Perfect Poison (3 page)

Stanley Jagodowski's daughter, Susan Lessard, received a phone call from the VAMC around 9:30 that same night.

“Your father's heart stopped,” the nurse said. “Come to the hospital right away.”

Lessard lived with her husband and two kids in nearby Chicopee, Massachusetts, about a twenty-minute drive from the VAMC.

Stunned by the news, Lessard and her husband stopped by her mother Claire's house to pick her up, and arrived at the VAMC at 10:30.

During the spring of 1995, Jagodowski had complained to Lessard about the pain in his legs just about every day. He had even lost his appetite, he'd complain, because the pain had become so severe.

But ever since the amputation in July, Lessard noticed, her father had been feeling much better.

“It was written on his face,” she later recalled. “He looked one hundred percent better. He was more relaxed.”

Lessard visited her father about five times a week while he was at the VAMC. In the middle of August, because he was doing so well, she decided to take a week's vacation with her family. She felt comfortable about leaving, she said later, because her father seemed to be in great spirits.

“I would not have gone on vacation unless he was improving.”

On Friday, August 19, Lessard, her husband and two kids returned home to find that things hadn't really changed much. She checked with her mother and was told that her father's condition, if anything, had improved since she'd left.

Lessard was relieved.

But when she showed up at the VAMC three days later and first laid eyes on her unconscious father, she fell apart.

He looks so helpless,
Lessard thought as she pulled up a chair next to his bed. With faint wheezing sounds coming from his mouth, she wanted to “pull him out of the state he was in” but realized it was impossible.

RN John Wall, a clean-cut, well-liked nurse who was often in charge of the ward, had admitted Jagodowski to the ICU at 9:00. Wall intubated him, placing a tube down his throat and into his lungs so he could breathe.

For the next few moments, Lessard sat with her father and held his hand while the machines around them buzzed and beeped. A ventilator to her right methodically kept her father alive as though it were a metronome counting down what little time he had left.

Every once in a while, Lessard would burrow up next to his ear and whisper, “Daddy, please squeeze my hand.”

Jagodowski would, clamping down gently.

“See,” Lessard would say to the doctor in the room, “he's not unconscious. He knows I'm here.”

As the night progressed, RN Wall recommended that Lessard receive a sedative because she was so distraught over what had happened.

She refused.

For about forty-five minutes, she sat by her father's side hoping he would, through some miracle, come around.

But nothing happened.

Shortly before Lessard and her family had arrived to the ICU, RN Kristen Gilbert had come in and relieved Wall for a few moments. While Gilbert was there, she made a mandatory “progress report” of Jagodowski's code and his current condition.

Signed at 9:30, after briefly describing the code, Gilbert wrote:

Though no one caught it at the time, not one other nurse or doctor who had treated Stanley Jagodowski had made similar observations.

For some reason, RN Gilbert falsified the report.

 

 

Feeling a bit drained after the visit, Lessard prepared to leave the hospital. She stopped in Admissions downstairs and told the nurse she was feeling “light-headed” and “very warm”—and while explaining her condition, she fell back and passed out.

When she awoke several minutes later, Lessard found herself in an Admissions bed . . .
being treated with a sedative.
Her father, she was told, had coded again while she had been out.

“It didn't look so good, Ms. Lessard,” one of the nurses said.

Shortly after midnight, for the second time since Lessard had been admitted, Claire Jagodowski walked down to Admissions to give Lessard a status report.

After coding for a third time at 11:38, Stanley Jagodowski died. There was a priest up there now, Claire explained through tears.

It was all over.

In 1978, Renee Walsh graduated from East Tennessee State, married a local serviceman, and moved to Germany, where she began working at the Frankfort Army Regional Medical Center as a staff nurse. When Walsh came back to the States two years later, she got a job at the Cape Fear Valley Medical Center's ER and trauma center, in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Eight years after that, she took a job at the local VA hospital.

In November 1990, Walsh's husband at the time was offered a job in Northampton, and she subsequently took a job at the Leeds VAMC.

By 1995, Walsh was a permanent daytime staff nurse on Ward C.

When the short nurse with black hair and an unmistakable Southern accent showed up for work on August 22, 1995 and heard that Stanley Jagodowski had died, she was curious about what had happened. Jagodowski had been sick—there was no denying that. But Walsh never expected him to just drop dead one night.

When Gilbert came into work later on that day, Walsh asked her about Jagodowski's code.

Gilbert and Walsh had become good friends through the years. Even though they no longer worked the same shift, they still socialized outside of work. Gilbert and her husband of six years, Glenn, owned a boat. They would often take Walsh and her young son out on the Connecticut River and go tubing.

“The Jagodowski code was really a sight, Renee,” Gilbert said, rolling her eyes. “You should have been there.”

“What do you mean?”

Gilbert smiled.

“Well, Claire Jagodowski began to have chest pains herself right in the ICU. So someone took her downstairs to get checked out. While she was down there, I got a call to go down because there really wasn't a real nurse around.”

“She's okay, though, right?”

“We did an EKG . . . she's fine.”

Gilbert began to laugh a bit louder.

“I wish you would tell me what's so darn funny, Kristen.”

“Well, that's just it. While I was down there, Susan Lessard—you know, Jagodowski's daughter—she fainted! It was fucking hysterical. Here you have Claire Jagodowski nursing chest pains and the daughter is lying on the floor, completely out cold. . . .”

“What?”

“Claire was just standing over Susan saying, ‘Get up! Get up! You have to go see your father upstairs! You'll never forgive yourself if you don't see him again.' ”

Walsh was taken aback. She could clearly see that Gilbert was getting a charge out of telling the story.

Later, when Walsh got home and thought about it, she questioned how a nurse—of all people—could find humor in the death of one of her patients and the family's reaction to it.

 

 

On November 15, 1967, the Red Cross sent U.S. Coast Guard serviceman Richard Strickland, who was stationed on an island one thousand miles off the coast of Hawaii, a telegram.
It's a girl. Mother and baby are doing fine,
the terse note read. Strickland's first child, Kristen, the note went on to say, had been born two days before.

A few weeks later, a photograph arrived. There she was, little Kristen Heather Strickland, with her perfect oval face perched underneath a modest shock of dark brown hair, in the arms of her charming mother, the former Claudia Morgan. Six months after Kristen was born, Richard got word that he was going home to Fall River, a tiny mill town on the southern coast of Massachusetts where he and Claudia had grown up. In May 1968, Claudia and baby Kristen, along with Richard's mother and father, welcomed him at Boston's Logan International Airport.

Just before Kristen turned three, the Stricklands enrolled her in the Christian Day School, a rather strict day-care center just outside of Fall River. Claudia was working as a substitute teacher then, and Richard was off pursuing a career as an electronics engineer.

After seven uneventful years, things abruptly changed for little Kristen. Seemingly overnight, she would now play second fiddle to her much younger sibling, Tara Morgan, who was born in 1974.

Kristen, perhaps now feeling the distance between her and her parents, began spending more time with her grandmother, Isabella Morgan, who lived down the street. Morgan and her husband, Claude, a thirty-year veteran of the Fall River Police Department, owned a small beach house in Little Compton, Rhode Island. Claude hated the water and disliked the beach. He bought the place for the kids. Because Tara was so little, Morgan would take Kristen to the beach every weekend—where she soon fell in love with the sand and surf.

 

 

Fall River is perhaps best known for being the birthplace of the world's most famous murderess, Lizzie Borden, who, despite continuing speculation of her guilt, was acquitted of butchering her parents with an axe in 1892.

For decades, children have played hopscotch and jumped rope to a schoolyard rhyme that has become synonymous with Borden's presumed guilt:

As Kristen Strickland made her way through junior high, she began to embrace the notoriety of being born in the same town as Lizzie Borden. Whenever the opportunity presented itself, she'd brag to friends—and, later, her coworkers at the VAMC—joyfully claiming she was related to Borden.

“Imagine that—me being related to Lizzie Borden,” she'd say with a sparkle in her eyes.

There is no evidence, however, of any blood relationship between the Stricklands, Morgans and Bordens. It was, like a lot of things in Kristen's youth, one more fabrication to add to a growing list. Kristen Strickland, the cute kid who used to bake fudge and sew quilts with her grandmother, was becoming a pathological liar.

In the early eighties, the Stricklands packed up their kids and moved to Groton, Massachusetts, a quaint little Hallmark-like New England town of about nine thousand, located just twenty miles south of the New Hampshire border.

They lived in an unassuming split-to-back ranch on the busy main thoroughfare of Boston Road. Although the Stricklands once took a trip to Disney World and frequently took the kids on weekend trips to New Hampshire and Vermont, it became, for Kristen and her younger sister, an “unaffectionate” household, as if Claudia and Richard were now robots, just going through the motions of parenting. They became strict and ran a regimented, disciplined household. Oddly, friends said, God and religion had no place in the Strickland home.

They were admitted atheists.

Kristen, as she grew into a young woman of fifteen, rebelled against her parents and spent a lot of time away from the home.

Richard, speaking of Kristen's formative years, later said she had, since childhood, lied just about everything. She “never had good relationships with women peers and tended to get into difficulties when she had friendships with men.” One time, she even went so far as to convince some of her friends that her mother was nothing but a drunk who beat her up. But Richard said it was “absolutely not true.”

The point, however, wasn't whether the stories were actually true; it was that Kristen had been saying they were and obviously had issues with both of her parents that went far beyond what most kids her own age go through.

Being popular, thin and attractive, sporting a lion's mane of curly, brunette locks that stretched a bit past her shoulders, Kristen had no trouble meeting friends at Groton-Dunstable Regional High School. Her yearbook picture shows a smug, smiling teenager, full of energy and life. In the notes next to the picture, she wrote of her love for red roses, ice cream and making new friends. “Vengeful people and fights,” however, were on her shitlist, and she despised “cliques” and “fake people.”

Although Kristen had a problem with lying, she wasn't stupid. For as she worked her way through her sophomore and junior years of high school, it became apparent that she was not an average student. Whatever she did, Kristen Strickland mastered with an almost effortless ease. She was in the top ten percent of her class and considered a gifted cornet player. She joined the marching band, orchestra and jazz ensemble. She became a member of the math team and whizzed through classes as if bored by the curriculum.

Still, as she grew older, a more vengeful, wicked side of Kristen Strickland emerged.

Pamela Erickson, a neighbor who lived across the street, became good friends with Kristen while the two rode the bus together and hung out after school.

Pamela's mother, however, wasn't too thrilled about her daughter's hanging around with the “Strickland girl.”

“She was a habitual liar,” a neighbor later recalled. “She would make things up on the spot. I could tell by just listening to her that she was lying.”

A culmination of events got Pamela Erikson thinking that maybe Kristen wasn't the person she had originally thought she was. According to a story published in the
Boston Globe,
one day Kristen mentioned to Pamela that she was infatuated by the evil nurse, Amy Vining, on
General Hospital,
a popular long-running daytime soap the two girls used to watch together after school.

Amy was “conniving and backstabbing,” Pamela recalled to the
Globe,
and would do anything to get her way.

“I like Amy,” Kristen said one day.

“Oh, my God, why would you like Amy?” Pamela asked.

“I just like Amy,” Kristen said with an obscure smile.

There was another time when Pamela couldn't find one of her favorite shirts. When Kristen showed up at her house the same day, she was wearing it.

“That's mine!” Pamela snapped.

“No. You're mistaken. It's mine!”

These were little things, of course. But bigger things were on the horizon.

 

 

Exhausting all of her studies midway through her junior year, Kristen was graduated a year and a half before the rest of her class.

In 1984, with high honors, she left high school and was immediately accepted at Bridgewater State College, where she enrolled as a pre-med major at the age of sixteen.

As an added bonus, Bridgewater, located about twenty-five miles south of Boston, was closer to the one place Kristen had grown to love more than anything else: the beach.

Life seemed to be taking shape for young Kristen. Not only was she in college, but living so close to New Hampshire, she could spend a lot of her free time at Hampton Beach, a seaside resort tucked in the corner of the Massachusetts and New Hampshire state lines. It was only about an hour's ride from Bridgewater.

At the time, Kristen was juggling several men she had dated throughout college. She was never the one to end a relationship. It was always the men. Yet Strickland, besieged by ridicule and scorn, had to have the final say. She couldn't let go without getting even.

Even in high school, according to one ex-boyfriend, Strickland was “mentally unstable.” She was an “intelligent manipulator,” he later said, when it came to relationships. Whenever she felt she had lost control of a relationship, she first begged for forgiveness, claiming she would do anything to save it. But when that didn't work, she became malicious, at times becoming physically violent and verbally abusive.

While dating a boy in high school, Kristen left him a suicide note one day after he ended the relationship. Because of the breakup, she claimed she was going to eat glass.

Worried, the boy rushed over to her house.

But there she was, sprawled out on her bed, unharmed.

Then the harassing phone calls began at his house. The caller would breathe heavily and hang up. It had to be Kristen, he assumed. When he confronted her about making the threatening calls, however, she became enraged and gouged her fingernails through his right cheek, leaving him bloodied and confused.

Another boyfriend from around the same period said he had received the same sort of treatment. Yet calling and hanging up wasn't enough. Strickland tore the spark-plug wires out of his car, keyed both sides of it, and slit the tires.

In college, not much changed.

Several days after a boy she was dating broke it off, he got into his car and drove off only to find that someone had loosened the lug nuts on the tire rims.

Then there was the time when a boy at Bridgewater stood her up.

For days, seeing him in class, Strickland didn't say anything, pretending it didn't bother her.

But she had a plan, of course.

Finals were coming up. Being in the same class, they took finals in the same room. When the day came to take finals and the boy finished taking his test, she watched with an unforgiving eye as he walked up to the teacher's desk and put his test in the pile with the others.

After the boy left the room, Kristen finished her test and walked up to place it on the stack, but when she placed her test in the pile, she traded it with the boy's, took it home and burned it. When recalling the story years later to a friend, she said she got the biggest charge out of how calculating and cool she had been. She laughed about it. “He deserved it,” she said. “I got him back! It took me a while, but I got him back.”

How cruel,
her friend thought.
How devious and vindictive.

 

 

During the summer of 1986, after a year in college and several tumultuous relationships that usually ended under sour circumstances, Strickland met a rather plain-looking man from Northampton, Massachusetts, who was vacationing in Hampton Beach for the week. Glenn Gilbert was perfect. He was tall and lanky, yet attractive in a debonair, boyish way. Two years her senior, Glenn was taken right away by the outspoken seventeen-year-old blonde from Groton who was studying to be a nurse.