Perfect Poison (38 page)

While Gilbert was in Danbury Federal Prison finishing up her sentence for the false bomb threat and awaiting the start of her murder trial, Bill Welch insisted that Murphy and Plante keep a close watch on any phone calls she made from the jail.

“I want you guys to get a list of her phone calls every week and go through them. See who she's been calling. Once a month, I want you down there listening to the tapes.”

It was a painstaking process, but one Murphy and Plante knew could yield new leads.

Most of the calls Gilbert made were quick, only one or two minutes. Being in prison, it took at least that long to make a call, so at first Murphy and Plante focused their attention on the longer, ten- to fifteen-minute calls. The prison would fax a list of the calls Gilbert had made throughout a week-long period to the US Attorney's Office. If Plante and Murphy saw something exciting, they'd make the two-hour trip to Danbury, sit in a stuffy little room, and listen to the tapes.

“I don't care how long a call is,” Welch blasted them one day. “I want you to listen to
every
call.”

Gilbert spent most of her phone time talking to her parents. Yet once in a while she'd call an old friend in Connecticut, or a former colleague in Northampton. For the most part, the calls didn't amount to much. But one phone number, Murphy and Plante noticed, kept showing up week after week: that of Carole Osman.

Osman had befriended Gilbert back in 1996, after the investigation had begun. Ever since then, Plante and Murphy had kept a close eye on her movements. She wasn't under any type of surveillance, but they still wanted to know what she was up to.

“Here's a few calls,” Murphy said one day, “to Carole. They're quite long.”

On December 2, Plante and Murphy got down to Danbury at about one
P.M.
As they listened to several calls made to several different people, nothing out of the ordinary struck a chord with them right off the bat. But when they got to one particular call Gilbert had made to Carole Osman, the two investigators, sitting slouched in their chairs drinking coffee, nearly spit up.

Osman, at one point during the call, asked Gilbert what she had been doing with all the free time she'd had.

Gilbert said she had been working on a novel that “drew on some life experiences.”

Plante and Murphy perked right up, looked at each other, and smiled.

“I bet we're in it,” Plante said, as they laughed.

Plante called Welch with the news.

“Get yourself a hotel. I'll initiate a search warrant for her cell.”

Murphy spent the night writing up an affidavit. The following day, along with the search warrant he had gotten from Welch, Murphy drove down to the Bridgeport Federal Court, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and saw the judge whose federal court held jurisdiction over the Danbury prison. The judge needed to sign the warrant before Plante and Murphy could legally enter Gilbert's cell.

After taking a look at the affidavit, shaking his head, the judge said, “This is the most incredible case I have
ever
seen. Good luck to you.”

Murphy smiled.

Gilbert was to be in a scheduled counseling session at four o'clock. Her counselor had wanted to explain the gravity of the charges that had just been brought against her in the indictments and discuss how Gilbert felt about them.

As soon as Gilbert left her cell for the meeting, Plante and Murphy entered it.

Within minutes, Murphy had in his hands twenty-five pages of a novel, handwritten by Gilbert, along with a three-page outline, detailing every character in the book, along with how the remainder of the book, which hadn't been written yet, would play out.

After confiscating the book, Plante met with Gilbert and explained what they had done, and then handed her a “return,” which was a receipt of items they had taken from her cell.

With her jaw nearly rubbing against the floor, she just took the receipt and walked away without a word.

It didn't take a literary scholar to see that not only had Gilbert based the novel on her life, but her plan was, according to the “outline,” to write a detailed account of the past two years.

“Looks like we'll be doing some reading tonight, sweetheart,” Murphy said when they got into the car.

Plante looked at the book and just shook his head.

“I couldn't believe it,” Plante later recalled. “Our biggest mistake, at least that day, may have been not letting her finish the book.”

 

 

Gilbert's fictional account of her life opened as a jury foreperson stood in front of her main character and read a “guilty” verdict. From there, it backtracked, telling the story of a married woman with two kids who worked at a government agency. The woman, in the book's opening pages, was thinking about initiating an affair with a security guard, “Clive,” who also worked at the same agency.

As the book moved on, and, as Gilbert wrote in her outline, the “torrid” affair between Clive and the married woman progressed, a second security guard at the fictional government agency was murdered. All eyes, of course, focused on the married woman. Her co-workers “shun” her as “the pressure is placed on them to cooperate” with the authorities.

The most telling part of the book for Plante and Murphy, upon first look, was the married woman's name: “Heather Morgan.” Gilbert's middle name is Heather and her grandmother's maiden name is “Morgan.”

“Can you believe this shit?” Murphy said aloud while reading.

As the pressure of the investigation began to get to Heather, Gilbert wrote, Heather tried to commit suicide, failed, and was hospitalized. Her husband, “James,” who had been behind her ever since the beginning of the accusations, saw the suicide attempt as “a sign of guilt” and ended up taking the children away from Heather.

Then Clive dumped her and began to emotionally abuse her. Clive “resents” her, seeing her as a “threat” to his job.

Then the government agency receives a “handwritten” letter from Heather, threatening “grievous harm and destruction.” Yet Heather has no memory of writing it.

Every major player in Gilbert's real life was outlined in the book, from Melodie Turner to Kathy Rix to Bill Welch to Samantha Harris to Gilbert's new friends at the Federal Prison in Danbury.

Perhaps the most telling section of the book proposal was an author's note at the top of the outline page. The outline itself was sketched out to look like a Mafia family tree designed by the FBI.

Gilbert wrote that the “following work is fiction.” She mentioned that although the main character, Heather, was “loosely” based on herself, “none of the events” were “real.” She made a point to write that “no other character” was dreamed up with the notion of a “real person” in mind.

“Any similarities,” she concluded, “are purely coincidental.”

 

 

Many later wondered why Gilbert would do such a thing.

“A jail term is a useless deterrent,” Dr. Sam Vaknin, author of
Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited,
explained, “if it only serves to focus attention on the narcissist. Being infamous is second best to being famous—and far preferable to being ignored. The only way to effectively punish a narcissist is to withhold narcissistic supply from [her], to prevent [her] from becoming a notorious celebrity. Given a sufficient amount of media exposure, book contracts, talk shows, lectures, and public attention, the narcissist may even consider the whole grisly affair to be emotionally rewarding. To the narcissist, freedom, wealth, social status, family, vocation are all means to an end. And the end is
attention.
If [she] can secure attention by being the big bad wolf—the narcissist will unhesitatingly transform [herself] into one.”

“In many respects,” Dr. Vaknin continued, “narcissists are children. Like children, they engage in magical thinking.”

Gilbert was transferred from her cell in Danbury on February 15, 1999, after serving ten months out of her fifteen-month bomb-threat sentence, to the Hamden County House of Correction for Women, in Ludlow, Massachusetts. Since she'd been denied bail, Hamden County would be her new home until the murder trial was over.

She had been scheduled to be released from Danbury in November 1998, so she could serve the rest of her time at a halfway house nearby. But the US Attorney's Office intervened at the eleventh hour, offering the court a strong opinion as to why she should be kept behind bars. Welch wasn't sure at the time that they were going to indict her, so he sent a letter to the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) stating that she was suspected in a “number of murders . . . was very dangerous, and they would be putting people at risk” if they allowed her release.

The BOP, once it heard the facts from Welch, changed its mind.

Later, Welch heard through the grapevine that when Gilbert and her father got wind of what he had done, they went “ballistic,” preaching to anyone who would listen that Welch had some sort of personal “vendetta” against her.

They were groundless accusations, of course. Welch was only, he later said, protecting the public from someone he viewed as a vicious sociopath capable of God knows what.

Meanwhile, as Gilbert got comfortable in her new surroundings, word that the US Attorney's Office was going to seek the death penalty began to spread through Western Massachusetts. Some residents were outraged; others were quick to judge, pegging Gilbert as a sadistic serial killer who deserved nothing less than death. To make matters worse, an earlier poll, taken by the Northeastern University College of Criminal Justice, reflected the unbalance Western Massachusetts residents were feeling.

In 1994, Northeastern found that out of six hundred and three Massachusetts residents, seventy-four percent favored the death penalty for a first-degree murder conviction. Yet, when these same people were asked to choose between the death penalty and life without parole, only thirty-eight percent opted for death, and fifty-four percent chose life without parole.

Nevertheless, on May 13, 1999, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno weighed in with the government's decision: Bill Welch and his team had the green light. Ironically, if Gilbert were convicted and sentenced to death, she would die in the same manner as she had killed: by lethal injection.

It was an unprecedented move on the government's part—because the last time a criminal had been executed in Massachusetts was more than fifty years ago. On May 9, 1947, thirty-four-year-old Edward Gertson and his thirty-two-year-old partner, Phillip Billeno, convicted in the murder of Robert Williams, were electrocuted.

 

 

Nearly two weeks after the government announced its plan to go forward with the death penalty, Gilbert was brought before Judge Michael Ponsor. If she ever wanted to save the taxpayers of the state of Massachusetts any money, as she had once told her then-husband, Glenn Gilbert, back in 1996, well, here was her opportunity.

Although she had gained some weight, Gilbert hadn't really changed much since she'd been incarcerated. She was still rather attractive, considering the life she had led for the past two years.

Looking down the entire time, Gilbert stood before the soft-spoken judge and calmly pled not guilty.

For the next year, defense attorneys David Hoose, Harry Miles and Paul Weinberg filed one motion after another, while Bill Welch and Ariane Vuono countered with their own. Each motion filed by Gilbert's defense was flavored with the same mantra Hoose and Miles had been trumpeting ever since they had taken on the Gilbert case: The government's shoddy scientific evidence and heap of circumstantial evidence pointed to their client only because it had no one else to pin the deaths on. The government was on a “witchhunt,” they insisted—and Kristen Gilbert had been its target since day one!

By March 2000, after several hearings on routine matters, the central theme of Gilbert's defense began to emerge as Hoose and Miles, opposing just about every motion filed by the government, continued to maintain that the patients in question had died of natural causes. There were no murders.

With a deadline of June 15 for all motions looming, Judge Ponsor was now faced with the decision of which pieces of evidence to allow into the trial.

Right away, Hoose went after what he thought was the government's most damning evidence: the toxicology tests done on Skwira, Jagodowski, Cutting and Hudon. Hoose called it “junk science,” and said that the specific type of testing done in this case actually disguised the natural cause of the death.

Dr. Fredric Rieders, the laboratory director of National Medical Services in Pennsylvania, where the testing in question had been done, took the stand during a hearing in late March to discuss his methods for testing tissue samples. Rieders had testified in several prominent murder cases throughout the years. In the OJ Simpson case, for example, he brought out the fact for Simpson's defense that blood on the socks found at Simpson's house and the back gate of Nicole Brown's condominium both contained EDTA, a blood preservative used in police labs.

Rieders would be saying that it was massive amounts of epinephrine that killed Gilbert's patients, not natural causes, as Hoose and Miles continued to claim.

He also said he was going to testify that Skwira, Jagodowski, Cutting and Hudon all had high levels of epinephrine in their tissue—much higher levels than are naturally occurring. This was consistent, Rieders claimed, with epinephrine poisoning—especially in the case of Cutting and Skwira, patients who hadn't received any injections of epinephrine during their codes.

For most of the day, Welch and Hoose grilled Rieders about his testing methods.

Then Hoose brought in his own experts to quash Rieders's theory that his method of testing was first-rate science. If the jury was allowed to hear Rieders's testimony, Hoose argued, it would mislead them.

At the end of the day, Judge Ponsor said he would take both arguments under consideration and make a decision as soon as he could.

 

 

Throughout the next few weeks and months, Ponsor began to crack his whip and show just how tight a leash he was going to keep on the Gilbert trial. The government's charges of obstruction of justice and retaliating against a witness, Ponsor ruled on Tuesday, April 11, 2000, would not be part of the murder trial. Gilbert, he said, would have to be tried separately on those charges.

By June, Ponsor had made a decision regarding Dr. Rieders's testimony.

“A jury should be permitted to consider—and accept or reject—this evidence,” Ponsor ruled.

The government had won a key ruling.

Then Ponsor shot down a motion by Hoose and Miles to challenge the death penalty. Ponsor said most of the defense's death penalty arguments had already been turned down by the US Supreme Court years ago in other cases, and as to those that hadn't, well, Hoose's arguments, according to the judge, were “unpersuasive.”

As one decision after the next came in from Judge Ponsor, Hoose and Miles were flippant about how one-sided the judge appeared to be in his rulings.

But two key motions eventually fell in Gilbert's favor, the most important being whether the jury would end up hearing from Glenn Gilbert that his then-wife had tried to murder him with an injection of potassium back in November 1995.

Ponsor barred any testimony about the incident saying it would “create unfair prejudice.”

The second ruling regarded the statistical evidence SA Plante had obtained back in 1996 from Stephen Gehlbach, dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Massachusetts. Gehlbach had run the numbers for Plante and, among many things, concluded that there was less than a one in one million chance it could have been a coincidence that Gilbert had been on duty for so many codes and medical emergencies. Ponsor made a point that there was no room in his courtroom for such evidence. It would only taint the jury's belief that the defendant was innocent until proven guilty. Along those same lines, Ponsor also ruled that Gilbert's colleagues were barred from testifying “that the death rate at the hospital increased during Gilbert's shifts.”

Things were, apparently, evening out.

 

 

The government sent out about seventeen hundred jury summonses during the first week of July, setting the stage for what was amounting to one of the largest jury pools the state of Massachusetts had even amassed.

In his jury proposal, Ponsor wrote that he would not sequester the jury, and that he was also considering keeping a scrapbook of newspaper articles about the case to give to each juror after the trial was over in hope of stifling any temptation on their part during the trial to read the coverage.

Each side had until August 11 to submit replies to Ponsor's proposal. After that, the process of picking a jury would begin.