Perfect Poison

by M. William Phelps

  “Okay, Bill. I’m on my way.”

  Murphy and John Stevens, a federal marshal, showed up at the Baystate Medical Center about five minutes before two o’-clock and waited in the lobby.

  Ten minutes later, Gilbert came waltzing through the elevator doors and stopped dead in her tracks when she saw Murphy standing there staring at her.

  “Ms. Gilbert,” he said. “Would you please follow us?”

  Gilbert didn’t resist.

  She appeared to be unmoved, Murphy later remembered, as if to say, “What took you so long?” There was no dramatic, last-minute declaration of innocence. No remorse. No apologies. She simply invoked her Miranda rights and chose not to speak.

  Several hours after she was booked, bound by shackles, Gilbert clanked her way into Judge Nieman’s courtroom.

  Harry Miles stood a few inches from his client, resting his arm on her shoulder. Because Gilbert had been out of work for so long and barely had enough money even to take care of herself, the court appointed Harry Miles as her attorney, seeing that she’d already had dealings with him.

  Judge Nieman acquainted Gilbert with her rights and told her what she was being charged with.

  “I will set a date for your arraignment where you can formally plead guilty or not guilty,” he concluded. “Do you understand these charges?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  Gilbert was then locked up at the Hamden County House of Corrections.

  Days later, she was brought back in front of Judge Neiman for an arraignment. After she pled not guilty, the judge ordered her released into the custody of her parents to await trial on the bomb-threat charge, which could take upward of a year. She would have to be fitted for an electronic anklet monitoring device, which would restrict her movements once she got to Long Island. And while waiting for that to happen, the judge said, she would be moved to Hampshire County Jail in Amherst.

  After Gilbert made several threatening phone calls to several witnesses throughout the next few days from a pay phone in the jail, Judge Neiman brought Gilbert back in his courtroom for violating her conditions for release. He ordered a restraining order prohibiting her from making any calls to anyone in Massachusetts.

  With no one in town left to call, Gilbert turned to the one person whom she felt she could still confide in: her old friend Rachel Webber. With Webber living in upstate New York, still completely detached from the Northampton scene, Gilbert used Webber as a go-between, someone who could fill her in on what was happening in town.

  During that first call Webber received from Gilbert, she questioned her.

  “Kristen,” she said, “what is going on?”

  “The investigators found some sort of voice-changer thing in the bushes outside my house.”

  “Okay,” Webber said, “continue.”

  “They think I called this bomb threat into the hospital, Rachel.”

  It sounded to Webber as if it weren’t that big of a deal to Gilbert. She even made light of the threat, Webber thought, in the tone she had used. Webber didn’t know then, but it had never been made public that a Talkgirl had been found in the bushes outside Gilbert’s apartment.

  “Yeah, well, maybe, Kristen . . . I think you did it!” Webber confessed.

  “You and my grandmother,” Gilbert said defiantly, “you both think I did it.”

  “I do, Krissy. I think you snapped. I think you did it, and I think you snapped.”

  A silence followed Webber’s statement.

  “Krissy . . . you there?”

  After a long pause, Gilbert dropped her voice down low, Webber imagined, so no one in the jail could hear her.

  In a whisper, she said, “All I can tell you is that people do strange things when they’re under a lot of stress.”

  “Well, Krissy, we’ve all done dumb things—but, thankfully, I haven’t done anything that dumb.”

  “You’ll come visit me in jail, won’t you?” Gilbert asked.

  “Of course, Krissy. Of course, I will.”

  From that moment on, Webber never doubted for a moment that Gilbert had committed the bomb threat. But she still wasn’t convinced of Gilbert’s role in the murders. Calling in a bomb threat under the emotional stress of losing a husband and a boyfriend, along with being investigated for murder, was one thing, but actually murdering people was another. There would have to be some hard evidence, Webber told herself, for her to believe that a woman whom she saw as a good nurse, a good mother, a good wife, someone who had even taken care of Webber’s kids, was a serial killer.

  During another phone call later that same week, Gilbert asked Webber if her husband, Steven, would mind if she moved to upstate New York to be near her after the bomb threat trial was over.

  “I have to start a new life somewhere. You think Steven would mind if I moved near you guys?”

  “No, not at all.”

  Later that night, Webber shared the conversation with her husband.

  “There’s no way in hell she’s involved in those murders. I don’t care what the statistics show; she did not kill anybody! She’ll get through this and get on with her life.”

  Steven wasn’t buying it.

  “If she gets out of jail, she’s not coming here.”

  Prior to her release from Hamden County Jail on October 15, Gilbert was ordered by the court to live in Setauket, Long Island, New York, with her parents. She was warned not to set foot on Massachusetts soil or call anyone involved in the murder or bomb-threat cases. While in New York, Gilbert was to continue the therapy she had started. And if she didn’t like it, well, there was a bunk waiting for her in Springfield where she could easily wait for her trial to begin.

  CHAPTER 67

  To Kristen Gilbert, being confined to her parents’ home two hundred miles away from Northampton was the same as being locked up. The telephone had become both her weapon and source of information. Yet here she was now ordered by a judge not to use it.

  For the past seven or so years, Richard and Claudia Strickland lived in a modest, middle-class neighborhood in Setauket, a rustic, homey community in Suffolk County situated halfway between Manhattan and Montauk, on the eastern tip of Long Island.

  Gilbert was prohibited by law from leaving the house. If she stepped out of her boundary, the anklet would trip a circuit, which would alert the local federal officers monitoring her actions.

  She was livid. Bored. And beginning slowly to self-destruct.

  With no one left to talk to, she phoned Rachel Webber weekly. Webber had still been in contact with several people from Northampton, and she was beginning to see things differently.

  By early November, Welch and his team were back on track with both the murder investigation and the bomb-threat investigation. He wasn’t worried too much about getting a conviction on the bomb-threat charge, but there was still a lot of work to be done on the murder case.

  Local newspapers in Northampton began running a variety of stories, most of which were based on rumor and speculation. Welch had done a good job keeping most of the records sealed. Nevertheless, the “leaked” stories fed the public’s growing need to find out what had been going on up at the VAMC for the past several years.

  As if there were going to be some sort of lottery, nurses were jogging their memories and drumming up all kinds of totals regarding the number of people Gilbert could have killed. Some said thirty, maybe forty; one even said it was closer to seventy-five or eighty.

  Any patient on Ward C who had died while Gilbert had worked there suddenly became one of her victims.

  For Rachel Webber, one thought kept haunting her as she read the newspapers and talked to her former coworkers: Whenever Kristen was on duty, we’d have a code. She couldn’t get the thought out of her mind. The busier the night was, Webber recalled, the more codes they’d have.

  “What are the newspapers saying about me?” Gilbert asked Webber one night over the phone.

  “Oh, Kristen. The same old stuff, you know.”

&nbs
p; “What have you heard?”

  “I haven’t heard anything. How are you?”

  “Ah, I don’t know. I’m going to therapy. At least it gets me out of the house once a week.”

  During another call, Webber voiced her concern about something she had heard just days before.

  “Kristen, I read an article—or someone told me, I can’t recall which—that you had a ‘psych background.’ You know, something in your past. Is that true?”

  “Mom,” Gilbert yelled into another room in her parents’ house, “do I have any psychiatric problems?”

  Gilbert held the phone out so Webber could hear her mother shout, “Nope!”

  “Kristen, this is serious.”

  “You heard her, Rachel,” she said, laughing. “No psychiatric problems here.”

  Under house arrest, facing serious time behind bars, a murder investigation under way, and it was still all just a joke to Kristen Gilbert.

  With the bomb-threat investigation just about wrapped up, Plante and Murphy began a vigorous interviewing schedule involving the nurses on Ward C. They would sit down and go through entries in medical files, being sure to get a clear picture of the notes each nurse had made. Each potential victim of Gilbert’s was treated as a separate case. So sometimes Plante and Murphy would have to talk to the same witness several times regarding several different victims.

  Rachel Webber had left the area shortly before everything blew up. But still, Plante and Murphy thought she might know something.

  When they showed up at Webber’s New York home, their presence negated any denial Webber might have still clung to at that point and helped her focus on the side of Gilbert she perhaps didn’t know.

  “We think,” Plante said as he sat down in the Webbers’ living room, “she is one of the most dangerous criminals we have ever come in contact with. It’s possible she’s killed forty, even forty-five of her patients.”

  Murphy nodded his head in agreement and Webber’s jaw dropped.

  “We think she killed her cats and dogs, too,” Plante said.

  “What?”

  “We think she tried to poison Glenn.”

  For about an hour, they filled Webber in on whatever they could legally. Webber just sat, listened, and added whatever she could. Plante said it was unlikely, from what Webber had told them, that she would be dragged into court to testify.

  “But who knows?” Murphy said.

  Plante, before they left, wanted to know one last thing.

  “Ms. Webber, your phone has been ringing off the hook since we’ve been here. That’s Gilbert calling, isn’t it?”

  Webber explained she had told Gilbert when they were coming.

  “We’ll be in touch,” Plante said. “Thanks for your time. Listen, the more you talk to her, the more you’re going to become involved. We could end up calling you into court.”

  Webber was mortified. Here were two investigators who had traveled more than one hundred and fifty miles to confirm rumors she had heard for the past few months. It wasn’t phone gossip and newspaper propaganda anymore. It was fact.

  Her phone didn’t stop ringing after Plante and Murphy left. So she picked it up and, at first, didn’t say anything.

  “They got to you, didn’t they?” Gilbert snapped.

  After a brief pause, “Yes, Kristen, they did.”

  “That’s real nice of them to take away my only friend.”

  “Kristen, there is a mountain of evidence against you.”

  “You know, you’re the only one I have left—that was real nice of them to do that.”

  “I really, really want . . . I want . . . to believe you, Kristen. But—”

  They both began to cry.

  “I just want you to know something, Rachel. I never killed anybody.”

  “I really want to believe you. It’s just that I can’t keep supporting you anymore. I can’t keep doing this.”

  “You know, I understand,” Gilbert said. She was weeping.

  “Kristen . . .”

  “I understand, and you’ll always be my friend,” Gilbert said before she hung up.

  CHAPTER 68

  Gilbert was indicted on November 2, 1996, on felony charges of falsely phoning in a bomb threat to a federal institution. She was ordered to spend the next year under house arrest at her parents’ Long Island home while waiting to tell her side of what happened on the night of September 26, 1996, and the trial was set for January 1998.

  Rumors circulating around town had it that Gilbert was going to pin the bomb-threat call on her old beau, James Perrault. The story was that he had set her up because he wanted her out of the picture, and, in doing so, it would make him look good during his bid to become a “real” cop.

  Laying out the dish on her old boyfriend, or even preparing for the bomb-threat trial, however, weren’t Gilbert’s biggest problems. Because three and a half weeks after the bomb-threat indictment was handed down, on November 27, 1996, Bill Welch, under the urging of forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden, got permission from the family of Ed Skwira to exhume his body, conduct an autopsy, and run the appropriate toxicology tests.

  Depending on what was found in Skwira’s body, more bodies might have to be exhumed in the coming weeks and months—maybe even years.

  Burying a family member once is hard enough. Yet the thought of doing it twice is horrifying to most people. The Skwira family was hesitant at first, but later agreed that it was for the good of the case to have Skwira’s body exhumed. After all, if he had been murdered, they wanted some answers.

  Plante and Murphy promised the Skwiras that his body would go back in the ground the exact same way it came out, they would see to it personally. Neither Plante nor Murphy had ever been present at an exhumation, but Welch wanted them both there, from the time the first shovelful of dirt was unearthed to the time the last shovelful was replaced.

  Murphy, of course, was no stranger to autopsies. He had seen dead bodies in many different forms throughout his career. As he explained to Plante one day shortly before the Skwira exhumation, “There is a lot to be learned from the viewing of a corpse.”

  Each body, Murphy explained, whether during an autopsy or at a crime scene, has an “individual horror attached to it—but also, more important, some teaching value.” Humor, he said, was one of the things that saved him from losing it over the years during an autopsy or arriving on the scene where he had to conduct his business in the presence of a child’s naked, mutilated body.

  “If you don’t find a way to vent the horror of what you see, you will be back on the Interstate with the radar gun watching the years pass you by.”

  The last place Plante and Murphy wanted to be on Monday, November 25, 1996, was six feet underground, giving hand signals to a backhoe operator. But here they were, standing in Ed Skwira’s grave, wrapping a leather strap around his casket so it could be hoisted out of the ground and into the medical examiner’s van.

  As Plante pushed Skwira’s casket into the medical examiner’s van and watched it drive away, he had only one thing to say to his partner, as they stood there watching.

  “What the hell are we going to find when we open up that box?”

  “Hopefully, sweetheart,” Murphy said, squishing his cigarette butt with the heel of his shoe into the ground, “some answers.”

  “Exhumation,” Dr. Baden wrote in his book Dead Reckoning, “is a painstaking process that begins with the very ground in which the person is buried.” An “important first step” is taking “soil samples” of the ground around the gravesite to “ensure that elements in the earth, such as arsenic, can be identified, so that any minerals seeping into the body are not mistaken for a cause of death.”

  One of the main reasons Ed Skwira had been selected for exhumation was that he’d had, Baden noticed, an “unanticipated sudden cardiac arrest with a rapid heart beat and there were three broken vials of epinephrine . . . found broken and used in the bucket . . . after [his] code. . . .”
/>   When they opened Skwira’s casket, there was a thick, cot-tonlike substance covering his face, similar to mold that grows on an orange as it rots. Although the fungus looked bad, it actually helped to preserve the body, absorbing any water that might seep into the casket.

  Lifting Skwira from his casket to the table, Murphy and Plante went to great pains not to disrupt the integrity of his body. Anything they found, be it incriminating or exculpatory, would be brought into evidence during trial proceedings. They had to be careful. Undressing Skwira, Murphy, who had been around countless corpses in his time, tried to lighten the mood for Plante, who was seeing this sort of thing for the first time.

  As the video camera rolled, Dr. Baden, who had done thousands of autopsies during his forty years of practice, began to look at Skwira’s internal organs. Immediately, he learned Skwira had not died of a heart attack. He did have heart disease, but that was not the cause of his death. His heart, Baden suggested, just gave out. What made it do that, however, was something he couldn’t tell right away. It would take months before the toxicology tests came back.

  While they waited for the results of the toxicology tests, Welch still had several things to do to cinch the bomb-threat case: matching Gilbert’s handwriting samples, matching her fingerprints, finding credit card and check receipts, and interviewing potential witnesses.

  And as the weeks progressed, the paper evidence began to convince Welch that a conviction was imminent; Gilbert was facing some hard time behind bars for making a false bomb threat. Maybe, Welch wondered, when Gilbert and Harry Miles had a chance to weigh the evidence he now had, she would save everyone the trouble of a long and tedious trial and change her plea?

  PART THREE

  I may be a murderer. Felony.

  Oh, but worse. There’s a law beyond the law, and a justice beyond human justice.

  Damnation is my only highway.