Perfect Poison (4 page)

By the end of June 1987, after dating Glenn throughout the winter, Strickland transferred to Wachusett Community College in Gardner, Massachusetts, and then to Greenfield Community College—just a twenty-minute drive from Northampton—to continue studying for her nursing degree and, more important, to be closer to the man she had fallen in love with.

Northampton was a melting pot for some of the upper echelon of Massachusetts, full of lawyers, doctors, artists, writers, professionals and, like Glenn Gilbert, middle-class blue-collar workers.

One of the better places to live in the state, it only seemed fitting that the elegant and beautiful Kristen Strickland, now a well-educated woman of twenty, live among people she could relate to. After all, she was going to be a nurse soon. The prospect of living among the cultural elite in Northampton seemed appetizing to Strickland, who had, up until that point, spent most of her life in rural, backwater towns where not too much of anything ever happened.

But it was Glenn, after all, who fit a picture Strickland had of someone she could shape and mold into whatever she wanted. Glenn was blue-collar, and by no means a rocket scientist—yet, by the same token, was exactly what Strickland was looking for.

While attending classes at Greenfield Community College, Strickland took a job as a home health aide with the Visiting Nurses Association of Franklin County.

One of her first patients was a blind, deaf, mute, and severely handicapped young boy who lived with his foster family in Bernardston, Massachusetts. The family, who also had a younger foster child, had already had Strickland's coworker, a young woman in her late twenties, over to the house on several occasions to care for the two children and ready them for bed.

When Kristen and her coworker arrived one summer night in August 1987, the coworker introduced Kristen to the family, showed her where to bathe the retarded boy upstairs, and assured the foster parents they could take off.

“I am going to leave you with him and go get the other child ready for bed, Kristen. Okay?” the coworker said.

“Sure,” Strickland said.

An hour or so later, the parents returned, and Strickland and her coworker left.

When the foster mother checked on the boy Strickland had cared for, she found his legs bright red and “demarcated by where the water level of the bathwater should have been.”

The boy had been scalded over sixty percent of his body.

This was impossible to do by mistake. The family had specially ordered a faucet that was preset to a certain temperature. The only way to raise the temperature was to “unlock the faucet [and] adjust the faucet from its preset position.”

The following morning, the foster mother called the VNA and said they “never had a problem with the faucet before” and, when the mother checked it out afterward, it had worked fine.

“Well, madam, we are—”

The foster mother interrupted. “We
never
want her to come into our home again.”

 

 

By Christmastime 1987, Glenn and Kristen knew their relationship wasn't just some fly-by-night romance. It was time to take the plunge.

But a full-fledged wedding was out of the question. Richard Strickland had suggested they get married in Long Island, where he and Claudia had moved with Tara right after Kristen went off to Bridgewater. Strickland said he would spring for the entire bill.

But Glenn and Kristen were adamant: They wanted to elope.

“Our families wouldn't have gotten along,” Strickland later told a friend. “Neither of us [was] particularly religious, anyway. It would have been nothing but a big hassle.”

By the time January 1988 turned into February, Kristen Strickland had become Kristen Gilbert—and it wouldn't take long for Glenn to find out exactly whom he'd married.

A month after the wedding, Kristen nearly killed her new husband one night.

During an argument, she pulled an eight-inch butcher knife out of a kitchen drawer and went after Glenn, chasing him from room to room in a tirade. Fearing for his life, Glenn locked himself inside a room and waited until she calmed down.

Perhaps it was an isolated incident? The stress of eloping? Or maybe her grueling schedule while studying to be a nurse had made her snap?

Regardless, Glenn would soon realize that it was the beginning of a marriage based on lies, deceit, adultery, threats and, in the end, another attempted murder that was almost successful.

Kristen Gilbert's graduation picture from Greenfield Community College showed a cheerful woman of twenty-one, standing with a bouquet of flowers in one hand, her diploma in the other.

She looked content.

Shortly after graduating, she began her nursing career at the Leeds VAMC on March 6, 1989—but it didn't take long before a “black cloud” began to follow Gilbert around, hovering over many of the patients she came in contact with. As if she were cursed, it seemed Gilbert had the worst luck when it came to her patients. At unprecedented rates, one after the other, they began to drop dead.

Louis Trainor
was one of the unfortunate.

Like many of the patients who came to the VAMC for long-term treatment, Trainor had his share of emotional problems. Yet despite the psychological effects of the self-inflicted wounds Trainor had put himself through, at fifty-one, he was in surprisingly good physical health.

Early in 1990, Trainor was admitted to the VAMC because he was having problems with his esophagus. Many years ago, he had swallowed Drano in an attempt to kill himself. He wasn't able to eat by himself because the chemicals had burned his throat so severely. Instead of reconstructive surgery, Trainor opted for a feeding tube in his stomach.

As grim as it may have seemed, Trainor's condition wasn't life-threatening. He came to the VAMC only for preventative IV antibiotic treatments.

Including Gilbert, there were two RNs working the floor on the night Trainor had been admitted.

A schizophrenic, and a bit on the irrational side, shortly after being sent up to Ward C, Trainor began screaming at the top of his lungs: “Oh, God, just let me die. Let me die. God . . . please let me die.”

But this was routine behavior for Trainor. He was delusional and suffered from manic depression. The nurses knew it was in his nature to scream, so they paid little attention to it.

Nevertheless, as he continued to carry on for about an hour, one of the nurses would periodically go in to check on him to make sure he was okay. Each time the nurse went in, Trainor would say, “I don't want to live anymore. Won't someone let me die?”

For some reason, on this particular night, he was acting a bit more irrational, and his behavior continually disrupted the nurses as they worked. Patients even began complaining. But no matter what the nurses said, Trainor wouldn't stop yelling. So they tried their best to carry on with their normal business and ignore the screaming that now played irritably in the background as if it were a car alarm no one could shut off.

Then, at one point, as one of the nurses was tending to another patient, she stopped what she was doing for a moment and realized that she hadn't heard Trainor yell for some time.

When she went in to check on him, Trainor was dead. There had been no code or medical emergency called. He was, as one nurse later put it, “Dead, dead, dead!” Just like that. “One minute he was alive and screaming at the top of his lungs, and the next he was dead. D-E-A-D. I remember it was the strangest thing.”

One of the nurses later checked to see who his primary care nurse had been. It was Kristen Gilbert.

“It was weird because there wasn't any real reason for him to have died. He wasn't sick particularly,” a nurse later recalled. “It didn't dawn on me that night, but years later, after I got to thinking about it, I know Kristen had something to do with it. She was the only nurse around.”

Later that same year, a VAMC staff physician, while studying the charts of several of his patients who had died during the night-shift hours, realized that RN Gilbert's name kept showing up repeatedly for a majority of the deaths. By itself, it wouldn't have been alarming. But Gilbert was generally alone with the patients at the time of their deaths, and, more important, most of them were making good progress and weren't expected to die.

One morning, after finding out that another one of his patients had died while under Gilbert's watch the previous night, the doctor went in to see Melodie Turner, Gilbert's nursing manager.

He told her he didn't want Gilbert taking care of any more of his patients.

Although no disciplinary action was ever taken, word leaked that the doctor had said something about Gilbert. Shortly after the meeting with Turner, the nursing staff began to shun the doctor.

 

 

As the coincidences mounted and rumors swirled, Gilbert became known as the “angel of death.” But it was a joke. No one took it seriously. The nurses teased her about the unfortunate luck and Gilbert lapped up the attention.

Yet, by the winter of 1991, a clerical worker at the VAMC, who was partly in charge of going through patient death records to insure their integrity, noticed a red flag while she was signing off on some of the previous years' deaths. There it was in black and white: Gilbert's name as the sole nurse who had found a majority of the patients on Ward C either in cardiac arrest or dead.

In fact, between 1990 and 1991, on Gilbert's shift alone, there were thirty-one deaths—more than triple the amount found on any other shift. Even more startling was that of those thirty-one deaths, Gilbert had found twenty-two herself. The next closest nurse had found only five. Which meant Gilbert was on duty and found approximately seventy-five percent of the deaths on her ward.

These were shocking numbers, by any account.

Upon a further look, the numbers of codes were even more staggering. Out of roughly forty codes called on Ward C between 1990 and 1991, Gilbert had found half of them: twenty, in fact. In 1990 alone, she had found thirteen, while her eight colleagues,
combined,
had found only five. Many of the nurses later admitted that throughout their entire tenures as nurses—some as long as twenty years—they had never even called a code, let alone seen them called on an average of one per week.

A statistician later concluded that the possibility of it being a coincidence that Gilbert had found and called that many codes was one in a million. There was just no way a nurse could have that much bad luck.

The perceptive VA worker, not sure of what to think, brought her findings to the attention of her supervisor.

“What are you accusing this nurse of?” her supervisor asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “I'm just pointing out the fact that this nurse's name is on a majority of these deaths and codes. I'm not saying she did anything. . . .”

The supervisor told her to go back to doing her job and stop making false accusations against people.

Years later, when investigators caught up with the supervisor, she couldn't recall that the conversation had ever taken place.

In December 1990, as gossip continued to center around her unfortunate luck with patients, a pregnant Kristen Gilbert took maternity leave to give birth to her first child.

After having a boy,
Brian
, she returned to work in February 1991. Gilbert began working second shift—4:00
P.M.
to midnight. Despite her prior reputation as the “angel of death,” Gilbert's colleagues considered her now a permanent member of what had become in her absence one of the tightest-knit groups in the hospital.

At twenty-four, Gilbert had been miraculously transformed from the angel of death into June Cleaver, it seemed, simply by giving birth. Married to a local man who was adored by her coworkers, she was seen now as nothing more than an impassive housewife, leading a mundane life in Northampton like the rest of them.

She was a bit on the chunky side now, her dirty blond hair cut conservatively about halfway down her back, usually propped up in a pink or purple bow. She relished the role of being perceived as the idyllic mother, and dressed like a Catholic schoolgirl: knee-high skirts, bulky sweaters, loose jeans.

“She was attractive in a motherly type of way,” a former colleague recalled. “She was happy and loved her job.”

As time went on, Gilbert and her coworkers began having cookouts and went over to one another's homes for dinner parties. They took Gilbert's boat out on the Connecticut River. Gilbert threw baby showers for her pregnant colleagues. They met for lunch. They went out to the area clubs on their nights off. Gilbert's favorite band was the Cowboy Junkies, and she would drag many of her coworkers to their shows.

Everything was in place for an amiable life in suburbia.

But Gilbert never talked about her formative years: how her ex-boyfriends—and even her own father—had claimed she was nothing but “a manipulative, vindictive individual” who had spent her entire dating life harassing men, “making false rape allegations and damaging personal property when the relationships began to sour.” Or that she was antisocial and narcissistic. Nor did anyone know she had threatened suicide on several occasions and even tried to stab Glenn. To her colleagues and friends, Gilbert was a caring nurse fulfilling the role of a soccer mom.

Then came the subtle signs when no one could deny that something was wrong.

One year, on Valentine's Day, while manning the phones at the nurse's station, Gilbert came running down the hallway screaming, “I just got a call from a guy who said he put on bomb on the ward.”

Renee Walsh was working that night.
A bomb? . . . What?
she thought. It didn't make any sense to Walsh.

Who, she wondered, would go through the trouble of putting a bomb—of all places—on the second floor of a VA hospital?

“No kidding. I just took the call,” Gilbert said when Walsh approached her.

“Okay, Kristen. Calm down,” Walsh said. “I'll get David and have him call the police.”

David Rejniak was the charge nurse that night. He was ultimately responsible for giving out orders if anything had gone wrong.

Soon the ward was inundated with police who, after looking in every corner of the ward, found nothing.

After the police left and things got back to normal, Renee Walsh was sitting at the nurse's station when she heard Gilbert, who had gone down the hall and around the corner near the janitor's closet for some reason, in a loud whisper, say, “David . . . David . . . oh, David,” as if she were playing peek-a-boo. “I think you ought to come down here. There's something in the closet I think you need to see.”

Curious, Walsh then got up and walked toward Gilbert's voice. Rejniak was just coming back up the hallway after speaking with Gilbert.

“What is it, David?” Walsh asked.

“Kristen says she found a ‘suspicious-looking' box in the closet.”

“A box?”

“Yup. It's weird; it has a swastika on it.”

A box with a Nazis symbol on it?
Walsh thought. So she went down to see for herself.

Sure enough, it was a harmless-looking Kleenex box wrapped in white paper with a swastika drawn crudely in pen, Walsh noticed, on the side of it.

Rejniak, perhaps a bit embarrassed, called the police back and told them the good news: that they had to come back.

It had taken hours for the Massachusetts State Police bomb squad to arrive. While they were en route, the ward had to be evacuated and every single patient taken out of his room and brought to another ward.

Within moments, the bomb squad determined that it was nothing more than what everyone had presumed—a box of Kleenex wrapped in white paper.

The patients were then brought back into their rooms, and life went on.

The nurses later referred to the night as being their own little version of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, for the simple reason that a tiny cardboard box painted to look menacing had caused so much confusion and panic.

Some of the nurses later speculated it was Gilbert who had planted the box.

Why?

So she could bask in the glory of finding it?

Still, in the eyes of many of her colleagues, Gilbert was the perfect mother. The perfect wife. The perfect nurse. She was a caring individual who spent time during the holidays setting up a Secret Santa program for area needy kids and volunteered at local homeless shelters. Having a separate room in her home dedicated to sewing, she loved to make Christmas stockings and quilts from scratch and give them away.

But it was all part of the façade.

At work, Gilbert told people her mother's real name was Tiesha, a name given to her by a royal family. She told people she had spent time as a child living and studying in England. She told people her parents were wealthy socialites. She said her family was connected to English royalty. All were lies.

“She was
so
Martha Stewart . . .
so
L.L. Bean-ish,” former friends later said. “Kristen always had to have the best of everything. And she wasn't afraid to let you know about it when she got it.”

As time went on, Gilbert, her coworkers began to notice, became obsessed with clothing and home items. Whether it was Gucci, Calvin Klein or Playschool, she not only had to have the latest in fashion and high chairs and toys for her kids, but it had to be the best. Even linens. Whenever someone came over, there she was, like a
Price Is Right
model, showing off whatever new bedspread, set of curtains or piece of furniture she had recently bought.

“You'll never believe what I just bought. Come on over and check it out,” Gilbert would say.

Yet her buying habits became tangled in a web of something just short of fraud. She would order expensive clothing from magazines for an up-and-coming dinner party, work outing or night out on the town with friends, only to return them after the event was over.

She also felt the need to one-up just about everyone whom she felt threatened by in some way.

Rachel Webber
was an attractive young nurse who had worked with Gilbert during the early nineties, and they became good friends almost immediately. Gilbert had thrown baby showers for Webber in 1992 and, later, in 1994. But something happened one day that gave Webber pause to think about how differently Gilbert had viewed the relationship.

At work one night in 1993, Webber told Gilbert that she was thinking of buying a new Jeep Grand Cherokee. Webber loved the new design, she said. But she wasn't sure her husband would agree. So she wrote it off as a pipe dream.

“Someday, Krissy,” she said. “If it's the last thing I do, someday . . . I'm going to get me that Jeep!”

Weeks later, Gilbert came into work and began talking about the vehicle as if she had engineered the thing herself.

“Wow,” Webber said. “How do you know so much about it?”

“Consumer Reports!”
Gilbert bragged. “I read up on it.”

“Well, it
is
a nice vehicle.”

“Sure is,” Gilbert said. “Guess what, Rachel?” she added, and threw a set of keys on the table in front of Webber.

“What, Kristen?
What
did you do?”

“I went out and bought one today—come check it out.”

“You're kidding me?”

As Webber walked around the vehicle, she could see Gilbert out of the corner of her eye, gloating. Webber took it as,
See what I have that you don't.

“Nice vehicle, Krissy.”

Walking back up to the ward as Gilbert drove off, Webber couldn't help thinking,
You bitch. Just because I wanted the thing, you had to go out and buy it.

“She was always like that,” Webber later recalled. “If you had it and she wanted it, well, she usually went out and bought it.”