectations. He was promoted to a position where he issued licenses for medical research products the company developed and sold.
Greg was also well liked by his coworkers, who saw him as an even-tempered, low-key, and friendly guy.
“This was a very well-thought-out, well-balanced, got-it-together type of a fellow,” said one colleague, Eldon Horn.
When Gruenwald left Pharmingen to form Orbigen, he and Greg stayed in touch by phone and e-mail.
In June 1997, Kristin answered an ad at SDSU for a student worker in the county Medical Examiner’s Office’s toxicology lab.
Kristin interviewed with Frank Barnhart, the supervising toxicologist. He’d started working there twenty-nine years earlier, doing urine drug screens, and inched his way up the ladder to help run the lab. Barnhart had testified in court many times to validate his lab’s test results and was somewhat of a meth expert. But since the office didn’t run any type of background check on applicants, he had no reason to ask Kristin about her drug history. If he had known about it, he said later, he never would have hired her.
That’s because forensic toxicologists’ jobs revolve around drugs, including those that cause death, alone or in combination, and are difficult to detect. While Kristin worked at the Medical Examiner’s Office, the lab’s shelves were filled with bottles and vials known as drug standards, which were purchased in a synthetic form for testing purposes. She and the other employees also had access to illegal street drugs and paraphernalia that Medical Examiner’s investigators impounded from death scenes to help identify the cause of death.
The investigators often collected prescription drug vials and bags of unidentified white powder, which, in San Diego, generally turned out to be methamphetamine or cocaine. They also removed glass pipes, straws, syringes, and any other medications that family members said they didn’t need anymore. Unidentified white powder wasn’t tested, but if the cause of death was later determined to be a methamphetamine or cocaine overdose, a toxicologist could call up the case number on a computer to see what was impounded.
Investigators placed the impounded items in evidence envelopes, which were dropped through a slot in a locked box back at the office. When the box got too full, someone could have theoretically reached into the open slot and pulled out an envelope.
But the easiest point of access came when the contents of the box were emptied into a large plastic bag and then moved to the toxicology lab’s Balance Room, which was left open during the day. The room was locked at night, but all the toxicologists knew where the keys were kept, and the office had no electronic system to monitor employees’ comings and goings. Eventually, the envelopes were transferred to lockers, from which the controlled narcotics were removed and sent to the Sheriff’s Department to be destroyed.
Barnhart was impressed by Kristin’s resume and transcript from SDSU, which showed she had not only taken many chemistry classes, but had done very well in them. He recommended she be hired, and she got the job. Of all the interns Barnhart had worked with over the years, Kristin turned out to be his favorite.
“In that twenty-nine years, we had some incredibly talented people, but Kristin was the best,” he said. “She stood out in terms of her ability to understand what you needed.”
He became a mentor to her and considered her a close friend, nicknaming her “Lil Bandit” because she did her work so well and so fast.
By 1999 Barnhart wasn’t happy working at the Medical Examiner’s Office. He’d felt compelled to express his disapproval to Dr. Brian Blackbourne, the chief medical examiner, for hiring Blackbourne’s girlfriend as the office operations manager, and Barnhart felt his remarks ended up costing him a promotion to head up the lab. After Blackbourne appointed someone else, Barnhart grew even more frustrated because the new guy kept asking him how to do things.
Barnhart finally decided he needed to leave, so he took a cut in pay to become a criminologist at the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department’s crime lab that March.
He and Kristin stayed in touch by e-mail, and a couple of months later, he asked her to come meet some of his new colleagues. He’d always been so impressed with her work that he urged his new colleagues to try to find her a job.
At the time, the
