Fiendish Killers

by Anne Williams

  For the next three years Marie lived a manufactured existence under an assumed name. She took the name Robbi Martin and married John Harmon in New Hampshire. She told him and her co-workers that she was dying from a rare disease. Her lies were so involved that she even left town for treatment at one point. While she was away she started living the life of Robbi’s twin sister, Teri. She got work as Teri and told her co-workers that her sister Robbi was very ill. It did not come as a surprise to her boss or co-workers when she told them that Robbi had died. Teri (Marie) called Robbi’s husband to tell him of Robbi’s death and that she would be coming to New Hampshire.

  It was a downhill road for Marie from there. Her lies didn’t add up and even though she managed to find work as Teri, she hadn’t anticipated that people around her would start to doubt her stories. The police arrested her at her place of work, following information from a work colleague, and became suspicious about a series of discrepancies in her story. She told them she was really Audrey Marie Hilley, and they suddenly became aware that they had the woman who was wanted for murder.

  The trial started, and it didn’t take long to determine that Marie had killed her husband and attempted to kill her own daughter Carol. The defence tried to claim that Carol could have been trying to poison herself and discredit her mother in a number of ways. This did not help Marie, however, as the jury did not believe her story, and she was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of her husband, and an additional twenty years for the attempted murder of her daughter. She was sent to the Wetumpka Women’s Prison in Alabama. Just three years later she was granted permission to leave the prison for a day and she disappeared.

  Audrey Marie Hilley eventually died following a gruelling manhunt that left her very weak. She had gone to a friend’s house and collapsed on the doorstep. She died in hospital on February 28, 1987, from a heart attack. There is much controversy surrounding the life and exploits of this black widow, and she continues to attract interest from all kinds of people even after her death. One thing is for certain however, Marie Hilley was a mistress of disguise.

  Kristen Gilbert

  Kristen Gilbert is a woman with deep-rooted psychological issues which spread throughout her life like poison ivy. Once her problems surfaced they manifested themselves in a variety of ways, from stealing to lying and finally to murder.

  Kristen Strickland was born on November 13, 1967, in Massachusetts, USA, to Richard and Claudia Strickland, and was the eldest of two sisters. Before Kristen entered High School she seemed to be like any other teenage girl and had the respect and admiration of her friends. She made friends and socialised easily. However, as she started to mature she became abusive and dishonest in all her relationships. After Kristen graduated from High School she attended medical school at Greenfield Community College in Massachusetts. While here her social problems worsened and ex-boyfriends described her as abusive and controlling in their relationships. If that wasn’t enough, Kristen took to petty theft, something which she denied when confronted about a stolen blouse that she had the gall to be wearing at the time. It was clear to all that knew her that Kristen had some serious issues.

  Kristen married Glen Gilbert whom she had met in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, and graduated from Greenfield College as a Registered Nurse in 1988. A short time later she began work at the Veterans Administration Medical Centre in Northampton, Massachusetts. While working in Ward C, Kristen got along well with her co-workers who described her as thoughtful and very sociable. Her work performance was rated as top notch according to management, and it seemed that Kristen had found her calling working at the hospital. Settling in with her new husband in their new home and a new job seemed like a dream come true, life couldn’t get any better than this!

  In 1990 Kristen and Glen had their first child.

  It was only after Kristen returned to work that the problems in Ward C started to occur. Since returning to work Kristen had transferred to the night shift which was 4.00 p.m. until midnight. Ward C, as if possessed by evil spirits, started experiencing an unusual number of deaths. Kristen was always on duty when these sudden deaths occurred and offered her expert medical attention. This kind of sudden death was occurring with patients throughout Ward C and even with patients who were not in the hospital for life-threatening conditions. The cause of death was determined for many of these deaths as cardiac arrest, but most of the patients didn’t have a previous risk of heart problems. Kristen’s co-workers dubbed her the Angel of Death but they remained silent and kept their suspicions to themselves for many years.

  In 1993, Kristen and Glen had their second child but their marriage was becoming strained. Kristen was enjoying a friendship with another man, James G. Perrault. He was a security guard at VA Medical Centre and was called whenever a patient required resuscitation. He worked during the same hours as Kristen and they became familiar, often going for drinks after work. It was also around this time that Glen Gilbert became very suspicious of Kristen. He told his friends he thought that his wife was trying to poison him. Shortly afterwards James told Kristen that they could not continue to see each other unless she left her husband. In December 1994, Kristen Gilbert decided that her relationship with James was more important than the one she had with her husband or the obligation she had to her children. She moved out of their home and moved into an apartment. Now that Kristen was free of family ties James was quite happy to escalate their relationship and they became more intimately involved. Meanwhile, the body count at the hospital continued to mount. Kristen’s co-workers began to talk about the sheer number of deaths that were occurring during her watch.

  When the nursing staff of Ward C started to investigate for themselves they made a startling discovery. Vials of the synthetic adrenaline heart medicine Epinephrine were missing from the supply closet. Epinephrine is a drug used under very controlled dosage to regulate the beating of the heart. If wrongly administered it can cause the heart to beat with an abnormal rhythm, even beat too fast to be effective and cause heart failure. On one occasion when a co-worker was experiencing breathing difficulties due to asthma, Kristen produced a vial of Epinephrine from her pocket and offered it as a bronchodilator. Other events of note included a time that Kristen, eager to meet up with her boyfriend James, asked her supervisor if the patient she had in Intensive Care died, would she be able to leave early. When the boss told her yes, the patient died in a matter of hours. In February 1995 after a patient suffering from AIDS collapsed under Kristen’s care, the medical staff decided to make their suspicions known. At this time Kristen had been working at the hospital for around seven years and 350 deaths had occurred during her watch.

  The police were brought in and they began to investigate Kristen Gilbert, her reputation and work practices. It did not take long to work out her motive and Kristen’s carefully maintained house of cards fell around her. The prosecution maintained that Kristen overdosed her patients with Epinephrine so that they would go into cardiac arrest and her lover James Perrault would be called. She did this so that she could impress him with her nursing abilities and to be near to him. As soon as Kristen was suspended from the hospital, the death rate in Ward C returned to normal. It was also during this time that Kristen’s relationship with James hit the rocks, and James decided to end their relationship by mid-1996. In response to his decision Kristen took an overdose and had to be admitted to hospital for psychiatric evaluation. During the time she was in care she called James, who was still working for the hospital, and confessed to the murders. James immediately contacted the police about her confession.

  ‘You know I did it. I did it. You wanted to know. I killed those guys,’ Kristen told James.

  Kristen landed herself in jail after she bought a voice changer and called the hospital with a bomb threat. Once traced and apprehended she was sentenced to fifteen months and it was during this time that investigators started exhuming many of the bodies of Kristen’s patients who had died under her care. By 1998 the investi
gators had enough evidence and charged Kristen with murder. It was a very lengthy trial in which US Attorney Welch II maintained that Kristen had killed to make it easier to spend time with her lover, James Perrault. Once James Perrault testified, David Hoose, Kristen’s defence attorney, claimed that there was not enough evidence to convict her. His efforts were in vain because on March 14, 2001, the jury returned their verdict – guilty. The malicious nurse was convicted on three counts of murder in the first degree, one count of murder in the second degree and the attempted murder of two more. Because her crimes were committed on federal property the death penalty was applicable but it was commuted in favour of a sentence to life in prison.

  Kristen Gilbert, at the age of thirty-three, was neutralised behind bars but her victims were not so fortunate. It is entirely possible that a good number of the 350 deaths that occurred in Ward C of the Veterans Administration Medical Centre between 1990 and 1995, were directly due to the ministrations and whims of this twisted nurse. Kristen Gilbert is now serving her life sentence with no possibility of release.

  Dorothea Puente

  Dorothea Puente is a woman whose life consisted of failed marriages, deceit, forgery and murder. Underneath a benevolent, grandmotherly guise was a woman who would rob from the defenceless and infirm and murder the innocent.

  Dorothea Helen Gray was born on January 9, 1929, in Redlands, California into a home that was already a ticking time bomb. Her childhood had barely started when her father died from consumption and less than two years later her mother died in an accident. After her parents’ death and before the age of ten, Dorothea had lived with multiple members of her family in and around southern California. Dorothea’s teenage years were turbulent ones as she began showing character traits that would remain with her for the rest of her ‘professional career’. In 1945, at the age of sixteen, she escaped her foster parents and fled to Washington State where she changed her name to ‘Sheri’. It was around this time that she met and fell in love with Fred McFaul. She told McFaul that she was thirty years old and they married soon after in Nevada. During their marriage Dorothea and Fred had two daughters. Shortly after the birth of their second daughter, Fred left Dorothea after he became aware of her habitual lying and the children went into care. Dorothea was again on the run.

  Dorothea got her first taste of prison when she was jailed for three years after stealing a series of government cheques. Her life of sudden relationships and marriages continued when she married sailor Axel Johansson. Because of the nature of Axel’s work he was hardly ever at home. This gave Dorothea ample opportunity to be unfaithful to him, an opportunity that she exercised frequently. Axel was often told of the strange men who came to their house while he was away on assignment. Despite their difficulties Dorothea and Axel remained married for fourteen years. Like so many marriages, the years were not happy ones and, as if set on a perpetual collision course with failure, Dorothea and Axel’s marriage finally crumbled.

  In 1968, after the split with Axel, Dorothea opened up a halfway home and soon began an affair with another man. Dorothea married twenty-one-year-old Robert Puente after they decided to go into business together in the half-way home. For multiple reasons, most prominently the fact that Robert was half Dorothea’s age, there was constant distress and this eventually led to total business failure in less than a year. The business was not the only casualty, however, as their marriage self-destructed around the same time. Puente’s disturbing behaviour continued when, although deeply in debt from her failed boarding home business, she moved into yet another halfway house and took the position of manager. Before long, she married one of the residents, fifty-two-year-old Pedro Montalvo. Pedro quickly realised his new wife was high maintenance and later complained about her extravagant spending habits. By 1978 Puente was back in court for trying to cash forged cheques. On this occasion the judge was more lenient and gave her five years of probation and ordered her to seek counselling.

  Dorothea Puente went back to work at her boarding house and a short time later a resident by the name of Ruth Monroe died of a drug overdose. Ruth was known to be a little mentally unstable and the coroner decided that her death was the result of suicide and did not pursue it. Puente was emboldened and continued to steal from the elderly after drugging them heavily. One man later described watching her through a drugged stupor as she pilfered his belongings while he lay paralysed. Around a month after Ruth’s death Puente was arrested for these crimes and was sentenced to five years in prison of which she would serve four.

  Upon her release Dorothea had no plans to discontinue her spree of murder, theft and deceit. While in prison she had corresponded with Everson Gillmouth, a seventy-seven-year-old who believed that Puente and he were in love. Everson wrote to his family telling them of his lover and that he and Puente were to be married. Within a short time Gillmouth made Puente a co-signer on his bank account. It was not long before Gillmouth had met the same fate as Ruth Monroe and was dumped at the side of the Sacramento River in a makeshift coffin. Gillmouth’s body would remain undiscovered for three months and unidentified for a further three years.

  Puente’s strange fascination with the elderly led her to continue breaking her rules of probation which stated that she was to have nothing to do with the elderly or handle any government cheques. When social services brought more of the elderly, infirm and substance abusers to Puente she accepted her latest victims with open arms. She never bothered to tell social services that it was against her parole and as many as nineteen people were placed under her care in 1987–88. Social services were more than happy with Puente as she was accepting many of the more difficult residents to house, such as the verbally and physically abusive. Unfortunately, Puente continued to take drugs and steal from her home’s occupants. Social services only stopped sending the needy to her after she was overheard and reported for being verbally abusive to a client.

  Investigators arrived at Puente’s boarding house in November 1988 looking for a previous occupant, Alvaro Montoya, who had been placed in the home by social services. After looking in the backyard, one of the detectives, John Caberra, stumbled on what appeared to be a tree stump. On further investigation it was revealed to be a human leg bone. When Caberra informed Puente she pretended to be totally shocked, but she knew exactly what had been uncovered in her back garden. The investigators returned the next day with heavy digging equipment, county officials and numerous coroners. They began to excavate the entire garden, including the area at the side of the house. Puente’s carefully buried bodies began to resurface all around her. In the following hours seven bodies were recovered from various places in the yard. During the excavation Puente asked the police if she could go to a local hotel to have a cup of coffee. Not only did the police allow her to leave but they escorted her through the crowd of spectators and press to freedom. Only hours later did investigators realise that Puente had not returned; little did they know she was already hundreds of miles away! The police entered the boarding house and found more evidence that pointed to Puente’s guilt. This included expensive clothes, perfume and a roster of how much money she was collecting from the boarders she had killed. Her profits were adding up to around $5,000 a month.

  Dorothea Puente, armed with some $3,000 and the need to escape and lay low, fled to Los Angeles without incident. It was not long before she was looking for another victim and found herself in a bar. Puente got talking to a man but aroused his suspicions when she asked about his personal finances – specifically how much he received in social security a month. Although it was not immediate, the man recognised Puente from the ‘Wanted’ bulletins on the news and he called the police. That night police surrounded the hotel where Puente was staying and arrested her with no difficulty. A few days later she was taken back to Sacramento to await trial. Puente pleaded innocent to the nine charges of murder for which she was a prime suspect. In court Puente played the role of the benevolent grandma by altering her hairstyle and dress. The prosecuto
r’s case was weakened as there were no witnesses to these crimes but the State was given a second wind when laboratory tests revealed the presence of tranquillisers in all of the exhumed remains. As the evidence mounted against Puente the prosecution was only able to maintain beyond a reasonable doubt that she had definitely killed one of her victims. The other bodies were too heavily decayed to make an exact determination as to the cause of death. Former residents of Puente’s half-way house testified against her, speaking of how she would try to get them to take drugs while they resided in her home. The case began to close around Puente’s neck like a noose. Six years after the bodies were discovered in the yard, after a long investigation and a gruelling trial, the verdict for the murderous grandma was ready.

  On December 10, 1993, Dorothea Puente was found guilty of murder on three counts and the judge sentenced her to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole. She was sent to a women’s prison in central California at the age of sixty-four. She remains incarcerated to this day.

  Karla Faye Tucker

  After a childhood that was full of abuse and neglect, and her early years spent in a haze of drugs and immorality, it is not surprising that Karla Faye Tucker went off the rails. By the age of nine, marijuana had become Karla’s ‘friend’, someone she could turn to when life became unbearable. But soon her ‘friend’ was not enough and she embarked on a downward spiral, injecting herself with heroin. Consequently, at an age when most young girls were still playing with dolls, Karla went out with her older siblings and became part of their orgies.