Perfect Poison

by M. William Phelps

  “I just wanted to say good-bye for the last time—good-bye,” a sullen, electronically altered voice chimed.

  It was strange and, at first, frightened Glenn. It sounded as though it had been pre-recorded and played back at a slower speed to sound intimidating, maybe to add a sense of drama that wouldn’t have been otherwise been there.

  Glenn noticed immediately the odd familiarity of the tone of the voice. It sounded like Kristen, but it couldn’t be—it was a male’s voice. On top of that, whoever it was sounded anxious, hurt, shamed.

  Ever since the investigation had began, like everyone else, Glenn had gotten bizarre calls from his estranged wife. For the most part, she’d use the kids as the reason behind the call. But after mentioning the kids only momentarily, she’d break into one of her “spousal immunity” rages, lecturing Glenn on the law.

  Yet here was Kristen, on the verge of tears, speaking in an electronically altered voice, saying good-bye? It didn’t add up. She had threatened to commit suicide all summer long, but never finished the job. Plante and Murphy had even found the infamous suicide “how to” book of the eighties, Final Exit, when they had searched Glenn’s home for a second time.

  After listening to the tape several times, Glenn decided to call Plante and Murphy.

  “From what you’re telling me, Glenn,” Plante said, “I can say that it’s probably her. I’ll be over as soon as I can.”

  Plante showed up later that night. Glenn made it clear right away that he was still unsure who it was.

  “Have you altered this tape in any way?” Plante asked as a formality, after they listened to the tape several times.

  “No. Of course not.”

  CHAPTER 52

  It was just after five o’clock on September 26, 1996, when James Perrault finished driving the VAMC grounds for his allotted two-hour tour of duty.

  Gilbert had always made it a point to ask Perrault which rotation he was working. As recently as just a few days ago, she called and wanted to know if he had started his shift driving the grounds or at the security desk. To Perrault, it seemed to be just one more crazy request, part of a continuing hold she tried to maintain on her former place of employment and the people she’d worked with, so he obliged.

  A few minutes after he returned from driving the grounds on September 26, Perrault sat down at the security desk to man the phones.

  Perrault’s colleague that night, Ron Shepard, a ten-year VAMC employee, then got into the SUV and began his two-hour tour of the grounds.

  “I’ll see you in a couple hours,” Shepard told Perrault.

  Perrault finished tidying up the desk and got comfortable in his chair. At 5:11 the security desk phone rang.

  “Officer Perrault speaking. How may I help you?”

  “This is a message for all Persian Gulf veterans who were exposed to chemical weapons,” an odd-sounding voice stammered matter-of-factly before hanging up.

  There was no doubt in Perrault’s mind that the caller was male, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty to forty years old, he guessed. But something was wrong. The caller, for obvious reasons, had disguised his voice somehow. It was distorted and eerie. To the same extent, however, it was calm and well-pronounced. “Almost,” Perrault later said, “like it had a mechanical ring to it.”

  As a first consideration, after the caller hung up, Perrault wrote it off as a prank. The high school was just down the street from the VAMC. Kids were always roaming around the grounds. Perhaps a dare had been set up? Perhaps Perrault had pissed off a few kids one time, maybe kicked them off the property, and they were getting even?

  Eleven minutes later, however, at 5:22, the caller made it obvious that it wasn’t an adolescent prank.

  “There are three explosive devices in Building One. You have two hours,” the caller stated and hung up.

  It was the same haunting voice: electronic, deep, raspy—and male.

  If it was the neighborhood pranksters, they were now teetering on doing some hard time in a federal pen.

  Perrault called Bernie LeFlam, the evening clinical coordinator for nursing. With almost thirty years of federal service, ten of which LeFlam spent as a supervisor up at the Leeds VAMC, LeFlam was the “go to” man in a time of crisis. He knew VA protocol.

  “Bernie, it’s Jim in security. We have a situation.”

  Located near Admissions, on the ground level of Building One, LaFlam rushed over to security.

  Perrault went over what had just happened. The threat was specifically directed to Building One, he explained. LeFlam, thinking fast, ordered a copy of the VAMC’s “Medical Center Memorandum” from Admissions. Karen Abderhalden printed it out and got it to LaFlam as fast as she could.

  It clearly outlined the procedure for bomb threats.

  LeFlam then called Melodie Turner. He explained that the patients in Building One would have to be evacuated, but the decision as to when would be left up to the fire marshal, who, along with local police and fire personnel, were on their way.

  Procedure dictated that it was the person’s responsibility who had received the call to ask certain questions of the person phoning in the threat. Where is the bomb? Who are you? Where are you calling from?

  But would a person phoning in a bomb threat actually respond to such absurd questions?

  The rationale behind the questions wasn’t necessarily to get the person to admit who he or she was; it was to keep him on the line as long as possible so a trace could be set up.

  While LaFlam gathered all the supervisors together in Admissions and read from the memo, Perrault called Ron Shepard.

  “Ronny,” he said in a hurried tone, “come back here . . . we have a situation developing.”

  Around 5:30, Perrault stepped away from the security desk to explain the situation to a few of the nurses. Then he ran over to Medical Administration Services, located in a different building, and borrowed a device for tape recording incoming phone calls.

  When Perrault returned, he noticed the cramped quarters of the security office were becoming a bit chaotic. Staff and senior personnel were scrambling around wondering what to do next. People were talking over one another. Theories were being thrown out. The patients had to be evacuated. Some were too weak to be moved. What was going to happen to them? Had anyone seen any weird packages lying around?

  Then the phone rang again.

  Ron Shepard was manning the phones. When Perrault heard the phone ring, he rushed over to Shepard and pressed the RECORD button on the recording device he had just finished hooking up.

  Perrault pointed to Ron as if he were an actor.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Security, Officer Shepard speaking.”

  “Nothing will compare as to what is going to happen tonight.”

  The caller said nothing more and hung up.

  “That voice sounds distorted,” Shepard said. “It was definitely not a person’s normal speaking voice. It was like some kind of tape recorder . . . maybe even a computer . . . it was muffled, garbled.”

  Perrault nodded; they agreed it was the same person.

  Moments before the call, two Northampton police cruisers and several fire trucks had arrived on the scene.

  At 5:36, once again taking over the helm at the security desk phone, Perrault took another call.

  “I want those patients out in time. Remember . . .”

  “Sir . . .” Perrault said, trying to get him to say something. “Sir? You there?” But the line went dead.

  The caller had been precise in his directions, Perrault thought. Not only that, but he had gone to great lengths to pronounce words slowly, accurately, and chose his words carefully. What was more, why would a self-proclaimed radical be concerned with the welfare of the people in the building he was about to bomb? Wasn’t the point of blowing up the place to harm people?

  At 5:40, the caller posed a question:

  “Would you like to know where to locate the devices?”

  “Si
r,” Perrault began to say . . . but again the line went dead.

  A Northampton police officer then walked into the security office. Thus far, Perrault explained, they had received a total of five calls. He said he had written down what the caller had said earlier and was able to record one of the calls.

  Two more calls came in at 5:45 and 5:50, but Perrault couldn’t make out a word.

  “You’ll have to speak up, sir. I can’t hear you,” he said as the caller mumbled.

  But there was no response.

  Almost everyone agreed that the caller was using some sort of electronic device to disguise his voice. Perrault couldn’t engage him in a conversation because his voice was being overridden by a recording. Exchanging dialogue would be impossible. Moreover, the hang-up calls were not hang-ups at all, but rather the caller’s tape recorder malfunctioning.

  The only background sounds Perrault could make out were from a small airplane. There were several small aircraft airports within a twenty-mile radius of the VAMC. It made sense to everyone that the caller was somewhere in the immediate area and was probably using a pay phone.

  Security guard Timothy Reardon, after listening to the tape, said he thought he recognized the voice.

  “It’s John Noble,” he said. “At least it sounds like him.”

  John Noble, a fifty-four-year-old ex-VAMC patient, lived in nearby Chesterfield. He had been the cause of some minor problems at the VAMC in years past. He was known as someone who would at times become angry while on the phone. He had issues with the government. It seemed logical to check him out.

  One of the officers took down a description of Noble

  A few minutes later, at 5:55, the caller decided to take a different approach.

  “You sound dumb, or you would go see to . . . ,” he said. But was cut off again when, as he spoke, the device began to malfunction.

  “Hello . . . sir . . . ?” Perrault said. “Could you please speak up? I cannot hear you.”

  At 6:10, the caller became angry.

  “You mustn’t think this is very serious, just sitting in your office answering phones?”

  Then, at 6:18: “If you’re too stupid to find them, you deserve to die with them.”

  Another call came in at 6:25, but again, it was hard to understand. The sound of a horn, likely from a car, had drowned out the caller’s low voice.

  Nearly half an hour went by without another call. The small crowd that had gathered in the security office thought it was finally over. Many felt relieved. Some were shocked. Others just dumbfounded. What the hell was happening? Was the caller serious?

  It was probably some disgruntled patient who had gotten drunk and decided to have a little fun, many speculated. Perhaps Reardon’s assumptions were right: John Noble was up to his old tricks again.

  Nevertheless, a bomb threat was a bomb threat. It was time to begin evacuating the patients.

  NYNEX, meanwhile, had tried to trace the calls, but they were too short and happening with such rapidity that it was impossible. On top of that, the caller was likely moving from one location to the next to avoid being, as NYNEX termed it, “trapped.”

  Then, at 6:48, the phone rang again.

  “You find this exciting, don’t you, officer . . . ?”

  “Sir, could you help me with this?” Perrault said sincerely, hoping to lure the caller into some sort of verbal showdown. “Sir, could you think about the patients?”

  The caller quickly hung up.

  Another call came in three minutes later. Plain and well-spoken, yet still on the chilling side, the caller made it perfectly clear what was going to happen within the next half hour: “This is my last call. In twenty-five minutes, I’ll see you in hell!”

  “Sir, could you think about . . .” Perrault tried saying as the caller hung up.

  CHAPTER 53

  Security went around and checked the pay phones in the immediate vicinity of the hospital and instructed staff to pay extra special attention to the phones inside the hospital. There was a chance the caller had made the calls from the grounds of the VAMC, or from one of the pay phones inside one of the buildings.

  Around seven o’clock, Northampton Police Officer John McCarthy was ordered by his superiors to close off all access to the hospital.

  As the process of evacuating patients began, state troopers, VAMC security, officers from the neighboring towns of Easthampton and Northampton, along with fire personnel, kept everyone calm as they directed patients and staff to safe areas. Things were getting hectic by the minute. People were scared. No one could say with any certainty that there wasn’t a bomb in the building.

  A small crowd had gathered by the main entrance on Route 9. Motorists driving by stopped to ask what was going on. Even if the threat turned out to be false, as almost everyone suspected, the caller had certainly done enough to make life at the VAMC, at least for this one night, a living hell—which was perhaps his only intention.

  The parking lot of the Look Restaurant, a popular diner just fifty yards across the street from the VAMC’s main entrance on Route 9, filled with onlookers and rubberneckers—among them, Kristen Gilbert, who later told a friend she stood a few feet from the pay telephone booth in the parking lot watching everything.

  Then, at 7:07, amid the chaos that had erupted both in and outside the hospital as word about the threats began to spread, the security phone rang.

  “It’s your job to think about those patients,” the caller said.

  It was, in one sense, a belated reaction to Perrault’s previous plea of “think about the patients.”

  This time, however, Perrault noticed that the caller sounded hurt, almost as if he were—or had been—crying.

  After a moment of silence, “I do care,” the caller said. “But the government needs a message.”

  Perrault tried reasoning with him.

  “Yes, I care about the patients, sir. But I need help with working with them.”

  The caller abruptly hung up. It was obvious now that the calls had been pre-recorded. They were too one-sided. Too well planned. There was no interaction. The caller often talked right over Perrault’s voice. Plus, if Perrault said something, the caller never addressed it immediately. It wouldn’t be until the next call that he would make reference to the previous call. This led everyone to believe that the VA bomber was, in fact, recording his voice and playing it back.

  By this time, staff were taking those patients who could walk on their own out of Building One. Patients confined to beds were rolled out. Those too weak or sick to walk were taken out on stretchers and wheelchairs. Some were extremely ill. Just moving them could be dangerous and life-threatening. The largest concern was for those patients with pneumonia and/or respiratory diseases and illnesses. Just exposing them to outside elements could worsen their conditions significantly.

  In all, about fifty patients were moved without any serious problems.

  After a careful sweep of the building, no suspicious objects were found, and it was soon determined that there were no bombs. As a precautionary measure, however, the evacuated patients, along with some of the staff, spent the night in Building Eleven and the Recreation Hall and were told they would be returned to their regular beds the following day.

  Everyone was curious about the caller’s identity. It was a Veterans Affairs Hospital, for God’s sake. The caller had made no demands. He hadn’t claimed to be part of some radical, extremist group.

  What was the point?

  CHAPTER 54

  Samantha Harris had done a pretty good job throughout the final weeks of September of keeping a low profile—as far as running into Gilbert outside in the parking lot or taking her phone calls. The last thing Harris wanted to do was blow her cover. If Gilbert found out that she was literally tracking her every movement for the government, Harris feared the consequences would be fatal.

  On the evening of September 26, Harris prepared to watch her favorite Thursday night television program, ER, when the sound
of two cats fighting outside her window interrupted her.

  Like most residents in town, Harris had no idea that the bomb scare at the VAMC was just winding down.

  Around 8:00, she walked into the kitchen, grabbed a glass of water, went outside, and splashed the cats, hoping to drive them away.

  While Harris was walking back up the cement walkway toward her apartment, she saw Gilbert barrel into the parking lot at high speed and pull her Olds into an open space in front of her apartment. At first, Gilbert didn’t see Harris. She was too busy fidgeting with her house keys and looking in all directions.

  Standing about a hundred yards from Harris, keys in hand, ready to open her door, Gilbert, in a surprised tone of voice, yelled, “What are you doing out here?”

  Harris walked closer but didn’t say anything.

  “What. Are. You. Doing. Out. Here?”

  Harris held up the empty glass of water and explained that the cats had been fighting. It was disrupting her show.

  “Oh . . .” Gilbert said, somewhat relieved.

  “Where are you coming from?” Harris asked.

  “I’m . . . I’m . . . I’m just getting back from doing my laundry,” Gilbert said, talking fast, looking around.

  “Laundry?”

  “I have to get inside, though. ‘Must-see TV’ is on tonight! You know how much I love that ER,” Gilbert said. Then she paused for a moment to catch her breath. “See ya, Sami. I gots to go!”

  The following day, one of the local newspapers ran a small article about the bomb threat the previous night.

  That morning, while Harris was walking with her husband toward her car, Gilbert came running out of her apartment as if she had been waiting by the window for Harris to emerge.

  “Take a look at this, Sami,” Gilbert said, holding the newspaper open to the page where the article appeared, pointing to it. She was excited. Wound up.

  “What am I looking at?” Harris asked.

  “The article. The article. The bomb threat. See . . . it’s right there!” Gilbert pointed to it. “I was at the Look Restaurant eating dinner when all of this happened,” she said as though it had been some type of sporting event. “I watched the whole thing unfold.”