Slain Man’s Family Wins $106 Million

A jury awarded $6 million in actual damages and $100 million in punitive damages Monday to the family of a man fatally poisoned by his wife, an employee of the county medical examiner’s office with access to poison.

The jury said the county should pay $1.5 million of the $6-million judgment for failing to detect Kristin Rossum’s illicit use of drugs and possible theft of drugs and poison from the workplace.

Rossum, 29, an honors graduate of San Diego State, is serving a life sentence after being convicted in 2002 of poisoning her husband, biotech industry technician Gregory de Villers, and using her scientific expertise to make the murder look like a suicide.

At the time of the murder, Rossum was having an affair with her supervisor.

The jury ordered Rossum to pay $100 million in punitive damages and $4.5 million of the $6 million in actual damages.

The lawyer who represented the county said she would recommend that the Board of Supervisors appeal the $1.5-million judgment.

De Villers’ family had sued Rossum and the county. De Villers’ father, Yves, is a plastic surgeon in Thousand Oaks.

Rossum’s father, Ralph Rossum, is a government professor at Claremont McKenna College, and her mother, Constance, is an associate professor of marketing and management at Azusa Pacific University.

De Villers, 26, who was married to Rossum for 17 months, was found dead in their La Jolla apartment. Tests showed he died from an overdose of fentanyl, a powerful painkiller that is often undetected in routine autopsies.

When paramedics found De Villers’ body, they found rose petals spread around the floor. Rossum said that was a sign that her husband had committed suicide because their marriage had been rocky. The roses, she said, were a reference to his favorite movie, “American Beauty,” in which rose petals are a motif.

During her trial, prosecutors showed that Rossum had purchased the roses and administered the fentanyl through a patch on her husband’s arm.

De Villers may have thought the patch contained medicine to combat the flu, according to trial testimony.