Perfect Poison (5 page)

November 13, 1993 was a special day in the Gilbert household. Not only was it Kristen's twenty-sixth birthday, but her and Glenn's second son,
Raymond,
was born.

For a good part of the early nineties, the Gilberts had led uneventful, middle-class lives. Sure, they argued and fought about the same domestic issues plaguing half of American marriages, but the arguments never materialized into much, and they usually just made up the old-fashioned way.

During the summer of 1995, however, the marriage began to pull apart at the seams, and was anything but the “Ozzie and Harriett” front Kristen would have liked people to think it was. She and Glenn were arguing now almost daily. Longer periods went by where they wouldn't talk. Although they had made a mutual decision years ago to forgo day care and work separate shifts so one of them could always be home with the kids, it just wasn't working anymore. They hadn't been intimate for some time, and the word divorce, usually coming from Kristen's mouth, was being thrown around the house at will.

Near the middle of the summer, her coworkers began to notice the change. Kristen went from being the model housewife and candid nurse who wasn't afraid to talk about anything to a secretive woman who rarely even opened her mouth to talk about her husband and kids. And if she did, it was to humiliate Glenn. “He's stupid, anyway,” she'd say.

Then her entire appearance changed.

She began to lose weight, as much as thirty pounds. With her new buffed body, she dressed more provocatively. It was only tight jeans and tight blouses, as if she were a sixteen-year-old girl trying to impress the new boy at school. She wore more makeup and changed her hairstyle and color just about every other month. One day she even showed up to work wearing a fake nose ring.

For Glenn, he began to notice a change when, for the first time in their lives, his wife began bringing a change of clothes to work so she could go out afterward. And if she didn't work, she would still go out.

Glenn would question her about it, but the conversations would quickly turn into shouting matches.

Even more bizarre was that even though she was never much of a cook, Kristen had begun to prepare home-cooked meals for Glenn on a more regular basis—this at a point in her life when she was thinking of divorcing him. It was unusual because they both worked different shifts and rarely ever ate meals together. Further, they just weren't getting along anymore.

Why the Betty Crocker impression now?

The meals, Glenn began to notice, had a powdery taste to them, he later remembered, “similar to the taste of dissolving aspirin in your mouth.” Of course, he couldn't say anything to his wife about it. They were constantly fighting. Telling her that her cooking tasted terrible would only make things worse.

To her friends at work, Kristen began to be more firm about her plans for the future.

“I don't love Glenn anymore,” she told one coworker. “I want to be out of that house by Thanksgiving!”

Around the same time, the name of James Perrault, a young security guard at the VAMC, kept popping up in conversation at the Gilberts' home. She would tell Glenn that she wanted to fix Perrault up with her sister, Tara.

Glenn, at thirty, his brown hair beginning to recede, had a slight belly most married men develop after years of being attached to the old ball and chain. But he was good-looking in a plain sort of way, the kind of guy most women would love to bring home to Mom: tall, quiet and passive. He was an extraordinary father to his two children, spending every free moment he had with them. He was a hard worker who had twenty-five people working under him as the shop supervisor of a local optical lens firm.

But lately, Glenn had a big problem: James Perrault's name being mentioned on a regular basis in his house. Here they were, having marital problems, and Kristen was throwing around another man's name at will. It was beginning to upset Glenn.

Perrault was twenty-six when Kristen met him, and had been working at the VAMC since July 1994. A Gulf War veteran, at a slender, well-built six feet, one hundred and sixty-five pounds, Perrault was a hard body of a man, with dark eyes and kinky, military-cropped brown hair.

In other words, the total opposite of Glenn.

On the outside, Perrault was a young, innocent man fumbling through life just waiting for bigger things to happen. Before the VAMC job, he'd worked as a security guard for Milton Bradley. Becoming a VAMC police officer was a step in the right direction for Perrault, who wanted nothing more than to be a bonafide cop one day. The VAMC had even sent him to Little Rock, Arkansas, for a month-long training course. And because he worked on government property, Perrault was authorized to carry a gun.

All VAMC security personnel, whether they worked the day or night shifts, were kept to the same regimen. In Perrault's case, his schedule during the late summer months of 1995 had him showing up at 3:00
P.M.
and going home around eleven. He would patrol the hospital grounds for two hours, and then take over at the security desk around 5:00
P.M.
for two hours, while continuing to rotate with the other security guard on duty until their replacements relieved them at eleven.

It wasn't quite the same as cruising through Springfield, tracking down drug dealers and pimps. But the time went by fast, and it sure beat chasing shoplifters through the aisles of some department store.

When he wasn't driving the grounds, Perrault's job would take him into any number of unplanned situations. Aside from being responsible for the safety of staff and patients, VAMC security personnel were mandated by VA guidelines to assist during any medical emergencies—or codes—and/or psyche interventions. If a patient was unruly or disruptive, for example, it was up to security to contain him.

During the latter part of August 1995, Perrault began spending more time up on Ward C associating with Gilbert. The two seemed to flirt with each other on occasion—especially, nurses were beginning to notice, during codes.

Perrault seemed to enjoy the attention Gilbert gave him. He was single. He was having trouble meeting women, and Gilbert, perhaps, filled that void.

If there wasn't a code, he would go up on his breaks and visit while she worked in the ICU.

Perrault seemed to many of the Ward C nurses as being the cocky jock in high school who was full of himself, and most of them despised him for it.

“He wasn't the smartest individual in the world,” one nurse later recalled.

But Kristen hadn't chosen Nobel prize-winners as lovers—and, as James Perrault would soon learn, for good reason: They were harder to manipulate.

During the latter part of September 1995, one of the more pressing issues facing many of the nurses who had worked with Kristen Gilbert for the past six years wasn't the obvious trouble in her marriage, or even the new boyfriend she thought she was keeping secret; it was that her new lifestyle was beginning to affect her work. Gilbert wasn't as conscientious a nurse as she used to be. Her once-admired nursing skills had diminished over the course of the summer, and she didn't seem to care about patients anymore.

This was somewhat shocking because Gilbert had always been able to separate life and work. She always kept it together, and even fed off the attention a career in nursing offered. During codes, for example, Gilbert thrived, often demanding to be the “defibrillation” person on the team who got to yell “clear” before applying the paddles to a patient in cardiac arrest. She, along with others, had brought scores of patients back to life over the years.

But something had changed.

Back on March 23, 1995, without calling in, Gilbert showed up for work late. So her boss, Melodie Turner, asked why.

“I was at the Holyoke Mall. I saw an elderly man fall on the ground . . . his wife on top of him. The man, Melodie, then went into cardiac arrest. I gave him CPR with the assistance of a bystander for about twenty minutes. The ambulance showed up and brought him to a local hospital.”

“What happened to him?” Turner asked.

“I stopped at the hospital on my way in to check on him . . . but he died, Melodie. I tried.”

Turner was overwhelmed.

The next day, Turner sent out e-mail to VAMC staff explaining how Gilbert had acted as an “angel of mercy to the poor wife who fell over.” The subject of the e-mail read “very nice job.”

Turner ended the short note with, “Kristen is an excellent emergency nurse,” before letting the staff know where Gilbert could be reached.

E-mails of gratitude poured in.

Priscilla McDonald, a colleague, called Gilbert a “hero.”

“Even though the man you assisted died,” wrote Denise Carey, “the wife would have been more distraught if no one had come to their aid.”

Investigators later located the elderly man and his wife. Surprisingly, they both were alive and well and living in Springfield. The wife said she had, indeed, fallen on top of her husband at the mall, but no one stopped to help them.

It was even possible, investigators speculated, that Gilbert had seen the entire incident take place—but, in fact, did nothing.

 

 

By the first week of October, James Perrault had set himself a few goals—one of which, undoubtedly, involved getting into Kristen Gilbert's pants. Not a day went by without Perrault's showing up on Ward C at some point during Gilbert's shift.

“I'm not meeting anybody I feel I can spend a lot of time with,” Perrault told Gilbert one night. He wasn't dating anyone at the time, he added, because there just wasn't anyone he “found interesting. I'm looking for something . . . solid.”

“My marriage,” Gilbert said, “is commonplace. I'm unhappy, too.”

As the days passed, Gilbert started e-mailing Perrault on the VAMC computer system.

Soon after, they started planning all their breaks together, meeting in the library, in the basement near the boiler, or anywhere they could find a spot to be alone. They began meeting up the street after work at the local VFW. They went out for breakfast at area diners.

One night, Perrault was sitting at the VFW bar having a few beers with a bunch of friends and coworkers. The place was packed. By the time Gilbert strolled in, around midnight, there wasn't a seat available.

“Can I share a stool with you, Jimmy?”

“Sure.”

After about an hour, Perrault said he had to go. So Gilbert asked him to walk her to her car.

When they got to Gilbert's car, without a word, they started kissing. Kathy Rix and Karen Abderhalden, coworkers and friends of Gilbert, were standing at the other end of the parking lot.

Worried that her coworkers had seen the kiss, Gilbert became upset, hopped into her car, and sped off.

Unsure of what had just taken place or where it was headed, a confused Perrault jumped into his truck and began driving toward his mother's house in Chester.

As he passed Ryan Road School in Florence, he noticed Gilbert's car pulled off to the side of the road on the grass. Gilbert's house, where Glenn and the kids were sleeping, was less than a mile away.

So Perrault pulled up behind her and flashed his lights.

As he shut off his truck, Gilbert got out of her car walked up to his driver's side window. Before Perrault could even get the window rolled down, Gilbert reached in, opened the door, hopped up, and straddled Perrault.

At first, Perrault didn't move. Then Gilbert began kissing him all over.

For about twenty minutes, they kissed and fondled each other. Then, just like that, Gilbert jumped out and sped off again without saying a word.

The following day, as Perrault was driving the grounds of the VAMC, he saw Gilbert coming out of the main door. She'd had the day off but had to stop by for something. When she saw him, she stopped and walked over to where he had parked in front of the main entrance.

“Last night was a big mistake,” she said. “That shouldn't have happened. I'm sorry for misleading you.”

“It's all right,” Perrault said. “I understand. You're married.”

“Can we go back to how things were and forget that it ever happened?”

Before driving away, Perrault said, “That's fine. If that's how you really feel, Kris, I have no hard feelings.”

At eleven that night, shortly before Perrault was getting ready to leave, he got a phone call in the security office.

“Can you meet me after you get off work?” Gilbert asked.

“What's going on?”

“I need to talk to you.”

“Sure,” Perrault said. “Up the street at the commuter parking lot?”

“I'll see you then, Jimmy.”

When Perrault pulled up, Gilbert came running over to his truck and said, “I want to be someplace alone with you . . . I know a place. . . .”

“Where?” Perrault asked, sticking his head out the window.

Gilbert didn't answer. Instead, she got into her car and took off.

Perrault followed.

She drove for about fifteen minutes toward Hatfield, a small farming town west of Northampton.

Far away from any residential neighborhoods, Gilbert turned off the main thoroughfare and drove down a dirt road by the edge of a cornfield, then continued on until they were far enough from the road where anyone driving by could not see them.

After turning off his lights, Perrault got out of his truck and walked toward Gilbert's car, while she walked over to the passenger-side back door and opened it.

“Get in!”

Neither said a word; they just started kissing. But after a moment, Perrault stopped her.

“No, Kris. Stop this.”

“Come on, Jimmy.”

“I don't know how far you want this to go, based on your conversation earlier today, Kris,” Perrault said.

“All the way,” Gilbert said. “I want it to go all the way.”