Perfect Poison

by M. William Phelps

  Then Ed Skwira’s death was brought up.

  Prosecutors asked Perrault about an ampoule of epinephrine that turned up missing while Skwira was in the middle of his code.

  Gilbert, Perrault said, told him that “it would impossible to say who took [it].”

  “Has Ms. Gilbert ever mentioned anything about the three broken ampoules of epinephrine which were found in Skwira’s room after the code?”

  Gilbert’s response to that, Perrault said, was that the VA was just making it up—that is, investigators were trying to scare people into thinking she had something to do with his death.

  Then Perrault ended his testimony with perhaps the most startling piece of evidence against Gilbert to date: her confession.

  Referencing that conversation he’d had with Gilbert over the phone, Perrault first explained, as he’d promised Gilbert he would, that she was hospitalized at the time and very stressed out.

  But when it came time to explain the actual confession, Perrault remembered it a bit differently. In addition to telling the grand jury that Gilbert said, “I did it. I did it. I injected those guys with a certain drug,” Perrault added that she had also said, “I killed those guys.”

  No matter how it was bottled, the grand jury took it as a confession nonetheless.

  While Perrault was in Springfield testifying, Gilbert was at home, undoubtedly climbing the walls. By the end of the afternoon, she had allegedly taken sixty five-hundred-milligram aspirin tablets and was admitted to Cooley Dickson Hospital for yet another psychiatric evaluation. The admitting doctor, reviewing her prior admission to Holyoke Hospital, wrote that “there is some question about her truthfulness during [that admission] and some problems with manipulation of staff.”

  After he finished testifying, James Perrault went to work for his regular four P.M.-to-midnight shift. Later that night, while he was sitting at his desk, RN Karen Abderhalden called. For the past few months, Abderhalden had been asking Perrault about Gilbert and, being a friend, was concerned with her welfare.

  A few minutes into the conversation, Abderhalden informed Perrault that Gilbert had been admitted to Cooley Dickinson while he was in Springfield.

  “I spoke to her, Jimmy. She said to tell you that she needs a few things from your apartment, some clothes . . .”

  “Jesus . . . all right. I’ll go see her tomorrow.”

  “She told me they were transferring her back to Arbour tomorrow.”

  “I’ll go to Cooley first thing, Karen.”

  “Thanks, Jimmy.”

  “Thank you, Karen. You’ve been a good friend to her.”

  Because the hospital really couldn’t tell one way or the other if Gilbert had taken as many pills as she had claimed, she was put in the ICU for observation.

  Perrault showed up the following morning.

  As he approached her bed, Gilbert tried to jump up and lash out at him, but he was able to run out of the room before a problem occurred.

  The hospital psychiatrist noted that Gilbert said she was “not intending to kill herself, but simply ‘seeking attention.’ The sort of attention she had in mind, [however], is not entirely definable.... She was quite eloquent in her desire not to be re-hospitalized and offers a variety of assurances,” the doctor wrote, that she will not attempt to try to kill herself again.

  The doctor discharged Gilbert, under the pretense that she be committed to Arbour Hospital again for further evaluation.

  His diagnosis?

  “Axis II . . . rules out a personality disorder in Cluster II, possibly a borderline personality.”

  Axis II is a scale doctors use to describe a wide variety of personality disorders. In Gilbert’s case, her personality traits fit into the scale as if it were designed specifically for her.

  James Perrault visited Gilbert at Arbour Hospital almost every day she was there. On one occasion, he even brought Karen Abderhalden, her husband and their son. As a friend, Abderhalden mentioned that she thought it might be a good idea if Gilbert, when she was released, spent some time at Abderhalden’s house. She lived out on the woods, away from everyone.

  Gilbert agreed. Maybe the time away would do her some good.

  On July 22, Perrault, by himself, went to see Gilbert again. They sat in the day room, near the visiting area.

  “What happened in the grand jury?”

  Perrault told her everything. Surprisingly, Gilbert accepted it all rather calmly.

  “Why were they asking you those questions, Jim?”

  “It’s an investigation, Kris.”

  “How did they react to your testimony?”

  Perrault changed the subject.

  “You want me to pick you up tomorrow—aren’t you supposed to be released?”

  “Yes and yes!”

  In his report, the attending psychiatrist at Arbour Hospital noted several characteristics about Gilbert that fell in line with a person who suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder. For one, he noted that “. . . [The] patient is trying to present herself healthier than what she might be. The most salient characteristics of patient’s [score on a personality test she took] are elevation on Scale 5 (Masculinity/Feminity) and Scale 4 (Psychopathic Deviate scale).... Although overall she is trying to contain herself, the record reveals signs of impulsivity.”

  His diagnosis again included “Axis II Personality Disorder,” with trends showing signs of “passive-aggressive, narcissistic [and] borderline.”

  The report went on to note that Gilbert was “an untrustworthy historian,” that she only behaved “good” this time around because any bad behavior would “only tend to delay the discharge she was so earnestly seeking.” He said she “had a strong tendency to minimize her difficulties and information that she was giving . . . about herself.”

  The picture that “emerged,” the doctor wrote, was of a “long-standing pattern of telling untruths, even when confronted with conflicting data.”

  CHAPTER 45

  As he said he would, Perrault picked up Gilbert at Arbour Hospital and drove her home. When they got to Gilbert’s Easthampton apartment, however, Perrault noticed the front door was wide open. A break-in?

  After they got out of his truck and approached the porch, Perrault saw SA Plante and Detective Murphy rummaging through Gilbert’s living room.

  “I suppose you have a search warrant?” Perrault asked. Murphy handed Gilbert a copy of the search warrant.

  “You can either stay here or leave. It’s up to you.”

  Perrault suggested they go next door, to Samantha Harris’s.

  “You can call your attorney over there, Kris,” he said.

  “Let’s go,” Gilbert said, as she began to cry. “Why are they doing this to me?” she asked as they walked toward Harris’s. “Why, Jim? What are they looking for? Why would they need to search my apartment?”

  “Just calm down. Call your attorney when we get to Sami’s.”

  At the urging of an attorney she had hired to handle her forthcoming divorce, Gilbert had hired noted criminal trial lawyer Harry Miles back in February, shortly after Wall, Rix and Walsh had turned her in.

  A Dartmouth graduate with a flourishing partnership in downtown Northampton, Miles, at fifty-two, had more than two decades’ worth of law experience when he first met Gilbert. He was no stranger to the type of high-profile client Gilbert would ultimately become. Nearly a year before he met Gilbert, Miles represented Richard Perry, a local man who was charged with and later found guilty of murdering a retarded Greenfield, Massachusetts, man named Billy Paige. Ironically, the judge who later heard the Perry case was none other than Judge William Welch, US attorney Bill Welch’s father.

  Gilbert conversed privately with Miles in Harris’s kitchen, while Harris and Perrault stayed in the living room. Neither heard what she had said, and Gilbert, apparently under the urging of Miles, didn’t talk about the short conversation afterward.

  With Miles long gone, Perrault said he had to leave. It was a Tuesday. He
had to go work.

  “They’re gone, Kristen,” Harris said, looking out the window.

  “I’ll be back later tonight,” Perrault told Gilbert. “We can talk about things then.”

  SA Plante’s detailed affidavit to Federal District Court Judge Michael Ponsor left no stone unturned. Among the list of items Plante said he had hoped to find in Gilbert’s apartment were medical or nursing textbooks, journals, manuals, any notes Gilbert might have made regarding acute medical care relating to cardiac illnesses and/or medication relating to cardiac illnesses; any cardiac medicines, including, but not limited to epinephrine; and any and all evidence relating to the Department of Veterans Affairs’ investigation.

  The thirty-page affidavit went into explicit detail concerning how the investigation was adding up. US attorney Bill Welch was right when he told Murphy to let Plante handle the report writing—because the man was as thorough as a CIA agent.

  An important fact that stood out on the black-and-white document was that Plante found out that there were seventy-five ampoules of epinephrine missing from the VAMC between August 30, 1995 and February 21, 1996. Unaccounted for. Plante explained that no doctor had administered the drug during that same period.

  When Perrault showed up at Gilbert’s later that night, she was fuming over the search warrant.

  “Why would they take my computer and answering machine?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What use would they be to the investigation? And my notebooks . . . my notes . . . my medical textbooks?”

  “What notebooks?” Perrault asked. He was curious.

  “I was keeping a list . . . keeping track of the questions that were being asked of other employees and friends of mine.”

  Indeed, included in Plante and Murphy’s find was a notebook with some of Perrault’s handwriting inside of it. Back in June, Gilbert had asked Perrault to write down what the investigators had asked him about. Thinking nothing of it, he did. Now, he thought, it might appear as if he were helping her.

  Plante and Murphy had also uncovered a piece of notebook paper with a list of names on it, and the heading explained it all: Friendly and Unfriendly Witnesses.

  Another one of Gilbert’s scorecards.

  The first person on the list, under Friendly Witnesses, was Glenn Gilbert. Under Glenn’s name was Perrault’s. Then Carole Osman, David Rejniak and Karen Abderhalden.

  Under the heading Unfriendly Witnesses, Kathy Rix’s name topped the list.

  “Because she was one of the ones that initiated the investigation,” Gilbert told Perrault.

  Next to Rix’s name, of course, was John Wall. Lori Naumowitz was next. According to Perrault, Gilbert said she put Lori’s name down only because “[Lori] was upset [that Perrault and Gilbert] were seeing each other and she felt that Lori was being loyal to [Glenn] instead of herself.”

  April Gougeon’s name was next, right above Lisa Baronas’s. On the second page, Beverly Scott, Jeff Begley and Frank Bertrand showed up—three nurses who, according to anyone who knew them, couldn’t collectively hurt a fly, much less frame someone for murder.

  Regarding Jeff Begley, who had been with Beverly Scott when Stanley Jagodowski coded, Gilbert later said he was “trying to frame her in order to get rid of her in order to get her slot.”

  When Plante and Murphy sat down to discuss what they had found at Gilbert’s apartment, something became crystal clear: Any nurse who could place her at the scene of a death or code was on her list of potentially unfriendly witnesses.

  Later, Perrault realized he had better come clean about what Gilbert had told him regarding the search. So he explained to Plante and Murphy one day that Gilbert was initially confused as to why her textbooks had been seized. Then she got extremely concerned, Perrault said, that at one time she had looked up the effects of epinephrine.

  “My fingerprints are on that page, Jim! With my fingerprints on that page, the IG[O] will think that I looked it up prior to the deaths to see what would kill a patient.”

  “Well,” Perrault asked, “why did you look it up, Kris?”

  “I didn’t know what the effects would be on a healthy person.”

  And... ?

  Some time later, Perrault then explained, he and Gilbert had a second conversation about the effects of epinephrine.

  “It would be difficult for investigators,” Gilbert had told him, “to be able to trace epinephrine because, one, epinephrine is the first thing—or one of many things—used during a code to revive a patient, so it’s put into the body. Secondly, epinephrine is a naturally occurring substance in the body. Third, epinephrine has such a short half-life—meaning that it breaks down [in the body] rather quickly—. . . the investigators would have a hard time trying to track it down.”

  CHAPTER 46

  After all that he had heard, James Perrault still had mixed feelings regarding Gilbert’s role in the deaths at the VAMC. On the one hand, he wanted to help Murphy and Plante, but on the other, he was still wrapped tight around Gilbert’s finger. After the search warrant was issued on July 23, Perrault found himself, just like old times, spending more time with Gilbert.

  They were an item again.

  At the urging of Gilbert, one day while Perrault had some free time at work he decided to go through the VAMC security journals for the four-month period Plante and Murphy had been focusing on in their investigation. Particularly interested in the days he had been working, Perrault made a list of all the medical emergencies that had occurred: times, dates, patients’ names, and the number of times security had responded, along with whom the security guard was.

  Immediately, he saw he had been on duty for every single code. In fact, for the majority of them, he was the security guard who had responded to the code.

  When he got home from work that night, he confronted Gilbert.

  “Why were the two of us on for every single one of those codes?”

  “It’s just a coincidence, Jim.”

  The one person who still hadn’t come forward to offer any more information than he had to was Glenn Gilbert. Here it was, the first week of August, and Glenn still wasn’t convinced, even after his estranged wife had called and basically admitted her involvement.

  But on August 15, something changed Glenn’s mind—because he called Plante and told him to come over and search the pantry of his house right away.

  Pantry? Plante wondered. Why just the pantry?

  The following day, Plante and Murphy showed up. The pantry was right in front of them as they walked in the back door. It was a small space, like a walk-in closet, used for storing extra canned goods, a vacuum cleaner or whatever. Gilbert had taken over the area years ago and used it to store her sewing materials. Glenn had rarely entered the room, he explained, since she’d left the house almost nine months ago.

  Glenn was an odd character, Murphy and Plante agreed. They couldn’t understand, save for the kids, why the hell he was still protecting her. They knew there was a strong possibility she had tried to poison him back in November. One of Murphy’s sources had said Glenn had admitted that “his sickness wasn’t a medical condition,” and Glenn had used the word “attempt” when he described the event to their source.

  When Plante and Murphy sat down in Glenn’s kitchen, Glenn explained why he wanted the pantry searched. And it all began to make sense.

  Glenn had been away for the past week on vacation with the kids. Before he had left, Gilbert had been bugging him to come over. She wanted to get into the house for some reason, he said. Glenn kept telling her no. But she kept persisting.

  Knowing she might break in while he was away, Glenn had his stepfather, Stanley Straub, come over and house-sit.

  No sooner had Glenn made his way onto Interstate 91 than Kristen was trying to talk her way past Straub.

  “I just need to get into the pantry,” she told the old man. “Just let me in.”

  “No. Absolutely not, Kristen. Now get!”

  When Glenn g
ot home, Straub told him how adamant Kristen had been about getting into the house.

  Later, Murphy and Plante went over and spoke to Glenn’s next-door neighbor, who also confirmed that she had tried to gain access to the house while Glenn had been away.

  By this point, Murphy had little patience left for Glenn Gilbert. He knew damn well Glenn was holding back. Murphy was caustic. He was as equally compassionate as Plante, but he did have a bite to him that scared people. He had no use for people who held back important information, especially when murder was involved. Here it was August, and Glenn was just now coming aboard.

  “I take people . . . who will give me one hundred percent of their knowledge, and I’ll treat them like gold,” Murphy later recalled. “But those people who hold back a little bit . . . I don’t know. At the end of every successful interview, whether you’re interviewing a witness or a target, you have to ask some pretty hard questions. And a lot of times, when you ask people hard questions, they can feel the focus of the interview shift from gathering information to focusing on them. ‘Where were you last night?’ You know, when you ask somebody a simple question like that, they get pissed off, especially if they are totally innocent. If they’re withholding information they don’t want to give you . . . well, you can just tell at that point.”

  The first time Murphy, Plante and Bill Welch interviewed Glenn, he arrived at the US Attorney’s Office with his lawyer. The interview became lax as it progressed and in a nonthreatening tone Welch and Plante were asking Glenn what he knew. Glenn started talking about the incident back in November when he believed Gilbert had tried to poison him. But he was beating around the bush, as if he were holding something back.