Kristen Gilbert was convicted in federal court in March 2001 of killing four patients on her ward at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northampton, Massachusetts, by injecting them with epinephrine. She is serving life without parole. Prosecutors believed the real number was considerably higher and could not prove it.
She was born Kristen Heather Strickland in Fall River, Massachusetts on November 13, 1967, to Richard and Claudia Strickland. She did well at school and finished high school at sixteen. Friends and family later described her as a habitual liar from her teens. She took a nursing degree at Greenfield Community College, qualified as a registered nurse in 1988, married Glenn Gilbert the same year, and joined the staff at the Northampton VA on March 6, 1989. She had two sons, in 1990 and 1993.
She was regarded as a highly capable nurse, particularly in an emergency. Colleagues nicknamed her the Angel of Death, which began as a joke about how often she happened to be present when a patient coded.
The four men she was convicted of killing were Stanley Jagodowski, sixty-six, an Army veteran, on August 21, 1995; Henry Hudon, thirty-five, Air Force, on December 8, 1995; Kenneth Cutting, forty-one, Army, on February 2, 1996; and Edward Skwira, sixty-nine, a veteran of the Second World War, on February 15, 1996. Two further patients survived attempts on their lives.
The method was epinephrine, adrenaline, injected into intravenous bags in doses far beyond anything ordered. In a compromised patient it drives the heart past what it can sustain and produces sudden cardiac arrest. It is also difficult to detect after death, which is part of why the case took years to build. She would then respond to the emergency call and often run the resuscitation herself.
The motive the prosecution advanced was that she was having an affair with James Perrault, a hospital police officer who was summoned when a patient coded, and that a code brought him to her ward. Evidence was given that she played footsie with him while a patient lay in arrest.
Deaths on the ward rose sharply in 1995. Nurses noticed the number of codes and, more specifically, empty epinephrine vials at the bedsides of patients who had died while she was present. In February 1996 colleagues took their concerns to the administration and police were called. She left her post shortly afterwards. She was arrested on July 11, 1996, and the investigation, exhumations, toxicology, years of it, led to indictment in 1998.
The trial ran in Springfield from October 16, 2000 before US District Judge Michael A. Ponsor. Because the killings happened on federal property, she faced a federal capital charge in a state that had abolished the death penalty. The prosecution's forensic case then broke: on January 5, 2001 the government conceded that the toxicology results purporting to establish high epinephrine levels in the victims were wrong, and its expert was withdrawn after miscalculating. The case that remained was circumstantial, together with testimony from Perrault and from her estranged husband that she had confessed to them.
The jury convicted her on March 14, 2001 of three counts of first degree murder, one of second degree murder, two of attempted murder, and a bomb threat against the medical centre. It deliberated the penalty for about six hours across two days and on March 26 recommended life imprisonment rather than death. She would otherwise have been the only woman on federal death row. Judge Ponsor imposed the sentence the following day.
Her defence argued throughout that the deaths were natural, that her frequent presence at cardiac arrests demonstrated competence rather than guilt, and that colleagues had turned on her over the affair. She did not testify. The conviction rests on a pattern and on two confessions reported by people close to her, not on the toxicology the case was originally built around. Which is the part of this case worth being careful with.