Perfect Poison (25 page)

Petrified by what she had just heard, Harris knew it was time to call the investigators.

At 4:00
P.M.
, on September 11, 1996, Harris called the Northampton DA's office and requested an immediate meeting with investigators. She said James Perrault had given her the phone number. She said she had information that could help the investigation into the alleged murders up at the VAMC. She said she was eager to help. She had seen enough. She was scared to death for the welfare of her family. She said she wanted to disassociate herself from Gilbert right away—because if Gilbert ever found out that she had called the DA's office, the consequences, Harris believed, would be deadly.

“One of the most dangerous things you can do at this point,” SA Plante warned Harris, “would be to end the relationship you have with Ms. Gilbert.”

Plante's words sent a chill down Harris's spine. It was the last thing she wanted to hear. If she thought the past few weeks were scary, she knew now that the future was going to be ten times worse.

“Oh, my God,” Harris said. “I lent her a bottle of ketchup the other day.” She wasn't sure if anyone in the house had used it since Gilbert had returned it. “I'm confused. I don't know what to do anymore.”

“Bring that ketchup bottle in with you when you come in,” Plante said. “We'll want to have the lab take a look at it.”

Regardless of how Harris felt, this was great news to Plante and Murphy. Having a source living right next door could add an element to the investigation that had been missing all along.

The DA's office was located right off Main, on Gothic Street, in downtown Northampton. A massive building by Northampton standards, the three-story, red brick structure housed some thirty lawyers. Whenever he had a break in the Gilbert case and needed to meet with Plante and Murphy, assistant US Attorney Bill Welch used the office as a remote location.

Plante and Murphy could tell right away that Harris wasn't fooling when she said over the phone the previous day that Gilbert had gotten under her skin—so much that every minute of every day was now spent worrying what Gilbert would do next.

“That's why I'm here. I have a child. A husband. I'm afraid for their lives. I pulled my boy out of school the other day because I thought she was going to grab him.”

Of course, Murphy and Plante had seen witnesses like Harris their entire careers. Sometimes they panned out; other times they didn't. It was all part of the game.

They first convinced her that everything was going to be all right. Then Harris began to go through everything she had seen and heard over the past few months.

Plante and Murphy were particularly interested in the conversation Harris had had with Gilbert during the car ride home from the hospital back in July.

“Yeah, now that I think back on it,” Harris said, “Kristen was actually trying to make me believe that it was impossible for you guys to ever catch her. She was filling me with information she thought would later help her. She was trying to manipulate me like everybody else.”

After about an hour of discussing everything she could remember, Plante leaned back in his chair and made a suggestion.

“Listen, Ms. Harris. We appreciate you coming forward. You've given us a lot of quality information. Why don't you start keeping a diary of Gilbert's movements? You know, mark down times and notes regarding her comings and goings. You live right next door. You see a lot of things, I'm sure.”

“Okay,” Harris said.

“We think,” Murphy added, “she's responsible for at least forty deaths.”

“Yes. And if she's killed as many people as we think she has, that makes your neighbor the most successful female serial killer in the history of the United States. We don't have to tell you that we need to put this person behind bars.”

Plante and Murphy were a bit more optimistic after the meeting. They had been gathering facts and data for months now. But they were looking for that one tangible piece of evidence that might solidify an indictment.

When Glenn Gilbert pulled into the driveway of his Drewson Drive home on September 15, 1996, he spied his estranged wife's Oldsmobile parked by the back door.

Glenn was furious. Back in June, he'd obtained a restraining order, prohibiting Kristen from coming anywhere near the house.

As Glenn entered, he saw Kristen in the kitchen and, startled, she turned around quickly.

“What are you doing here?” Glenn yelled.

“I . . . I . . . needed some things,” Kristen said.

“You're not supposed to be in this house.”

The kids, who were a few steps behind Glenn, walked in, and stood in the living room staring at their mother.

“I know,” Kristen tried to say, “but—”

“Jesus, Kristen. Get out, or I'll call the cops!”

Kristen became enraged. She began yelling and screaming. Glenn couldn't even understand what she was saying. She was going on and on as if
he
had done something wrong.

“I want you out of here right now,” he said as he picked up the phone to call the cops.

Shaken by the sound of their mother's screaming, the kids followed Glenn into the kitchen and stood behind him.

Kristen then ran toward Glenn and grabbed the base of the telephone and ripped it off the wall.

Glenn struggled with her for a moment, but then he stopped himself. After a moment, he stood back and calmly said, “Get out of my house.”

By this point, Kristen had backed off and was standing about ten feet away. She looked dazed, but had apparently given up, and started walking toward the door.

Glenn turned around to comfort the children.

Kristen then turned back and charged at him. She had her car keys in her hand, with one key sticking out in between her middle and forefinger, like a knife.

Then, within a moment, as Glenn grabbed her by the arm, she went limp and began crying.

“Get the hell out,” Glenn said. “Now!”

 

 

James Perrault, like almost everyone else who had anything to do with the VAMC murder investigation, had received sporadic prank phone calls throughout the entire summer of 1996. But by the beginning of September, they became more frequent.

There was no method to most of them. The caller wouldn't say much—just some melodramatic heavy breathing, similar to that in any low-budget “slasher” film. Other times, the caller would simply hang up as soon as Perrault answered the phone.

An even-tempered guy, Perrault felt no harm had been done after the first few calls. Every household on the planet received these types of calls once in a while.

By the middle of September, though, Perrault noticed a dramatic increase in the number of calls, along with a change in content.

Taking into account the events of the past year, and after receiving several calls within a short period of time, Perrault decided to put a trace on the calls to see what the hell was going on.

Like clockwork, the phone began to ring off the hook one night. Again, Perrault would pick it up, and the caller would hang up. After several calls in a row, he pressed the star fifty-seven function on his phone, which would normally log the number the person was calling from on his phone bill. Perrault could then order a copy of his phone records and check to see what number had been calling him.

Despite his ambitions of being a cop one day, Perrault's investigative efforts on this night proved fruitless—because the star fifty-seven function, he found out the following day, hadn't worked.

So he decided to call NYNEX and have it run a conventional trace. He knew damn well it was Gilbert, but he wanted hard evidence to confront her with.

NYNEX obliged.

Perrault soon learned that several of calls had been made from Gilbert's 182 Northampton Street telephone number. She had obsessively called his apartment on September 12, 15, 19, 20 and 21. And each time corresponded with the time he had gotten a hang-up or heavy breathing. Several of the calls were made from pay telephone booths around Easthampton and Northampton: the Tasty Top Ice Cream Shop, for one, which was about a quarter mile up the road from Gilbert's apartment; the Citgo Station, about a mile away; the phone booth in the parking lot of the
Hampshire Gazette
newspaper, about three miles away; and the phone booth just down the street from the VFW, in Florence.

It was then explained to Perrault that the reason he couldn't star fifty-seven Gilbert after she had hung up on him was that she had used the star sixty-seven function, which made it impossible to trace the calls.

 

 

A creature of habit, Glenn Gilbert got home from work on September 26 around 4:30, and he did what he had done every day: check his AT&T answering service for any phone messages.

Next saved message, received Thursday, September 26, at 3: 34 P.M.,
the choppy computer voice stated.

“I just wanted to say good-bye for the last time—good-bye,” a sullen, electronically altered voice chimed.

It was strange and, at first, frightened Glenn. It sounded as though it had been pre-recorded and played back at a slower speed to sound intimidating, maybe to add a sense of drama that wouldn't have been otherwise been there.

Glenn noticed immediately the odd familiarity of the tone of the voice. It sounded like Kristen, but it couldn't be—it was a male's voice. On top of that, whoever it was sounded anxious, hurt, shamed.

Ever since the investigation had began, like everyone else, Glenn had gotten bizarre calls from his estranged wife. For the most part, she'd use the kids as the reason behind the call. But after mentioning the kids only momentarily, she'd break into one of her “spousal immunity” rages, lecturing Glenn on the law.

Yet here was Kristen, on the verge of tears, speaking in an electronically altered voice, saying good-bye? It didn't add up. She had threatened to commit suicide all summer long, but never finished the job. Plante and Murphy had even found the infamous suicide “how to” book of the eighties,
Final Exit,
when they had searched Glenn's home for a second time.

After listening to the tape several times, Glenn decided to call Plante and Murphy.

“From what you're telling me, Glenn,” Plante said, “I can say that it's probably her. I'll be over as soon as I can.”

Plante showed up later that night. Glenn made it clear right away that he was still unsure who it was.

“Have you altered this tape in any way?” Plante asked as a formality, after they listened to the tape several times.

“No. Of course not.”

It was just after five o'clock on September 26, 1996, when James Perrault finished driving the VAMC grounds for his allotted two-hour tour of duty.

Gilbert had always made it a point to ask Perrault which rotation he was working. As recently as just a few days ago, she called and wanted to know if he had started his shift driving the grounds or at the security desk. To Perrault, it seemed to be just one more crazy request, part of a continuing hold she tried to maintain on her former place of employment and the people she'd worked with, so he obliged.

A few minutes after he returned from driving the grounds on September 26, Perrault sat down at the security desk to man the phones.

Perrault's colleague that night, Ron Shepard, a ten-year VAMC employee, then got into the SUV and began his two-hour tour of the grounds.

“I'll see you in a couple hours,” Shepard told Perrault.

Perrault finished tidying up the desk and got comfortable in his chair. At 5:11 the security desk phone rang.

“Officer Perrault speaking. How may I help you?”

“This is a message for all Persian Gulf veterans who were exposed to chemical weapons,” an odd-sounding voice stammered matter-of-factly before hanging up.

There was no doubt in Perrault's mind that the caller was male, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty to forty years old, he guessed. But something was wrong. The caller, for obvious reasons, had disguised his voice somehow. It was distorted and eerie. To the same extent, however, it was calm and well-pronounced. “Almost,” Perrault later said, “like it had a mechanical ring to it.”

As a first consideration, after the caller hung up, Perrault wrote it off as a prank. The high school was just down the street from the VAMC. Kids were always roaming around the grounds. Perhaps a dare had been set up? Perhaps Perrault had pissed off a few kids one time, maybe kicked them off the property, and they were getting even?

Eleven minutes later, however, at 5:22, the caller made it obvious that it wasn't an adolescent prank.

“There are three explosive devices in Building One. You have two hours,” the caller stated and hung up.

It was the same haunting voice: electronic, deep, raspy—and male.

If it was the neighborhood pranksters, they were now teetering on doing some hard time in a federal pen.

Perrault called Bernie LeFlam, the evening clinical coordinator for nursing. With almost thirty years of federal service, ten of which LeFlam spent as a supervisor up at the Leeds VAMC, LeFlam was the “go to” man in a time of crisis. He knew VA protocol.

“Bernie, it's Jim in security. We have a situation.”

Located near Admissions, on the ground level of Building One, LaFlam rushed over to security.

Perrault went over what had just happened. The threat was specifically directed to Building One, he explained. LeFlam, thinking fast, ordered a copy of the VAMC's “Medical Center Memorandum” from Admissions. Karen Abderhalden printed it out and got it to LaFlam as fast as she could.

It clearly outlined the procedure for bomb threats.

LeFlam then called Melodie Turner. He explained that the patients in Building One would have to be evacuated, but the decision as to when would be left up to the fire marshal, who, along with local police and fire personnel, were on their way.

Procedure dictated that it was the person's responsibility who had received the call to ask certain questions of the person phoning in the threat. Where is the bomb? Who are you? Where are you calling from?

But would a person phoning in a bomb threat actually respond to such absurd questions?

The rationale behind the questions wasn't necessarily to get the person to admit who he or she was; it was to keep him on the line as long as possible so a trace could be set up.

While LaFlam gathered all the supervisors together in Admissions and read from the memo, Perrault called Ron Shepard.

“Ronny,” he said in a hurried tone, “come back here . . . we have a situation developing.”

Around 5:30, Perrault stepped away from the security desk to explain the situation to a few of the nurses. Then he ran over to Medical Administration Services, located in a different building, and borrowed a device for tape recording incoming phone calls.

When Perrault returned, he noticed the cramped quarters of the security office were becoming a bit chaotic. Staff and senior personnel were scrambling around wondering what to do next. People were talking over one another. Theories were being thrown out. The patients had to be evacuated. Some were too weak to be moved. What was going to happen to them? Had anyone seen any weird packages lying around?

Then the phone rang again.

Ron Shepard was manning the phones. When Perrault heard the phone ring, he rushed over to Shepard and pressed the RECORD button on the recording device he had just finished hooking up.

Perrault pointed to Ron as if he were an actor.

“Go ahead.”

“Security, Officer Shepard speaking.”

“Nothing will compare as to what is going to happen tonight.”

The caller said nothing more and hung up.

“That voice sounds distorted,” Shepard said. “It was definitely not a person's normal speaking voice. It was like some kind of tape recorder . . . maybe even a computer . . . it was muffled, garbled.”

Perrault nodded; they agreed it was the same person.

Moments before the call, two Northampton police cruisers and several fire trucks had arrived on the scene.

At 5:36, once again taking over the helm at the security desk phone, Perrault took another call.

“I want those patients out in time. Remember . . .”

“Sir . . .” Perrault said, trying to get him to say something. “Sir? You there?” But the line went dead.

The caller had been precise in his directions, Perrault thought. Not only that, but he had gone to great lengths to pronounce words slowly, accurately, and chose his words carefully. What was more, why would a self-proclaimed radical be concerned with the welfare of the people in the building he was about to bomb? Wasn't the point of blowing up the place to harm people?

At 5:40, the caller posed a question:

“Would you like to know where to locate the devices?”

“Sir,” Perrault began to say . . . but again the line went dead.

A Northampton police officer then walked into the security office. Thus far, Perrault explained, they had received a total of five calls. He said he had written down what the caller had said earlier and was able to record one of the calls.

Two more calls came in at 5:45 and 5:50, but Perrault couldn't make out a word.

“You'll have to speak up, sir. I can't hear you,” he said as the caller mumbled.

But there was no response.

Almost everyone agreed that the caller was using some sort of electronic device to disguise his voice. Perrault couldn't engage him in a conversation because his voice was being overridden by a recording. Exchanging dialogue would be impossible. Moreover, the hang-up calls were not hang-ups at all, but rather the caller's tape recorder malfunctioning.

The only background sounds Perrault could make out were from a small airplane. There were several small aircraft airports within a twenty-mile radius of the VAMC. It made sense to everyone that the caller was somewhere in the immediate area and was probably using a pay phone.

Security guard Timothy Reardon, after listening to the tape, said he thought he recognized the voice.

“It's John Noble,” he said. “At least it sounds like him.”

John Noble, a fifty-four-year-old ex-VAMC patient, lived in nearby Chesterfield. He had been the cause of some minor problems at the VAMC in years past. He was known as someone who would at times become angry while on the phone. He had issues with the government. It seemed logical to check him out.

One of the officers took down a description of Noble

A few minutes later, at 5:55, the caller decided to take a different approach.

“You sound dumb, or you would go see to . . . ,” he said. But was cut off again when, as he spoke, the device began to malfunction.

“Hello . . . sir . . . ?” Perrault said. “Could you please speak up? I cannot hear you.”

At 6:10, the caller became angry.

“You mustn't think this is very serious, just sitting in your office answering phones?”

Then, at 6:18: “If you're too stupid to find them, you deserve to die with them.”

Another call came in at 6:25, but again, it was hard to understand. The sound of a horn, likely from a car, had drowned out the caller's low voice.

Nearly half an hour went by without another call. The small crowd that had gathered in the security office thought it was finally over. Many felt relieved. Some were shocked. Others just dumbfounded. What the hell was happening? Was the caller serious?

It was probably some disgruntled patient who had gotten drunk and decided to have a little fun, many speculated. Perhaps Reardon's assumptions were right: John Noble was up to his old tricks again.

Nevertheless, a bomb threat was a bomb threat. It was time to begin evacuating the patients.

NYNEX, meanwhile, had tried to trace the calls, but they were too short and happening with such rapidity that it was impossible. On top of that, the caller was likely moving from one location to the next to avoid being, as NYNEX termed it, “trapped.”

Then, at 6:48, the phone rang again.

“You find this exciting, don't you, officer . . . ?”

“Sir, could you help me with this?” Perrault said sincerely, hoping to lure the caller into some sort of verbal showdown. “Sir, could
you
think about the patients?”

The caller quickly hung up.

Another call came in three minutes later. Plain and well-spoken, yet still on the chilling side, the caller made it perfectly clear what was going to happen within the next half hour: “This is my last call. In twenty-five minutes, I'll see you in hell!”

“Sir, could you think about . . .” Perrault tried saying as the caller hung up.