Perfect Poison (30 page)

While Welch and his crew continued with the search, Gilbert called Harry Miles from Harris's apartment and told him what was going on.

Some time later, the tall, balding, gray-haired defense attorney with glasses barged through Harris's front door without even knocking.

“Where is my client?” Miles demanded to know.

Harris was sitting in the living room. Startled, she could think of nothing more to say other than, “Excuse me?”

With his rumpled suit, loud voice and forceful manner, Miles repeated himself: “Where is my client?”

Hesitantly, Harris got up and began to speak. “I think you should have at least—”

Paying no mind to what she was trying to say, Miles cut her off and walked into the kitchen where Gilbert was sitting.

Harris thought it best to stay put. There was no need for her to know what they were talking about. It would mean only more explaining on her part when everything was said and done.

After spending about ten minutes with Gilbert, Miles rushed out of the house without saying a word.

“Come in here,” Gilbert yelled from the kitchen.

Harris walked in and sat down. “I don't want to know what your lawyer said to you, Kristen. It's none of my business.”

“Don't worry . . . it was . . . nothing.” Gilbert was acting strange, Harris noticed.

In what had become one of Gilbert's signatures, her entire mood changed in the blink of an eye. With her arms folded, she was now rocking back and forth in her chair, trembling like a junkie. Every so often, she would stop rocking, run her hands through her hair, and mumble something. She began to sweat and speak in broken sentences. Harris had seen her like this before, but never as bad as she was tonight.

Yet whenever Gilbert wanted to make a point, she would snap out of her trance and speak flawlessly.

In an eerie whisper, she looked at Harris one time and said, “I want you to bring me to the bank, then to the pharmacy . . . and . . . and . . . a hotel.”

My God, she's planning on killing herself,
Harris thought.

“Why are they doing this to me?” Gilbert asked again. “I haven't
done
anything.”

“Come on,” Harris said, grabbing Gilbert by the arm. “Let's go.”

It was well after eleven now.

As they drove to the ATM machine down the street, Gilbert continued to talk. She wanted Harris to know she was grateful for all she had done. She wanted Harris to understand she wasn't a bad person. “I haven't done anything wrong,” she kept repeating. It was everyone else's fault. The VA was out to get her. Perrault was lying. Her coworkers were setting her up.

Gilbert then said she was thankful most of all for the fact that Harris had kept her mouth shut and had never spoken to the investigators.

At that point, Harris just looked at her.
If you only knew. You freakin' lunatic. If you only knew what I've been up to.

“Listen,” Gilbert said. “I want you to bring me into Northampton now.” They had already stopped at the ATM machine and pharmacy. Gilbert had plenty of money and a bag of pills.

“I thought you wanted me to bring you to a hotel.”

“No!” Gilbert said, getting louder. “Bring me to the bus station!”

“The bus station? Come on, Kristen. I can't do that.”

“No. Listen to me. I don't want you to know where I'm going. This way you won't feel obligated to tell them
anything
when they come around asking questions. I mean, they know I came over your house. So you're the first person they're going to when they can't find me.”

When Harris pulled into the bus station, Gilbert got out of the car and stopped just short of shutting the door.

“I feel like I can't trust
anyone
anymore,” she said.

“You know, Kristen, you probably can't trust anyone.” Gilbert closed the door and walked away.

For Samantha Harris, the night was just beginning.

About an hour after Harris got home, she called Gilbert's apartment and left a message on the answering machine.

“Hi, Kristen . . . just checking up on you to see what's going on. Call me.”

A few minutes later, Plante showed up at her door.

“Very funny,” he said.

“Come in.”

“I suppose that was a signal to come over?”

Harris smiled.

Plante explained that he only had a few minutes. They were meticulously going through everything in Gilbert's apartment, and he had to get back to work as soon as possible.

“I think you'll want to sit down for a minute and hear me out,” Harris said.

She brought him up to date and told him everything that had just happened.

“Thanks, Sami. You've been a big help. You know that, don't you?”

It certainly felt good to hear Plante say she had done the right thing by dropping Gilbert off at the bus depot. Harris had felt funny about it up until that point, as if she had been an accomplice in helping Gilbert escape.

Everything was about subterfuge with her,
Harris thought as she walked up the stairs toward her bedroom. It was now near midnight, and she had to get up at five
A.M.
to start her bus route.
She was always trying to lead people in the wrong direction.

“They're going to arrest her any day now, Phillip,” Harris told her husband. He was watching television upstairs. “I can feel it. They're over there digging through her apartment . . . they're going to find something.”

“Go to sleep,” Phillip said. “It's late. I'll be in bed soon.”

An hour later, after Harris and her husband had fallen asleep, the telephone rang. When she picked it up, she could hear someone moaning on the other end of the line.

Gilbert sounded groggy and tired, even drugged, Harris thought as she listened.

“Sami . . . is that you?” Gilbert mumbled. “Sami . . . you there?”

“I don't feel so . . . good . . . Sami. I feel like—”

It sounded to Harris as if Gilbert had dropped the phone. “Are you there?” Harris yelled.

There was silence, followed by what sounded like the phone being picked up and dropped.

“You need to call 911, Kristen,” Harris said. She was frightened. “Where are you?”

Silence. Then breathing. Then moaning.

“I'm. Going. To. Hang. Up. Now,” Harris said slowly, as if she were speaking to a child, “and you're going to call 911.”

They went back and forth a few times. Gilbert would mumble something and then drop the phone. Harris would say she was going to hang up, and Gilbert would quickly pick up the phone and, as sober as a doorknob, snap out of it and say, “I'm here. I'm here.”

After several more calls, Harris concluded that Gilbert's latest suicide attempt, like all the others, was merely another attempt to put the spotlight on herself. She sounded as if she were play-acting. Harris didn't believe for one minute that the same woman who had falsely attempted suicide time and again throughout the summer was tonight suddenly on the verge of dying.

“I'm hanging up now,” Harris said at one point.

“No, don't hang up. I wanted to leave my parents' phone number with you, Sami,” Gilbert said.

“Why, Kristen?”

“Call them in the morning and tell them I'm dead.” Then she dropped the phone and started moaning.

After a pause, Harris snapped. “Damnitall, Kristen!” she said. “Are you there? Tell me where you are? I'm hanging up now, so you can call 911.”

As soon as she heard that, Gilbert picked up the phone again. “I can't deal with this shit anymore. I just can't do it.”

Harris hung up.

Gilbert called back.

“Kristen,” Harris said in a more relaxed, pleading tone. “You need to call 911. I have no idea where you are. It's late. I have to get up in a few hours and go to work.... I'm hanging up now. I have no—”

Gilbert dropped the phone.

Harris hung up.

Two minutes later, Gilbert called back.

“Don't hang up on me, please. . . .” She was crying and slurring her speech.

“You need to call 911! I cannot do anything for you.” Harris heard the phone drop. “I'm hanging up. . . .”

“Wait,” Gilbert said as she picked the phone back up. “Just wait a minute.”

“Kristen, where are you? I'll call Jim or Glenn. One of them can come and get you.”

There was a long pause. But Gilbert hadn't dropped the phone this time. Harris could tell she was just holding it, thinking.

“Glenn is not such an intellectual firecracker now, is he?” Gilbert finally said. She began to laugh. “He's stupid, isn't he?”

“Call 911,
Kristen. I'm hanging up.”

Gilbert called at least another ten times before Harris decided to turn off the ringer and get some sleep.

When Gilbert realized Harris wasn't going to pick up her phone any more, she turned her attention toward her new friend, Carole Osman.

Osman, a divorced mother of two grown daughters, was easy prey for Gilbert. Osman enjoyed living in Northampton and being around the artsy, well-educated class of people Gilbert had fooled everyone into thinking she fit in with. In her late forties, Osman kept few friends and hadn't become friendly with Gilbert until after the murder investigation had been initiated. Some considered Osman to be “weird” and on the “eccentric” side. Gilbert used to belittle her when they worked together, making fun of her around colleagues whenever she saw the opportunity. Some said Osman was perhaps in the midst of a midlife crisis at the time she went to work at the VAMC. She had been a florist for most of her adult life and, late into her forties, decided to go to nursing school. One VAMC nurse, who had worked with Osman for many years, said she was the most incompetent nurse she had ever seen in some twenty years on the job.

Gilbert must have known that a call to Carole Osman would mean she'd be tracked down—because Osman had two separate phone lines installed in her home, and Gilbert had been over there plenty enough times to know that. But she still called Osman and gave her the same sob story she had just given to Samantha Harris.

Unlike Harris, Carole Osman fell for it hook, line and sinker. She later told Harris that she felt as if Gilbert was “at the end of her rope and near death that night.” She felt sorry for her.

Working Osman like a piece of clay, Gilbert carried on and on about her problems and her need to kill herself.

Osman, scared for her life, told Gilbert to hold on for a moment. She had something on the stove she needed to check on before it burnt the house down.

When Gilbert agreed, Osman rushed over to the second phone line and dialed up the Northampton Police Department so they could trace the call.

Osman kept Gilbert on the line while the police learned she was calling from just a few miles down the road—at the local Days Inn, in Northampton.

When the police got to the hotel, Gilbert appeared to be shaken, desolate, and in distress.

But close to death? Not a chance.

Officers from the NPD determined that Gilbert would need psychiatric evaluating and brought her to Cooley Dickinson Hospital.

Confined to the psych ward of Cooley Dickinson, on the morning of October 2, Gilbert decided to retaliate against the one person she saw as being responsible for everything that had just happened—James Perrault—by using the only weapon she had at her disposal: the telephone.

During the first couple of messages she left on Perrault's answering machine, Gilbert said she had suspected for the past month or so that he had been supplying investigators with information about her.

“You fucking prick,” Gilbert said into Perrault's answering machine in a deep, threatening tone. “I
know
you're the one behind the search warrant.”

It wasn't such a stretch to think that Perrault had something to do with the search warrant. What other choice did he have? Plante and Murphy were telling him that his ex-girlfriend, a woman he had been sleeping with for the past ten months, had possibly killed as many as forty of her patients, maybe even more. What was he supposed to do?

Gilbert went on to say she knew he had broken into her apartment when she wasn't home.

Perrault did have keys to Gilbert's apartment. She had given them to him herself. But what Gilbert didn't know was that every time Perrault had entered her apartment, he had taken Samantha Harris along with him as a witness for that very reason.

“I will press breaking-and-entering charges against you,” she rambled on. “Your police career will be ruined! Do you think that the investigators have any keys to your getting a job? How 'bout when you have a police record . . . huh?”

After Gilbert hung up, she called Samantha Harris.

“I want my fucking keys back, Sami.” She sounded different. It wasn't the same person Harris had dropped off at the bus station the night before, or the suicidal victim Harris had spoken to on the phone later on.

Harris wanted to laugh.
You crazy bitch. It's all over for you now.
But she kept her composure.

“You don't need keys to my apartment,” Gilbert continued. “I want my fucking keys back.”

“I don't have your keys, Kristen.”

The psychiatric ward of area hospitals had become a second home to Gilbert by this point. She had been admitted nearly a half-dozen times throughout the summer. Plante and Murphy speculated that it had been Harry Miles putting Gilbert up to all the hospital admissions: telling her that it would help her case if it ever went to court. Regardless, here she was, close to being arrested, doing the same thing she had done all summer along: threatening people from the telephone.

The same day Gilbert called Perrault and Harris, she called her old friend, Rachel Webber.

Webber and her husband had moved to Albany, New York, in late 1994, to raise a family and begin new careers. Gilbert had always stayed in touch, making sure to call Webber once a week and fill her in on all that was going on back in Northampton—that is, the things she wanted Webber to know. But as far as the murder investigation, her affair with Perrault and the end of her marriage were concerned, Gilbert never confided in Webber much more than to dispel rumor.

When Webber first heard about the investigation back in February, she presumed it was a witch hunt. She had a hard time believing what people were saying about her friend. But now, hearing stories from other nurses and reading newspaper accounts, Webber was having second thoughts about Gilbert's innocence. Gilbert had been calling her throughout the summer, yet she would tell her only bits and pieces of what was happening. Gilbert always maintained that Webber was one of her only “true” friends left and would often joke over the phone about the entire situation.

One day, shortly after word had spread that Gilbert was the main suspect in the bomb threat, she called Webber. Laughing, as if nothing were wrong, she said, “This is going to make a good movie someday, huh, Rachel?”

She then went through a list of actors she had handpicked for everyone involved. Still believing Gilbert was being railroaded, Webber laughed with her about it.

Gilbert always kept the juicy details of her real life to herself. Webber would find out from other nurses what was really going on and call Gilbert on it the next time they spoke. Gilbert would explain it all away, and Webber would buy it.

It wasn't a shock to Webber when Gilbert phoned the day after the search and confessed she was once again in the hospital.

“I heard, Kristen. Are you okay?” Webber asked.

“Oh, I'm fine. They thought I did something to myself. They strapped me down and put a tube down my nose. You should have seen them try to fight with me,” Gilbert said, laughing.

It occurred to Webber that if there were tubes and stomach pumps involved, well, it must have been serious.
They're pumping her stomach, and she's making light of the situation?
she said to herself as Gilbert continued to mock the doctors.

“What did you do, Kristen?”

“Oh, you know, they thought I took something.”

It was a game, Webber told herself after hanging up. Gilbert looked at it as though it were some sort of “me against them” battle she was winning.

 

 

As Assistant US Attorney Bill Welch sat in his office during the first week of October, he mulled over his options. Gilbert was, at least for the time being, out of everyone's hair. But Welch hardly had his suspect where he wanted her: confined to a cold, eight-by-ten-foot jail cell on the fourth floor of the Federal Building, in Springfield, just one floor above his office.

With Gilbert in the hospital, he could at least monitor her movements and keep an eye on her comings and goings. If she so much as sneezed on someone, Murphy and Plante would be on her like a shadow.

Welch had to act fast if he was going to secure an arrest warrant. Ideally, he wanted to transport Gilbert from her hospital bed at Cooley Dickinson to a metal bunk in Springfield. He knew she would never plead guilty to any of the charges he was preparing to file, and she would likely fight down to the wire, so his case had to be solid. No frills. No holes. No problems with evidence. The trick was to think long term. Nothing short of an air-tight case would suffice. The US Magistrate Judge who would ultimately review the arrest warrant didn't want hearsay evidence and shoddy police work; he wanted Welch to prove on paper that Gilbert was the only person who could have made those calls to the VAMC. It didn't matter that she was being investigated for murder. That was a separate case.

Further confusing the situation, there were several safety concerns that took precedence over everything else. After listening to the messages Gilbert had left at Perrault's apartment, and speaking with Samantha Harris, Welch felt Gilbert would retaliate against Perrault's property as soon as she had the opportunity and likely confront Harris the minute she got out of the hospital. He had to think about protecting his witnesses.

He also had to make sure Gilbert didn't get wind of what he was doing. Every legal maneuver he made would have to be sealed. Reporters from the
Union-News
and
Daily Hampshire Gazette
would be scouring the area like buzzards waiting for a break in the murder case. Welch couldn't take any chances and endanger all the work his office had done up until that point.

Then there was the possibility Gilbert would sign herself out of the hospital and split. Her parents lived in Long Island and, as far as Welch was concerned, they couldn't be trusted. The last thing he needed was Gilbert on the loose, running around Long Island causing trouble. With an open warrant for her arrest, witnesses would be hard-pressed to say anything.

Filing an arrest complaint was not as easy as filling out paperwork and handing it over to a judge to sign. It took time. Judges demanded rock-solid evidence.

A few things were certain, but Welch wanted to point them out to Plante and Murphy so there would be no disagreement as to the goal at hand. Welch, Murphy and Plante had butted heads before on issues regarding the murder case. All good teams disagreed from time to time. It was a natural part of discovering the absolute truth. But now was not the time to be arguing a point. It was time to act. Speculation and hindsight wouldn't cut it. Welch was too smart an attorney to talk himself into believing that. They needed proof. Stick to “this case,” Welch urged. He wanted hard facts to back up his hypothesis that Gilbert had called in the bomb threat. Period. They would nail her on murder charges later.

While Gilbert stewed like a caged animal at Cooley Dickinson, continually calling people and threatening them, Welch sat in the board room down the hall from his office with Plante and Murphy devising their plan.

“Let's send out the check and credit card receipts she used to purchase the Talkboy and Talkgirl to the VA Criminalistics Lab for handwriting comparison,” Welch suggested, looking at Plante and Murphy. “Agreed?”

“Right,” Murphy said.

“We'll have to issue subpoenas for her bank records and credit card statements,” Welch added. “Make a note of that.”

Murphy and Plante understood why, of course. But they agreed it would take some time to do that. What was the significance of doing that now, anyway? Didn't they have enough?

“We want to show she had been paying her credit card bills and that she never reported her credit card stolen or lost.”

They feared Gilbert, as conniving and calculating as she had proved herself to be, would say her credit card had been stolen and someone else had used the card to charge the Talkgirl.

“Let's put ourselves in the position of the defense,” Welch urged, raising his eyebrows. “You follow me?”