heard. For one, Ralph said he hit Kristin with an open hand, while Kristin claimed it was a closed fist. Still, Horowitz didn’t see any basis for the child-abuse claim.
After the ordeal, Constance and Ralph took Kristin in for a full physical. They told the doctor about finding the glass pipe, and he gave her a good talking-to about using drugs. Then, life in the Rossum household seemed to calm down for a while.
“We thought we had the problem licked at that point,” Ralph said.
Like all the other seniors at Claremont High, Kristin went to a photo studio for her senior yearbook portrait. The boys posed in tuxedo shirts and bow ties, and the girls wore black, V-necked formal dresses. Kristin’s photo showed no sign of drug use. She seemed healthy, wearing a string of pearls, her hair long and very blond. She looked attractive and comfortable with herself, just like the model she was trained to be. Kristin also sang with the A Cappella Singers Choir that year, posing for the yearbook with the other students in a long dark dress, the pearls, and some tasteful makeup.
But that fall, her parents began to notice the unwelcome reminders of her troubled past: she was picking at her hands again, she was losing weight, and her grades weren’t as good. They definitely knew something was wrong when they saw that she was doing poorly in calculus. Kristin had always been so good at math.
It’s typical for parents to feel sad, frustrated, helpless, and angry when they can’t fix their child’s drug problem, and the Rossums appeared to follow the norm.
“All this beauty and talent and wasting it all on people who were unworthy of her,” Ralph later recalled thinking.
This would become a sad refrain throughout Kristin’s life.
On January 14, 1994, Kristin came home from school around 3 P.M., acting erratically. Constance suspected her daughter was using methamphetamine again and felt compelled to confront Kristin about it. But that only escalated the situation.
Kristin started to touch her tank top protectively, so Constance asked if she had drugs on her. Kristin became defensive and tried to run away. Constance grabbed her, reached into her shirt, and pulled a glass pipe out of her bra. She was horrified. She didn’t know what else to do but call the police and report that her daughter was under the influence of drugs. She’d hoped they were done with this mess.
Because Officer Horowitz had dealt with the Rossum family before, he took the call. When he arrived at the house on Weatherford Court, Constance seemed to be at her wit’s end as she handed him the pipe. She also handed him a few other things she’d found in Kristin’s belongings—some Ex-Lax, a small mirror, and some razor blades.
“Kristin has had a drug problem for the past several years,” she told him. “The episodes with her friends using the credit cards and the checks and taking the car have caused us to realize how extensive her involvement was. We have tried doctors and therapy, but nothing so far has worked. This incident is the last straw, and something needs to be done about this.”
After talking with a distraught Constance, the officer went upstairs, where the door to Kristin’s room was ajar. Kristin was inside, sobbing, her nose running and her eyes red from crying. He asked what was going on, but she didn’t answer him. The floor of the room was covered with papers and clothes strewn about. She was fidgety and obviously distressed, unable to complete a sentence or express a clear thought.
He did a quick physical examination, shining a penlight into her eyes, which did nothing to shrink her dilated pupils. She seemed dry-mouthed, and her pulse was going at a rate of 118 beats a minute. He asked if she’d smoked speed before going to school.
Yes, Kristin admitted, she’d gotten some drugs and the pipe from a boy the night before at Claremont High, where she’d gone to watch a performance of the musical Oklahoma.
“He owed me some money, so he paid me back with the drugs and pipe,” she told Horowitz.
Kristin said she’d smoked at the high school that night and again the next morning in her bedroom before going to school. She took the pipe and the remainder of the drugs with her to school and brought them home again. She told him she used the drugs to help her study and with “other activities.”
Horowitz placed Kristin under arrest for possession of paraphernalia and for being under the influence of a controlled substance. He snapped handcuffs on her wrists, read her her rights, and took her away in his squad car. He got the feeling that Kristin’s family was more concerned about the image problem her drug addiction caused than about the drug problem itself.
At the city jail, the seventeen-year-old was fingerprinted, booked, photographed and ordered to produce a urine sample. A marked contrast to the pretty pictures Kristin took as a child model, her first booking photo shows her with her eyes closed, grimacing and crying.
Since Kristin was still a minor, Horowitz had a choice of moving her to Juvenile Hall within six hours of the arrest or releasing her to her parents. He chose the latter. Kristin was placed in a holding cell for about two hours until her parents came to get her.
Generally, he explained later, juveniles are released to a parent or guardian unless they are habitual offenders or have committed a violent crime. He was unable to explain why nothing ever came of the arrest, saying that county probation officials had jurisdiction over her case. Perhaps, he said, it fell through the cracks because she was so close to turning eighteen. At the time, he’d hoped that the court would compel her to attend a drug rehab program and get some help.
“She had every resource and ability through her family to get through life…but again, methamphetamine is a very, very pernicious drug, and you don’t lose the taste once you cross that line,” he said.
This time the Rossums decided to try something different. What Kristin needed, they concluded, was a change of environment. Surely, it would help to get her away from her drug friends at Claremont High. So, they had her graduate early and enrolled her at the University of Redlands, about thirty miles from home. She took only two courses her first semester there, but getting mumps and chicken pox didn’t help.
Since Ralph was teaching a course at Redlands that semester, he drove her door to door so he could monitor her comings and goings. The two of them coordinated a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule and tried to rebuild their tattered relationship in the car driving to and from school each day. It worked. They soon recaptured the rapport they’d had when Ralph drove her to ballet rehearsal in Anaheim. At night, after school, the two of them attended twelve-step family-group therapy meetings in Chino, a city southeast of Claremont, where no one knew them.
Kristin dated Chris Elliott for a couple of months in 1994, before he went off to Johns Hopkins University. To him, she seemed to be trying to figure out what made her happy, not her parents. Elliott didn’t think Kristin was that interested in him romantically, but he never had the impression that she was doing drugs.
“She seemed like an incredibly motivated person, very disciplined,” he said.
For their final date, they went surfing together at Dana Point Sands. Elliott was still a beginner, but he was hoping this would strengthen the bond between them. Unfortunately, his plan went awry. Nothing seemed to go right.
First, the waves were much bigger than he expected. He offered to help Kristin, but that only seemed to insult her because she was so athletic. Meanwhile, the waves kept getting bigger. They paddled out, trying to get beyond them. Kristin tried to catch one particularly large wave, but it crashed over her. All but her feet disappeared into the wall of water, her board shooting into the monster and out again. She seemed
