Guest Author - Vance Rowe
Kristen Gilbert was a nurse that worked in Northampton, Mass at Veteran’s Affairs Medical Center in Ward C. She was a nurse until she was arrested for using an adrenaline - inducing drug called epinephrine to cause patients to die of cardiac arrest.
Three nurses and a security officer, Kristen Gilbert’s former lover, witnessed against her with damaging testimony. Gilbert’s attorney argued that her lover testified because he was acting out of revenge for being jilted, blamed the other nurses for having drug addictions to explain away the missing vials of the synthetic adrenaline, Epinephrine. The bodies that were deemed as murdered by Gilbert were exhumed and tissue samples from the bodies were found to contain the drug in question. The lawyer said that this type of evidence gathering and sampling was shoddy at best. While his arguments were good, in the end, the jury believed the prosecution. One nurse even testified that she had told Kristin that she was suffering from asthma and Kristen pulled a vial of epinephrine from her pocket and offered it to her.
Kristin Gilbert was a very good nurse and was well liked by everyone she worked with. However, that began to change when she began working the 4-midnight shift. This is also when she met VA police officer, James G. Perrault, whom was just hired in. They became friends and often went out for drinks together after work. Perrault worked the 3-11 shift at the hospital. Soon, patients on her shift began dying from cardiac arrest when they shouldn’t have. Nurses began getting suspicious and noticed that the patients were all on Kristin’s shift. The nurses at Ward C began monitoring all of the drugs that could be used to induce heart attacks. They soon began to notice that the vials of epinephrine began to disappear. The suspicions grew even more against Gilbert when, one night she asked her supervisor if she could leave early if her patient died. She was told she could and hours later, the patient did in fact succumb to a cardiac arrest.
This was brought out in the trial and Perrault even said that Gilbert had bragged to him about killing a patient. Kristen Gilbert and James Perrault began to get intimate and this caused problems in her marriage. She left her husband after he accused her of trying to kill him as he noticed his food began to tatse funny. Gilbert said that she was given an ultimatum to leave her husband and be with him. She did.
When it was all said and done, at least 350 people died on her shift during the seven years that she worked there. Massachusetts has no death penalty but since she committed the murders on federal property, the federal government and the District Attorney was seeking the death penalty. However, a jury decided to give her life in prison plus twenty years with no possibility of parole. She is currently serving her sentence at Carswell Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas.
