Perfect Poison

by M. William Phelps

  “You stole the damn canoe and gave it to your boyfriend for his birthday? Are you kidding me? What the hell is wrong with you?”

  Kristen denied it. She said she bought the canoe from a guy in Holyoke who sold outdoor sporting goods in his front yard.

  “Do you have a receipt?”

  “No,” Gilbert said.

  Glenn and his brother-in-law cut their losses and decided not to call the cops and press charges. There was enough going on already. It would have been hard to prove.

  Perrault, on the other hand, felt ridiculed and embarrassed. He returned the canoe, and it was rarely ever discussed again.

  When Glenn told Harris what had happened, she couldn’t believe the story. Kristen, she insisted, because of her injury, was incapable picking up a handbag, much less a canoe.

  So Harris wrote it off and, as Kristen had told her many times, assumed Glenn was upset that she had left him for another man. This was one of the ways he could get back at the both of them, Kristen said.

  The canoe incident was usurped a couple of months later by an event involving a pair of kittens Gilbert had taken in around the middle of July—an event that proved to Harris how most things in Gilbert’s life were sketched around the way James Perrault felt about her.

  “Attention,” Harris would tell herself. “Everything Kristen did, she did under the guise of gaining attention.”

  It had something to do with Tara, Gilbert’s younger sister, Harris believed. Gilbert didn’t speak of Tara too often, but when she did, it was always in the realm of how much more attention Gilbert’s father had given to Tara. One story was that the old man had built a tree house for Tara when they were kids, and Gilbert wasn’t allowed in it. When Gilbert asked for one, the old man coldly refused.

  The kittens Gilbert took in were beautiful females, about ten weeks old. Whenever Gilbert was confined to jail or the hospital, Harris and Perrault had made it a point to have keys to her apartment so one of them could feed the kittens in her absence. When Gilbert wasn’t there, Perrault made sure always to enter her apartment with Harris, so Gilbert couldn’t later accuse him of anything.

  One day, out of the blue, Gilbert called Harris and said that one of the kittens had developed a bacterial infection and would be spending some time at the vet hospital.

  It was the first time Harris had heard one of the kittens had been ill.

  “She’ll be okay,” Harris promised Gilbert. “Don’t worry about it. It’s just an infection. It’ll be okay, Kristen.”

  But a few days later, shortly after Harris had gotten home from work, Gilbert called a second time. She was hysterical.

  “The kitten’s dead. She’s dead. I can’t believe it . . .”

  Thinking that it was the kitten Gilbert had taken to the vet a few days earlier, Harris rushed over to comfort her friend.

  Gilbert was upstairs in the corner of her bedroom when Harris walked in: crying, moaning, visibly trembling, looking away from the kitten, but pointing at it as if she were scared to look.

  As Harris approached the animal, she could see it curled up in a ball. It was barely breathing, with blood running out of its mouth. Its eyes were glossed over, a murky pus-colored yellow. But she could hear it making a faint wheezing sound.

  “Kristen, what happened?”

  “Well,” Gilbert said. She wasn’t looking at Harris or the kitten. She was looking off in the distance. “I came home, and it crawled out from underneath the bed . . . and . . . it . . . it had a seizure and just laid on the ground.” Gilbert then began to get hyper, moving around, pacing. “So . . . I . . . I . . . I gave it mouth-to-mouth,” she said, perking up, “and saved its life!”

  The first thing Harris thought of was getting the kitten to the vet before it died in front of them.

  “Kristen, we need to call the vet right away.”

  “Well, I already called Jim.”

  “No. No. No! We need to call the vet. Right now!”

  Gilbert then went to the linen closet, got a towel, and wrapped up the kitten. As Harris watched, she couldn’t believe how Gilbert, instead of comforting the thing, held it out in front of herself as if she were repulsed by the sight of it. As a mother, all Harris wanted to do was pick the animal up and cradle it in her arms.

  Harris then called the vet.

  “Can we bring it in right away? It’s going to die at any time.”

  “Bring it in immediately.”

  “Kristen,” Harris said, turning toward Gilbert and grabbing her by the shoulders, “listen to me. The vet said to bring it in right away.”

  Gilbert wouldn’t look into Harris’s eyes.

  “Oh, no. I have to wait for Jim to come before I do anything.”

  “My God, Kristen, the kitten is going to die. Why in the world do you have to wait for Jim?”

  “Because I called him, and he said he was on his way.”

  “Kristen, why don’t you just take the kitten to the vet, and I’ll wait here for Jim and send him down there when he gets here?”

  “No! Absolutely not! I have to wait for Jim, Sami. Now that’s the end of it!”

  Gilbert put the cat down on the ground, walked away and sat down on the bed.

  Harris was stunned by her lack of compassion. Gilbert had spent her entire adult life in nursing. Her job had been to care for people.

  Luckily, while they were talking, Perrault arrived. He and Gilbert then brought the animal to the vet, and both kittens ended up being fine in a matter of a couple weeks.

  The next day, Perrault went over to Harris’s to thank her for what she had done.

  “What the hell happened yesterday, Jim? I wish someone would explain it to me.”

  “I don’t know, Sami. She’s . . . she’s . . . I don’t know what to say.”

  “What the hell is wrong with her?”

  Perrault then moved in closer as if he didn’t want anyone else to hear what he was about to say.

  “You know, Sami,” he whispered, “just the other day, in the heat of an argument, I told her that I loved those kittens more than her. You know, just to hurt her feelings. Maybe this had something to do with that?”

  “What?”

  “And just last night we were watching one of those ‘real video’ shows on TV, and they showed a tape of this fireman who saved this cat’s life by giving it mouth-to-mouth.”

  Harris just shook her head.

  There was one more instance, even more horrifying, that finally sent Harris running to the DA’s office.

  In early September, Gilbert called Harris and started ranting and raving about the investigation and everyone who had turned their backs on her. It was same rhetoric Harris heard since the July car ride, when Gilbert had told her about the investigation. “I’ll get them all,” Gilbert would say. “They’re all against me!” It had become casual conversation. All she ever talked about was the investigation.

  Yet this particular morning, Gilbert said something that Harris didn’t take as just another one of her informal threats. It gave her pause to wonder if Gilbert was planning on taking a grander step toward stopping the investigation.

  “You know,” Gilbert said over the phone, “that Karen Abderhalden better watch out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Harris liked Karen. She had only met her a few times, but she had spoken to her over the phone on numerous occasions throughout the first few weeks of September. Abderhalden had a warm disposition. But like everyone else involved, she was petrified of Gilbert. And because Harris was so close to Gilbert, she became the epicenter of the investigation. Everyone involved was calling her at one time or another to see what Gilbert was up to. Most called out of fear, and actually believed Gilbert would follow through on her threats. It became a ritual. People would call Harris and, half-joking, half-serious, say, “Tell me: What kind of day am I going to have today, Sami?” Or maybe their car had been vandalized the previous day, and they would call to see if Gilbert was home at such-and-such a time.r />
  Abderhalden lived with her parents in Ashfield, a rather spread-out, reclusive town just outside of Northampton, and had taken Gilbert in back in August. She had convinced her parents that Gilbert needed to be around friends. Everyone had turned their backs on her. She was having problems with Perrault, her husband had totally written her off, and the investigation was beginning to destroy her emotionally. Gilbert had attempted suicide several times, and Abderhalden just wanted to be there for her as a friend. Yet, in truth, Gilbert had played Abderhalden and her parents like a virtuoso, convincing them of her innocence and using them to further her agenda.

  “Well, well, well,” Gilbert said to Harris, “you know, Karen’s house is so far out in the boondocks . . . if the whole family was killed, nobody would find them for a very long time.”

  This coming from a woman who had called Abderhalden eighty-six times between August thirtieth and early September to lean on her for support. The calls lasted anywhere from thirty seconds to more than an hour. During one call, Gilbert had told Abderhalden that “because Jimmy [Perrault] loved her cats so much, she intended to strike back at him by having them euphemized [sic] and was going to lay the cats at his doorstep.”

  Petrified by what she had just heard, Harris knew it was time to call the investigators.

  CHAPTER 50

  At 4:00 P.M., on September 11, 1996, Harris called the Northampton DA’s office and requested an immediate meeting with investigators. She said James Perrault had given her the phone number. She said she had information that could help the investigation into the alleged murders up at the VAMC. She said she was eager to help. She had seen enough. She was scared to death for the welfare of her family. She said she wanted to disassociate herself from Gilbert right away—because if Gilbert ever found out that she had called the DA’s office, the consequences, Harris believed, would be deadly.

  “One of the most dangerous things you can do at this point,” SA Plante warned Harris, “would be to end the relationship you have with Ms. Gilbert.”

  Plante’s words sent a chill down Harris’s spine. It was the last thing she wanted to hear. If she thought the past few weeks were scary, she knew now that the future was going to be ten times worse.

  “Oh, my God,” Harris said. “I lent her a bottle of ketchup the other day.” She wasn’t sure if anyone in the house had used it since Gilbert had returned it. “I’m confused. I don’t know what to do anymore.”

  “Bring that ketchup bottle in with you when you come in,” Plante said. “We’ll want to have the lab take a look at it.”

  Regardless of how Harris felt, this was great news to Plante and Murphy. Having a source living right next door could add an element to the investigation that had been missing all along.

  The DA’s office was located right off Main, on Gothic Street, in downtown Northampton. A massive building by Northampton standards, the three-story, red brick structure housed some thirty lawyers. Whenever he had a break in the Gilbert case and needed to meet with Plante and Murphy, assistant US Attorney Bill Welch used the office as a remote location.

  Plante and Murphy could tell right away that Harris wasn’t fooling when she said over the phone the previous day that Gilbert had gotten under her skin—so much that every minute of every day was now spent worrying what Gilbert would do next.

  “That’s why I’m here. I have a child. A husband. I’m afraid for their lives. I pulled my boy out of school the other day because I thought she was going to grab him.”

  Of course, Murphy and Plante had seen witnesses like Harris their entire careers. Sometimes they panned out; other times they didn’t. It was all part of the game.

  They first convinced her that everything was going to be all right. Then Harris began to go through everything she had seen and heard over the past few months.

  Plante and Murphy were particularly interested in the conversation Harris had had with Gilbert during the car ride home from the hospital back in July.

  “Yeah, now that I think back on it,” Harris said, “Kristen was actually trying to make me believe that it was impossible for you guys to ever catch her. She was filling me with information she thought would later help her. She was trying to manipulate me like everybody else.”

  After about an hour of discussing everything she could remember, Plante leaned back in his chair and made a suggestion.

  “Listen, Ms. Harris. We appreciate you coming forward. You’ve given us a lot of quality information. Why don’t you start keeping a diary of Gilbert’s movements? You know, mark down times and notes regarding her comings and goings. You live right next door. You see a lot of things, I’m sure.”

  “Okay,” Harris said.

  “We think,” Murphy added, “she’s responsible for at least forty deaths.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. And if she’s killed as many people as we think she has, that makes your neighbor the most successful female serial killer in the history of the United States. We don’t have to tell you that we need to put this person behind bars.”

  Plante and Murphy were a bit more optimistic after the meeting. They had been gathering facts and data for months now. But they were looking for that one tangible piece of evidence that might solidify an indictment.

  CHAPTER 51

  When Glenn Gilbert pulled into the driveway of his Drewson Drive home on September 15, 1996, he spied his estranged wife’s Oldsmobile parked by the back door.

  Glenn was furious. Back in June, he’d obtained a restraining order, prohibiting Kristen from coming anywhere near the house.

  As Glenn entered, he saw Kristen in the kitchen and, startled, she turned around quickly.

  “What are you doing here?” Glenn yelled.

  “I . . . I . . . needed some things,” Kristen said.

  “You’re not supposed to be in this house.”

  The kids, who were a few steps behind Glenn, walked in, and stood in the living room staring at their mother.

  “I know,” Kristen tried to say, “but—”

  “Jesus, Kristen. Get out, or I’ll call the cops!”

  Kristen became enraged. She began yelling and screaming. Glenn couldn’t even understand what she was saying. She was going on and on as if he had done something wrong.

  “I want you out of here right now,” he said as he picked up the phone to call the cops.

  Shaken by the sound of their mother’s screaming, the kids followed Glenn into the kitchen and stood behind him.

  Kristen then ran toward Glenn and grabbed the base of the telephone and ripped it off the wall.

  Glenn struggled with her for a moment, but then he stopped himself. After a moment, he stood back and calmly said, “Get out of my house.”

  By this point, Kristen had backed off and was standing about ten feet away. She looked dazed, but had apparently given up, and started walking toward the door.

  Glenn turned around to comfort the children.

  Kristen then turned back and charged at him. She had her car keys in her hand, with one key sticking out in between her middle and forefinger, like a knife.

  Then, within a moment, as Glenn grabbed her by the arm, she went limp and began crying.

  “Get the hell out,” Glenn said. “Now!”

  James Perrault, like almost everyone else who had anything to do with the VAMC murder investigation, had received sporadic prank phone calls throughout the entire summer of 1996. But by the beginning of September, they became more frequent.

  There was no method to most of them. The caller wouldn’t say much—just some melodramatic heavy breathing, similar to that in any low-budget “slasher” film. Other times, the caller would simply hang up as soon as Perrault answered the phone.

  An even-tempered guy, Perrault felt no harm had been done after the first few calls. Every household on the planet received these types of calls once in a while.

  By the middle of September, though, Perrault noticed a dramatic increase in the number of calls, along with a change
in content.

  Taking into account the events of the past year, and after receiving several calls within a short period of time, Perrault decided to put a trace on the calls to see what the hell was going on.

  Like clockwork, the phone began to ring off the hook one night. Again, Perrault would pick it up, and the caller would hang up. After several calls in a row, he pressed the star fifty-seven function on his phone, which would normally log the number the person was calling from on his phone bill. Perrault could then order a copy of his phone records and check to see what number had been calling him.

  Despite his ambitions of being a cop one day, Perrault’s investigative efforts on this night proved fruitless—because the star fifty-seven function, he found out the following day, hadn’t worked.

  So he decided to call NYNEX and have it run a conventional trace. He knew damn well it was Gilbert, but he wanted hard evidence to confront her with.

  NYNEX obliged.

  Perrault soon learned that several of calls had been made from Gilbert’s 182 Northampton Street telephone number. She had obsessively called his apartment on September 12, 15, 19, 20 and 21. And each time corresponded with the time he had gotten a hang-up or heavy breathing. Several of the calls were made from pay telephone booths around Easthampton and Northampton: the Tasty Top Ice Cream Shop, for one, which was about a quarter mile up the road from Gilbert’s apartment; the Citgo Station, about a mile away; the phone booth in the parking lot of the Hampshire Gazette newspaper, about three miles away; and the phone booth just down the street from the VFW, in Florence.

  It was then explained to Perrault that the reason he couldn’t star fifty-seven Gilbert after she had hung up on him was that she had used the star sixty-seven function, which made it impossible to trace the calls.

  A creature of habit, Glenn Gilbert got home from work on September 26 around 4:30, and he did what he had done every day: check his AT&T answering service for any phone messages.

  Next saved message, received Thursday, September 26, at 3: 34 P.M., the choppy computer voice stated.