Perfect Poison

by M. William Phelps

  CHAPTER 94

  “Now I can say to you,” Judge Ponsor admonished the jury while looking over the bridge of his glasses, “you can begin to discuss the case.”

  Late into the day on February 23, 2001, deliberations were finally under way in the Government vs. Kristen Gilbert, a case that with more than seventy witnesses and two hundred pieces of evidence was heading into its fifth month.

  Judge Ponsor decided to split up the jury, sending the twelve regulars off to one room and the five alternates to another. The separation of the two groups, Ponsor said, was “a poignant moment [and] a bit of a tug of heart” for him, but, in the end, something he thought he had to do.

  He then explained that he wouldn’t be sequestering the jury, and that they would retain regular hours—nine-to-five—during deliberations.

  Putting on his serious face, Ponsor then gave the jury his last bit of advice.

  “You must not allow any possible punishment which may be imposed upon the defendant to—in any way—influence your verdict or enter into your deliberations.”

  During the trial, a few of the jurors had been pumping another juror, a nurse, for information, asking her questions about some of the more complex testimony—a situation that could have potentially been grounds for a mistrial.

  Judge Ponsor was informed. After carefully weighing his options, he decided the trial hadn’t been compromised in any way.

  The episode, however, caused some friction among several jurors, and that turmoil spilled over into the first day of deliberations.

  For four hours, jurors talked in circles, breaking off into groups of three to discuss not one or two of the alleged murders, but throwing out bits and pieces of the trial they thought were most meaningful. Ponsor had let them takes notes during the proceedings, and most did. But the first few hours were nothing short of a free-for-all as jurors tore through their notes and started spitting out all sorts of scenarios and halfhearted claims.

  On Tuesday, the second day, Howard Darnley, a sixty-two-year-old machine designer, stood up and, frustrated, decided to take control of a situation he saw was getting out of hand. With Hilda Colon, a human resources worker, Darnley walked over to the blackboard and wrote down Stanley Jagodowski’s name and listed the pros and cons of the case insofar as Jagodowski was concerned.

  One by one, jurors began to toss out bits of information, and within a short time, a rather telling picture of Jagodowski’s death, entirely based on the medical evidence offered in the case, emerged.

  The following day, after briefly discussing Jagodowski’s death, one of the jurors suggested they take a paper ballot to see where they stood.

  Connie Berneche, a stay-at-home mom from Chicopee, helped the foreperson tally the votes.

  When Berneche got to the last ballot, she began to weep. Then she ran into the bathroom and vomited. Soon, the other eight women began to cry, with a few others retreating to the bathroom to vomit. Scott Stetz, Howard Darnley and Gerald Murphy, the only males in the group, looked at one another, wondering what the hell they should do.

  “It was emotional,” one juror remembered, “because once we had a guilty verdict, we knew we would ultimately be deciding on the death penalty. At that point, it became all too real.”

  Letting the women have the time they needed to compose themselves, Darnley suggested they curtail deliberations for the rest of the day.

  Judge Ponsor agreed, and let them leave early.

  Because Jagodowski was Gilbert’s first victim, the jury decided she was trying to figure out how to kill. They felt she didn’t intend to kill Jagodowski, but it just happened. So, even though Judge Ponsor had warned them not to discuss the penalty Gilbert could ultimately receive, after discussing it they agreed to convict her of second-degree murder instead of first-degree, which carried the death penalty.

  As the days wore on, they took each victim separately, discussed the evidence, and decided that Gilbert had, without a doubt, intended to murder Ed Skwira, Kenny Cutting and Henry Hudon.

  They would find her guilty of first-degree murder on those counts.

  When it came down to it, most of the jurors didn’t put as much thought into Bonnie Bledsoe and John Wall’s testimony as David Hoose and his team had perhaps hoped.

  “I may not have gotten along with them as people,” Scott Stetz later recalled, “but I didn’t think they were lying. Bonnie Bledsoe may have had a checkered past and made some mistakes in her life, but I just couldn’t see her coming into a federal court and lying about it. It’s one thing to start rumors about someone at work and bad-mouth them. But to take it all the way to federal court is a different story.”

  For the most part, coworker testimony, as the deliberations wore on, rarely came into play. The jurors put most of their focus on the medical records.

  “People can lie,” one juror later said, “but documents cannot.”

  At one point, a heated exchange took place as several jurors began discussing whether Kathy Rix could have seen the broken ampoules of epinephrine in the needle-disposal bucket. In the deliberations room, they took the bucket, placed some ampoules in it, and began to re-enact what Rix had seen that day.

  Many claimed there was no way she could have seen the broken ampoules. It was just too dark at the bottom of the bucket, and the ampoules weren’t clearly marked.

  Howard Darnley just sat, listening intently. As he watched the re-enactment, he felt the jurors were beating up on Rix, discounting her state of mind at the time she had found the ampoules.

  “Hey! Hey!” Darnley said, standing up. “Don’t you remember how you felt when we first voted on Stanley Jagodowski? You all cried. When Kathy Rix saw those vials, that was her guilty verdict! For crissakes, how do you think she felt?”

  On Friday, March 2, Judge Ponsor brought up something during the morning’s proceedings that was bothering him. The Boston Globe ran a story the previous day stating that one of the jurors had been seen giving a thumbs-up to Gilbert as the jury walked out of the courtroom. Ponsor wanted to know if anyone else had seen the gesture.

  No one admitted they had.

  In chambers, Ponsor blasted the Globe. He said he had been “very disappointed” in its coverage of the entire trial. “The [Globe] . . . has really emphasized the lurid and flamboyant sides of the case and has had an almost National Enquirer tone at times . . .”

  Yet, after further discussing it with counsel, Ponsor told the jury that the Court had concluded that the gesture never took place—that the reporter was seeing something no else had.

  It was time to get back to deliberating.

  CHAPTER 95

  By the afternoon of March 14, after almost two weeks of deliberations, the jury submitted word to the court that it had reached a verdict on all counts.

  “Before we walked in, I looked in the mirror and realized I was crying and didn’t even know it,” Scott Stetz later recalled. “I’m twenty years old, and here I am deciding the fate of this woman. It was a remarkable feeling.”

  As the jury filed into the courtroom, the anxiety Stetz had felt in the deliberations room stayed with him as he took his seat, which was about twenty yards from Gilbert. He couldn’t look at her, or the attorneys, or anyone. He felt as if his heart were going to stop as the foreperson handed in the verdicts.

  Gilbert, sitting nervously, moving around in her chair, hung her head and began to sob as the packed courtroom learned of her fate for the first time.

  On three counts—involving Skwira, Cutting and Hudon—she was found guilty of first-degree murder. On one count—Jagodowski’s death—she was found guilty of second-degree murder. In the deaths of Angelo Vella and Thomas Callahan, Gilbert was found guilty of attempted murder.

  But the jury acquitted her of the death of Francis Marier.

  “At that point,” one juror later recalled, “it didn’t matter. A conviction on the Francis Marier count wouldn’t have added anything to her sentence. We had doubts that she did it, so we chose to ac
quit.”

  The only thing left now for Kristen Gilbert was to learn whether she was going to die for her crimes. The jury would sit, once again, and hear testimony as the government argued why she should die and Gilbert’s defense team argued why she should live. Emotions would run high. Rumor around the court was that Glenn Gilbert was going to testify that in 1995 his then-wife had tried to poison him. In addition, the jury would finally hear about the false bomb threat Gilbert had been convicted of back in 1998, along with her extensive history of violence toward the men in her life.

  For US attorneys Ariane Vuono and Bill Welch, their day had come. They could present to the jury, finally, a complete portrait of Kristen Gilbert.

  Thursday, March 15, at a hearing to set the ground rules for the sentencing, Bill Welch informed Judge Ponsor that the government, on the one hand, wanted to call Glenn Gilbert to testify during the sentencing phase. On the other, it was having second thoughts because it placed Glenn and his family “in an extremely difficult position.”

  Sensing that Glenn was going to testify against her, Gilbert refused to show up in court on Friday, and signed a waiver allowing her attorneys to handle her affairs. Ponsor, however, wouldn’t hear of it. He demanded that she be there, if for nothing else, to avoid a mistrial.

  By Monday, March 19, Welch and Vuono decided to withdraw Glenn from their witness list after giving the matter some prudent thought. Welch and Vuono later said they could have made Glenn testify, but Welch explained that Glenn was totally against being part of putting the mother of his children to death.

  The decision had little to do with the job Bill Welch had been sworn to do as a public servant, and it wouldn’t change the tongue-lashing he was about to unleash on Gilbert.

  During his opening statement, Welch said the killings were “morally repugnant and deserve death.” They were “so dark, so unfathomable,” Welch argued, that “the circumstances of these murders show that no humanity exists behind the mask. Behind that face, it is dark, it is empty. It is evil!”

  Harry Miles asked jurors not to use their “God-like” powers. “Kristen Gilbert is in your hands, and I can only ask that they be merciful.”

  Miles then wanted the jury to understand that his client never intended to kill anyone. For the first time, Gilbert’s defense team actually admitted that she had perhaps done something wrong.

  “Her aim,” Miles said sincerely, “was to cause medical emergencies so she could be a hero.”

  By Wednesday, March 21, the courtroom was filled with relatives of the victims, Gilbert’s parents, a few of her relatives, and a throng of reporters and spectators.

  Using family photographs displayed over the monitors in the courtroom, Welch and Vuono had relatives of the victims on the stand explain how their losses had affected their daily lives.

  Ed Skwira’s daughter, Marsha Yarrows, said, “There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about him. It’s a big loss. You don’t have him for advice. You don’t have him there for holidays.”

  Kenny Cutting’s father said, “He made me a better man.”

  Then it was Nancy Cutting’s turn. Then Julia Hudon. One after the other, family members of the victims brought tears to the eyes of some of the jurors as they explained the true nature of their losses.

  “I felt a connection there between the family members and the person they had lost,” one juror later recalled. “When [Kristen Gilbert’s] father was on the stand, I felt like he was reading from a checklist he had written beforehand. There was no emotion.”

  Richard Strickland finally got his chance to explain how deeply the loss of his daughter would be felt if she were to be killed by lethal injection. With Harry Miles at the podium, a photo of Gilbert as a newborn appeared on screens throughout the room as Strickland explained how he had not been there when Gilbert was born.

  Next, as Gilbert began to cry, Strickland began on page one and described where Gilbert had grown up, her accomplishments in high school, and how gifted a child she was.

  When Miles asked him how his daughter’s death might affect the family, Strickland said, “I only have two daughters.... How else can one describe the love of a daughter?”

  Then he explained how his wife might not be able to survive Gilbert’s execution. He shocked the room by saying that Gilbert’s mother had been in Springfield for the past five weeks, but couldn’t bring herself to sit in the courtroom. He said she was depressed and suffered from high blood pressure and glaucoma.

  “She couldn’t deal with it emotionally.”

  “All her father did,” Scott Stetz later said, “was talk about himself. It was all about him and his wife. His spiel had nothing to do with his daughter. Anyone sitting in that room could have seen that!”

  Glenn Gilbert finally spoke on Friday, March 23, through Cynthia Monahon, the director of an outpatient clinic where Gilbert’s two children were being treated.

  Not surprising anyone, Glenn was speaking on behalf of his former wife, hoping the jury would spare her life for the sake of the kids.

  “He believes the execution of Kristen Gilbert,” Monahon read, “will have a . . . profoundly detrimental impact on his children and their well-being.” Glenn Gilbert believes, she added, that it is “critically important for his two sons to have their mother as they grow older.”

  Welch and Vuono chose not to cross-examine Monahan.

  The jury room during the death penalty phase was a somber, gloom-filled atmosphere of bewilderment and concern. Jurors decided there would be no discussion. They would take a vote, and that would be it. Gilbert’s fate would be decided.

  “The fact that she was a good mother, a good nurse, and did all these things for the needy was great,” Scott Stetz later recalled. “But it didn’t give her a license to kill!”

  Stetz was adamant. He wanted to see Gilbert die.

  At noon, on Monday, March 26, after the jury failed to reach a unanimous decision, by a vote of eight to four, Gilbert’s life had been spared. When Judge Ponsor read the jury’s decision, Gilbert and her attorneys wept.

  But it still wasn’t over.

  Now it was up to Judge Michael Ponsor to decide on Gilbert’s punishment.

  After her lawyers indicated that she had nothing to say, Ponsor, his voice quiet and unyielding, sentenced Gilbert to four consecutive life terms.

  “This should be the beginning of a better day for the relatives of her victims. . . .” Ponsor said, looking out into the galley of spectators, reporters, and anyone else at the courthouse who could find an open space to sit and listen.

  In May 2001, Kristen Heather Strickland Gilbert was transferred from a federal prison for women in Framingham, Massachusetts, to a federal prison for women in Carswell, Texas, where she has remained ever since.

  By June, the Court had tallied the cost of Gilbert’s defense: approximately one million, eight hundred thousand dollars, with Harry Miles receiving the bulk of it—six hundred and fifty-four thousand, nine hundred and eighty-nine dollars.

  Then the government’s cost of prosecuting the case was released: about seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, merely half of what the defense had amassed in expenses.

  What was the cost of one ampoule of 1:1000 strength epinephrine, which was enough to kill either Ed Skwira, Henry Hudon, Kenny Cutting or Stanley Jagodowski?

  Twenty-two cents.

  EPILOGUE

  As of the date of this writing, Kristen Gilbert has filed “a notice of appeal.” A legal brief, spelling out her reasons why the convictions should be overturned, was due in February 2003, but there has been no ruling on the appeal or brief.

  I made several attempts to contact Gilbert and her former lawyers, David Hoose and Harry Miles. They never returned my phone calls or letters. A letter was sent to Charles Rankin, a lawyer from Boston who is now handling Gilbert’s affairs, shortly before this book went to press, offering him an opportunity to make a statement, but I have not heard back from him.

  Accord
ing to Springfield’s Union-News, Carole Osman and Ann French continue to cultivate a close relationship with Gilbert, corresponding via telephone and mail. Gilbert has said through Osman and French that she misses her children and spends a lot of her “free” time reading novels Osman sends her. An “avid sewer,” Ann French told the Union-News, Gilbert has been making quilts for premature babies. Doing this, French claims, helps Gilbert forget about “being branded a serial killer.”

  Ann French went on to say that Gilbert is “very embarrassed by the whole situation”; and she can’t stand the fact that some people have compared her to the likes of Timothy McVeigh and Manual Noriega.

  Glenn Gilbert, who still resides in Florence, refuses any contact with the media.

  James Perrault, along with several of Gilbert’s former coworkers, still works at the Leeds VAMC. Fulfilling a life-long dream, Perrault is now a part-time cop for the town of Hatfield, Massachusetts.

  John Wall, Renee Walsh, Kathy Rix, Dr. Michael Baden, Special Agent Steve Plante, Detective Kevin Murphy, Supervising US Attorney Kevin O’Regan, Dr. Thomas Rocco, Dr. Thomas Graboys, US attorneys Bill Welch and Ariane Vuono, along with many more, were honored by the VA with the Eagle Award in June 2001 for their efforts in bringing Gilbert to justice.

  SA Plante, Detective Murphy, Ariane Vuono and Bill Welch later received the Director’s Award, for their “outstanding contributions in law enforcement,” from the Attorney General’s Office in Washington, DC.