Badlands by Houlihan Liam

Author:Houlihan, Liam
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522859768
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

WHEN GREG De Villers bought his wife a bouquet of roses for her birthday on 25 October 2000, he would not have known he only had days to live. On 6 November De Villers was at the marital home when his heart stopped and he stopped breathing. He was only twenty-six. Six months into Rossum’s affair with Robertson, her youthful but inconvenient husband was dead.

Rossum called authorities from her apartment, screaming that her husband had stopped breathing while resting in bed. She was crying so hard the 911 emergency dispatcher had found it almost impossible to instruct her over the phone on how to attempt CPR.

Paramedics arrived to find the blonde weeping and hovering over her husband’s corpse begging to know why he had committed suicide. If the death scene was to be believed—and it seems, at least initially, it was—then the betrayed husband had discovered his wife’s affair and taken his own life. He had poisoned himself and lay on his bed to die. His and Kristin’s wedding photo was propped near his head. And the document purportedly explaining the motive behind his suicide—a crumpled-up love letter from Robertson to Kristin—was conveniently close by, explaining all. Rossum’s journal was open to a passage explaining she ‘made a mistake’ marrying De Villers.

The scenario had the downside for Rossum of instantly putting her lover in the picture. In another view, however, it neutralised a badly kept secret that was highly relevant and suspicious.

In addition to all this precise, detailed, romantic preparation, the suicide victim had apparently done something else. It would seem he had extravagantly decorated his death bed with rose petals—in exactly the manner a speed-addled brain might conceive a suicidal heterosexual male would do. ‘I pulled back the covers and I saw that there were red rose petals everywhere, all over his chest,’ Kristin Rossum said. ‘And he had a photograph of our wedding day up by his head near the pillow.’

Campus police who had jurisdiction over the death scene followed the prompts laid out for them and concluded the incident was a heartbroken suicide. In the aftermath of her husband’s death, Kristin Rossum said:

If I had committed this crime to cover up the affair and the drug usage, why would the first thing out of my mouth be ‘Yes, I had an affair’ and ‘Yes, I’ve been having a drug problem’? I think Greg was depressed and so upset with life that he took his whole life, and he did so in such a way that could have put blame on me and Michael Robertson. I don’t know how intentional that was, but that’s the outcome of it. And it could very well have been his plan to really hurt me in a way that he felt I hurt him by in a sense saying, ‘If I can’t have her, nobody will.’

De Villers had been poisoned, but for six months the suicide theory reigned and in the meantime everything was going in its favour. At the morgue an autopsy was performed on De Villers’ body and his blood screened for some, but not all, toxins.

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