Perfect Poison (46 page)

By the afternoon of March 14, after almost two weeks of deliberations, the jury submitted word to the court that it had reached a verdict on all counts.

“Before we walked in, I looked in the mirror and realized I was crying and didn't even know it,” Scott Stetz later recalled. “I'm twenty years old, and here I am deciding the fate of this woman. It was a remarkable feeling.”

As the jury filed into the courtroom, the anxiety Stetz had felt in the deliberations room stayed with him as he took his seat, which was about twenty yards from Gilbert. He couldn't look at her, or the attorneys, or anyone. He felt as if his heart were going to stop as the foreperson handed in the verdicts.

Gilbert, sitting nervously, moving around in her chair, hung her head and began to sob as the packed courtroom learned of her fate for the first time.

On three counts—involving Skwira, Cutting and Hudon—she was found guilty of first-degree murder. On one count—Jagodowski's death—she was found guilty of second-degree murder. In the deaths of Angelo Vella and Thomas Callahan, Gilbert was found guilty of attempted murder.

But the jury acquitted her of the death of Francis Marier.

“At that point,” one juror later recalled, “it didn't matter. A conviction on the Francis Marier count wouldn't have added anything to her sentence. We had doubts that she did it, so we chose to acquit.”

 

 

The only thing left now for Kristen Gilbert was to learn whether she was going to die for her crimes. The jury would sit, once again, and hear testimony as the government argued why she should die and Gilbert's defense team argued why she should live. Emotions would run high. Rumor around the court was that Glenn Gilbert was going to testify that in 1995 his then-wife had tried to poison him. In addition, the jury would finally hear about the false bomb threat Gilbert had been convicted of back in 1998, along with her extensive history of violence toward the men in her life.

For US attorneys Ariane Vuono and Bill Welch, their day had come. They could present to the jury, finally, a complete portrait of Kristen Gilbert.

 

 

Thursday, March 15, at a hearing to set the ground rules for the sentencing, Bill Welch informed Judge Ponsor that the government, on the one hand, wanted to call Glenn Gilbert to testify during the sentencing phase. On the other, it was having second thoughts because it placed Glenn and his family “in an extremely difficult position.”

Sensing that Glenn was going to testify against her, Gilbert refused to show up in court on Friday, and signed a waiver allowing her attorneys to handle her affairs. Ponsor, however, wouldn't hear of it. He demanded that she be there, if for nothing else, to avoid a mistrial.

By Monday, March 19, Welch and Vuono decided to withdraw Glenn from their witness list after giving the matter some prudent thought. Welch and Vuono later said they could have made Glenn testify, but Welch explained that Glenn was totally against being part of putting the mother of his children to death.

The decision had little to do with the job Bill Welch had been sworn to do as a public servant, and it wouldn't change the tongue-lashing he was about to unleash on Gilbert.

During his opening statement, Welch said the killings were “morally repugnant and deserve death.” They were “so dark, so unfathomable,” Welch argued, that “the circumstances of these murders show that no humanity exists behind the mask. Behind that face, it is dark, it is empty. It is evil!”

Harry Miles asked jurors not to use their “God-like” powers. “Kristen Gilbert is in your hands, and I can only ask that they be merciful.”

Miles then wanted the jury to understand that his client never intended to kill anyone. For the first time, Gilbert's defense team actually admitted that she had perhaps done something wrong.

“Her aim,” Miles said sincerely, “was to cause medical emergencies so she could be a hero.”

By Wednesday, March 21, the courtroom was filled with relatives of the victims, Gilbert's parents, a few of her relatives, and a throng of reporters and spectators.

Using family photographs displayed over the monitors in the courtroom, Welch and Vuono had relatives of the victims on the stand explain how their losses had affected their daily lives.

Ed Skwira's daughter, Marsha Yarrows, said, “There is not a day that goes by that I don't think about him. It's a big loss. You don't have him for advice. You don't have him there for holidays.”

Kenny Cutting's father said, “He made me a better man.”

Then it was Nancy Cutting's turn. Then Julia Hudon. One after the other, family members of the victims brought tears to the eyes of some of the jurors as they explained the true nature of their losses.

“I felt a connection there between the family members and the person they had lost,” one juror later recalled. “When [Kristen Gilbert's] father was on the stand, I felt like he was reading from a checklist he had written beforehand. There was no emotion.”

Richard Strickland finally got his chance to explain how deeply the loss of his daughter would be felt if she were to be killed by lethal injection. With Harry Miles at the podium, a photo of Gilbert as a newborn appeared on screens throughout the room as Strickland explained how he had not been there when Gilbert was born.

Next, as Gilbert began to cry, Strickland began on page one and described where Gilbert had grown up, her accomplishments in high school, and how gifted a child she was.

When Miles asked him how his daughter's death might affect the family, Strickland said, “I only have two daughters.... How else can one describe the love of a daughter?”

Then he explained how his wife might not be able to survive Gilbert's execution. He shocked the room by saying that Gilbert's mother had been in Springfield for the past five weeks, but couldn't bring herself to sit in the courtroom. He said she was depressed and suffered from high blood pressure and glaucoma.

“She couldn't deal with it emotionally.”

“All her father did,” Scott Stetz later said, “was talk about himself. It was all about him and his wife. His spiel had nothing to do with his daughter. Anyone sitting in that room could have seen that!”

Glenn Gilbert finally spoke on Friday, March 23, through Cynthia Monahon, the director of an outpatient clinic where Gilbert's two children were being treated.

Not surprising anyone, Glenn was speaking on behalf of his former wife, hoping the jury would spare her life for the sake of the kids.

“He believes the execution of Kristen Gilbert,” Monahon read, “will have a . . . profoundly detrimental impact on his children and their well-being.” Glenn Gilbert believes, she added, that it is “critically important for his two sons to have their mother as they grow older.”

Welch and Vuono chose not to cross-examine Monahan.

 

 

The jury room during the death penalty phase was a somber, gloom-filled atmosphere of bewilderment and concern. Jurors decided there would be no discussion. They would take a vote, and that would be it. Gilbert's fate would be decided.

“The fact that she was a good mother, a good nurse, and did all these things for the needy was great,” Scott Stetz later recalled. “But it didn't give her a license to kill!”

Stetz was adamant. He wanted to see Gilbert die.

At noon, on Monday, March 26, after the jury failed to reach a unanimous decision, by a vote of eight to four, Gilbert's life had been spared. When Judge Ponsor read the jury's decision, Gilbert and her attorneys wept.

But it still wasn't over.

Now it was up to Judge Michael Ponsor to decide on Gilbert's punishment.

After her lawyers indicated that she had nothing to say, Ponsor, his voice quiet and unyielding, sentenced Gilbert to four consecutive life terms.

“This should be the beginning of a better day for the relatives of her victims. . . .” Ponsor said, looking out into the galley of spectators, reporters, and anyone else at the courthouse who could find an open space to sit and listen.

 

 

In May 2001, Kristen Heather Strickland Gilbert was transferred from a federal prison for women in Framingham, Massachusetts, to a federal prison for women in Carswell, Texas, where she has remained ever since.

By June, the Court had tallied the cost of Gilbert's defense: approximately one million, eight hundred thousand dollars, with Harry Miles receiving the bulk of it—six hundred and fifty-four thousand, nine hundred and eighty-nine dollars.

Then the government's cost of prosecuting the case was released: about seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, merely half of what the defense had amassed in expenses.

What was the cost of one ampoule of 1:1000 strength epinephrine, which was enough to kill either Ed Skwira, Henry Hudon, Kenny Cutting or Stanley Jagodowski?

Twenty-two cents.

As of the date of this writing, Kristen Gilbert has filed “a notice of appeal.” A legal brief, spelling out her reasons why the convictions should be overturned, was due in February 2003, but there has been no ruling on the appeal or brief.

I made several attempts to contact Gilbert and her former lawyers, David Hoose and Harry Miles. They never returned my phone calls or letters. A letter was sent to Charles Rankin, a lawyer from Boston who is now handling Gilbert's affairs, shortly before this book went to press, offering him an opportunity to make a statement, but I have not heard back from him.

According to Springfield's
Union-News
, Carole Osman and Ann French continue to cultivate a close relationship with Gilbert, corresponding via telephone and mail. Gilbert has said through Osman and French that she misses her children and spends a lot of her “free” time reading novels Osman sends her. An “avid sewer,” Ann French told the
Union-News,
Gilbert has been making quilts for premature babies. Doing this, French claims, helps Gilbert forget about “being branded a serial killer.”

Ann French went on to say that Gilbert is “very embarrassed by the whole situation”; and she can't stand the fact that some people have compared her to the likes of Timothy McVeigh and Manual Noriega.

Glenn Gilbert, who still resides in Florence, refuses any contact with the media.

James Perrault, along with several of Gilbert's former coworkers, still works at the Leeds VAMC. Fulfilling a life-long dream, Perrault is now a part-time cop for the town of Hatfield, Massachusetts.

John Wall, Renee Walsh, Kathy Rix, Dr. Michael Baden, Special Agent Steve Plante, Detective Kevin Murphy, Supervising US Attorney Kevin O'Regan, Dr. Thomas Rocco, Dr. Thomas Graboys, US attorneys Bill Welch and Ariane Vuono, along with many more, were honored by the VA with the
Eagle Award
in June 2001 for their efforts in bringing Gilbert to justice.

SA Plante, Detective Murphy, Ariane Vuono and Bill Welch later received the
Director's Award,
for their “outstanding contributions in law enforcement,” from the Attorney General's Office in Washington, DC.

Judge Michael Ponsor ended up fining Gilbert $1.5 million, noting that she would also have to “reimburse her victims' survivors for funeral expenses.”

Based on her pay scale at the Carswell, Texas, penitentiary where she is incarcerated, working an eight-hour day, five days a week, it will take Gilbert more than thirty-five hundred years to pay off her fine.

Several civil suits were ultimately filed by victims' families against the Leeds VAMC. In June 2002, however, Judge Ponsor allowed a government motion to dismiss the suits filed by the families of Stanley Jagodowski, Ed Skwira, Angelo Vella, along with the families of Carl Rauch and Ralph McEwen, two veterans who were not named in the indictments against Gilbert but had also died—like many, many more—while under her care.

The civil suits, Ponsor ruled, were filed after the statute of limitations had run out. The families argued that they didn't know there had been malpractice because Gilbert's crimes weren't made public for some time after the deaths.

“By 1996,” Ponsor wrote, “each plaintiff knew—at least—that an investigation into the unusually high number of deaths from cardiac arrests at the VAMC was under way.” The families were devastated by this.

But Kenny Cutting's wife, Nancy Cutting, filed a lawsuit
within
the time frame of the statute, Ponsor ruled.

Her case continues.

 

 

The United States is home to more than twenty-five million veterans of military service, about three million of whom are treated every year for various reasons at some twelve hundred government medical facilities nationwide. All fifty states have veteran patient care centers of some sort.

With an average of twenty-five million outpatient visits and one million inpatient discharges yearly, the Department of Veterans Affairs, Veterans Health Administration, is the largest healthcare system in the world. With a budget of $20 billion, and a staff of more than one hundred and eighty thousand—sixty thousand of which are nurses—it prides itself on the quality of the people it employs.

Practice, Quality of Care
and
Performance
stand at the top of the VHA's mission statement.

To some, however, these words mean nothing. Many times, when there is a problem nurse, for example, the VA does little to discipline him or her and, like the Catholic Church, simply relocates the problem person.

“[The VA] has a way of never getting rid of anybody,” one nurse who has worked for the VA for more than twenty years and chooses to remain anonymous for obvious reasons says. “If you're a bad nurse, the worse I've ever seen them do to anybody is move them to another ward.”

 

 

About six months after I began researching this book, I called the VAMC in Leeds and asked the Public Relations Director if I could come up to the hospital for a tour. Ward C had been dismantled by then, but I wanted to get a feel for the place, its sounds and smells, the color of the paint on the walls, the ebb and flow of the hospital, and the people who work there.

“I'm writing a book about the Gilbert murders,” I said. “A tour of the facility would help color the background of my book.”

After a brief silence, “Absolutely not!” she shouted.

She was, obviously, appalled that I had the nerve even to ask.

“Well, I would just want to look around to get a feel for the place, ma'am. I mean, a majority of the book takes place inside your facility.”

“You are not welcome here. We would
never,”
she said, raising her voice again, “allow someone to come up here for that reason. It is against policy.”

I could hear her huffing and puffing.
How dare you!

A week or so later, I had coffee with a local reporter who had covered the Gilbert story.

“I understand you spoke to [the Public Relations Director],” he said as we sat down.

Stymied, I looked at him.
How the hell did you know?

I didn't say anything at first, though. Then, after collecting my thoughts, “Yes,” I said, “and boy, was she pissed.”

“I saw her yesterday,” he said, leaning back in his chair, smiling, gloating. “She said that if
I
were to write the Gilbert book she would have no trouble allowing me full access to the hospital.”

He took a bite of his bagel, eyeing at me the entire time.

“Do you think that I didn't go up there already and poke around before calling her?” I asked.

“What?”

“I've been up there two times,” I said. “Inside the hospital, looking around, asking questions, taking notes . . .”

“How did you get in?”

“I walked.”

 

 

As the weeks went by and I began to make my way through town, visiting all of the locations involved in this story, beginning the process of interviewing people, I learned quickly that the VAMC in Leeds would rather wish away the fact that Kristen Gilbert went on a murderous rampage under its nose for—as some have suggested—seven years, rather than confront it.

“Push it all underneath a very large rug,” one nurse told me.

Ever since coming forward with their allegations, the three nurses responsible for initiating the investigation into the deaths at the Leeds VAMC—Renee Walsh, Kathy Rix and John Wall—have been treated as if they have broken some sort of sacred vow.

Wall, Walsh and Rix did something many of their coworkers, for years, had the opportunity to do, but, for whatever reason, chose not to. Their photographs should be on the walls in the entrances of all the VA medical centers throughout the country, visible as soon as you walk in. A caption above each photo should praise their integrity, their courage, their honesty. These people are
heroes.

Throughout Renee Walsh's VA career, she has received several monetary awards for, she told a reporter one day, “just doing her job.” One time, she received a $250 award for attending a meeting to help a ward merger; a second time, she was awarded $500 for working with two younger nurses, helping them deal with hospice patients who were dying.

Yet though Walsh stuck her neck and career on the line and turned in Gilbert, to this day, neither she—nor Kathy Rix nor John Wall—has received anything from the Leeds VAMC other than animosity and silence.

It's not about the money, Walsh told that same reporter. It's about being recognized for coming forward and “doing the right thing.”

Three nurses turn in a coworker and save more lives in one day than anyone at the VAMC will save in their entire careers, and the Leeds VAMC acts as if it never happened, shunning Rix and Walsh every chance it can. (John Wall no longer works for the VA.)

According to documents I obtained later, in late 2001, the National Forensic Nursing Conference, held yearly in Colorado, sent an e-mail notice to all of the VA medical centers across the country with instructions to notify the nursing staffs in all its facilities that the annual conference was coming up. Renee Walsh and Kathy Rix, along with former nursing manager Melodie Turner, had received similar messages about similar conferences and VA-related matters routinely throughout the years.

The 2001 NFN conference, however, was quite a bit different from years past: The entire conference was dedicated to discussing Kristen Gilbert and, in general, serial killers in hospitals.

Yet neither Melodie Turner, Renee Walsh nor Kathy Rix received the e-mail announcement. It was as if the Leeds VAMC didn't want them to attend—and, more sinisterly, didn't even want them to know about it.

But it didn't end there.

The Leeds VAMC not only failed to tell Rix, Walsh or Turner about the conference, but it paid for and sent William Boutelle, Chief of Staff, and David Levin, chief of Quality Management. In fact, the two men were keynote speakers.

Kathy Rix and Renee Walsh were directly responsible for the apprehension, and partly responsible for the conviction, of Kristen Gilbert, thus initiating the subject matter of the conference in the first place. If
anyone
from the Leeds VAMC should have been speaking at that conference, one would think it would have been Rix, Walsh, or both.

 

 

It must be noted that US Attorney Ariane Vuono, who, in my opinion, was often treated poorly by the local press—many times being pushed to the side in post-trial stories, leaving the reader to believe that Bill Welch tried the case by himself—played as big a role in Gilbert's conviction as any other member of the government's team.

In addition, Gilbert's former attorney, David Hoose, in a post-trial newspaper story, likened US attorney Bill Welch to a “Nazi.” Hoose was upset because Welch pursued the death penalty in the Gilbert case so vigorously, and made it sound as though he had a personal vendetta against Gilbert. I spent some time with Mr. Welch, studied his entire career, reviewed hundreds of pages of documents he prepared for the Gilbert trial, and spoke to many people who know him. I can say that Bill Welch is one of the most considerate, well-spoken, truth-seeking, and justice-driven lawyers I have ever met. David Hoose could not have been more unprofessional and ridiculous with his comments.

Nearly everyone I spoke to while writing this book asked me the same question:
Why did she do it?

There is no definitive answer to that question. There's plenty of speculation. Rumor. Gossip. Theories. But it is all
spin.
My answer, after spending years studying the minds of the criminally insane and more than a year and half researching Kristen Gilbert's entire life, is still the same as it was from day one: Adults don't one day wake up and decide to become serial killers; they are wired at some point—usually during childhood—so that they might later cultivate a malevolence and perpetrate crimes based on what they have been taught. Only Kristen Gilbert knows when, where and by whom that evil seed was planted. She is the only person on this earth who can honestly say if there even was a reason behind her brutality—and to this day, Gilbert continues to deny having anything to do with the VAMC murders for which she was convicted.

 

—M. William Phelps

October 21, 2002