Poisoned Love Read Free Page B

then, on Sunday night, Greg, still upset, had taken some of her old prescriptions to help him sleep. He’d been sleeping all day on Monday, in fact. Her lab was only fifteen minutes away, so she came home a number of times to check on him. Each time she’d found him breathing—a little loudly at times—but otherwise he seemed fine.
    Kristin said they’d had some soup together around lunchtime, and that’s when he told her he’d taken some of her old oxycodone and clonazepam. Oxycodone is a narcotic painkiller similar to Vicodin. Clonazepam, a sedative and also a narcotic, is classified as a date rape drug.
    She told Jones she’d run some errands after work and then came home to take a long bath and a shower. She was about to get into bed sometime around nine o’clock, when she leaned over to kiss Greg. His forehead was cold, and he wasn’t breathing, so she called 911. The dispatcher told her to pull Greg off the bed and onto the floor, so that he was flat on his back and she could start doing CPR. Kristin wasn’t sure she’d be strong enough to get him off the bed by herself, but the dispatcher insisted. She pulled back the covers so she could turn him sideways, and that’s when she saw the rose petals all over his chest and their wedding photo under his pillow.
    Jones asked her about the shredded letter he’d found in a plastic ziplock bag on the dining-room table. Kristin said Greg found it on Thursday and got angry, so she put it through the shredder, but he’d been trying to piece it back together with tape. Jones took the letter as evidence, along with a note in Kristin’s handwriting that one of his officers found in the kitchen. Signed with a heart and Kristin’s first initial, it said: “Hi, sleepy. Hope you feel better. I’m out to get a wedding gift,” 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