Throughout the night, he battled fatigue and muscle cramps until, finally, he began vomiting, feeling as though he were going to pass out. At around 10:45, he broke down and called his wife.
“I need you to come home and take me to the ER.”
“I’ll be right there.”
While in the ER, as they drew blood, Glenn was wide awake, alert. There wasn’t a doubt in anybody’s mind that he was ill, but he was certainly aware of what was going on around him.
A short time later, the ER doctor came in and said that Glenn’s potassium level had dropped to a “critically low level.” In addition, “his heart was beating irregularly and exhibiting cardiac arrhythmias.”
Potassium is found naturally in the body. It was unheard of for a man of Glenn’s age and physical shape to have a low potassium level. A person would have to stop drinking water for days—and even then, the level of potassium would be higher than what Glenn was exhibiting.
Not having much of anything to say, Kristen stood by and watched as the nurses and doctors worked on Glenn. After a while, Glenn was released and given a prescription of potassium to get his level back up to where it should be.
Still feeling ill, Glenn took the following day off from work. But after getting most of his strength back the next day, November 7, he was able to return.
“I’m not happy with how you were treated at the ER,” Kristen told him later that night before she left for work. “I’ll have the VA check your blood to make sure your potassium level is back up.”
“How you going to do that?”
“I’ll bring home the equipment, take a blood sample myself, and bring it back to the VA with me.”
“Okay,” Glenn said, and Kristen went off to work.
This was extraordinary. Hospitals, under strict guidelines, never test employees’ blood samples, and VAMC policies strictly forbid it. Further, Gilbert had never even spoken to the lab technician, who later said she would have told her no, anyway.
Over the next several days, Kristen never denied the fact to her coworkers that Glenn had been ill.
“He should have coded,” she told one friend, “due to his low potassium level. But he didn’t.” She also displayed her dissatisfaction about how the ER had treated him. “The hospital should have taken a blood sample to check his potassium level before they discharged him.”
But the ER had taken a blood sample. Kristen had stood there and watched them do it.
Then she called her old friend, Rachel Webber.
“What happened?” Webber asked, after Kristen explained how sick Glenn had been.
“Oh, he played some volleyball, and his electrolytes were off. They had to replenish his fluids . . . they put him on an IV.”
“Is he okay now?”
“He’s fine.”
Feeling a bit better, on November 10, Glenn went for an appointment at Kaiser Permanente, where his doctor checked his potassium level once again. It was, finally, back to normal.
Kristen had November 11 and 12 off. On the eleventh, while LPN April Gougeon was filling out some paperwork at the nurse’s station, she looked up and spotted Kristen walking toward the medicine supply closet—or satellite pharmacy—which was directly across the hallway from the nurse’s station on Ward C. Gougeon was surprised to see Gilbert. But there she was, dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans, rummaging through the medicine supply closet.
“Hi, Kristen, what’s going on? What are you doing here?” Gougeon asked.
As Gilbert rushed by, she said, “Oh, I need to . . . get some more medication for Glenn. He didn’t fill his prescription, and I need to get some more potassium.”
Gougeon watched as Gilbert tore through the medicine cabinet and, after apparently finding what she was looking for, took off.
The following night, November 12, she showed up again.
This time, LPN Lori Naumowitz watched as Gilbert walked hurriedly by the nurse’s station without saying a word, again en route toward the medicine supply closet.
As she entered the satellite pharmacy, Naumowitz followed her. Looking on from the doorway, she watched as Gilbert rummaged through the closet.
“Um . . . what are you doing?” Naumowitz asked.
“Oh, Lori . . . hi,” Gilbert said. “Glenn got a prescription for potassium from the hospital, but he ran out. I’m just taking some potassium home for him. No big deal.”
The VAMC stocked potassium on Ward C in many different forms, the most popular and easily accessible being tiny, clear ampoules similar to many of the other medications in the closet. Given in large doses, potassium is fatal. It is the final drug administered during an execution by lethal injection and stops the heart almost immediately upon impact.
After Gilbert left, Naumowitz pulled nursing assistant Lisa Baronas into an empty room and, privately, told her what Gilbert had done.
Baronas had her own story to tell.
A couple of days prior to November 11, she said she saw the strangest thing. As she walked into the nurse’s locker room to use the restroom at the beginning of her shift, she noticed a funny-looking reflection on the wall. At first she thought it was from her watch because there was no curtain on the window and the sun, which was just beginning to set, had been reflecting off the floor. But after looking more closely, she saw that the reflection was being made by a couple of silver drug packet strips hanging out of Gilbert’s coat.
So she walked over.
Immediately, she saw the VA symbol on the packets and knew that they were from the medicine cabinet. Without removing them from Gilbert’s jacket, Baronas looked at the names printed on the back of each packet: nifedipine and captopril.
In all her years of nursing, Baronas had never seen nor heard of the drugs.
A few days later, while telling Beverly Scott over the phone what she had seen, the two nurses made a date to look up the meds in a reference book. What they eventually found out not only piqued their interest and confused them, but gave them cause for concern.
Nifedipine is a calcium blocker. Calcium blockers are used in the treatment of certain heart conditions and victims of stroke. It causes the blood vessels and heart muscles to relax and dilate. The type of nifedipine Gilbert had in her pocket, however, had never been authorized or prescribed for any patients on Ward C.
Captopril is used in the treatment of cardiovascular diseases, hypertension and congestive heart failure, generally for lowering blood pressure.
Combined, both drugs can lower the heart rate of a healthy person to an extremely dangerous level—and, if given in a large enough dose, can cause death.
CHAPTER 10
A week or so after the initial incident that had landed Glenn in the ER, Kristen, without notice, came home from work during her dinner break one night toting a large canvas bag. She had a simple request for Glenn: As she had promised, she wanted to take a sample of his blood back to work and have it tested. She said she didn’t trust the doctors. She wanted to be sure his potassium level was where it should be.
Here they were discussing divorce and having arguments every other day about who would stay in the house and who would leave, and now Kristen was coming home to make sure Glenn was okay?
Something didn’t fit.
Kristen brought the canvas bag into the bathroom.
“Come on in, Glenn,” she said, and took a large syringe out of the bag. It was filled with a clear liquid.
Glenn looked at the needle.
“It’s saline,” Kristen said. “I need to flush your vein first, before I take blood from you.” She had another syringe that was empty. Glenn guessed it was for the blood she was going to draw.
After wrapping a tourniquet around his arm, she inserted the larger needle “into the crook of his left arm and began injecting the clear liquid.”
Glenn hadn’t thought of it at the time, but anyone who had ever gotten blood drawn knew that the vein was never flushed because it would dilute the blood.
As the fluid entered G
lenn’s body, his fingertips went numb and, growing cold, his “hands, arms and chest drain[ed] of color and [became] translucent.”
What the hell is going on . . . ?
As Glenn tried to pull away, Kristen pinned him with her hip against the wall and hurriedly pushed the injection into his vein until the syringe was at least half empty. At the same time, she ripped the tourniquet off his arm so the fluid would quickly enter his bloodstream before he could do anything.
In seconds, Glenn’s legs locked. As he began to lose consciousness, he slowly slid down the side of the bathroom wall he had been leaning on like some drunken bandit in a spaghetti Western who had been hit over the head with a bottle.
Within a few moments, he came out of it and saw Kristen scrambling around the bathroom in a frenzy. She was gathering up the syringes and putting them back into the bag.
“This isn’t going to work,” Kristen said as Glenn came to. “You must have fainted at the sight of the needles.”
Even so, while her husband lay helpless on the floor, Kristen walked out of the house and returned to work as if nothing had happened.
When she returned, she ran into Lori Naumowitz and gave her version of what had happened back at home.
“You just left him there . . . and came back to work?” Naumowitz asked.
“He’s fine. He just fainted.”
“We have to call him, Kristen. We have to make sure he’s okay.”
“He just fainted, Lori. He’ll be fine.”
The next day, Glenn confronted her.
“What the hell happened here last night?”
“You fainted. Everything’s fine. It happens all the time. It’s no big deal, Glenn.”
“Jesus. What the . . . ?”
“You’re fine. But listen, don’t tell anybody about it, okay?”
In his naivety—or perhaps denial—Glenn let it go.
Oddly enough, just a week before, Gilbert had called the family veterinarian. She said that their Labrador, Mindy, suffered from car sickness. “Could I come in and get some Acepromazine? We’re taking a car trip pretty soon.”
“Sure,” the doctor said.
Gilbert showed up some time later and picked up five twenty-five-milligram tablets of the drug.
Acepromazine is similar to Valium. It’s a stimulant for dogs that are stressed out. It can also be used to prepare an animal for an operation; it stabilizes the rhythms of the heart. An overdose, given in one large dose or over an extended period of time in smaller doses, will drastically reduce the heart rate of an animal or human being.
In time, it will cause death.
Glenn Gilbert later recalled that they weren’t planning any road trips at the time. They may have been planning on getting divorced, but a trip was the last thing on their minds. Also, he said, Mindy had been in the car plenty of times, and not once had she ever gotten carsick.
James Perrault sat down one evening and decided to write Gilbert a letter. He knew the only way he could get her full attention was to put his thoughts down on paper and read the letter to her aloud the next time he saw her. If Gilbert didn’t like where a conversation was headed, she had a way of manipulating it so it swung back in her direction. Perrault wanted to make sure that didn’t happen.
The next morning, he met Gilbert for breakfast at a local mall.
After they got a cup of coffee and had something to eat, Perrault told her to sit down.
“What is it, Jimmy?”
He pulled out the letter and read it aloud from beginning to end. It said that he wasn’t happy with the way things were, or where they appeared to be heading. He urged her to move out of her house so they could see if there was anything between them. The way things were now, he couldn’t do it much longer.
“Yes, Jimmy. We could have a future together,” Gilbert said, taking the letter.
As she read it, Gilbert began to cry. Perrault had mentioned in the letter that he would end the relationship if something wasn’t done soon.
“Don’t . . . Jimmy . . . don’t . . . please,” Gilbert begged.
From Perrault’s point of view, it was do-or-die time for Gilbert. She couldn’t have it both ways any longer.
“If you don’t leave Glenn, Kristen, I’m leaving you,” Perrault said.
Gilbert jumped up from her seat and took off toward a pay phone.
“I’m calling Glenn right now,” she screamed.
Perrault went after her.
“Is Glenn there?” Perrault heard Gilbert say to whoever was on the other end of the line.
After a pause, Gilbert said, “It’s me. I just want you to know that I am not happy anymore. It’s over. I want a divorce.”
Perrault was impressed. She was finally taking charge.
“What?” Glenn asked on the other end.
Gilbert hung up, turned toward Perrault and smiled. She began crying, hugging him as if they’d just hit the lottery.
Several days later, Glenn proposed counseling. He said he still loved her and wanted to save the marriage for the sake of the children. Seven years was worth a counseling session or two, if only to get directions on how to end the marriage.
They went to counseling one time. When they got home, Kristen lashed out at him.
“You move out!” she said. “I’m not leaving this place.”
“Fine, then. I will.”
For the next few days, Kristen lived the life of a single woman, seeing Perrault whenever and wherever she wanted to.
Weeks later, without a fight, she changed her mind and moved out of the house.
CHAPTER 11
Shaped like a horseshoe, with the open end facing Northampton Street (Route 10), the apartment complex James Perrault helped Kristen Gilbert move into on December 1, 1995, provided the perfect spot in town for divorcées, single mothers and newlyweds. Rent was cheap. Retail and grocery stores were nearby. And for some of those who worked in Springfield or Holyoke, it was the best of both worlds: community-oriented, small-town living with the benefits of big-city life just up the road.
For Kristen Gilbert, Northampton Street was the perfect location. Not only was Glenn’s work just a two-minute ride down the road, but Perrault lived only two miles away.
The kids stayed with Glenn. Kristen didn’t even make it an issue. She would see them every day, of course, because Glenn worked so close by. He would drop them off in the morning and pick them up after he got out of work.
It appeared to be the perfect setup for everyone involved.
Perrault and Gilbert’s relationship took on a new dimension now that they were free to come and go as they pleased. They went to the movies. Attended plays. Went bar-hopping and had romantic dinners.
Perhaps it was love after all for James Perrault.
By the end of 1995, codes on Ward C had become an outright problem. Nurses were beginning to mention to each other that there was a “marked increase” in the past few months, but now it seemed as though they were happening weekly. And for some reason, most of the codes were being called during the busiest times—say, for example, when they were understaffed—and, lo and behold, on Gilbert’s tour of duty.
Here it was December, and already there had been about thirty-five codes for the year on Ward C alone during Gilbert’s 4:00 P.M. to midnight shift. Even more shocking was that Gilbert had found twenty of the codes herself. The closest nurse behind her had found only five. By comparison, during the previous year, 1994, there had been a total of fifteen codes, yet Gilbert had found half of those, too.
But even more alarming was the number of deaths.
By December 7, Ward C had lost thirty-seven patients on Gilbert’s shift alone. There was no comparison with the two other shifts: The day shift had lost only six patients and the overnight shift ten. But the most significant factor in the second-shift deaths was that Kristen Gilbert had found twenty, more than half of them, herself.
In 1995, Henry Hudon, from Westfield, Massachusetts, was a thirty-five-year-old schizophr
enic who liked to smoke cigarettes, drink beer and, shortly after being admitted to the VAMC, run away from the hospital whenever the opportunity presented itself.
“I’m going out for a smoke,” Hudon would say, never to return.
A frequent visitor to the VAMC’s psychiatric ward, Hudon was an Air Force veteran who had “demonstrated excellent performance in all phases of his duties,” his sergeant, Thomas Harrington, wrote about him in 1980.
Growing up in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts, Hudon lived the average life kids in Springfield’s most reclusive suburbs did during the seventies. He graduated from East Longmeadow High School in 1977, an above-average student. He took the postmaster’s daughter to his high school prom and the police chief’s daughter to the senior banquet, and was a member of the high school’s swim and golf teams.
Born prematurely on February 5, 1960, in Holyoke, Hudon embodied the persona of an all-American military boy, created in the image of his father, a twenty-four-year Air Force vet who had fought in World War II.
When it came time, deciding on a career in the military was an easy decision for Hudon, who looked up to his father. So, years later, the scrawny, blond-haired boy with thin lips and an imposing smile enlisted.
Hudon’s outgoing personality, strong moral fiber and easygoing attitude, however, landed him in a vegetative state not too long after he arrived at the Royal Air Force Station, in Lakenheath, England.
As Hudon, an assistant physical therapist, and two friends walked into a local London pizza joint one night, the base commander, with his wife, children and another couple, stopped Henry at the door. There were two men fighting in the back of the restaurant, the commander said. He asked Henry if he could break it up.
“I’ll do my best, sir.”
Henry was known throughout his company as a peacemaker, a guy who didn’t like to see people argue and fight. So he walked over to where the men were yelling and pushing each other and tried getting in the middle, demanding that they stop fighting.
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