The Rose Petal Murder

Perfect Poison

Gregory de Villers, victim

It was all so perfectly orchestrated, so operatic in its sweep and tone. Greg deVillers, a young man just a few days shy of his 26^th birthday, lay dead on the floor of his La Jolla bedroom. Rose petals covered his chest. Beside his lifeless head lay a copy of his wedding picture, taken less than two years earlier: a frozen shard of a perfect moment, or so it seemed.

Nearby, a crumpled love letter had fallen to the floor. His wife, Kristin Rossum, had received it from another man, the dashing Australian doctor for whom she worked. Beside the letter was Kristin's journal in which she confided to no one in particular that she feared that her marriage had been a mistake.

"Kristin is the most wonderful person I've ever met," deVillers had said on videotape at his wedding. "I just can't wait to spend the rest of my life with her."

And on the surface, it seemed that he had gotten his wish. It all seemed so obvious. Broken-hearted over his wife's affair, unwilling to face the future without her, deVillers had taken his own life.

Or had he?

In what would become known as the Rose Petal Murder Mystery, authorities would soon come to suspect that deVillers' own wife, a 26-year-old blond beauty, the daughter of well-respected university professors, used the knowledge she had gained as a toxicologist for the San Diego Medical Examiner's office to poison her unsuspecting husband with a deadly cocktail of drugs.

Kristin Rossum (AP/Wide World)

Among the narcotics found in his system was fentanyl, a synthetic opiate 100 times more powerful than morphine.

It was a drug, authorities would later say, that Rossum knew her own office never tested for and which she believed medical examiners would never detect.

"It was the perfect poison," Deputy San Diego District Attorney David Hendron has said.

But was it the perfect murder? Or was it a carefully orchestrated suicide by a desperate husband bent on killing himself and destroying his unfaithful wife in the process?

To determine that, investigators had to follow a twisted trail of drugs and lies and sex that wound from the comfortable suburbs of Los Angeles County to the seamy streets of Tijuana, Mexico, and into the inner workings of the San Diego County Medical Examiner's Office.