Perfect Poison (41 page)

Because a winter storm had arrived in Springfield on Thursday, December 14, court proceedings were canceled for the day. When things picked back up on Friday, Frank Bertrand finished David Hoose's cross-examination and Ariane Vuono's redirect examination. For perhaps the first time during the trial, a witness had placed Gilbert in a patient's room as he went into cardiac arrest. It wasn't eye-witness testimony to murder, but the closest thing to it Welch and Vuono had to offer thus far.

After Bertrand, it was up to former Ward C nursing manager Melodie Turner to give jurors a glimpse into life on Ward C both before Gilbert had been under suspicion for murder and afterward. Since the investigation had begun in 1996, Turner had been ousted from her managerial position and placed in the outpatient clinic at the hospital as a registered nurse. It was a political move all the way. Turner hadn't been qualified for the job as nursing manger in the first place. But her superiors, of course, had told her she was. Yet a nurse who had never even participated in a code taking a job in which she would have to supervise those who did, it was surely something that would now, as soon as Hoose got hold of her, come into question and fall on her shoulders.

First thing Monday morning, December 18, with Turner still on the stand, Welch wasted no time bringing into the record her history of letting the nurses know how important it was to document a patient's vital signs and staple various sections of a patient's heart monitor rhythm strips to his chart.

“Did you make [this] known to all of your nursing staff?”

“Yes.”

“Did you leave signs or messages within the ICU or out on Ward C with respect to rhythm strips and charting?”

“I had things under the glass blotters. I had blank medication sheets posted right in front of the nurse's station and the same setup in the ICU under the glass top blotter. . . .”

Turner was explaining to the jury one of the government's main theories: that Gilbert knew VAMC policy and procedure, yet failed to document the condition of her patients the same as the other nurses on the ward had been doing. There were many times throughout Turner's testimony where Welch brought into the record a chart from a patient that, with the exception of Gilbert, had been documented accurately. It showed one of two things: that Gilbert had either failed to follow procedure or that she chose not to include information that might later implicate her in something that had happened to a particular patient.

For the next few hours, Welch had Turner testify as to the different types of epinephrine the VAMC stocked (1:10,000 bristo-jet plungers and the 1:1000 glass ampoules), several tour sheets that placed Gilbert at work on the nights in question, how Gilbert had lost weight, how her appearance changed drastically, becoming, according to Turner, “flamboyant” and “provocative looking,” how she started wearing makeup to work where she previously hadn't, how she had gotten a “layered kind of tossing hairdo,” and how Gilbert had left her husband after she started a relationship with Perrault.

By the time Welch finished, he had brought twenty-two pieces of evidence into the record, mostly memos and letters from the Labor Board describing Gilbert's work-related injuries over the years.

Before lunch, Paul Weinberg got his shot at Turner. Since she'd had
The Handbook of Poisoning
in front of her already, Weinberg decided to take a stab at trying to convince jurors that the book was mainly used for preventative methods, not as a murderer's how-to manual. Welch had already established that Turner had never given the book to Gilbert or placed it in her sewing bag, as Gilbert had once claimed.

“Is it fair to say that this book is aimed at prevention, diagnoses and treatment of poisoning?” Weinberg asked.

“That is what it says on the back of the jacket.”

“It wouldn't be fair to describe that book as a ‘how-to' manual of poisoning, would it?”

“I don't think I could make that decision one way or another. I think it tells you what poisonings are.”

When Weinberg realized he wasn't getting anywhere, he moved on to another subject: the fact that Turner's mother and husband had worked for the VA. Then another: that Turner had perhaps “developed a sort of affection for [Gilbert].” Then another: that maybe Turner, because of the position she had held, had been preventing certain employees from moving up the professional ladder.

“Now, during the time that you were working with Ms. Gilbert, it's true that you never saw her engage in any obvious inappropriate behavior or actions that could be interpreted as harmful to a patient, isn't that correct?”

Either Turner didn't understand the question, or she didn't want to respond.

“You want me to rephrase the question?” Weinberg asked after waiting a few moments.

“Yes.”

“During the time you worked with Ms. Gilbert, you
never
saw her do anything you thought was done intentionally to hurt a patient,
did
you?”

“No, I never saw her do anything intentionally to a patient.”

Paul Weinberg may have been a lawyer who had never before tried a criminal case in his professional career. But here he was now, standing in front of the podium like a peacock, firing off questions as if he were an old pro.

At one point near the end of his cross-examination, Weinberg got Turner to admit she had initiated prior investigations when she found out that drugs had become missing. He was laying the groundwork for one of the defense's key arguments: that there were several other people who had worked at the VAMC in 1996 who could have, for their own selfish reasons, stolen the missing ampoules of epinephrine.

With the Christmas and New Year holiday seasons approaching, it was obvious to anyone who had been keeping score that Hoose and his team were getting beat up by each new witness the government presented. Although Weinberg had scored a few points with Melodie Turner, by December 19, with James Perrault and Glenn Gilbert still waiting in the wings, the defense needed to find some sort of life raft they could cling to. Because when Gilbert's two former lovers came into the courtroom and spoke of the confessions she had made, Gilbert's boat was likely going to take a plunge into an abyss with a very deep and dark bottom.

Indeed, it would be hard for her to recover—especially if she wasn't going to take the stand herself.

David Hoose was a professional, however, with a reputation for being a crack lawyer who knew the ropes better than most of his peers. He knew John Wall and Bonnie Bledsoe's past drug use would cast doubt on the government's case and suppress any momentum that was building.

The years immediately after the investigation had begun hadn't been good to Bonnie Bledsoe. Her drug use, as Hoose would soon get his chance to expose during his cross-examination, had escalated to a point higher than it had ever been.

In fact, in October 1999, Bledsoe crashed and burned. After a binge, she collapsed on the floor of her home, stopped breathing, and went into cardiac arrest. From there, she was put on a respirator for twelve days and ended up staying in the hospital for six weeks. It was the last time she had used drugs.

On Tuesday, December 19, 2000, when she took the stand under an offer of immunity from the U.S. Attorney's Office, Bledsoe had been clean for well over a year. She wore a red winter scarf and a black dress. She looked anxious, but no more so than any other witness. She had family members sitting in the third row for moral support alongside her attorney.

The previous day had been taken up with arguments without the jury present. Welch wanted restrictions put on Hoose's questioning of Bledsoe's history of drug abuse. Hoose, of course, wanted to go up one side of her and down the other. He said he had evidence that she stole money from John Wall and her parents' bank accounts to support her drug habit.

“It's important for the jury to understand the depth of her problem. She repeatedly lies about her drug use.”

Ponsor decided to let Hoose question Bledsoe at will. She was going to say some incriminating things against the defendant; it was only fair that the jury knew the kind of person who was making those accusations. Weinberg had already established through Melodie Turner that the defense was going after Bledsoe's drug use with full force, asking Turner if she knew Bledsoe, who had worked for her all those years, had also been using crack cocaine and heroin while employed at the VAMC.

Turner had said she didn't have a clue.

 

 

Welch was an experienced trial attorney. He knew how to work things in gradually, hoping to lessen the sting of the more potent problems Bledsoe had had.

But Bonnie Bledsoe was a reformed drug addict; there was no way of getting around it.

Welch established immediately that Bledsoe and Wall had dated on and off from 1991 until 1999, and that between October 1991 and March 1996, they had lived together. Regarding Gilbert's performance as a nurse, Bledsoe, like many of Welch's previous witnesses, admitted she thought Gilbert was a “good nurse,” kind and intelligent.

Bledsoe explained she had been asthmatic all her life, often taking shots of epinephrine to control the more severe bouts with the disease. “It worked very well,” she said of the drug. But at the same time, she added, it made her heart race.

Then Welch had her describe the one reason why she was on the stand: Michael Cascone's several codes on January 28, 1996.

During Cascone's third code, Bledsoe said she told Gilbert that if she had to run over to Building One, where Cascone was, to respond to another code, she was going to start “wheezing.”

That was when, Bledsoe testified, Gilbert had reached into her pocket and pulled out “a vial of something” and asked, “Do you want some epi, Bonnie?”

Whispers were heard throughout the courtroom. It hadn't mattered at that moment that a former drug addict had said it; what mattered was that Gilbert had been carrying ampoules of epinephrine around the ward with her.

Then came the hardball questions.

“I want to ask you,” Welch said, “whether or not there came a time in late 1994 when you began using heroin?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember when you first started using heroin?”

“Around the fall of '94.”

“For approximately how long did you use heroin after the fall of 1994?”

“Until April of '95.”

After Bledsoe indicated she had detoxed herself off the drug on April Fool's Day 1995, Welch asked if she thought that she was addicted to the drug.

“Yes, I did.”

“Approximately how much heroin were you using as of, say, February or March of 1995?”

“Between five and ten bags a day.”

“Can you indicate to the members of the jury whether or not there were occasions when you would use at work?”

“Yes, there was.”

Welch then asked if Bledsoe thought her drug use affected her performance while at work.

“No, it did not.”

To reinforce Bledsoe's claim that a five-to-ten-bag-a-day drug habit had nothing to do with her job performance, Welch admitted into evidence several work performance evaluations backing up her earlier testimony.

She hadn't a blemish on her record.

“Did there come a point . . . in 1995 when you began using another controlled substance?”

“Yes, there was.”

While Bledsoe answered Welch's questions, she looked nervously around the room, sizing up the jury, looking toward her parents and, finally, staring down Gilbert, who never once looked back.

“And what controlled substance was that?”

“Crack cocaine.”

He asked when.

“Late summer, fall of '95.”

“For how long did you continue to use crack cocaine?”

“On and off until 1999.”

Welch then toned it down a bit, getting Bledsoe to acknowledge that her addiction to crack had caused her to miss long periods of time from work. Then he questioned her about John Wall, and how she had stolen money from him to support her habit.

“During this time frame [1996–1997], were you on occasion using with Mr. Wall?”

“Yes, I was.”

Establishing the fact that she had begun using both heroin
and
crack cocaine during the same period, and that it had put a huge strain on her asthma, which put her in and out of area hospitals on many different occasions, Welch wanted again to know how much of each drug she had been using.

“A day?” Bledsoe asked.

“A day.”

“A hundred dollars of heroin a day, a couple of hundred dollars of crack a day.”