Deadly Dose

KRISTIN ROSSUM'S HUSBAND COMMITTED SUICIDE. OR DID HE?

- BY Robert F. Howe

The call reached the 911 operator a little after nine p.m.

A woman, sounding desperate, pleaded that she couldn't wake her husband. Only a few minutes later, a paramedic bounded up the steps to a second-floor, one bedroom apartment near the campus of the University of California at San Diego. There, he found the door partially ajar and, pushing it open, saw Kristin Rossum, 24, weeping into a cordless phone. She pointed to the bedroom. The paramedic rushed into a small off-white room crammed with a computer station, two dressers and a queen-size bed, its blue-and-white striped comforter crumpled in a heap. On the carpet between the bed and a dresser lay Greg de Villers, 26, Kristin's husband of just 17 months. Beside him was their wedding photo, and on a bedside table was a glass half full of what appeared to be water.

Sprinkled on the floor around the young man were red rose petals. The emergency medical crew that responded the night of 6 November 2000, had arrived too late. Kristin's personal saviour, the man who had rescued her from self-destruction in the years before, was gone.

KRISTIN HAD MET GREG six years earlier when she was just 18, a petite hazel-eyed blonde with sinewy legs that had once propelled her across the stage in an amateur production of The Nutcracker. She'd been blessed with beauty, an intellectual pedigree and an affluent upbringing in Claremont, east of Los Angeles. It seemed the world was hers to conquer.

It hadn't worked out that way. For two years, since a 'friend' introduced her to the powerful and addictive stimulant crystal methamphetamine, she had battled the demons of drug abuse. Her grades tumbled, and her relationship with her parents eroded badly.