Perfect Poison

by M. William Phelps

  His approach was three-pronged: First, he looked at the medical care of the patient. Second, what disease, if any, did that particular patient have? And, finally, most important, should that person have died when he died?

  He quickly saw that many of the patients were scheduled to leave the VAMC within days of their death, and, to make matters worse, they were getting better.

  The one way to rule out foul play, Baden suggested, was to exhume the bodies and have a look.

  CHAPTER 39

  Bearing a strong resemblance to actor Robert Loggia, with his sun-drenched skin and receding hairline, Massachusetts State Police Detective Kevin Murphy, at six-two, two hundred and ten pounds, fit perfectly into the tough-guy cop mold created by many television shows. In his late forties, Murphy was tall and unassuming, street-smart, unruly and gruff. Throughout his career with the state police, he had seen just about everything: dead babies left in Dumpsters; bloated and unidentifiable bodies strewn about the banks of the Connecticut River; junkies dead from overdoses left to rot in rundown warehouses and crack dens; kids with their heads blown off during drive-bys; hangings; burned bodies; and bodies stabbed, shot and mutilated.

  The only crime Detective Murphy hadn’t come across in his twenty-four years on the job was serial murder.

  On paper, SA Plante and Detective Murphy were a peculiar match. One was a street cop who had been somewhat soured by the years on the job. The other was full of fire, even though he had chased paper cases for his entire career. Murphy, rough around the edges, drank beer and smoked. Plante, clean-cut, went to the gym every morning before work. Murphy was the first to say he didn’t take any “bullshit” from sources who held back on him. Plante took it all, he admitted, providing it moved his case along.

  At an early age, Murphy learned how disappointing life could be when one of his four brothers developed Hodgkin’s disease and struggled with the illness for four years before losing the battle in July 1961. Murphy’s uncle, NYPD cop James Murphy, was once featured in a magazine article as “The Toughest Cop in New York.”

  Nailing speeders on the Interstate and chasing down drunk drivers wasn’t Murphy’s bag. But beginning on January 10, 1972, he did it, without regret, for the first nine years of his career. After that, he moved on to Homicide and Death Investigation. In the late eighties, he worked with the FBI on a joint terrorist task force that eventually captured several fugitives responsible for the murder of Phil Lamonica, a New Jersey State Trooper.

  “Being involved in that task force,” Murphy recalled, “solidified my resolve in the benefits of being a team player. No matter how hard you work or how smart you think you are, that job taught me that you always need other people. . . .”

  During another murder case he pursued for nearly three years, the perp ended up committing suicide, addressing his suicide note to Murphy—who was about to arrest him any day.

  In late June, Murphy sat with his notebook in the Northampton DA’s office listening intently to SA Plante as he presented the case he had been developing against Gilbert. Sitting beside Murphy were US attorneys Bill Welch and Kevin O’Regan, DA Elizabeth Schiebel and her two top assistants, Michael Goggins and David Angier.

  The purpose of the meeting was to discuss a possible collaboration between local and federal law enforcement. SA Plante needed help. The case against Gilbert was overwhelming him. Juggling all the interviews he still had to conduct, the medical files that still needed reviewing, and the footwork that was undoubtedly ahead was more than one man could handle.

  As it was, Plante was away from his family five days a week, commuting home only on the weekends. This was the first time in his career he had ever done that for such an extended period of time. In addition, he was working around the clock, also something he had never done before. Every day seemed to turn up new leads, new accusations, and new possibilities.

  When Plante finished his spiel in the main conference room, Murphy walked over, introduced himself, and invited the well-dressed special agent upstairs for a cup of coffee.

  “Let’s forget about all this administrative rhetoric,” Murphy said as they made their way. “This can-you-help-our-guy-and-we’ll-help-your-guy bullshit! Do you have a case or not? I want to know how you feel about it.”

  Murphy was referring to the promises the feds and locals had made to each other. They had discussed deputizing a DA from the state as a special US attorney. Both agencies would share credit equally. They would agree to keep it all hush-hush for the time being . . . and all that other political mumbo-jumbo Murphy had no interest in. When it came down to brass tacks, Murphy was a cop. He knew the area. He had developed sources through the years. He could help.

  Cruising through downtown Northampton now, Murphy looked over at Plante and told him he would help.

  “But the administrative nuances of all this we don’t care about, right?”

  Plante nodded.

  “We gotta get the bad guy, Stevie,” Murphy said. “If she’s innocent, we’ll prove it! If she’s not, we’ll find out.”

  CHAPTER 40

  The first thing SA Plante did was introduce Murphy to everyone up on the hill. By all rights, no one who worked at the VAMC had to answer to local law enforcement because it was a federal institution. This also proved to be a very serious situation for Gilbert. If the case made it to court, since the crimes had been committed on federal property, Gilbert could face the death penalty.

  Ironically, if convicted, she would die by lethal injection.

  Plante made it clear to everyone, including Perrault and his boss, that when Murphy came up on the hill to get something or ask questions, he had better be taken seriously, or Plante would step in and, wielding his authority as a government agent, make damn sure he was.

  Plante and Murphy needed some type of case management plan. Documents were piling up by the boxful. Without any type of order, mistakes could be made, critical information possibly overlooked, and they ran the risk of doing things twice.

  “What sort of paperwork do you want us to generate?” Murphy asked Bill Welch one afternoon.

  A cop who knew the legal ropes fairly well, Murphy also knew that within the state system, everything he wrote down was discoverable. Defense attorneys would sooner or later get hold of it, and a harmless note to himself could be turned into some sort of startling piece of defense evidence. Also, if Plante wrote up a report about a certain incident and, for some reason, Murphy had written one without telling him, they had to be sure the reports jibed.

  “Make your own personal notes,” Welch advised. “But I don’t want you writing anything down as far as a ‘report’ is concerned. Steve has written plenty of them. He knows the federal system. Let him handle it.”

  Glenn Gilbert was living under a pretty well-laid out routine by the time July 4, 1996, came around. He went to work, dropped off the kids at his estranged wife’s apartment along the way, got out of work, picked up the children, settled in at home, and just tried to forget about what had happened between him and his wife. Couples split up, marriages dissolved.

  Kristen, on the other hand, was beginning to crack under the pressure of the investigation. Now, with Perrault scheduled to testify in front of the grand jury in about a week, and the evidence against her mounting daily, she could feel a certain shift in Perrault’s demeanor.

  He was thinking things over. Starting to talk less. Gilbert didn’t like that.

  Perrault wanted to be a bonafide cop one day. What he did the next couple of months would, undoubtedly, have an effect on his future in law enforcement. He had to be careful.

  Plante had done a mind-numbing study of the medical records to put some sort of statistical spin on everything. If nothing else, at least he could present in lay terms what he had to Perrault and Glenn, and maybe get them to finally open their eyes.

  What Plante found turned out to be devastating.

  Between February 17, 1996—the day Gilbert went out on medical leave—and the first week
of July, there had been only four deaths and two medical emergencies on Ward C. Comparatively speaking, from October 1995 to February 17, 1996, there had been twenty-three deaths and nearly thirty medical emergencies. Plante’s study went as far back as 1989, when Gilbert was working several different shifts. That year, the deaths for each of the three shifts were “randomly distributed among each shift and averaged between ten to fifteen deaths per shift per year.” Later in 1989, and the early part of 1990, however, when Gilbert began working solely the midnight-to-eight A.M. shift, the numbers during the day and evening shifts “remained essentially constant” while the midnight-shift numbers doubled. Throughout the next five years whatever shift Gilbert worked, the numbers followed her, while they stayed virtually the same on the shifts she hadn’t worked. Dr. Stephen Gehlbach, Dean of the University of Massachusetts School of Public Health, ran the numbers for Plante and calculated that the probability of Gilbert’s “being on duty for such a large number of patient deaths per shift,” given the fact that she had sometimes worked part-time, was “. . . a chance occurrence [of] 1:100,000,000.” Regarding all the codes she had been on duty for, Dr. Gehlbach came up with the exact same numbers: one in a hundred million.

  This wasn’t smoking-gun evidence. But the probability that she didn’t have something to do with the deaths and codes was, at least according to Dr. Gehlbach, astronomically small.

  Now all Plante and Murphy had to do was get Glenn to believe it.

  Cops know, however, that denial can put blinders on a spouse. They sometimes see only what they want to. What husband wanted to believe his wife was a serial killer? With Glenn being the Gomer Pyle type, innocent and naïve, still rapt under Kristen’s spell, they knew the chances of his coming around were slim, but they had to keep trying.

  “Let me go talk to him,” Plante said to Murphy.

  “That might be better,” Murphy said, and smiled.

  Murphy could be somewhat pushy and impatient. Yet Plante had developed patience and poise as a sixth and seventh sense, and the nurses he was interviewing were becoming quite comfortable with him. With his heavy Boston accent—pock the cah near the bah—his personable, New England charm oozed from his pores.

  Maybe Glenn would finally see it, too.

  Back in early May, before Murphy was involved, Plante had made a house call to Glenn, coming up on him as he worked in the yard one day. Plante filled him in on what he could without giving away too much.

  Glenn listened, but didn’t offer anything.

  “If you want to talk, Glenn,” Plante said, handing him his card, “give me call.”

  Immediately after he left, Kristen called, as if she had been casing the place.

  “Why didn’t you just slam the door in his face?” she asked.

  “I didn’t say anything, Kris! He did all the talking.”

  After discussing it a bit more, Plante and Murphy both agreed that they needed to get anything they could from Glenn: a lead, a name, something she had done.

  Anything.

  But when Plante showed up again shortly after the July Fourth holiday, Glenn still didn’t want to talk about anything.

  “Can’t help you. Sorry.”

  Since he was feeling the heat from both sides, it was time for James Perrault to make a decision. Gilbert was pestering him almost daily, asking him to find out what he could and report it back to her. On occasion, she would even ask if anyone had been talking about “epinephrine.” Perrault was becoming more reluctant to do anything anymore, especially since he had been subpoenaed to testify in front of the grand jury on July 16, just a few weeks away. In fact, he was even thinking of breaking off the relationship. Things weren’t making sense. He needed some space to think things through.

  One day, while they were just hanging around Gilbert’s apartment, Perrault saw a “yellow kit” lying on the coffee table and asked Gilbert what it was. It had been the second time he had seen the thing.

  “I’m allergic to bee stings,” she said. “It’s a bee-sting kit.”

  “Is that epinephrine?” Perrault asked, pointing to a brown ampoule in the pouch.

  “Oh, yes. That. I need it for my allergy to the bees.”

  A few days later, Perrault contacted SA Plante and told him what he had seen.

  Armed with that information, Plante and Murphy began to examine Gilbert’s medical history. Back on June 16, they found out, she had been admitted to Cooley Dickinson Hospital to get some work done on her shoulder. When Murphy and Plante obtained those medical records and matched them up against her medical records throughout the years and her pre-employment medical examination, nowhere did Gilbert indicate she was allergic to bee stings. To the contrary, she made it a point to note that she was allergic only to penicillin. When they interviewed Melodie Turner, who had been taken out of her supervisory post and reassigned, as one person later recalled, “to a job that was akin to watching paint dry,” Turner said she was “completely unaware of Gilbert’s allergic reaction to bee stings.”

  Another day, another path to explore.

  CHAPTER 41

  By July 8, James Perrault had seen enough. His head was spinning from all the allegations and statistics Plante had laid on him. All the coincidences. He wanted no part of Gilbert any more.

  Later that night, after they had gone out for dinner, Perrault mentioned to Gilbert that he thought their relationship hadn’t been going so good over the past few weeks. Maybe it was time to separate.

  As Perrault expected, she didn’t take the news so well. She became upset, rushed into the bathroom, locked the door, and began bawling hysterically.

  Listening to her sob, Perrault went into the bedroom to sit down and collect his thoughts. Breaking up with her wasn’t as easy as he thought it would be. He still loved the woman.

  A few moments later, Perrault heard the toilet flush, and Gilbert stormed into the bedroom and threw an empty bottle of Fiorinal, a migraine medication she had been taking, on the bed.

  Perrault stood up.

  “Now look what you made me do,” Gilbert stammered. She seemed drunk, slurring her speech, stumbling around.

  Then she took off running.

  Concerned for her safety, Perrault chased her. But approaching the end of the hallway just outside his door, where a set of stairs led to the outside parking lot, he stopped, went back inside his apartment, and phoned the Easthampton Police Department.

  While he was on the line explaining what had just happened, Gilbert rushed back into the apartment and, when she figured out to whom he was talking, began grabbing at him, screaming and yelling.

  When she realized it was impossible to overpower him, she ran out the door.

  After Perrault hung up, he looked out the door and saw Gilbert sitting outside on the front steps.

  She hadn’t run anywhere.

  “Listen, I called the cops because I’m worried about you, Kris.”

  “That’s fine. When they get here, I’ll just tell them you beat me up.” She turned toward him, “I’ll have you arrested!”

  The cops showed up and—as they do in all domestic disturbance cases—separated the two lovebirds. One cop took Perrault off to the side and began asking him questions, while the other stayed with Gilbert.

  Perrault came clean right away. He told the officer what Gilbert had in mind. Sizing up Gilbert’s present condition, the officer agreed with Perrault; he hadn’t laid a finger on her.

  After both cops had a brief meeting with Gilbert while Perrault waited in the wings, one of the officers approached him.

  “Can she spend the night at your apartment?”

  “Absolutely not!”

  Perrault said he was worried she might, sometime during the course of the night, again make false allegations against him for abuse.

  First thing the next morning, July 9, Perrault woke to the sound of Gilbert banging at his door. She was “in a daze,” Perrault noticed, acting as if she were under the influence of drugs or alcohol. He thou
ght she might have taken a second bottle of pills and was coming back to reach out for help.

  So he invited her in.

  He realized immediately he wasn’t going to get through to her. She needed to be under a doctor’s care. She was a danger to herself, if not others. But instead of calling the cops, Perrault decided to do something he thought for the life of him he would never be faced with: calling Glenn at work to ask him to come over and see if he could have her committed.

  The two men had never spoken at any length before. What does one man who took another man’s wife away from him say? It was awkward, to say the least. But for Perrault, it was the only option he had left. Gilbert had been acting as he had never before seen her. Her neighbor, Samantha Harris, whom Perrault had come to know pretty well throughout the summer, referred to Gilbert, when she was in this state, as “manic.” But Perrault had never really understood the comment until now. Gilbert, Harris said, would become delirious and frenzied as if she had no idea what she was doing.

  As Perrault went into his bedroom to call Glenn, Kristen retreated to the kitchen, where she curled herself up in a fetal position on the floor and began to prove just how manic she could be.

  As he dialed Glenn’s number, Perrault could hear her moaning.

  “I didn’t do anything . . . you have to believe me,” she kept saying over and over.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Perrault, walking back into the kitchen, asked after hanging up with Glenn.

  Kristen didn’t answer. She just kept repeating the same thing: “You have to believe me; I didn’t do anything . . . I didn’t do . . .”

  It was about 2:00 P.M. when Glenn arrived. After discussing the situation with Perrault for a moment, he walked into the kitchen.