into the camera. She was simply beguiling.
On the back of the photo, along with her particulars, she was featured in five different poses, illustrating her versatility and ability to switch from mood to mood and from one outfit to another. She was goofy in one, serious or playful in the others, wearing a dark leotard and white tights, a sailor suit, or a button-up shirt with a sweater tied around her neck, clutching a handful of daises or holding a balloon on a string. In one shot, she feigned surprise as she pretended to read one of the Madeline children’s books, glasses perched on her head, her mouth and eyes agape.
The pretty, towheaded girl worked as a model for Marshall Field’s, Sears, McDonald’s, and Montgomery Ward. She was a natural. She wore a standard size 6X dress, and the camera loved her.
Kristin gave up modeling for ballet the following year, when the family moved to Bethesda, Maryland, and her father took a job as a deputy director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice. He worked for the Bureau—the national repository for crime statistics collected by government and law enforcement agencies—in 1983 and 1984, during the Reagan administration.
Six-year-old Kristin began training at the Maryland Youth Ballet Academy, where she proved to be quite a talented little dancer. She was chosen for a walk-on role as a page in the Joffrey Ballet’s performance of Romeo and Juliet, reveling in the honor of being backstage at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Years later she wrote in her diary that the powerful Prokofiev score touched her to the core and remained one of her favorites.
“There is so much passion in his notes,” she wrote.
Around that time, she also began to discover a love for science. And the academic pressures soon began to mount.
Ralph Rossum relocated to Claremont, California, in 1984, when he was granted tenure as a faculty member at Claremont McKenna College. He stayed for one semester, then spent some time working on a grant in Washington, D.C., where his wife, Constance, was a marketing manager for the Marriott Corporation. By June 1985, the family had reunited in Claremont, a small enclave of primarily white, highly educated residents. This community would serve as the family’s base in the years to come.
The fourteen-square-mile city is located about thirty miles east of downtown Los Angeles. In 2000 it had a population of 34,000 and a median income of about $70,000. Known for its tree-lined streets and small-town feel, Claremont generally houses about five thousand students and professors associated with the eight institutions of higher learning in the area. Of those, seven are within the city’s limits and are collectively its largest employer: Claremont McKenna College, Pomona College, Pitzer College, Scripps College, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont Graduate University, and the Claremont School of Theology. Azusa Pacific University, a small evangelical Christian university where Constance Rossum was director of nonprofit graduate programs and a professor of marketing and management, is ten miles away.
One resident once likened Claremont to the community depicted in the movie Pleasantville, where residents live a 1950s lifestyle in black and white until two modern teenagers introduce art, literature, sex, independent thought, and a symbolic sense of color to a town previously unaware that life existed beyond its boundaries.
“People feel reasonably safe here,” said Lieutenant Stan Van Horn, who headed the Claremont Police Department’s detective bureau in 2004.
Van Horn said the city’s crime rate was pretty low, averaging one homicide every four or five years, which left police officers with plenty of time to deal with low-level crimes like vandalism and high school kids partying on weekends. His department’s philosophy on crime fighting was as follows: “If you can take care of the small stuff, it doesn’t develop into larger problems.”
Kristin’s parents passed their work ethic onto their children and drew them into the academic world early on.
In the summer of 1988, Kristin posed with her professor father for the cover of Claremont McKenna’s campus magazine, Profile. With their heads together and her arms wrapped around his neck, they looked happy, almost serene. But unlike his daughter, Ralph did not grow up around parents with such academic drive, let alone the money to pay for it.
Raised on a small dairy farm in Alexandria, Minnesota, Ralph was the only member of his extended family to graduate from college. His father’s education ended with the eighth grade, and his mother’s with high school. Since his parents weren’t able to pay his tuition, he had to qualify for scholarships and work to make up the difference. In 1968, he graduated summa cum laude from Concordia College, a four-year liberal arts institution in Minnesota associated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
The first academic job listed on his ten-page curriculum vitae is instructor of behavioral sciences in the City Colleges of Chicago’s Department of Police Academy Services, where he started working in 1970. He earned his master’s degree from the University of Chicago in 1971, married Constance in 1972, and by 1973 had obtained his Ph.D. Over the course of his career, he held high-ranking academic and administrative positions in California, Louisiana, Iowa, Illinois, Virginia, and Tennessee.
In 2004 Ralph was still a professor of political philosophy and American constitutionalism at Claremont McKenna, where he also served as director of its Rose Institute of State and Local Government.
Ralph appears to have taken the academic community’s motto—“publish or perish”—to heart. In 2004, his curriculum vitae included seven books he wrote or coauthored, as well as dozens of articles and book chapters. A number of his writings focus on the jurisprudence of Antonin Scalia, a conservative Republican on the U.S. Supreme Court and a Reagan appointee. Ralph team-taught a class with Scalia at the University of Aix-Marseille III Law School in Aix-en-Provence, France.
Constance, who was raised in Indiana, was no slouch herself. She studied radio and television journalism as an undergraduate and journalism again in graduate school at Indiana University in Bloomington. She earned a master’s degree in management from Claremont Graduate University, where she went on to earn her Ph.D. in education and management.
With her background, Constance was able to straddle the worlds of academia and business, starting her own consulting firm, Management Directives, in 1991, after working twenty years in advertising, marketing/management, and consumer research for major companies, such as Procter & Gamble, United Airlines, McDonald’s, and the Marriott Corporation. She has taught at various public and private colleges, including Azusa Pacific University; the University of California, Riverside; and California State University at San Bernardino. She also has been involved with a New York–based group called the Leader to Leader Institute, which helps nonprofit groups perform effectively. She and her husband have coauthored books and articles on topics such as constitutional law.
By the time Kristin was nine or ten, she was taking her dance classes seriously. As the years went on, she split her after-school time between ballet and homework, earning straight A’s.
Her bent toward perfectionism also influenced her dancing. She wrote in her diary years later that at twelve or thirteen, she began to feel “hypercritical” of her abilities, her technique, and her own physical limitations. “I wanted so badly to be the best—the prima ballerina,” she wrote. “The girls with high arches, long legs, and a flexible back…[They] had physical traits I so desperately wanted.”
She’d just turned fourteen and was a freshman in high school when her talents had progressed enough to land her a coveted role in The Nutcracker with the Forum Dance Ensemble in neighboring Orange County. She was supposed to be an understudy, but when the star ballerina got sick, Kristin ended up with the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy, dancing with a professional cavalier from the Houston Ballet.
Her
