Gregory DeVillers and Kristin Rossum were a picture-perfect couple – both attractive, brilliant prodigies of incredibly successful fathers.
He was a 26-year-old biochemical expert and the son of a world-famous plastic surgeon. She was the 24-year-old daughter of a governmental scholar, embarking on a career in toxicology.
They met in Tijuana and married after a whirlwind romance. But a little more than a year later, DeVillers’ lifeless body was found on a November morning in the marital bed of their San Diego home.
He was sprinkled with red rose petals in what could have been a scene ripped from the Oscar-winning movie “American Beauty.”
Their wedding photo was tucked under his head. On a nearby table, his wife’s diary was opened to a page revealing she had “made a mistake” in marrying him.
On the floor lay a crumpled love letter to his spouse from another man.
DeVillers, it seemed, was distraught because he found out his beautiful wife was having an affair – and took his life in a wildly romantic suicide.
But eight months later, Rossum is sitting in jail, charged with his murder.
Authorities believe Rossum, a junior toxicologist at the county medical examiner’s office, had poisoned DeVillers with a lethal chemical she stole from the lab. They say she tried to use her expertise in medicine to disguise that he was poisoned.
She killed him, prosecutors say, because he threatened to tell her colleagues that she was having an affair with her Australian boss. Police think he also threatened to turn her in for stealing methamphetamines from the lab.
Cops said it also didn’t help matters that she off-handedly mentioned that her favorite movie is “American Beauty.”
But the circumstances of the case have intrigued investigators, who refer to it as the perfect murder mystery. And friends and family can’t believe that something could have gone so wrong for the seemingly perfect couple.
Rossum had landed her dream job as a junior toxicologist at the county medical examiner’s office just months before DeVillers’ death. She had graduated summa cum laude from San Diego State University, and was called scholarly and sweet by her peers.
DeVillers, whose father jetted between homes in Monaco and California, was a hotshot biochemist who headed up business development for a biotech company.
He was enrolled in classes at the University of California in San Diego, where the couple shared an apartment off campus. It seemed they were just starting to make good money and live comfortably. They reveled in their love of science.
But several months before DeVillers’ death, cops are discovering, their relationship had started to crumble. Rossum had taken up with her boss, Michael Robertson, an internationally renowned biochemist. She drifted from DeVillers and started to show signs that she regretted getting married.
On Nov. 6, Rossum called police, screaming that her husband had stopped breathing while resting in bed. She cried so hard, the 911 dispatcher found it nearly impossible to explain over the phone how to administer CPR.
When the paramedics arrived at their modest apartment, they found the sobbing beauty hovering over her husband’s lifeless body, begging to know why he had taken his life.
The campus police, who were responsible for the investigation because it was in their jurisdiction, thought she was the victim of a jilted spouse who couldn’t handle that his wife had been caught straying.
It was a ruse, authorities say, that lasted for nearly six months.
The campus police sent DeVillers’ body to the morgue. He was autopsied, his blood screened for toxins. Because he was an organ donor, most of his body parts were removed and shipped off to awaiting recipients.
Campus police got the blood toxins back and sensed something was amiss. Although he had over-the-counter medicines in his system, they also found traces of other toxins that they couldn’t identify.
Experts from Los Angeles, Nevada and Utah were called in to recheck the blood samples. The case was turned over to the San Diego police, who didn’t buy the suicide theory for a second.
“The dead giveaway that she killed him was that we’ve never seen a male suicide victim spread flowers around his bed before killing himself,” San Diego Homicide Captain Ron Newman told The Post.
Cops also said alarm bells rang after her admission that her favorite movie was “American Beauty,” the 1999 suburban tragedy in which a tormented husband is slain and metaphorically covered in rose petals.
Additional toxicology screenings revealed he was drugged with fentanyl, a powerful painkiller prescribed to terminal cancer patients or others in excruciating pain.
Only a health professional like Rossum could acquire the drugs, authorities contend. Police said they were later found missing from the medical examiner’s office. She had apparently been slipping the drugs into her pocket before leaving work at night.
Prosecutors now believe Rossum tricked her husband into taking certain strong medications that would make it very difficult to determine that there were other, more potent drugs in his blood. It almost worked.
Rossum appeared in court last week for the November killing, and pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder with “special circumstances,” which means she could face her own lethal injection under California law, said Jim Pippen, a chief trial deputy.
” ‘Special circumstances’ means a committee of attorneys found that there was more involved than a simple murder. The use of poison makes her case more damaging,” Pippen told The Post.
She’s being housed without bail in Las Calinas Women’s Detention Facility, although her loving father insists that she’s not a flight risk.
“Mexico is very close. She could have left at any time,” said her father Ralph Rossum, a constitutional scholar at Claremont McKenna College and the director of the Rose Institute think tank.
Red-eyed and trembling, Rossum hung her head and cried during her court appearance, insisting to her family and friends that she’s both innocent and a grieving widow.
A month after the death, she was fired from her toxicology job, under suspicion that she was stealing drugs to feed a secret addiction.
Rossum’s father has told reporters his daughter had called him minutes before she found her husband’s body. Though he admitted the couple was planning to separate before DeVillers’ death because of her relationship with Robertson, he refuses to believe the death was anything more than an “accident.”
“I know from the abject terror when she called that night to tell us that Greg had stopped breathing, I know that she’s innocent,” he stressed.