Perfect Poison (19 page)

At about 8:00
P.M.
on March 6, after attending a Lenten service at her local church, Renee Walsh opened the door to her apartment to the sound of a ringing telephone. Without even turning on the lights or taking off her coat, she picked up the receiver.

“Hi, Renee. It's Kristen.”

Walsh was breathless. She hadn't seen nor heard from Gilbert since before she had turned her in.

Act normal . . . act normal
, she told herself.
Just take it easy and see what she wants
.

“Kristen? Oh, you caught me off guard . . . I just got home.”

Gilbert didn't waste any time.

“What did they talk to you about? What do they want to know?”

With her mind racing, Walsh said, as calmly as she could, “Well . . . they are asking a lot of questions regarding policy and procedure. They wanted to know about certain drugs we use during codes.”

As Walsh said this, she turned on the light and took a piece of paper out of the drawer and began jotting down what Gilbert was saying.

“There's been an increase of codes, Kristen,” Walsh said when Gilbert fell silent. “And they felt the need to look into it.”

“They talked to you for three hours about
that?”

“How do you know they had me in there for three hours?”

“Carole [Osman] told me.”

Walsh remembered seeing Osman on the ward as she got called down to talk to SA Plante. She made a mental note:
Tell Kathy and John to stay the hell away from Carole Osman
.

“Well, Kristen, I don't know what else to say,” Walsh said.

Gilbert's tone became more aggressive. She spoke fast.

“I have to tell you this makes me paranoid as hell, Renee. If they start looking at the records, my name is all over seventy-five percent of the deaths.”

“There are a lot of other names are on those charts, Kristen. It's not just yours.”

“I wonder why they feel they have to investigate this now.”

“I have no idea.”

“You don't think that the family of one of the patients [who] died filed a wrongful death suit, do you?”

“I haven't heard anything like that, Kristen.”

“You know how everyone always jokes and teases me about being the angel of death and always being there when someone has a cardiac arrest? You don't think anyone would be stupid enough to say something like that to the inspectors, do you?”

“No, no, no,” Walsh said. “None of the questions have [lent] themselves to that. That's not what they talked to me about, anyway.”

Gilbert wouldn't let up.

“What
did
they ask you about then . . . for three hours?”

“Just a broad range of things. You know, Kristen, they wanted to know how well we're staffed. How things work on the ward. Stuff like that.”

“But why? Why do they want to know this?”

“There's been an increase in the number of deaths lately, Kristen. That's no secret.”

“Why, though?”

“I don't
know,
Kristen. Listen, I have to get going. I am not even out of my coat yet. I need to eat dinner. I'll talk to you later.”

“Yeah,” Gilbert said. “If I'm not in jail!”

By March 13, all of the HCI inspectors summoned to the scene since February had been sent back to their offices in Washington, and SA Plante, now alone, was left to sift through a mountain of documents and interviews. After quickly ruling out the possibility of malpractice, improper patient care or poor ventilation, Plante carefully began to put flesh on the bones of what he now considered a criminal investigation.

For SA Plante, as he went through the scores of interviews and studied each of them meticulously, his focus was drawn toward the many lies Gilbert had told.

She had met with Dell Levy and Rayda Nadal between March 8 and 13, and they had asked her to explain Francis Marier's and Thomas Callahan's codes. On both occasions, Plante learned, Gilbert went out of her way to mislead them.

Lie number one
.

Regarding Marier, Gilbert said that because Marier had been on a restricted diet, and on his usual dose of insulin, he was getting too much insulin for the amount of food he had been taking in, and thus he had gone into shock and coded because of that. This was in total contrast to her earlier story about Marier's blood sugar level being at 44 when she said she checked it shortly before he coded.

Lie number two
.

As for Callahan, Gilbert claimed she had contacted the on-call doctor, and he had come in to check on Callahan right before he coughed and coded. A quick look at Callahan's chart told Plante that no doctor had come into the room because there was no note written by any doctor.

On March 12, during an interview with SA Plante, after he had informed her about the “statistical analysis and the correlation between the increased number of patients' deaths and the times she was on duty,” Gilbert said, “The deaths and codes came in spurts. It was probably just a coincidence [that I was on duty]. It was just my time to be involved.”

Plante then grilled her about why she thought she had been around so many codes.

“The LPNs and nursing assistants frequently called on me and reported to me crisis situations, thus increasing my numbers.”

Plante knew already from talking to several of the LPNs and nursing assistants that this was a lie. It didn't matter who found a patient in an emergency situation; that person would call the code. One didn't have to be a nurse to call a code.

This, of course, wasn't evidence that Gilbert had killed anyone. Plante was smarter than that. But it did make it clear she was trying to hide something.

 

 

When Dell Levy returned to Washington, she was surprised when she was given only twenty days to complete a report based on what she found at the Leeds VAMC.

In her ten-year career working for the government, Levy had been given upward of a year or more to conclude her findings regarding cases of this magnitude. Why the change all of a sudden ?

The VA was in a panic. It realized that the biggest problem it faced right away was that there had been zero accountability for the ampoules of epinephrine that went missing. Armed with that information, the VA sent out a memo to all of its facilities stating its concerns, making sure to let each center know to begin some sort of inventory regarding its supply of epinephrine.

Levy said later that the simple fact the VAMC in Leeds “lacked any ability to review trends in deaths and codes on a particular ward that could be associated with a particular healthcare employee” was also of great concern to her bosses upon her return. They were afraid what happened at the VAMC in Leeds could be happening elsewhere, and no one would know about it unless a whistle-blower had come forward.

None of this, however, was of any concern to SA Plante. His job was to catch a killer—and now, with the mounting evidence he was accumulating against Gilbert, it seemed as if it was only a matter of time.

Going through boxes and boxes of medical records, SA Steve Plante's gut instincts told him that he could be investigating the most successful serial killer the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had ever seen. During Gilbert's seven-year tenure at the VAMC, three hundred and fifty patients had died. She hadn't killed them all, of course. But even one, Plante thought, was enough to keep him looking for more.

By the end of March, Plante moved his case off “the hill” and took it into town. It was time to start banging on doors.

Back in February, Kristen had phoned her estranged husband, Glenn, and told him that an investigation by the IGO “regarding a high number of deaths on a certain ward” was under way at the VAMC. She said SA Plante would likely be calling.

“You don't have to say anything if you don't want to, Glenn.”

Knowing that Plante was sooner or later going be knocking on Glenn's door, in a bit of a panic one afternoon in late March, Kristen called again. She wanted Glenn to be prepared.

“You have spousal privileges, you know, Glenn,” she said.

“Marriage protects one spouse from incriminating another. The privileges are there, Glenn, if you want to use them.”

Glenn was still in the dark about a lot of things; he didn't really understand what his soon-to-be former wife was talking about, because he didn't really think that she was involved.

This was the first time Kristen had flat-out asked Glenn to keep quiet. For the past six weeks or so, she would call and just express her anger toward whoever had been cooperating with the investigation—mainly John Wall, Kathy Rix, Lori Naumowitz and David Rejniak.

Kristen felt they had betrayed her.

Regarding Lori, she said, “How could that bitch speak to those people, Glenn?”

But now she was telling Glenn there was going to come a time when he would have to make a decision about whose side he was on.

“Yeah, whatever,” Glenn said and hung up. He wanted to be left alone.

SA Plante, as Kristen had promised, paid a visit to Glenn around the first week of April, but Glenn didn't say much. He wasn't hostile or rude. But he made it perfectly clear that he wasn't going to be talking about his soon-to-be ex. They had kids. The kids needed their mother, even if they were no longer living together.

Plante didn't push Glenn. He knew that if it came down to it, he could have him subpoenaed. Then he'd have to talk.

 

 

SA Plante faced a number of obstacles as spring approached. Most of the people he'd reached out to were not all that thrilled about answering questions about Gilbert, yet they continued to help. But Glenn Gilbert and James Perrault—the two people he needed most, if he was going to begin to understand the kind of person Gilbert truly was—weren't talking about their personal relationships with her. Perrault would answer any questions related to the VAMC—“He had no problem with that,” Plante later recalled—but when it came to his personal or sexual relationship with Gilbert, which was still burning strong as ever, he continually said it was off limits.

“He knew his rights. He was being well informed.”

What was it going to take, Plante often wondered, to get these guys to talk? He knew that ninety percent of the evidence he needed for a conviction was in the medical records at the VAMC. But he also knew that if he was going to understand that evidence, he would have to get into the minds of those who knew Gilbert best: Perrault and Glenn.

As Plante contemplated what to do next, Gilbert went on the move.

During one of her frequent calls to Glenn to find out what he'd heard, Kristen mentioned that the investigation had been centered on a “certain type of drug.”

This piqued Glenn's interest.

“What kind of drug?”

“Epi,” Gilbert said.

“Epi . . . what is that?”

Gilbert explained. Then she said, “If they're looking for it in these bodies, well, they're
going
to find it!”

Glenn was confused.

“Because,” Gilbert said. “Because . . . they're focusing on it as the reason these people died.... [But],” she insisted, “it would be hard to prove.”

She was correct, of course.

All human beings have epinephrine—more commonly known as adrenaline—in their tissue. Whenever a person becomes startled or scared, his blood pressure rises and he feels anxious.

That is adrenaline at work.

Detecting excessive amounts of it in one's system, however, was not clear science at the time. There was no definitive way to test for it—and any results would be vehemently challenged in court.

 

 

Plante decided that he had to present Glenn Gilbert and James Perrault with some hard facts if he was going to convince them that Gilbert was the malicious serial killer he now thought her to be. He would have to show them in black and white the evidence he had without giving away his case. Yet, before he could do that, it was time to start thinking about getting the US Attorney's Office involved.

Gilbert, on the other hand, was acting stranger than ever.

Near the end of May, as she was wandering around the grounds of the VAMC looking for Perrault one afternoon, she ran into RN Karen Abderhalden, whom she had known quite well and still considered a close friend.

“Karen,” she said, “have you seen Jim? I have his dinner.”

“No.”

“Listen, Karen, do you think you can get me a needle and syringe?”

“What? Why, Kristen?”

“I need to draw some blood from Mindy [her and Glenn's dog]. Glenn and I are short on cash. We need to have Mindy checked for heartworms. We can save some cash if we bring the blood to the vet ourselves.”

“Absolutely not, Kristen. You're crazy for even asking such a thing during the middle of an investigation like this.”