Perfect Poison (33 page)

It was Sunday, January 4, 1998, and William Welch sat at his desk inside the Federal Building and contemplated the week ahead.

The bomb-threat trial was finally here.

He felt confident about a conviction. After all, the proof was sitting right in front of him on his desk: Gilbert's own voice on tape.

As he went over his opening statement one final time, Welch decided to listen again to the tapes Perrault had made on the nights in question.

Welch agreed with Perrault that the tones and inflections in Gilbert's voice were all there. But the question remained: Would a jury buy the theory that she had slowed her voice down to make it sound like a man's?

They might, but it would be far better if Welch could somehow mine Gilbert's actual voice from the tapes.

So he began to think that if the toy could slow a voice down, there had to be a way to speed it back up to its natural state.

After fumbling through the office and coming up with a Dictaphone, putting the tape in and fiddling with the knobs, thus reversing the process Gilbert had used to disguise her voice in the first place, there it was: Gilbert's normal voice.

Of course,
Welch thought,
it was so damn simple.

On Monday, January 5, Glenn Gilbert came into the US Attorney's Office and confirmed Gilbert's voice on the new and improved tape.

Harry Miles was informed on Tuesday.

Miles, of course, wasn't happy about Welch's eleventh-hour discovery. But either way he looked at it, it was a destructive blow to his defense.

Giving the situation some prudent thought, Miles said he was prepared to talk about a plea bargain. “If you're offering probation, we can settle this thing right now.”

“Eighteen months. No less,” Welch said.

“Probation?”

“Are you kidding me? Eighteen months in
prison!”

Miles walked out of the room.

 

 

At fifty-one, Judge Michael Ponsor, a soft-spoken man with a reputation for putting up with nothing above a whisper in his courtroom, had been sitting on the US District Court in Springfield since 1994. Before that, the six-foot-two, slenderly built judge spent ten years as a magistrate. After receiving his bachelor's degree from Harvard, in 1969, Ponsor went on to earn a second bachelor's degree, along with a master's, from Oxford, where he was also named a Rhodes Scholar. Like many area judges and attorneys, Ponsor received his law degree from Yale Law School.

Judge Ponsor addressed the Springfield US District Court in the
Government vs. Kristen Gilbert
case early Wednesday morning, January 7, 1998.

There had been so many pre-trial hearings regarding which pieces of evidence would be allowed and which wouldn't, many wondered if Gilbert would
ever
stand trial. But here they were, about sixteen months after the crime itself had been committed, on the fifth floor of the Federal Building, ready to make a go of it.

The main argument wasn't if any of the evidence collected during the course of the murder investigation would be allowed into the bomb-threat trial, but rather would Bill Welch be able even to
mention
there was a murder investigation going on. Not being able to talk about the murder investigation would be a severe blow to his case—if not for its effect on the jury, then for the evidence that lent itself to Gilbert's demeanor at the time she made the threatening call. Without knowing about the murder investigation, jurors might wonder,
What motive did she have for making the bomb-threat call?

Harry Miles argued that the two matters were separate and should be treated as such. The jury, he worried, would form a judgment against his client based on the murder investigation, not the false bomb-threat allegation.

It was a good, solid argument, and Miles sounded sincere. In theory, a defendant—any defendant—is presumed innocent until proven otherwise.

But as some of the witnesses in both the murder and bomb-threat cases could acknowledge, however, Harry Miles wasn't the gentle soul he was making himself out to be in front of Judge Ponsor's court. Just days before the trial, Miles hired a private investigator to knock on the door of every single one of Samantha Harris's neighbors.

“Have you ever seen Ms. Harris using drugs? Does she cheat on her husband? How does she treat her kid?”

It was the oldest trick in the book. Miles wanted the dish on Harris—who he, undoubtedly, knew was going to bury his client when it came time for her testimony.

The same PI had also called Renee Walsh on one occasion and started asking questions about her relationship with Gilbert. Walsh said she wasn't interested in talking; she had been working with the US Attorney's Office. A day later, the PI showed up at her house. Her ten-year-old son answered the door.

“Is your mother home?” he asked.

“Nope.”

“Do you mind if I come in for a few minutes?”

“No, I don't think so,” Walsh's son said.

 

 

Judge Ponsor, after listening to both attorneys argue the matter without the jury present, made his decision.

“. . . I'm going to allow the government to put into evidence the fact that there was [a murder] investigation going on.”

With that, it was time to put the gloves on and get it on.

In his dark blue, Hart Shaffner & Marx suit, Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Welch stood up from his seat on the afternoon of January 7, 1998, and walked slowly toward the podium to deliver his opening statement.

In the front row of the courtroom, SA Plante and Detective Murphy sat directly in back of Welch. The reason for their presence was threefold: for support, of course; to be ready to testify whenever Welch needed them to; and because Welch had a gut feeling that Gilbert's father, Richard Strickland, who was himself sitting in the front row behind Gilbert, only a few feet from Welch, would lash out at him at some point during the trial. They had crossed paths several times in the hallway, and Strickland would just stare Welch down, like a boxer during the weigh-in before a big fight. Welch took it as a
How dare you accuse my daughter?
type of reaction to the charges he had lodged against Gilbert.

“On September 26, 1996, Kristen Gilbert decided to get even,” Welch said, pointing at Gilbert. “In short, this case is about revenge, payback—about getting even with people you're not happy with.”

From there, Welch, piece by piece, laid out the government's case.

“Studies have shown,” Harry Miles said as he walked toward the podium an hour later, “that after the openings, jurors tend to start to form opinions.” He paused and let the thought linger for a moment. “Therefore, I ask you to pay specific and very close attention to the court's instruction to you not to form any opinion or even begin to form one.

“The evidence gathered was gathered,” Miles claimed at one point, “with blinders on, ignoring other potential evidence that would have exculpated the defendant, or the investigation was simply incompetent.”

It was an outrageous claim. Between Murphy, Plante and Detective Thomas Soutier, there was over sixty years of collective police experience working the Gilbert case on any given day. Furthermore, Murphy had never lost one of the more than one hundred murder cases he had investigated throughout his twenty-six-year career. If Murphy was a shoddy investigator, pressuring people for information and evidence, overlooking possible suspects, a jury would have seen through it long ago.

Then came the assault on James Perrault.

“Does he have another motive for what he does?” Miles asked jurors. James Perrault “[suddenly] decides, oops, the inflections [in Gilbert's voice when she called in the threats] are the same[.]

“Well, you're going to hear that Mr. Perrault is a police officer . . . at the VAMC [and . . . ] that he wanted to be a police officer, a real police officer, a town police officer, a state police officer.”

Moments later, Miles said, “I'd submit to you that you also need to consider as we go though this case, was Mr. Perrault helped by that phone call? Did he, in fact, gain a professional advantage because he was now able to participate in this investigation?

“The government's case is one of character assassination in which they tell you that Kristen Gilbert is a terrible person and is guilty.”

Miles sat down as the bell rang for round one.

Welch's first witness was Ann Millett, the manager of Toys-R-Us. She was on the stand for one reason—and Welch wasted no time getting it out of her.

After Millett explained that she had experimented with the Talkboy, Welch asked her what kind of affect the toy had on her voice.

“It made my voice sound like a man's voice,” she said.

“Objection! Move to strike,” Miles interjected.

But it didn't matter. Millett had already said it; the jury had already heard it.

“I'm going to overrule it,” Judge Ponsor, staring at Welch, said.

Gilbert shook her head. They were less than an hour into her trial, and she was getting buried. Gilbert's mother, sitting emotionless next to her impatient husband, hadn't moved a muscle. “Claudia Strickland was stoic, as if she were a ghost,” someone later recalled.

After a short recess for lunch, through Stephanie Lussier, the Toys-R-Us cashier who had waited on Gilbert, Welch brought out the fact that Gilbert mentioned that she was purchasing the toy for a nephew.

By the time Stephen Fortenberry, the director of the forensic lab with the Department of VA-IGO, in Washington, DC, who had studied Gilbert's handwriting samples and compared them to the VISA receipt SA Plante had confiscated from Toys-R-Us, and Michelle Lawrence, a Bank of Boston detail operator specialist, were finished, it was clear that it was Gilbert—and no one else—who had purchased the Talkboy toys.

Then came one of Welch's star witnesses: Glenn Gilbert.

The room was quiet as Glenn worked his way from the double doors at the back of the courtroom to the witness stand. At five-ten, one hundred and eighty pounds, wearing a brown tweed jacket and a fabric tie to match, with his brown hair parted in the middle and slicked back, Glenn looked every bit as innocent and naïve as he was.

Gilbert didn't react one way or the other toward her former husband.

After getting Glenn to talk about his and Gilbert's children for a moment, Welch had him establish that he had a half-brother, Alan Clemente, who, more important,
didn't
have any children. Then he asked Glenn if Kristen's sister, Tara, had any children.

“No.”

Just like that, the jury understood that there were no male children on either Glenn or Kristen's side of the family. To say that she had purchased the toy as a gift for a nephew was a lie. Gilbert didn't have any nephews.

Welch asked Glenn when his wife filed for divorce. December 20, 1995, he said. One of Glenn's Christmas presents that year consisted of a sheriff showing up at his door on Christmas Eve to serve him divorce papers. The divorce, Glenn added, went through two years later, in December 1997.

Then Welch moved on to the calls Glenn had gotten from Gilbert throughout the summer of 1996. For the most part, she was calling, Glenn explained, to urge him not to speak to investigators about the “other” investigation. He noted that the annoying calls—hang-ups, heavy breathing—didn't begin until
after
Kristen learned he was helping investigators.

Glenn said she was “angry” and “nervous” most of the time.

“What else would she say?”

“Again, reminding me of the fact that I didn't have to speak with anyone.”

Welch wanted the jury to realize the time of the year it was. Because just about everyone involved in Gilbert's life began receiving similar calls around that same period.

“When was that, Mr. Gilbert?”

“Toward the end of spring, 1996.”

Glenn next brought jurors back to September 15, 1996, the day he came home from work early, found Gilbert inside their Drewson Drive home, and she attacked him with her car keys.

“And during that argument, did you see an emotional reaction? Did you physically see that—”

“Yes.”

“—in her?” Welch said, finishing the question anyway.

“Would you describe that?”

“Anger followed by crying,” Glenn said.

Patterns. Glenn had seen his wife act like that plenty enough times to recall an episode at will. It had all fit into what he described as his ex-wife's being “scared” and worried about being “singled out” in regard to the murder investigation.

Then it was on to the day in question—September 26, 1996. Welch asked Glenn if he received any strange messages on his answering machine that day.

“Yes.”

“Your reaction to that message?”

“It frightened me.”

“Why?”

“Because the sound of the voice . . .”

“How would you describe the sound of the voice that was on the message?”

“It sounded to me like an altered voice in a very deep, almost haunting tone.”

And with that, Welch made the connection that he would later tie to SA Plante's theory that Gilbert made
both
calls.

Miles didn't have much for Glenn. He had to be careful. The last thing he wanted to do was badger the ex-husband who had been duped by his wife and her boyfriend. It would come across to the jury the wrong way—as if Kristen was the victim and Glenn was up there trying to get back at her. The jury wouldn't buy it. They liked Glenn. He was the harmless husband who had gotten screwed. The guy next door who cut his lawn on Saturday and took the family to church on Sunday. There wasn't a person in Northampton who had a bad word to say about him. The jury wasn't going to appreciate some crass criminal lawyer from uptown who made more money in the course of a morning than most of them made all week, trying to pin the blame on the innocent ex-husband. It would backfire horribly.

After asking a few personal questions about the marriage, Miles looked directly at Glenn and proceeded to bombard him for about half an hour with questions about Glenn's archenemy, James Perrault: How Perrault and Glenn met? When? Where? Did Glenn like him? Did he have any “feeling” for him?

At one point, Welch decided he'd heard enough and objected. “Relevance?” He was looking at Miles.

“I'll overrule it.”

So Miles began asking about the kinds of toys Glenn and Kristen kept around the house, but carefully slithered his way back into Glenn and Perrault's relationship.

Realizing he wasn't getting the answers he'd hoped for, Miles threw his hands in the air, shook his head, and quickly concluded his cross-examination.

On redirect, Welch, without moving from his seat, had only two questions, the most important being, “In respect to obtaining sole custody of your children, when did that occur, as well as having custody during the days
and
evenings?”

“Again, around August '96,” Glenn answered.

Welch wanted to clear up any confusion the jury might have regarding whether Gilbert's children were staying with her at the time investigators found the Talkboy in her apartment. They were not. She hadn't seen the kids for weeks.