This account is a truly horrifying and chilling tale of a nurse named Kristen Gilbert who worked at a veterans hospital that decides to go on a killing spree where she murders many patients over the course of her 7 year medical career. Gilbert's fellow nurse jokingly began calling her the "Angel of Death" because there were so many codes and deaths while she was on duty and she found most of them herself. Gilbert wrote only very sporadic notes in the charts of her patients and very rarely documented their vital signs despite hospital regulations. She was also supposed to place multiple EKG montioring strips in her patients' charts especially the ones that coded. She rarely did this if at all. If she did do this, there were only one or two strips when as stated in the book there should be at least 8 strips in the chart of a patient that coded. She even disposed of some of the strips. Some of her fellow nurses began to suspect that Gilbert was using the codes as a way to get attention for herself and also to flirt with her lover that she soon left her husband for as it was required that a member of security be present at all codes and he was usually one of the security guards on duty at the same time as she was. She would disappear off the ward early or manufacture reasons to leave so she could meet with her lover.
Some of Gilbert's fellow nurses began to watch her more closely because they were suspecting her strongly of murdering patients that weren't really in danger of dying even though they were ill. One nurse began to notice that vials of epinephrine were coming up missing and started counting them. The nurse thought it was odd because they very rarely if ever used it on the ward. Eventually 3 of her fellow nurses got together and voiced their suspicions about Gilbert to each other. They had all 3 come to the same conclusion: that she was murdering patients by giving them overdoses of epinephrine. The insisted on having a meeting with their supervisor and the nursing manager's supervisor was in the room as well for this meeting. They stated their case against Gilbert and this launched a formal inquiry into the case which led eventaully to the FBI becoming involved in the case and beginng to build a murder case against Kristen Gilbert.
The FBI began investigating the case and they worked tirelessly for a number of years building a case against Kristen Gilbert. While they were building a murder case against her, Gilbert was going off the deep end. She attempted suicide several times by supposedly overdosing on pills and did several stints in psych wards during this time. At one point she called her ex-husband and also called her ex-lover and confessed to the murders. She also started threatening and stalking anyone involved in the case and she eventually started making bomb threats to the hospital with her ex-lover as the main target of the calls. The authorities were able to prove that Gilbert was the one behind the bomb threats and they arrested her and took the case to trial. She was found guilty and sentenced to a prison term and then later released and placed under house arrest and required to live with her parents in New York for the year she was on house arrest. She was also mandated to attend weekly therapy sessions and was not allowed to have any contact with anyone in Massachusetts where she was still being investigated for murder. The FBI continued building the case against her the whole time she was in prison and under house arrest. They finally had enough evidence to try Gilbert for murder after building the case for several years.
The judge in the case decided that Gilbert needed to be locked up while the trial was going on because she had tried to tamper with her ankle monitor when she was under house arrest. Once the jury was selected the trial could finally begin. The trial spanned several months and after many witnesses were presented on both sides, the jury began deliberations. A few days after they began deliberations they returned a verdict that she was guilty of one case of second degree murder, several first degree murder charges, and a couple of attempted murder charges and dismissed one count because they could not be certain if Gilbert had killed one of the patients. The jury then began deliberations to determine her sentence but were unable to do so as part of them wanted the death penalty and part did not. This meant Gilbert's fate was to be decided by the judge presiding over the case. The judge gave Gilbert 4 consecutive life sentences with no possibility of parole. Gilbert was eventually transferred from a a Massachusetts prison to a facilty in Texas where she remains today and where she could continue to recieve intensive psychiatric help because in the years before her trial, she had been diagnosed with several different mental disorders.
It is absolutely appalling to me that Kristen Gilbert was able to get away with murdering so many people over the course of her 7 year career. It is estimated that she may have murdered as many as 40 people over those 7 years. I worked in a hospital (although not a VA hospital) during the mid 2000s and the drugs the nurses used were closely monitored. There were even cameras in the medication rooms and anywhere else where medications were stocked and these tapes were reviewed often by nursing managers and security to catch any potential problems. In fact I remeber one nurse gettign fired because she was stealing pain medications. Everything was documented in a patient's chart no matter how minor. Charting was strictly monitored as well. I don't understand how Gilbert was able to get away with waht she did for so long. It is horrifying that no one in management noticed that their was an unusual number of deaths and codes on the ward when she was on duty especially since she had called more codes and was present for more deaths than any of the other nurses combined. It is equally chilling that no one other than one nurse noticed the missing vials of Epinephrine and it always needing to be restocked despite it hardly ever being used. No one said anything either about the missing information that Gilbert failed to record in the patients' charts. I think it was jsut negligence on the part of the hospital administatrion and on the rest of the nursing staff that all of these events went unreported for so long and no action was taken against her.
My recommendation: This is a very well written account and at certain points it reads more like a novel than the true story that it is. It's definitely not a book for the soft-hearted but it is definitely worth a read.
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