Perfect Poison (7 page)

A week or so after the initial incident that had landed Glenn in the ER, Kristen, without notice, came home from work during her dinner break one night toting a large canvas bag. She had a simple request for Glenn: As she had promised, she wanted to take a sample of his blood back to work and have it tested. She said she didn't trust the doctors. She wanted to be sure his potassium level was where it should be.

Here they were discussing divorce and having arguments every other day about who would stay in the house and who would leave, and now Kristen was coming home to make sure Glenn was okay?

Something didn't fit.

Kristen brought the canvas bag into the bathroom.

“Come on in, Glenn,” she said, and took a large syringe out of the bag. It was filled with a clear liquid.

Glenn looked at the needle.

“It's saline,” Kristen said. “I need to flush your vein first, before I take blood from you.” She had another syringe that was empty. Glenn guessed it was for the blood she was going to draw.

After wrapping a tourniquet around his arm, she inserted the larger needle “into the crook of his left arm and began injecting the clear liquid.”

Glenn hadn't thought of it at the time, but anyone who had ever gotten blood drawn knew that the vein was never flushed because it would dilute the blood.

As the fluid entered Glenn's body, his fingertips went numb and, growing cold, his “hands, arms and chest drain[ed] of color and [became] translucent.”

What the hell is going on . . . ?

As Glenn tried to pull away, Kristen pinned him with her hip against the wall and hurriedly pushed the injection into his vein until the syringe was at least half empty. At the same time, she ripped the tourniquet off his arm so the fluid would quickly enter his bloodstream before he could do anything.

In seconds, Glenn's legs locked. As he began to lose consciousness, he slowly slid down the side of the bathroom wall he had been leaning on like some drunken bandit in a spaghetti Western who had been hit over the head with a bottle.

Within a few moments, he came out of it and saw Kristen scrambling around the bathroom in a frenzy. She was gathering up the syringes and putting them back into the bag.

“This isn't going to work,” Kristen said as Glenn came to. “You must have fainted at the sight of the needles.”

Even so, while her husband lay helpless on the floor, Kristen walked out of the house and returned to work as if nothing had happened.

When she returned, she ran into Lori Naumowitz and gave her version of what had happened back at home.

“You just left him there . . . and came back to work?” Naumowitz asked.

“He's fine. He just fainted.”

“We have to call him, Kristen. We have to make sure he's okay.”

“He just fainted, Lori. He'll be fine.”

The next day, Glenn confronted her.

“What the hell happened here last night?”

“You fainted. Everything's fine. It happens all the time. It's no big deal, Glenn.”

“Jesus. What the . . . ?”

“You're fine. But listen, don't tell anybody about it, okay?”

In his naivety—or perhaps denial—Glenn let it go.

Oddly enough, just a week before, Gilbert had called the family veterinarian. She said that their Labrador, Mindy, suffered from car sickness. “Could I come in and get some Acepromazine? We're taking a car trip pretty soon.”

“Sure,” the doctor said.

Gilbert showed up some time later and picked up five twenty-five-milligram tablets of the drug.

Acepromazine is similar to Valium. It's a stimulant for dogs that are stressed out. It can also be used to prepare an animal for an operation; it stabilizes the rhythms of the heart. An overdose, given in one large dose or over an extended period of time in smaller doses, will drastically reduce the heart rate of an animal or human being.

In time, it will cause death.

Glenn Gilbert later recalled that they weren't planning any road trips at the time. They may have been planning on getting divorced, but a trip was the last thing on their minds. Also, he said, Mindy had been in the car plenty of times, and not once had she ever gotten carsick.

 

 

James Perrault sat down one evening and decided to write Gilbert a letter. He knew the only way he could get her full attention was to put his thoughts down on paper and read the letter to her aloud the next time he saw her. If Gilbert didn't like where a conversation was headed, she had a way of manipulating it so it swung back in her direction. Perrault wanted to make sure that didn't happen.

The next morning, he met Gilbert for breakfast at a local mall.

After they got a cup of coffee and had something to eat, Perrault told her to sit down.

“What is it, Jimmy?”

He pulled out the letter and read it aloud from beginning to end. It said that he wasn't happy with the way things were, or where they appeared to be heading. He urged her to move out of her house so they could see if there was anything between them. The way things were now, he couldn't do it much longer.

“Yes, Jimmy. We could have a future together,” Gilbert said, taking the letter.

As she read it, Gilbert began to cry. Perrault had mentioned in the letter that he would end the relationship if something wasn't done soon.

“Don't . . . Jimmy . . . don't . . . please,” Gilbert begged.

From Perrault's point of view, it was do-or-die time for Gilbert. She couldn't have it both ways any longer.

“If you don't leave Glenn, Kristen, I'm leaving you,” Perrault said.

Gilbert jumped up from her seat and took off toward a pay phone.

“I'm calling Glenn right now,” she screamed.

Perrault went after her.

“Is Glenn there?” Perrault heard Gilbert say to whoever was on the other end of the line.

After a pause, Gilbert said, “It's me. I just want you to know that I am not happy anymore. It's over. I want a divorce.”

Perrault was impressed. She was finally taking charge.

“What?” Glenn asked on the other end.

Gilbert hung up, turned toward Perrault and smiled. She began crying, hugging him as if they'd just hit the lottery.

Several days later, Glenn proposed counseling. He said he still loved her and wanted to save the marriage for the sake of the children. Seven years was worth a counseling session or two, if only to get directions on how to end the marriage.

They went to counseling one time. When they got home, Kristen lashed out at him.

“You move out!” she said. “I'm not leaving this place.”

“Fine, then. I will.”

For the next few days, Kristen lived the life of a single woman, seeing Perrault whenever and wherever she wanted to.

Weeks later, without a fight, she changed her mind and moved out of the house.

Shaped like a horseshoe, with the open end facing Northampton Street (Route 10), the apartment complex James Perrault helped Kristen Gilbert move into on December 1, 1995, provided the perfect spot in town for divorcées, single mothers and newlyweds. Rent was cheap. Retail and grocery stores were nearby. And for some of those who worked in Springfield or Holyoke, it was the best of both worlds: community-oriented, small-town living with the benefits of big-city life just up the road.

For Kristen Gilbert, Northampton Street was the perfect location. Not only was Glenn's work just a two-minute ride down the road, but Perrault lived only two miles away.

The kids stayed with Glenn. Kristen didn't even make it an issue. She would see them every day, of course, because Glenn worked so close by. He would drop them off in the morning and pick them up after he got out of work.

It appeared to be the perfect setup for everyone involved.

Perrault and Gilbert's relationship took on a new dimension now that they were free to come and go as they pleased. They went to the movies. Attended plays. Went bar-hopping and had romantic dinners.

Perhaps it was love after all for James Perrault.

By the end of 1995, codes on Ward C had become an outright problem. Nurses were beginning to mention to each other that there was a “marked increase” in the past few months, but now it seemed as though they were happening weekly. And for some reason, most of the codes were being called during the busiest times—say, for example, when they were understaffed—and, lo and behold, on Gilbert's tour of duty.

Here it was December, and already there had been about thirty-five codes for the year on Ward C alone during Gilbert's 4:00
P.M.
to midnight shift. Even more shocking was that Gilbert had found twenty of the codes herself. The closest nurse behind her had found only five. By comparison, during the previous year, 1994, there had been a total of fifteen codes, yet Gilbert had found half of those, too.

But even more alarming was the number of deaths.

By December 7, Ward C had lost thirty-seven patients on Gilbert's shift alone. There was no comparison with the two other shifts: The day shift had lost only six patients and the overnight shift ten. But the most significant factor in the second-shift deaths was that Kristen Gilbert had found twenty, more than half of them, herself.

 

 

In 1995, Henry Hudon, from Westfield, Massachusetts, was a thirty-five-year-old schizophrenic who liked to smoke cigarettes, drink beer and, shortly after being admitted to the VAMC, run away from the hospital whenever the opportunity presented itself.

“I'm going out for a smoke,” Hudon would say, never to return.

A frequent visitor to the VAMC's psychiatric ward, Hudon was an Air Force veteran who had “demonstrated excellent performance in all phases of his duties,” his sergeant, Thomas Harrington, wrote about him in 1980.

Growing up in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts, Hudon lived the average life kids in Springfield's most reclusive suburbs did during the seventies. He graduated from East Longmeadow High School in 1977, an above-average student. He took the postmaster's daughter to his high school prom and the police chief's daughter to the senior banquet, and was a member of the high school's swim and golf teams.

Born prematurely on February 5, 1960, in Holyoke, Hudon embodied the persona of an all-American military boy, created in the image of his father, a twenty-four-year Air Force vet who had fought in World War II.

When it came time, deciding on a career in the military was an easy decision for Hudon, who looked up to his father. So, years later, the scrawny, blond-haired boy with thin lips and an imposing smile enlisted.

Hudon's outgoing personality, strong moral fiber and easygoing attitude, however, landed him in a vegetative state not too long after he arrived at the Royal Air Force Station, in Lakenheath, England.

As Hudon, an assistant physical therapist, and two friends walked into a local London pizza joint one night, the base commander, with his wife, children and another couple, stopped Henry at the door. There were two men fighting in the back of the restaurant, the commander said. He asked Henry if he could break it up.

“I'll do my best, sir.”

Henry was known throughout his company as a peacemaker, a guy who didn't like to see people argue and fight. So he walked over to where the men were yelling and pushing each other and tried getting in the middle, demanding that they stop fighting.

But someone watching the fight didn't appreciate Hudon's can't-we-all-just-get-along attitude. While he was trying his best to separate the two men, Hudon was struck in the back of the head with a beer bottle, and his paralyzed body fell to the ground. The impact his head had made with the cement floor was so powerful it detached a retina from his right eyeball and shattered his front teeth.

Henry Hudon would never be the same.

For the next three weeks, he lay in a coma, incoherent and nonresponsive. But Hudon was a fighter. After several surgeries, and plenty of prayers on the part of his family, surprising even his doctors, Hudon fought his way out of the coma.

Unfortunately, he was a different person.

Before the accident, Henry Hudon was a guy who never argued with anyone and took orders from his commanders as the letter of the law. Now, Hudon would become enraged at the drop of a dime and had a hard time listening to anyone.

“He looked the same,” Julia Hudon, his mother, recalled, “but he was
not
the same.”

He became emotional. He “heard voices” and saw things that weren't there. He accused people of stalking him. While on certain medications, Henry's hands shook as if he suffered from Parkinson's disease. Within a year, he was honorably discharged and sent back to the United States under the official diagnosis of suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.

Not knowing what to do, Julia Hudon had her son committed to North State Hospital a year after he returned, but realized soon after that the VAMC in Leeds had similar services available.

Once a healthy, twenty-year-old member of the United States Air Force with a promising career ahead of him, Henry Hudon would now live out the rest of his life dependent upon a cocktail of psychiatric medications and frequent visits to the VA hospital whenever he felt his mental health spiraling out of control.

Between 1986 and 1995, his mental status fluctuated from being “out of control” to “in control,” which landed him in and out of the VAMC at Leeds more than three dozen times. He'd take his medication as prescribed, and it would work wonders. But the effects wouldn't last. Three or four times a year, he'd show up for a new prescription or an adjustment of the meds he was already on, and end up spending anywhere from ten days to three weeks, and, one time, nearly a year.

Throughout the fall of 1995, Henry's condition worsened. None of the medications he was prescribed worked. Doctors couldn't find the right mix. Not only that, but he developed “tardive dysdiadochokinesis,” a syndrome, caused by the medication, that made his body shake uncontrollably. He developed TMJ, which made his face sag and his speech slur. Spending so much time at the VAMC, Hudon began hanging around with other VA patients and started smoking pot once in a while with them outside. When he didn't take his medication regularly, he would get nasty.

“You're the one who's sick, not me!” he'd snap.

Julia Hudon would clean her son's apartment daily and sometimes find his medication thrown all over the place. It was a double-edge sword: When he was sick, he felt he didn't need the medication, which was, in fact, the time he needed it the most.

On December 7, 1995, Julia Hudon was sitting at home when she picked up the phone and was startled to hear Henry's voice.

“You're home?” Julia asked. For all she knew, Henry had been on the locked ward of the VAMC for the past few days.

“Yes, Momma . . . I don't feel good, Momma,” he said.

Although he was thirty-five years old, Henry always referred to his mother as “Momma,” and the sound of it never got old to Julia Hudon.

“What's wrong, Henry?” she asked.

“I've been throwing up . . . I have diarrhea, like when I had the flu. I feel so sick. I've been throwing up, Momma.”

“Well, you're going to have to go back to the VA. You're not stabilized!”

“Oh, Momma . . .”

“Do you want me to come over and get you now?”

“I just want to sleep, Momma. Please, can I just go back to bed and sleep?”

Julia Hudon didn't answer.

“Come and get me tomorrow morning,” Henry suggested.

“All right. But if you need me tonight, call.”