CRAZY NURSE – Her Patients Never Survived
Taking the life of another person is a very profound act. It’s not an easy process to engage in. 2 hours east of Boston is the city of Northampton, Massachusetts, home to America’s first veteran psychiatric hospital. The medical center, often referred to as simply the VA, provides psychiatric and other health care services to United States service veterans.
The veterans hospitals are specialized. The one in Northampton is primarily a psychiatric hospital, but they also have general beds and intensive care units. But for the families of veterans who seek care there, it’s a very, very important place. It has been a long month for Stanley Jagodowski.
The 66-year-old Korean War veteran has been a patient at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northampton, Massachusetts since his surgery in July. Despite initial complications, Stanley’s condition is improving every day. Although Stanley Jagodowski had been sick, he’d been getting much better and he had been recommended to be transferred to the VA Medical Center’s nursing home unit.
The only reason he hadn’t been transferred is because all the beds were occupied and there was no vacancy. In August 1995, the VA’s Ward C is a 26-bed acute care facility on the hospital’s second floor. They didn’t have any surgical options, but if you had a heart attack, if you had diabetes, they could treat you there similar to how you’d be treated in a regular hospital.
Stanley Jagodowski continues to recover. When two of the ward nurses check on him at 8:43 p.m. on August 21st, he is in good spirits. Later that night, hospital staff respond to an emergency code in Ward C. One of their patients is having a heart attack. For veteran nurses Kathy Ricks and Kristen Gilbert, it comes with the territory.
For James Perrault, the newest member of the hospital police force, it is something to get used to since on-duty security officers must also respond to cardiac emergencies. Unfortunately, this time there is nothing anyone can do. The patient, 66-year-old Stanley Jagodowski, is dead. For hospital staff, the loss of a patient is a sad but not uncommon consequence of the job.
In fact, in the last few years, the number of deaths on Ward C has increased. Because the types of patients who were admitted at the VA Medical Center had serious illnesses, the fact that they had cardiac arrests or cardiac events in and of itself wasn’t that unusual. What is unusual is that the next heart attack involves a patient who doesn’t fit the usual pattern.
Henry Hudon is 19 when he enlists in the Air Force following his father’s footsteps into military service. Very adventurous, very playful. Um he was a little more than 3 years younger than me. So, he was aggravating at times, but I was brought up, you know, with you’re his big sister and it’s your job to protect him and watch out for him.
He enlisted in the fall of 1979 and he went to basic training and then technical training and his first tour of duty was over in England. Henry serves as a physical therapist until the night a commanding officer asks him to settle a fight at a local restaurant. He ended up getting a beer bottle on the back of the head and slammed down onto a cement floor face first and he ended up with a frontal lobe injury in the brain.
I made a trip to go visit him when he was released from the hospital and and I could see a whole personality change in him already. He was not the same person and within 9 months he was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. Um on one hand it was like taking care of a child again and then at other times he’d be hearing voices and he’d be listening to them and he would become very aggressive and violent and there were times where you’d have to leave the house for your own safety.
By December 1995, 35-year-old Henry Hudon is a regular visitor to the VA Medical Center, where he receives medication. Admitted to the psychiatric wing, he often takes off before his release, forcing family members to retrieve him. It was whoever was available between my mother and I on any given time that he had to go back to the hospital that we’d go over and bring him back.
It is Julia Hudon who returns her son to the medical center on December 8th, 1995, after he skips out the day before. At the time he had the flu, he was violently ill with it, and he is the one who called my mother and I for one of us to take him back up to the hospital. He was very sick, and upon him being admitted, the doctor was explaining to him and my mother that they’re going to keep him in the medical building overnight.
But something about Ward C doesn’t sit well with Henry. There are rumors, and Henry is scared. He just started screaming and yelling and going off the wall. Um, he said staff and patients are all talking about people being killed, people being people are dying around here for no reason, um, over the last few months, and he was hysterical.
After he started with what we thought were delusions, the doctor asked my mom and told her, “We think it’s best that you leave now.” He just turned around and he looked at my mom, and his last words to her were, “Mom.” And he was crying at that point. He said, “I don’t want to die. Please don’t leave me here.
” Late that night, Julia Hudon a telephone call. A doctor informs her that her son is gone. Since Henry has a habit of leaving the hospital before being released, his mother is more exasperated than concerned. She just assumed that he had skipped out and she just said, you know, “Fine, I’ll go over to his apartment and I’ll do my best to talk him into coming back again.
” And then the doctor sent to her, um, “No, he’s gone.” As in dead, d e a d. From that moment on, my mother, for the rest of the evening, did nothing but cry. She was just numb. She wasn’t saying a word. I got in the car and I went up there for identification purposes. Christine is told that her brother went into cardiac arrest just hours after being admitted to Ward C.
He suffered at least two more heart attacks before dying at 10:00 p.m. But after speaking with the doctor, I the words just came out. I I want an autopsy. And he said, “No, you don’t need one.” And after going back and forth, um, I insisted that he’s going to have an autopsy. I mean, he had the flu. Um, I don’t know of too many cases where you go into cardiac arrest three times with the flu.
It just didn’t make sense. Nursing staff at the VA Medical Center would agree. They have noticed the unusually high number of deaths from cardiac arrest at Ward C’s intensive care unit. The question is, why? The Northampton VA Medical Center Western Massachusetts cares for elderly and injured armed forces veterans.
Many are seriously ill, but some have died unexpectedly, including 66-year-old Stanley Jagadowski. Jagadowski’s health appeared to be improving when he died suddenly of a heart attack. Another patient, 35-year-old Henry Houdon, had psychiatric issues, but was otherwise strong and healthy. Yet, he too went into cardiac arrest just hours after being admitted to Ward C’s intensive care unit.
His death is so suspicious that his family has ordered an autopsy. Just 12 days after Houdon’s death, 72-year-old Francis Maryer also suffers a heart attack. But, the Ward C emergency team manages to stabilize the World War II veteran. Nurse Kathy Rex would like to pass off the number of cardiac arrests as coincidence, but there is a discrepancy in the hospital records concerning one of its medications, a deadly discrepancy.
Hospital records cannot account for 88 out of 135 ampules of epinephrine that were dispensed on Ward C from the summer of ’95 to the beginning of ’96. Epinephrine is a naturally produced chemical within the body generated by the adrenal glands. It causes various systems within the body to become stimulated by its release.
So, for example, if someone scares you and yells “Boo!”, your heart rate will increase dramatically as a result of the release of epinephrine. Epinephrine is also produced synthetically. The hospital stocks two different strengths, a light dose to revive heart attack victims, and a dose 10 times more concentrated to counter the anaphylactic shock of allergic reaction.
When epinephrine is dispensed to somebody who is is in trouble, has a heart condition that that needs to be stabilized, it can be a lifesaver. But when it’s dispensed or given to somebody who uh uh whose heart is normal, it it essentially accelerates the heart rate to a dangerous level. Epinephrine is colorless and difficult to trace.
At the time, there was no way to tell the difference between synthetic epinephrine and epinephrine produced by the body. So, if you’re going to inject somebody with synthetic epinephrine, it metabolizes so fast that you wouldn’t be able to determine it in an autopsy. Although the drug does not show up in Henry Hudon’s autopsy, something has had a profound impact on his heart.
His autopsy showed that his heart had sped up to such a rate that part of it exploded throughout the chest cavity. Hoping her suspicions are baseless, nurse Kathy Ryx decides to keep a close eye on the hospital’s epinephrine supply. One time before Kathy Ryx went on vacation, she did an inventory of the epinephrine in the ICU.
When she returned to work, uh approximately 2 weeks later, the majority of the medication was missing. So, she checked the records and she >> found that no patient on the ward had been prescribed that medication, and therefore nobody should have been given that medication. So, she contacts two of her colleagues.
One is John Wall, one is Renee Walsh, and she says to them, “There’s some anomalies here that we need to check on.” In late January, 60-year-old army vet Thomas Callahan goes into cardiac arrest after complaining of a burning pain. Fortunately, ICU duty nurse Kristen Gilbert and her emergency team are able to stabilize him.
Kathy Rex was a nurse on Ward C. She checked the disposal bucket and found uh three broken ampules of of epinephrine. And that sort of sent alarm bells because there was no there was no prescribed need for that medication on that ward at that time. Just 6 days later, 74-year-old ex-Marine Michelle Cascoyne suffers four cardiac emergencies in the ICU.
Bonnie Bledsoe, a respiratory therapist from another ward, must respond. There had been a series of codes on on Ward C. One of the nurses’ name was Bonnie Bledsoe. She was an asthmatic. And uh after the third code, she’s she’s running from one end of the hospital to the other. And she at one point confronted or ran up against Kristen Gilbert and said, “Chrissy, if there’s going to be another code, I’m going to start wheezing any minute.
” She was worried about her health. And at that point uh Gilbert reached into the pocket of her smock and pulled out an ampule of epinephrine and said, “Want some Epi?” Later that night, after his fourth heart attack, Michelle Cascoyne is dead. By early February 1996, fearful whispers echo through the corridors of Ward C.
>> >> Members of the nursing staff have discovered a disturbing pattern they find difficult to ignore and even more difficult to explain. First, there is the disappearance of epinephrine from medical supply cabinets, a powerful drug that rapidly increases heart rates. Code blue! They also notice that an alarming number of codes occur when one particular nurse is on duty.
She is 28-year-old Kristen Gilbert, a pretty and popular mother of two who’s been at the VA Medical Center for almost 7 years. Kristen Gilbert had a reputation as being a a common compassionate nurse. Her her proficiency reports from her superiors were if not stellar, very good. They said that she was uh you know, a calming influence.
She was uh she worked well with mentally impaired patients and that she was frequently assigned to the ICU. It is inconceivable to colleagues that Kristen could have anything to do with the deaths on Ward C. Yet, there is a shadow of doubt. After Gilbert joined the evening shift in ’91, the death rate there tripled. And the death rate on the shift that she had left uh returned to uh normal levels.
And so, uh on Ward C, she acquired the nickname Angel of Death. Socially, Kristen is still one of the gang, doing what she can to brighten the lives of those around her. Kristen helped organize a club called the Sunshine Club. And the Sunshine Club was used when someone became sick and um would get flowers.
And she was also very social and after hours would go down to the local bar at the VFW and hang out. Colleagues also noticed that Kristen’s relationship with new security officer James Perrault is more than just professional. The partner Gilbert was a wife and mother, but she had hinted to him that her 7-year marriage was on the rocks.
So, they began a increasingly flirtatious affair. They exchanged emails that were funny and increasingly sexually charged, and eventually that romance blossomed into a full-blown love affair. A week before the death of Henry Hudon in December 1995, Peralta helps Kristen move out of the house she shares with her husband and two young sons.
So, by February 1996, the love affair between Peralta and Gilbert was in full flower. And what was interesting is that he was by her side at every single code that she responded to. In early February, Kristen Gilbert is the only nurse working the intensive care unit in Ward C. Her only patient is 41-year-old Army veteran Kenneth Cutting.
Kenny Cutting was a Air Force veteran, had multiple sclerosis. He was unable to walk. His hands were twisted. He was blind. But, he was very affable and friendly to the staff. Kristen was supposed to work until 11:30 that night. She went to her supervisor and she said, “You know, Kenny’s not doing too well.
If Kenny dies, can I go home early tonight?” And the supervisor, being in the business, didn’t see anything wrong with that. And 35 minutes later, Kenny Cutting starts having codes. At 7:10 p.m., moments after Gilbert returned to the ICU, Kenneth Cutting suffered a massive heart attack and died. Gilbert delivered his body to the morgue, and less than 2 hours later, by 9:00 p.m.
or so, she had checked out of work. The deadly coincidences surrounding the beautiful young nurse are becoming hard to ignore. In James Perrault, however, Kristen Gilbert seems to have found a powerful ally. Five patients have died under mysterious circumstances in the Northampton VA Medical Center’s intensive care ward.
The latest is 41-year-old Ken Cutting, who died suddenly of cardiac arrest on February 2nd, 1996. When deadly intravenous drugs go missing, attention turns to nurse Kristen Gilbert, who is on duty when all the deaths occur. When 68-year-old Edward Squires dies of a heart attack 2 weeks later, nurse Kathy Ricks checks the inventory closely.
On February 15th, when Kathy Ricks came on duty, she went to the ICU unit and counted three epinephrine ampules in the ICU medicine cabinet. Mr. Squires was later admitted to the ICU unit and then subsequently coded. Kathy Ricks immediately responded to the code and went directly to the ICU medicine cabinet, where she looked for the three epinephrine ampules, but they weren’t there.
She then went immediately to the needle disposal bucket and found the three broken ampules in the bucket. Kristen Gilbert was the only nurse assigned to the ICU unit at that time. The discovery is identical to the one made after Thomas Callahan’s emergency code in January. For Kathy Ricks, John Wall, and Renee Wash, it is time to face the facts and come forward with their suspicions.
They definitely had feelings of doubt about their suspicions, and the reason for that is because as trained nurse professionals, they believe that people came into the profession to help people, not hurt people. The case is assigned to special agent Steve Plant of the Veterans Affairs Office of the Inspector General.
Our job was to conduct criminal investigations within the VA system. Uh our criminal investigations involve uh robberies, homicides, embezzlements, contract frauds. Um on February 29th, 1996, I received the call about a new case. My focus in the investigation in the beginning was just not on one individual. It was involved everybody.
I mean, it could involve one individual, two individuals. So, my focus was um basically to remain unbiased and let the pieces of the puzzle fall where they may. I interviewed the three nurses, and they informed me of certain situations that they were involved with where their patients either coded or died.
And in looking back, those patients should have not coded and died. And the common denominator with those deaths and codes was Kristen Gilbert. The director of the hospital ordered a board investigation over a certain period of time to determine how many deaths occurred in that time frame. In that time frame, 106 deaths occurred overall in the at the hospital.
Of the 106 deaths, 63 deaths occurred on Ward C. Of the 63, 44 occurred in the evening shift when Kristen Gilbert was working, and of the 37, she was present for those 37 deaths. Some people felt that the VA wasn’t being aggressive in investigating this, that it would be embarrassing for them. But I think there was also a reluctance among the nurses to shine the spotlight on one of their own and say this person is killing all these people.
When when the three nurses finally came forward, they did it after a lot of trepidation and a lot of discussion. As the investigation gets underway, Kristen Gilbert suddenly leaves her job with an apparent shoulder injury. Kristen got wind of the investigation and knew she was going to be brought in and perhaps suspended.
So, she came forward first and claimed that she had a shoulder injury from a patient twisting her arm and went out on a workman’s compensation injury instead. That was a good thing the way she left because she would go home, she wouldn’t be out looking for a job, and she wouldn’t be dealing with patients at the hospital.
So, it worked out positive for everybody because we didn’t have to worry about the problem moving somewhere else. Kristen Gilbert’s absence doesn’t prevent investigators from questioning her. Kristen Gilbert was a smart and excellent nurse. People relied on her in in emergency situations and in code situations. Her explanation as to why she was there so often was because she was a relied relied upon so often in these emergency situations.
When I interviewed Kristen Gilbert, she was very monotone, uh didn’t offer much as far as any explanations other than the questions that I was asking her. And she just wanted to know what this she was being accused of something. I told her she wasn’t being accused of anything. We were just trying to find out why this anomaly happened at the hospital.
No one has actually seen Kristen administer epinephrine to the patients. It is her word against those who believe she is responsible. It was not your typical murder case involving a gun or a knife. It was more like a white-collar crime case where you track medical evidence, build a circumstantial case, and identify your perpetrator.
We interviewed over 150 people. And when we put the all the interviews together, they all pointed towards one individual, and that was Kristen Gilbert. Investigators believe they have their suspect. What they need now is a motive and an answer to the question, why? Every Every criminal commits a crime in a different way.
Each crime is like a puzzle. The more pieces you find, the clearer the picture gets. I received a call from one of the special agents who told me that he believed that they had a serial killer at the VA Medical Center and needed to open a grand jury investigation. I have to say that I viewed his allegations with a skepticism because the VA Medical Center is a very tranquil place.
But they had the results of interviews of three senior nurses with more than 60 years experience who all had the same suspicions. So at that point we opened the grand jury investigation. We added Trooper Kevin Murphy who had homicide experience, and I became more active in the investigation. Word of the grand jury investigation reaches members of the local news media.
I tried to reach Kristen Gilbert several times, and then my investigation took me to Family Probate Court where I knew she was going through a divorce, and I discovered an affidavit that confirmed that she was a suspect in the serial deaths over at the VA Hospital. We broke the story, and as you can imagine in a town of 30,000, it was big news and the talk of the town for days.
Meanwhile, VA Special Agent Steve Plant and Homicide Detective Kevin Murphy search for a motive that would tie Kristen Gilbert to the deaths, including her relationship with a certain security officer. Uh one witness noticed during a code that uh Gilbert was literally playing footsie with Perrault. Another time she’d reach out affectionately smiling at him during a code, and some co-workers noticed her slipping out secretly to meet with Perault after work.
The theory was that she was injecting these patients with epinephrine. Uh she then called code. Uh number of people would respond including the security department. Uh the prosecution maintained she had the hots for the one of the security guards. And she’d perform perform, she’d kind of get off on him being there.
Um there was definitely a sexual element to it. During the initial inquiry, Perault helps Kristen keep tabs from home passing on what he knows about the investigation. Perault really wanted to believe Gilbert. Uh they discussed the case. Uh he was he wanted to support her. She was increasingly lashing out at co-workers. And uh it becoming increasingly testy about co-workers who are pointing the finger at her.
The relationship became increasingly stormy. They began began fighting as she accused him of secretly spying on her for the investigators. With her love affair going cold and investigators on the scene, Kristen Gilbert, the cool controlled intensive care nurse, starts to come apart. Five mysterious deaths at the Northampton Medical Center in Massachusetts have forced staff to face their suspicions about popular nurse Kristen Gilbert.
With authorities closing in, Gilbert becomes more aggressive, particularly in her relationship with lover James Perault. Uh she was mad as hell at James Perault because he was cooperating with our investigation and she didn’t think she he was very supportive of her. As Kristen becomes more physically abusive, Perrault tries to end the relationship.
After she almost rams his car during an argument, Perrault gets a restraining order against her. It is just days before investigators arrive at his door. He was cooperative but guarded. I believe that he had some concerns that others may view him as having some role or involvement in these crimes. So, it took a while before he became comfortable with the fact that we viewed him solely as a witness and nothing more.
They handed Perrault a a grand jury summons and a blunt message. You need to decide which side of the fence you’re going to be on uh because if you stay with Gilbert, you’re not going to have a job when this is over. Investigators also talked to Kristen’s husband, Glenn Gilbert. The husband allowed us to search the home.
And I find in the pantry a handbook of poisons. Now, it’s not that unusual to find a handbook of poison in a nurse’s house. But what was curious is that there were pages dog-eared. One was for potassium and one was for epinephrine. >> [snorts] >> Gilbert tells the investigators that not long after his wife met James Perrault, he began to notice a strange taste in his home-cooked meals.
So, the husband tells a story that he comes home one night and he’s not feeling well and his wife decides to take him to the local emergency room, not the Veterans Hospital. And once there, they find that his potassium level is low. If you give somebody a diuretic and you grind it up and put that in their food, it will lower their potassium level.
In a young person, it can lower it enough to cause cardiac arrest. Glenn Gilbert also describes a night when Kristen comes home unexpectedly during her shift, apparently to take a blood sample. She says to her husband, “Before I take your blood, I have to flush your vein.” So, she injects into him a clear fluid and almost immediately he starts to lose consciousness and does lose consciousness.
10 minutes later, he awakens to find Kristen gathering up her gear and she made a comment to him that you probably passed out from the sight of the needle. Anybody that knows anything about medicine knows that if you’re going to be giving blood, nobody injects anything into that vein before the blood is drawn.
From that, we hypothesized that she actually tried to kill him. In September 1996, James Peralta is set to appear before the grand jury investigation. Kristen tries to stop him, begging him not to attend. But, Peralta testifies. During questioning, Peralta confirms that the night patient Ken Cutting died, Kristen met him for a date after booking off early.
Peralta also describes one night when an overdose puts Kristen in hospital. Peralta told investigators about a phone call from Gilbert in which she said, “You know I did it. I did it. I killed those guys.” And then she hung up. Without proof, investigators cannot verify Peralta’s claim. But, Steve Plant suggests that he start recording all telephone calls.
After he walked out of his 2-hour interview with investigators, Peralta said the front tire in his car had been deflated and over the next few days, he noticed that somebody had keyed his car. The the windshield had been spray-painted and he was convinced that Gilbert was defacing his car. One evening the VA Medical Center received a bomb threat.
It was a male sounding caller who said, There are three explosive devices in building one. You have two hours. Uh the fire department was called, police department was called, a search was conducted of the hospital itself, and no bomb could be found. For all that tape recordings of the bomb threat caller when they had come in, so he provided me copies of the the tapes themselves.
I listened to the tapes and it sounded like a male male caller, but whose voice and sound was mechanically altered. There are three explosive devices in building one. You have two hours. VA police officer Perrault also listened to the tapes over and over again, and he said the sound of the voice on the phone didn’t seem like it was Kristen Gilbert, but when he when he listened to it over and over again, the words that she used and how they were structured.
And in his opinion, it was Kristen Gilbert. So we start checking with the telephone company to backtrack some of these phone calls that have been used. And we find that a couple of local phone booths had actually been used to make these bomb threat calls. Perrault agrees to contact Kristen to let her know that he is on duty at the hospital security desk.
We decide we’re going to blanket as many phone booths as we can, and there’s probably 15 phone booths within 5 miles of Kristen’s house. I set up on one location where I can see five telephone booths from where I am. And lo and behold, she drives in right next to me. She can’t be 25 feet away, stops, gets out of the car, and makes a telephone call.
>> >> As soon as she leaves, I contact the Veterans Hospital and ask if they They just received a telephone call. They said “Yes.” So, I stayed at the scene to preserve the forensic evidence at the phone. And later on, we had it dusted for fingerprints and we found Kristen’s prints. We didn’t have enough evidence to arrest Kristen Gilbert at the time, but we did have enough probable cause for a search warrant.
So, we searched her house and found a device similar to the one that she had purchased, but not at not that identical one. The best thing about Steve plan is he’s one of the best investigators that I’ve ever met in my life. He’s going home one night and he says to himself, “I got to figure out how this woman gets a device to alter her voice.
” I went to a toy store and met with the sales manager. I asked her if she had any type of voice changing toy that would alter one’s voice. She spoke into the toy and slowed her voice down and it sounded almost identical to what was on the recordings from the VA Medical Center regarding the bomb threats. I asked if she had any documentations or documentations regarding the purchase of these toys within the last week and a half.
She came up with some documents and one of the documents was a credit card receipt signed by Kristen Gilbert purchasing that particular device. Well, with the evidence we had, we had the receipt as well as the devices that she used to call in the bomb threats. We had the eyewitness from Proof of Murphy showing her making a phone call to the VA Medical Center.
And we also had Bill Welch taking one of the tapes from the bomb threat, playing it in a recorder at a normal speed, and Glenn Gilbert recognized the the voice in that recording as her as his wife, Kristen Gilbert. There is an explosive device in the building. You have 1 hour left. She was arrested.
She was convicted of the bomb threat and she was sentenced to 15 months in in federal penitentiary where she couldn’t do any more harm. It was a blessing. Her conviction got her out of the area. Kristen Gilbert had been tracking the investigation and talking to potential witnesses. And they were concerned that she may retaliate against them.
So, by getting her out of the area, witnesses were more forthcoming. With Kristen behind bars, investigators get permission from the families to exhume the remains of Stanley Jagadowski, Edward Squier, and Kenneth Cutting. Tissue samples taken from the eyes of the victims are sent to a laboratory for testing, along with samples from Henry Hudon’s autopsy.
There’s a small hole at the back of your eye that spasms. And when you die, it prevents the fluid in your eye from leaking out, so it becomes an excellent repository for poisons. And we were actually able to recover vitreous from deceased people and examine it with our scientists, and they actually found that there was an elevated epinephrine level.
I’ll never forget the night that I got a phone call at 8:00 on a Friday night to go down to the District Attorney’s Office. When I got there, the whole investigative team was there. My chair was right across from Kevin Murphy’s, and I sat down, and he said, “I have some bad news for you.” And he just looked me eye to eye and said, “Your brother’s been murdered.
” It is clear to investigators that Henry Hudon is not the only victim to suffer at the hands of the Angel of Death. What is frightening is that the victims they know about may be just the tip of the iceberg. In Northampton, Massachusetts, VA nurse Kristen Gilbert is indicted for first-degree murder in the deaths of four of her patients: Henry Hudon, Edward Squier, Stanley Jagadowski, and Kenneth Cutting.
The reason that we chose those four people is that we had excellent medical documentation on the patients, and we had excellent medical observation by the staff at the hospital. Kristen Gilbert’s murder trial gets underway in November 2000 and attracts a great deal of media attention. The reason is the decision by federal authorities to ask for the death penalty.
Because the crime took place on on the VA property, which is federal property, it came under the federal statutes, and at the time the federal government had the death penalty. Massachusetts hadn’t had the death penalty in about 25 years. So, it was the first death penalty case here in a generation. During the trial, protesters against the death penalty picketed in front of the federal building, and some actually sat through some of the testimony, and I remember one man who was so moved by the thought the state would execute this woman, he had
tears in his eyes. At the center is defendant Kristen Gilbert, now 33 years old. It was an amazing case to prosecute, but it was also amazing case to investigate. There was no smoking gun in this case. It was all based on circumstantial evidence. Nobody actually saw her inject a patient with epinephrine.
In pre-trial arguments, prosecutors said that Gilbert had been on duty for half of the 350 deaths that occurred on her ward over the 7 years where she worked there. As the trial progresses, it becomes clear that there are two sides to Kristen Gilbert, as contradictory as black and white. Kristen was very bright when she was a senior in high school.
She was taking college courses. She met her husband at a beach in New Hampshire. They had two children. So, in many ways, um she lived a very normal life. However, if you dug a little deeper and talked more with the neighbors, you would discover that there was something indeed very odd about this woman.
I spoke with the neighbor across the street, Alberta Erickson, who remembered Kristen as a young girl lying a lot. Alberta said that she seemed to make things up as she went along. There was a soap opera called General Hospital. And this young girl remembers that Kristen’s favorite character on that show was a nurse named Amy.
And Amy was this conniving, evil, despicable character. And her friend said, “Kristen, why would you like Amy?” And she said, “I don’t know. There’s just something about her I like.” Prosecutors contend that Gilbert preyed on patients to impress her new lover, James Perrault. That she thrived on the energy and excitement generated by the cardiac emergencies she created.
Well, the trial lasted 6 months. And I was there every day. I did not miss a one day of the trial. Um I wanted to find out what happened to my brother. And [snorts] it was very emotional. Um there were an awful lot of people with an awful lot of personal issues that were brought out in that trial. Um a lot of the details, things that nobody could be prepared for.
Two of the prosecution’s most dramatic witnesses are the men closest to Kristen Gilbert. Husband Glenn Gilbert and lover James Perrault. Both testify that Kristen confessed to them that she committed the murders. Although Kristen Gilbert never takes the stand, the defense presents its own set of witnesses, arguing that there is no proof that the victims died of epinephrine injections, or that Gilbert administered them.
There were one or two of her colleagues who refused to believe that Kristen Gilbert would have tried to kill any of her patients. They believe that all of these patients died of natural causes. The jury does not agree. After 12 days of deliberation, they find Kristen Gilbert guilty of three counts of first-degree murder.
The jury’s job is not over. Now they must decide whether Kristen should live or die. I really felt that Kristen Gilbert deserved the death penalty. Um I mean, this is somebody who in cold blood has killed many, many veterans, um people who fought for this country to keep her safe as well as everyone else in this country.
And I was just appalled at somebody that could have so little regard for life. Her defense attorney argued that the jury should not put her to death for the only reason that she’s a mother and to let her sons someday go to her and ask, “Why? Why did you do this?” This time, the jury does agree. They sentence Kristen Gilbert to four consecutive life terms plus 20 years with no possibility for parole.
The gratitude to the two nurses and the one occupational therapist that um actually blew the whistle on her. They had suspicions of what she was doing and uh they paid attention and they found out that that is indeed what she was doing. And if they never came forward with the authorities, I don’t. I don’t even know that there’d be a trial.
Um if there was a trial, I don’t see how they would have reached a guilty verdict. Everything hinged on them coming forward and their testimonies. Some psychologists and psychiatrists say that it was almost like a Munchausen’s disease that Kristen Gilbert had, where she was putting patients into a code situation and then to be the one there with the defibrillator to bring that patient back.
Then becoming the hero. So, she fed off that hero hero worship. You can’t take the life of another person if you experience them as human is, I think, very true. I would add that it is probably also true that you can’t experience yourself as human while taking the life of another person.
Although she was only charged with four counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder, uh the prosecutors theorized she could have killed more than 40 people and have been the most prolific serial killer in US history.
