True Crime Campfire - Angel of Death: Serial Killer Nurse Kristen Gilbert

Episode Date: April 7, 2023

Nurses often take what they call the Florence Nightingale Pledge at graduation. It goes, in part, like this: “I solemnly pledge myself before God and in the presence of this assembly, to pass my life in purity and to practice my profession faithfully. I will abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous, and will not take or knowingly administer any harmful drug….With loyalty will I endeavor to aid the physician in his work, and devote myself to the welfare of those committed to my care.” A solemn promise, from caregiver to patient, to protect the lives in their care—and above all, to do no harm. Most nurses work hard to stick to that promise. But a few, often managing to slither under the radar for years before they’re caught, do just the opposite. They chose nursing not because they wanted to heal, but because it’s a target-rich environment for them to hunt for prey. This is the story of one of those nurses: Kristen Gilbert. Sources:The Boston Globe, multi-part series: https://cache.boston.com/globe/metro/packages/nurse/part1.htmThe New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/23/us/former-nurse-on-trial-in-patients-deaths.htmlhttps://sites.google.com/site/shelbymillerkristengilbert/the-victimsAll That's Interesting: https://allthatsinteresting.com/kristen-gilbertOxygen's "Snapped: Notorious, Kristen Gilbert"Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. Nurses often take what they call the Florence Nightingale Pledge at graduation. It goes in part like this. I solemnly pledge myself before God and in the presence of this assembly to pass my life in purity and to practice my profession faithfully. I will abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous

and will not take or knowingly administer any harmful drug. With loyalty will I endeavor to aid the physician and his work and devote myself to the welfare of those committed to my care. A solemn promise, from caregiver to patient, to protect the lives in their care, and above all to do no harm. most nurses work hard to stick to that promise but a few often managing to slither under the radar for years before they're caught do just the opposite they chose nursing not because they wanted to heal but because it's a target-rich environment for them to hunt for prey this is the story of one of those nurses this is angel of death serial killer christin gilbert So, campers, for this one, we're in Northampton, Massachusetts, an artsy little town you often hear described as idyllic. Smith College is there, and it tends to attract academics and artists and musicians. Nice place to live. Safe, too, with a murder rate of one every two to three years. But in the early 1990s, that sense of safety gave way to...

to a sense of unease. The local veterans' hospital was seeing a big spike in the patient mortality rate, big enough to be suspicious. Now, obviously, it's not weird for people to die in the hospital, veterans especially, actually. Vets tend to smoke more than civilians, and they have a higher rate of substance abuse, too, so health issues are common. This was a sudden, rapid uptick in the death rate at this one hospital, and cardiac arrest were way up, too. It was really starting to worry some of the nurses. So much so that in February of 94, several of the staff at the hospital got together and made a call to a Veterans Affairs investigator named Stephen Plant. They were worried, they told him, that one of their own might be murdering patients. And they knew which one.

The one who always seemed to be on duty when the patients coded or passed. The one you might least suspect if you knew her. A pretty, popular nurse with a friendly smile and an employee file full of stellar performance reviews. 33-year-old Kristen Gilbert. The only thing that might raise a true-crime efficientado's eyebrow about Kristen's childhood was that she grew up in Fall River, Massachusetts, where Lizzie Borden went on trial

for the brutal axe murders of her dad and stepmom in 1893. So about 100 years before, right? Other than that, according to the Boston Globe's Thomas Farager, Kristen had a normal middle-class childhood. She was smart and pretty, and she had tons of friends. She liked soap operas, and she was good at math. and the neighbors were always asking her to babysit their kids. But above all else, Kristen loved being the center of attention.

More than loved it, fed off it, like a plant feeds off the sunlight. Better yet, like a vampire feeds off blood. And that was it, the source of all the trouble, that deep need for the spotlight. For some people, it translates into a career as an actor or singer or supermodel, but for Kristen, it morphed her into a chronic liar, willing to say anything. to keep all eyes on her. She started telling friends that her mom was an abusive alcoholic. Total nonsense she made up out of whole cloth.

She liked to tell people she was distantly related to Lizzie Borden. Yeah. I mean, I might do the same thing if I thought I could get away with it. I'm not going to lie, but, yeah. Kristen was good friends for a while with Alberta Erickson, a girl who lived next door. They were in the same class at school, and they were both obsessed with the show General Hospital, and when you're in the eighth grade, that's pretty much all it takes to make you best friends forever. But the friendship didn't last. Alberta started noticing all the lies.

One time her favorite shirt went missing, and then Kristen showed up at school wearing it, claiming it was hers. And it creeped Alberta out that Kristen's favorite character on General Hospital was Amy, the conniving, backstabbing, evil nurse. Evil Amy and Lizzie Borden. Seems like our girl likes to identify with the villain, huh? After a while, Alberta started distancing herself from Kristen, and she wasn't the only one. Former boyfriends would later tell their horror stories to the Boston Globe, stories of manipulation and, quote, scary histrionics. When a boy she liked started pulling away from her, Kristen would threaten to kill herself if they left her.

Once, she left a boyfriend and note that she'd swallowed glass. Other guys had similar stories. Kristen had tampered with their cars or physically assaulted them, scratching them with her long fingernails like a pissed-off cat. One former boyfriend put it succinctly to the Boston Globe. Kristen, he said, was twisted. And sometimes, when she was making up some wild story or another, she'd get this creepy thousand-yard stare in her eyes.

Just blank, like there was nobody home. After high school, Kristen followed in her favorite general hospital characters' footsteps and enrolled in nursing school. While she was there, she met an easy-going, well-liked guy named Glenn Gilbert. And after three years of dating, she married him. And in 1989, Kristen started working at the VA Medical Center. From the start, she had a great reputation. Her new colleagues really liked her.

She set up the secret Santa at Christmas and a toy drive for low-income families. She started something called the Sunshine Fund, too, to send flowers and cards to employees who were sick or just had a baby. And everybody agreed she was a damn good nurse. She was a natural leader, the kind of nurse that other nurses go to for help and advice, the one you'd want on hand in a crisis. She was so good that they assigned her to work the intensive care unit, where you find the sickest, most fragile patients.

And Kristen seemed to thrive on that. According to Dr. Greg Blackman, who worked with her for years, she was, quote, always front and center during codes, aka cardiac arrests. It would take a while for people to start noticing the spike in deaths on the war during Kristen's shifts. In the meantime, Kristen worked at building her career and her family. Over the next few years, she and Glenn had two little boys together. As we're always hearing on Dateline, from the outside looking in, they seem like the perfect little family. But behind

closed doors, shit got dark. It didn't take Glenn long to find out what Kristen's previous boyfriends already knew, that her moods weren't exactly, um, stable. One night they got into an argument and Kristen grabbed a kitchen knife and chased Glenn all over the house. He had to lock himself in a room until she finally calmed down. Kristen was determined to be the center of Glenn's attention, just as she'd been with the guys she'd been with before him. And, you know, relationships just don't work like that. You have a honeymoon phase where you're both marinating in bonding hormones and

endorphins and stuff, and then that wears off and real life takes over, especially once you have kids. It doesn't mean you're not still in love. If you do it right, you fall even more in love over the future. years. Oh, absolutely, but it's not going to be like it was in those first few weeks, obviously. It's just a different kind of love. And for somebody like Kristen Gilbert, that is unacceptable. Yeah. Remember how Tracy Richter would get jealous of the attention her first husband paid to the dogs? Same flavor of unhinged we're dealing with in Miss Gilbert here. The type to get jealous of

her own kids for taking some of their dad's love away from her, which if you talk to any dad, they're They're like, that's not how, no, that's no. That's not how that works. Different accounts. You have plenty of love in both. Yeah. So the marriage started to hit the skids. Kristen would get verbally, sometimes physically abusive.

Glenn wanted to keep his family together, so he stayed. But Kristen was getting bored and antsy. And one day at the hospital, a hunky security guard named James Peralt caught her eye. At the VA, one of the rules was to have a security guard in the room whenever a co did. So the first time Kristen and James first ran into each other, it was during one of those high stress, high drama moments, the kind of moments Kristen lived for. James was an army vet. He'd fought in the Persian Gulf, and his ultimate goal was to become a cop. He had kind of a macho energy, and our girl aimed herself at him like a sex-seekin missile.

First, it was flirting at the nurse's station, then it was sexy little emails back in forth. One night, the staff went out to the VFW hall for drinks after shift change, and Kristen and James spent the whole evening together, talking and dancing, and at the end of the night, James walked her to her car and kissed her. They started an affair. Obviously, we can't diagnose anybody, but I don't think it's a big leap to say that Kristen at least has some psychopathic traits, and one of those, of course, is getting bored a lot. Affairs are actually really common for psychopaths because it's an easy fix for boredom and they're not going to have any guilt about it. James Peralt was new and exciting and Kristen was warm for his form.

She must have felt like she was living out all her general hospital soap opera dreams. The pretty young nurse and a handsome man in uniform, even if it was just a security guard uniform, still counts, right? Yeah, of course. Making goo-goo eyes at each other in the halls and sneaking off for a little grab-ass in the supply closet now and then. Good times. Yeah, nothing gets the engine. going, like the smell of antiseptic and old mops. Yeah, way more fun than all the boring wife and mother crap she had to do at home.

Ew. And at some point, like so many creeps before and after her, Kristen must have decided that she wanted out of her marriage and she didn't like the whole divorce idea. At some point during 1995, Glenn started getting sick. First, he was having to pee all the time. Then he felt weak and nauseated, throwing up a lot. If it occurred to him that there might be a connection between his sudden illness and the fact that Kristen had been cooking for him a lot more lately, Glenn didn't say anything about it. But he kept getting sick.

And sometimes he noticed a weird metallic taste to his food. Meanwhile, Kristen and James were getting hotter and heavier by the day. Kristen told James that Glenn was abusive, something we should be clear there's never been one shred of evidence for. James told her she should leave Glenn, but Kristen said she couldn't do it. Why? I don't know. I assume because divorce is expensive and she was afraid she'd lose money or custody of the kids or the house or whatever. So anyway, this went on for a while and eventually Glenn started to get suspicious. Kristen told him he was imagining things. Of course she wasn't having an affair. How ridiculous. But she must have known he was going to find out sooner or later.

And to make things worse, James was getting sick of hearing her complaint about what an awful husband Glenn was. Why don't you leave him? Come be with me. So one night, after eating a nice home-cooked dinner, Kristen had made him, Glenn got horribly, violently sick. So sick that Kristen rushed him to the emergency room, a civilian one, not the one she worked in. After some tests, doctors diagnosed Glenn with low potassium and glucose, got him stabilized and sent him home. He seemed to feel better in a day or two, but a week later, Kristen came home from the VA on her dinner break and showed Glenn a syringe. I'm not happy with the care you got at that ER, she told him. I want to take some blood and test it at the VA

just to make sure those doctors didn't miss anything. Aw, how sweet, right? Such a concerned wife, even if she is messing around behind his back. So Lynn said, fine, she could run a blood test if she wanted to. He followed her into the bathroom and let her do her thing. From a bag, Kristen took two syringes, one with a clear liquid inside. This is saline, she told him. I have to flush your vein before we take the sample.

This, campers, was horseshit. You do not need to flush. a person's vein before you draw blood, but Glenn didn't know any better. Kristen was a nurse. He trusted her. So he let her wrap a tourniquet around his arm and stick in the needle, but right away he felt like something was wrong. His arm felt ice cold and he felt a sudden wave of weakness. Stop, stop, he told her. But Kristen didn't stop. She pressed his body up against the wall with hers and squeezed the

plunger, injecting the rest of the liquid into his arm. The next thing Glenn knew, he was waking up on the floor. You fainted, Kristen said. This isn't going to work. She seemed annoyed. Later, prosecutors would allege that Kristen had tried to kill her husband that day. Either it hadn't worked, or she'd given up on the idea in midstream. Who knew why?

Around that same time, James Peralt was turning the screws on Kristen, really upping the pressure on her to leave Glenn. Finally, he gave her a straight-up ultimatum. Leave this guy and be with me, or I am out. Kristen burst into tears right there in the middle of the mall food court where they were having lunch. And then she jumped up from the table, ran over to a payphone and called Glenn. James was standing right next to her and heard her tell her husband that she was leaving him. Glenn had been on the alert lately. He had a feeling something was going on, but he didn't know for sure until this moment.

And despite the fact that Kristen was far from perfect, I mean, the woman had chased him around the house with a butcher knife. He wanted to try to make the marriage work. work. But Kristen wasn't having it. In early December, she packed her stuff and moved out, left the two kids with Glenn and got her own apartment, not far from where James lived. Like we've said before, serial killers often start killing after some kind of precipitating stressor in their lives. Death in the family, loss of a job, a big breakup, whatever. Although Kristen was having a great time with James Peralt, it must have been stressful to move out on her husband and leave the kids behind.

So maybe that was partly the reason why, according to prosecutors, Kristen soon became a murderer for the very first time. The first time we know about anyway. Right. It was around the end of July 1995 when Stanley Jagadowski, a 66-year-old Korean war veteran and truck driver, arrived at the VA for treatment. He had diabetes and chronic heart problems, and he was having some GI trouble after a recent surgery.

According to Stanley's daughter, he wasn't happy at the hospital, and as a lot of us might in the same situation, he complained a bit. Stanley was in the hospital for about three weeks, and by August 21st, he was almost ready to roll. Dr. Blackman said he was going to discharge him the next day. No doubt, Stanley was happy to hear that. Anybody who's in the hospital for any length of time knows how great that is when they finally tell you you're ready to leave. Oh my God, yes. But it wasn't to be. At about 8.45 that evening, two nurses visited Stanley to see how he was doing.

He was fine, ready to get the hell out of Dodge the next day. As the nurses were leaving, one of them saw Kristen Gilbert head into Stanley's room holding a syringe. Kristen later said she was going to flush his IV line with saline, but all Stanley's meds were oral. He didn't have any IV meds prescribed, so it wouldn't usually be necessary to flush out the line, like if all you were getting was fluids, I guess. Anyway, the two other nurses went on their way, and a few minutes later, they heard Stanley yell. Ow, it hurts. You're killing me. What the hell? So they started towards Stanley's room, and just as they reached the door, Kristen came out into the hall. Oh, he's fine. Don't worry, whatever.

The two nurses poked their heads in the door, and their patient, once again, seemed calm. But 15 minutes later, Stanley Jagadowski went into cardiac arrest. Everybody came running to try and save him, but he didn't make it. A much-loved man was gone. on the eve of his release from the hospital. Now, I'm sure y'all didn't miss the line about flushing out the ivy with saline, right? Same kind of thing she claimed she'd been doing to hubby Glenn when he passed out a couple months before. Our girl had gotten her first, as far as we know, taste of killing, and it would not be her last.

Henry Hudon was just 35 years old, a former physical therapist in the Air Force. When he was still in the service, he'd been having pizza at a restaurant on base one afternoon when a fight broke out, between two other airmen. Henry tried to break it up and got hit in the head with a beer bottle. He was in a coma for almost a month, and he came out with a traumatic brain injury. Man, no good deed goes unpunished, right? Plus his heart, he ran in trying to help, and this what happens. And after that, Henry changed. Later, he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, which his very loving family were trying to help him manage. In February of 1996, his sister Christine brought him to the VA hospital for a bad case of the flu.

Other than that, he was healthy. No heart issues whatsoever. He was just there for IV fluids and other basic flu treatments. And for minute one, he was not happy about being there. Now, Henry was actually a frequent flyer at the VA, but he was used to being on Ward 7, which is the psychiatric floor. Now that he was on Ward C, he was freaking out. While Christine was checking him in, he begged her to get him the hell out of there. You can't leave me in this building, he screamed, people are dying around here for no reason. One of the orderlies who knew him from Syke had to come over and talk him down so they could get him checked in and into a room, but Henry wouldn't let it go. When his mom showed up to visit,

he told her, the patients are talking about it, the staff is talking about it, the staff is talking to the patients about it, people are dying. Henry's folks were used to him saying stuff like this. He heard voices, and he was scared a lot. It was part of his illness. Lately, he'd been off his meds because they made him nauseated. That was part of why they wanted to check him into Ward C for a while to get him on some nausea meds so he could go back on the antipsychotics and hopefully get himself stabilized and get back to his life. Henry begged his mother. I know I'm a nut, he said, but I'm your son. Can't you believe me just this one time? I don't want to die here. The VA will own my soul. Don't leave me here, Mama. I don't want to die. Which is just the most heartbreaking thing I've ever.

I can't even imagine that. Poor mom. Oh, my God. But as a lot of us, probably most of us would. Henry's mom gave him a hug and a kiss, told him he was going to be fine, nothing bad was going to happen to him, and she'd be back to visit him again tomorrow, and then she left. Henry was paranoid, I mean, clinically so. But maybe he had heard something.

The gossip mill had been spinning lately, what with all the patient's coding, and there was talk of some missing epinephrine. The Twisted Mirror podcast presents genre and mind-bending stories that reflect the deepest, darkest recesses of the human psyche. These tales aren't just designed to make you double-check your locks at night, but instead will have you questioning whether you have you have already welcomed the monster through your front door. In the tradition of great horror shows like The Twilight Zone, the Twisted Mirror podcast will

leave you thinking long after the final words of each story. Looking into the reflection of a warped world, just slightly different than our own, you'll begin to find the lines blurred between the world you know and its reflection in the twisted mirror. Please enjoy this short excerpt from a story entitled, What Came With the Storm. Ariel dozed off in front of the fire on the sheepskin rug that had been my favorite spot to nap on as a child. Watching her lays away peacefully give me some much-needed serenity. I grabbed a blanket and covered her, turning the radio to a station of classics.

My dad used to do this, too, play songs from his childhood, songs his parents loved. I turned on the volume low enough to make it a lullaby for Ariel, but not so low that it couldn't be heard over the howling, angry winds outside. I made myself a cup of tea and wrapped myself in my dad's heirloom blanket, the one he always kept in the cedar chest, and cosied up in a worn cognac leather chair beside the window. The forest outside was ink-black, but the porch light illuminated flecks of sleep raining down along its path. Invisible around it were hints of barren trees and frozen ground. Staring out the window at the harsh weather made me feel even cozier within the cabin walls. After a while, the comforting contrast seduced me toward a warm slumber, and my eyelids began to droop. I thought I should move to an actual bed, and so began the stubborn battle between instant sleep and delayed gratification.

A few times my head sagged, and my eyes dropped, as I deliberated, each time opening them to the stream of ochre light outside and the pellets of the frozen rain shooting past it. Once, twice, three times, maybe four or five, or six. After the last time, I forced my eyelids open, she was there. I jumped in my seat and blinked my eyes in a frenzy, assuming I must have been half asleep and dreaming, but the vision persisted.

Out in the dark, freezing storm, directly in the path of the light, stood a little girl, staring back at me. Her arms were at her sides, unmoving as the weather sadistically beat her. Her wet hair whipped in the wind like a torn sail in an ocean storm. She wore a little red piquot with white stockings. Her legs beneath her knees were buried in the snow. It was far too inhospitable outside for a child. More importantly, what the hell was she doing out here, and how the hell did she get out here? I peered through the ice-blurred windows for any

adults, but saw none. I'm ashamed to admit it, but the first emotion I felt was fear. What could a little girl do to me? She needed my help, not my suspicion. But people didn't just happen upon this cabin, especially little girls in their Sunday best during the storm of the decade. Ariel. I whispered, not taking my eyes off of the little girl. She didn't hear me. Ariel!

I hissed. She stirred innocently. Hmm? I frantically waved her over, but kept my voice low. Wake up. Hurry. She sensed the urgency in my hushed tone. As she sat up quickly, her face still covered with the mask of sleep.

What is it? There's... Just come look, I gestured impatiently. She did the opposite of fixing herself to her spot with wide-eyed trepidation. You're scaring me. Don't be scared. Just look up. Please. She hesitantly crept over. I didn't want to speak, though there was no way anyone could hear us outside over the violent winds. She leaned over the chair behind me.

What the hell? She muttered, crouched over my shoulder. I was falling asleep and she was just standing there. All alone? Did someone drop her off? I didn't see, but the snow looks untouched. No tracks from what I can see. I was half asleep, and she literally just seemed to appear. We have to go get her, right? I asked. Yeah, but. I knew what Ariel was going to say. It wasn't safe for the two of us to just run out there.

Something felt off. I know, I said, glancing back over at the motionless child as the storm swirled around her in the black night. We stared at each other for a few seconds. We were good people. We would always save a child in need. But there was something aberrant about her little frame as still as a post with an unwavering glare amidst. nature's cold chaos. The fact that she would be out here alone, one in the morning, the fact that her clothes looked like she was going to Sunday school, not like she should be

anywhere near a forest in this weather. I stood up. Okay, I proclaimed through a resolute exhale, bracing Ariel's shoulders. I ran into the bedroom closet, which was mostly empty now, save for the one thing I had decided I would keep in it, a shotgun. I loaded the shelves, and Ariel gasped. I don't think she'd ever seen anyone load a gun up close in her life. Don't worry. I shook my head inside. God, I don't want to scare this kid. You stay in here. If anything weird goes down,

don't open the door okay just don't she nodded but i didn't believe her i threw on boots in a parka and wrestled the door open against the unforgiving elements outside the biting wind screamed as soon as i stepped out from the warm dry air of the cabin i held a flashlight in one hand and rested the shotgun just inside the door. If this sounds like your special version of hell, please subscribe to the Twisted Mirror podcast, and you can also follow me on Instagram at Twisted Mirror podcast or on Facebook, facebook.com slash twisted mirror pod. I'll be waiting on the other side of the twisted mirror.

Epinephrine, if you're not familiar, is basically a synthetic adrenaline used for serious allergic reactions and for patients in cardiac arrest. If you're not in anaphylactic shock or cardiac arrests, though, it's incredibly dangerous. It causes a fast spike in blood pressure, anxiety that some experts describe as a fight or flight reaction, and a dangerously fast heart rate. It's also tough to trace in the blood, making it a pretty handy murder weapon. After Henry's mom left, Dr. Greg Blackman came by to check on him. Besides the flu, he seemed okay, and the doctor expected him to feel a lot better in a day or two. He was going to be fine. But less than an hour later, he coded. Cardiac arrest. Everybody came running, doctors, nurses, security

guard James, and they managed to resuscitate Henry. who had never had heart trouble a day in his life before now. As anybody who's worked in a hospital can tell you, there's a kind of buzz in the room when you bring somebody back from the brink. And once they got Henry stabilized, Dr. Blackman was sort of smiling and high-fiving around, telling everybody good job. Kristen Gilbert turned around and stared at him.

I wouldn't be so happy if I were you, she said. Dr. Blackman was confused. Why? he asked. Well, Kristen said, he's schizophrenic. Oh, I guess. See, this is what we mean when we say the mentally ill are a lot more likely to be victims than perpetrators because of this shit, this mean-spirited stigma. Oh, it's disgusting. It's such a cruel thing to say. And for like no real logical reason, like Henry Hudon was clearly worthless in Kristen's eyes, which is probably why she picked him. She was like, oh, whatever. He's, he's, you know, he's broken. Who the fuck cares? Or because he was yelling about people dying at the hospital. I mean, that can't be good for her, right?

No, absolutely, absolutely. Dr. Blackman was grossed out by Kristen's attitude, of course, and he just turned around and walked away. Years later, he had tears in his eyes describing the scene. It still affects him to this day. The doc didn't expect any more trouble with Henry Hudon, but he was wrong. Henry coded again sometime later. then again a third time. The last time, despite all their efforts to bring him back,

Henry's heart just couldn't recover. He died, 35 years old with nothing more serious than the flu. All three codes happened within a six-hour period. When Dr. Blackman called Henry's mom, Julia, and said, We lost him. She didn't understand at first. Henry had run away from hospitals before, so she just thought it had happened again. Her brain wouldn't let her grasp the reality that Henry was gone, gone.

Henry's sister Christine was convinced there was some medical malpractice happening, that the doctor had written an order wrong or something like that. She didn't think it was on purpose, but she couldn't think of any other reason why her otherwise healthy brother would be dead. Christine couldn't shake the image of her brother, terrified, sitting in a wheelchair in the hallway outside Ward C, and begging her to take him out of there, to not let him die. It would haunt her forever. I bet.

Patients were coding left and right, and super nurse Kristen Gilbert was having the time of her life. She was in the midst of a hot and heavy affair, and she was getting plenty of chances to jump into the high drama of cardiac arrest and drag patients back from the edge of death. Patience's families tended to be impressed with her. She had an air of glamour about her

with her chic blonde hair and her designer clothes. She seemed, as Henry Hudon's sister told the Boston Globe, sophisticated, high society, and maybe just the slightest bit arrogant. The hospital was her stage, and she walked around like she owned the place, especially during codes, and people were starting to notice something a little disturbing.

Like we said before, one of the first people to get the call when a patient coded was James Peral, the security guard, and Kristen's main man. and Kristen seemed to really enjoy showing off for him while you know her patients were fighting for their lives as one of the top nurses Kristen was the center of attention during a code and people started to notice her flirting with James while she worked on the patients

like openly flirting even when they were losing somebody and everybody else was frantic she touched his arm and giggle or play footsie with him in the middle of all the chaos I mean literally as a witness said they saw her playing quote footsie with him Sometimes James would be called on to do chest compressions. Once, a fellow nurse heard Kristen compliment him on the way his biceps flexed while he was pressing on a patient's sternum. Once, she jumped up and straddled a patient to reveal sexy little garters underneath her nursing uniform. Wow. I mean, obviously, it's hilarious in a really dark sort of way, but it's also a perfect example of how people like Kristen see other human beings as props.

Not people, just props. Yeah. Scary. It's hilarious because of how absolutely devoid of humanity it is. This woman was so disconnected from her fellow man that she thought it was appropriate to turn code blues into foreplay. Yeah. Obviously, we don't find it funny, ha ha.

But it's just bizarre fucking behavior that you can't help but laugh and disbelieve. This woman woke up in the morning and picked her outfit, put garters on, in anticipation for someone dying so she could show her boyfriend how hot she looked. Like, what? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Now, the other staff had already started calling Kristen the angel of death

because patients were dropping like flies during her shifts, but it was just a joke. It wasn't serious. Not yet, anyway, but as Gavin DeBecker tells us in his book The Gift of Fear, dark humor is sometimes the very first sign that an unpleasant little truth is starting to shake loose from our subconscious and make its way to the surface of our minds. Death was following in Kristen's footsteps,

and people were starting to notice. Not long after Henry Hudon's death, 41-year-old husband and father, Kenneth Cutting, checked into the hospital for treatment of sepsis. Kenneth was blind and suffered from multiple sclerosis, but he'd never had any heart trouble in his life, and he was a cheerful, friendly guy. He fully expected to get better and go home to his wife, Nancy, and their son.

Kristen Gilbert had other ideas. When he arrived on Ward C., Kristen went to her boss and said, Hey, if this guy dies by 8, can I go home early? She had a date with James, you see, and she didn't want to be late. Later that day, Kenneth Coded. They couldn't bring him back. And it wasn't just the deaths. Codes, cardiac arrests, were way up on Ward C.

Interestingly enough, quite a few of these seemed to happen on shifts when Kristen had expressed a desire to leave work early, usually to go suck face with James who got off work earlier than she did. Sometimes she seemed downright annoyed when the patient survived. One of those patients was Marine Corps veteran Angelo Vela. Angelo's sister later testified in front of a grand jury about her brothers run in with Kristen. She'd put some kind of medication in his IV line, she said, something that as far as Angelo knew, she was supposed to be doing.

But while she was injecting the line, Angelo started feeling hot all over. Then his stomach cramped up and he felt a crushing pain in his chest. The last thing he remembered before he passed out was another nurse coming into the room, taking one look at him and yelling for Kristen to take his IV out. Luckily, Angelo Vela survived, and there were plenty more like him. At some point in the midst of all this, there was a tipping point and her colleagues started getting suspicious. Yeah, one colleague in particular, definitely a camper at heart, checked the sharps box in the room of one of Kristen's patients after they coded and found three

broken ampules of epinephrine. The dosage of epinephrine was stronger than any dose that would be prescribed on the ward, so it just didn't make any sense. But it did make the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. Epinephrine can definitely cause cardiac arrest in a patient who doesn't need it. And then there was another death. Edward Squireau was a 68-year-old World War II veteran with a wife and kids who loved him. He also had a drinking problem. He was struggling to overcome. He was in the hospital getting treatment for that. He'd had a seizure due to delirium tremens, the DTs, a scary symptom of alcohol withdrawal. Dr. Blackman ordered him some Valium, a sedative, to help him feel better. Later that night, Edward quoted. He died a few days later.

After Edward Squyre's death, Kristen's colleague peeked into the Sharps container in his room, and yet again, broken ampules of epinephrine. That was it. It was time to go to the bosses. Three of Kristen's fellow nurses went to their supervisors with their suspicions. It wasn't an easy thing to do. Kristen was popular, a talented nurse. One of the colleagues said later,

imagine having to testify against somebody who you worked with closely for a number of years on a matter like this. Someone you liked and got to know and got to know their husband and their kids. it bothers some people quite a bit. Who would ever suspect something like this? Absolutely, and this is one of the reasons why serial killers in healthcare

tend to get away with it for a long time, because it's a really tough leap for people to make. I mean, understandably so. Most people in health care are there because they have a real desire to help people. What Kristen was doing is the photo negative of that, and it's just hard for most nurses and doctors to wrap their heads around it. The nurses decided to call Veterans Affairs investigator Stephen Plant, and from that day forward, Kristen Gilbert was under the microscope.

Not that she realized it at first, of course, but Plant and his informant started tracking the suspicious deaths, and they noticed they followed her from shift to shift. Night shift, patience coding. Day shift? Patience coding. Mid shift? Guess what? Patience coding. The common denominator was always Kristen Gilbert. So much so that the odds of it being a coincidence were nearly impossible. It's hard to keep anything a secret in a hospital. It's the gossipiest place outside a hair salon. And around this time, James Peralt hurt rumors about his girlfriend's involvement in all these patient deaths. And he noped out, broke off the relationship cold. I know. Y'all thought those two crazy kids

were kind of make it. I am so sorry to have to break it to you. I mean, just a few months earlier, Kristen had given James a Valentine's card that said, never has love touched my heart so Gently moved my soul so powerfully. Barf. And James had been just as madly in love with her. That is, before he found out she might be a serial killer. At that point, he realized, yo, if I ever want to become a real cop, I better eat this chick into space. So he dumped her.

Good for him. He didn't do anything wrong aside from sleeping with a married coworker, which on the scale of, like, you know, ethics is pretty far down from serial murder. her comparatively definitely yeah yeah so like shout out to james dude you live and you learn and as you can imagine our girl handled it with perfect poise and aplom i'm kidding she threatened to kill herself things were not going well for christin investigators were sniffing all around ward c and she was starting to lose friends and allies left and right not to mention love of her life james as if this bitch would no love if it's shit in her hair. Kristen started lashing out at people at work, accusing them of starting the witch hunt against her,

which must have been fun for them, yikes, given what she was suspected of, but those people were sleeping with one eye open. But this was right about the point where the cheese really started to slide off Kristen's cracker. On September 26, 1996, the phone rang at the VA hospital, and a creepy, kind of robotically deep voice said, there are three explosive devices in building one. In 25 minutes, I'll see you in hell. Well, shit. Shaken to their core, the hospital staff sprang into action, evacuating the building, including 50 extremely ill patients who did not need this bullshit on top of all their other problems.

Of course, there was no bomb. But the call was pretty explosive anyway. Because, see, investigators have been keeping a close eye on Ms. Kristen Gilbert for a while now. ever since the nurses voiced their suspicions and an undercover detective had been watching in disbelief as Kristen walked up to a payphone, made the bomb threat, and walked away. Later, the call was traced to that very payphone. What our girl was thinking here is a mystery to everybody but her, but my guess is she was hoping this would somehow derail the investigation into the desk on the ward. I don't see how, but that must have been what she was hoping for, but in fact, it did just the opposite. The bomb threat was actually just the push investigators needed to get a judge to sign a search warrant for Kristen's apartment. They followed her home one afternoon and knocked on her door.

One investigator later said the word I would use to describe Kristen in that moment was dumbfounded. She kept insisting there was no reason to search her house while also saying, well, fine, go ahead, you won't find anything, and acting like it was ridiculous that they were even investigating her. Yeah, right. On her bed, they found the jacket, Kristen had worn when she made the phone phone phone. call at the phone booth. And in the jacket pocket was an instruction packet for a voice modulator. In the kids' bedroom closet, they found a talk boy, a voice-changing device you could buy at a toy store. Yeah, they're not going to find anything, right, Kristen? Bless your heart, honey.

They also took a journal containing several suicide notes, a stack of medical books, including a book with a page on epinephrine dog-eared and computers. Decent circumstantial evidence. The talk boy and the undercover detective's eyewitness testimony was enough for them to put the habeas gravis on her for making a bomb threat to a federal institution right away. She was convicted on that and sentenced to 15 months in the federal pen.

That gave investigators 15 months to get their ducks in a row for the murder case while Kristen was out of the way. They needed to exhume the bodies in order to get physical evidence to find high levels of epinephrine. And lo and behold, autopsy results showed just that, fatal levels of epinephrine in each of the bodies.

Most of her victims had healthy hearts that should not have stopped. So, boom. They had their evidence. And look, the feds don't tend to take cases they can't win. They have a 99.6% conviction rate, which is impressive. Now, because this was a federal case, because again, it's a VA hospital, Kristen was eligible for the death penalty, despite Massachusetts having abolished capital punishment in 1984. for her part Kristen maintained her innocence pleading not guilty on all counts and as Kristen sat stone-faced at the defense table during her trial her attorneys threw what they could at the wall to see what might stick they couldn't prove murder in this patient's death or they couldn't prove Kristen had administered the epinephrine in that one but it didn't work the pattern was just too clear the odds of it being anything other than serial murder were astronomical The jury found Kristen Gilbert guilty of four counts of first-degree murder and two counts of attempted

murder. She was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. But investigators and prosecutors suspect her actual body count is much higher, as high as 60 deaths, and who knows how many close calls. Of the hospital's 350 deaths during the time Kristen was working there, she was present for half of them. The chances of this just being a coincidence would be about one in a hundred million. Like you said, astronomical. Yeah. Kristen appealed her case, but when a Supreme Court ruling made her eligible for the death penalty

if she was retried, she dropped the appeal. She's 55 today and still sitting in prison. Every day, millions of us hand our lives over to doctors and nurses. Kristen was supposed to help veterans, men and women who had sacrificed their health and well-being for our country. Instead, she killed them. just so she could feel important. So she could be the center of attention in front of her boyfriend.

It's a betrayal so great you can hardly wrap your mind around it. We're never more vulnerable than when we're sick in the hospital. Most nurses understand that there's a sacred trust between patient and provider, and no power on earth would make them break that. But for Kristen Gilbert, people were nothing but props on her stage. She'd take your life to get off work an hour early. I don't know what the moral of the story is. The serial killer cases are always tough to tie up in a bow.

There's real evil in the world. I guess maybe that's the takeaway. Sometimes you just have to keep your head on a swivel and hope to hell you never end up on the wrong end of the needle. So that was a wild one, right, campers? You know we'll have another one for you next week, but for now, lock your doors, let your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the tree.

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