Perfect Poison

by M. William Phelps

  For the next few hours, Welch had Turner testify as to the different types of epinephrine the VAMC stocked (1:10,000 bristo-jet plungers and the 1:1000 glass ampoules), several tour sheets that placed Gilbert at work on the nights in question, how Gilbert had lost weight, how her appearance changed drastically, becoming, according to Turner, “flamboyant” and “provocative looking,” how she started wearing makeup to work where she previously hadn’t, how she had gotten a “layered kind of tossing hairdo,” and how Gilbert had left her husband after she started a relationship with Perrault.

  By the time Welch finished, he had brought twenty-two pieces of evidence into the record, mostly memos and letters from the Labor Board describing Gilbert’s work-related injuries over the years.

  Before lunch, Paul Weinberg got his shot at Turner. Since she’d had The Handbook of Poisoning in front of her already, Weinberg decided to take a stab at trying to convince jurors that the book was mainly used for preventative methods, not as a murderer’s how-to manual. Welch had already established that Turner had never given the book to Gilbert or placed it in her sewing bag, as Gilbert had once claimed.

  “Is it fair to say that this book is aimed at prevention, diagnoses and treatment of poisoning?” Weinberg asked.

  “That is what it says on the back of the jacket.”

  “It wouldn’t be fair to describe that book as a ‘how-to’ manual of poisoning, would it?”

  “I don’t think I could make that decision one way or another. I think it tells you what poisonings are.”

  When Weinberg realized he wasn’t getting anywhere, he moved on to another subject: the fact that Turner’s mother and husband had worked for the VA. Then another: that Turner had perhaps “developed a sort of affection for [Gilbert].” Then another: that maybe Turner, because of the position she had held, had been preventing certain employees from moving up the professional ladder.

  “Now, during the time that you were working with Ms. Gilbert, it’s true that you never saw her engage in any obvious inappropriate behavior or actions that could be interpreted as harmful to a patient, isn’t that correct?”

  Either Turner didn’t understand the question, or she didn’t want to respond.

  “You want me to rephrase the question?” Weinberg asked after waiting a few moments.

  “Yes.”

  “During the time you worked with Ms. Gilbert, you never saw her do anything you thought was done intentionally to hurt a patient, did you?”

  “No, I never saw her do anything intentionally to a patient.”

  Paul Weinberg may have been a lawyer who had never before tried a criminal case in his professional career. But here he was now, standing in front of the podium like a peacock, firing off questions as if he were an old pro.

  At one point near the end of his cross-examination, Weinberg got Turner to admit she had initiated prior investigations when she found out that drugs had become missing. He was laying the groundwork for one of the defense’s key arguments: that there were several other people who had worked at the VAMC in 1996 who could have, for their own selfish reasons, stolen the missing ampoules of epinephrine.

  With the Christmas and New Year holiday seasons approaching, it was obvious to anyone who had been keeping score that Hoose and his team were getting beat up by each new witness the government presented. Although Weinberg had scored a few points with Melodie Turner, by December 19, with James Perrault and Glenn Gilbert still waiting in the wings, the defense needed to find some sort of life raft they could cling to. Because when Gilbert’s two former lovers came into the courtroom and spoke of the confessions she had made, Gilbert’s boat was likely going to take a plunge into an abyss with a very deep and dark bottom.

  Indeed, it would be hard for her to recover—especially if she wasn’t going to take the stand herself.

  David Hoose was a professional, however, with a reputation for being a crack lawyer who knew the ropes better than most of his peers. He knew John Wall and Bonnie Bledsoe’s past drug use would cast doubt on the government’s case and suppress any momentum that was building.

  The years immediately after the investigation had begun hadn’t been good to Bonnie Bledsoe. Her drug use, as Hoose would soon get his chance to expose during his cross-examination, had escalated to a point higher than it had ever been.

  In fact, in October 1999, Bledsoe crashed and burned. After a binge, she collapsed on the floor of her home, stopped breathing, and went into cardiac arrest. From there, she was put on a respirator for twelve days and ended up staying in the hospital for six weeks. It was the last time she had used drugs.

  On Tuesday, December 19, 2000, when she took the stand under an offer of immunity from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Bledsoe had been clean for well over a year. She wore a red winter scarf and a black dress. She looked anxious, but no more so than any other witness. She had family members sitting in the third row for moral support alongside her attorney.

  The previous day had been taken up with arguments without the jury present. Welch wanted restrictions put on Hoose’s questioning of Bledsoe’s history of drug abuse. Hoose, of course, wanted to go up one side of her and down the other. He said he had evidence that she stole money from John Wall and her parents’ bank accounts to support her drug habit.

  “It’s important for the jury to understand the depth of her problem. She repeatedly lies about her drug use.”

  Ponsor decided to let Hoose question Bledsoe at will. She was going to say some incriminating things against the defendant; it was only fair that the jury knew the kind of person who was making those accusations. Weinberg had already established through Melodie Turner that the defense was going after Bledsoe’s drug use with full force, asking Turner if she knew Bledsoe, who had worked for her all those years, had also been using crack cocaine and heroin while employed at the VAMC.

  Turner had said she didn’t have a clue.

  Welch was an experienced trial attorney. He knew how to work things in gradually, hoping to lessen the sting of the more potent problems Bledsoe had had.

  But Bonnie Bledsoe was a reformed drug addict; there was no way of getting around it.

  Welch established immediately that Bledsoe and Wall had dated on and off from 1991 until 1999, and that between October 1991 and March 1996, they had lived together. Regarding Gilbert’s performance as a nurse, Bledsoe, like many of Welch’s previous witnesses, admitted she thought Gilbert was a “good nurse,” kind and intelligent.

  Bledsoe explained she had been asthmatic all her life, often taking shots of epinephrine to control the more severe bouts with the disease. “It worked very well,” she said of the drug. But at the same time, she added, it made her heart race.

  Then Welch had her describe the one reason why she was on the stand: Michael Cascone’s several codes on January 28, 1996.

  During Cascone’s third code, Bledsoe said she told Gilbert that if she had to run over to Building One, where Cascone was, to respond to another code, she was going to start “wheezing.”

  That was when, Bledsoe testified, Gilbert had reached into her pocket and pulled out “a vial of something” and asked, “Do you want some epi, Bonnie?”

  Whispers were heard throughout the courtroom. It hadn’t mattered at that moment that a former drug addict had said it; what mattered was that Gilbert had been carrying ampoules of epinephrine around the ward with her.

  Then came the hardball questions.

  “I want to ask you,” Welch said, “whether or not there came a time in late 1994 when you began using heroin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember when you first started using heroin?”

  “Around the fall of ’94.”

  “For approximately how long did you use heroin after the fall of 1994?”

  “Until April of ’95.”

  After Bledsoe indicated she had detoxed herself off the drug on April Fool’s Day 1995, Welch asked if she thought that she was addicted to the drug.

&nb
sp; “Yes, I did.”

  “Approximately how much heroin were you using as of, say, February or March of 1995?”

  “Between five and ten bags a day.”

  “Can you indicate to the members of the jury whether or not there were occasions when you would use at work?”

  “Yes, there was.”

  Welch then asked if Bledsoe thought her drug use affected her performance while at work.

  “No, it did not.”

  To reinforce Bledsoe’s claim that a five-to-ten-bag-a-day drug habit had nothing to do with her job performance, Welch admitted into evidence several work performance evaluations backing up her earlier testimony.

  She hadn’t a blemish on her record.

  “Did there come a point . . . in 1995 when you began using another controlled substance?”

  “Yes, there was.”

  While Bledsoe answered Welch’s questions, she looked nervously around the room, sizing up the jury, looking toward her parents and, finally, staring down Gilbert, who never once looked back.

  “And what controlled substance was that?”

  “Crack cocaine.”

  He asked when.

  “Late summer, fall of ’95.”

  “For how long did you continue to use crack cocaine?”

  “On and off until 1999.”

  Welch then toned it down a bit, getting Bledsoe to acknowledge that her addiction to crack had caused her to miss long periods of time from work. Then he questioned her about John Wall, and how she had stolen money from him to support her habit.

  “During this time frame [1996–1997], were you on occasion using with Mr. Wall?”

  “Yes, I was.”

  Establishing the fact that she had begun using both heroin and crack cocaine during the same period, and that it had put a huge strain on her asthma, which put her in and out of area hospitals on many different occasions, Welch wanted again to know how much of each drug she had been using.

  “A day?” Bledsoe asked.

  “A day.”

  “A hundred dollars of heroin a day, a couple of hundred dollars of crack a day.”

  “How were you financing that sort of habit?”

  “Selling things I owned. I sold most of my furniture, sold most of John’s [Wall] furniture. When I left the [VAMC] the year before, I took my thrift savings plan, spent all that. We had sold John’s house in May of 1999, so we had a lot of money left over from that.”

  “How much money was that?”

  “Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

  It got worse.

  “And by the end of 1999,” Welch asked, “what happened to all that money?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “By the end of 1999, what happened to all that money?”

  “It was gone.”

  In less than a year, Bledsoe and Wall had used a quarter of a million dollars worth of cocaine and heroin.

  “As your resources dwindled, did you have to begin to steal things in order to support your habit?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I would go to Home Depot and shoplift items and return them for cash.”

  Then Welch got into the cardiac episode that, according to Bledsoe, changed her life and sent her running for treatment.

  Finishing up, Welch had her admit she was now a card-carrying member of Narcotics Anonymous.

  “Do you also chair and teach [at] such meetings?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “My last question to you, Ms. Bledsoe, is whether or not you were the only person to blame for your drug addiction?”

  “Yes, I was.”

  CHAPTER 87

  “Ms. Bledsoe, my name is David Hoose. I think you know me, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  That was the last time anything pleasant would come from David Hoose’s mouth, as far as Bonnie Bledsoe was concerned. He had a job to do. He had a witness accusing his client of having in her possession an ampoule of the drug that the government was claiming she had killed patients with. It wasn’t time to exchange pleasantries; it was time to let the jury know exactly who Bonnie Bledsoe was.

  “[W]hen you’re using drugs to the level you were using them, you learn a lot about deceptive behavior, don’t you?” Hoose asked.

  “Yes, you do.”

  “You learn a lot about how to manipulate people and things, don’t you?”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “And you certainly learn how to lie a lot, don’t you?”

  “. . . I didn’t learn how to lie. No.”

  “Well, when you were using drugs you told a lot of lies, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  After several more questions regarding Bledsoe’s reasoning behind not telling people she had used drugs, Hoose’s voice getting louder with each word, he said, “And a couple of people that you particularly didn’t want to know about your drug use history was Mr. Welch and Ms. Vuono, isn’t that correct?”

  “I figured they knew about it.”

  “All right. That wasn’t my question. You didn’t want them to know, did you?”

  “At one point, no.”

  “All right. Now, what about Agent Plante, you didn’t want him to know either, did you?”

  “At one point, no.”

  “Trooper Murphy, you didn’t want him to know at one point either, did you?”

  “At one point, no.”

  “All right. And, in fact, you had met with all those people without telling them anything about your drug history, isn’t that correct?”

  “It was never asked of me.”

  Hoose continued along these lines for quite a while, hoping to break Bledsoe down and get her to keep repeating that she had held back information. However, when it came down to it, the lies she had told had nothing to do with what she saw while working with Gilbert that cold night in January 1996. They were two separate issues. And Welch had been solid in his questioning, making sure to bring up the later dates, 1997, 1998, 1999, when Bledsoe’s drug addiction was at its peak.

  Bledsoe had an uncanny way of smiling while Hoose questioned her.

  “Is this humorous to you? I notice you smiling a lot.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  By the end of the day, Hoose wanted to convince the jury that what Bledsoe had said she saw on the night Michael Cascone coded was not at all what had happened.

  “You can’t be sure it was epinephrine, can you?”

  “No . . .” Bledsoe answered, looking down toward the floor.

  By the following day, December 20, word around the courthouse had it that David Hoose was just getting started with Bonnie Bledsoe. Today he was really going to get to the core of her credibility.

  First thing in the morning, Hoose made sure the jury knew Bledsoe didn’t just decide one day to quit her job at the VAMC, as Welch had suggested during his direct examination. Rather, she had been written up so many times for missing work because of her addiction to drugs that she was forced to leave.

  But that was about it. Hoose didn’t have much more.

  Nonetheless, by the time Bledsoe left the stand, Hoose had planted in the jury’s minds the theory that she and Wall lifted several ampoules of epinephrine from the VAMC at around the same period Gilbert was said to have used them to kill Jagodowski, Hudon, Cutting and Skwira.

  When Hoose subpoenaed Wall and Bledsoe’s medical records, he noticed that on several different occasions Bledsoe had asked to have a shot of epinephrine for her asthma. Yet on a few occasions, Hoose noted, Bledsoe had told the hospital or clinic that she had already taken a shot at home before coming in.

  Who gave her the shot?

  John Wall.

  Hoose wanted to know if John Wall had stolen the epinephrine that he had given to her from the VAMC?

  “No! He most certainly did not.”

  Then he wanted to know if Bledsoe had.

  “No, I did not.”

  As April
Gougeon began to testify later that same day, it was clear where Welch and Vuono were bringing the government’s case against Gilbert next.

  Gougeon told the jury about a phone call she had received one night from Gilbert where she talked about getting a new garter belt. During a code the next night, Gougeon explained, she saw Gilbert straddling a patient, like a horse, showing that same garter belt off to James Perrault, who was participating in the code.

  She then talked about the night in November 1995 when Gilbert had come into the VAMC on her night off to get some potassium out of the medical supply closet. Gilbert claimed it was for her husband. On several occasions throughout her testimony, Gougeon praised Gilbert’s nursing skills, claiming she outdid just about everybody else on the ward when it came to code work.

  Most of the testimony now was geared toward one destination: the affair Gilbert had had with James Perrault. A clear picture of Gilbert and Perrault’s burgeoning relationship during the fall of 1995 was beginning to develop, with the jury getting intimate glimpses into how the relationship heated up over the summer and fall.

  While her coworkers filed up to the stand and spoke about how they viewed Gilbert during those crucial months of 1995 and the first months of 1996, Gilbert never once looked at any of them.

  The jury, on the other hand, was heading into the holiday break with an earful of circumstantial evidence to chew on for the next twelve days. When they came back, things were going to get even more interesting. Kathy Rix, James Perrault, John Wall, Glenn Gilbert and, finally, Dr. Michael Baden were set, along with several other material witnesses, to finish out the government’s case.

  On Tuesday, January 2, 2001, court resumed. After Lori Naumowitz and Carl Broughear concluded their testimony, the government called one of its key witnesses: Kathleen Rix. If there was ever a doubt in the jury’s mind at this point whether Gilbert had been responsible for the deaths at the VAMC, Welch and Vuono were confident Rix’s testimony would wash it away.