Perfect Poison

by M. William Phelps

  Wall bowed his head.

  “Yes . . .”

  Hampshire Gazette staff writer Judith Cameron, who had been covering the trial from day one, ended a piece she wrote that week by saying that “Phillip Cass, a private investigator” who had been hired by Hoose and Miles, had “uncovered Wall’s history of drug use and addiction.” Further, Gilbert’s defense had maintained throughout the trial that Bill Welch and Ariane Vuono hadn’t known about Bonnie Bledsoe and John Wall’s drug use until a few days before trial.

  But the government saw it differently.

  Under the rules of discovery, the U.S. Attorney’s Office was obligated to provide the defense with any impeachment evidence it had on potential witnesses. But it didn’t have to turn over the evidence until no later than three weeks before trial, even if the government knew about it months or years before. Impeachment evidence is the ugly stuff prosecutors want more than anything to keep out of the courtroom: prior convictions, mental health history, drug use, alcoholism, bias, etc.

  Back in July, David Hoose had improperly (and, the government claimed, illegally) subpoenaed John Wall and Bonnie Bledsoe’s personal medical records and found out about their subsequent drug problems in the course of studying those records. In turn, it was thought that the U.S. Attorney’s Office had been blindsided by Wall and Bledsoe—that Wall and Bledsoe had hidden the drug abuse from them. But Welch and Vuono, it turned out, were only waiting for the three-week period to come up before submitting the evidence.

  Under the law, Hoose was supposed to notify John Wall and Bonnie Bledsoe he was subpoenaing their medical records. But he never did.

  Welch and Vuono were incensed. Hoose and his team were officers of the court who knew the law.

  But what was done was done. When Ponsor found out, he really couldn’t do much more than give Gilbert’s defense a slap on the wrist and continue on with the trial.

  On January 10 and 11, David Hoose finished drilling John Wall about his drug use, his addiction, how he had lied to his family, friends, coworkers and drug counselors, and how he had refused on several occasions to take a urine test for the defense.

  Then, “It can only be described as a deeply disturbing development in the case,” Judge Ponsor said on Friday, January 12, when he heard that the government wouldn’t be using Dr. Fredrick Rieders’s toxicological evidence.

  In April 2000, there had been a rather long hearing about whether Rieders’s evidence would be allowed. Hoose had called it “junk science,” and now it was turning out to be just that.

  Hoose said he was going to seek a dismissal of the indictments. If Rieders’s tests were inconclusive, then any future testimony from Dr. Baden or Dr. Thomas Grayboys, a cardiac specialist, shouldn’t be allowed, he argued, because the doctors were basing part of their testimony on what Rieders had found.

  Judge Ponsor, fuming at Vuono and Welch, said he would make a decision on Hoose’s motions by month’s end.

  Over the next two weeks, there were several witnesses who kept adding to the incriminating evidence the government was building brick by brick.

  Each nurse and doctor had his or her own stories to tell insofar as Gilbert and missing ampoules of epinephrine were concerned.

  Judge Ponsor was seen one day with a copy of the Hampshire Gazette folded under his arm and, for a second time, lashed out at Gilbert’s defense team for violating a gag order he had put on the trial.

  His reason? Hoose, Miles and Weinberg had not only spent the weekend talking to the Gazette about the “toll of defending Gilbert,” but their pictures were plastered all around the article.

  Later that week, Ponsor ruled against the motions Hoose had filed regarding government witnesses Grayboys and Baden.

  It was back to business as usual.

  Renee Walsh took the stand on January 18. Sitting directly in front of Walsh, in the pew behind the government’s table, was her fiancé, George Edward Skwirz, a scholarly-looking local accountant who had met Walsh in May 2000 following her second divorce.

  As the clerk announced Walsh’s name, Edward Skwirz noticed that Gilbert, who had been actively participating in her defense as many of the expert witnesses took the stand, sat back in her chair, slouched her shoulders, put her hands in her lap, and fell silent, never once looking at Walsh. Gilbert, Skwirz noticed, seemed to react differently to each witness. While an expert witness would get her full attention, a former colleague or friend wouldn’t even get a passing glimpse.

  Other than referring to the March 6, 1996, phone call, when Gilbert had expressed her concerns to Walsh about being called the “angel of death” by her coworkers, Walsh didn’t present anything that was extremely damaging. More or less, she was called as a witness to corroborate previous testimony by Kathy Rix and John Wall that the three of them had gotten together in February 1996 and decided to blow the whistle on Gilbert.

  On January 23, dressed in a tweed suit, with his head hung low, Glenn Gilbert entered the courtroom to a muffled silence of stares and whispers. He looked gaunt, tired, and worn down with worry.

  Like James Perrault, Glenn Gilbert was sitting on the witness stand for one reason: to tell the jury that Kristen had confessed to the murders.

  As he spoke, Welch and Judge Ponsor continually had to ask Glenn to speak up. Earlier, Ponsor had ruled that Glenn wouldn’t be allowed to tell the jury about his wife’s alleged poisoning attempt on his life.

  Welch had a way of letting each witness he questioned tell a story that was similar to those of each of the previous witnesses. Glenn spoke of his then-wife’s metamorphosis from soccer mom to single mom; from never going out after work to going out every night; from wearing conservative clothes to something out of an MTV video.

  It was obvious Glenn was still shaken by the events, even five years later.

  Kristen never once looked at her ex-husband. She kept her head down and doodled on a notepad.

  At the end of Welch’s direct, Glenn laid it all out.

  “On the evening of July 10, 1996, did there come a point in time when Ms. Gilbert called you from Holyoke Hospital and discussed the investigation with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was her demeanor when she had this conversation with you, initially?”

  “She was in hysterics: crying, sobbing, and sounding like she was hyperventilating.”

  “. . . [D]id she then begin to make some statements about the investigation?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She had said to me that she was calling to tell me to contact the investigators. She wanted to save the taxpayers a lot of money for this investigation. She was basically confessing.”

  Harry Miles, who would conduct the cross-examination, turned red as he stood up and shouted, “Objection, move to strike.”

  Ponsor agreed. He said he wanted Glenn to “relate the precise words” he heard from the defendant that night.

  “She had mentioned specifically that she wanted me to call the IG [Inspector General’s Office], that she wanted to save the taxpayers a lot of money. That she did it.”

  There was lots of sidebar discussion after Glenn had incriminated his ex-wife. Miles wanted a mistrial. Welch laughed. Ponsor agreed to not let Welch go any further down the hearsay path.

  But in the end, Glenn Gilbert had told the jury that his then-wife had confessed to killing the patients she was being investigated for. There was no silver lining on the testimony; it was, simply, one man’s word against a defendant who, at this point, still wasn’t scheduled to testify on her own behalf.

  During the next week and a half, several more nurses and doctors took the stand and added more weight to the testimony that preceded them. On February 1, however, Gilbert’s defense was blasted by Judge Ponsor for a last-minute request to show a controversial videotape of Ed Skwira’s autopsy.

  David Hoose argued that some of the government’s investigators were overheard during the video saying they needed to find epineph
rine in Skwira’s tissue. Hoose said Dr. Michael Baden could be heard saying, “We’ve got to beat up on [Dr.] Rieders . . . to find something.”

  Ponsor denied the motion, but the left the door open to show the tape later.

  With that out of the way, SA Plante took the stand and tied together all the testimony up until that point. Any question that hadn’t been previously answered was put to Plante, and he carefully filled in the blanks.

  Next, Plante’s partner, Detective Kevin Murphy, sat down in the witness chair and assistant U.S Attorney Ariane Vuono peppered him with the same questions Plante had just been asked by Welch: Why? Where? When? How?

  After about a half hour, Vuono said, “Thank you, I have nothing further,” and passed her witness over to Hoose.

  With the jury out of the room, David Hoose asked Judge Ponsor if he could now play the video. It would impeach the government’s witness, he said. Detective Murphy, Hoose argued, at one point during the tape, said, “We ought to put a little epi in there,” while leaning over Ed Skwira’s open chest cavity.

  Ponsor then went into his chambers and viewed the tape.

  “I don’t know why on earth I had not been given this yesterday,” Ponsor lashed out when he returned. “It’s absolutely ridiculous to put me in a position in the middle of a trial to be seeing this for the first time.” He paused. “I can’t believe you did this to me.”

  Ponsor then said that the tape could have a “lurid and emotional impact” on the jury if it were allowed to see it. At one point, someone is seen, Ponsor said, holding Skwira’s heart “like it’s something you pick up at a grocery store.”

  Then Vuono weighed in.

  “They want to discredit an investigation that took years by pulling out twelve lines of a three-and-a-half-hour videotape. . . .”

  “The government started with a suspect, they started with a drug they were looking for, and, by God, they were going to find it,” Hoose maintained.

  Ponsor ruled that Hoose could cross-examine Detective Murphy without the tape.

  After a series of questions regarding where and how Murphy located The Handbook of Poisoning in Glenn Gilbert’s pantry, Hoose then got right into the Skwira autopsy.

  He asked Murphy if he knew the videotape recorder was recording audio. Murphy said he wasn’t sure. Then Hoose insinuated that, because there was no audio in any of the latter autopsy tapes, Murphy, Baden and the rest of those participating in the autopsy might be saying things they didn’t want anyone else to hear.

  Then Hoose asked Murphy if he could be heard during Skwira’s autopsy saying that someone “ought to put a little EPI in there”?

  “Yes,” Murphy said.

  And that was it. Hoose wasn’t going to get anything else about the matter out of the thirty-year veteran of the Massachusetts State Police.

  After several more government witnesses testified, rumor around the courthouse on Friday, February 2, had it that Dr. Michael Baden would be taking the stand when court resumed after the weekend.

  Welch told reporters outside the courthouse that following Baden there would be a few more key medical witnesses, but that would be it. The government would rest its case.

  CHAPTER 90

  Dr. Michael Baden brought to the courtroom its first taste of national celebrity. Having testified in numerous high-profile cases throughout his forty years of practicing forensic medicine, and basking in the success of his first book, Unnatural Death: Confessions of a Medical Examiner—a book Harry Miles had been seen reading—Baden was sure to bring with him to the stand a profound appreciation and understanding for how the justice system worked.

  Ariane Vuono spent the first forty-five minutes having Baden go through his rather stellar list of credentials. By the time he was finished, it was understood that there wasn’t much Baden hadn’t done.

  Then he began to talk about what he had found when he autopsied Ed Skwira, Kenny Cutting, and Stanley Jagodowski.

  Regarding Skwira, Baden said that “. . . there was evidence of an old heart attack that may have occurred many years ago, but there was no fresh or recent heart attack.”

  “. . . [O]n the basis of your autopsy, what is your opinion with respect to the death certificate’s statement that chronic alcoholism led to Mr. Skwira’s death?”

  “A number of answers to that question. One is [that] chronic alcoholism did not have anything to do with his death, did not lead to his death. There was no damage from alcoholism that caused or contributed to his death.”

  Baden went on to say that although Skwira had drunk alcohol daily for fifty years, “his liver, which is often the target organ for alcohol injury, was in very good condition.”

  Vuono then asked if Skwira’s cardiac event on February 15, 1996, could have been caused by what Baden had explained was a pre-existing heart condition, or heart disease.

  “No. He did not have any finding that could cause sudden death. There is [sic] just a few things that can cause sudden death, like a blood clot, pulmonary embolism, massive myocardial infarc[tion]. He did not have any evidence that . . . he had an infarc. No fresh infarc. He did not have a dissecting aortic aneurysm. . . .”

  After a break in the trial because of a winter storm, Baden returned on February 7 and confirmed that he found ketamine in Ed Skwira’s tissue. Then it was on to the comments he made about Dr. Rieders during the videotape.

  “Doctor, what did you mean when you said that you have to ‘beat up on Rieders and that he’s got to find something’?”

  “What I meant was that I know, from past dealings with Dr. Rieders, that he has many distractions and other cases . . . I wanted to make the point that it’s important to keep after Dr. Rieders to do his studies . . . to get those tests done in a timely fashion, we had to keep calling him up and making sure that progress was being made. . . .”

  One by one, Baden went through each victim’s death and responded with the same conclusion: Based on his extensive study of medical records and the autopsies he performed, all the victims had died of acute epinephrine poisoning.

  Vuono wanted to be sure she covered every base. Regarding Dr. Rieders’s toxicology tests being inconclusive and withdrawn because of the mathematical errors he had made, she had one final question for Baden.

  “With respect to your opinions that you have given to the court and jury here . . . did you rely at all upon the test results that Dr. Rieders had provided to you earlier regarding the presence or nonpresence of epinephrine in the tissue samples obtained during the autopsies that you preformed?”

  “No, I did not.”

  Vuono conferred with Bill Welch for a moment.

  “Thank you, Doctor. I have no further questions.”

  With David Hoose carrying the load for the defense throughout the last ten weeks of trial, it was time for Harry Miles to stand up and show Gilbert and the government what he was made of.

  It would get ugly right away.

  A few minutes into his cross-examination, Miles asked Baden about his grand jury testimony, where he alluded to the fact that Ed Skwira had a “normal” aorta.

  “Did you say that Mr. Skwira’s aorta was perfectly normal. Are those the words you used?”

  “Those are the words I used, that’s right. I refer to it as my senile moment.”

  “Did you also say there was no dissecting aneurysm?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you said there was no abnormality of any kind in the aorta, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And all of those were senile moments, were they?”

  “No . . . no . . . there was no dissecting aneurysm—and the aorta was perfectly normal as far as any abnormality that would lead to a dissecting aneurysm—”

  “Was Dr. Joann Richmond, excuse me, if I might—”

  “Can I finish?”

  Miles was trying to get Baden to admit that a second medical examiner—Dr. Joann Richmond—who took part in Ed Skwira’s autopsy disagreed with what Baden had found a
nd that the two doctors had discussed it at one point.

  But Baden stuck by his words and finished what he had started to say: that he could find no other cause of death.

  “And, initially, doctor, after the autopsy, if you had found no other competing cause of death, would you have had to conclude that it was a bad heart that caused Mr. Skwira’s death?”

  “If the only information I knew was the autopsy findings and there was no obvious competing cause of death, yes.”

  For the next hour or so, Harry Miles tried to get the jury to believe that Dr. Baden’s findings had been significantly influenced by the toxicological tests Dr. Rieders had performed. Using several letters Baden had written to Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Welch over the past few years, Miles proved his point rather well: that Baden had relied not only on his findings, but the fact that Rieders had found in several of the victims an overabundance of metanephrine, which is a “breakdown product” of epinephrine.

  Baden kept mixing up the dates of his meetings with Bill Welch, always sure to correct himself by saying it was “one of [his] senile moments.”

  As late afternoon approached, Miles broke out the infamous autopsy videotape and, having received permission from Judge Ponsor, popped it in and played a small portion where Baden could be clearly heard saying that “we gotta beat up on Rieders . . . he’s gotta find something.”

  “You didn’t say we have to track him to make sure he gets out his results in a timely way, did you?”

  Baden looked tired. He had been on the stand for two full days.

  “No, I didn’t use those words.”

  “And you refer to—you didn’t refer to pushing to get Dr. Rieders to get out prompt results, did you?”

  Still sharp, despite being fatigued, Baden said, “That’s what I meant!”

  “But you didn’t say that, did you?”

  “I said . . . I used different words, but that’s what I had intended to convey: that we have to push Rieders.”