American Beauty

A young husband winds up dead, with an unusual drug in his system. Was it suicide - or was he murdered by his wife? When they were married in 1999, 20-somethings Kristin Rossum and Greg De Villers seemed to have a wonderful future in front of them.

But before the couple could celebrate their second wedding anniversary, Greg was dead, and Kristin behind bars. Prosecutors say she staged a suicide scene with rose petals, reminiscent of one of her favorite movies, "American Beauty." What happened?

Bill Lagattuta reports on this unusual case.

Rossum is hardly the typical inmate at the Las Calinas Detention Center. She graduated summa cum laude with a degree in chemistry from San Diego State University.

But now she is facing capital murder charges in the poisoning death of her husband. Kristin says she is innocent. She insists Greg's death was a suicide.

The marriage was no fairy tale.

"About a year into our marriage, Greg became very, very clingy to me. I was trying to pull myself away and have some sort of independence," Kristin says.

Kristin says she decided to leave Greg. She says she broke the news to him over the weekend of November 5, 2000. She says Greg did not take the news well.

That Monday morning, Kristin says, she got ready for work. Greg did not. "He wasn't getting up like normal. He was really sluggish, and his voice was slurred. It sounded like he had taken too much of something the night before," she says.

A toxicologist with the San Diego County medical examiner's office, Kristin went to work at the coroner's office and called the biotech company where Greg worked to say he would not be in that day.

She says Greg told her that he had taken Oxycontin and Clonazepam, a pain killer and a muscle relaxant.

She says when she came home, he was asleep and snoring. She says she let him sleep. Later that night, she says, she noticed he wasn't breathing and called 911 and tried to give him CPR.

Kristin says as she tried to move Greg to the floor she made a very chilling discovery. "I pulled the bedspread back, and his chest was covered in rose petals. Red rose petals. And he had a picture of our weddings photos in bed with him."

"He had given me a dozen beautiful long-stem roses for my birthday. I think he was just making a statement that he knew our relationship was over."

When the paramedics arrived, they tried to revive him, but De Villers was dead at 26. Kristin says she doesn't know if it was suicide or a cry for help.

But Greg's family and friends were suspicious. Pressured by them, police started investigating the death as a possible homicide. Police quickly learned that Kristin had been taking methamphetamine. She was a former drug addict, and she had started using again.

She first tried crystal meth in high school. She met Greg while she was still using. With Greg's help, Kristin beat her addiction, finished college, and got a job with the coroner's office.

But by the time they married five years later, the dynamic in the relationship had changed. Kristin says she finally told Greg she wanted a trial separation.

One of the reasons she wanted to leave was because, within the first year of marriage, she had started an affair with her married boss, Michael Robertson.

"We had a lot in common, we were both in relationships we weren't happy with, and we gravitated towards each other. And we loved each other," she says.

Kristin says she told Greg about her affair. After that, she says, he became very obsessive. With the stress of her troubled marriage, she says, she went back to smoking crystal meth.

According to Kristin, Greg then threatened to report her drug use and her affair to her supervisors, including Michael Robertson's boss. Prosecutors say that she killed Greg because she was afraid he was going to expose her affair with Robertson and her drug use.

During the investigation, police found that Greg had a lot of fentanyl, a powerful pain killer, in his body. It can be administered by injection, or swallowed, or it comes in timed-release patches applied to the skin.

It's not the kind of drug you'd find in your medicine cabinet. Who would know how this drug works - and have access to it? Kristin Rossum for one, because she is a toxicologist.

She had access to fentanyl at work. She also knew that her office did not routinely test for fentanyl in autopsies. Her boss and lover, Michael Robertson, knew that, too. Fentanyl was missing from the place where Kristin worked. Kristin says she did not take it.

But if Greg did kill himself with fentanyl, how is it possible he left behind no evidence?

Kristin's lawyer, Alex Loebig, says there's no evidence because Greg got rid of it, to make it look like murder, to frame Kristin.

If he killed himself and got rid of the evidence, Greg De Villers was either very crafty or very lucky. Most experts say an injection would knock him out immediately, so he'd have to use the patches. The defense has argued that he drank it from a glass found at his bedside. The contents of the glass was never tested by police.

But Prosecutor Dan Goldstein says that theory doesn't explain one crucial piece of evidence. Although Greg's body had needle marks from shots administered by paramedics, there was one extra needle mark. That needle mark, he says, is where Kristin may have injected her husband.

Although the evidence, at best, was circumstantial, it was enough to charge Kristin with murder.

Goldstein believes Robertson somehow helped Kristin carry out the murder.

Robertson, who was fired from the medical examiner's office for not reporting Kristin's drug use, is an Australian national. Shortly before Kristin was arrested and charged with murder, he went back to Australia. He says, however, that he is not hiding out in Australia, and says he is innocent.

But the prosecution says Robertson had a motive and opportunity. Robertson and Rossum were seen together several times that day, both in and out of the office, having what witnesses described as "emotional" conversations.

Robertson claims that he had just learned that Kristin was using meth again, and he was confronting her about that. He says they were not plotting a murder.

Robertson, who says his former girlfriend is not capable of committing murder, has separated from his wife. Since returning to Australia, he says he has not had contact with Kristen. After months of searching, he finally found a job in the science field. But he admits he fears that U.S. authorities will one day apply for his extradition.

While prosecutors have decided not to seek the death penalty against Kristin Rossum, they wanted to send her to prison for the rest of her life. Just before the trial, another important piece of evidence surfaced - Kristen's receipt from a supermarket on the day Greg died. She bought soup, cold medicine and a single rose.

Kristin says she bought a yellow rose and gave it to Robertson. The petals found on Greg's body were red, and the receipt did not specify the color of the flower.

In a four-week trial in October, 2002, Kristin became the media's main attraction. Cameras, banned form the courtroom, followed her fashionable entrances and exits. She was on the witness stand for more than eight hours.

The prosecution spent seven and half hours on closing arguments; the defense summed up its case in fewer than two hours. The jury deliberated for eight hours over two days.

The verdict: She was found guilty of the murder of her husband, and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole.

Her parents say an appeal and a new trial are now their only hope.