Kristen Gilbert was a registered nurse at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in the Leeds section of Northampton, Massachusetts, from March 1989 to February 1996. In March 2001 a federal jury in Springfield convicted her of murdering four veterans who were patients on her ward and of trying to kill two others. Prosecutors said she injected the men with epinephrine, a heart stimulant, to set off cardiac emergencies, and that she did it for the attention the emergencies brought her, above all from a hospital police officer with whom she was having an affair.
The case was federal because the hospital stands on federal land, and the government asked for the death penalty in a state that had abolished its own. The jury did not impose it, and she was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Before any murder charge was filed she had already been convicted of a separate federal crime: a telephoned bomb threat to the same hospital in September 1996, made while a grand jury was examining the deaths on her ward.
She was born Kristen Heather Strickland on November 13, 1967, in Fall River, Massachusetts, the elder of the two daughters of Richard and Claudia Strickland, the Boston Globe reported in a two-part profile published in October 2000, a week before her trial. The family moved to Groton when she was a preteen. She was a good student, joined the math club and graduated from Groton-Dunstable Regional High School in 1985. A neighbor, John Moore, told the Globe she had been "a great kid" who seemed decent and normal. After a dispute in the neighborhood, he said, the Stricklands moved away suddenly.
Others remembered her differently. Former boyfriends described her to the Globe as a manipulator; one said she had once left him a false suicide note saying she had eaten glass. Her father later told a psychiatrist that she was a habitual liar. "She lied a lot," a family acquaintance, Alberta Erickson, told the paper. Gilbert also told people she was distantly related to Lizzie Borden, who was acquitted of a double murder in 1893.
She attended Mount Wachusett Community College and then Greenfield Community College, where she studied microbiology and surgical nursing and earned her degree in 1988. The coordinator of Greenfield's nursing program, Jean A. Simmons, told the Globe after the charges that the school did not graduate nurses it did not trust with patients.
In 1988 she married Glenn Gilbert, a Northampton native who worked for an optical lens company; they had met at Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. They lived in Greenfield and Easthampton before buying a ranch house in Florence. Their first son was born in 1990 and their second on November 13, 1993, her 26th birthday.
She started work at the VA Medical Center on March 6, 1989. The hospital sits on about 105 acres on Bear Hill, near Route 9 in Leeds. The land was bought by the federal government in 1922 and the hospital opened in 1924 as the VA's first psychiatric hospital; by the 1990s it had 191 beds in 26 brick buildings. Supervisors praised her skills. "We had no problems with her nursing skills," Bernard P. LaFlam, a VA clinical nursing coordinator, told the Globe. A colleague, Karin Abderhalden, described how Gilbert organized Christmas gift exchanges and ran a fund that sent flowers to coworkers. She earned about 40,000 dollars a year.
She moved to the overnight shift in 1990, and after maternity leave she returned in March 1991 to the evening shift, 4 p.m. to midnight, according to the Globe. The federal appeals court later described her post as Ward C, which housed chronically ill patients and the hospital's intensive care unit, on the late-afternoon to midnight shift, four days a week. Ward C was a 26-bed acute care unit on the second floor of Building One, with a four-bed intensive care unit at the end of a hallway.
James G. Perrault, an Army veteran of the Persian Gulf War from Cheshire, had worked as a department store security guard before he joined the hospital's police force of 11 officers. He worked the 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. shift, and the hospital's rules required its officers to respond to medical emergencies, which staff called codes. That put him on Ward C whenever a patient there went into arrest.
The First Circuit recorded that Gilbert befriended Perrault in the summer of 1995 and that by the fall they were having an affair. The Globe traced it to August 1995, when evening staff began meeting after work at a Veterans of Foreign Wars post about a mile from the hospital. Gilbert was then married with two young children. Perrault later told the Globe that she had told him, without proof, that her husband abused her, and that he told her at the Holyoke Mall to choose between her marriage and him. On December 1, 1995, she moved into an apartment in Easthampton, leaving her sons with their father. Perrault helped her move. She was 28 and he was 25.
What happened to Glenn Gilbert in November 1995 was never charged, and the jury that decided her guilt never heard most of it; it remains an allegation, as the courts described it.
On November 5, 1995, Glenn Gilbert fell violently ill, and his wife drove him to Cooley Dickinson Hospital, where he was treated for low potassium and low blood sugar and released. The government suspected that she had been putting low doses of diuretics in his food. About a week later, by his account, she came home with two syringes, said she needed to draw blood to check his potassium, and injected a clear liquid she described as saline. He lost consciousness and recovered without treatment. She told him he had fainted at the sight of the needle. She said she had only been drawing blood. He did not report the episode until months later, during a bitter divorce and custody dispute, a point her lawyers stressed.
Before trial, Judge Michael A. Ponsor of the U.S. District Court in Springfield excluded the episode from the guilt phase. The First Circuit affirmed on October 3, 2000, describing the evidence as resting largely on a hostile witness's allegation and calling it "undeniably explosive." Its main danger, the court said, was the inference that a woman who would try to kill her husband would kill her patients.
Stanley J. Jagodowski, 66, was a truck driver from Holyoke and a veteran of the Korean War who had chronic heart trouble. He was admitted in late July 1995 after surgery for bowel obstructions and was due to be transferred on August 22.
On August 21, Gilbert came on duty at 4 p.m. Two licensed practical nurses checked on him at about 8:43 p.m. and found him well. Soon afterward a nurse saw Gilbert go into his room with a needle and a swab, saying she was flushing his intravenous line with saline. All of his medications were taken by mouth, the prosecutors said. Another nurse heard him cry out in pain and saw Gilbert leave the room. He went into cardiac arrest and died about three hours later. The defense said flushing a line was routine and that he died of natural causes.
The jury convicted Gilbert of second-degree murder in his death. "I'm really, really happy," his daughter, Susan Lessard, told ABC News after the verdict in 2001.
Henry Hudon was born prematurely on February 5, 1960, in Holyoke, and went to East Longmeadow High School. His father had served 23 years in the Air Force and had fought in North Africa in the Second World War. Henry enlisted in the Air Force too. "He loved his country," his mother, Julia Hudon, told the Globe. He trained as an assistant physical therapist and was stationed at RAF Lakenheath in England, where he was named airman of the month.
His life changed after a fight in a pizza shop in which he was struck on the head with a beer bottle. He suffered a detached retina and was in a coma for three weeks. When he woke, he had paranoia and hallucinations, and he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. For about ten years he went in and out of the Northampton VA for adjustments to his medication, usually staying between ten days and three weeks, and he often left early and went home to West Springfield.
On Friday, December 8, 1995, he asked to be readmitted with flu symptoms. Staff placed him in the Ward C intensive care unit at about 2 p.m. He did not want to stay, his mother said, and he had heard patients and staff talking about deaths on the ward. His sister, Christine Duquette, told the Associated Press in 1998 that his last words to their mother were a plea not to leave him there. Julia Hudon left at 4:45 p.m.; Gilbert had been on duty for 45 minutes, and the Globe reported that she and Henry Hudon were then alone in the unit. He went into cardiac arrest at 5:48 p.m., suffered three more arrests and died at 10 p.m., at 35. Prosecutors said she injected him with epinephrine early that evening. Her lawyers said he had died of an overdose of an antihistamine.
Julia Hudon learned of his death in a late-night telephone call. At first, she told the Globe, she thought the doctor meant that her son had walked out of the hospital again.
Francis Marier, 72, a veteran of the Normandy campaign, went into cardiac arrest on December 20, 1995, on a night when Gilbert had been upset that a request to leave early was refused, the Globe reported. He survived, and she was charged with attempting to kill him.
Thomas Callahan, an Army veteran admitted with pneumonia, suffered a dangerous heart rhythm on January 22, 1996. He survived. A colleague reported finding three broken ampules in the disposal bucket afterward, and Gilbert was charged with attempting to kill him as well.
Michele Cascone, 74, was admitted on January 26, 1996, with pneumonia and placed in the Ward C intensive care unit. He had a history of atrial fibrillation, congestive heart failure, diabetes and strokes. On the evening of January 28 he had a series of cardiac emergencies, four by the Globe's count, and he was pronounced dead at 11:25 p.m. His death certificate listed ventricular tachycardia and his lung and heart conditions. His wife declined an autopsy.
Gilbert was never charged with his death, and the Globe reported in 2000 that there was no evidence he had been given epinephrine. Prosecutors did describe one moment from that night. A respiratory therapist, Bonnie Bledsoe, who has asthma, had to run between wards for each of his codes, and after the third she joked that she would start wheezing. Gilbert, the prosecution said, then took out a vial that looked like an epinephrine ampule and asked whether she wanted some.
Kenneth Cutting, 41, of Leominster, was an Army veteran who had multiple sclerosis and was blind. He had been a VA patient for about 20 years, and he had a do-not-resuscitate order.
On February 2, 1996, Gilbert was the only nurse in the intensive care unit, and Cutting was its only patient. During her 6 p.m. dinner break, prosecutors said, she asked her supervisor whether she could go home early if Cutting died. At 7:10 p.m. his heart went into ventricular fibrillation and he died. At 9 p.m. she signed out sick. Perrault was expected to testify that she kept a date with him that night. Her lawyers said his death was consistent with the late stage of multiple sclerosis. His widow, Nancy Cutting, later brought a claim against the government that the district court treated as a model of reasonable promptness.
Angelo Vella, a Marine Corps veteran, had a heart rate of about 300 beats a minute on February 4, 1996. His stepdaughter, JoAnn Sell, told the grand jury that he remembered Gilbert injecting something into his intravenous line, feeling flushed and then passing out. He survived, and Gilbert was charged with attempting to kill him. The AP reported in 1998 that one patient who survived said she had pumped something into his hand that caused pain and numbness and that an emergency team had to rescue him; the report did not name him.
Edward Skwira was a decorated Army veteran of the Second World War, a husband and the father of three. In early February 1996 he entered a substance abuse program in Worcester for chronic alcoholism, and on February 15 he was transferred to Ward C at Northampton. The Globe gave his age as 68; the Associated Press gave it as 69.
That day a nurse, Kathy Rix, counted three epinephrine ampules that were later missing, and found three broken ampules in the disposal bucket. Skwira went into arrest at 5:07 p.m. His chart showed no order for epinephrine. He was taken to Baystate Medical Center for tests, and doctors there told the family he was dying of natural causes. He was returned to Northampton and died on February 18, 1996. His death certificate listed a dissecting aneurysm, a heart attack and an irregular heartbeat, and no autopsy was done.
Two days after Skwira's emergency, a patient being treated with antibiotics became nauseous, felt a burning sensation and passed out after Gilbert flushed his intravenous line, the Globe reported. His account was one of those that set off a formal inquiry.
Colleagues had nicknamed her the Angel of Death, the Globe reported. By late 1995, nurses on Ward C were asking why so many patients were dying and why Gilbert was so often nearby, and they began watching her quietly, the Globe reported. Three of them reported the pattern in February 1996, the Associated Press said, along with missing doses of epinephrine.
Epinephrine is a synthetic form of adrenaline. It can restart a heart that has stopped, but in a heart that is still beating it can drive a dangerously fast rhythm. The hospital stocked it in two forms: a large prefilled syringe used to revive patients in cardiac arrest, and a small glass ampule ten times as strong, used mostly for severe allergic reactions. Records showed no authorized use of the stronger form on Ward C during the six months in question, and hospital records could not account for about 88 of the 135 ampules sent to the ward between August 20, 1995, and February 17, 1996, the Globe reported. The AP's 1998 figure was 85 missing doses. Nurses twice found used ampules in the needle disposal box after a patient's emergency.
Prosecutors later said Gilbert had been present at 37 deaths in her last 14 months on the ward and for about half of all its medical emergencies. When they sought the death penalty, the notice they filed cited more than 37 deaths on her shifts from January 1995 to February 1996, according to a 2007 law review study of the case by John P. Cunningham, a Justice Department lawyer writing in a personal capacity.
When the hospital opened its inquiry, Gilbert left her job. She later collected workers' compensation for a shoulder injury, the Globe reported, and the death rate on the evening shift was reported to have fallen. In an interview with VA investigators on March 8, 1996, she said that codes "always came in spurts" and that her presence at so many was coincidence. Through e-mail, Perrault kept her informed of what he was hearing.
The first official review came from the VA's Office of Healthcare Inspections, which found no evidence that any hospital employee had intentionally harmed patients. A criminal investigation followed in the spring of 1996, run by the VA Inspector General, the U.S. Attorney's Office and the Massachusetts State Police. A draft internal VA report that summer found that 70 of the deaths it reviewed involved patients who were seriously or terminally ill.
The local press began reporting in the summer. On July 17, 1996, the Daily Hampshire Gazette reported a federal inquiry into a higher than usual number of cardiac deaths on one ward. On August 2 it reported that a nurse on that ward had been placed on leave and was a focus of the inquiry, though she had not been charged. In early August the U.S. Attorney's Office confirmed in a short press release that a grand jury was investigating, and on August 8 the Gazette reported that the grand jury was hearing evidence. A federal grand jury had begun its inquiry in June 1996, the Globe said.
Perrault was served with a grand jury summons and, he said, was told to choose a side. He tried to end the relationship. On July 8, 1996, Gilbert took an overdose of Fiorinal and was admitted to the psychiatric unit at Holyoke Hospital, the Globe reported. Perrault later said that she telephoned him from there and told him she had killed "those guys." Prosecutors gave the jury a fuller version in their opening statement: "I did it! I did it! You wanted to know? I killed all those guys by injection."
Perrault cooperated with investigators, and Gilbert turned on him. He told of tires let down and a car egged, keyed and spray-painted. The First Circuit recorded that she once blocked his car in his driveway and pleaded with him not to keep an appointment with investigators, and that when he went anyway she followed him and vandalized his car while he was being interviewed. She was also angry with coworkers who cooperated with the inquiry.
On September 26, 1996, Gilbert bought a toy voice changer called a Talkgirl Jr. That afternoon a message in an altered voice was left on her estranged husband's answering machine. Between 5:22 and 7:07 p.m., Perrault took a series of calls at the hospital's security desk. In one, a disguised voice said there were three explosive devices in Building One and gave him two hours. About 50 patients were evacuated from Ward C and its annex. No device was found.
More calls followed over the next days, many of them personal and taunting; some mentioned Persian Gulf veterans. On September 30 she bought a second device, a Talkboy Jr., telling the clerk it was for nephews she did not have. On October 1 she was seen at a pay phone in the evening, and her fingerprint was lifted from the receiver. Telephone company records traced seven calls to her number. A search of her apartment found the device, its packaging, a receipt and the instructions. Investigators also seized three suicide notes, one of them a farewell to Perrault postmarked four days after the threat.
She was arrested on October 8, 1996, and charged with threatening to bomb the hospital. Her father told the Globe that the pressure had caused her to give way. With her name now public, local media identified her as the subject of the inquiry into the deaths.
The case was tried in federal court on a single count of making a bomb threat by telephone, under 18 U.S.C. 844(e). The trial began on January 7, 1998. In preparing for it, the prosecutor found that speeding up the recordings of the September 30 calls brought back the caller's natural voice. An expert, Bruce Koenig, made a speed-corrected tape, and Karin Abderhalden and Glenn Gilbert both identified the voice as hers. The jury found her guilty. In April 1998 she was sentenced to 15 months in prison and three years of supervised release.
On appeal she argued that the threat was not a federal matter, that the voice evidence was an ambush and unreliable, and that the jury should not have heard about the inquiry into the deaths. The First Circuit rejected each point on June 21, 1999. A telephone is an instrument of interstate commerce, the court held, and evidence of the investigation was relevant to her motive. It found the evidence sufficient even without the voice identifications.
Proving the deaths was slow. Epinephrine is colorless and odorless, breaks down quickly and is hard to trace. Investigators began exhuming men who had died on Ward C while Gilbert was on duty. In October 1996 they approached the Skwira family, the first family contacted, for permission to exhume. Edward Skwira's body was exhumed and examined on November 25, 1996. The next day the family was told that his death certificate was wrong, although that did not necessarily mean his death was unnatural. In July 1997 investigators reported finding the anesthetic ketamine in his body, with no prescription for it in the records. The government developed new testing methods for epinephrine, and on June 8, 1998, investigators told the family that the tests showed he had died of epinephrine poisoning and that they believed Gilbert had killed him. They said a legitimate dose of ketamine had been ruled out.
The prosecution's toxicologist was Dr. Fredric Rieders, who had examined bloodstains in the O. J. Simpson murder trial.
A federal grand jury indicted Gilbert in November 1998, while she was serving the bomb-threat sentence. The indictment was sealed for seven days so the families could be told first. When it was unsealed, the AP reported that she was charged with killing Henry Hudon, Kenneth Cutting and Edward Skwira and with two attempted murders, along with retaliation against a witness and obstruction of justice. She was 31 and was listed as living in Setauket, New York. She was divorced and had not been granted custody of her children. U.S. Attorney Donald K. Stern said investigators had found books on assisted suicide in her home, but that the injected patients had not asked to die. A VA assistant inspector general, Michael Costello, called the case an aberration that the department itself had uncovered.
By the time the government brought its pretrial appeal in 2000, the charges covered four deaths, including that of Stanley Jagodowski, and three attempts, all within six months after the affair with Perrault began. The method alleged was intravenous epinephrine, except for one attempt in which insulin was said to have been given to a diabetic patient. The government's theory was that she took epinephrine from Ward C's medicine cabinet, waited until other staff had left a patient's room and injected the drug while claiming to flush the line with saline, so that she could answer the emergency she had caused. The witness retaliation and obstruction counts were severed for a separate trial.
Her defense, as the appeals court summarized it, was that six of the seven charged events were natural deaths or near-deaths from existing illness, and that the seventh, the insulin case, resulted from negligent orders by VA doctors.
Massachusetts had abolished capital punishment in 1984. Federal law applied because the crimes were committed on federal property, and the federal death penalty was available for first-degree murder. On May 13, 1999, U.S. Attorney Stern, acting under the authority of Attorney General Janet Reno, decided to seek death. Gilbert challenged federal jurisdiction, arguing that it had reverted to the state; Judge Ponsor rejected the argument, finding that the land had been bought in 1922, the hospital opened in 1924 and jurisdiction ceded to the United States in 1926.
Her lead lawyer, David P. Hoose, was a former head of Massachusetts Citizens Against the Death Penalty, and he argued that a case resting on uncertain science should not carry a death sentence. Harry L. Miles and Paul Weinberg joined him for the defense. The prosecutors were Assistant U.S. Attorneys William M. Welch II and Ariane D. Vuono. It was only the third federal death penalty trial in a state without capital punishment.
While awaiting trial she was held at the Hampden County Correctional Center in Ludlow. The Globe reported that authorities had seized a murder mystery manuscript she wrote in jail, which she said drew on her own experiences.
Before trial, Judge Ponsor excluded three groups of evidence the government wanted to use. The first was the alleged attempt on Glenn Gilbert. The second was the bomb threat and her harassment of Perrault, which the government offered as proof of a guilty conscience. The judge found the conduct far more likely to have sprung from anger at a lover who had left her, and wrote that the government's theory required "an awful lot of squeezing for precious little juice." The third was the testimony of Ward C staff that codes had increased noticeably from the fall of 1995 to mid-February 1996, which he found impressionistic and without an objective basis.
The government appealed. On October 3, 2000, the First Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Stahl, affirmed the exclusions with one exception: the day she blocked Perrault's car and begged him not to cooperate. That, the court said, was more clearly an attempt to obstruct the investigation and less inflammatory, and the trial judge had not considered it separately. The staff impressions could still be used to explain why a witness had begun to look into the missing ampules, but not to prove that deaths had increased. All the rulings remained open to revision at trial. The court identified the government's principal evidence as two admissions Gilbert had made to Perrault and the toxicology.
Judge Ponsor also kept out a statistical analysis. The prosecution's study held that Gilbert was on duty for about half of the 350 deaths on her ward from March 1989 to February 1996, and put the odds of that by chance at one in 100 million, the Globe reported before trial. Welch had told the court that the evening shift's death rate tripled after she joined it in 1991 compared with the three years before, and that "deaths followed Gilbert as she switched from shift to shift to shift." Miles answered that the figures were misleading and that a skilled nurse could be singled out for doing her job well.
Jury selection began in October 2000, with hundreds of potential jurors filling out a 17-page questionnaire; the Globe reported that it was to be held at Springfield's Symphony Hall. A jury of 12 and six alternates was seated on November 17, and opening statements were given on November 20. Jurors were allowed to take notes, which was rare.
Welch told the jury that Gilbert created emergencies so that she could respond to them and win attention from her colleagues and from Perrault. He said she flirted with Perrault and pressed against him during codes, and once straddled a patient, apparently to show him a garter belt. She had turned the drug "from a drug of life into a drug of death," he said, for her own pleasure. Each man's heart had been functioning normally when he entered intensive care, he said, and she had falsified records to cover what she had done. So many sound hearts failing in one ward, always following her, was like "lightning striking not once, not twice, not three times."
Hoose told the jurors that all the men who died had serious illnesses and that their illnesses had killed them. "All life ends," he said. Investigators had made her a scapegoat, he argued, and coworkers had turned on her because they sided with her husband in the divorce.
The trial ran for months. Cunningham's study counted more than 250 motions, 1,500 jury summonses, 70 witnesses, 52 days of testimony and more than 200 exhibits. Doctors testified that the men had shown no sign of being about to die. Nurses described their suspicions and the empty vials found at bedsides. Relatives described sudden deaths they could not explain. Glenn Gilbert testified, including about the illness he believed she had caused by tampering with his food, and Perrault testified that she had told him she "killed all those guys." The defense attacked Perrault's motives and pointed to a witness's admitted drug use at the hospital. The forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden testified for the prosecution; when he corrected a mistake about a heart condition, calling it a "senile moment" before changing it to "senior moment," the defense used the slip against him.
On January 5, 2001, the government told the court that laboratory results on epinephrine levels in the men's tissue were wrong, and it withdrew them. ABC News reported that Rieders had been dropped as a witness after the government learned that he had made a calculation error in analyzing the tissue samples. Judge Ponsor called it a very troubling development but did not strike the related testimony; he told the jury the evidence had been withdrawn. The case was also complicated by the fact that two of the men had received epinephrine properly during efforts to revive them.
The prosecution rested after about ten weeks. The defense called witnesses who described Gilbert as a competent and caring nurse, and argued that her presence at so many emergencies reflected her skill. Its medical experts said the men had died of natural causes, although its chief medical expert conceded under cross-examination that the deaths were most likely natural but that "anything is possible." Gilbert did not testify. The evidence closed on February 21, 2001, and closing arguments ended the next day. Judge Ponsor told the jurors that they could return second-degree murder, which did not carry death, instead of first-degree.
The jury deliberated for 83 hours over 12 days. On March 14, 2001, it found Gilbert guilty of first-degree murder in the deaths of three veterans, second-degree murder in the death of a fourth, Stanley Jagodowski, and attempted murder of two other veterans. It acquitted her on one count of attempting to kill a veteran. ABC News reported that she was also convicted of four counts of assault with intent to kill and of lesser charges. She bowed her head and wept quietly as the verdict was read.
The same jury heard the penalty phase, which began the following week. The government was allowed to present, as aggravating evidence beyond the verdicts, the alleged 1995 injection of Glenn Gilbert, the attempted poisoning of another patient and the bomb-threat conviction. Judge Ponsor struck other items it had proposed, including the 1988 incident with her husband and a knife, an allegation that years earlier she had scalded a mentally disabled boy in bath water, and most of a claim that she would be dangerous in prison, which he called "simply illusory." None of those excluded allegations was ever tested in court.
Welch called her a "shell of a human being" who deserved to die for the cold, calculated way she had killed. The defense said that life in prison was punishment enough for a young woman convicted on circumstantial evidence. Her father showed the jurors photographs of her as a child and as a young mother, and both her grandmothers asked them to spare her, saying a death sentence would devastate the family and her two sons. Glenn Gilbert submitted a statement about the boys. The victims' families were divided on the death penalty.
After about six hours of deliberation over Friday and Monday, March 26, the jury did not return a death sentence. ABC News reported that it recommended life in prison; other accounts, including Cunningham's study, describe the jury as unable to reach the unanimous decision a death sentence required. Either way, the only sentence left was life without parole. Had the jury chosen death, she would have been the only woman on federal death row.
Gilbert was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Richard Brunswick, a doctor who worked at the Leeds hospital in 1996, wrote in the Daily Hampshire Gazette in 2021 that she was serving four consecutive life terms without parole, plus 20 years, in a federal prison in Texas. Cunningham's study records that she was moved to a high-security federal facility in Texas.
Her bomb-threat conviction was affirmed in 1999. The 2000 First Circuit decision concerned the pretrial evidence rulings, not her guilt. No appellate decision on the murder convictions has been reported, and the federal prison system lists her release date as life.
Several families sued the United States under the Federal Tort Claims Act, alleging that the VA had negligently supervised her. Federal law required an administrative claim within two years of when a claim accrued, and the government argued that the families had waited too long.
The district court consolidated six suits, including those of the Cutting and Skwira families. On June 11, 2002, in Cutting v. United States, it reluctantly dismissed five of them as filed too late; in the Skwira case it held that the claim accrued on November 26, 1996, the day after the exhumation, when the family was told the death certificate was wrong. Nancy Cutting's claim was timely. Caroline Brandt, the widow of another patient, had also filed a timely claim.
The Skwira family appealed. Edward Skwira's daughter, Marsha Yarrows, had testified that when she read the newspaper reports in the summer of 1996 she recognized at once what had happened to her father. On September 15, 2003, the First Circuit affirmed the dismissal, holding that the claim accrued once the family knew of the death and of facts suggesting a link to the government; certainty about the medical cause was not required. Chief Judge Boudin agreed with the result but called it harsh, and suggested that relief such as pausing the deadline during a government investigation was a matter for the Supreme Court or Congress. Judge Torruella dissented, arguing that the cause of death could not have been known until June 8, 1998, so the claim was timely. The family asked the Supreme Court to hear the case, and the Solicitor General filed a brief opposing review in May 2004.
The Cascone family fared differently. A newspaper report on April 25, 2000, first publicly suggested that Gilbert might have killed Michele Cascone. The estate filed a claim with the VA on November 10, 2000; the VA denied it as untimely, and the district court dismissed the suit in July 2003. On May 27, 2004, the First Circuit reversed. Unlike the families who had been asked to exhume, the court held, Cascone's family had no reasonable basis before November 10, 1998, to suspect that he had died of anything other than his existing heart disease, and it sent the case back for further proceedings. That ruling concerned only when the family could sue; no court has found that Gilbert caused his death.
As of October 21, 2026, the Federal Bureau of Prisons inmate locator lists Kristen Gilbert, register number 90371-038, age 58, at the Federal Medical Center, Carswell, in Fort Worth, Texas, with a release date of life.
Proven by jury verdict: the murders of Stanley Jagodowski (second degree), Henry Hudon, Kenneth Cutting and Edward Skwira (first degree for the three counts, with Skwira's named among them by the First Circuit), and two counts reported as attempted murder of other patients. The reports do not say which of the three surviving patients, Francis Marier, Thomas Callahan or Angelo Vella, was the subject of the acquittal.
Never charged or tried: the death of Michele Cascone, which was the subject only of his estate's civil claim and about which the Globe reported there was no evidence of epinephrine; the alleged 1995 attempt on Glenn Gilbert, which was admitted only at the penalty phase; and the knife and scalding allegations, which were excluded.
Suspected only: other deaths on Ward C. The statistical study's claim that she was on duty for about half of 350 deaths over seven years, and the count of 37 deaths in her last 14 months, describe deaths that occurred on her shifts, not deaths shown to be killings. A draft VA report found that 70 of the deaths it reviewed involved seriously or terminally ill patients. No court has attributed any death beyond the four to her.
Accounts differ on the number of missing ampules (about 88 of 135, Globe; 85, AP); Edward Skwira's age (68, Globe; 69, AP); the convictions on the lesser counts (two attempted murders, AP and Cunningham; four counts of assault with intent to kill plus an acquittal on one attempt, ABC News; three attempts, as stated in passing in the Cascone opinion); and whether the penalty jury recommended life or deadlocked.
November 13, 1967: Kristen Heather Strickland is born in Fall River, Massachusetts.
1985: graduates from Groton-Dunstable Regional High School.
1988: earns her nursing degree at Greenfield Community College and marries Glenn Gilbert.
March 6, 1989: starts work at the VA Medical Center in Leeds, Northampton.
1990: first son born; moves to the overnight shift.
March 1991: returns from maternity leave to the evening shift.
November 13, 1993: second son born.
Summer and fall 1995: friendship, then affair, with hospital police officer James Perrault.
August 21, 1995: Stanley Jagodowski dies.
November 1995: Glenn Gilbert is treated for low potassium; he later says she injected him about a week afterward (never charged).
December 1, 1995: she moves to an apartment in Easthampton.
December 8, 1995: Henry Hudon dies.
December 20, 1995: Francis Marier survives a cardiac arrest.
January 22, 1996: Thomas Callahan survives a dangerous arrhythmia.
January 28, 1996: Michele Cascone dies after a series of cardiac emergencies (never charged).
February 2, 1996: Kenneth Cutting dies.
February 4, 1996: Angelo Vella survives a heart rate of about 300.
February 15, 1996: Edward Skwira goes into cardiac arrest; he dies on February 18.
February 1996: three nurses report the pattern; Gilbert leaves the hospital.
March 8, 1996: interviewed by VA investigators.
Spring and June 1996: criminal investigation begins; a federal grand jury opens its inquiry.
July 8, 1996: overdose and admission to Holyoke Hospital's psychiatric unit.
July 17 to August 8, 1996: the Daily Hampshire Gazette reports the inquiry; the U.S. Attorney's Office confirms a grand jury.
September 26, 1996: bomb threat by telephone; about 50 patients evacuated.
October 8, 1996: arrested on the bomb threat charge.
November 25, 1996: Edward Skwira's body is exhumed and examined.
January 7, 1998: bomb threat trial begins; she is convicted.
April 1998: sentenced to 15 months.
June 8, 1998: investigators tell the Skwira family that tests showed epinephrine poisoning.
November 1998: indicted for the patient deaths.
May 13, 1999: the government decides to seek the death penalty.
June 21, 1999: First Circuit affirms the bomb threat conviction.
October 3, 2000: First Circuit largely upholds the pretrial exclusions.
October 2000: jury selection begins in Springfield.
November 20, 2000: opening statements.
January 5, 2001: the government withdraws its toxicology results.
February 21 and 22, 2001: evidence closes; closing arguments end.
March 14, 2001: guilty of three first-degree murders, one second-degree murder and two attempted murders.
March 26, 2001: the jury does not return a death sentence; life without parole follows.
June 11, 2002: district court dismisses five families' suits as untimely.
September 15, 2003: First Circuit affirms in Skwira v. United States.
May 27, 2004: First Circuit revives the Cascone estate's claim.
April 16, 2021: a former hospital doctor writes that she is serving four consecutive life terms plus 20 years in Texas.
October 21, 2026: held at FMC Carswell, Fort Worth, Texas, release date life (BOP).