Perfect Poison

by M. William Phelps

  Gilbert went on to say she knew he had broken into her apartment when she wasn’t home.

  Perrault did have keys to Gilbert’s apartment. She had given them to him herself. But what Gilbert didn’t know was that every time Perrault had entered her apartment, he had taken Samantha Harris along with him as a witness for that very reason.

  “I will press breaking-and-entering charges against you,” she rambled on. “Your police career will be ruined! Do you think that the investigators have any keys to your getting a job? How ’bout when you have a police record . . . huh?”

  After Gilbert hung up, she called Samantha Harris.

  “I want my fucking keys back, Sami.” She sounded different. It wasn’t the same person Harris had dropped off at the bus station the night before, or the suicidal victim Harris had spoken to on the phone later on.

  Harris wanted to laugh. You crazy bitch. It’s all over for you now. But she kept her composure.

  “You don’t need keys to my apartment,” Gilbert continued. “I want my fucking keys back.”

  “I don’t have your keys, Kristen.”

  The psychiatric ward of area hospitals had become a second home to Gilbert by this point. She had been admitted nearly a half-dozen times throughout the summer. Plante and Murphy speculated that it had been Harry Miles putting Gilbert up to all the hospital admissions: telling her that it would help her case if it ever went to court. Regardless, here she was, close to being arrested, doing the same thing she had done all summer along: threatening people from the telephone.

  The same day Gilbert called Perrault and Harris, she called her old friend, Rachel Webber.

  Webber and her husband had moved to Albany, New York, in late 1994, to raise a family and begin new careers. Gilbert had always stayed in touch, making sure to call Webber once a week and fill her in on all that was going on back in Northampton—that is, the things she wanted Webber to know. But as far as the murder investigation, her affair with Perrault and the end of her marriage were concerned, Gilbert never confided in Webber much more than to dispel rumor.

  When Webber first heard about the investigation back in February, she presumed it was a witch hunt. She had a hard time believing what people were saying about her friend. But now, hearing stories from other nurses and reading newspaper accounts, Webber was having second thoughts about Gilbert’s innocence. Gilbert had been calling her throughout the summer, yet she would tell her only bits and pieces of what was happening. Gilbert always maintained that Webber was one of her only “true” friends left and would often joke over the phone about the entire situation.

  One day, shortly after word had spread that Gilbert was the main suspect in the bomb threat, she called Webber. Laughing, as if nothing were wrong, she said, “This is going to make a good movie someday, huh, Rachel?”

  She then went through a list of actors she had handpicked for everyone involved. Still believing Gilbert was being railroaded, Webber laughed with her about it.

  Gilbert always kept the juicy details of her real life to herself. Webber would find out from other nurses what was really going on and call Gilbert on it the next time they spoke. Gilbert would explain it all away, and Webber would buy it.

  It wasn’t a shock to Webber when Gilbert phoned the day after the search and confessed she was once again in the hospital.

  “I heard, Kristen. Are you okay?” Webber asked.

  “Oh, I’m fine. They thought I did something to myself. They strapped me down and put a tube down my nose. You should have seen them try to fight with me,” Gilbert said, laughing.

  It occurred to Webber that if there were tubes and stomach pumps involved, well, it must have been serious. They’re pumping her stomach, and she’s making light of the situation? she said to herself as Gilbert continued to mock the doctors.

  “What did you do, Kristen?”

  “Oh, you know, they thought I took something.”

  It was a game, Webber told herself after hanging up. Gilbert looked at it as though it were some sort of “me against them” battle she was winning.

  As Assistant US Attorney Bill Welch sat in his office during the first week of October, he mulled over his options. Gilbert was, at least for the time being, out of everyone’s hair. But Welch hardly had his suspect where he wanted her: confined to a cold, eight-by-ten-foot jail cell on the fourth floor of the Federal Building, in Springfield, just one floor above his office.

  With Gilbert in the hospital, he could at least monitor her movements and keep an eye on her comings and goings. If she so much as sneezed on someone, Murphy and Plante would be on her like a shadow.

  Welch had to act fast if he was going to secure an arrest warrant. Ideally, he wanted to transport Gilbert from her hospital bed at Cooley Dickinson to a metal bunk in Springfield. He knew she would never plead guilty to any of the charges he was preparing to file, and she would likely fight down to the wire, so his case had to be solid. No frills. No holes. No problems with evidence. The trick was to think long term. Nothing short of an air-tight case would suffice. The US Magistrate Judge who would ultimately review the arrest warrant didn’t want hearsay evidence and shoddy police work; he wanted Welch to prove on paper that Gilbert was the only person who could have made those calls to the VAMC. It didn’t matter that she was being investigated for murder. That was a separate case.

  Further confusing the situation, there were several safety concerns that took precedence over everything else. After listening to the messages Gilbert had left at Perrault’s apartment, and speaking with Samantha Harris, Welch felt Gilbert would retaliate against Perrault’s property as soon as she had the opportunity and likely confront Harris the minute she got out of the hospital. He had to think about protecting his witnesses.

  He also had to make sure Gilbert didn’t get wind of what he was doing. Every legal maneuver he made would have to be sealed. Reporters from the Union-News and Daily Hampshire Gazette would be scouring the area like buzzards waiting for a break in the murder case. Welch couldn’t take any chances and endanger all the work his office had done up until that point.

  Then there was the possibility Gilbert would sign herself out of the hospital and split. Her parents lived in Long Island and, as far as Welch was concerned, they couldn’t be trusted. The last thing he needed was Gilbert on the loose, running around Long Island causing trouble. With an open warrant for her arrest, witnesses would be hard-pressed to say anything.

  Filing an arrest complaint was not as easy as filling out paperwork and handing it over to a judge to sign. It took time. Judges demanded rock-solid evidence.

  A few things were certain, but Welch wanted to point them out to Plante and Murphy so there would be no disagreement as to the goal at hand. Welch, Murphy and Plante had butted heads before on issues regarding the murder case. All good teams disagreed from time to time. It was a natural part of discovering the absolute truth. But now was not the time to be arguing a point. It was time to act. Speculation and hindsight wouldn’t cut it. Welch was too smart an attorney to talk himself into believing that. They needed proof. Stick to “this case,” Welch urged. He wanted hard facts to back up his hypothesis that Gilbert had called in the bomb threat. Period. They would nail her on murder charges later.

  While Gilbert stewed like a caged animal at Cooley Dickinson, continually calling people and threatening them, Welch sat in the board room down the hall from his office with Plante and Murphy devising their plan.

  “Let’s send out the check and credit card receipts she used to purchase the Talkboy and Talkgirl to the VA Criminalistics Lab for handwriting comparison,” Welch suggested, looking at Plante and Murphy. “Agreed?”

  “Right,” Murphy said.

  “We’ll have to issue subpoenas for her bank records and credit card statements,” Welch added. “Make a note of that.”

  Murphy and Plante understood why, of course. But they agreed it would take some time to do that. What was the significance of doing that now, anyway? Didn’t
they have enough?

  “We want to show she had been paying her credit card bills and that she never reported her credit card stolen or lost.”

  They feared Gilbert, as conniving and calculating as she had proved herself to be, would say her credit card had been stolen and someone else had used the card to charge the Talkgirl.

  “Let’s put ourselves in the position of the defense,” Welch urged, raising his eyebrows. “You follow me?”

  CHAPTER 65

  As it turned out, Gilbert had paid her credit card bill, and she never made a formal complaint about the card ever being stolen.

  Just like that, step one was complete.

  But there was still one major problem, maybe even the most pressing of the moment: How could Bill Welch be sure Gilbert wouldn’t sign herself out of the hospital and take off? After all, she hadn’t been arrested yet. She was free to do what she pleased.

  On October 3, while Plante and Murphy continued to gather evidence and conduct follow-up interviews, Welch obtained a court order to have Gilbert transferred to Baystate Medical Center. Legally speaking, it was a simple “psychiatric evaluation transfer” request. Welch argued that Cooley Dickinson didn’t have a full-time psychiatric unit and Baystate Medical did. He wanted her evaluated as soon as possible.

  The judge agreed.

  It was explained to the staff at Baystate before she arrived that she was likely going to be arrested within the week. “Keep an eye on her,” Plante and Murphy advised hospital staff. Welch wanted to know everything she was doing, and, most important, he wanted doctors to assess her psychologically.

  For the first time under a court order, several psychiatrists began to evaluate Gilbert. Two things became clear: For one, she was never going to admit to having any psychiatric problems; and, two, she was going to try her best to manipulate anyone who said she did.

  Fooling a few friends whom she had worked with for the past seven years and a security guard she had been sleeping with was one thing, but a doctor trained to pick out this kind of behavior was quite another.

  After assessing her condition, the attending psychiatrist at Baystate Medical said that she “cannot be trusted to tell accurate information about herself or what was going on. We had information from the patient’s father that she, in fact, lies and has lied about her own past psychiatric history.”

  Indeed, Gilbert’s father, Richard Strickland, told doctors when Gilbert was getting into trouble in high school that she was a “habitual liar.” He said one time Gilbert claimed that her mother was a raging drunk and, at times, even abusive.

  Gilbert’s hatred for her mother wasn’t something she discussed openly. But from time to time, she would give subtle hints about what she thought of her. Once, Gilbert confided in Rachel Webber. They were talking about Gilbert’s mother being an elementary school teacher.

  “You know,” Gilbert said, “it always surprised me [that she was a teacher], because my mother really didn’t like kids.”

  Webber was curious. She had never heard Gilbert, in the five years she had known her, even mention her parents.

  “Why?” Webber asked.

  Gilbert became quiet.

  “Kristen . . . you there? Kristen?”

  “I don’t know why she’s a teacher—she doesn’t like kids.” Then Gilbert changed the subject and refused to talk about it anymore.

  Further evaluating her mental condition at the time of her admission at Baystate, one of the doctors who interviewed Gilbert finished his report by noting that “she apparently had overdoses in her early twenties which she denied to us. She has given contradictory statements to various people about her intentions—particularly around suicide.”

  He also went on to say that an unnamed friend of Gilbert’s reported that most of Gilbert’s friends “appear frightened of her because so many strange things appear to be happening in her life and she is unpredictable.”

  It was then determined that Gilbert suffered from three disorders: Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Personality Traits and Antisocial Personality Disorder.

  The first step in fixing any one of these problems is for the patient to stop denying there is, in fact, a problem.

  Something Gilbert was just not ready to do.

  Later, as more doctors weighed in, it became obvious to Welch and his team that Gilbert fit into the mold of a female serial killer rather well and that most “angels of death” suffer from similar personality disorders.

  Regarding how Gilbert fared on a “Psychopathic Deviate Scale” test, her psychiatrist wrote:

  This clinical profile has marginal validity because the client attempted to place herself in an overly positive light by minimizing faults and denying psychological problems. This defensive stance is characteristic of individuals who are trying to maintain the appearance of adequacy and self-control. . . . The clinical profile may be an underestimate of the client’s psychological problems.

  In other words, Gilbert wasn’t a willing participant; therefore, since she was manipulating her own diagnosis, her doctors couldn’t rely on what she was saying to be true.

  On a second test, one designed to check masculine and feminine traits in females, a second doctor had this to say:

  The clinical scale prototype used in the development of this narrative included evaluations on Pd [the Psychopathic Deviate Scale]. Individuals with this MMPI-2 clinical profile are not admitting to many psychological symptoms or problems. The client’s profile is within normal range, suggesting that she views her present adjustment as adequate. However, she reported some personality characteristics, such as pleasure seeking, impulsivity, proneness to rule infractions, and high-risk behavior, that may make her vulnerable to clashes with authority at times.... The client has a wide range of interests. Women who score high on MF [the Masculinity/Feminity Scale test] are somewhat unusual compared to other women. They endorse item content that is typically seen as representing extreme masculine interests.

  CHAPTER 66

  While Glenn Gilbert was rummaging through his kitchen cabinets one evening in early October, he found a plastic bag stuffed inside an old pill box. Looking at it, Glenn noticed it was lined with an acrid-smelling white powder he could not immediately identify.

  So he called SA Plante.

  After taking the bag to the Massachusetts State Police Crime Laboratory for testing, Plante learned that it was Acepromazine, a common tranquilizer used in veterinary medicine to prepare animals for anesthesia.

  Gilbert, Plante surmised, must have ground the tablets into a fine powder after she stole them from an area veterinary clinic. So he had Murphy visit every vet in the area. Murphy found out that Gilbert had made seven visits to the Northampton Veterinary Clinic back in 1995. On several occasions, Murphy had personally observed Acepromazine left out in the open. Stealing it, as they thought Gilbert had done, would be easier than lifting a pack of gum from a supermarket.

  But as Murphy began to look deeper into this new direction, he uncovered even more. Talking to Glenn one day about all the pets he and Kristen had kept as a couple, Murphy learned that every dog or cat they had ever owned had “mysteriously died.” The last dog, Glenn explained, had been sick for quite a while during the latter part of 1995. He remembered Kristen had taken it to the vet one night and returned home empty-handed.

  “They had to put it to sleep,” she told him.

  But when Murphy and Plante went back to talk to the vet, he said he had no record of Gilbert’s ever bringing the dog in during that time frame. So they visited other veterinarians. Again, there was no record of Gilbert’s having brought the dog to a vet in the area.

  Murphy then looked for the dog’s body in every animal graveyard and vet hospital in the immediate and surrounding areas, but his search turned up nothing.

  “We were prepared to exhume the dog’s body if it came down to it.”

  After a series of dead ends, Murphy looked at Plante one day and said, “She probably zippe
d the dog and dumped it somewhere in the woods . . . we’ll never find it.”

  On October 7, Gilbert made one last-ditch effort to cover her tracks for the night Murphy had observed her making a call to the VAMC in the parking lot of the Tasty Top Ice Cream Stand.

  Early that morning, Perrault received a phone call from Gilbert. She said she had something to say regarding the events of a week ago.

  “I placed several phone calls from different phone booths that day, Jim.”

  “You did what?”

  “I stopped at the Tasty Top to call my apartment so I could check my messages to see if you had called.”

  Perrault couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “I used the pay phone in front of the Gazette and the Condor Citgo pay phone, too.”

  October 8, 1996 was a day Plante, Murphy and Bill Welch had been waiting for all summer long.

  “She’s going to be released from the hospital at two this afternoon,” Bill Welch said over the phone to Murphy. “I want you to be there when she gets out.”

  There was one small problem that haunted Murphy as he prepared to go: Plante was out of town on family business. With Plante gone, Murphy felt terrible about having to make the arrest without him.

  Nevertheless, they wanted Gilbert behind bars. As Welch suggested, Murphy would have to set aside for the moment his brotherly code of respect and get the job done. Plante would have to understand. There would be plenty of time in the coming weeks for Plante’s hands-on involvement. One way or another, Gilbert was going to be released from the hospital. This could be their only chance.

  “Kevin,” Welch said over the phone. “Go get her . . . now.”