Perfect Poison (26 page)

Security went around and checked the pay phones in the immediate vicinity of the hospital and instructed staff to pay extra special attention to the phones inside the hospital. There was a chance the caller had made the calls from the grounds of the VAMC, or from one of the pay phones inside one of the buildings.

Around seven o'clock, Northampton Police Officer John McCarthy was ordered by his superiors to close off all access to the hospital.

As the process of evacuating patients began, state troopers, VAMC security, officers from the neighboring towns of Easthampton and Northampton, along with fire personnel, kept everyone calm as they directed patients and staff to safe areas. Things were getting hectic by the minute. People were scared. No one could say with any certainty that there wasn't a bomb in the building.

A small crowd had gathered by the main entrance on Route 9. Motorists driving by stopped to ask what was going on. Even if the threat turned out to be false, as almost everyone suspected, the caller had certainly done enough to make life at the VAMC, at least for this one night, a living hell—which was perhaps his only intention.

The parking lot of the Look Restaurant, a popular diner just fifty yards across the street from the VAMC's main entrance on Route 9, filled with onlookers and rubberneckers—among them, Kristen Gilbert, who later told a friend she stood a few feet from the pay telephone booth in the parking lot watching everything.

Then, at 7:07, amid the chaos that had erupted both in and outside the hospital as word about the threats began to spread, the security phone rang.

“It's your job to think about those patients,” the caller said.

It was, in one sense, a belated reaction to Perrault's previous plea of “think about the patients.”

This time, however, Perrault noticed that the caller sounded hurt, almost as if he were—or had been—crying.

After a moment of silence, “I
do
care,” the caller said. “But the government needs a message.”

Perrault tried reasoning with him.

“Yes, I care about the patients, sir. But I need help with working with them.”

The caller abruptly hung up. It was obvious now that the calls had been pre-recorded. They were too one-sided. Too well planned. There was no interaction. The caller often talked right over Perrault's voice. Plus, if Perrault said something, the caller never addressed it immediately. It wouldn't be until the next call that he would make reference to the previous call. This led everyone to believe that the VA bomber was, in fact, recording his voice and playing it back.

By this time, staff were taking those patients who could walk on their own out of Building One. Patients confined to beds were rolled out. Those too weak or sick to walk were taken out on stretchers and wheelchairs. Some were extremely ill. Just moving them could be dangerous and life-threatening. The largest concern was for those patients with pneumonia and/or respiratory diseases and illnesses. Just exposing them to outside elements could worsen their conditions significantly.

In all, about fifty patients were moved without any serious problems.

After a careful sweep of the building, no suspicious objects were found, and it was soon determined that there were no bombs. As a precautionary measure, however, the evacuated patients, along with some of the staff, spent the night in Building Eleven and the Recreation Hall and were told they would be returned to their regular beds the following day.

Everyone was curious about the caller's identity. It was a Veterans Affairs Hospital, for God's sake. The caller had made no demands. He hadn't claimed to be part of some radical, extremist group.

What was the point?

Samantha Harris had done a pretty good job throughout the final weeks of September of keeping a low profile—as far as running into Gilbert outside in the parking lot or taking her phone calls. The last thing Harris wanted to do was blow her cover. If Gilbert found out that she was literally tracking her every movement for the government, Harris feared the consequences would be fatal.

On the evening of September 26, Harris prepared to watch her favorite Thursday night television program,
ER,
when the sound of two cats fighting outside her window interrupted her.

Like most residents in town, Harris had no idea that the bomb scare at the VAMC was just winding down.

Around 8:00, she walked into the kitchen, grabbed a glass of water, went outside, and splashed the cats, hoping to drive them away.

While Harris was walking back up the cement walkway toward her apartment, she saw Gilbert barrel into the parking lot at high speed and pull her Olds into an open space in front of her apartment. At first, Gilbert didn't see Harris. She was too busy fidgeting with her house keys and looking in all directions.

Standing about a hundred yards from Harris, keys in hand, ready to open her door, Gilbert, in a surprised tone of voice, yelled, “What are
you
doing out here?”

Harris walked closer but didn't say anything.

“What. Are. You. Doing. Out. Here?”

Harris held up the empty glass of water and explained that the cats had been fighting. It was disrupting her show.

“Oh . . .” Gilbert said, somewhat relieved.

“Where are you coming from?” Harris asked.

“I'm . . . I'm . . . I'm just getting back from doing my laundry,” Gilbert said, talking fast, looking around.

“Laundry?”

“I
have
to get inside, though. ‘Must-see TV' is on tonight! You know how much I love that
ER,”
Gilbert said. Then she paused for a moment to catch her breath. “See ya, Sami. I gots to go!”

 

 

The following day, one of the local newspapers ran a small article about the bomb threat the previous night.

That morning, while Harris was walking with her husband toward her car, Gilbert came running out of her apartment as if she had been waiting by the window for Harris to emerge.

“Take a look at this, Sami,” Gilbert said, holding the newspaper open to the page where the article appeared, pointing to it. She was excited. Wound up.

“What am I looking at?” Harris asked.

“The article. The article. The bomb threat. See . . . it's right there!” Gilbert pointed to it. “I was at the Look Restaurant eating dinner when all of this happened,” she said as though it had been some type of sporting event. “I watched the whole thing unfold.”

Harris looked at Gilbert without saying anything.

Gilbert, on the other hand, couldn't get her words out fast enough. She read the entire article aloud.

“I have a theory about who did it,” Gilbert said after reading the article. “You want to hear it?”

“Sure, Kristen,” Harris said, looking at her husband, who was rolling his eyes. “You're probably going to tell me anyway, right?”

“It was probably a former patient at the VA who wanted to sit by and watch. Some nut who wanted to see all the action. He probably called in the threat from right there at the Look Restaurant pay phone.”

“Could be,” Harris said.

In a frenzy, Gilbert continued to explain how she had seen fire trucks and police swarming the area around the VAMC. At one point, Harris had to tell her to chill out.

“Take your time.”

Then, as Harris and her husband got into their car and Gilbert went back inside her apartment, Harris recalled the conversation she'd had with Gilbert less than twelve hours before.

If she had been doing her laundry, like she claimed,
Harris thought,
wouldn't she have, at the least, had a basket of clothes with her?

But there was one more thing: Why hadn't Gilbert mentioned the bomb threat incident the previous night?
If it had that much of an impact on her, why the hell didn't she say anything about it?

The following day, Gilbert knocked on Harris's door. She said she needed to talk to someone. There had been more coverage in the newspapers about the bomb threat. Gilbert said she sensed that investigators would try to pin it on her. They had blamed her for everything else. Why not this, too?

“Do you remember what happened at the Olympics when they were in Atlanta?” Gilbert asked.

“No. But I'm sure you're going to tell me.”

“That guy who got blamed for the bombing. You don't remember?”

Gilbert was referring to security guard Richard Jewell, whom the FBI named as an early suspect in the bombing of a Centennial Olympic Park tent during the 1996 Atlanta games. Someone at the FBI had leaked Jewell's name to the press, and a feeding frenzy ensued. Jewell was later found to be innocent. But the press had already tarred and feathered him.

“Yeah,” Harris said. “I think I remember something about that now.”

“Well, I know exactly how he feels, Sami,” Gilbert said.

“Why is that? No one's accused you of anything, Kristen.”

“I bet they rented an apartment across the way,” Gilbert said. Then she got up off the couch and went to the window. She pointed at the apartment directly across from Harris's. “They're watching me. They're spying on me all the time. I can fucking feel it.”

In fact, Gilbert's sensibilities were accurate. But they weren't in an apartment across the way; they were in a black surveillance van on the other side of Route 10. It wasn't anything out of a spy novel, just a trooper inside the van who watched Gilbert come and go. When the trooper felt Gilbert went to bed for the night, the surveillance ended. If there was an available officer the following day, the surveillance continued.

“You know what, Kristen?” Harris asked. “I bet you're right. I bet they're watching your every move.”

Gilbert looked at her and smiled.

“Bridget Fonda!” she said, waving her finger at Harris.

“What, Kristen?”

“The movie—I want Bridget Fonda to play me.”

“What
are you talking about now? You want Bridget Fonda to play you? What in God's name are—”

“When they make a movie of my life, she'd be perfect. Don't you think?”

Assistant US Attorney Bill Welch had plenty of reason to believe Gilbert was responsible for both the bomb threat and the murders up at the VAMC, but he didn't yet have enough evidence to indict her on federal felony murder charges or even consider an arrest warrant for the bomb threat.

He needed proof, not speculation.

In the eyes of the law, the two crimes were separate. Yet it was impossible to believe they weren't connected in some bizarre way.

Concerning the deaths at the VAMC between the summer of 1995 and the winter of 1996, Plante was convinced of Gilbert's guilt. He had been embroiled in the murder investigation since June and knew the particulars of the case better than anyone—and had been telling some of his sources that Gilbert could be responsible for as many as forty deaths.

 

 

After hearing threads of the false bomb threat from various sources at the Northampton DA's office, SA Plante phoned Timothy Reardon and asked him for his take on what happened. The two men discussed the calls in detail. Reardon said they had made several tapes. “Whoever it was,” Reardon noted, “had used some sort of electronically altered device to disguise his voice. A tape recorder or something. It was the strangest thing.”

“Great,” Plante said. “We'll come up and listen to the tapes.” Satisfied with what Reardon had told him, Plante and Detective Thomas Soutier then drove to the Northampton Police Department to interview the officers who had responded to the scene. After that, they decided to stop in town for a little shopping trip before continuing up to the VAMC.

But something kept gnawing at Plante as they drove from one place to the next trying to piece together the previous night's events: the call Glenn Gilbert had received from his estranged wife the previous day, September 26. So Plante made a mental note: The call she had made to Glenn was just an hour and a half
before
the first threatening call had been made to the VAMC.
Electronically altered device,
Plante kept repeating to himself.

After spending about an hour at the NPD, Plante and Soutier took a walk around downtown Northampton, stopping in various electronic shops, hoping they could dig up some sort of electronic device Gilbert might have used.

They went in and out of several stores, asking questions, looking at several different devices. But nothing stood out.

When the shopping trip failed, Plante and Soutier went back up to the VAMC to see if they had missed something earlier.

Plante spoke with Perrault first.

The two men knew each other well by this point. Plante had been in and out of the VAMC during the past six months hunting down leads in the murder investigation. Perrault, he knew, could be helpful. He was cocky and sometimes difficult, but professional and cooperative, nonetheless.

“I'll be honest with you, Jim. I have a hunch it's her,” Plante said.

“It sounds like her,” Perrault agreed, nodding his head. “But it can't be,” he added. “It was a man's voice.”

“Do you know where she was yesterday?”

“I think . . . I think she went to the Holyoke Mall—some sort of Internet place . . . the Worldwide Café . . . something like that. I guess she logged on to the Internet for some reason. Who knows?”

“Thanks,” Plante said. “That could help us out.”

It was late Friday afternoon. Bill Welch had already left earlier that day to be with his family for the weekend, and Murphy had been working another case and was nowhere to be found. Plante wanted to be on the Mass Pike with a hot cup of coffee in his hand traveling back to Bedford for a long weekend with his wife and kids. Fridays were precious. All he thought about was seeing his wife and children.

But Plante was a doer. He couldn't leave things unfinished. Having an open lead on his desk all weekend would ruin the little time he had with his family. There was nothing worse than figuring something out, but being ninety miles away from the case when it hit.

So he decided, on September 27, to visit the Holyoke Mall and see what he could uncover. There was something there. He could sense it. What Perrault said bothered him. Gilbert wouldn't go to the mall unless she had something in mind.

The Holyoke Mall at Ingleside was a fifteen-minute drive from Gilbert's Easthampton apartment. The town of Holyoke sits just below the mall to the east. The famous Mount Tom ski resort, where teenagers and families flock to by the bus loads during winter months, overlooks the mall to the north. A look to the south, and Springfield rises out of the mountains as if it were Emerald City.

Plante visited the Worldwide Café first, which was located on the main level. He asked the manager if it was possible to search the computers to see who had logged on to the Internet the previous day.

“Sure,” the manager said. “That'll be easy.”

They searched to see if Gilbert had been stupid enough to use her own name when she had logged on.

Not a chance.

Then Plante had him try Gilbert's maiden name.

“Strickland,” he said. “Try Kristen Strickland.”

But again, nothing.

Plante then pulled out a current picture of Gilbert.

“You recognize this woman?”

“No, sir. Sorry.”

Another dead end.

Plante was hoping to track Gilbert's movements via her surf through cyberspace, but she had obviously used a bogus name. He was curious as to why she had browsed the Internet in the first place.
What role did the Internet play in all of this?
Although he believed it was definitely Gilbert who had made the threat, Plante didn't believe she had actually planted a bomb inside the building. She was all about making threats; not carrying them out. Her kind of criminal, Plante had learned from experience, rarely went through with threats. The thrill was in the threat itself. Like poking an animal in a cage to see what kind of reaction she would get, Gilbert prodded and pushed people and then ran away to watch their reaction.

Walking out of the café, Plante had a thought as he stopped for a moment and looked across the walkway.

Directly across the aisle from the Worldwide Café was Service Merchandise. But after a careful search through the electronics department, he came up empty-handed.

Then it was on to Sears. But again, nothing. Then Brookstones.

Nothing.

By the time he reached KB-Toys, Plante realized he was probably on some sort of wild-goose chase. But maybe, he thought, he had been looking at it from the wrong angle all along? He had to try to piece together what Gilbert was thinking at the time she was at the mall.

While he was in KB-Toys, Plante found a device that could change the tone of a person's voice, but it was more of a microphone-type of device, similar to a karaoke machine. It was too big and bulky. There was no way Gilbert could have toted it around.

But KB-Toys opened the floodgates:
Toys. She had used a kid's toy.
Then he remembered Toys-R-Us was right around the corner from the Worldwide Café, back up on the main level.

The manager of Toys-R-Us, Ann Millett, was all ears when Plante flashed his badge and asked her the question that perhaps blew the entire bomb-threat investigation wide open.

“Do you sell a device that can change the tone of a person's voice?”

“Sure,” Millett said. “Come right over here, and I'll show it to you.”

Millett then lead Plante to the electronics department. There was a wide array of devices to choose from: everything from karaoke machines to tape recorders to large robot-type machines that a child could record different sounds on. It was overwhelming at first. But Plante realized he had hit the jackpot. Somewhere within this pile of toys was what he had been looking for all day.

As he stood for a moment in deep thought, scanning each toy, Millett pointed out something specific.

“It's called a Talkgirl. It's the most popular of all these types of toys,” she said.

Plante looked at it and smiled.

“Is it possible to find out if someone purchased one of these toys yesterday?”

“Certainly. We can check the sku number on the package itself.”

“Can you do that right now?”

“No problem.”

“How 'bout credit card receipts? Is there any way we can see if someone purchased a toy like this”—Plante held it up like a trophy—“with a credit card?”

“Most certainly.”

On September 5, at the request of a grand jury subpoena, Gilbert was ordered to give “handwriting exemplars” to the Northampton DA's office, which she did without incident. That same day, Plante fingerprinted her and took several photos. It would be piece of cake to match her fingerprints and her handwriting with any evidence culled from Ann Millett's search.

Within a few minutes, Millett plucked a receipt from a pile, lifting it up in the air as if she had found a lost lottery ticket, and said, “Here it is right here.”

Sure enough, Gilbert had used her VISA card to purchase a Talkgirl toy at two
P.M.
on the afternoon of September 26—the day of the bomb threat.