Perfect Poison (20 page)

Shaped like an inverted L, the US Attorney's Office, located on the third floor of the Federal Building in downtown Springfield, is a stuffy office space tucked into the northeastern corner of the building. About the size of a gas station kiosk, the reception area of the office sports an American flag, a rather large picture of the attorney general and, next to that, a picture of the president of the United States.

On June 21, 1996, Assistant United States Attorney William Welch, after coming in from one of his semi-daily jogs around downtown, sat down to man the “duty” phone, or whistle-blower hotline that handles calls from citizens or law enforcement who want to report a crime, open an investigation, or need assistance in an investigation. When Bill, as everyone in the office called him, picked up the phone at around two
P.M.
, SA Jeff Leonard, who wasn't working with SA Plante on the Gilbert case, but had been briefed about it by Plante, was on the other end of the line.

“I'm with the VA-IGO in Bedford. How are you, Mr. Welch?”

“Fine. What's up?”

“We have an agent in Northampton right now investigating some suspicious deaths up at one of our medical centers, and we believe we have a serial killer on our hands. We'd like to maybe open up a grand jury investigation.”

Bill Welch, himself a Northampton resident, was stunned. It was, up until that point, a casual Friday afternoon. Watching the clock tick down all day, Welch sometimes cut out early and had a few beers with his friends at a local bar. US attorneys worked exhausting hours. There were many times when fifteen-hour days turned into ten-hour nights and sleep came in the form of a nap in the conference room.

“Can you come in—or have your agent on scene come in—today?” Welch asked.

“Sure.”

A graduate of Princeton University and Northwestern University Law School—where Welch, at six-two, two hundred and twenty pounds, felt more comfortable on the football field than he did stuffed inside a classroom—he joined the Springfield US Attorney's Office early in 1995. He was sworn in as US attorney in 1991 and worked in Reno, Nevada. For the most part, he was assigned criminal tax section cases, but soon got involved with major drug cases. In one case, Welch tried several defendants who had a major methamphetamine and cocaine distribution center in northern Nevada. The case, which garnered national attention, took thirteen months to try.

Two of the defendants got mandatory life sentences.

Law was injected into attorney Welch's blood, from as far back as he can remember, by his father, the honorable Massachusetts Superior Court Judge William H. Welch.

 

 

When SAs Leonard and Plante showed up at the US Attorney's Office that Friday, they brought with them memos from Plante's interviews with Kathy Rix, John Wall and Renee Walsh.

Welch was overwhelmed by the allegations. Trying drug, murder-for-hire, fraud, extortion and mob cases was one thing, but going after a nurse for the deaths of her patients was something Welch had never imagined. It didn't seem possible. Welch lived in Northampton. He had driven by the VAMC and gone mountain biking in the hills just beyond it ever since moving into town. To think that a nurse had killed multiple patients was incredible. Yet, he told himself after reading the notes from the interviews, there had to be something to it, seeing that the three nurses had more than five decades of experience among them, which alone gave the substance of their allegations credibility.

“What is your biggest concern right now?” Welch wanted to know.

“Well,” Plante said, “it's the boyfriend, James Perrault. He's a cop up there. He hasn't been all that cooperative. . . .”

The first thing Bill Welch did, after deciding they might have a case, was open up a grand jury investigation.

The next thing he did was issue a subpoena for James Perrault.

Days later, Plante and Welch met again.

“We have to review each death and come up with, as morbid as it sounds, a Top Ten list of suspicious deaths,” Welch advised.

“Dr. Mike Baden,” Plante said, “has been doing that for the past few days. He's on the scene now, going through the medical records.”

Along with renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Baden, Welch made a few calls and enlisted the help of Dr. Mark Nelson, a VA doctor who had reviewed records in a couple dozen deaths that occurred between March and August 1992 at the Harry S. Truman Memorial Veterans Hospital in Missouri.

 

 

Dr. Michael Baden, a product of the 1930s Bronx, had a career as a forensic pathologist spanning some four decades. By the time he was called in to study the medical records in the Gilbert case, working on VA poisoning cases had become a forte of his. Resident Agent Bruce Sackman, the top dog himself, in charge of IG offices in Boston, New York and New Jersey, had taken an aggressive position in the Dr. Michael Swango murder case and the Missouri VA hospital murders.

In March, when the Gilbert case was put in front of Sackman, he took the same stance, knowing exactly whom to call.

“We have this funny case up in the Northampton, Massachusetts, VA hospital,” Sackman told Baden during that first phone call. “We think one of the nurses may have been doing harm to the patients. We need you to take a look.”

Baden's expertise had been instrumental in helping to get the US Attorney's Office in New York to open a case against Dr. Michael Swango, the debonair, blond-haired, blue-eyed doctor who was ultimately convicted of murdering three patients in a New York VA hospital and one woman while he was an intern at Ohio State University Hospital.

It was because of Bruce Sackman, Baden recalled, that Swango was brought to justice. The former US attorney in New York, who had refused the case several times before she took another job in the private sector, had for years failed to see what Sackman had. But as soon as she left her post, the US attorney who took her place jumped right on the case and pursued it.

“As much as everybody wanted that case to go away,” Baden recalled, “the IGO—Bruce Sackman in particular—didn't. If it weren't for Bruce's persistence . . . nothing would have happened to Swango.”

In his book
Dead Reckoning: The New Science of Catching Killers,
cowritten with Marion Roach, Baden labeled himself an atheist.

“It's hard for me to believe in a God who would not only tolerate Hitler but also allow people to do the horrible things they do to one another,” he wrote.

When he enters the “autopsy suite” to look into a person's life and death, Baden wrote, he has to leave God at the door and rely on science. It's the only way to get through it all.

Conducting more than thirty thousand autopsies throughout his career, working part of his career in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York City, Baden has no doubt seen everything imaginable.

Sporting a partially receding swath of wiry gray hair, at seventy, Baden was reminded daily of how cruel the human race can be to one another—an issue that started for him shortly after he was born, when fourteen of his mother's siblings were murdered in Auschwitz.

Baden's credentials spoke for themselves. He had been involved in O.J. Simpson's defense; the autopsy of actor John Belushi; the re-autopsy of Medgar Evers; the autopsy of New York Yankee Billy Martin; the autopsies of Mary Beth Tinning's nine kids; the re-examination of the Lindbergh kidnapping and murder; and the investigation by the Congressional Select Committee on Assassinations into the deaths of JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Married, with three grown children, he lived in New York City, where he hosted a show on cable's Home Box Office called
Autopsy
.

Bruce Sackman knew he was calling in the best when he got Baden involved in the Gilbert case. If the truth was there, Baden would find it.

 

 

Within a few days after arriving at the VAMC and reviewing one tedious medical file after the next, Baden realized that several of the patients under suspicion had suffered unexpected
sudden
deaths. SA Plante had already narrowed the initial list of the three hundred and fifty deaths down to three dozen. A lot of the records in question, Baden noticed, were from patients who were either expected to be released from the VAMC in a matter of days, or who had been receiving treatment for conditions unrelated to their hearts.

His approach was three-pronged: First, he looked at the medical care of the patient. Second, what disease, if any, did that particular patient have? And, finally, most important, should that person have died
when
he died?

He quickly saw that many of the patients were scheduled to leave the VAMC within days of their death, and, to make matters worse, they were getting better.

The one way to rule out foul play, Baden suggested, was to exhume the bodies and have a look.

Bearing a strong resemblance to actor Robert Loggia, with his sun-drenched skin and receding hairline, Massachusetts State Police Detective Kevin Murphy, at six-two, two hundred and ten pounds, fit perfectly into the tough-guy cop mold created by many television shows. In his late forties, Murphy was tall and unassuming, street-smart, unruly and gruff. Throughout his career with the state police, he had seen just about everything: dead babies left in Dumpsters; bloated and unidentifiable bodies strewn about the banks of the Connecticut River; junkies dead from overdoses left to rot in rundown warehouses and crack dens; kids with their heads blown off during drive-bys; hangings; burned bodies; and bodies stabbed, shot and mutilated.

The only crime Detective Murphy hadn't come across in his twenty-four years on the job was serial murder.

On paper, SA Plante and Detective Murphy were a peculiar match. One was a street cop who had been somewhat soured by the years on the job. The other was full of fire, even though he had chased paper cases for his entire career. Murphy, rough around the edges, drank beer and smoked. Plante, clean-cut, went to the gym every morning before work. Murphy was the first to say he didn't take any “bullshit” from sources who held back on him. Plante took it all, he admitted, providing it moved his case along.

At an early age, Murphy learned how disappointing life could be when one of his four brothers developed Hodgkin's disease and struggled with the illness for four years before losing the battle in July 1961. Murphy's uncle, NYPD cop James Murphy, was once featured in a magazine article as “The Toughest Cop in New York.”

Nailing speeders on the Interstate and chasing down drunk drivers wasn't Murphy's bag. But beginning on January 10, 1972, he did it, without regret, for the first nine years of his career. After that, he moved on to Homicide and Death Investigation. In the late eighties, he worked with the FBI on a joint terrorist task force that eventually captured several fugitives responsible for the murder of Phil Lamonica, a New Jersey State Trooper.

“Being involved in that task force,” Murphy recalled, “solidified my resolve in the benefits of being a team player. No matter how hard you work or how smart you think you are, that job taught me that you always need other people. . . .”

During another murder case he pursued for nearly three years, the perp ended up committing suicide, addressing his suicide note to Murphy—who was about to arrest him any day.

 

 

In late June, Murphy sat with his notebook in the Northampton DA's office listening intently to SA Plante as he presented the case he had been developing against Gilbert. Sitting beside Murphy were US attorneys Bill Welch and Kevin O'Regan, DA Elizabeth Schiebel and her two top assistants, Michael Goggins and David Angier.

The purpose of the meeting was to discuss a possible collaboration between local and federal law enforcement. SA Plante needed help. The case against Gilbert was overwhelming him. Juggling all the interviews he still had to conduct, the medical files that still needed reviewing, and the footwork that was undoubtedly ahead was more than one man could handle.

As it was, Plante was away from his family five days a week, commuting home only on the weekends. This was the first time in his career he had ever done that for such an extended period of time. In addition, he was working around the clock, also something he had never done before. Every day seemed to turn up new leads, new accusations, and new possibilities.

When Plante finished his spiel in the main conference room, Murphy walked over, introduced himself, and invited the well-dressed special agent upstairs for a cup of coffee.

“Let's forget about all this administrative rhetoric,” Murphy said as they made their way. “This can-you-help-our-guy-and-we'll-help-your-guy
bull
shit! Do you
have
a case or not? I want to know how you feel about it.”

Murphy was referring to the promises the feds and locals had made to each other. They had discussed deputizing a DA from the state as a special US attorney. Both agencies would share credit equally. They would agree to keep it all hush-hush for the time being . . . and all that other political mumbo-jumbo Murphy had no interest in. When it came down to brass tacks, Murphy was a cop. He knew the area. He had developed sources through the years. He could help.

Cruising through downtown Northampton now, Murphy looked over at Plante and told him he would help.

“But the administrative nuances of all this we don't care about, right?”

Plante nodded.

“We gotta get the bad guy, Stevie,” Murphy said. “If she's innocent, we'll prove it! If she's not, we'll find out.”

The first thing SA Plante did was introduce Murphy to everyone up on the hill. By all rights, no one who worked at the VAMC had to answer to local law enforcement because it was a federal institution. This also proved to be a very serious situation for Gilbert. If the case made it to court, since the crimes had been committed on federal property, Gilbert could face the death penalty.

Ironically, if convicted, she would die by lethal injection.

Plante made it clear to everyone, including Perrault and his boss, that when Murphy came up on the hill to get something or ask questions, he had better be taken seriously, or Plante would step in and, wielding his authority as a government agent, make damn sure he was.

Plante and Murphy needed some type of case management plan. Documents were piling up by the boxful. Without any type of order, mistakes could be made, critical information possibly overlooked, and they ran the risk of doing things twice.

“What sort of paperwork do you want us to generate?” Murphy asked Bill Welch one afternoon.

A cop who knew the legal ropes fairly well, Murphy also knew that within the state system, everything he wrote down was discoverable. Defense attorneys would sooner or later get hold of it, and a harmless note to himself could be turned into some sort of startling piece of defense evidence. Also, if Plante wrote up a report about a certain incident and, for some reason, Murphy had written one without telling him, they had to be sure the reports jibed.

“Make your own personal notes,” Welch advised. “But I don't want you writing anything down as far as a ‘report' is concerned. Steve has written plenty of them. He knows the federal system. Let him handle it.”

 

 

Glenn Gilbert was living under a pretty well-laid out routine by the time July 4, 1996, came around. He went to work, dropped off the kids at his estranged wife's apartment along the way, got out of work, picked up the children, settled in at home, and just tried to forget about what had happened between him and his wife. Couples split up, marriages dissolved.

Kristen, on the other hand, was beginning to crack under the pressure of the investigation. Now, with Perrault scheduled to testify in front of the grand jury in about a week, and the evidence against her mounting daily, she could feel a certain shift in Perrault's demeanor.

He was thinking things over. Starting to talk less. Gilbert didn't like that.

Perrault wanted to be a bonafide cop one day. What he did the next couple of months would, undoubtedly, have an effect on his future in law enforcement. He had to be careful.

Plante had done a mind-numbing study of the medical records to put some sort of statistical spin on everything. If nothing else, at least he could present in lay terms what he had to Perrault and Glenn, and maybe get them to finally open their eyes.

What Plante found turned out to be devastating.

Between February 17, 1996—the day Gilbert went out on medical leave—and the first week of July, there had been only
four
deaths and
two
medical emergencies on Ward C. Comparatively speaking, from October 1995 to February 17, 1996, there had been
twenty-three
deaths and nearly
thirty
medical emergencies. Plante's study went as far back as 1989, when Gilbert was working several different shifts. That year, the deaths for each of the three shifts were “randomly distributed among each shift and averaged between ten to fifteen deaths per shift per year.” Later in 1989, and the early part of 1990, however, when Gilbert began working solely the midnight-to-eight
A.M.
shift, the numbers during the day and evening shifts “remained essentially constant” while the midnight-shift numbers doubled. Throughout the next five years whatever shift Gilbert worked, the numbers followed her, while they stayed virtually the same on the shifts she hadn't worked. Dr. Stephen Gehlbach, Dean of the University of Massachusetts School of Public Health, ran the numbers for Plante and calculated that the probability of Gilbert's “being on duty for such a large number of patient deaths per shift,” given the fact that she had sometimes worked part-time, was “. . . a chance occurrence [of] 1:100,000,000.” Regarding all the codes she had been on duty for, Dr. Gehlbach came up with the exact same numbers: one in a hundred million.

This wasn't smoking-gun evidence. But the probability that she didn't have something to do with the deaths and codes was, at least according to Dr. Gehlbach, astronomically small.

Now all Plante and Murphy had to do was get Glenn to believe it.

Cops know, however, that denial can put blinders on a spouse. They sometimes see only what they want to. What husband wanted to believe his wife was a serial killer? With Glenn being the Gomer Pyle type, innocent and naïve, still rapt under Kristen's spell, they knew the chances of his coming around were slim, but they had to keep trying.

“Let
me
go talk to him,” Plante said to Murphy.

“That might be better,” Murphy said, and smiled.

Murphy could be somewhat pushy and impatient. Yet Plante had developed patience and poise as a sixth and seventh sense, and the nurses he was interviewing were becoming quite comfortable with him. With his heavy Boston accent—
pock the cah near the bah
—his personable, New England charm oozed from his pores.

Maybe Glenn would finally see it, too.

 

 

Back in early May, before Murphy was involved, Plante had made a house call to Glenn, coming up on him as he worked in the yard one day. Plante filled him in on what he could without giving away too much.

Glenn listened, but didn't offer anything.

“If you want to talk, Glenn,” Plante said, handing him his card, “give me call.”

Immediately after he left, Kristen called, as if she had been casing the place.

“Why didn't you just slam the door in his face?” she asked.

“I didn't say anything, Kris! He did all the talking.”

 

 

After discussing it a bit more, Plante and Murphy both agreed that they needed to get anything they could from Glenn: a lead, a name, something she had done.

Anything.

But when Plante showed up again shortly after the July Fourth holiday, Glenn still didn't want to talk about anything.

“Can't help you. Sorry.”

 

 

Since he was feeling the heat from both sides, it was time for James Perrault to make a decision. Gilbert was pestering him almost daily, asking him to find out what he could and report it back to her. On occasion, she would even ask if anyone had been talking about “epinephrine.” Perrault was becoming more reluctant to do anything anymore, especially since he had been subpoenaed to testify in front of the grand jury on July 16, just a few weeks away. In fact, he was even thinking of breaking off the relationship. Things weren't making sense. He needed some space to think things through.

One day, while they were just hanging around Gilbert's apartment, Perrault saw a “yellow kit” lying on the coffee table and asked Gilbert what it was. It had been the second time he had seen the thing.

“I'm allergic to bee stings,” she said. “It's a bee-sting kit.”

“Is that epinephrine?” Perrault asked, pointing to a brown ampoule in the pouch.

“Oh, yes. That. I need it for my allergy to the bees.”

A few days later, Perrault contacted SA Plante and told him what he had seen.

Armed with that information, Plante and Murphy began to examine Gilbert's medical history. Back on June 16, they found out, she had been admitted to Cooley Dickinson Hospital to get some work done on her shoulder. When Murphy and Plante obtained those medical records and matched them up against her medical records throughout the years and her pre-employment medical examination, nowhere did Gilbert indicate she was allergic to bee stings. To the contrary, she made it a point to note that she was allergic only to penicillin. When they interviewed Melodie Turner, who had been taken out of her supervisory post and reassigned, as one person later recalled, “to a job that was akin to watching paint dry,” Turner said she was “completely unaware of Gilbert's allergic reaction to bee stings.”

Another day, another path to explore.