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Due to the nature of this killer's crimes, listener discretion is advised. This episode includes discussions of substance misuse, murder, and suicide. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. To get help on mental health and suicide, visit spotify.com slash resources.
Kristen Gilbert spent her entire life telling lies. As a child, she spread horrendous stories about her parents. As a teenager, she claimed she was related to an infamous alleged murderer. But there was one lie that held far more weight. Kristen insisted that she had no hand in her patients' deaths.
Over the years that she worked as a nurse at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northampton, Massachusetts, dozens of Kristen's patients died unexpectedly. But she only ever claimed that the deaths occurred naturally. Of course, like many things Kristen said, this was categorically untrue. Her patients were not dying from natural causes. She was murdering them.
I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast. You can find us here every Monday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at Serial Killers Podcast. And we'd love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Hey, y'all. Marci Martin here with a little Tampax story. One time I went on vacation in the Bahamas with some friends, and of course, I got my period.
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Before we get into this story, amongst the many sources we used, we found "Perfect Poison: A Female Serial Killer's Deadly Medicine" by M. William Phelps to be extremely helpful to our research. Kristen Gilbert, born Kristen Strickland, was raised in the small town of Fall River, Massachusetts, a place already steeped in dark lore.
Fall River is best known for being the hometown of Lizzie Borden, who was acquitted of killing her father and stepmother with a hatchet in 1892. The morbid story of Lizzie Borden still hung over the town of Fall River in the 1970s, and young Kristen loved it. When her family moved away from Fall River in her teenage years, Kristen remained fascinated with her hometown and its dark past.
Her love of Fall River and the Borden story went beyond mere homesickness or morbid fascination. She began telling people that she was, in fact, a blood relative of Lizzie Borden, and repeated this claim well into adulthood. Of course, Kristen wasn't related to Lizzie Borden at all. She had no scandalous lineage. But her insistence on the claim revealed something even darker hidden inside her psyche.
Kristen exhibited traits of a pathological liar. She lied about everything: her family's history, her friends, her activities after school. She spread false stories about her mother being violent and drinking heavily. But her lying was easy to ignore when Kristen was excelling at other aspects of her life. She was a popular, intelligent student at the top of her class.
Behind closed doors, however, there were warning signs about her psyche, even beyond the habitual lying. To the boys she dated, she could be vindictive, manipulative, and occasionally physically violent. In particular, Kristen did not take breakups well. She reportedly never ended a relationship herself. And if any boy dared to dump her, she'd make sure they felt her anger.
According to the accounts of her former boyfriends, she made threatening phone calls, harassed them at school, damaged their cars, and clawed them with her fingernails. In 1984, Kristen graduated high school early at the age of 16. The following year, she enrolled at nearby Bridgewater State College to study pre-med with plans of becoming a nurse.
Her behavior didn't change as she left home for the first time. It only grew more intense. After a date stood her up, Kristen reportedly sabotaged his final exam by stealing it from the professor's desk and burning it. Another ex-boyfriend alerted Bridgewater to Kristen's behavior, telling them that he wouldn't be surprised if she hurt or even killed somebody.
College officials took the allegations seriously and ordered Kristen to receive psychiatric treatment in order to continue her studies. But Kristen had no interest in facing professional scrutiny. Besides, she already had one foot out the door at Bridgewater, and this was just another reason to leave.
While on a summer vacation in 1986, Kristen met Glenn Gilbert, who lived in a town about two hours west of Bridgewater. The two swiftly entered into a serious relationship, giving Kristen a perfect reason to leave Bridgewater State College and their psychiatric mandates. She transferred to a university closer to her new boyfriend.
To further her studies, Kristen began working as a home health aide. In August of 1987, she was assigned to care for a child with developmental disabilities who was living with a foster family. Kristen and another aide arrived at the foster family's home one night in August 1987 for her first visit. The aide went to take care of another child in the house, while Kristen gave the boy a bath.
Afterwards, she tucked him into bed and both aides left the house. When the foster parents checked on the boy, they discovered the boy's skin was scalded. The foster parents were shocked. The bathtub had been specifically designed to prevent the water from becoming too hot. The only way for the water to reach scalding temperatures was for someone to manually unlock the faucet.
When the parents checked the bathtub, they found that the faucet worked as intended. They came to a disturbing realization: their new home-aid must have unlocked the faucet, made the water as hot as possible, then re-locked it to cover her tracks.
The parents immediately called the Visiting Nurses Association of Franklin County and demanded that they never send Kristen back into their home. They believed that this young nurse was a clear danger, and they were more right than they knew. Somehow, the Visiting Nurses Association appears to have allowed Kristen to continue working, though there are no other known incidents during her time as a home health aide.
With no consequences, Kristen continued her progress towards becoming a nurse and moved forward in her personal life. In January 1988, she married Glenn Gilbert, and later that year, she graduated from college.
In March of 1989, Kristen began her professional career as a nurse at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northampton. She was assigned to Ward C, where she cared for patients in the chronic care and intensive care units.
Working mainly the night shift, Kristen was immediately popular among her fellow nurses. They appreciated the hard work and energy of their new coworker, whose calm demeanor and excellent bedside manner stood out even among veteran nurses. Kristen also gained further respect when she organized an annual gift drive for poor families.
But underneath that idyllic exterior, there was a darkness inside Kristen's psyche that was ready to spill out. In late 1990, a staff doctor went through the records for the year and discovered that Kristen, during her shift, was the primary nurse for a majority of all patient deaths. That year, Kristen alone had called in 13 emergencies out of 18 total.
While the doctor didn't sound the alarm, he did quietly request that none of his patients be assigned to Kristen's care. That doctor wasn't the only one to notice an alarming trend. In late 1991, another hospital worker went through the data and discovered that Kristen wasn't just the primary nurse for the majority of night shift deaths. In the past two years, her shifts produced triple the deaths of any other shifts.
Kristen herself had found and reported 22 of the deaths herself, the most of any nurse. The next closest had reported only five. When the hospital employee took these numbers to a superior, they were reportedly told to ignore the strange coincidences unless they wanted to make a direct accusation. The employee declined.
Murmurs about Kristen and her oddly high patient mortality rate began to spread among the staff of the hospital, becoming loud enough that other nurses eventually began talking openly about it. They nicknamed Kristen the "Angel of Death" and joked that she must have the worst luck of any nurse in the hospital. She loved it.
Just like her long-lasting lie that she was related to Lizzie Borden, this new reputation gave her the mystique and attention that she craved. The strange deaths on Kristen's watch didn't seem to affect her life outside the hospital. She and Glenn had two children in the next few years, and Kristen embraced her new role as a mother.
Glenn had a well-paying job at an optical lens firm that allowed them to take care of the kids without need for a nanny. The Gilbert family seemed to have their lives figured out perfectly.
But, just like her job at the hospital, not all was well underneath that blissful exterior. Her marriage had its share of rocky moments. During one particularly vicious argument, Kristen grabbed a butcher knife from the kitchen and chased her husband around the house. By 1995, a little over a year after their second child was born, the Gilberts' marriage began to fall apart.
They argued constantly, and the threat of divorce cast a pall over the household. Kristen realized her marriage was doomed. But just like in her high school and college relationships, she apparently refused to be the one who ended it. Instead, she would wait and plan her revenge.
In the summer of 1995, Kristen began a very flirtatious and very noticeable affair with a security guard at the hospital, a young Gulf War veteran named James Perrault. James worked the same evening shifts as Kristen, and one of his duties was to rush in to assist whenever one of the nurses called in a "code" or sounded the alarm over a patient. Every time Kristen called in a code, James was quickly at her side.
Kristen already called in more codes than anyone else in the ward by double digits. After her affair with James began, those numbers rose. Frustratingly, investigators could never prove whether Kristen intentionally killed the patients who died in her care between 1989 and 1995. But that changed in August 1995 when Kristen killed her first known victim.
Two months prior, 65-year-old Stanley Jagodowski had been transferred to the Northampton VAMC from a hospital in Rhode Island.
He was recuperating from a leg amputation after an infection in his right foot had spread to his entire leg. By August 21st, he'd made significant progress in his recovery. His doctors decided that once a bed was available, he'd be transferred from Ward C into a long-term care unit of the hospital.
Around 8 that evening, Stanley's nurses put him to bed for the night. He'd received his medication, his IV was secure, he was stable, and while the nurses talked in the hallway, Kristen headed into Stanley's room.
The other nurses didn't find it odd, at first. They assumed the doctor had ordered another medication for Stanley without informing the rest of the nursing staff, a common occurrence. But one minute later, they heard an awful scream from Stanley's room. The nurses ran in while Kristen quietly made her exit. Stanley was in his bed, holding his arm as though he'd just been given a shot.
But the nurses knew Stanley frequently complained about them. They had all heard one or two snide remarks from him. But this seemed different. He seemed scared, panicked. The nurses sat with Stanley for a few minutes, but they couldn't stay all night. They had other patients to attend to. Once he seemed calm, the nurses assured him they'd be back later. Then they left his room and continued on with their jobs.
Minutes after they closed the door, he went into cardiac arrest. Nurses, security, and doctors came rushing into Stanley's room to resuscitate him. They were able to stabilize him, but his heart grew weaker. He coded three more times and died just before midnight.
Around the same time she killed her first victim, Kristen began regularly preparing home-cooked meals for her husband. Her sudden interest in cooking was strange for several reasons, including their deteriorating marriage and the fact that Kristen typically didn't like to cook. The food tasted terrible, but Glenn, in an attempt to keep the peace, didn't complain.
What Glenn didn't know was that his wife probably didn't care if the food tasted good. She may have been more interested in the special ingredients that a co-worker believed she'd pilfered from the hospital medicine cabinet, nifedipine and captopril. If the two are taken together in large doses, they can cause someone's heart to stop.
It's not definitively clear whether Kristen mixed these medications into her husband's food, but other nurses saw them in Kristen's possession, and that soon after, her husband's health took an abrupt turn for the worse.
On November 5th, 1995, Glenn Gilbert returned home from work with severe nausea and muscle cramps. As the night progressed, his symptoms escalated and he began vomiting. Worried something was seriously wrong, Glenn called his wife, who was working her shift at the hospital, and asked her to bring him to the emergency room.
Kristen rushed home and brought her husband to the hospital. There, doctors discovered that Glenn's potassium levels were critically low and his heart was beating irregularly, unusual symptoms for a young, healthy man. After the doctors and nurses stabilized Glenn and prescribed him extra potassium, they released him from the hospital. After a few days, his levels returned to normal. His wife was not happy.
Over the next week, Kristen continued to complain that the local civilian hospital didn't treat Glenn correctly. She also claimed that the doctors there hadn't taken a sample of Glenn's blood before they discharged him, even though they had.
A week after Glenn's initial hospitalization, Kristen returned home from a shift and announced she had a solution. She would take a sample of Glenn's blood at home, then bring it into the VAMC to test it.
According to M. William Phelps, author of Perfect Poison, Kristen brought her husband into the bathroom, where she wrapped a tourniquet around his arm before taking two needles and syringes out of her bag. The larger one was filled with a clear liquid, which Kristen told her husband was saline. She claimed she needed to flush the vein before taking blood.
Glenn accepted the explanation and allowed his wife to push the needle into his arm and begin injecting the clear liquid. Within moments, he knew something was wrong. His arm felt cold, his fingertips went numb, and his skin turned pale. Glenn tried to turn away from his wife, but she held him up and forced him against the wall.
Then she ripped off the tourniquet and rushed to get as much of the liquid injected into Glenn's bloodstream as she could.
Glenn lost consciousness and collapsed onto the bathroom floor. After a few seconds, he woosily came to and saw his wife stuffing the needles back into her bag. When she saw Glenn wake up, she told him that he'd fainted at the sight of the needle. Then, with her husband lying on the bathroom floor, Kristen rushed out of the room and headed right back to the medical center to start her shift.
Later, investigators would argue that Kristen had slowly poisoned her husband with her home-cooked meals, leading to his hospitalization. She then allegedly used his illness as an excuse to inject him with an overdose of potassium in an attempt to induce cardiac arrest. Whatever Kristen did to her husband, it wasn't enough. Glenn survived, recovered, and confronted her about the incident the next day.
But Kristen, as she always did, stuck to her lie. Glenn simply fainted. Somehow, Glenn decided to let it go. But the incident hastened the collapse of their marriage. By the end of the month, Kristen finally demanded a divorce, and the two had split for good.
Kristen left the house and moved into an apartment near her work. She and James started publicly dating, trading trysts in Kristen's car for dinner and a show. It seemed her personal life had finally settled down. On the other hand, her work life was growing tense. The number of unexpected patient deaths during Kristen's shifts was double the amount during other shifts.
Early in the morning of December 8th, 1995, 35-year-old Henry Hudon was feeling ill, so he asked his mother to take him to the VAMC. He was admitted to Ward C.
Henry was an Air Force veteran who was diagnosed with schizophrenia following a head injury he sustained while breaking up a bar fight as a young man. In the years since, he'd become a regular at the hospital. The nurses, who knew him well, gave Henry a bed and monitored his vitals. Later in the afternoon, Henry's vitals were stable and he seemed to be improving.
At 5 o'clock, there was a shift change at the hospital, and a new nurse, Kristen Gilbert, took over Henry's care. Just before 6 p.m., Henry's condition rapidly worsened. His heart rate and blood pressure spiked. Within a matter of minutes, he was in a state of cardiac arrest. Kristen called in the doctors, who successfully resuscitated him.
45 minutes later, it happened again. So, like she had earlier, Kristen called in the doctors and they saved Henry's life once more. About an hour later, it happened a third time. The fourth time Kristen called in the doctors, they couldn't save him. Despite having no serious health conditions when he entered the hospital, Henry had died.
After Henry's inexplicable death, the other doctors and nurses at the VA Medical Center could no longer ignore the bizarrely high death rate during Kristen's shifts, or the fact that she called in the vast majority of them. They no longer jokingly called her the Angel of Death. Their lighthearted attention had turned to grave suspicion.
But even with these strange links between Kristen and the untimely deaths of so many patients, the nurses were hesitant to formally accuse her of murder. Such claims could easily tarnish their reputations if they accused an innocent worker without proof. So they decided to search for hard evidence.
By February 1996, nurse Kathy Ricks had become good friends with Kristen. When she first met Kristen, Kathy was impressed with her vast medical knowledge and diligent attention to patients' needs.
But over the years, Kathy started to suspect there was a darker side to Kristen. First, it was the affair with James, then Kristen's late nights at a local bar, and now patients in her care were dying with little to no explanation. With Kristen's record, it wasn't hard to assume the worst. She coded in more medical emergencies than all of the other staff nurses combined.
During each of these, Kristen alerted the staff to a patient's failing health, then watched the doctors rush in to help. It sweetened the deal for Kristen that the hospital's security guard, her boyfriend, was required to be at each crisis response scene.
Kathy poked around the hospital for clues and quickly noticed that the hospital had been going through huge amounts of epinephrine. Also known as adrenaline, epinephrine is a hormone that stimulates the heart and increases blood supply. This can be life-saving. For example, injectable epinephrine devices called epipens are used to treat serious allergic reactions. In high doses, however, it can be deadly.
Quietly, Kathy decided to start taking regular stock of the epinephrine. Somehow, Ward C had been going through a box of approximately 25 doses of epinephrine every six weeks. She didn't say a word to the hospital administration yet. She was still determining how much dirt she'd need to prove her case.
Unfortunately, while Kathy was searching for clues, Kristen was searching for her next victim.
On February 6th, 1996, 68-year-old World War II veteran and truck driver Edward Squira entered a substance abuse treatment center in Worcester, Massachusetts. He'd been experiencing a variety of health issues, including diabetes and alcohol misuse. Otherwise, Ed was in relatively good health. His vitals were solid and he seemed mentally sharp.
Ed completed a week of detox. Then his doctors transferred him to the Veterans Affairs Medical Center so he could continue his recovery under medical supervision.
Ed reported chest pain upon entry to the medical center on February 15th, so doctors placed him in the ICU as a precaution. To Ed's relief, the aching soon subsided, but he wasn't out of the woods. Kristen had just shown up for her 4:00 p.m. shift. As her first task of the day, she performed a full-body CT scan and chest X-ray.
The tests revealed a bulge in Ed's aorta, possibly an aneurysm or tear. The professionals at VAMC wasted no time transferring Ed to a larger hospital for an open-heart surgery. But just before his plans for transfer were finalized, Kristen called in a code from the ICU. Ed was suffering from serious chest pain again.
Doctors, nurses, and security officer James Perrault rushed into the ICU to tend to the patient. Thinking he was experiencing an aneurysm, the doctors expedited their plans to get Ed to the larger hospital. Kristen helped load Ed into the ambulance and then rode with him to Bay State Medical Center.
As the ambulance sped away, nurse Kathy Ricks felt that something wasn't right with Ed's emergency. When she checked the medicine cabinet, she discovered that three doses of epinephrine had been used that day. But that wasn't the worst of it. When she peered into the needle disposal bin beside Ed's bed, she found all three used and discarded epinephrine doses.
Unfortunately, Ed's transfer to Bay State Medical Center was futile. His doctors determined that in addition to the heart damage, he also had a tear in his stomach caused by the attempts to intubate him. There was nothing left to be done but administer Ed morphine to ease the pain as he died.
For the next two days, he went in and out of consciousness, experiencing strange hallucinations. Finally, on February 18th, 1996, Ed Squira died. Melancholy lingered through the ward as it always did after a patient's death. But this time, the staff members weren't so ready to feel pity for the attending nurse. Kristen had gotten sloppy with her needle disposal.
And Kathy wasn't about to let her off the hook. On February 17th, 1996, two days after Ed Squira coded under the watchful eyes of Kristen Gilbert, three concerned nurses, including Kathy Ricks, met with their manager to discuss their suspicions.
Above all else, the terrified staff members hoped to keep Kristen away from patients for the time being, while they gathered evidence. Their manager agreed to report the situation to her superiors, but she didn't take immediate action towards Kristen. The nurses had to devise a plan to keep Kristen's attacks at bay themselves.
When Kristen arrived for her shift that day, her three colleagues asked her if she would be the charge nurse for the evening. This meant that Kristen would stay at the central desk, answering phones and doing paperwork. Kristen refused. She wanted to continue working directly with her patients. With no authority to tell her she couldn't, Kristen did as she pleased.
Hours later, Kristen came rushing out of one patient's room, screaming and crying. Cradling her right arm and shoulder, Kristen claimed that the patient had attacked her, dislocating her shoulder and causing her right palm to be pricked with a needle. Several nurses sat with her as she calmed down and recounted the tale, but most were skeptical. After Kristen left to go home, the nurses further discredited Kristen's supposed attack.
The patient who allegedly hurt Kristen was a frail Alzheimer's patient in his 70s. On top of that, Kristen's injury, a dislocated shoulder, was incredibly suspicious. Kristen was double-jointed and was known to pop her shoulder out as a gag in the office.
The injury story didn't hold water, but most importantly, they realized that Kristen likely knew they were onto her when they requested that she be the charge nurse for the evening. Rather than come clean or do as she was asked, Kristen used a supposed attack to distract them, get out of work, and evade scrutiny.
As far as theories went, it made sense, but they could only do so much about it. Luckily, the nursing manager was successful in making her superiors aware of the seriousness of the circumstances and requested a formal investigation into Kristen for the deaths of multiple patients under her watch.
In the days that followed, authorities from the VA Inspector General's offices in Boston and Washington, along with state police, descended on Northampton. They didn't publicly state what they were investigating, but word had gotten out. Kristen was placed on leave, officially for medical reasons due to her dislocated shoulder, but with authorities swarming around, she could tell there was something else entirely going on.
Kristen knew of only one way to get herself out of trouble: she would lie like her life depended on it. When she was interviewed by the investigators, Kristen was eager to tell her side of the story. But her accounts of events kept changing. She frequently misremembered important encounters, fudged details, or made things up entirely.
In addition, her tale of being attacked by the Alzheimer's patient kept changing. Each time she told it, the debacle grew more and more unbelievable. She also said she didn't know the hospital stocked epinephrine, which only further discredited her. Most brazenly, Kristen claimed that she wasn't even involved in caring for most of the patients who had died on her watch.
But Kristen knew her own testimony wasn't enough. She needed to get others on her side. She took matters into her own hands, regularly asking hospital staff what the investigators were asking them. Even worse, she attempted to nudge them into remembering events in a way that exonerated her. She pushed extra hard on her boyfriend, James. But James wasn't as blindly loyal as Kristen expected him to be.
As staff testimony and circumstantial evidence piled up against Kristen, investigators had enough to convene a grand jury and subpoena James. As he weighed the seriousness of Kristen's allegations, James was forced to confront that he may have been dating a serial murderer,
he decided to gently break things off with Kristen. On July 8th, he took her out to dinner and explained that he wanted to end the relationship. In line with the rest of her dating history, she did not take it well.
On the evening of September 26, 1996, James received a strange phone call at the security desk of the VAMC. An odd-sounding, deep voice on the other end had a simple message: There were three bombs in the building, and they would detonate in two hours.
James bolted into action, alerting the head nurses and preparing to evacuate patients. While that happened, the supposed bomber called again and again to reiterate the threat. James recorded the conversation and tried to ask questions, but the caller didn't respond. The voice, he realized, was pre-recorded and likely manipulated.
After they evacuated as many patients as they could, the security team searched the entire building and didn't find anything suspicious. The caller had lied, and no one knew why. Four days later, the mysterious caller rang the medical center again, this time reaching a nurse at the admissions desk. The caller asked if the nurse remembered the bomb threat, then hung up.
The nurse recognized the unique type of distortion used. It was the same one she'd heard in the movie Home Alone 2, in which Kevin McAllister used a recorder called a Talkboy to make his voice sound deeper. Thanks in part to her memory of the movie, the nurse was able to perceive the real voice underneath the distortion. Kristen Gilbert.
On October 1, 1996, a group of state troopers, local officers, and federal investigators converged on Kristen's apartment. They had a warrant to search her home and car for anything related to the bomb threat calls.
In what had previously been her children's bedroom closet, they found what they were looking for: a Talkboy Junior recorder, the exact same device the nurse believed the mysterious caller had been using to call in the bomb threats.
The police couldn't yet charge Kristen for any of the murders at the VA Medical Center, but more than anything, they needed to protect the public from Kristen. And the bomb threat was enough to hold her on for the time being.
On the afternoon of October 8th, Kristen signed herself out of a psychiatric hospital and prepared to head home. When she stepped out of the elevator, she found herself face to face with a detective and a federal marshal waiting to arrest her. About a week later, police released Kristen into her parents' custody. She was required to wear an ankle bracelet while she awaited trial.
Perhaps Kristen felt like she was finally in the clear. In truth, police only ramped up their investigation in the months that followed, desperate to find something tangible to link her to the alarming rate of patient deaths. Sure enough, something tangible came.
In May 1998, authorities received Ed Squira's toxicology report. The result was startling. Not only was Ed poisoned with epinephrine, but there were also significant amounts of the drug ketamine in his system at the time of death. The discovery of these substances in Ed's system perplexed doctors, as they had never prescribed him either of these.
There wasn't even ketamine available for medical use at the VAMC where Ed had spent his final days. The only plausible explanation was that Kristen had taken Ed's treatment into her own hands. Earlier that year, in January 1998, Kristen had been found guilty of calling in a bomb threat. She was sentenced to 15 months in prison.
As she served her time behind bars, investigators scrambled to find other patients who had suffered similar fates to Ed Squira. On November 24, 1998, the U.S. Attorney's Office came forward with an announcement. Kristen was charged with the murders of Ed Squira, Henry Hudon, and Kenneth Cutting, and two counts of attempted murder for Angelo Vela and Thomas Callahan.
As the case progressed, she would also be charged with the murder of Stanley Jagodowski, as well as a third attempted murder. Kristen pleaded not guilty. It took another two years for the trial to begin. The evidence against Kristen hinged on the presence of large amounts of epinephrine in her victims, consistent with epinephrine poisoning. Kristen's lawyers argued that the victims had all died from natural causes.
A key sticking point came in the exact way each victim had died. The head of cardiology at a different VAMC took the stand and testified that none of the patients suffered from serious enough heart problems that would make death by sudden cardiac arrest logical.
Their deaths, regardless of who or what was to blame, were highly abnormal. The cardiologist testified that the victims' deaths weren't consistent with natural cardiac death, but they were consistent with epinephrine poisoning.
The prosecutors also brought in character witnesses that testified to Kristen's need for attention. The roster of witnesses included Kristen's ex-husband Glenn. It also included James Perrault, who told the court that Kristen had once, in passing, confessed to injecting patients with a certain drug.
With this testimony, the prosecution presented the narrative that Kristen loved being at the center of a medical emergency and sometimes used them to spend more time with her boyfriend. They also stressed that while she was only on trial for four murders, she could have been responsible for many other deaths.
On March 14, 2001, Kristen Gilbert was found guilty on three counts of first-degree murder and one count of second-degree murder. While the prosecutors sought the death penalty, the jury ultimately sentenced her to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
Kristen was sent to serve out her sentence at the Carswell Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas, where she remains as of 2024.
Thanks for listening to Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast. We're here with a new episode every Monday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at Serial Killers Podcast, and we'd love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Amongst the many sources we used, we found Perfect Poison, a female serial killer's deadly medicine by M. William Phelps to be extremely helpful to our research.
Stay safe out there. Serial Killers is a Spotify podcast. This episode was written by Ryan Lee, edited by Maggie Admire and Chelsea Wood, researched by Chelsea Wood, fact-checked by Bennett Logan and Laurie Siegel, and sound designed by Kelly Gary. Our head of programming is Julian Boirot. Our head of production is Nick Johnson, and Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor. I'm your host, Vanessa Richardson.