Former VA Nurse Kristen Gilbert Convicted of Murdering Four Veterans in Her Care
A federal jury found that Gilbert killed patients at the Northampton veterans hospital with overdoses of the heart stimulant epinephrine in 1995 and 1996.
Published
Kristen Gilbert's fellow nurses suspected her first: patients kept dying on her shifts. On March 14, 2001, a federal jury convicted her of murdering four of them.
The jury in Springfield, Massachusetts, found that Gilbert, 33, had murdered four veterans in her care at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northampton in 1995 and 1996. After 83 hours of deliberation over twelve days, the jurors convicted her of the first-degree murders of Henry Hudon, Kenneth Cutting and Edward Skwira, the second-degree murder of Stanley Jagodowski, and assault with intent to kill two other veterans. They acquitted her of a third count of assault with intent to kill.
Nurses had told their superiors they suspected she was taking vials of epinephrine from a locked cabinet in the critical care unit. Prosecutors said Gilbert injected the men with overdoses of epinephrine, also called adrenaline, which sent their hearts racing out of control, and that she did it for the drama of the emergencies that followed and to win the attention of her lover, a security guard at the hospital. Veterans she had treated testified that after she flushed their intravenous lines with something, their hearts raced and their temperatures soared. Some colleagues had called her "the angel of death." Her lawyers argued that the case was circumstantial, that no one had seen her harm anyone, and that the men, who were old, sick or both, had died of natural causes.
The case had been in the federal courts because the hospital was federal property, which also made Gilbert eligible for a death sentence in a state that does not allow executions. While a grand jury investigated the deaths, she had been convicted in 1998 of telephoning bomb threats to the same hospital and served fifteen months in federal prison. Her murder trial opened in October 2000.
Because of the first-degree verdicts, the same jury had to decide her punishment. On March 26, 2001, after less than six hours of deliberation, it rejected the death penalty and chose life in prison.
The Hartford Courant described the two non-fatal counts as assault with intent to kill, while the Los Angeles Times called them attempted murder.
Sources
- Lawyers Ask Jury To Spare Gilbert's Life, For Sons' Sake, Hartford Courant
- Ex-VA Nurse Is Spared Death Penalty, Los Angeles Times
- Murderous Nurse Escapes Death Penalty, ABC News
- Kristen Gilbert Trial: 2000-01, Encyclopedia.com