Perfect Poison (31 page)

As it turned out, Gilbert had paid her credit card bill, and she never made a formal complaint about the card ever being stolen.

Just like that, step one was complete.

But there was still one major problem, maybe even the most pressing of the moment: How could Bill Welch be sure Gilbert wouldn't sign herself out of the hospital and take off? After all, she hadn't been arrested yet. She was free to do what she pleased.

On October 3, while Plante and Murphy continued to gather evidence and conduct follow-up interviews, Welch obtained a court order to have Gilbert transferred to Baystate Medical Center. Legally speaking, it was a simple “psychiatric evaluation transfer” request. Welch argued that Cooley Dickinson didn't have a full-time psychiatric unit and Baystate Medical did. He wanted her evaluated as soon as possible.

The judge agreed.

It was explained to the staff at Baystate before she arrived that she was likely going to be arrested within the week. “Keep an eye on her,” Plante and Murphy advised hospital staff. Welch wanted to know everything she was doing, and, most important, he wanted doctors to assess her psychologically.

For the first time under a court order, several psychiatrists began to evaluate Gilbert. Two things became clear: For one, she was never going to admit to having any psychiatric problems; and, two, she was going to try her best to manipulate anyone who said she did.

Fooling a few friends whom she had worked with for the past seven years and a security guard she had been sleeping with was one thing, but a doctor trained to pick out this kind of behavior was quite another.

After assessing her condition, the attending psychiatrist at Baystate Medical said that she “cannot be trusted to tell accurate information about herself or what was going on. We had information from the patient's father that she, in fact, lies and has lied about her own past psychiatric history.”

Indeed, Gilbert's father, Richard Strickland, told doctors when Gilbert was getting into trouble in high school that she was a “habitual liar.” He said one time Gilbert claimed that her mother was a raging drunk and, at times, even abusive.

Gilbert's hatred for her mother wasn't something she discussed openly. But from time to time, she would give subtle hints about what she thought of her. Once, Gilbert confided in Rachel Webber. They were talking about Gilbert's mother being an elementary school teacher.

“You know,” Gilbert said, “it always surprised me [that she was a teacher], because my mother really didn't like kids.”

Webber was curious. She had never heard Gilbert, in the five years she had known her, even mention her parents.

“Why?” Webber asked.

Gilbert became quiet.

“Kristen . . . you there? Kristen?”

“I don't know why she's a teacher—she doesn't like kids.” Then Gilbert changed the subject and refused to talk about it anymore.

Further evaluating her mental condition at the time of her admission at Baystate, one of the doctors who interviewed Gilbert finished his report by noting that “she apparently had overdoses in her early twenties which she denied to us. She has given contradictory statements to various people about her intentions—particularly around suicide.”

He also went on to say that an unnamed friend of Gilbert's reported that most of Gilbert's friends “appear frightened of her because so many strange things appear to be happening in her life and she is unpredictable.”

It was then determined that Gilbert suffered from three disorders: Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Personality Traits and Antisocial Personality Disorder.

The first step in fixing any one of these problems is for the patient to stop denying there is, in fact, a problem.

Something Gilbert was just not ready to do.

Later, as more doctors weighed in, it became obvious to Welch and his team that Gilbert fit into the mold of a female serial killer rather well and that most “angels of death” suffer from similar personality disorders.

Regarding how Gilbert fared on a “Psychopathic Deviate Scale” test, her psychiatrist wrote:

In other words, Gilbert wasn't a willing participant; therefore, since she was manipulating her own diagnosis, her doctors couldn't rely on what she was saying to be true.

On a second test, one designed to check masculine and feminine traits in females, a second doctor had this to say:

While Glenn Gilbert was rummaging through his kitchen cabinets one evening in early October, he found a plastic bag stuffed inside an old pill box. Looking at it, Glenn noticed it was lined with an acrid-smelling white powder he could not immediately identify.

So he called SA Plante.

After taking the bag to the Massachusetts State Police Crime Laboratory for testing, Plante learned that it was Acepromazine, a common tranquilizer used in veterinary medicine to prepare animals for anesthesia.

Gilbert, Plante surmised, must have ground the tablets into a fine powder after she stole them from an area veterinary clinic. So he had Murphy visit every vet in the area. Murphy found out that Gilbert had made seven visits to the Northampton Veterinary Clinic back in 1995. On several occasions, Murphy had personally observed Acepromazine left out in the open. Stealing it, as they thought Gilbert had done, would be easier than lifting a pack of gum from a supermarket.

But as Murphy began to look deeper into this new direction, he uncovered even more. Talking to Glenn one day about all the pets he and Kristen had kept as a couple, Murphy learned that every dog or cat they had ever owned had “mysteriously died.” The last dog, Glenn explained, had been sick for quite a while during the latter part of 1995. He remembered Kristen had taken it to the vet one night and returned home empty-handed.

“They had to put it to sleep,” she told him.

But when Murphy and Plante went back to talk to the vet, he said he had no record of Gilbert's ever bringing the dog in during that time frame. So they visited other veterinarians. Again, there was no record of Gilbert's having brought the dog to a vet in the area.

Murphy then looked for the dog's body in every animal graveyard and vet hospital in the immediate and surrounding areas, but his search turned up nothing.

“We were prepared to exhume the dog's body if it came down to it.”

After a series of dead ends, Murphy looked at Plante one day and said, “She probably zipped the dog and dumped it somewhere in the woods . . . we'll never find it.”

 

 

On October 7, Gilbert made one last-ditch effort to cover her tracks for the night Murphy had observed her making a call to the VAMC in the parking lot of the Tasty Top Ice Cream Stand.

Early that morning, Perrault received a phone call from Gilbert. She said she had something to say regarding the events of a week ago.

“I placed several phone calls from different phone booths that day, Jim.”

“You did what?”

“I stopped at the Tasty Top to call my apartment so I could check my messages to see if you had called.”

Perrault couldn't believe what he was hearing.

“I used the pay phone in front of the
Gazette
and the Condor Citgo pay phone, too.”

 

 

October 8, 1996 was a day Plante, Murphy and Bill Welch had been waiting for all summer long.

“She's going to be released from the hospital at two this afternoon,” Bill Welch said over the phone to Murphy. “I want you to be there when she gets out.”

There was one small problem that haunted Murphy as he prepared to go: Plante was out of town on family business. With Plante gone, Murphy felt terrible about having to make the arrest without him.

Nevertheless, they wanted Gilbert behind bars. As Welch suggested, Murphy would have to set aside for the moment his brotherly code of respect and get the job done. Plante would have to understand. There would be plenty of time in the coming weeks for Plante's hands-on involvement. One way or another, Gilbert was going to be released from the hospital. This could be their only chance.

“Kevin,” Welch said over the phone. “Go get her . . . now.”

“Okay, Bill. I'm on my way.”

Murphy and John Stevens, a federal marshal, showed up at the Baystate Medical Center about five minutes before two o'-clock and waited in the lobby.

Ten minutes later, Gilbert came waltzing through the elevator doors and stopped dead in her tracks when she saw Murphy standing there staring at her.

“Ms. Gilbert,” he said. “Would you please follow us?”

Gilbert didn't resist.

She appeared to be unmoved, Murphy later remembered, as if to say, “What took you so long?” There was no dramatic, last-minute declaration of innocence. No remorse. No apologies. She simply invoked her Miranda rights and chose not to speak.

Several hours after she was booked, bound by shackles, Gilbert clanked her way into Judge Nieman's courtroom.

Harry Miles stood a few inches from his client, resting his arm on her shoulder. Because Gilbert had been out of work for so long and barely had enough money even to take care of herself, the court appointed Harry Miles as her attorney, seeing that she'd already had dealings with him.

Judge Nieman acquainted Gilbert with her rights and told her what she was being charged with.

“I will set a date for your arraignment where you can formally plead guilty or not guilty,” he concluded. “Do you understand these charges?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

Gilbert was then locked up at the Hamden County House of Corrections.

Days later, she was brought back in front of Judge Neiman for an arraignment. After she pled not guilty, the judge ordered her released into the custody of her parents to await trial on the bomb-threat charge, which could take upward of a year. She would have to be fitted for an electronic anklet monitoring device, which would restrict her movements once she got to Long Island. And while waiting for that to happen, the judge said, she would be moved to Hampshire County Jail in Amherst.

After Gilbert made several threatening phone calls to several witnesses throughout the next few days from a pay phone in the jail, Judge Neiman brought Gilbert back in his courtroom for violating her conditions for release. He ordered a restraining order prohibiting her from making any calls to anyone in Massachusetts.

With no one in town left to call, Gilbert turned to the one person whom she felt she could still confide in: her old friend Rachel Webber. With Webber living in upstate New York, still completely detached from the Northampton scene, Gilbert used Webber as a go-between, someone who could fill her in on what was happening in town.

During that first call Webber received from Gilbert, she questioned her.

“Kristen,” she said,
“what
is going on?”

“The investigators found some sort of voice-changer thing in the bushes outside my house.”

“Okay,” Webber said, “continue.”

“They think I called this bomb threat into the hospital, Rachel.”

It sounded to Webber as if it weren't that big of a deal to Gilbert. She even made light of the threat, Webber thought, in the tone she had used. Webber didn't know then, but it had never been made public that a Talkgirl had been found in the bushes outside Gilbert's apartment.

“Yeah, well, maybe, Kristen . . . I think you did it!” Webber confessed.

“You and my grandmother,” Gilbert said defiantly, “you both think I did it.”

“I do, Krissy. I think you snapped. I think you did it, and I think you snapped.”

A silence followed Webber's statement.

“Krissy . . . you there?”

After a long pause, Gilbert dropped her voice down low, Webber imagined, so no one in the jail could hear her.

In a whisper, she said, “All I can tell you is that people do strange things when they're under a lot of stress.”

“Well, Krissy, we've all done dumb things—but, thankfully, I haven't done anything
that
dumb.”

“You'll come visit me in jail, won't you?” Gilbert asked.

“Of course, Krissy. Of course, I will.”

From that moment on, Webber never doubted for a moment that Gilbert had committed the bomb threat. But she still wasn't convinced of Gilbert's role in the murders. Calling in a bomb threat under the emotional stress of losing a husband and a boyfriend, along with being investigated for murder, was one thing, but actually murdering people was another. There would have to be some hard evidence, Webber told herself, for her to believe that a woman whom she saw as a good nurse, a good mother, a good wife, someone who had even taken care of Webber's kids, was a serial killer.

During another phone call later that same week, Gilbert asked Webber if her husband, Steven, would mind if she moved to upstate New York to be near her after the bomb threat trial was over.

“I have to start a new life somewhere. You think Steven would mind if I moved near you guys?”

“No, not at all.”

Later that night, Webber shared the conversation with her husband.

“There's no way in hell she's involved in those murders. I don't care what the statistics show; she
did not
kill anybody! She'll get through this and get on with her life.”

Steven wasn't buying it.

“If she gets out of jail, she's
not
coming here.”

 

 

Prior to her release from Hamden County Jail on October 15, Gilbert was ordered by the court to live in Setauket, Long Island, New York, with her parents. She was warned not to set foot on Massachusetts soil or call anyone involved in the murder or bomb-threat cases. While in New York, Gilbert was to continue the therapy she had started. And if she didn't like it, well, there was a bunk waiting for her in Springfield where she could easily wait for her trial to begin.