Perfect Poison (37 page)

The long list of indictments the US Attorney's Office was putting together against Gilbert was beginning to overwhelm Bill Welch, who had been on the case since June 1996.

As Gilbert did her time for the bomb threat, the murder investigation moved forward. In reaction to the growing number of witnesses and new evidence, including the Kenny Cutting and Stanley Jagodowski exhumations, Welch went to his boss, supervising US attorney Kevin O'Regan, and said he wanted another prosecutor who could share equally in the workload.

The court had already appointed defense attorney David Hoose back in December 1997 to represent Gilbert in any future matters. Hoose had been recommended by trial judge David Bruck, who was in charge of coordinating public defenders for federal defendants in capital cases.

At forty-five, Hoose was a Northampton resident and partner in Katz, Sasson, Hoose and Turnbull, with offices in Springfield and Northampton. Welch had seen Hoose in court and he knew the tall, slick and bald defense attorney was going to be tough to go up against. Hoose had a reputation for being a hard hitter, both on and off the field. Shortly before taking the Gilbert case, Hoose had defended Alex Rankin, who was later convicted of killing a South Hadley dentist, Robert D'Amour, in 1993.

Under federal law, a person accused of capital felony murder is entitled to two lawyers, and one of them must have death penalty case experience. Hoose had worked on appeals in capital punishment cases before. Since Harry Miles had already been dealing with Gilbert for a number of years, Hoose quickly announced Miles would act as his co-counsel.

After some prudent thought, Miles and Hoose decided to ask the court if they could bring in another attorney. Judge Ponsor heard their argument and agreed.

Hoose and Miles chose Paul Weinberg, who, in over twenty years of practicing law, had never tried a criminal case. Weinberg was a malpractice attorney. Hoose and Miles had chosen him because of his obvious expertise in medical records. Later, Weinberg told a reporter for the
Hampshire Gazette
he was “reluctant to get aboard” what he called “the train from hell.... Because once you buy your ticket, the doors close . . . and you're off, and there is nothing you can do about it.”

Welch's first choice for co-counsel was Ariane Vuono, a former Northwestern assistant district attorney who had been sworn in as a US Attorney in July 1995. Not only did Vuono have trial experience, but she could bring a female perspective to the case, something Welch was looking for.

She was the “perfect fit,” Welch later said. “Extremely talented.” She could bring to the team insight they didn't have, and, hopefully, answer the one question Plante, Murphy and Welch had been asking themselves for well over two years now: What made Gilbert tick?

Back in 1995, Vuono went to work under Jeffrey Kinder, the assistant US attorney in charge of the Springfield office at the time. She had been brought in by Kinder to take on the large-scale drug-dealing cases and corruption cases the Springfield US Attorney's Office prosecuted. She was chosen, Kinder later said, because of her trial experience and appellate work in Northampton.

Around the office, the soft-spoken Vuono came across to most of her new colleagues as laid-back and nonthreatening. Strikingly attractive, rather small and petite, just under five feet, maybe one hundred pounds, an avid runner, at forty-one Vuono was in the incredible shape of a healthy twenty-year-old.

Prior to her appointment as a US Attorney, Vuono had worked as an A.D.A. in the Northwestern District Attorney's Office for seven years. She graduated from Yale University, received a master's degree in Italian Language and Literature from Middlebury College, and a law degree from the University of Connecticut.

She was married to a well-respected chair of the Italian Literature department at Smith College, Alfonse Procaccini. Only months before Vuono had been sworn in as an assistant US attorney, she prosecuted Sandra Dotsie, a twenty-eight-year-old nurse who had smothered her stepson to death over resentment of child-support payments and the time her husband had spent with the child. With a child of her own from a previous relationship and two stepchildren, Vuono had a unique point of view to bring to the Dotsie case, for which she ultimately obtained a conviction.

 

 

One day shortly before the bomb-threat trial concluded, Welch walked about twenty yards from his corner office, sat down in Vuono's office, and just stared at her.

“What is it, Bill?”

“I need you to come aboard,” Welch said. “Would you be willing to do the murder investigation and prosecute Gilbert?”

There had been another prosecutor working with Welch at the time, David Gier, and Vuono wanted to know where she fit in. Three prosecutors? She didn't like the sound of it.

“In what capacity would you need me, Bill, if you already have David?”

“Just you and me, Ariane. David won't be part of this.”

Gier was certainly a competent attorney in his own right. He was working for the Northampton DA's office, and he had just taken on more responsibility in the office. Welch knew he wasn't going to have the time. Plus, it was a federal case. Local law enforcement would be helping, sure, but it was a government case all the way.

Vuono was still a bit skeptical, however.

“Is it going to be fifty-fifty, Bill?”

“I heard David is withdrawing from the case, anyway,” Welch said. Vuono could tell by the look in Welch's eyes he was serious. “Yes, of course. Fifty-fifty. You and me!”

Vuono turned out to be exactly what Welch needed. Not only was she talented, but Vuono was the only attorney in the US Attorney's Office at the time to have tried a murder case.

As the evidence continued to pour in, the case against Gilbert was amounting to the biggest thing to roll through Western Massachusetts in decades. Bill Welch needed the best. By his estimation, he now had it.

The first few months of the new year, 1998, had been difficult for Special Agent Steve Plante. With pressure mounting to secure an indictment, Plante and Murphy had been meeting with one family member after the next to inform them of the bad news: there was a good chance their son, brother, father or husband had not died of natural causes as they had once believed, but Kristen Gilbert had murdered them. In the midst of breaking the dreadful news to family members, Plante had just gotten word that his father had been diagnosed with cancer and had only six months left to live, which made it only that much more difficult for Plante to face each family member.

On the first warm spring afternoon in May 1998, Plante was exactly where he wanted to be: at home, in Bedford, taking a stress-relieving jog through the neighborhood where he lived. He had just visited with his father, who wasn't doing so well. Running helped Plante deal with what was turning out to be one of the worst years he could recall. In addition to watching his father die a slow and painful death, Plante had been involved in the Gilbert investigation now for nearly two years, and they still hadn't secured enough evidence, Welch kept telling him, to indict her.

That, of course, could all change when the toxicology results from Ed Skwira's exhumation came in. But, like any good cop, Plante knew they couldn't depend on it.

As he came up on a hill about a mile from his house, Plante's pager went off.

“George Jackson?” he said to himself looking down at the number. “Why the hell is George calling?”

A forensic toxicologist, Jackson was employed by National Medical Services, one of the leading toxicology companies in the private sector. The IGO had retained the services of NMS to test the tissue samples from Ed Skwira and Henry Hudon. Hudon's body had been cremated, but because the medical examiner couldn't find a natural cause of death at the time he conducted an autopsy, he saved tissue samples.

Plante jogged to the nearest pay phone and dialed up Jackson.

“What's up, George? I haven't spoken to you in a long time.”

“Steve, listen,” Jackson said. “We found ketamine in your guy, Ed Skwira.”

“Ketamine?” Plante had never heard of the drug.

“Yeah, Steve. Ketamine!”

“What the hell is ketamine, George?”

“Well, it's a veterinarian type of drug. Kids on the street call it ‘Special K.' ”

“What? You've
got
to be kidding me.”

At first, Plante stood in the phone booth and just thought about the depth of the case. Every time he turned around, there was another path to follow. Yet, as soon as he started to become overwhelmed, the alarm bells went off.

“It all began making sense after I thought about it,” Plante later recalled: the seven trips Gilbert had made to area veterinarians throughout August 1995 and June 1996, all of Gilbert's pets mysteriously dying throughout the years, the story Samantha Harris had told him about Gilbert's cats, and, possibly, Glenn Gilbert's deteriorating health throughout the fall of 1995.

When Plante got home, he called Murphy right away.

“Now, sweetheart,” Murphy said, “all we have to do is find out where she got it.”

Ketamine wasn't a controlled substance in 1996, so anyone could order the drug through the mail if he or she wanted. Kristen Gilbert had been telling a story for the past two years that she and Glenn had always ordered drugs for their pets through catalogue companies so they could save money. But Glenn, of course, later denied it.

There was one more interesting fact that made much more sense to Plante and Murphy now: The VAMC had never purchased or stocked ketamine, but Baystate, along with many other area hospitals—including all the veterinarian clinics in the area—had.

Perhaps Gilbert had stolen the drug?

They soon developed the theory that Gilbert had ordered several different drugs for several different reasons, one of which was to poison people. They surmised that she had tried to kill Skwira with epinephrine, but when it failed, she took a ride with him to Baystate and somewhere along the way tried to “zip” him with ketamine. That would explain why Skwira suddenly began having hallucinations once he got to Baystate, and later at the VAMC, shortly before he died.

After a laborious search, they couldn't locate a canceled check or money order in Gilbert's name, thus tying her directly to mail-ordering ketamine. At best, it was a longshot, anyway. Gilbert had made mistakes in the past, sure. But using her own name to order a potential murder weapon, nearly everyone agreed, was not something she would have likely done.

It turned out to be another dead end.

 

 

On September 22, Steve Plante got the news he had been dreading ever since the beginning of the year: His father had passed away.

After returning from the funeral a few days later, Plante learned that Mary Vella, Angelo Vella's daughter, was going to be informed that day that Gilbert had attempted to kill her father. Vella had died of natural causes only a short time before, but Plante knew Mary well enough to know that the news of Gilbert's poisoning attempt was going to devastate her.

“Let me tell her,” Plante insisted.

As he walked Mary out of the US Attorney's Office after breaking the news, she broke down in his arms and began crying. So Plante comforted her.

“It's going to be okay, Mary,” he said.

As he stood there, everything just hit Plante all at once: his father dying, the funeral, the years of the investigation piling up, and the ripple effect on the lives Gilbert had ruined. He was mad at himself for being pulled away from his father by the investigation. He had wanted to go to his father, who had been following the Gilbert case right along, one day and tell him before he died that she had been found guilty. But now he realized that day would never come.

For a few minutes, Plante and Mary Vella didn't speak; they just stood, rocking back and forth, embracing each other and crying.

For perhaps the first time, Plante realized how much of an impact Gilbert's narcissistic behavior had on the people involved, not to mention how many lives she had affected. The killing had stopped up at the VAMC years ago, but the aftereffects were still being felt years later.
It was time
, Plante thought,
Gilbert paid for that.

November 24, 1998 was a dreary day in Springfield. Temperatures hovered around sixty degrees, which was a pleasant relief from all of the cold weather lately, but it had been raining on and off all day long.

Kristen Gilbert was confined to her six-by-eight-foot cell in Danbury, Connecticut. For her, the gloominess of the day would pale in comparison to what was about to happen.

With Kevin Murphy and Steve Plante standing like bodyguards behind him, Bill Welch, Massachusetts US Attorney Donald Stern, and Ariane Vuono called a press conference for late afternoon. It was no secret around town that the time had finally come for the feds to announce the long list of indictments against former VAMC registered nurse Kristen Gilbert.

One might have expected the attorneys to be gloating, a look of triumph in their eyes. But Stern, Welch and Vuono were stoic, as if it had been a long night of deep reflection. After all, they weren't only there to announce the government was going ahead with its serial murder case against a former nurse, but to solidify to the public that, from their view, several people had been murdered while under Gilbert's care. When the facts about the case emerged, the public was going to be outraged.

Donald Stern stepped up to the podium, while print reporters sat captivated and television cameras focused on him sharply. They waited to hear what the government had on Gilbert.

With his normally soft-spoken voice now emotional, Stern called the government's case against Gilbert “deeply disturbing.” Looking from side to side and blinking continuously as cameras flashed around him, Stern said, “The fact that a nurse, expected and obliged to care for patients who were in an intensive care facility at the VA [hospital], would murder them in their vulnerable condition while they lie in their beds, is shocking and un
think
able.”

Stern didn't want to give away the government's case, so he quickly announced that he wouldn't be addressing what the government thought was Gilbert's motive for the killings. Yet he assured everyone in the room that the deaths were
not
mercy killings.

“These men did not want to die,” he said. “This was not a mercy killing by any stretch of the imagination.”

WWLP, TV-20, one of the local television news stations that had been covering the Gilbert case since her bomb-threat trial, headlined the day's events later that night by beginning its newscast with: “She was supposed to be an angel of mercy; instead, she was an angel of death.”

Gilbert was indicted on three counts of murder for the deaths of Henry Hudon, Ed Skwira and Kenny Cutting; two counts of attempted murder for Angelo Vella and Thomas Callahan; and obstruction of justice for, among many other things, blocking James Perrault's car back on September 10, 1996 while he was en route to the US Attorney's Office. Six months later, two more indictments were added: one for the murder of Stanley Jagodowski and another for the attempted murder of Francis Marier.

After the official announcement, talk around town quickly shifted from shock and disbelief to whether the government would pursue the death penalty.

US Attorney Donald Stern said he wasn't sure if his office was going forward with the death penalty, stating that he first wanted to speak to family members of the victims and see how they felt about it.

Christine Duquette, Henry Hudon's sister, was later interviewed by a local television station and said she wasn't quite sure how she felt regarding the death penalty.

“Now, my parents, on the other hand,” she said, “. . . that's their baby, even though he was thirty-five. That was their son. I honestly think they're going to look at this, especially as the trial goes on in the months to come . . . as, you know, an eye for an eye.”

No matter what any of the families felt, however, the decision to prosecute Gilbert under the death penalty was in the hands of one person: US Attorney General Janet Reno. Her office would have the final say.