Читать книгу Poisoned Love - Caitlin Rother - Страница 8

Kristin Margrethe Rossum, the eldest child of two driven and accomplished Midwestern parents, was raised with the pressures to perform and to succeed, almost from the very start. At an early age, they instilled in her the importance of image and appearances, which no doubt contributed to the perfectionism she described in her diary years later.

“It was always obvious to me that I was expected to do well in school,” she wrote. “I wanted to make my parents proud of me. I wanted to be the best in everything I did. I wanted to be perfect. For the most part, I excelled at everything I tried.”

But this sense of self-confidence was vulnerable to other forces at work in her psyche. At times, she wrote, she found herself “torn between sound, logical ideas and unreasonable, unattainable ideals. It’s an interesting internal conflict.”

That conflict was perpetuated by a persistent inner voice that criticized the way she looked in the mirror. She thought her legs and arms were strong and she had an attractive face. But her butt was rounder than she liked, her inner thighs were a little too flabby, her stomach wasn’t flat enough, and her arms could be more toned. “At 5 feet, 2 ¼ inches tall,” she wrote, she was “vertically challenged. OK, SHORT!!!”

“I continue to feel dissatisfied with my body, because I don’t think it’s perfect,” she wrote. But, she added, “I guess that my belief is that it is within my power to control the shape of my body. Therefore, if I am dissatisfied with my body, it is only the result of my own failings.”

It’s possible that this drive to be perfect grew so overwhelming at times that her only relief came from getting high. One friend said Kristin’s addictive relationship with methamphetamine may have been the only part of her life that Kristin saw as her own, separate from the parents who had such a strong influence on her. And people high on meth don’t think or act rationally.

Kristin came into the world on October 25, 1976, in Memphis, Tennessee, where her father was a political science professor and her mother was a marketing researcher. Kristin’s brother Brent was born in nearby Germantown about three years later, and Pierce, the youngest, about four years after that.

As Kristin and her brothers were growing up, they moved around the country as their parents’ careers progressed. Sometimes, Kristin said, her mother “would hold down the fort” when her father had to leave town for a professional opportunity elsewhere.

When Kristin was four or five, the Rossums moved to Wilmette, a suburb on the north shore of Chicago, where she saw a lot of her extended family. She and her mother would take the train into the city to watch a performance of The Nutcracker or go Christmas shopping at Marshall Field’s.

The focus on her outward appearance started when she was very young. When she was four, her parents arranged for Kristin to have a commercial head shot taken. The photographer sat her at the piano, laid one of her little hands on the keys, and told her to turn and smile. Her straight, shoulder-length blond hair was pulled back with a barrette, and she wore a tent dress with a tiny white collar and embroidered flowers that covered her legs. She was three feet three inches tall, weighed thirty-four pounds, and wore a size 4 to 4T dress.

In a head shot taken two years later, in December 1982, she’d grown in confidence and dress size. This time her big, hypnotic green eyes stared straight into the camera. She was simply beguiling.

On the back of the photo, along with her particulars, she was featured in five different poses, illustrating her versatility and ability to switch from mood to mood and from one outfit to another. She was goofy in one, serious or playful in the others, wearing a dark leotard and white tights, a sailor suit, or a button-up shirt with a sweater tied around her neck, clutching a handful of daises or holding a balloon on a string. In one shot, she feigned surprise as she pretended to read one of the Madeline children’s books, glasses perched on her head, her mouth and eyes agape.

The pretty, towheaded girl worked as a model for Marshall Field’s, Sears, McDonald’s, and Montgomery Ward. She was a natural. She wore a standard size 6X dress, and the camera loved her.

Kristin gave up modeling for ballet the following year, when the family moved to Bethesda, Maryland, and her father took a job as a deputy director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice. He worked for the Bureau—the national repository for crime statistics collected by government and law enforcement agencies—in 1983 and 1984, during the Reagan administration.

Six-year-old Kristin began training at the Maryland Youth Ballet Academy, where she proved to be quite a talented little dancer. She was chosen for a walk-on role as a page in the Joffrey Ballet’s performance of Romeo and Juliet, reveling in the honor of being backstage at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Years later she wrote in her diary that the powerful Prokofiev score touched her to the core and remained one of her favorites.

“There is so much passion in his notes,” she wrote.

Around that time, she also began to discover a love for science. And the academic pressures soon began to mount.

Ralph Rossum relocated to Claremont, California, in 1984, when he was granted tenure as a faculty member at Claremont McKenna College. He stayed for one semester, then spent some time working on a grant in Washington, D.C., where his wife, Constance, was a marketing manager for the Marriott Corporation. By June 1985, the family had reunited in Claremont, a small enclave of primarily white, highly educated residents. This community would serve as the family’s base in the years to come.

The fourteen-square-mile city is located about thirty miles east of downtown Los Angeles. In 2000 it had a population of 34,000 and a median income of about $70,000. Known for its tree-lined streets and small-town feel, Claremont generally houses about five thousand students and professors associated with the eight institutions of higher learning in the area. Of those, seven are within the city’s limits and are collectively its largest employer: Claremont McKenna College, Pomona College, Pitzer College, Scripps College, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont Graduate University, and the Claremont School of Theology. Azusa Pacific University, a small evangelical Christian university where Constance Rossum was director of nonprofit graduate programs and a professor of marketing and management, is ten miles away.

One resident once likened Claremont to the community depicted in the movie Pleasantville, where residents live a 1950s lifestyle in black and white until two modern teenagers introduce art, literature, sex, independent thought, and a symbolic sense of color to a town previously unaware that life existed beyond its boundaries.

“People feel reasonably safe here,” said Lieutenant Stan Van Horn, who headed the Claremont Police Department’s detective bureau in 2004.

Van Horn said the city’s crime rate was pretty low, averaging one homicide every four or five years, which left police officers with plenty of time to deal with low-level crimes like vandalism and high school kids partying on weekends. His department’s philosophy on crime fighting was as follows: “If you can take care of the small stuff, it doesn’t develop into larger problems.”

Kristin’s parents passed their work ethic onto their children and drew them into the academic world early on.

In the summer of 1988, Kristin posed with her professor father for the cover of Claremont McKenna’s campus magazine, Profile. With their heads together and her arms wrapped around his neck, they looked happy, almost serene. But unlike his daughter, Ralph did not grow up around parents with such academic drive, let alone the money to pay for it.

Raised on a small dairy farm in Alexandria, Minnesota, Ralph was the only member of his extended family to graduate from college. His father’s education ended with the eighth grade, and his mother’s with high school. Since his parents weren’t able to pay his tuition, he had to qualify for scholarships and work to make up the difference. In 1968, he graduated summa cum laude from Concordia College, a four-year liberal arts institution in Minnesota associated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

The first academic job listed on his ten-page curriculum vitae is instructor of behavioral sciences in the City Colleges of Chicago’s Department of Police Academy Services, where he started working in 1970. He earned his master’s degree from the University of Chicago in 1971, married Constance in 1972, and by 1973 had obtained his Ph.D. Over the course of his career, he held high-ranking academic and administrative positions in California, Louisiana, Iowa, Illinois, Virginia, and Tennessee.

In 2004 Ralph was still a professor of political philosophy and American constitutionalism at Claremont McKenna, where he also served as director of its Rose Institute of State and Local Government.

Ralph appears to have taken the academic community’s motto—“publish or perish”—to heart. In 2004, his curriculum vitae included seven books he wrote or coauthored, as well as dozens of articles and book chapters. A number of his writings focus on the jurisprudence of Antonin Scalia, a conservative Republican on the U.S. Supreme Court and a Reagan appointee. Ralph team-taught a class with Scalia at the University of Aix-Marseille III Law School in Aix-en-Provence, France.

Constance, who was raised in Indiana, was no slouch herself. She studied radio and television journalism as an undergraduate and journalism again in graduate school at Indiana University in Bloomington. She earned a master’s degree in management from Claremont Graduate University, where she went on to earn her Ph.D. in education and management.

With her background, Constance was able to straddle the worlds of academia and business, starting her own consulting firm, Management Directives, in 1991, after working twenty years in advertising, marketing/management, and consumer research for major companies, such as Procter & Gamble, United Airlines, McDonald’s, and the Marriott Corporation. She has taught at various public and private colleges, including Azusa Pacific University; the University of California, Riverside; and California State University at San Bernardino. She also has been involved with a New York–based group called the Leader to Leader Institute, which helps nonprofit groups perform effectively. She and her husband have coauthored books and articles on topics such as constitutional law.

By the time Kristin was nine or ten, she was taking her dance classes seriously. As the years went on, she split her after-school time between ballet and homework, earning straight A’s.

Her bent toward perfectionism also influenced her dancing. She wrote in her diary years later that at twelve or thirteen, she began to feel “hypercritical” of her abilities, her technique, and her own physical limitations. “I wanted so badly to be the best—the prima ballerina,” she wrote. “The girls with high arches, long legs, and a flexible back…[They] had physical traits I so desperately wanted.”

She’d just turned fourteen and was a freshman in high school when her talents had progressed enough to land her a coveted role in The Nutcracker with the Forum Dance Ensemble in neighboring Orange County. She was supposed to be an understudy, but when the star ballerina got sick, Kristin ended up with the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy, dancing with a professional cavalier from the Houston Ballet.

Her father drove her to and from rehearsals in Anaheim every afternoon, a thirty-two-mile drive each way. Kristin sensed that Ralph got a little frustrated when the hours-long sessions ran late, as they often did, but he remained supportive of her efforts. He felt a deep pride when he watched her dance. She had such a passion for it.

Kristin was popular at Claremont High School, where her dancing skills were well known among her classmates. Her fellow students thought Kristin, who always seemed to be smiling, had a sweet nature. She was the model student.

As a freshman, Kristin briefly dated a junior named Chris Elliott, the son of family friends who used to baby-sit her little brothers while Kristin was at ballet practice. Chris’s father also taught at Claremont McKenna. The two teenagers first met when Kristin was thirteen and Chris was seventeen. Chris was impressed that Kristin was such a high achiever, dancing even when she had a 102-degree fever and focusing so intensely on her ballet rather than just hanging out after school. All her friends were “bunheads,” as her mother called them—dancers who wore their hair up in a bun.

In 1991 Kristin auditioned for a spot in a prestigious summer program with the Boston Ballet. She got it and spent the summer back east.

That fall, Ralph took a job as president of Hampden-Sydney College, a private liberal arts school in southern Virginia. Kristin enrolled at an Episcopalian boarding school for girls about sixty miles away so she could dance with a troupe in Richmond. She and Chris wrote letters to each other while she was away. She took a bad fall that year, when a fellow dancer dropped her. She tore several ligaments and had to wear an ankle cast for nearly two months. She reinjured her leg a few months later, and by the time she healed, she’d lost the calluses on her toes that allowed her to go en pointe. She also developed a stress fracture that wouldn’t heal. She grew frustrated and quit.

Kristin began experimenting with drugs and alcohol around that time—mostly beer and marijuana, though she didn’t much care for pot because “it didn’t do anything.” She also developed a fondness for cigarettes and would turn to them again later in life when under stress.

Her father remembered Kristin leaving Claremont as a girl in 1991 and returning from Virginia as a woman, just before the start of her junior year in 1992.

Ralph returned to Claremont McKenna to teach constitutional law, and Constance transferred within Marriott to a job as director of marketing. The family was happy and healthy, and everything seemed to be going along swimmingly.

“Frankly, we thought we were blessed with three lovely children,” Constance said.

Although ballerinas typically are self-conscious about their bodies, Kristin, who usually weighed between 100 and 110 pounds, took this concern to a new level, often taking laxatives and diet pills to make her small frame look even smaller.

“For some reason, she thought she was fat,” Constance said. “I don’t understand that.”

After Kristin stopped dancing, Constance noticed a sadness in her daughter that she didn’t recognize.

“She just didn’t seem like our Kristin,” she said. “I thought it was the sixteen-year-old teenage angst…. Her grades were still very good.”

Kristin’s brothers also started noticing that something was different. She was exhibiting strange behavior and staying up late at night. One day they found a pipe and a small mirror in the house and showed them to Constance. Naïve and unaware that these items were drug paraphernalia, Constance had no clue what her daughter was up to.

Kristin had always excelled in school, so when she began turning in her homework late, her parents felt something must be wrong. When they asked what was going on, she told them everything was fine. She’d do better next time. Ralph encouraged Constance to give their daughter some space. Surely, her behavior would improve. But it didn’t. It got worse, and her parents grew increasingly anxious.

Kristin’s parents made a point of getting to know their children’s friends. What they didn’t know was that Kristin had forged a new relationship she knew her parents would never condone, a relationship with crystal methamphetamine.

Kristin’s close friend since the third grade had moved to England. So Kristin filled the void with a new set of friends, a more social group that liked to party. Before the big Home-coming game, a girlfriend pulled out a bindle of white powder while they were sitting in a car in the parking lot. The girl said it was speed and drew them some lines. Kristin inhaled the powder and felt a burning sensation. After the burn came a rush. She felt revved up. Positively euphoric.

She knew the stuff was illegal, but she liked it so much that she wanted to do it again. Only crystal meth wasn’t a very socially acceptable drug. Their other friends gave them flack about using it, and her girlfriend didn’t make a habit of it, so Kristin decided to pursue a buy on her own.

Two weeks later, Kristin approached the dealer who’d sold the meth to her friend. It was easy. She bought some, and little by little, she began using it more frequently, smoking it, and always alone. Soon, Kristin was spending less time with her friends. She lost a few pounds, and her grades began to suffer. She couldn’t focus as easily on her schoolwork, and during her second semester, her usual A’s fell to B’s.

The first family crisis Kristin caused occurred in early 1993, after Ralph and Constance went on an anniversary cruise in the Caribbean. The Rossums asked some adult friends to check on the children during the day, but they left Kristin in charge overnight. They also left Kristin some money for pizza or any emergency. Instead, she used it to buy drugs. She threw a surprise birthday party for Pierce on St. Patrick’s Day, but word leaked out at the high school that Kristin was having “a rager.” Older kids started showing up. Seniors and football players. With beer.

“It kind of got out of control for a little bit,” Kristin admitted later, saying she didn’t remember whether she’d used meth that night, but it was possible. Kristin let a group of girlfriends stay over, and sometime during the same week, Kristin’s dealer came by with some friends.

A couple of weeks after her parents returned from their cruise, they discovered that some credit cards, personal checks, and a video camera were missing. On March 21, they called the police and reported a burglary. Constance also found a suspicious package of white powder in the mailbox. When she asked Kristin about it, her daughter said she had no idea where it came from, so Constance turned it over to the police. The lies were starting to pile up, and Kristin’s parents began to think the worst: Their daughter was using drugs.

Kristin knew she had a problem. She felt tired and worn out, but she couldn’t stop using. In the beginning, she’d smoked crystal because it made her feel so good. But it had become a necessity. She needed it just to feel like herself.

Methamphetamine is classified as a psychostimulant, just like amphetamine and cocaine. Methamphetamine and cocaine are structurally quite different, but both result in an accumulation of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that produces an unnatural level of euphoria in the brain. While cocaine is quickly metabolized by the body, methamphetamine stays in the system twelve times longer, and so it creates more lasting effects. Meth can produce a high that lasts eight to twenty-four hours, compared to a rush of twenty to thirty minutes with cocaine. Even in small doses, meth can decrease the appetite and keep people awake for hours. High doses can raise the body temperature to dangerous levels and cause convulsions.

On the street, methamphetamine has many names, including speed, meth, crank, ice, crystal, and glass. It can be inhaled, smoked, snorted, or injected. Chronic users can have episodes of violent behavior, anxiety, confusion, insomnia, hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia that can result in homicidal and suicidal thoughts. Psychosis can persist for months or years after a person stops using the drug. Experts say the continued use of the drug also tends to heighten the desire for sexual gratification and prompts users to seek increasingly high levels of sexual stimulation.

On March 30, 1993, around 7 P.M., Kristin said she had to go to the library to study for a class. Her parents, who’d been making calls to try to figure out what happened to their credit cards and checks, decided they needed to settle a few things with Kristin before she went anywhere.

Kristin decided otherwise and tried to leave. Ralph told her he wanted to look in her backpack, but she refused. Ralph tugged the pack away from her and unzipped it. He pulled out a white box and demanded to know what was in it. Kristin said it was a present for her mother. But when Ralph opened the box, he found a glass pipe, a plastic pen casing, and some razor blades inside. He demanded to know how she could have lied to him like this. She had betrayed his trust.

Ralph became enraged and started yelling as he hit her repeatedly on the upper arm, hard enough to leave a bruise. Then he grabbed one of her sandals off her bedroom floor and hit her on the butt with it. Constance yelled at him to stop, but she did nothing to pull him away. At some point, Constance slapped Kristin in the face.

Kristin ran into the kitchen, picked up a knife, and tried to cut her wrists with it until Ralph wrestled it out of her hands. She turned and ran back upstairs, where she locked herself in the bathroom and made superficial cuts in her wrists with a razor blade.

“I’m worthless,” she cried through the door. “You’d be better off without me.”

Because the cuts weren’t deep, Constance and Ralph determined she didn’t need medical treatment.

Sometime in the next few days, Kristin showed the bruise on her arm to a couple of girls at school and told them her parents had “beaten on her” during an argument. She started banging on the lockers and talking about committing suicide.

The two girls, concerned about Kristin’s recent odd behavior, went to the office to talk to a counselor, Leopoldina Abreu, a Cuban mother and grandmother to whom the high school yearbook staff dedicated their 1993 edition. School officials immediately reported a potential case of child abuse to the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services and to the Claremont Police Department.

Larry Horowitz, a police officer who was working on a master’s degree in social work at the time, got the call around lunchtime on April 2, while he was out on patrol. When he arrived at the high school, Kristin and her two girlfriends were sitting outside the office of Barbara Salyer, the dean of discipline, waiting for him. Horowitz went into Salyer’s office and closed the door. Given the bruise and Kristin’s lack of disciplinary problems, Salyer was concerned her story might be true. Horowitz called the girls in one at a time and interviewed them.

The first girl told him that she and her friend had grown very worried about Kristin because her behavior had changed so much over the past week. So they talked to their counselor about it, and she decided to bring Kristin in for some help.

Kristin’s parents didn’t like the two girls, one of them told Horowitz. Describing Constance as “very curt” with them, she said that Constance wouldn’t “allow Kristin to talk with us or do anything with us. They don’t seem like very friendly people.”

Horowitz sent the two girlfriends on their way and spent the next forty-five minutes talking to Kristin. She seemed flat, numb, and depressed. She wouldn’t look him in the eye, and he had a hard time establishing a rapport with her. To him, all of these indicators pointed to a problem at home. He spent a few minutes asking for basic information, such as which grade she was in and where she lived, before proceeding to the hard questions.

Kristin told him that she had confided in her girlfriends, but she said, “I guess they wanted me to get into trouble, so they went to Mrs. Abreu and told her what was going on. I was brought into the office, but I didn’t want to bring up family matters with the school.”

This was the first time her father had hit her, she said. Most of the problems with her parents stemmed from their complaining about her friends. But this time, she said, it went further than usual, and her mother called her “worthless” and “a slut.” She said she didn’t want to see her parents get into trouble over their fight; she thought they could work the whole thing out over spring break.

Horowitz examined her arm and wrote in his notes that she had “pronounced bruising to the upper arm.” He took photos of the area but decided the injury wasn’t serious. He did notice, however, that she had fresh wounds on her knuckles—apparently from punching the lockers—and appeared to have picked at sores on the back of her hands. He figured drugs were involved.

She told him she felt safe going home because things had already improved.

“My dad even welcomed me back into the family on Thursday night,” Kristin told him.

Horowitz told Kristin to inform her parents about their conversation and to warn them he’d be calling that night to set up an interview. Back at the station, he followed police procedures by notifying the child abuse hotline of the incident and preparing a written report of suspected child abuse.

Around six o’clock, Kristin called to clarify her story. She said the bruise on her arm was really caused by her dad grabbing her as she tried to leave the house, not from hitting her as she’d said before. Horowitz thought she was backtracking to minimize what had happened, posturing to protect her parents.

When he called the Rossum house at 7:15 P.M., he told Constance that he was investigating a reported case of child abuse and made an appointment to meet with her and Ralph at home around 8 the next morning.

The Rossums lived in a white, two-story house at the end of a cul-de-sac on Weatherford Court, a short, quiet street with well-kept lawns and flowerbeds. In 2004 the house had red rose bushes growing in the front yard.

Horowitz talked with Constance and Ralph for about an hour in the family room off the kitchen, while Kristin stayed in her bedroom. He found the Rossums to be quite cooperative. After their anniversary cruise, Constance told him, she and Ralph learned that Kristin was using drugs, smoking cigarettes, and having parties for friends who stole checks and credit cards. The incident happened when they tried to confront her about all of this.

“Ralph got mad and did hit her in the arm,” Constance said. “I admit that I slapped her in the face, but she tried to hit me first.”

Constance explained how Kristin tried to cut her wrists, first with a knife and then with razor blades, but that she had made only superficial cuts, so they didn’t take her to see a doctor.

“I was afraid of what would happen if we took her to the hospital,” she told Horowitz. “We don’t know who to go to or what to do.”

Then it was Ralph’s turn. He said he found it unusual that Kristin had asked to use the car to go to the library because her driving privileges had been suspended due to “her actions while we were gone.” It was also unusual, he said, for her to carry a backpack. When he found the drug paraphernalia inside, he said, he began tugging on her arm, demanding to know the truth.

“I admit that I took my open hand and struck her three or four times on the upper arm,” he told Horowitz. “She told me what had been going on and apologized. Kristin was visibly upset and started talking about killing herself.”

After things had settled down later that evening, Ralph told him, they all agreed to work on the situation.

“I realize that there’s a lot going on and that we need some help,” Ralph said.

Horowitz saw a few discrepancies in the stories he’d heard. For one, Ralph said he hit Kristin with an open hand, while Kristin claimed it was a closed fist. Still, Horowitz didn’t see any basis for the child-abuse claim.

After the ordeal, Constance and Ralph took Kristin in for a full physical. They told the doctor about finding the glass pipe, and he gave her a good talking-to about using drugs. Then, life in the Rossum household seemed to calm down for a while.

“We thought we had the problem licked at that point,” Ralph said.

Like all the other seniors at Claremont High, Kristin went to a photo studio for her senior yearbook portrait. The boys posed in tuxedo shirts and bow ties, and the girls wore black, V-necked formal dresses. Kristin’s photo showed no sign of drug use. She seemed healthy, wearing a string of pearls, her hair long and very blond. She looked attractive and comfortable with herself, just like the model she was trained to be. Kristin also sang with the A Cappella Singers Choir that year, posing for the yearbook with the other students in a long dark dress, the pearls, and some tasteful makeup.

But that fall, her parents began to notice the unwelcome reminders of her troubled past: she was picking at her hands again, she was losing weight, and her grades weren’t as good. They definitely knew something was wrong when they saw that she was doing poorly in calculus. Kristin had always been so good at math.

It’s typical for parents to feel sad, frustrated, helpless, and angry when they can’t fix their child’s drug problem, and the Rossums appeared to follow the norm.

“All this beauty and talent and wasting it all on people who were unworthy of her,” Ralph later recalled thinking.

This would become a sad refrain throughout Kristin’s life.

On January 14, 1994, Kristin came home from school around 3 P.M., acting erratically. Constance suspected her daughter was using methamphetamine again and felt compelled to confront Kristin about it. But that only escalated the situation.

Kristin started to touch her tank top protectively, so Constance asked if she had drugs on her. Kristin became defensive and tried to run away. Constance grabbed her, reached into her shirt, and pulled a glass pipe out of her bra. She was horrified. She didn’t know what else to do but call the police and report that her daughter was under the influence of drugs. She’d hoped they were done with this mess.

Because Officer Horowitz had dealt with the Rossum family before, he took the call. When he arrived at the house on Weatherford Court, Constance seemed to be at her wit’s end as she handed him the pipe. She also handed him a few other things she’d found in Kristin’s belongings—some Ex-Lax, a small mirror, and some razor blades.

“Kristin has had a drug problem for the past several years,” she told him. “The episodes with her friends using the credit cards and the checks and taking the car have caused us to realize how extensive her involvement was. We have tried doctors and therapy, but nothing so far has worked. This incident is the last straw, and something needs to be done about this.”

After talking with a distraught Constance, the officer went upstairs, where the door to Kristin’s room was ajar. Kristin was inside, sobbing, her nose running and her eyes red from crying. He asked what was going on, but she didn’t answer him. The floor of the room was covered with papers and clothes strewn about. She was fidgety and obviously distressed, unable to complete a sentence or express a clear thought.

He did a quick physical examination, shining a penlight into her eyes, which did nothing to shrink her dilated pupils. She seemed dry-mouthed, and her pulse was going at a rate of 118 beats a minute. He asked if she’d smoked speed before going to school.

Yes, Kristin admitted, she’d gotten some drugs and the pipe from a boy the night before at Claremont High, where she’d gone to watch a performance of the musical Oklahoma.

“He owed me some money, so he paid me back with the drugs and pipe,” she told Horowitz.

Kristin said she’d smoked at the high school that night and again the next morning in her bedroom before going to school. She took the pipe and the remainder of the drugs with her to school and brought them home again. She told him she used the drugs to help her study and with “other activities.”

Horowitz placed Kristin under arrest for possession of paraphernalia and for being under the influence of a controlled substance. He snapped handcuffs on her wrists, read her her rights, and took her away in his squad car. He got the feeling that Kristin’s family was more concerned about the image problem her drug addiction caused than about the drug problem itself.

At the city jail, the seventeen-year-old was fingerprinted, booked, photographed and ordered to produce a urine sample. A marked contrast to the pretty pictures Kristin took as a child model, her first booking photo shows her with her eyes closed, grimacing and crying.

Since Kristin was still a minor, Horowitz had a choice of moving her to Juvenile Hall within six hours of the arrest or releasing her to her parents. He chose the latter. Kristin was placed in a holding cell for about two hours until her parents came to get her.

Generally, he explained later, juveniles are released to a parent or guardian unless they are habitual offenders or have committed a violent crime. He was unable to explain why nothing ever came of the arrest, saying that county probation officials had jurisdiction over her case. Perhaps, he said, it fell through the cracks because she was so close to turning eighteen. At the time, he’d hoped that the court would compel her to attend a drug rehab program and get some help.

“She had every resource and ability through her family to get through life…but again, methamphetamine is a very, very pernicious drug, and you don’t lose the taste once you cross that line,” he said.

This time the Rossums decided to try something different. What Kristin needed, they concluded, was a change of environment. Surely, it would help to get her away from her drug friends at Claremont High. So, they had her graduate early and enrolled her at the University of Redlands, about thirty miles from home. She took only two courses her first semester there, but getting mumps and chicken pox didn’t help.

Since Ralph was teaching a course at Redlands that semester, he drove her door to door so he could monitor her comings and goings. The two of them coordinated a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule and tried to rebuild their tattered relationship in the car driving to and from school each day. It worked. They soon recaptured the rapport they’d had when Ralph drove her to ballet rehearsal in Anaheim. At night, after school, the two of them attended twelve-step family-group therapy meetings in Chino, a city southeast of Claremont, where no one knew them.

Kristin dated Chris Elliott for a couple of months in 1994, before he went off to Johns Hopkins University. To him, she seemed to be trying to figure out what made her happy, not her parents. Elliott didn’t think Kristin was that interested in him romantically, but he never had the impression that she was doing drugs.

“She seemed like an incredibly motivated person, very disciplined,” he said.

For their final date, they went surfing together at Dana Point Sands. Elliott was still a beginner, but he was hoping this would strengthen the bond between them. Unfortunately, his plan went awry. Nothing seemed to go right.

First, the waves were much bigger than he expected. He offered to help Kristin, but that only seemed to insult her because she was so athletic. Meanwhile, the waves kept getting bigger. They paddled out, trying to get beyond them. Kristin tried to catch one particularly large wave, but it crashed over her. All but her feet disappeared into the wall of water, her board shooting into the monster and out again. She seemed upset and embarrassed by the experience.

“I felt really bad about it,” Elliott said.

After surfing, Elliott thought they could try roller-blading so Kristin could regain her self-esteem. At one point, they stopped skating, and for no apparent reason, she fell. On the way back to the car, she fell again. From there, they went to a party, and when the date was over, they didn’t speak to each other for two years.

That summer the sores on Kristin’s hands and face healed. Ralph saw no other signs that the drugs were back, and he thought she was over the worst of it. She was spending time with friends he and Constance liked, and they thought it would be good for her to live in the dorms the fall semester.

They didn’t sense anything unusual when they saw their daughter at Thanksgiving. In fact, they didn’t know anything was wrong until Kristin disappeared one day in December 1994.