Perfect Poison (29 page)

At 6:30
P.M.
, on October 1, Murphy pulled into the Tasty Top Ice Cream Stand and drove his blue Crown Victoria toward the back of the empty lot. After carefully assessing the situation, he parked where he had a good view of several pay telephone booths in the area.

He then lit a cigarette, reclined back in his seat, and waited to see if Gilbert would make a move.

Across town, about four miles away, Plante sat in the parking lot of the
Daily Hampshire Gazette
newspaper on Conz Street. He was running the same type of surveillance at a phone booth NYNEX had earlier confirmed could have been used to make some of the earlier calls.

The Tasty Top was a popular summer stop for area families, located smack dab in the middle of town on Route 10, just a half mile down the street from Gilbert's apartment.

From where he sat in his car, Murphy was confident that if Gilbert decided to use any one of five phone booths around him, he would have no problem seeing her. Just fifty feet to his left there was a booth straddling Route 10, on the north side of the street, directly to the right of Tasty Top's walk-up counter. It was one of the newer booths, open on all sides, with two small panels fanning out from each end like an old wicker chair. Across the street, at a BP gas station, there was a standing booth. Next door to the Tasty Top was a Burger King. Along the side of the building was yet another booth. Looking south, Murphy could see Gilbert's apartment complex down below the crest of the hill.

It was a waiting game now.

Murphy was a practical man. With twenty-six years on the job, there wasn't too much he hadn't seen. But for the life of him, he had never witnessed a suspect he was investigating commit a crime right in front of his face.

As he put out his first cigarette and prepared to light another, the veteran homicide detective looked up and couldn't believe his eyes: there was Gilbert's 1993 Oldsmobile Cutlass pulling into the parking lot.

She had taken a left off Route 10 and made a U-turn into the parking lot, nearly clipping Murphy's cruiser in the process, yet she hadn't even seen him.

“You've
got
to be kidding me,” Murphy said to himself. “Will you get a load of this shit?”

Gilbert parked right in front of his car. He could have spit on her back windshield from where he was sitting. With the tail end of Gilbert's car facing him, Murphy verified her license plate number with dispatch. Gilbert, wearing a pair of blue jeans and an outdoor-type winter jacket, her blond hair blowing in the slight wind, got out of her car, looked around, and walked up to the phone booth.

It was 6:35
P.M.

Murphy quickly picked up his radio and called his lieutenant to see if Plante was within radio range.

“Steve is not going to believe this,” Murphy said. He was almost laughing.

Plante had since moved on to the Look Restaurant, about five miles away, which was just across the street from the VAMC. They had learned earlier that day that Gilbert had used the Look Restaurant phone booth on several occasions. So he had been roaming back and forth, between Conz Street and the Look Restaurant.

“Plante, you there?” Murphy whispered into his radio, his eyes glued on Gilbert.

“Go ahead, Murph . . .”

“You're not going to believe this. She just pulled in and . . . she's using the phone booth right in front of me.”

“No way?”

“No shit. I'm serious.”

“I'll call the VA to see if Jimmy received any calls.”

Plante called Perrault at the VAMC.

“Anything going on over there, Jim?”

“I just took a call,” Perrault said. “I could hear a lot of traffic in the background. The caller breathed heavy and hung up.”

As Murphy sat in his cruiser watching Gilbert use the phone, he faced several problems. First of all, knowing what he knew, should he arrest her, or just let her go and secure the scene? Or maybe he should follow her? Murphy worked for the state police. This was a federal crime. Did he have jurisdiction? Murphy and Plante, working closely with Bill Welch, had taken careful steps not to cross paths between federal and state law.

Gilbert was at the Tasty Top telephone booth for twenty-five seconds, which was just enough time to make one call, hang up, and get back in her car.

NYNEX was contacted to make sure the call Perrault had received had, in fact, come from the Tasty Top phone booth. It was a match; the number NYNEX traced was the same as one of those SA Plante had earlier written down.

As Gilbert backed out, she turned her car to the right and ended up directly facing Murphy's cruiser. He did everything he could not to mock her with a sarcastic smile and a wave of his hand. But Murphy didn't say or do anything, deciding instead to let her leave.

Gilbert must have driven directly from the Tasty Top straight to her apartment, which, Plante had already timed, was a mere sixty-second ride. At 6:42, she called Perrault at the security office for the second time that night.

“He called again!” Gilbert said, referring to the Southern male. She was out of breath. “He's making fun of my anatomy, Jimmy. He left messages on my answering machine.”

She was frantic, babbling, on the verge of tears.

“Hold on. Hold on,” Perrault said, trying to calm her down. “Save those messages.”

“I won't. I'm going to erase them!” she said before hanging up.

Then she called back five minutes later.

“Can you help me do something about the calls, Jimmy? I'm really concerned. I think he's following me around. Help me.” She was panicking, talking fast. “Please help me . . .”

As clearly as he could, Perrault said no. Then he paused for a moment, perhaps to add a bit more weight to his next suggestion, and added, “Call the Easthampton Police if you want help.”

 

 

It was now near seven o'clock. Perrault had to leave his post at the security desk for a while to attend to other matters.

At 7:35, an officer filling in for Perrault took a call. The voice was “distorted, male-sounding, and strange,” he later told Plante and Murphy.

During the interim, NYNEX confirmed that the previous calls—the sexually graphic ones—were made from the Condor Citgo gas station, which was about four miles from Gilbert's apartment, and the
Daily Hampshire Gazette
parking lot phone booth.

Gilbert had obviously thought she was smart, running from phone booth to phone booth, hoping to avoid any chance of a trap.

Murphy, meanwhile, had secured the Tasty Top phone booth as a crime scene. Detective Soutier showed up shortly afterward, with Plante not far behind.

Soutier arranged for the Massachusetts State Police Crime Scene Services to dust the phone booth for fingerprints.

In the meantime, several other troopers were called in to do various tasks. The most important, seeing that Gilbert had without question seen Murphy as she was driving out of the parking lot, was to put an unmarked cruiser in the area of her apartment. While Plante and Bill Welch applied for a search warrant, they wanted to be sure Gilbert wouldn't run. Things were moving at a feverish pace now. They had to act fast. Every decision was critical.

About a half hour went by. Agents confirmed that one of the prints pulled from the Tasty Top telephone receiver was that of Gilbert's right index finger.

Welch, who had been maintaining a careful watch on the situation from the DA's office, and Plante then took off for the town of Amherst, about ten miles away, where they were to meet with Judge Michael Ponsor at the Amherst Police Department.

At 9:10, Judge Ponsor signed a search warrant filed by Plante. It was for a search and seizure of any and all pieces of evidence used in making a false bomb threat to the VAMC on September 26 that might be found inside Gilbert's Easthampton apartment or her Oldsmobile Cutlass.

“I find reasonable cause to initiate and conduct the search after ten
P.M.
,” Judge Ponsor wrote.

He went on to state his reason for issuing a search warrant at such an ungodly hour: to “preserve evidence” immediately.

It was clear from Plante's filing that Gilbert had gone to great lengths within the past few days to block phone calls, obstruct justice, and hinder different parts of both the murder and bomb-threat investigations. They certainly wouldn't put it past her to get rid of evidence if she thought the heat was on. Time was crucial.

So, while Welch and Plante made certain all the paperwork was in order, a posse of state troopers, local police and special agents converged on 182 Northampton Street, Apartment D.

A tough-looking cop at five-eight, one hundred and ninety pounds, Massachusetts State Police Lieutenant Thomas Soutier knocked on Kristen Gilbert's front door at eight
P.M.
Several of his colleagues, including Detective Murphy, stood behind him—one of whom was carrying a video camera. Welch and Plante were still trying to obtain a copy of the search warrant.

As Soutier and Murphy, along with the rest of the crew, waited patiently on the front steps for Gilbert to come to the door, above them, on the second floor, they heard the squeal of a window being pushed open.

Pushing her face up against the screen, Gilbert shouted, “What do
you
want?”

“Ma'am, we need to come inside now. You need to come to the door,” Soutier said.

To preserve the integrity of any search, an “entrance ‘in-and-out' video” is shot upon first entering a residence, car, or any area where a search will later be conducted. It is designed to preserve the exact layout of a location before investigators disturb the scene while conducting the actual search. It was important for Welch's team in this case, because they didn't have the search warrant in their hands yet. They wanted to be sure there were no screw-ups. Not now. They were too close to having Gilbert where they wanted her.

After a few moments, Gilbert thumped her way down the stairs and opened the door. She had been in her child's room—or the room, rather, that her kids had slept in when Glenn used to allow them to visit. It had been almost six weeks since she had lost joint custody. She hadn't seen the children since she entered Glenn's house without permission and attacked him back on September 15, three weeks ago.

After letting everyone in, Gilbert asked what they were looking for.

“We are looking for a
recording device
used to make calls to the VA. We'll be here for a while. You can either stay here or leave, Ms. Gilbert. It's up to you,” Soutier said.

Murphy was a bit more impersonal. With his rough and overpowering voice, “We're seizing the house,” he said, pushing his way toward Gilbert. “We have a warrant for your car, too. You can leave, but don't touch anything!”

Gilbert went for her pocketbook and began heading for the door.

Murphy took a step to his right, blocking her from going any farther. “No. No. No. That stays here,” he said, placing his hand on Gilbert's purse.

A female trooper, Sue Cronin, then rushed over. “That stays with us, ma'am,” she said. “But you're welcome to get your house keys out of it.”

So Gilbert grabbed her keys and walked out the door. There were a few troopers standing outside, and they watched her as she headed straight for Samantha Harris's apartment.

“Perfect,” Murphy said after one of the young troopers came in and told him where she had gone.

While they waited for a copy of the search warrant, one of the troopers made a video recording of the entire apartment. Murphy noticed right away that the light in the children's bedroom upstairs wasn't working. So he ordered a floodlight so they could have some light while they filmed and, later, searched. A video would be made at the end, also, to preserve the aftereffects of the search. This way, while they applied for an arrest warrant, Gilbert, who would be free to come back into the apartment, couldn't accuse them of ransacking the place or, even worse, planting evidence.

Downstairs, just inside the front door, was the living room. The walls were bare. It was unusual for a woman not to decorate her home. Most women, even single women, made it a priority to pepper their walls, end tables and coffee tables with knick-knacks and pictures. But not Gilbert. Except for one picture, her apartment was empty, as if she had used the place only to sleep in.

Strangely enough, the one picture Gilbert kept in her home was that of her sister Tara. It had been blown up, framed, and hung on the wall above the sofa as if it were some type of homage to her younger sibling.

Even more unusual, however, was that there weren't any pictures of Gilbert's children in the house.

After the entrance video was made and Plante and Bill Welch showed up with the search warrant, the crew snapped on their latex gloves and got to work.

Plante went upstairs, while Soutier took the living room, and Murphy the kitchen.

In the living room, Soutier picked up a notebook that was sitting on the coffee table in plain sight. As soon as he opened it, he knew it was going to be a good night.

“He wishes—he thinks he's a real cop. He's nothing but a rent-a-cop,” was scrawled across the inside page, alongside a few obscenities that Soutier guessed were in reference to Perrault, too.

Participating in dozens of searches throughout his twenty-six-year career, Murphy knew exactly where to start in the kitchen: the garbage can. Digging like a possum in a Dumpster, he hit the jackpot right away: three empty packages of Energizer batteries, two batteries and a receipt from Thrifty's Health & Beauty. A quick look at the receipt told him Gilbert had purchased the batteries just days ago.

Sometime later, Soutier, now upstairs in the child's bedroom where Gilbert had been when they showed up, standing inside the closet, buried knee-deep in clothes and toys and boxes, waded through several items and finally reached into a cardboard box and pulled out a Talkboy, Jr.

He then walked into the master bedroom, where Plante was rummaging through Gilbert's closet.

“Whata ya got?”

Soutier smiled. “Take a look at this.”

They rewound the tape and listened. But it was mostly static, blank.

Plante placed the Talkboy on the dresser and pointed to several items he had found lying on Gilbert's bed: a book, pen, a few letters, telephone, a copy of the September 27, 1996, edition of the
Daily Hampshire Gazette,
and the jacket she had been wearing when Murphy fingered her at the Tasty Top just a few hours ago.

“What do you make of this stuff?” Plante asked Soutier.

“Check inside the jacket.”

In the lefthand pocket, Plante pulled out the operating instructions for the Talkboy.

Next to the jacket, an issue of the
Daily Hampshire Gazette
piqued Plante's attention next. It was soft and worn. He could tell it had been read through several times. There was a headline on page A-3 that immediately stuck out:

As Murphy, Plante and Soutier continued the search, Gilbert was at Samantha Harris's apartment climbing the walls.

“Why are they doing this to me? I have done nothing wrong,” Gilbert said as she walked through the door.

“Relax,” Harris said. “Let me get you a glass of water.”

“They say they're looking for a voice-changing device or something. A kid's toy. You know . . . you can change your voice up high, like a chipmunk, or down low like a man,” Gilbert said. “It's probably in the kids' room, but there's probably no tape in it . . . it's probably been erased or the batteries are dead or there's no batteries in it.”

She was talking in quick-fire repetition. Looking toward the door. Fidgeting with her house keys. Pacing.

What Harris didn't know at the time, but would soon find out, was that Soutier or Murphy never told Gilbert they were looking for a “child's toy.” They simply secured the apartment, said they were looking for a “recording device,” and told her she could stay or leave.