Perfect Poison

by M. William Phelps

  Plante jogged to the nearest pay phone and dialed up Jackson.

  “What’s up, George? I haven’t spoken to you in a long time.”

  “Steve, listen,” Jackson said. “We found ketamine in your guy, Ed Skwira.”

  “Ketamine?” Plante had never heard of the drug.

  “Yeah, Steve. Ketamine!”

  “What the hell is ketamine, George?”

  “Well, it’s a veterinarian type of drug. Kids on the street call it ‘Special K.’ ”

  “What? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  At first, Plante stood in the phone booth and just thought about the depth of the case. Every time he turned around, there was another path to follow. Yet, as soon as he started to become overwhelmed, the alarm bells went off.

  “It all began making sense after I thought about it,” Plante later recalled: the seven trips Gilbert had made to area veterinarians throughout August 1995 and June 1996, all of Gilbert’s pets mysteriously dying throughout the years, the story Samantha Harris had told him about Gilbert’s cats, and, possibly, Glenn Gilbert’s deteriorating health throughout the fall of 1995.

  Ketamine!

  When Plante got home, he called Murphy right away.

  “Now, sweetheart,” Murphy said, “all we have to do is find out where she got it.”

  Ketamine wasn’t a controlled substance in 1996, so anyone could order the drug through the mail if he or she wanted. Kristen Gilbert had been telling a story for the past two years that she and Glenn had always ordered drugs for their pets through catalogue companies so they could save money. But Glenn, of course, later denied it.

  There was one more interesting fact that made much more sense to Plante and Murphy now: The VAMC had never purchased or stocked ketamine, but Baystate, along with many other area hospitals—including all the veterinarian clinics in the area—had.

  Perhaps Gilbert had stolen the drug?

  They soon developed the theory that Gilbert had ordered several different drugs for several different reasons, one of which was to poison people. They surmised that she had tried to kill Skwira with epinephrine, but when it failed, she took a ride with him to Baystate and somewhere along the way tried to “zip” him with ketamine. That would explain why Skwira suddenly began having hallucinations once he got to Baystate, and later at the VAMC, shortly before he died.

  After a laborious search, they couldn’t locate a canceled check or money order in Gilbert’s name, thus tying her directly to mail-ordering ketamine. At best, it was a longshot, anyway. Gilbert had made mistakes in the past, sure. But using her own name to order a potential murder weapon, nearly everyone agreed, was not something she would have likely done.

  It turned out to be another dead end.

  On September 22, Steve Plante got the news he had been dreading ever since the beginning of the year: His father had passed away.

  After returning from the funeral a few days later, Plante learned that Mary Vella, Angelo Vella’s daughter, was going to be informed that day that Gilbert had attempted to kill her father. Vella had died of natural causes only a short time before, but Plante knew Mary well enough to know that the news of Gilbert’s poisoning attempt was going to devastate her.

  “Let me tell her,” Plante insisted.

  As he walked Mary out of the US Attorney’s Office after breaking the news, she broke down in his arms and began crying. So Plante comforted her.

  “It’s going to be okay, Mary,” he said.

  As he stood there, everything just hit Plante all at once: his father dying, the funeral, the years of the investigation piling up, and the ripple effect on the lives Gilbert had ruined. He was mad at himself for being pulled away from his father by the investigation. He had wanted to go to his father, who had been following the Gilbert case right along, one day and tell him before he died that she had been found guilty. But now he realized that day would never come.

  For a few minutes, Plante and Mary Vella didn’t speak; they just stood, rocking back and forth, embracing each other and crying.

  For perhaps the first time, Plante realized how much of an impact Gilbert’s narcissistic behavior had on the people involved, not to mention how many lives she had affected. The killing had stopped up at the VAMC years ago, but the aftereffects were still being felt years later. It was time, Plante thought, Gilbert paid for that.

  CHAPTER 79

  November 24, 1998 was a dreary day in Springfield. Temperatures hovered around sixty degrees, which was a pleasant relief from all of the cold weather lately, but it had been raining on and off all day long.

  Kristen Gilbert was confined to her six-by-eight-foot cell in Danbury, Connecticut. For her, the gloominess of the day would pale in comparison to what was about to happen.

  With Kevin Murphy and Steve Plante standing like bodyguards behind him, Bill Welch, Massachusetts US Attorney Donald Stern, and Ariane Vuono called a press conference for late afternoon. It was no secret around town that the time had finally come for the feds to announce the long list of indictments against former VAMC registered nurse Kristen Gilbert.

  One might have expected the attorneys to be gloating, a look of triumph in their eyes. But Stern, Welch and Vuono were stoic, as if it had been a long night of deep reflection. After all, they weren’t only there to announce the government was going ahead with its serial murder case against a former nurse, but to solidify to the public that, from their view, several people had been murdered while under Gilbert’s care. When the facts about the case emerged, the public was going to be outraged.

  Donald Stern stepped up to the podium, while print reporters sat captivated and television cameras focused on him sharply. They waited to hear what the government had on Gilbert.

  With his normally soft-spoken voice now emotional, Stern called the government’s case against Gilbert “deeply disturbing.” Looking from side to side and blinking continuously as cameras flashed around him, Stern said, “The fact that a nurse, expected and obliged to care for patients who were in an intensive care facility at the VA [hospital], would murder them in their vulnerable condition while they lie in their beds, is shocking and unthinkable.”

  Stern didn’t want to give away the government’s case, so he quickly announced that he wouldn’t be addressing what the government thought was Gilbert’s motive for the killings. Yet he assured everyone in the room that the deaths were not mercy killings.

  “These men did not want to die,” he said. “This was not a mercy killing by any stretch of the imagination.”

  WWLP, TV-20, one of the local television news stations that had been covering the Gilbert case since her bomb-threat trial, headlined the day’s events later that night by beginning its newscast with: “She was supposed to be an angel of mercy; instead, she was an angel of death.”

  Gilbert was indicted on three counts of murder for the deaths of Henry Hudon, Ed Skwira and Kenny Cutting; two counts of attempted murder for Angelo Vella and Thomas Callahan; and obstruction of justice for, among many other things, blocking James Perrault’s car back on September 10, 1996 while he was en route to the US Attorney’s Office. Six months later, two more indictments were added: one for the murder of Stanley Jagodowski and another for the attempted murder of Francis Marier.

  After the official announcement, talk around town quickly shifted from shock and disbelief to whether the government would pursue the death penalty.

  US Attorney Donald Stern said he wasn’t sure if his office was going forward with the death penalty, stating that he first wanted to speak to family members of the victims and see how they felt about it.

  Christine Duquette, Henry Hudon’s sister, was later interviewed by a local television station and said she wasn’t quite sure how she felt regarding the death penalty.

  “Now, my parents, on the other hand,” she said, “. . . that’s their baby, even though he was thirty-five. That was their son. I honestly think they’re going to look at this, especially as the trial goes on in the months to
come . . . as, you know, an eye for an eye.”

  No matter what any of the families felt, however, the decision to prosecute Gilbert under the death penalty was in the hands of one person: US Attorney General Janet Reno. Her office would have the final say.

  CHAPTER 80

  While Gilbert was in Danbury Federal Prison finishing up her sentence for the false bomb threat and awaiting the start of her murder trial, Bill Welch insisted that Murphy and Plante keep a close watch on any phone calls she made from the jail.

  “I want you guys to get a list of her phone calls every week and go through them. See who she’s been calling. Once a month, I want you down there listening to the tapes.”

  It was a painstaking process, but one Murphy and Plante knew could yield new leads.

  Most of the calls Gilbert made were quick, only one or two minutes. Being in prison, it took at least that long to make a call, so at first Murphy and Plante focused their attention on the longer, ten- to fifteen-minute calls. The prison would fax a list of the calls Gilbert had made throughout a week-long period to the US Attorney’s Office. If Plante and Murphy saw something exciting, they’d make the two-hour trip to Danbury, sit in a stuffy little room, and listen to the tapes.

  “I don’t care how long a call is,” Welch blasted them one day. “I want you to listen to every call.”

  Gilbert spent most of her phone time talking to her parents. Yet once in a while she’d call an old friend in Connecticut, or a former colleague in Northampton. For the most part, the calls didn’t amount to much. But one phone number, Murphy and Plante noticed, kept showing up week after week: that of Carole Osman.

  Osman had befriended Gilbert back in 1996, after the investigation had begun. Ever since then, Plante and Murphy had kept a close eye on her movements. She wasn’t under any type of surveillance, but they still wanted to know what she was up to.

  “Here’s a few calls,” Murphy said one day, “to Carole. They’re quite long.”

  On December 2, Plante and Murphy got down to Danbury at about one P.M. As they listened to several calls made to several different people, nothing out of the ordinary struck a chord with them right off the bat. But when they got to one particular call Gilbert had made to Carole Osman, the two investigators, sitting slouched in their chairs drinking coffee, nearly spit up.

  Osman, at one point during the call, asked Gilbert what she had been doing with all the free time she’d had.

  Gilbert said she had been working on a novel that “drew on some life experiences.”

  Plante and Murphy perked right up, looked at each other, and smiled.

  “I bet we’re in it,” Plante said, as they laughed.

  Plante called Welch with the news.

  “Get yourself a hotel. I’ll initiate a search warrant for her cell.”

  Murphy spent the night writing up an affidavit. The following day, along with the search warrant he had gotten from Welch, Murphy drove down to the Bridgeport Federal Court, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and saw the judge whose federal court held jurisdiction over the Danbury prison. The judge needed to sign the warrant before Plante and Murphy could legally enter Gilbert’s cell.

  After taking a look at the affidavit, shaking his head, the judge said, “This is the most incredible case I have ever seen. Good luck to you.”

  Murphy smiled.

  Gilbert was to be in a scheduled counseling session at four o’clock. Her counselor had wanted to explain the gravity of the charges that had just been brought against her in the indictments and discuss how Gilbert felt about them.

  As soon as Gilbert left her cell for the meeting, Plante and Murphy entered it.

  Within minutes, Murphy had in his hands twenty-five pages of a novel, handwritten by Gilbert, along with a three-page outline, detailing every character in the book, along with how the remainder of the book, which hadn’t been written yet, would play out.

  After confiscating the book, Plante met with Gilbert and explained what they had done, and then handed her a “return,” which was a receipt of items they had taken from her cell.

  With her jaw nearly rubbing against the floor, she just took the receipt and walked away without a word.

  It didn’t take a literary scholar to see that not only had Gilbert based the novel on her life, but her plan was, according to the “outline,” to write a detailed account of the past two years.

  “Looks like we’ll be doing some reading tonight, sweetheart,” Murphy said when they got into the car.

  Plante looked at the book and just shook his head.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” Plante later recalled. “Our biggest mistake, at least that day, may have been not letting her finish the book.”

  Gilbert’s fictional account of her life opened as a jury foreperson stood in front of her main character and read a “guilty” verdict. From there, it backtracked, telling the story of a married woman with two kids who worked at a government agency. The woman, in the book’s opening pages, was thinking about initiating an affair with a security guard, “Clive,” who also worked at the same agency.

  As the book moved on, and, as Gilbert wrote in her outline, the “torrid” affair between Clive and the married woman progressed, a second security guard at the fictional government agency was murdered. All eyes, of course, focused on the married woman. Her co-workers “shun” her as “the pressure is placed on them to cooperate” with the authorities.

  The most telling part of the book for Plante and Murphy, upon first look, was the married woman’s name: “Heather Morgan.” Gilbert’s middle name is Heather and her grandmother’s maiden name is “Morgan.”

  “Can you believe this shit?” Murphy said aloud while reading.

  As the pressure of the investigation began to get to Heather, Gilbert wrote, Heather tried to commit suicide, failed, and was hospitalized. Her husband, “James,” who had been behind her ever since the beginning of the accusations, saw the suicide attempt as “a sign of guilt” and ended up taking the children away from Heather.

  Then Clive dumped her and began to emotionally abuse her. Clive “resents” her, seeing her as a “threat” to his job.

  Then the government agency receives a “handwritten” letter from Heather, threatening “grievous harm and destruction.” Yet Heather has no memory of writing it.

  Every major player in Gilbert’s real life was outlined in the book, from Melodie Turner to Kathy Rix to Bill Welch to Samantha Harris to Gilbert’s new friends at the Federal Prison in Danbury.

  Perhaps the most telling section of the book proposal was an author’s note at the top of the outline page. The outline itself was sketched out to look like a Mafia family tree designed by the FBI.

  Gilbert wrote that the “following work is fiction.” She mentioned that although the main character, Heather, was “loosely” based on herself, “none of the events” were “real.” She made a point to write that “no other character” was dreamed up with the notion of a “real person” in mind.

  “Any similarities,” she concluded, “are purely coincidental.”

  Many later wondered why Gilbert would do such a thing.

  “A jail term is a useless deterrent,” Dr. Sam Vaknin, author of Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited, explained, “if it only serves to focus attention on the narcissist. Being infamous is second best to being famous—and far preferable to being ignored. The only way to effectively punish a narcissist is to withhold narcissistic supply from [her], to prevent [her] from becoming a notorious celebrity. Given a sufficient amount of media exposure, book contracts, talk shows, lectures, and public attention, the narcissist may even consider the whole grisly affair to be emotionally rewarding. To the narcissist, freedom, wealth, social status, family, vocation are all means to an end. And the end is attention. If [she] can secure attention by being the big bad wolf—the narcissist will unhesitatingly transform [herself] into one.”

  “In many respects,” Dr. Vaknin continued, “narcissists are children. Lik
e children, they engage in magical thinking.”

  CHAPTER 81

  Gilbert was transferred from her cell in Danbury on February 15, 1999, after serving ten months out of her fifteen-month bomb-threat sentence, to the Hamden County House of Correction for Women, in Ludlow, Massachusetts. Since she’d been denied bail, Hamden County would be her new home until the murder trial was over.

  She had been scheduled to be released from Danbury in November 1998, so she could serve the rest of her time at a halfway house nearby. But the US Attorney’s Office intervened at the eleventh hour, offering the court a strong opinion as to why she should be kept behind bars. Welch wasn’t sure at the time that they were going to indict her, so he sent a letter to the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) stating that she was suspected in a “number of murders . . . was very dangerous, and they would be putting people at risk” if they allowed her release.

  The BOP, once it heard the facts from Welch, changed its mind.

  Later, Welch heard through the grapevine that when Gilbert and her father got wind of what he had done, they went “ballistic,” preaching to anyone who would listen that Welch had some sort of personal “vendetta” against her.

  They were groundless accusations, of course. Welch was only, he later said, protecting the public from someone he viewed as a vicious sociopath capable of God knows what.

  Meanwhile, as Gilbert got comfortable in her new surroundings, word that the US Attorney’s Office was going to seek the death penalty began to spread through Western Massachusetts. Some residents were outraged; others were quick to judge, pegging Gilbert as a sadistic serial killer who deserved nothing less than death. To make matters worse, an earlier poll, taken by the Northeastern University College of Criminal Justice, reflected the unbalance Western Massachusetts residents were feeling.