and told him there were leftovers in the fridge. Jones didn’t take Kristin’s diary, which an officer found lying on the coffee table.
Ralph Rossum arrived at the apartment around midnight, after stopping first at the hospital, where the social worker notified him of Greg’s death. He joined his daughter and Jones at the dining-room table.
Angie Wagner, an investigator colleague of Kristin’s at the Medical Examiner’s Office, showed up around 1 A.M. By then, Kristin was sitting on the couch in the living room. Wagner didn’t know her very well. In fact, she hadn’t even known Kristin was married. Wagner asked Kristin her own series of questions for her report.
After all the interviews were over, Michael left, and Ralph helped his daughter into his car to start the difficult drive back to Claremont. Kristin’s hair was a mess, her face was puffy, and her eyes were swollen from crying all night.
“I’ve lost my Greggy,” she told him. “I’ve lost my best friend.”
It was about 1:40 A.M. The investigators saw no reason to disbelieve Kristin’s story. There were no broken doorjambs and no sign of a struggle. They left the apartment, thinking it was probably a suicide.
Stefan Gruenwald arrived at Orbigen on Tuesday around 9:45 A.M. and scanned the parking lot for Greg’s car. It wasn’t there, so he headed inside, intending to call Greg’s apartment first thing. But before Gruenwald even got to his desk, his assistant told him there was a phone call for him in his office.
“Who is it?” he asked.
“I don’t know—a Mike Robertson,” she said. “It’s about Greg.”
Michael Robertson introduced himself as Kristin’s boss and told Gruenwald that something had happened to Greg. He gave Gruenwald the Rossums’ phone number in Claremont and asked him to call them right away. Michael said he couldn’t answer any questions and deferred to the Rossums.
Gruenwald called the number and got Constance Rossum. She said Greg had passed away the night before.
“What happened?” he asked, in disbelief.
Constance said Greg had experienced flu-like symptoms over the weekend, so he started taking cough syrup with some other drugs on Saturday and continued on Sunday. He must have had an allergic reaction, she said.
That sounded odd to Gruenwald, who’d earned a medical degree and a Ph.D. back in Frankfurt, Germany, and had spent some time doing forensics work. If someone was going to have an allergic reaction, he thought, it would develop right away, not two days later. He didn’t say anything to Constance at the time, but he thought the story sounded suspicious. Gruenwald called back a few hours later so he could talk to Kristin directly.
“I can’t believe what happened,” he said. “He was such a good person.”
Kristin was crying. She agreed and said she couldn’t believe it, either. But from there, he said, the story changed. This time Kristin described Greg’s death as more of an overdose, perhaps an accidental one.
An overdose? Gruenwald had never seen Greg drunk, let alone under the influence of any drugs. He wouldn’t even go near the lab at Orbigen, which was used mostly for cancer research. Gruenwald had once asked Greg to help clean out the storage room, where they kept hundreds of containers of chemicals, but he refused, saying he didn’t want to touch them. Greg was much more comfortable with the business side of things. So, for Gruenwald, the idea of Greg dying from a drug overdose, even accidentally, just didn’t ring true.
Jerome de Villers felt the same way. Greg wasn’t the kind of guy to do or take too much of anything, and now he was dead. It just didn’t make sense. His head was jumbled with questions: Where did Greg get the medication that killed him? Did Kristin give it to him? Did Kristin have drugs in the apartment? Were they were doing drugs together and something went wrong?
He dismissed the last scenario because he remembered it wasn’t that long ago that Greg wouldn’t even take the anti-histamines Marie offered him for his stuffy nose. Jerome, an insurance investigator, was determined to find out from Kristin—and whomever else he had to ask—exactly what happened to his brother and why.
Chapter 2
Kristin Margrethe Rossum, the eldest child of two driven and accomplished Midwestern parents, was raised with the pressures to perform and to succeed, almost from the very start. At an early age, they instilled in her the importance of image and appearances, which no doubt contributed to the perfectionism she described in her diary years later.
“It was always obvious to me that I was expected to do well in school,” she wrote. “I wanted to make my parents proud of me. I wanted to be the best in everything I did. I wanted to be perfect. For the most part, I excelled at everything I tried.”
But this sense of self-confidence was vulnerable to other forces at work in her psyche. At times, she wrote, she found herself “torn between sound, logical ideas and unreasonable, unattainable ideals. It’s an interesting internal conflict.”
That conflict was perpetuated by a persistent inner voice that criticized the way she looked in the mirror. She thought her legs and arms were strong and she had an attractive face. But her butt was rounder than she liked, her inner thighs were a little too flabby, her stomach wasn’t flat enough, and her arms could be more toned. “At 5 feet, 2 ¼ inches tall,” she wrote, she was “vertically challenged. OK, SHORT!!!”
“I continue to feel dissatisfied with my body, because I don’t think it’s perfect,” she wrote. But, she added, “I guess that my belief is that it is within my power to control the shape of my body. Therefore, if I am dissatisfied with my body, it is only the result of my own failings.”
It’s possible that this drive to be perfect grew so overwhelming at times that her only relief came from getting high. One friend said Kristin’s addictive relationship with methamphetamine may have been the only part of her life that Kristin saw as her own, separate from the parents who had such a strong influence on her. And people high on meth don’t think or act rationally.
Kristin came into the world on October 25, 1976, in Memphis, Tennessee, where her father was a political science professor and her mother was a marketing researcher. Kristin’s brother Brent was born in nearby Germantown about three years later, and Pierce, the youngest, about four years after that.
As Kristin and her brothers were growing up, they moved around the country as their parents’ careers progressed. Sometimes, Kristin said, her mother “would hold down the fort” when her father had to leave town for a professional opportunity elsewhere.
When Kristin was four or five, the Rossums moved to Wilmette, a suburb on the north shore of Chicago, where she saw a lot of her extended family. She and her mother would take the train into the city to watch a performance of The Nutcracker or go Christmas shopping at Marshall Field’s.
The focus on her outward appearance started when she was very young. When she was four, her parents arranged for Kristin to have a commercial head shot taken. The photographer sat her at the piano, laid one of her little hands on the keys, and told her to turn and smile. Her straight, shoulder-length blond hair was pulled back with a barrette, and she wore a tent dress with a tiny white collar and embroidered flowers that covered her legs. She was three feet three inches tall, weighed thirty-four pounds, and wore a size 4 to 4T dress.
In a head shot taken two years later, in December 1982, she’d
