1 case tagged “American Beauty murder”
Convicted: Kristin Margrethe Rossum
When paramedics arrived at the San Diego apartment on November 6, 2000, they found Gregory de Villers lying in bed, unresponsive, his body blanketed in red rose petals, a wedding photograph pressed against his chest. His wife, Kristin, stood nearby in tears, telling them he had taken his own life. It looked like a scene from a movie. It was, in fact, staged to look like one. Kristin Rossum, 24 years old and a trained toxicologist with access to the county medical examiner's controlled substance supply, had poisoned her husband with seven times the lethal dose of fentanyl — then arranged his corpse in a tableau lifted from her favorite film, American Beauty. She was sleeping with her married boss, secretly using methamphetamine she stole from her own workplace, and her husband had just threatened to expose everything. The rose petals were the detail that haunted investigators, the detail that made the case famous, and the detail that ultimately helped convict her. This is the story of how a summa cum laude graduate with a drug habit, a secret affair, and a dangerous job became one of California's most notorious poisoners.