the receiver. Michael’s face went gray, and he took the phone into the next room.
“Stay the hell away from my wife,” Greg told him.
Michael had told Nicole that he was attracted to someone in the office. But even after the phone call, Michael told her the same story that Kristin told Greg: The two of them were having an emotional relationship, but they weren’t physically involved.
However, the e-mails the two lovers exchanged reflected a connection that was all encompassing.
“You are my love, my perfect match, the one I see beside me at the altar, at home, holding my children, waking beside me in the morning, and kissing good night,” Michael wrote on July 23.
Later that summer, Kristin told student worker Tom Horn she wasn’t happy in her marriage and wasn’t sure her husband was the right man for her. She asked Horn if he knew of any apartments available in Mission Hills, but she said nothing about having an affair with their boss.
For the first time ever, Greg told his brothers that he and Kristin were going to have to back out of plans to go to Mammoth over Labor Day. They didn’t have the money for it. Greg apologized to nonfamily members that he and Kristin had to cancel at the last minute because of their work schedules. He was working at a start-up company, he explained, and it was a bad time to take time off. Kristin also had a work project that needed her full attention through September.
In August or September, Greg’s high school friend Bill Leger came to San Diego with his fiancée and went to the zoo with his parents. They invited Kristin and Greg to come along, and the two couples made plans to get together over Thanksgiving for a ski trip to Tahoe. Sometime after that, Leger and Greg talked on the phone about the ski trip, and Greg told him he was thinking about buying a house. The lease for their apartment was about to expire, and it was the last one that the university would renew since he wasn’t a UCSD student anymore. By the end of the year, he told Leger, he and Kristin should be completely out of debt.
Kristin saw her friend Melissa Prager once in March 2000 and several times over the summer. The March rendezvous was at Miracles Café in Encinitas, where Prager was excited to spend some alone time with her friend for the first time since she’d met Greg. But Greg showed up, too.
Finally, in August, Kristin came alone. She and Prager had dinner in La Jolla and watched the sunset together, and Kristin said she’d been taking ballet lessons again. She seemed more relaxed, clearheaded, and healthy than Prager had ever seen her. Kristin glowed as she talked about this guy she’d met at work. Michael was her boss, she said, and he appreciated and respected her for her mind, her beauty, and her true spirit.
“She was definitely in love with him,” Prager said. “You could see it in her eyes.”
Kristin told Prager that she wanted to tell Greg about the affair but didn’t know how to break it to him. Their relationship was so fragile. Kristin said she was terrified that Greg would get depressed and upset if she tried to talk to him about her feelings, but she knew she had to.
Kristin said she and Michael were both confused about what to do with their respective marriages, but she was thinking she should go to counseling with Greg or spend some time away from him so she could decide whether she ultimately wanted to stay married.
Sometime after Prager moved to the Bay Area in September, Kristin called to say that she’d told Greg about the affair, but he wanted her to stay and try to work things out.
As always, Prager encouraged Kristin to follow her heart. “I could never understand why she didn’t want to get a divorce,” she said.
Kristin asked if the studio at the Pragers’ house in Encinitas was available. Prager said Kristin also asked if she would consider moving down to San Diego so they could share an apartment together.
On September 21, Kristin took a trip to Tijuana, where she saw Dr. Victor M. Martinez. He wrote her a prescription in Spanish for Somacid, a muscle relaxant that many American doctors won’t prescribe because it can be addictive. He also wrote her a prescription for a drug called Asenlix in Mexico and Clobenzorex in the United States, a diet pill that metabolizes like amphetamine, or speed. The drug literature says it’s not intended for people with drug or alcohol addictions.
Kristin later admitted that by taking the diet pills, she had gone into relapse. “Relapse” is a therapeutic term that encompasses the problems, thoughts, and actions that lead recovering addicts to begin taking their drug of choice again. This combination of factors works in a chain reaction, similar to a line of dominos falling, one at a time, until the last one knocks the addict down.
The week before Kristin and Michael left for the October SOFT conference, they each submitted travel request and expense forms to the office administrator, Lloyd Amborn, with the estimated cost of their trip. Amborn said nothing of their plans to leave San Diego on Saturday, September 30, two days before the conference started, and to return from Milwaukee on Saturday, October 7, the day after it ended. Each made a notation that personal time would be included in the trip.
Sometime before the trip, Amborn confronted Michael about the rumored affair for the third time, and Michael continued to deny it. So, Amborn approved the expense forms for meals, separate hotel rooms for Kristin and Michael, airline tickets, a shuttle, and registration, which cost taxpayers a total of $2,691. It’s unclear whether Amborn knew until afterwards that the two of them planned to stay at the Inn Towne Hotel, a different hotel from the one hosting the conference, the Hyatt Regency.
On September 22, Kristin e-mailed her old friend, Frank Barnhart, at the sheriff’s crime lab. She told him how busy it had been over at the “house of death” and asked if he still intended to attend the conference. She told him that she and Michael were going to arrive on Saturday, and that she was scheduled to give a fifteen-minute presentation on a strychnine death case the following Friday.
“I’m petrified, but I’ll get over it,” she wrote, signing the note with the nickname he’d given her, “Lil Bandit.”
Barnhart could not believe that the county was paying to send her to an out-of-town conference. In the twenty-nine years he worked there, he couldn’t think of a single time they’d paid for him to do that. He teased her about that over the phone, so she e-mailed him to ask if he still loved her. Yes, he wrote back, he did. Barnhart didn’t understand why Kristin was going to Milwaukee on Saturday, since the conference wouldn’t really get going until late Sunday or early Monday morning.
That same day Greg e-mailed Kristin with some suggestions on how to use computer graphics to help illustrate the chemical structure of strychnine for her presentation. He seemed eager to help make it easier for her since she’d worked so hard on it. A week later—the day before she was to leave on her trip—Greg e-mailed her with an 800 number she could use to call home while she was away. He wished her luck on her “practice talk” and asked her to call and let him know how it went.
Before Michael left for the trip, he and Nicole decided to separate. On October 5, Nicole wrote him a letter to mark the start of their separation, which began the day he left for the SOFT conference. Assuming that he’d be feeling a similar sense of loss, she told him she knew what he’d be going through during his week away.
After speaking with his sister the previous week, she told him she now understood that he had modeled their marriage on his parents’ and his behavior on his father’s. As Nicole saw it, their marriage would be destroyed if he did not come to terms with a few things. Just like his father, Michael seemed unable to commit to his wife. He didn’t know how to be in love over the long term because he was always
