A rising star at celebrity trials like O.J. Simpson’s. Then a quiet, mysterious death

Kristin Jeannette-Meyers made a career showing America the darkness behind its sunny facades.

As an anchor and reporter for Court TV and CBS News in the 1990s, she specialized in the legal sagas that transfixed the nation, from William Kennedy Smith, the Kennedy cousin acquitted of raping another bar patron in Palm Beach, Fla., to Lorena Bobbitt, a woman who, after what she said was prolonged domestic violence, severed her husband’s penis.

With a law degree and blonde good looks the camera loved, Jeannette-Meyers reached the pinnacle of her success in Los Angeles in 1995 covering the biggest real-life film noir of all, the O.J. Simpson case.

“We felt like we were at the center of the universe,” recalled ABC’s chief legal affairs correspondent, Dan Abrams, a Court TV colleague who worked side-by-side with Jeannette-Meyers during the former NFL star’s murder prosecution. By its stunning conclusion, he said, she was “a star. She was borderline a household name.”

Then, within a few years, Jeannette-Meyers vanished from the airwaves and the lives of broadcasting colleagues who had marveled at her work ethic and ambition.

Last summer, she was found dead in Larchmont Village. A coroner’s investigator who arrived in June at a dilapidated Spanish villa behind a high hedge and in view of the Hollywood sign noted the decomposed state of her remains and wrote, “It is unknown the last time the decedent was known to be alive.”

Kristin Jeannette-Meyers, a once-celebrated television journalist, was found dead in her home, center bottom, in June 2023.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Her death, at age 57, drew little attention beyond an obituary her family published in her hometown New Hampshire newspaper. It attributed her demise, incorrectly it would turn out, to natural causes.

The Times learned of Jeannette-Meyers’ death last summer from a person concerned about the circumstances, but it took months for the coroner’s office to release its findings to the newspaper. That report, along with other public records and interviews, tell the story of a promising life derailed.

Just as the headline-grabbing cases that defined her career illuminated the problems of that era, her quiet passing underscores the plagues of today — mental illness, opioids and loneliness.

“I’m so horrified she came to such an end,” said Cynthia Bowers, her co-host at “CBS Morning News,” who remembered Jeannette-Meyers working out daily at Equinox in Manhattan and meticulously choosing silk suits that were alluring without being too sexy. “Kristin was the most pulled-together person I knew.”

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