Perfect Poison (45 page)

After questioning a jury consultant it had hired—Anita Sarro—Kristen Gilbert's defense rested its case on Tuesday, February 20. The government then brought in two rebuttal witnesses, DEA agent Clarence Shuler, and the former head of the Springfield Police Department's Narcotics Unit, Officer John Delaney. Welch had worked on a case in 1995 with Delaney involving the distribution of approximately one-hundred-and-fifty kilograms of cocaine.

Both cops were there to explain to the jury that in all their years of narcotics investigation they had never heard of crack cocaine and heroin users mixing epinephrine with street drugs. Another misguided claim by Gilbert's defense.

With that, Ponsor said closing arguments would begin in two days.

 

 

The previous weekend, Ariane Vuono had labored for three days, trying to come up with the right words to describe to jurors what they had heard for the past four months. She began early Saturday morning and, except for breaking to sleep and eat, didn't stop writing until late Sunday night. Knowing that it would the biggest day of her professional career, on Tuesday, Vuono practiced the speech before her colleagues in the US Attorney's Office.

“It's perfect,” they agreed after she was done.

As she began in court, Vuono thanked the jury for the time they had spent away from their families, then quickly explained the crux of the government's case—that Gilbert murdered Stanley Jagodowski, Henry Hudon, Kenny Cutting and Ed Skwira, and she “assaulted with the intent to murder Francis Marier, Thomas Callahan, and Angelo Vella,” simply to impress her new boyfriend, James Perrault.

Pointing at Gilbert, Vuono raised her voice and lashed out, “These seven victims, ladies and gentlemen, were veterans. They protected our country during war and peace. They were vulnerable, due to their physical and mental illnesses. Some were seriously ill. And some had no family. And because of that, ladies and gentlemen, they were the
perfect
victims. And when Kristen Gilbert decided to kill them or assault in attempt to kill them, she used the
perfect
poison.”

Gilbert sat with her head bowed, showing no sign of emotion. Not since day one and two of the trial had her parents been in the courtroom, but now they sat staring at Ariane Vuono as she accused their daughter of the unthinkable.

“This small vial of 1:1000 epinephrine,” Vuono said, holding an ampoule in her hand as if she were a magician doing tricks with a coin, “can be a life-saving drug.... On the other hand, if this is used maliciously, it can cause death. And don't think for one minute this defendant, Kristen Gilbert, didn't know exactly what epinephrine would do when she used it, because everybody will agree that this woman was a bright nurse.”

For the next hour and a half, Vuono meticulously went through and explained each victim's death and how each witness implicated Gilbert in that death.

At 11:36, she began her timeline argument, explaining how Gilbert had killed Stanley Jagodowski, Henry Hudon, Kenny Cutting and, finally, Ed Skwira.

“She confessed from her own words. She corroborated all the medical evidence in this case . . . she admitted her guilt,” Vuono said.

At one point, Vuono argued how, during a conversation the defendant had with Glenn Gilbert, she confessed she was “the world's best con artist.”

Vuono next wanted the jury to understand why Gilbert's coworkers hadn't come forward sooner.

“They were working elbow to elbow with a person who was killing patients—they were afraid!”

Blasting Dr. Kirchhoffer, Vuono asked jurors if they wanted to rely on the testimony of a doctor who implanted an experimental wire in pacemaker patients during a study without letting them know.

“Do you know how Dr. Kirchhoffer got involved in this case?” Vuono asked, throwing up her hands. “He had a prior case with attorney Weinberg. They were friendly. And now [Dr. Kirchhoffer] is
forty
thousand dollars richer! Those are sufficient reasons to discount his testimony.

“Let me just say, quickly, that with respect to Dr. Kirchhoffer, anything is possible.... Dr. Grayboys told you, ‘A chair could levitate across the room, too, but it's not likely to happen.' ”

After describing what each victim should have been able to do in his life if Gilbert hadn't cut it short, Vuono concluded by saying, “Ed Skwira, he should have been able to celebrate his sobriety with his family. And instead, his family had to make a decision to let him die.”

 

 

Since day one, David Hoose had perhaps the most difficult job out of anyone in the courtroom: putting together a defense for a defendant who failed to provide him with any tangible evidence he could put his arms around. Besides saying that she didn't do it, and remaining steadfast in her claim throughout the trial, Gilbert hadn't given Hoose answers to some of the government's most damaging questions. One witness after the other had placed Gilbert at the scene of each death and given a believable reason as to how and why she could have done it. But the only explanation Gilbert offered was that there was a vendetta against her, and Bonnie Bledsoe and John Wall were stealing epinephrine to support their own heroin and cocaine habits.

Still, Hoose had to give it his best shot.

After explaining to the jury that he wasn't going to wow them with charts and graphics during his closing, like Vuono had, Hoose said he appreciated the time the jurors had taken out of their lives to participate in such a long and taxing trial.

Then he broke into the only real argument he had at his disposal.

“You must understand this fundamental principle, ladies and gentlemen, to understand why this prosecution was fatally and irretrievably flawed from the outset. We had a suspect before we even knew if there had been a crime committed. And everything that the government did on this case was distorted by that perception.

“There really were only four possible proofs,” Hoose said. “First there is pathology, which never existed. Then there is toxicology, which was not produced. The last two are medicine and circumstantial evidence. We've already got two legs of the table cut off. It is being supported by two others: circumstantial evidence and medicine.

“The government has this notion that you can pinpoint the exact moment and cause of death. They're doctors, not God. Alcohol, weight, cholesterol, tobacco, diabetes—all of them [the patients] had problems with those things. Is everything our family physicians have been telling us all our lives completely irrelevant?

“You have to look for the most obvious cause of death. That is something no government witness did. They
looked
for epinephrine
first,”
Hoose shouted. “If you start out looking at cases with sinister eyes and suspicions that something is wrong, then you'll find it.”

For the next forty-five minutes, Hoose tried to discredit several of the government's key witnesses, mainly John Wall and Bonnie Bledsoe, who had reasons, he insisted, to try to frame his client.

“[T]o divert attention from themselves, their own drug use and their own probable thefts of epinephrine. Once you have drug addicts like John Wall and Bonnie Bledsoe in the middle of something like this, all bets are off. You cannot believe anything they say or do.”

He talked about a coup, suggesting that some of the nurses had gotten together with Wall and Bledsoe because they disapproved of the affair Gilbert was having with Perrault.

After two and a half hours, Hoose finished his argument with a simple plea: “You may, in your lifetimes, ladies and gentlemen, you may never have the opportunity to take a stand as important as the one that you can take tomorrow. It is important for you to do justice in this case and to stand up and to hold on to principle and to hold on to everything that you believe in and to stick to your guns and to not be overwhelmed by an enormous government effort by a technically masterful presentation, but one that is devoid of substance of the type necessary for you to vote for a conviction.

“I ask you to go to the jury room tomorrow and to do what is long overdue in this case: acquit Kristen Gilbert of these horrendous charges that have been levied against her.”

Those who knew Hoose's work said it was one of the best closing arguments of his career.

 

 

With the first word of his twenty-minute rebuttal, Assistant US Attorney Bill Welch summed up how the government felt about Hoose's continued claims that it had started with a suspect and built a case around her.

“Baloney!”
Welch screamed as he stood and walked toward the podium. “That's what I say, that the government started with a suspect and then forced the facts to fit that theory. I was drowning in a river of analogies for two and a half hours, but in these twenty minutes, I would like to tell you what the
facts
are in this case. In this case, a witness took the stand and said this: Time is a great test of humility. Well, I say that time is a great test of whether or not you have the right suspect, because in this case every fact that was developed after February 1996 continued to point to that defendant.

“She took the
trust
and
faith
the profession put in her hands and
abused
it in the most horrible way.... [W]hen you take all the facts of this case and you put them together, it forms a compelling wall of guilt. In the end, she is guilty of first-degree murder. She is guilty of assaulting with intent to kill, and the reason she is guilty is because”—and here Welch kicked the volume up a notch—
“she did it
. Thank you.”

“Now I can say to you,” Judge Ponsor admonished the jury while looking over the bridge of his glasses, “you can begin to discuss the case.”

Late into the day on February 23, 2001, deliberations were finally under way in the
Government vs. Kristen Gilbert,
a case that with more than seventy witnesses and two hundred pieces of evidence was heading into its fifth month.

Judge Ponsor decided to split up the jury, sending the twelve regulars off to one room and the five alternates to another. The separation of the two groups, Ponsor said, was “a poignant moment [and] a bit of a tug of heart” for him, but, in the end, something he thought he had to do.

He then explained that he wouldn't be sequestering the jury, and that they would retain regular hours—nine-to-five—during deliberations.

Putting on his serious face, Ponsor then gave the jury his last bit of advice.

“You must not allow any possible punishment which may be imposed upon the defendant to—
in any way
—influence your verdict or enter into your deliberations.”

 

 

During the trial, a few of the jurors had been pumping another juror, a nurse, for information, asking her questions about some of the more complex testimony—a situation that could have potentially been grounds for a mistrial.

Judge Ponsor was informed. After carefully weighing his options, he decided the trial hadn't been compromised in any way.

The episode, however, caused some friction among several jurors, and that turmoil spilled over into the first day of deliberations.

For four hours, jurors talked in circles, breaking off into groups of three to discuss not one or two of the alleged murders, but throwing out bits and pieces of the trial they thought were most meaningful. Ponsor had let them takes notes during the proceedings, and most did. But the first few hours were nothing short of a free-for-all as jurors tore through their notes and started spitting out all sorts of scenarios and halfhearted claims.

On Tuesday, the second day, Howard Darnley, a sixty-two-year-old machine designer, stood up and, frustrated, decided to take control of a situation he saw was getting out of hand. With Hilda Colon, a human resources worker, Darnley walked over to the blackboard and wrote down Stanley Jagodowski's name and listed the pros and cons of the case insofar as Jagodowski was concerned.

One by one, jurors began to toss out bits of information, and within a short time, a rather telling picture of Jagodowski's death, entirely based on the medical evidence offered in the case, emerged.

The following day, after briefly discussing Jagodowski's death, one of the jurors suggested they take a paper ballot to see where they stood.

Connie Berneche, a stay-at-home mom from Chicopee, helped the foreperson tally the votes.

When Berneche got to the last ballot, she began to weep. Then she ran into the bathroom and vomited. Soon, the other eight women began to cry, with a few others retreating to the bathroom to vomit. Scott Stetz, Howard Darnley and Gerald Murphy, the only males in the group, looked at one another, wondering what the hell they should do.

“It was emotional,” one juror remembered, “because once we had a guilty verdict, we knew we would ultimately be deciding on the death penalty. At that point, it became all too real.”

Letting the women have the time they needed to compose themselves, Darnley suggested they curtail deliberations for the rest of the day.

Judge Ponsor agreed, and let them leave early.

Because Jagodowski was Gilbert's first victim, the jury decided she was trying to figure out how to kill. They felt she didn't intend to kill Jagodowski, but it just happened. So, even though Judge Ponsor had warned them not to discuss the penalty Gilbert could ultimately receive, after discussing it they agreed to convict her of second-degree murder instead of first-degree, which carried the death penalty.

As the days wore on, they took each victim separately, discussed the evidence, and decided that Gilbert had, without a doubt, intended to murder Ed Skwira, Kenny Cutting and Henry Hudon.

They would find her guilty of first-degree murder on those counts.

When it came down to it, most of the jurors didn't put as much thought into Bonnie Bledsoe and John Wall's testimony as David Hoose and his team had perhaps hoped.

“I may not have gotten along with them as people,” Scott Stetz later recalled, “but I didn't think they were lying. Bonnie Bledsoe may have had a checkered past and made some mistakes in her life, but I just couldn't see her coming into a federal court and lying about it. It's one thing to start rumors about someone at work and bad-mouth them. But to take it all the way to federal court is a different story.”

For the most part, coworker testimony, as the deliberations wore on, rarely came into play. The jurors put most of their focus on the medical records.

“People can lie,” one juror later said, “but documents cannot.”

At one point, a heated exchange took place as several jurors began discussing whether Kathy Rix could have seen the broken ampoules of epinephrine in the needle-disposal bucket. In the deliberations room, they took the bucket, placed some ampoules in it, and began to re-enact what Rix had seen that day.

Many claimed there was no way she could have seen the broken ampoules. It was just too dark at the bottom of the bucket, and the ampoules weren't clearly marked.

Howard Darnley just sat, listening intently. As he watched the re-enactment, he felt the jurors were beating up on Rix, discounting her state of mind at the time she had found the ampoules.

“Hey! Hey!” Darnley said, standing up. “Don't you remember how you felt when we first voted on Stanley Jagodowski? You all cried. When Kathy Rix saw those vials, that was her guilty verdict! For crissakes, how do you
think
she felt?”

 

 

On Friday, March 2, Judge Ponsor brought up something during the morning's proceedings that was bothering him. The
Boston Globe
ran a story the previous day stating that one of the jurors had been seen giving a thumbs-up to Gilbert as the jury walked out of the courtroom. Ponsor wanted to know if anyone else had seen the gesture.

No one admitted they had.

In chambers, Ponsor blasted the
Globe.
He said he had been “very disappointed” in its coverage of the entire trial. “The
[Globe]
. . . has really emphasized the lurid and flamboyant sides of the case and has had an almost
National Enquirer
tone at times . . .”

Yet, after further discussing it with counsel, Ponsor told the jury that the Court had concluded that the gesture never took place—that the reporter was seeing something no else had.

It was time to get back to deliberating.