Perfect Poison

by M. William Phelps

  After listening to the tape, Perrault identified the “distortion and background noise” as being similar to that in the calls he had received, but there was a problem recognizing the caller’s voice. It sounded similar, he said, meaning “metallicky” and “mechanical sounding,” but he could tell from the tone and inflections that it was definitely not Gilbert.

  It wasn’t necessarily something they could use as evidence in court, but at least it told the detectives that Perrault could discriminate between Gilbert’s voice and somebody else’s.

  “We figure Gilbert made the calls from the phone booth at the Look Restaurant across the street,” Plante, who had just walked into the room, said. “The traffic sounds are what lead us to believe that. What do you think, Jim?”

  “I’ll buy that,” Perrault answered.

  “We need you to do something,” Murphy, who had also come in with Plante, then suggested. “When you get to work today, after you make your usual rounds, we want you to call her.”

  Perrault agreed.

  Murphy then explained that he would conduct surveillance around the immediate area of Gilbert’s apartment—especially the pay telephone booths, both north and south of where she lived. Easthampton was farming country. Beside the fast-food restaurants, gas stations and car dealerships found in any town, there really wasn’t much to it. There was only one main road, Route 10, which ran perpendicular through town in a north-south direction. Telephone booths were spotty. Putting a cop at one for the evening would be a piece of cake. And if Gilbert was dumb enough to be making the mistakes she had been making up until that point, being fingered wasn’t something Plante or Murphy had to worry about.

  Plante would be on the other side of town, driving back and forth between several phone booths, but concentrating mainly on the one in the parking lot of the Daily Hampshire Gazette.

  Before the surveillance, Plante had driven by every pay phone in the area and jotted down their numbers. It had been agreed that when a call came in, someone would get hold of NYNEX, who was now working closely with them, to see if a trace turned up a match to any one of the numbers Plante had written down. NYNEX had already placed a pen register, at the request of Plante and Murphy, on Gilbert’s home phone. If, for some reason, she decided to make calls from her apartment, the pen register, in real time, would tell the investigators whom she was calling.

  It wasn’t rocket science—just good, solid police work.

  At 5:12, as he said he would, Perrault called Gilbert’s apartment. She wasn’t home—or wasn’t answering the phone. So he left a message on her answering machine.

  “I’ll be at the security desk until seven o’clock. Call me.”

  Around 5:30, the security desk phone rang. As luck would have it, it was the mysterious VAMC bomber.

  Gilbert didn’t say much of anything that Perrault could understand during the first call; her words were garbled and inaudible, as if the recording device she was using had once again malfunctioned. But if everyone’s assumptions were correct, she wouldn’t stop there. It was a game to her now, an obsession. Murphy and Plante had investigated criminals similar to Gilbert in the past. As they saw it, like an active alcoholic, there was no way she could just stop.

  Between 5:40 and 6:30, Gilbert made several more calls. Most were brief and rather indiscernible. Yet she began to reveal an entirely different side of herself that no one had anticipated.

  In the first call, disguising her voice once again in a thick and slow Southern drawl, she asked, “What can I do to make you understand what’s going on here . . . ?”

  “Well,” Perrault said, “you can talk to me and tell me what’s going on. I mean, I’m—”

  “—Oh, man, her pussy taste so sweet,” Gilbert said, cutting in on Perrault, before she hung up.

  A few moments later, “I’m going to fuck your bitch, Perrault.”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  There was a pause. Then, “. . . until she begs . . .” before the line went dead.

  A minute later, “Officer Perrault speaking, how may I . . .” “I really enjoy looking in the window of Apartment D, James Perrault. She looks mighty fine today in those . . .”

  Perrault tried interrupting, but his voice was squelched by Gilbert’s.

  “Well, she is available,” Perrault tried insisting. “If you want to go out with her, you can call her up.”

  When he realized that it was useless to try to interact with a recording, Perrault stopped talking and let it finish.

  “. . . I got a hard one just thinking about it. I been following her . . .”

  Perrault couldn’t help himself, thinking maybe Gilbert was listening somehow. So he said, “Why don’t you talk to her and see about doing something?”

  “I been seeing her around, James Perrault . . . I know where she’s been today.”

  “Where has she been today?”

  The line went dead.

  A minute later, Perrault picked up the phone again.

  At first, all he heard was a loud buzzing sound. So he tried to get things going. It was possible that Gilbert was just hanging on the line, waiting for the right time to press the PLAY button on the Talkboy.

  “Sir, do you have a problem with me?” Perrault asked. “I mean, I know you happen to like my ex-girlfriend. And from what I understand, you happen to like me. . . . I personally am not into that. But if you would like to talk to me, I’ll see what we could arrange. You know, give me a call, talk to me face to face . . . do something.”

  Perrault seemed to be letting the calls get the best of him by this point. His tone kept rising as he spoke. He was getting frustrated.

  “I’m tired . . . tired of the little threats,” he said, “so . . . so . . . why don’t you do somethin’?”

  There was a sigh—then a long, heavy breath.

  “Well,” Perrault said, “breathing sounds nice.” He could hear someone tapping on a computer keyboard in the background. “Hello . . . is anybody there?”

  Gilbert hung up.

  Shortly after that, the phone rang again.

  “This is . . . so . . . I can go in and fuck her brains out,” Gilbert said, again disguising her voice as the Southern black man.

  Surprisingly, around 5:50, Gilbert phoned the security office.

  “Hi, it’s Kristen,” she said in a soft and innocent voice.

  When Perrault asked her why she was calling, Gilbert said she had received several “sexually graphic” phone calls the previous night, September 30, and into the early morning hours of October 1, from the same person who, she believed, had been calling the VAMC. She thought Perrault needed to know.

  “The calls,” Gilbert said, “were very demeaning to you, Jim. That’s why I’m calling you.”

  Confused, or perhaps overwhelmed by her gall, Perrault demanded an explanation.

  “Well, the caller said he has given you so much information about himself that he can’t believe you haven’t caught him by now. He said you couldn’t police a 7-Eleven . . . that you’re nothing but a rent-a-cop.”

  “Is that right?” Perrault asked sarcastically. “What did the caller sound like? How many calls did you receive?”

  “About five. He sounded like . . . like a Southern black male.”

  “Listen, Kris, why don’t you star fifty-seven the calls? Maybe you can trace them back and find out who it is . . . you know, where he’s calling from? I mean, if you’re that scared—”

  Gilbert cut him off. “I can’t do that,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Well . . . I don’t want to be dragged into the investigation. Let’s just keep this between you and me, Jimmy. Okay?”

  “You can help, though . . .”

  “Actually,” Gilbert said, interrupting Perrault, “if you really want me to, I’ll try that star fifty-seven thing.”

  After a bit more small talk, Perrault said he had to go.

  CHAPTER 60

  At 6:30 P.M., on October 1,
Murphy pulled into the Tasty Top Ice Cream Stand and drove his blue Crown Victoria toward the back of the empty lot. After carefully assessing the situation, he parked where he had a good view of several pay telephone booths in the area.

  He then lit a cigarette, reclined back in his seat, and waited to see if Gilbert would make a move.

  Across town, about four miles away, Plante sat in the parking lot of the Daily Hampshire Gazette newspaper on Conz Street. He was running the same type of surveillance at a phone booth NYNEX had earlier confirmed could have been used to make some of the earlier calls.

  The Tasty Top was a popular summer stop for area families, located smack dab in the middle of town on Route 10, just a half mile down the street from Gilbert’s apartment.

  From where he sat in his car, Murphy was confident that if Gilbert decided to use any one of five phone booths around him, he would have no problem seeing her. Just fifty feet to his left there was a booth straddling Route 10, on the north side of the street, directly to the right of Tasty Top’s walk-up counter. It was one of the newer booths, open on all sides, with two small panels fanning out from each end like an old wicker chair. Across the street, at a BP gas station, there was a standing booth. Next door to the Tasty Top was a Burger King. Along the side of the building was yet another booth. Looking south, Murphy could see Gilbert’s apartment complex down below the crest of the hill.

  It was a waiting game now.

  Murphy was a practical man. With twenty-six years on the job, there wasn’t too much he hadn’t seen. But for the life of him, he had never witnessed a suspect he was investigating commit a crime right in front of his face.

  As he put out his first cigarette and prepared to light another, the veteran homicide detective looked up and couldn’t believe his eyes: there was Gilbert’s 1993 Oldsmobile Cutlass pulling into the parking lot.

  She had taken a left off Route 10 and made a U-turn into the parking lot, nearly clipping Murphy’s cruiser in the process, yet she hadn’t even seen him.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Murphy said to himself. “Will you get a load of this shit?”

  Gilbert parked right in front of his car. He could have spit on her back windshield from where he was sitting. With the tail end of Gilbert’s car facing him, Murphy verified her license plate number with dispatch. Gilbert, wearing a pair of blue jeans and an outdoor-type winter jacket, her blond hair blowing in the slight wind, got out of her car, looked around, and walked up to the phone booth.

  It was 6:35 P.M.

  Murphy quickly picked up his radio and called his lieutenant to see if Plante was within radio range.

  “Steve is not going to believe this,” Murphy said. He was almost laughing.

  Plante had since moved on to the Look Restaurant, about five miles away, which was just across the street from the VAMC. They had learned earlier that day that Gilbert had used the Look Restaurant phone booth on several occasions. So he had been roaming back and forth, between Conz Street and the Look Restaurant.

  “Plante, you there?” Murphy whispered into his radio, his eyes glued on Gilbert.

  “Go ahead, Murph . . .”

  “You’re not going to believe this. She just pulled in and . . . she’s using the phone booth right in front of me.”

  “No way?”

  “No shit. I’m serious.”

  “I’ll call the VA to see if Jimmy received any calls.”

  Plante called Perrault at the VAMC.

  “Anything going on over there, Jim?”

  “I just took a call,” Perrault said. “I could hear a lot of traffic in the background. The caller breathed heavy and hung up.”

  As Murphy sat in his cruiser watching Gilbert use the phone, he faced several problems. First of all, knowing what he knew, should he arrest her, or just let her go and secure the scene? Or maybe he should follow her? Murphy worked for the state police. This was a federal crime. Did he have jurisdiction? Murphy and Plante, working closely with Bill Welch, had taken careful steps not to cross paths between federal and state law.

  Gilbert was at the Tasty Top telephone booth for twenty-five seconds, which was just enough time to make one call, hang up, and get back in her car.

  NYNEX was contacted to make sure the call Perrault had received had, in fact, come from the Tasty Top phone booth. It was a match; the number NYNEX traced was the same as one of those SA Plante had earlier written down.

  As Gilbert backed out, she turned her car to the right and ended up directly facing Murphy’s cruiser. He did everything he could not to mock her with a sarcastic smile and a wave of his hand. But Murphy didn’t say or do anything, deciding instead to let her leave.

  Gilbert must have driven directly from the Tasty Top straight to her apartment, which, Plante had already timed, was a mere sixty-second ride. At 6:42, she called Perrault at the security office for the second time that night.

  “He called again!” Gilbert said, referring to the Southern male. She was out of breath. “He’s making fun of my anatomy, Jimmy. He left messages on my answering machine.”

  She was frantic, babbling, on the verge of tears.

  “Hold on. Hold on,” Perrault said, trying to calm her down. “Save those messages.”

  “I won’t. I’m going to erase them!” she said before hanging up.

  Then she called back five minutes later.

  “Can you help me do something about the calls, Jimmy? I’m really concerned. I think he’s following me around. Help me.” She was panicking, talking fast. “Please help me . . .”

  As clearly as he could, Perrault said no. Then he paused for a moment, perhaps to add a bit more weight to his next suggestion, and added, “Call the Easthampton Police if you want help.”

  It was now near seven o’clock. Perrault had to leave his post at the security desk for a while to attend to other matters.

  At 7:35, an officer filling in for Perrault took a call. The voice was “distorted, male-sounding, and strange,” he later told Plante and Murphy.

  During the interim, NYNEX confirmed that the previous calls—the sexually graphic ones—were made from the Condor Citgo gas station, which was about four miles from Gilbert’s apartment, and the Daily Hampshire Gazette parking lot phone booth.

  Gilbert had obviously thought she was smart, running from phone booth to phone booth, hoping to avoid any chance of a trap.

  Murphy, meanwhile, had secured the Tasty Top phone booth as a crime scene. Detective Soutier showed up shortly afterward, with Plante not far behind.

  Soutier arranged for the Massachusetts State Police Crime Scene Services to dust the phone booth for fingerprints.

  In the meantime, several other troopers were called in to do various tasks. The most important, seeing that Gilbert had without question seen Murphy as she was driving out of the parking lot, was to put an unmarked cruiser in the area of her apartment. While Plante and Bill Welch applied for a search warrant, they wanted to be sure Gilbert wouldn’t run. Things were moving at a feverish pace now. They had to act fast. Every decision was critical.

  About a half hour went by. Agents confirmed that one of the prints pulled from the Tasty Top telephone receiver was that of Gilbert’s right index finger.

  Welch, who had been maintaining a careful watch on the situation from the DA’s office, and Plante then took off for the town of Amherst, about ten miles away, where they were to meet with Judge Michael Ponsor at the Amherst Police Department.

  At 9:10, Judge Ponsor signed a search warrant filed by Plante. It was for a search and seizure of any and all pieces of evidence used in making a false bomb threat to the VAMC on September 26 that might be found inside Gilbert’s Easthampton apartment or her Oldsmobile Cutlass.

  “I find reasonable cause to initiate and conduct the search after ten P.M.,” Judge Ponsor wrote.

  He went on to state his reason for issuing a search warrant at such an ungodly hour: to “preserve evidence” immediately.

  It was clear from Plante’s f
iling that Gilbert had gone to great lengths within the past few days to block phone calls, obstruct justice, and hinder different parts of both the murder and bomb-threat investigations. They certainly wouldn’t put it past her to get rid of evidence if she thought the heat was on. Time was crucial.

  So, while Welch and Plante made certain all the paperwork was in order, a posse of state troopers, local police and special agents converged on 182 Northampton Street, Apartment D.

  CHAPTER 61

  A tough-looking cop at five-eight, one hundred and ninety pounds, Massachusetts State Police Lieutenant Thomas Soutier knocked on Kristen Gilbert’s front door at eight P.M. Several of his colleagues, including Detective Murphy, stood behind him—one of whom was carrying a video camera. Welch and Plante were still trying to obtain a copy of the search warrant.

  As Soutier and Murphy, along with the rest of the crew, waited patiently on the front steps for Gilbert to come to the door, above them, on the second floor, they heard the squeal of a window being pushed open.

  Pushing her face up against the screen, Gilbert shouted, “What do you want?”

  “Ma’am, we need to come inside now. You need to come to the door,” Soutier said.

  To preserve the integrity of any search, an “entrance ‘in-and-out’ video” is shot upon first entering a residence, car, or any area where a search will later be conducted. It is designed to preserve the exact layout of a location before investigators disturb the scene while conducting the actual search. It was important for Welch’s team in this case, because they didn’t have the search warrant in their hands yet. They wanted to be sure there were no screw-ups. Not now. They were too close to having Gilbert where they wanted her.

  After a few moments, Gilbert thumped her way down the stairs and opened the door. She had been in her child’s room—or the room, rather, that her kids had slept in when Glenn used to allow them to visit. It had been almost six weeks since she had lost joint custody. She hadn’t seen the children since she entered Glenn’s house without permission and attacked him back on September 15, three weeks ago.