closing words came slowly, his voice thick with emotion. “I just can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with her.”
Finally, Bertrand, who’d had a bit too much champagne, gave the final touching toast featured on the homemade wedding video.
“Kristin is a beautiful woman inside and out, and I couldn’t think of a better person to have with my brother. I’m so proud to have you as a sister now and to have an extension of our family here in the United States. It’s wonderful.”
Bertrand, turning to Greg, teased his older brother about the deep and sincere feelings he had for Kristin, admitting that when he and Jerome ribbed Greg about the relationship, it was only out of love.
“Sometimes we just think we’re losing you,” he said. “I can only hope that I’m so in love with a girl like you are when I get married, because it’s really beautiful, and I can tell you’re totally infatuated. As much as we give you a hard time about it, we really think it’s beautiful…. I don’t know if you understand how well you complement each other. No one’s perfect individually, but, Greg, you do such a good job of bringing out the best in Kristin, and she does a wonderful job [of doing the same with you]…. May God bless your relationship forever and ever.”
Chapter 6
During the next six months, Greg and Kristin seemed happy. As a wedding gift, Greg’s family paid for them to honeymoon at Whistler-Blackcomb Mountains, a vacation area north of Vancouver. The newlyweds started talking about having children.
“Mom, I’m going off birth control,” Constance recalled Kristin telling her, “and what happens will happen.”
Greg had already come up with a name for the baby if they had a girl: Isabelle. Constance suggested Marie Isabelle, after Greg’s mother.
But the marital bliss didn’t last long.
In January 2000, Kristin started complaining to Constance during their phone conversations and shopping trips that Greg was getting more clingy and controlling, and that she felt like a bird in a cage. Kristin wrote in her diary about one such shopping excursion in La Jolla, where she and Constance engaged in some heart-to-heart “mother-daughter bonding.” She wrote that she never felt very close to her mother, but she was trying to get closer. It was a very emotional afternoon.
One night, when her parents came down to San Diego to visit, Kristin showed up alone, saying she’d left Greg home in bed because he wasn’t feeling well.
“He seemed…not robust,” Constance said, “though he’d never really been robust.”
At one point, Constance said, Greg wondered if he might have chronic fatigue syndrome. However, he never mentioned any such thing to his own family, who thought he was quite healthy.
None of the negative sentiments Kristin confided to Constance showed up in the e-mails she regularly exchanged with Greg. Oftentimes, Greg would make a suggestion and ask her what she wanted to do for lunch, dinner, or the weekend. He didn’t dictate what they were doing. In turn, she would often ask him to make decisions for them.
On January 14, 2000, for example, she told him she’d picked up her transcript from SDSU and was excited to learn she was graduating summa cum laude with distinction in chemistry. She suggested going out for a celebratory beer or renting some movies, but asked him to choose their activities for the evening. She ended with, “Let me know the plans. Love you with all my heart, Wifey.”
It was apparent from the e-mails that Greg liked to spend his spare time with her and to plan different activities for them. And it appeared to be mutual. Kristin seemed to be trying hard to please him as well.
“I’m going to go to the grocery store this afternoon. Any requests?” she wrote on February 22. “…Your wish is my command.”
Kristin made lunches and tins of biscotti for Greg to take to work, often checking with him about what he wanted to eat for dinner and offering him a choice of entrees. She obviously liked to cook them nice meals, anything from salmon to stir-fried chicken, sun-dried tomato cream pasta with steamed artichokes, shrimp, pork tenderloin, or steak.
Frequently, they’d discuss renting a video or two to watch the same night. American Beauty was one of Kristin’s favorites, and she’d seen it three or four times. Greg liked basic guy movies, but he also enjoyed more thoughtful films, such as A River Runs Through it, Legends of the Fall, or Shakespeare in Love.
The e-mails they exchanged rarely had sexual overtones, although Kristin and Greg often said “I love you” and gave each other pet names like “Mr. Big,” “Sweetie,” “Dolling,” “Gregie,” “Wifey, “Bunny Kristin,” and “Kristinie.”
But, in general, the gist of most of their messages was pretty mundane. They discussed emptying the dishwasher, dropping off the rent check, getting the car fixed, or planning a trip to visit the in-laws. The only notable exception was a series of quick notes that Kristin started on February 2, sending Greg a “giant, wet, slobbery kiss” and telling him she loved him. Greg said he didn’t usually like those wet kisses, but by e-mail, it wasn’t that bad. Kristin offered a “soft, tender, gentle” kiss instead, and Greg said he especially liked those kinds of kisses.
Like best friends, they shared their good news with each other and celebrated one another’s successes. While Kristin was waiting to hear whether she’d get a permanent job as a county toxicologist, she explored other career options, including the Navy’s engineering officer program. But on March 1, Kristin got her dream job. She sent an e-mail to Greg—written in capital letters with two lines of exclamation points—to tell him how excited she was to get a job offer as a permanent toxicologist at the Medical Examiner’s Office.
“Yippee for me!” Kristin wrote.
“See, you are the best!” Greg replied.
A letter from Lloyd Amborn said her new job would officially start March 17, as long as she passed a law enforcement background investigation and a medical screening. The starting annual salary was $32,448, with a 3 percent raise scheduled to go into effect in July. If county officials ever did that background check, they wouldn’t have had access to her arrest in 1994 because she was under eighteen when it happened.
On May 22, when Greg was winding down at Pharmingen, Kristin wished him a good day in his last week before starting his new job at Orbigen.
“I’m so proud of you,” she wrote.
Many of Greg’s e-mails supported Constance’s claim that he was not in the best of health. He repeatedly mentioned feeling tired and sluggish, having a hard time getting out of bed, and being plagued by headaches.
“I hope my head is not pounding by the end of the day, though! Still feeling achy and sore in my muscles! I just need to get more rest,” he wrote on April 24.
Greg’s ailments continued throughout the summer. “I did not feel well this morning,” he wrote Kristin on the morning of July 7. “Feeling a little dizzy with a bad headache and also just feeling sick. It was something that seemed to hit me yesterday evening.”
Nonetheless, Greg usually tried to rally after work so he could go with Kristin to swing dance lessons or yoga class or to watch her take a ballet class.
At the same time Kristin was sending
