Perfect Poison

by M. William Phelps

  “You mentioned that she told you that she stopped at the Tasty Top to check on her messages. Her messages where . . . at her home? And do you know from your own personal knowledge the distance between the Tasty Top and her home?”

  “Approximately a half mile.”

  “Did she tell you anything that occurred at the Tasty Top during this conversation?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “She felt she had observed a state trooper, and she felt that he was following her around. . . .”

  “I have nothing further, Your Honor,” Welch said.

  “Good morning, Mr. Perrault,” Miles offered comfortingly after Welch sat down.

  That said, Gilbert’s gray-haired attorney first went after Perrault’s background in the military and how he should have known, because of his time in the military, how to keep better records. In particular, Miles insisted, Perrault’s “report writing” and “investigative” skills as a security guard, making the assumption that on the night of September 26, Perrault should have written “tighter” reports. He made the point that Perrault, professionally speaking, was a cop wannabe, a security guard who tried, but failed to become a cop.

  Using Perrault’s job record as a launching pad, noting that he had applied to several area police departments but had been turned down by every last one of them, Miles began to lay out one of his theories.

  “Has anyone ever told you that they would give you a recommendation for the state police . . . ?”

  “Yes.”

  “And who told you that . . . ?”

  “Trooper Soutier.”

  “Detective Lieutenant Soutier?”

  “Yes.”

  “When did Detective Soutier tell you that he would recommend you to the state police?”

  “I believe it was October [1996].”

  “That would be after these incidents . . . occurred?”

  “No. It was while we were investigating them.”

  “So while you were investigating this bomb threat, Detective Soutier told you that he would like to give you a recommendation to the state police?”

  “Yes.”

  Miles rubbed his chin. This was the cusp of his defense: that Perrault had made all of this up to get a job with a “real” police force and get the woman he wanted nothing to do with anymore off his back for good.

  “Is that when you were asked to report telephone calls from Kristen Gilbert?”

  “It was before.”

  “And how long before you were requested to report telephone calls from Kristen Gilbert did Detective Soutier tell you that he would . . . recommend you for a position with the state police?”

  “Maybe ten minutes.”

  Miles then had Perrault talk about several cards Perrault had received from Gilbert and when he received them, suggesting that Perrault and Gilbert had been romantically linked for longer than Perrault wanted to admit.

  Getting nowhere, Miles brought Glenn into the picture, asking Perrault whether he wanted Kristen and her husband to get back together. Perrault said he “encouraged” Kristen back in the fall of 1995, and the winter of 1996 to reconcile with Glenn. He said he told Kristen she should go to counseling with Glenn.

  “And you’re still having a sexual relationship with her at the time?” Miles asked.

  “Yes.”

  Then he wanted to know if Perrault had suspected Gilbert, at that time, of doing “it,” killing her patients.

  “Not at that time.”

  “Do you suspect it today?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you suspect it today because it helps you to testify against her. Isn’t that correct?”

  “No. It doesn’t.”

  “Isn’t it true, sir, that the reasons you’re saying some of these things against Kristen Gilbert is because it helps you in your career and it justifies your dumping her?”

  “No. It doesn’t, sir.”

  “You don’t think it does?”

  “No, sir.”

  Miles kept throwing dates at Perrault like darts, hoping to confuse him. But it didn’t work. More confident now than ever, Perrault stayed sharp.

  For the next half an hour, Miles went through several turbulent episodes during the affair, hoping to convince the jury that Perrault had reasons to want Gilbert out of his life.

  “Did she [ever] physically threaten you [ . . . ]?”

  “Physically without words, yes.”

  “Did she hit you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you hit her back?”

  “No.”

  “Did you report it?”

  “No.”

  “Did you make any notes of it?”

  “No. I did not.”

  “Did you tell her that you wanted to go to counseling with her?”

  “No.”

  “Did she ask you if you wanted to go to counseling?”

  “I don’t recall.”

  “And when she hit you, would it be just a punch or a slap . . . ?”

  “She’s punched me twice in the testicles.”

  That one statement put a damper on Miles’s momentum. Perhaps he shouldn’t pry anymore? There was a chance Perrault knew something else.

  As Perrault’s testimony wore on, it became remarkably clear that after the initial courtship, the affair he had with Gilbert was a rocky road of emotional instability that continued to escalate as the pressure surrounding the murder investigation began to wear Gilbert down. Her life was becoming more unmanageable by the day, and she was bringing all that baggage into the relationship. What was clear—and Miles probably didn’t want it to come out this way, but it did—was that as soon as Perrault got a whiff of what kind of woman he had been shacking up with, he quickly made the decision that there wasn’t a piece of ass in the world worth that much trouble.

  CHAPTER 72

  The Daily Hampshire Gazette, which had been covering the trial from gavel to gavel, ran a front-page headline over the weekend that hit Bill Welch like a sucker punch:

  NURSE’S CO-WORKER SAYS INVESTIGATORS

  THREATENED HIS JOB

  Many who were in the courtroom the previous week, however, didn’t quite see it that way. The Gazette article rallied many on the side of Gilbert, saying Perrault had said that a “VA investigator offered him help with a job search” if he helped in the murder investigation or he could “face losing his job” at the VAMC.

  But to a lot of the people who were in Ponsor’s courtroom during Perrault’s testimony, it never happened that way.

  Nevertheless, if any of the jurors had seen the weekend paper, there was a good chance they were questioning the very testimony they had just witnessed.

  It was a prosecutor’s worst nightmare.

  On Monday, January 12, Miles indicated he had only a few more questions for Perrault. Perrault had been on the stand for about three days. He looked tired. Drained. He was ready to call it a day.

  But before Perrault took the stand, Miles and Welch argued about the testimony of Welch’s next witness, Bruce Koenig, a former FBI expert who specialized in analyzing voice and tape. Miles said he was informed months ago that Koenig wasn’t going to be used as an “expert” witness.

  “I was hoping . . . I would have a little more time to ponder it. . . .” Ponsor said after hearing out Welch and Miles, but “I would say that it’s very likely I am going to permit the government to put on [Mr. Koenig]. . . .”

  With that out of the way, the coast was clear for Perrault to return.

  After asking him a few questions about the trap NYNEX had installed on the VAMC phone line on September 26, Miles turned his attention toward Gilbert’s home phone.

  “On [September] twenty-seventh, were any of the calls [you received at the VAMC] traced to Kristen Gilbert’s apartment?”

  “I don’t believe any of them were. . . .”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “None of them were traced to Kristen’s apartment!” />
  “So, did you know how many calls were made by this person you identify as the caller?”

  “Between twenty and thirty maybe.”

  “So twenty or thirty calls were made by this individual and none of them were traced to [Gilbert’s] apartment; is that correct?”

  “No, they weren’t. That is correct.”

  “I have no further questions.”

  On redirect, Welch established that even before Perrault had met Gilbert and became romantically involved, he had been applying for law-enforcement jobs. There was little need to go over the obvious: that phone calls from Gilbert’s apartment had little, if anything, to do with the case. The government had never claimed Gilbert had made the calls from her home.

  Miles stood back up.

  “Do you remember being asked on redirect examination . . . if you would manufacture a bomb threat in the case?”

  “Yes.”

  “And if you would have manufactured a bomb threat, would you tell us that?”

  “I wouldn’t manufacture a bomb threat.”

  “If you had, would you tell us that?”

  “I wouldn’t make a bomb threat, so therefore I wouldn’t have to.”

  “And do you recall being asked if you manufactured a bomb threat to get rid of Kristen Gilbert?”

  “Yes, I recall that.”

  “And would you tell us that if you had?”

  “I hadn’t made one, so therefore I wouldn’t have to worry about that.”

  Perrault was tough.

  “Is it fair to say, sir, that with respect to the actual threatening telephone call, the one that mentioned an explosive device, you’re the only person who heard that?”

  “Yes.”

  “In order to believe that that occurred, we have to believe your testimony?”

  “Yes.”

  It hadn’t been a good start to the new week for Harry Miles and Kristen Gilbert. With Ponsor ruling against a motion Miles had filed, seeking to stop several witnesses from testifying that the voice on one of the tapes was, in fact, Gilbert’s, it appeared Miles’s claim of bias on the part of the government had some credence—if only in the way things looked.

  There was, though, little he could do about it at this point besides plan an appeal if Gilbert was found guilty—because Welch was calling retired FBI voice expert Bruce Koenig, who had eliminated most of the distortion on the sped-up tape Welch had discovered before trial, and there wasn’t much Miles could do about it. Although Koenig couldn’t make the determination that the voice on the tape was Gilbert’s, Welch won the argument earlier that morning and said he would be bringing in witnesses who could.

  While the court waited for Detective Kevin Murphy to make his way to the witness stand, Miles walked over to Welch and said something with regard to how the case was proceeding.

  Seizing the moment, Welch said, “You just keep a leash on Gilbert’s father, Mr. Strickland. I don’t want him lashing out at me during the proceedings.”

  Miles took a look over to where Mr. Strickland was sitting, and paused for a moment. “Yes,” he said, “he’s been acting a bit strange lately.... He requires a lot of maintenance.”

  Earlier that morning, Strickland had once again made Welch feel uncomfortable with the way he had stared at him. They were in the hall outside the courtroom, and the old man gave Welch one of his how-dare-you-do-this-to-my-daughter stares that had become part of his daily regimen.

  “He’s coming over that railing one of these days,” Welch had said half-jokingly to Murphy as they entered the courtroom.

  Welch felt Strickland wasn’t the type to whip out a knife or gun and “go postal.” But he wasn’t putting it past the old man to do something irrational if he thought his daughter was going to prison.

  With his neighborly charm, Detective Kevin Murphy took a seat in the witness stand. He looked every bit like the seasoned pro he was.

  Welch had him first describe his role in the bomb-threat investigation and then had him give the jury a blow-by-blow account of the night he watched Gilbert make a call from the Tasty Top Ice Cream Stand public telephone. But beyond that, there really wasn’t much more the detective could offer as far as evidence was concerned.

  On January 13, the following morning, Miles tore right into Murphy, questioning just about every aspect of his investigation. Yet, in the end, Murphy stood his ground and offered Miles absolutely nothing he could build upon.

  He was a cop doing his job. Period. Miles couldn’t get out of him what wasn’t there.

  By the end of the day, Welch brought in FBI expert Bruce Koenig and had him make the point that it was highly possible that the person who had made the calls to the VAMC on September 26 used a Talkboy toy. The clicking sounds in the background were a dead giveaway, Koenig explained. There was no other conclusion he could come to.

  CHAPTER 73

  Days before the start of the second week of proceedings in the Gilbert bomb threat trial, the world’s most famous serial bomber, Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, the Unabomber, was in the midst of the start of his trial three thousand miles away.

  The Gilbert trial hadn’t quite lived up to the same dramatics as the Unabomber’s, nor had it garnered the same mass television coverage, but one thing was certain by the time January 13 rolled around: Harry Miles was feeling the walls of the government’s case closing in around him. He needed to do something—and quick.

  Earlier that morning, Miles argued that his voice identification “expert” witness, Christopher Ryan, would be leaving for California at 12:15 that day, and he needed either to get him on the stand right away, or, as they had previously discussed, have the court videotape his testimony.

  On top of that, Miles said that Ryan would testify on the mechanics of the Talkboy and how it was mechanically impossible for a person to record her voice and keep rolling the tape as another person—meaning Perrault—spoke over it, and then play another message.

  Welch was raging mad at Miles for his eleventh-hour proclamations.

  Judge Ponsor, after listening to both attorneys for several minutes, said he would allow Ryan to testify as an “expert” and the jury was returned to the courtroom.

  Living up to the image of the crowd he ran with, Christopher Ryan wore his hair long, in a pony tail, and had that hard-edged look most musicians succumb to after years on the road. He wasn’t quite Willie Nelson, but thirty years down the road, well, he might just be able pull it off.

  After he sat down in the witness chair, Ryan said good morning.

  “If you could lean forward a little bit,” Miles said, “so your voice would be amplified for the jury, I’d appreciate it.”

  Here was a man who was supposed to be a “sound expert,” a sound technician and recording engineer being told to speak into the microphone so he could be heard. Welch couldn’t have scripted a better start.

  Miles first asked Ryan what he did for a living.

  “I am a full-time musician, master engineer and record producer.”

  “What is a master engineer?”

  “A master engineer is someone who tweaks and puts the icing on the final product of a record or CD for production or mass-producing of records.”

  After a few more questions, Miles asked Ryan who he had worked with.

  “. . . Def Leppard, John Mellencamp, Billy Cobin . . . Phil Collins, Whitney Houston.”

  And then—after Ryan explained how he had listened to the tapes—came the question of the hour.

  “And as you were listening to the tape, and later with your examination of the Talkboy, did you come to any conclusion as to whether that conversation was taking place in real time?”

  “I definitely thought that the conversation was in real time.”

  “I have no further questions.”

  The main reason why Ryan was testifying, Welch knew as he stared at his notes before beginning his cross-examination, was to counter Bruce Koenig’s claim that the phone calls Perrault had received were pre-recor
ded.

  So Welch stood and, immediately, put Ryan’s qualifications and credentials into perspective.

  “Is it fair to say you don’t have any sort of graduate degree in engineering, phonetics, linguistics, or anything like that?”

  “That is true.”

  “Nor do you have any sort of graduate degree in those fields—is that right?”

  “True.”

  “Do you have a high school degree?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “As far as training and listening to tapes, are you familiar with, for example, the FBI’s, or the Internal Association for Identification’s two-year apprenticeship program?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “In fact, everything you have done is with respect to music, is that correct?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Specifically with replicating drum sounds, is that right?”

  “True.”

  “Which on occasion are quite loud, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  Soon Ryan admitted that he hadn’t had an ear exam in quite some time and that he couldn’t tell the court how good his hearing was. He was a drummer. He had been around loud music his entire life. One didn’t have to be an ear specialist to draw the conclusion that his hearing probably wasn’t the same as a person who hadn’t.

  “You certainly haven’t been formally certified by anybody, either an entity or an individual, in doing tape comparisons or tape analysis, is that right?”

  “Correct.”

  On January 14 the government got back on track.

  The next phase of Welch’s case involved time: Did Gilbert have the opportunity that night to commit the bomb threat? Welch wanted to make sure the jury knew Gilbert was out and about between the hours of the threat. And if there was any doubt in the jury’s mind that she didn’t have the opportunity to commit the crime, Welch’s next witness, Samantha Harris, would clear it up.

  As Harris entered the courtroom, Gilbert took a long, hard look at her and shook her head. The most grueling part of testifying, many of the witnesses agreed, was having to sit only a few feet from Gilbert. The witness box was directly in front of the defense table, where Gilbert could stare down each one of her old friends.