Kristen Gilbert (1967-?)
Kristen Gilbert, also known as the Angel of Death, is a former nurse and American serial killer who was convicted of 4 murders and 2 attempted murders of patients in the Veterans Affairs Medical Center (VAMC) in Northampton, Massachusetts, inducing cardiac arrest in her patients by injecting their IV bags with huge doses of epinephrine (an untraceable heart stimulant). She would respond to the emergency she had created, often resuscitating the patient herself. Her known victims are Stanley Jagodowski, Henry Hudon, Kenneth Cutting and Edward Skwira.
Gilbert was born Kristen Heather Strickland on November 13, 1967, in Fall River, Massachusetts. She was the eldest of the 2 daughters of Richard, an electronics executive, and Claudia, a homemaker and part-time teacher. As Gilbert became a teenager, friends and family noticed she would constantly tell lies and had a history of faking suicide attempts in order to manipulate people who was often known to make violent threats against people. Gilbert graduated from Groton-Dunstable Regional High School in Groton, Massachusetts and in 1986 enrolled at Bridgewater State College in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. College officials ordered her to get psychiatrist help after she made a fake suicide attempt and because of this, in 1987, she transferred to Mount Wachusett Community College in Gardner, Massachusetts, and then to Greenfield Community College in Greenfield, Massachusetts. Gilbert graduated from Greenfield Community College with a diploma in nursing and became a registered nurse in 1988. Later that same year, she married Glenn Gilbert, with whom she had 2 sons (the couple divorced in 1998). At the time of her arrest, Gilbert lived in Setauket, New York, in Suffolk County.
In 1989, Kristen Gilbert joined the staff of the VAMC in Northampton and was featured in the magazine VA Practitioner in April of 1990. Despite the fact that other nurses noticed a higher number of deaths of Gilbert’s shifts, they passed it off and jokingly began to call her the “Angel o Death”. In 1996 3 nurses reported their suspicions in an increase of cardiac arrests deaths and a decrease in the supply of epinephrine. This sparked an investigation – Gilbert, on one occasion, called in a bomb threat to try and derail enquiries. Gilbert left the VAMC in 1996 in the middle of the investigation into the suspicious patient deaths that occurred during her shifts. That autumn, she checked herself into psychiatric hospitals 7 times, staying between 1-10 days on each occasion. In January 1998 Gilbert went on trial for calling in the bomb threat to the Northampton VAMC in an attempt to retaliate against co-workers and ex-boyfriend James Perrault for their participation in the investigation against her. In April 1998 Gilbert was convicted for that crime. VA hospital staff believed that Gilbert could be responsible for 80+ deaths and over 300 medical emergencies in the 7 years she had worked there. The prosecutor in the case, Assistant U.S. Attorney William M. Welch II, stated that Gilbert used these emergencies to get the attention of Perrault, her boyfriend at the time, a VA police officer (hospital rules required that hospital police be present at any medical emergency). Perrault testified against Gilbert, saying that he confessed to at least 1 murder by phone while she was hospitalised in a psychiatric ward. Defence attorney David P. Hoose claimed reasonable doubt based on a lack of direct evidence. Dr. William Boutelle, a psychiatrist and chief of staff at the Northampton VAMC, theorised that she created these emergency medical situations in order to display her skill as a nurse.
Gilbert had been making violent threats against others since she was a teenager, according to court records. At trial, prosecutors talked about Gilbert using a large kitchen knife in an assault in Greenfield, Massachusetts in January/February 1988. They also said she twice tried to murder someone with poison in November 1995 and tried to poison a patient at the VA hospital on January 28, 1996 and caused a medical emergency by removing a patient’s breathing tube at the VA hospital on January 30, 1994. Prosecutors said Gilbert abandoned a patient that was in cardiac arrest on November 9, 1995, and then asked another nurse to come with her to check on patients. She waited until her colleague spotted the patient’s difficulty before raising the alarm. She also forced an untrained colleague to use cardiac defibrillation paddles during a medical emergency on November 17, 1995, by refusing to use the equipment herself. Prosecutors spoke of Gilbert threatening the life of at least 1 person verbally and physically in July 1996. While she worked as a home health aide before she was a registered nurse, Gilbert once purposely scalded a mentally handicapped child with hot bath water, about 8 years before her VAMC crimes. On March 14, 2001, a federal jury convicted Kristen Gilbert on 3 counts of first-degree murder, 1 count of second-degree murder and 2 counts of attempted murder. Although Massachusetts doesn’t have capital punishment, her crimes were committed on federal property and so were subject to the death penalty. In an effort to secure the death penalty prosecutors tried to admit evidence of aggravating factors during the penalty phase, such as Gilbert’s 1998 conviction for the bomb threat – the defence introduced evidence of mitigating factors, such as the well-being of Gilbert’s 2 children. On March 26, 2001, the jury recommended a sentence of life imprisonment and the next day the judge formally sentenced Gilbert to 4 consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole, plus 20 years. She was then transferred from a women’s prison in Framingham, Massachusetts, to a special federal prison in Texas, where she has remained ever since. She is serving her sentence at Federal Medical Center, Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas. In July 2003, Gilbert dropped her federal appeal for a new trial after a recent US Supreme Court ruling that would have allowed prosecutors to re-seek the death penalty in the event of a retrial.
