Perfect Poison

by M. William Phelps

  Later that same year, a VAMC staff physician, while studying the charts of several of his patients who had died during the night-shift hours, realized that RN Gilbert’s name kept showing up repeatedly for a majority of the deaths. By itself, it wouldn’t have been alarming. But Gilbert was generally alone with the patients at the time of their deaths, and, more important, most of them were making good progress and weren’t expected to die.

  One morning, after finding out that another one of his patients had died while under Gilbert’s watch the previous night, the doctor went in to see Melodie Turner, Gilbert’s nursing manager.

  He told her he didn’t want Gilbert taking care of any more of his patients.

  Although no disciplinary action was ever taken, word leaked that the doctor had said something about Gilbert. Shortly after the meeting with Turner, the nursing staff began to shun the doctor.

  As the coincidences mounted and rumors swirled, Gilbert became known as the “angel of death.” But it was a joke. No one took it seriously. The nurses teased her about the unfortunate luck and Gilbert lapped up the attention.

  Yet, by the winter of 1991, a clerical worker at the VAMC, who was partly in charge of going through patient death records to insure their integrity, noticed a red flag while she was signing off on some of the previous years’ deaths. There it was in black and white: Gilbert’s name as the sole nurse who had found a majority of the patients on Ward C either in cardiac arrest or dead.

  In fact, between 1990 and 1991, on Gilbert’s shift alone, there were thirty-one deaths—more than triple the amount found on any other shift. Even more startling was that of those thirty-one deaths, Gilbert had found twenty-two herself. The next closest nurse had found only five. Which meant Gilbert was on duty and found approximately seventy-five percent of the deaths on her ward.

  These were shocking numbers, by any account.

  Upon a further look, the numbers of codes were even more staggering. Out of roughly forty codes called on Ward C between 1990 and 1991, Gilbert had found half of them: twenty, in fact. In 1990 alone, she had found thirteen, while her eight colleagues, combined, had found only five. Many of the nurses later admitted that throughout their entire tenures as nurses—some as long as twenty years—they had never even called a code, let alone seen them called on an average of one per week.

  A statistician later concluded that the possibility of it being a coincidence that Gilbert had found and called that many codes was one in a million. There was just no way a nurse could have that much bad luck.

  The perceptive VA worker, not sure of what to think, brought her findings to the attention of her supervisor.

  “What are you accusing this nurse of?” her supervisor asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I’m just pointing out the fact that this nurse’s name is on a majority of these deaths and codes. I’m not saying she did anything. . . .”

  The supervisor told her to go back to doing her job and stop making false accusations against people.

  Years later, when investigators caught up with the supervisor, she couldn’t recall that the conversation had ever taken place.

  CHAPTER 5

  In December 1990, as gossip continued to center around her unfortunate luck with patients, a pregnant Kristen Gilbert took maternity leave to give birth to her first child.

  After having a boy, Brian, she returned to work in February 1991. Gilbert began working second shift—4:00 P.M. to midnight. Despite her prior reputation as the “angel of death,” Gilbert’s colleagues considered her now a permanent member of what had become in her absence one of the tightest-knit groups in the hospital.

  At twenty-four, Gilbert had been miraculously transformed from the angel of death into June Cleaver, it seemed, simply by giving birth. Married to a local man who was adored by her coworkers, she was seen now as nothing more than an impassive housewife, leading a mundane life in Northampton like the rest of them.

  She was a bit on the chunky side now, her dirty blond hair cut conservatively about halfway down her back, usually propped up in a pink or purple bow. She relished the role of being perceived as the idyllic mother, and dressed like a Catholic schoolgirl: knee-high skirts, bulky sweaters, loose jeans.

  “She was attractive in a motherly type of way,” a former colleague recalled. “She was happy and loved her job.”

  As time went on, Gilbert and her coworkers began having cookouts and went over to one another’s homes for dinner parties. They took Gilbert’s boat out on the Connecticut River. Gilbert threw baby showers for her pregnant colleagues. They met for lunch. They went out to the area clubs on their nights off. Gilbert’s favorite band was the Cowboy Junkies, and she would drag many of her coworkers to their shows.

  Everything was in place for an amiable life in suburbia.

  But Gilbert never talked about her formative years: how her ex-boyfriends—and even her own father—had claimed she was nothing but “a manipulative, vindictive individual” who had spent her entire dating life harassing men, “making false rape allegations and damaging personal property when the relationships began to sour.” Or that she was antisocial and narcissistic. Nor did anyone know she had threatened suicide on several occasions and even tried to stab Glenn. To her colleagues and friends, Gilbert was a caring nurse fulfilling the role of a soccer mom.

  Then came the subtle signs when no one could deny that something was wrong.

  One year, on Valentine’s Day, while manning the phones at the nurse’s station, Gilbert came running down the hallway screaming, “I just got a call from a guy who said he put on bomb on the ward.”

  Renee Walsh was working that night. A bomb? . . . What? she thought. It didn’t make any sense to Walsh.

  Who, she wondered, would go through the trouble of putting a bomb—of all places—on the second floor of a VA hospital?

  “No kidding. I just took the call,” Gilbert said when Walsh approached her.

  “Okay, Kristen. Calm down,” Walsh said. “I’ll get David and have him call the police.”

  David Rejniak was the charge nurse that night. He was ultimately responsible for giving out orders if anything had gone wrong.

  Soon the ward was inundated with police who, after looking in every corner of the ward, found nothing.

  After the police left and things got back to normal, Renee Walsh was sitting at the nurse’s station when she heard Gilbert, who had gone down the hall and around the corner near the janitor’s closet for some reason, in a loud whisper, say, “David . . . David . . . oh, David,” as if she were playing peek-a-boo. “I think you ought to come down here. There’s something in the closet I think you need to see.”

  Curious, Walsh then got up and walked toward Gilbert’s voice. Rejniak was just coming back up the hallway after speaking with Gilbert.

  “What is it, David?” Walsh asked.

  “Kristen says she found a ‘suspicious-looking’ box in the closet.”

  “A box?”

  “Yup. It’s weird; it has a swastika on it.”

  A box with a Nazis symbol on it? Walsh thought. So she went down to see for herself.

  Sure enough, it was a harmless-looking Kleenex box wrapped in white paper with a swastika drawn crudely in pen, Walsh noticed, on the side of it.

  Rejniak, perhaps a bit embarrassed, called the police back and told them the good news: that they had to come back.

  It had taken hours for the Massachusetts State Police bomb squad to arrive. While they were en route, the ward had to be evacuated and every single patient taken out of his room and brought to another ward.

  Within moments, the bomb squad determined that it was nothing more than what everyone had presumed—a box of Kleenex wrapped in white paper.

  The patients were then brought back into their rooms, and life went on.

  The nurses later referred to the night as being their own little version of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, for the simple reason that a tiny cardboard box painted to look menacing h
ad caused so much confusion and panic.

  Some of the nurses later speculated it was Gilbert who had planted the box.

  Why?

  So she could bask in the glory of finding it?

  Still, in the eyes of many of her colleagues, Gilbert was the perfect mother. The perfect wife. The perfect nurse. She was a caring individual who spent time during the holidays setting up a Secret Santa program for area needy kids and volunteered at local homeless shelters. Having a separate room in her home dedicated to sewing, she loved to make Christmas stockings and quilts from scratch and give them away.

  But it was all part of the façade.

  At work, Gilbert told people her mother’s real name was Tiesha, a name given to her by a royal family. She told people she had spent time as a child living and studying in England. She told people her parents were wealthy socialites. She said her family was connected to English royalty. All were lies.

  “She was so Martha Stewart . . . so L.L. Bean-ish,” former friends later said. “Kristen always had to have the best of everything. And she wasn’t afraid to let you know about it when she got it.”

  As time went on, Gilbert, her coworkers began to notice, became obsessed with clothing and home items. Whether it was Gucci, Calvin Klein or Playschool, she not only had to have the latest in fashion and high chairs and toys for her kids, but it had to be the best. Even linens. Whenever someone came over, there she was, like a Price Is Right model, showing off whatever new bedspread, set of curtains or piece of furniture she had recently bought.

  “You’ll never believe what I just bought. Come on over and check it out,” Gilbert would say.

  Yet her buying habits became tangled in a web of something just short of fraud. She would order expensive clothing from magazines for an up-and-coming dinner party, work outing or night out on the town with friends, only to return them after the event was over.

  She also felt the need to one-up just about everyone whom she felt threatened by in some way.

  Rachel Webber was an attractive young nurse who had worked with Gilbert during the early nineties, and they became good friends almost immediately. Gilbert had thrown baby showers for Webber in 1992 and, later, in 1994. But something happened one day that gave Webber pause to think about how differently Gilbert had viewed the relationship.

  At work one night in 1993, Webber told Gilbert that she was thinking of buying a new Jeep Grand Cherokee. Webber loved the new design, she said. But she wasn’t sure her husband would agree. So she wrote it off as a pipe dream.

  “Someday, Krissy,” she said. “If it’s the last thing I do, someday . . . I’m going to get me that Jeep!”

  Weeks later, Gilbert came into work and began talking about the vehicle as if she had engineered the thing herself.

  “Wow,” Webber said. “How do you know so much about it?”

  “Consumer Reports!” Gilbert bragged. “I read up on it.”

  “Well, it is a nice vehicle.”

  “Sure is,” Gilbert said. “Guess what, Rachel?” she added, and threw a set of keys on the table in front of Webber.

  “What, Kristen? What did you do?”

  “I went out and bought one today—come check it out.”

  “You’re kidding me?”

  As Webber walked around the vehicle, she could see Gilbert out of the corner of her eye, gloating. Webber took it as, See what I have that you don’t.

  “Nice vehicle, Krissy.”

  Walking back up to the ward as Gilbert drove off, Webber couldn’t help thinking, You bitch. Just because I wanted the thing, you had to go out and buy it.

  “She was always like that,” Webber later recalled. “If you had it and she wanted it, well, she usually went out and bought it.”

  CHAPTER 6

  November 13, 1993 was a special day in the Gilbert household. Not only was it Kristen’s twenty-sixth birthday, but her and Glenn’s second son, Raymond, was born.

  For a good part of the early nineties, the Gilberts had led uneventful, middle-class lives. Sure, they argued and fought about the same domestic issues plaguing half of American marriages, but the arguments never materialized into much, and they usually just made up the old-fashioned way.

  During the summer of 1995, however, the marriage began to pull apart at the seams, and was anything but the “Ozzie and Harriett” front Kristen would have liked people to think it was. She and Glenn were arguing now almost daily. Longer periods went by where they wouldn’t talk. Although they had made a mutual decision years ago to forgo day care and work separate shifts so one of them could always be home with the kids, it just wasn’t working anymore. They hadn’t been intimate for some time, and the word divorce, usually coming from Kristen’s mouth, was being thrown around the house at will.

  Near the middle of the summer, her coworkers began to notice the change. Kristen went from being the model housewife and candid nurse who wasn’t afraid to talk about anything to a secretive woman who rarely even opened her mouth to talk about her husband and kids. And if she did, it was to humiliate Glenn. “He’s stupid, anyway,” she’d say.

  Then her entire appearance changed.

  She began to lose weight, as much as thirty pounds. With her new buffed body, she dressed more provocatively. It was only tight jeans and tight blouses, as if she were a sixteen-year-old girl trying to impress the new boy at school. She wore more makeup and changed her hairstyle and color just about every other month. One day she even showed up to work wearing a fake nose ring.

  For Glenn, he began to notice a change when, for the first time in their lives, his wife began bringing a change of clothes to work so she could go out afterward. And if she didn’t work, she would still go out.

  Glenn would question her about it, but the conversations would quickly turn into shouting matches.

  Even more bizarre was that even though she was never much of a cook, Kristen had begun to prepare home-cooked meals for Glenn on a more regular basis—this at a point in her life when she was thinking of divorcing him. It was unusual because they both worked different shifts and rarely ever ate meals together. Further, they just weren’t getting along anymore.

  Why the Betty Crocker impression now?

  The meals, Glenn began to notice, had a powdery taste to them, he later remembered, “similar to the taste of dissolving aspirin in your mouth.” Of course, he couldn’t say anything to his wife about it. They were constantly fighting. Telling her that her cooking tasted terrible would only make things worse.

  To her friends at work, Kristen began to be more firm about her plans for the future.

  “I don’t love Glenn anymore,” she told one coworker. “I want to be out of that house by Thanksgiving!”

  Around the same time, the name of James Perrault, a young security guard at the VAMC, kept popping up in conversation at the Gilberts’ home. She would tell Glenn that she wanted to fix Perrault up with her sister, Tara.

  Glenn, at thirty, his brown hair beginning to recede, had a slight belly most married men develop after years of being attached to the old ball and chain. But he was good-looking in a plain sort of way, the kind of guy most women would love to bring home to Mom: tall, quiet and passive. He was an extraordinary father to his two children, spending every free moment he had with them. He was a hard worker who had twenty-five people working under him as the shop supervisor of a local optical lens firm.

  But lately, Glenn had a big problem: James Perrault’s name being mentioned on a regular basis in his house. Here they were, having marital problems, and Kristen was throwing around another man’s name at will. It was beginning to upset Glenn.

  Perrault was twenty-six when Kristen met him, and had been working at the VAMC since July 1994. A Gulf War veteran, at a slender, well-built six feet, one hundred and sixty-five pounds, Perrault was a hard body of a man, with dark eyes and kinky, military-cropped brown hair.

  In other words, the total opposite of Glenn.

  On the outside, Perrault was a young, inno
cent man fumbling through life just waiting for bigger things to happen. Before the VAMC job, he’d worked as a security guard for Milton Bradley. Becoming a VAMC police officer was a step in the right direction for Perrault, who wanted nothing more than to be a bonafide cop one day. The VAMC had even sent him to Little Rock, Arkansas, for a month-long training course. And because he worked on government property, Perrault was authorized to carry a gun.

  All VAMC security personnel, whether they worked the day or night shifts, were kept to the same regimen. In Perrault’s case, his schedule during the late summer months of 1995 had him showing up at 3:00 P.M. and going home around eleven. He would patrol the hospital grounds for two hours, and then take over at the security desk around 5:00 P.M. for two hours, while continuing to rotate with the other security guard on duty until their replacements relieved them at eleven.

  It wasn’t quite the same as cruising through Springfield, tracking down drug dealers and pimps. But the time went by fast, and it sure beat chasing shoplifters through the aisles of some department store.

  When he wasn’t driving the grounds, Perrault’s job would take him into any number of unplanned situations. Aside from being responsible for the safety of staff and patients, VAMC security personnel were mandated by VA guidelines to assist during any medical emergencies—or codes—and/or psyche interventions. If a patient was unruly or disruptive, for example, it was up to security to contain him.

  During the latter part of August 1995, Perrault began spending more time up on Ward C associating with Gilbert. The two seemed to flirt with each other on occasion—especially, nurses were beginning to notice, during codes.

  Perrault seemed to enjoy the attention Gilbert gave him. He was single. He was having trouble meeting women, and Gilbert, perhaps, filled that void.

  If there wasn’t a code, he would go up on his breaks and visit while she worked in the ICU.

  Perrault seemed to many of the Ward C nurses as being the cocky jock in high school who was full of himself, and most of them despised him for it.