Denise Anette Huber was 23 years old in the summer of 1991, living in Newport Beach, California, and working as a waitress. Friends and family described her as energetic, social, and responsible—a young woman in that liminal space between early adulthood and a fully settled life, with plans but plenty still unwritten. She loved music, and that passion set the stage for the last night anyone saw her alive.

A Love Story Tainted by Secrets On paper, Greg de Villers and Kristin Margrethe Rossum looked like a golden couple at the dawn of the new millennium. Greg, a French-born biotech worker in his mid-twenties, had found professional footing with an up‑and‑coming firm in San Diego. Kristin, also in her mid‑twenties, had graduated summa cum laude from San Diego State University and parlayed that into a coveted job as a toxicologist with the San Diego County medical examiner’s offic