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  Just before Kristen turned three, the Stricklands enrolled her in the Christian Day School, a rather strict day-care center just outside of Fall River. Claudia was working as a substitute teacher then, and Richard was off pursuing a career as an electronics engineer.

  After seven uneventful years, things abruptly changed for little Kristen. Seemingly overnight, she would now play second fiddle to her much younger sibling, Tara Morgan, who was born in 1974.

  Kristen, perhaps now feeling the distance between her and her parents, began spending more time with her grandmother, Isabella Morgan, who lived down the street. Morgan and her husband, Claude, a thirty-year veteran of the Fall River Police Department, owned a small beach house in Little Compton, Rhode Island. Claude hated the water and disliked the beach. He bought the place for the kids. Because Tara was so little, Morgan would take Kristen to the beach every weekend—where she soon fell in love with the sand and surf.

  Fall River is perhaps best known for being the birthplace of the world’s most famous murderess, Lizzie Borden, who, despite continuing speculation of her guilt, was acquitted of butchering her parents with an axe in 1892.

  For decades, children have played hopscotch and jumped rope to a schoolyard rhyme that has become synonymous with Borden’s presumed guilt:

  Lizzie Borden took an axe

  And gave her mother forty whacks.

  And when she saw what she had done,

  She gave her father forty-one

  As Kristen Strickland made her way through junior high, she began to embrace the notoriety of being born in the same town as Lizzie Borden. Whenever the opportunity presented itself, she’d brag to friends—and, later, her coworkers at the VAMC—joyfully claiming she was related to Borden.

  “Imagine that—me being related to Lizzie Borden,” she’d say with a sparkle in her eyes.

  There is no evidence, however, of any blood relationship between the Stricklands, Morgans and Bordens. It was, like a lot of things in Kristen’s youth, one more fabrication to add to a growing list. Kristen Strickland, the cute kid who used to bake fudge and sew quilts with her grandmother, was becoming a pathological liar.

  In the early eighties, the Stricklands packed up their kids and moved to Groton, Massachusetts, a quaint little Hallmark-like New England town of about nine thousand, located just twenty miles south of the New Hampshire border.

  They lived in an unassuming split-to-back ranch on the busy main thoroughfare of Boston Road. Although the Stricklands once took a trip to Disney World and frequently took the kids on weekend trips to New Hampshire and Vermont, it became, for Kristen and her younger sister, an “unaffectionate” household, as if Claudia and Richard were now robots, just going through the motions of parenting. They became strict and ran a regimented, disciplined household. Oddly, friends said, God and religion had no place in the Strickland home.

  They were admitted atheists.

  Kristen, as she grew into a young woman of fifteen, rebelled against her parents and spent a lot of time away from the home.

  Richard, speaking of Kristen’s formative years, later said she had, since childhood, lied just about everything. She “never had good relationships with women peers and tended to get into difficulties when she had friendships with men.” One time, she even went so far as to convince some of her friends that her mother was nothing but a drunk who beat her up. But Richard said it was “absolutely not true.”

  The point, however, wasn’t whether the stories were actually true; it was that Kristen had been saying they were and obviously had issues with both of her parents that went far beyond what most kids her own age go through.

  Being popular, thin and attractive, sporting a lion’s mane of curly, brunette locks that stretched a bit past her shoulders, Kristen had no trouble meeting friends at Groton-Dunstable Regional High School. Her yearbook picture shows a smug, smiling teenager, full of energy and life. In the notes next to the picture, she wrote of her love for red roses, ice cream and making new friends. “Vengeful people and fights,” however, were on her shitlist, and she despised “cliques” and “fake people.”

  Although Kristen had a problem with lying, she wasn’t stupid. For as she worked her way through her sophomore and junior years of high school, it became apparent that she was not an average student. Whatever she did, Kristen Strickland mastered with an almost effortless ease. She was in the top ten percent of her class and considered a gifted cornet player. She joined the marching band, orchestra and jazz ensemble. She became a member of the math team and whizzed through classes as if bored by the curriculum.

  Still, as she grew older, a more vengeful, wicked side of Kristen Strickland emerged.

  Pamela Erickson, a neighbor who lived across the street, became good friends with Kristen while the two rode the bus together and hung out after school.

  Pamela’s mother, however, wasn’t too thrilled about her daughter’s hanging around with the “Strickland girl.”

  “She was a habitual liar,” a neighbor later recalled. “She would make things up on the spot. I could tell by just listening to her that she was lying.”

  A culmination of events got Pamela Erikson thinking that maybe Kristen wasn’t the person she had originally thought she was. According to a story published in the Boston Globe, one day Kristen mentioned to Pamela that she was infatuated by the evil nurse, Amy Vining, on General Hospital, a popular long-running daytime soap the two girls used to watch together after school.

  Amy was “conniving and backstabbing,” Pamela recalled to the Globe, and would do anything to get her way.

  “I like Amy,” Kristen said one day.

  “Oh, my God, why would you like Amy?” Pamela asked.

  “I just like Amy,” Kristen said with an obscure smile.

  There was another time when Pamela couldn’t find one of her favorite shirts. When Kristen showed up at her house the same day, she was wearing it.

  “That’s mine!” Pamela snapped.

  “No. You’re mistaken. It’s mine!”

  These were little things, of course. But bigger things were on the horizon.

  Exhausting all of her studies midway through her junior year, Kristen was graduated a year and a half before the rest of her class.

  In 1984, with high honors, she left high school and was immediately accepted at Bridgewater State College, where she enrolled as a pre-med major at the age of sixteen.

  As an added bonus, Bridgewater, located about twenty-five miles south of Boston, was closer to the one place Kristen had grown to love more than anything else: the beach.

  Life seemed to be taking shape for young Kristen. Not only was she in college, but living so close to New Hampshire, she could spend a lot of her free time at Hampton Beach, a seaside resort tucked in the corner of the Massachusetts and New Hampshire state lines. It was only about an hour’s ride from Bridgewater.

  At the time, Kristen was juggling several men she had dated throughout college. She was never the one to end a relationship. It was always the men. Yet Strickland, besieged by ridicule and scorn, had to have the final say. She couldn’t let go without getting even.

  Even in high school, according to one ex-boyfriend, Strickland was “mentally unstable.” She was an “intelligent manipulator,” he later said, when it came to relationships. Whenever she felt she had lost control of a relationship, she first begged for forgiveness, claiming she would do anything to save it. But when that didn’t work, she became malicious, at times becoming physically violent and verbally abusive.

  While dating a boy in high school, Kristen left him a suicide note one day after he ended the relationship. Because of the breakup, she claimed she was going to eat glass.

  Worried, the boy rushed over to her house.

  But there she was, sprawled out on her bed, unharmed.

  Then the harassing phone calls began at his house. The caller would breathe heavily and hang up. It had to be Kristen, he assumed. When he confronted her about making the threatening
calls, however, she became enraged and gouged her fingernails through his right cheek, leaving him bloodied and confused.

  Another boyfriend from around the same period said he had received the same sort of treatment. Yet calling and hanging up wasn’t enough. Strickland tore the spark-plug wires out of his car, keyed both sides of it, and slit the tires.

  In college, not much changed.

  Several days after a boy she was dating broke it off, he got into his car and drove off only to find that someone had loosened the lug nuts on the tire rims.

  Then there was the time when a boy at Bridgewater stood her up.

  For days, seeing him in class, Strickland didn’t say anything, pretending it didn’t bother her.

  But she had a plan, of course.

  Finals were coming up. Being in the same class, they took finals in the same room. When the day came to take finals and the boy finished taking his test, she watched with an unforgiving eye as he walked up to the teacher’s desk and put his test in the pile with the others.

  After the boy left the room, Kristen finished her test and walked up to place it on the stack, but when she placed her test in the pile, she traded it with the boy’s, took it home and burned it. When recalling the story years later to a friend, she said she got the biggest charge out of how calculating and cool she had been. She laughed about it. “He deserved it,” she said. “I got him back! It took me a while, but I got him back.”

  How cruel, her friend thought. How devious and vindictive.

  During the summer of 1986, after a year in college and several tumultuous relationships that usually ended under sour circumstances, Strickland met a rather plain-looking man from Northampton, Massachusetts, who was vacationing in Hampton Beach for the week. Glenn Gilbert was perfect. He was tall and lanky, yet attractive in a debonair, boyish way. Two years her senior, Glenn was taken right away by the outspoken seventeen-year-old blonde from Groton who was studying to be a nurse.

  By the end of June 1987, after dating Glenn throughout the winter, Strickland transferred to Wachusett Community College in Gardner, Massachusetts, and then to Greenfield Community College—just a twenty-minute drive from Northampton—to continue studying for her nursing degree and, more important, to be closer to the man she had fallen in love with.

  Northampton was a melting pot for some of the upper echelon of Massachusetts, full of lawyers, doctors, artists, writers, professionals and, like Glenn Gilbert, middle-class blue-collar workers.

  One of the better places to live in the state, it only seemed fitting that the elegant and beautiful Kristen Strickland, now a well-educated woman of twenty, live among people she could relate to. After all, she was going to be a nurse soon. The prospect of living among the cultural elite in Northampton seemed appetizing to Strickland, who had, up until that point, spent most of her life in rural, backwater towns where not too much of anything ever happened.

  But it was Glenn, after all, who fit a picture Strickland had of someone she could shape and mold into whatever she wanted. Glenn was blue-collar, and by no means a rocket scientist—yet, by the same token, was exactly what Strickland was looking for.

  While attending classes at Greenfield Community College, Strickland took a job as a home health aide with the Visiting Nurses Association of Franklin County.

  One of her first patients was a blind, deaf, mute, and severely handicapped young boy who lived with his foster family in Bernardston, Massachusetts. The family, who also had a younger foster child, had already had Strickland’s coworker, a young woman in her late twenties, over to the house on several occasions to care for the two children and ready them for bed.

  When Kristen and her coworker arrived one summer night in August 1987, the coworker introduced Kristen to the family, showed her where to bathe the retarded boy upstairs, and assured the foster parents they could take off.

  “I am going to leave you with him and go get the other child ready for bed, Kristen. Okay?” the coworker said.

  “Sure,” Strickland said.

  An hour or so later, the parents returned, and Strickland and her coworker left.

  When the foster mother checked on the boy Strickland had cared for, she found his legs bright red and “demarcated by where the water level of the bathwater should have been.”

  The boy had been scalded over sixty percent of his body.

  This was impossible to do by mistake. The family had specially ordered a faucet that was preset to a certain temperature. The only way to raise the temperature was to “unlock the faucet [and] adjust the faucet from its preset position.”

  The following morning, the foster mother called the VNA and said they “never had a problem with the faucet before” and, when the mother checked it out afterward, it had worked fine.

  “Well, madam, we are—”

  The foster mother interrupted. “We never want her to come into our home again.”

  By Christmastime 1987, Glenn and Kristen knew their relationship wasn’t just some fly-by-night romance. It was time to take the plunge.

  But a full-fledged wedding was out of the question. Richard Strickland had suggested they get married in Long Island, where he and Claudia had moved with Tara right after Kristen went off to Bridgewater. Strickland said he would spring for the entire bill.

  But Glenn and Kristen were adamant: They wanted to elope.

  “Our families wouldn’t have gotten along,” Strickland later told a friend. “Neither of us [was] particularly religious, anyway. It would have been nothing but a big hassle.”

  By the time January 1988 turned into February, Kristen Strickland had become Kristen Gilbert—and it wouldn’t take long for Glenn to find out exactly whom he’d married.

  A month after the wedding, Kristen nearly killed her new husband one night.

  During an argument, she pulled an eight-inch butcher knife out of a kitchen drawer and went after Glenn, chasing him from room to room in a tirade. Fearing for his life, Glenn locked himself inside a room and waited until she calmed down.

  Perhaps it was an isolated incident? The stress of eloping? Or maybe her grueling schedule while studying to be a nurse had made her snap?

  Regardless, Glenn would soon realize that it was the beginning of a marriage based on lies, deceit, adultery, threats and, in the end, another attempted murder that was almost successful.

  CHAPTER 4

  Kristen Gilbert’s graduation picture from Greenfield Community College showed a cheerful woman of twenty-one, standing with a bouquet of flowers in one hand, her diploma in the other.

  She looked content.

  Shortly after graduating, she began her nursing career at the Leeds VAMC on March 6, 1989—but it didn’t take long before a “black cloud” began to follow Gilbert around, hovering over many of the patients she came in contact with. As if she were cursed, it seemed Gilbert had the worst luck when it came to her patients. At unprecedented rates, one after the other, they began to drop dead.

  Louis Trainor was one of the unfortunate.

  Like many of the patients who came to the VAMC for long-term treatment, Trainor had his share of emotional problems. Yet despite the psychological effects of the self-inflicted wounds Trainor had put himself through, at fifty-one, he was in surprisingly good physical health.

  Early in 1990, Trainor was admitted to the VAMC because he was having problems with his esophagus. Many years ago, he had swallowed Drano in an attempt to kill himself. He wasn’t able to eat by himself because the chemicals had burned his throat so severely. Instead of reconstructive surgery, Trainor opted for a feeding tube in his stomach.

  As grim as it may have seemed, Trainor’s condition wasn’t life-threatening. He came to the VAMC only for preventative IV antibiotic treatments.

  Including Gilbert, there were two RNs working the floor on the night Trainor had been admitted.

  A schizophrenic, and a bit on the irrational side, shortly after being sent up to Ward C, Trainor began screaming at the top of his lungs: “Oh, G
od, just let me die. Let me die. God . . . please let me die.”

  But this was routine behavior for Trainor. He was delusional and suffered from manic depression. The nurses knew it was in his nature to scream, so they paid little attention to it.

  Nevertheless, as he continued to carry on for about an hour, one of the nurses would periodically go in to check on him to make sure he was okay. Each time the nurse went in, Trainor would say, “I don’t want to live anymore. Won’t someone let me die?”

  For some reason, on this particular night, he was acting a bit more irrational, and his behavior continually disrupted the nurses as they worked. Patients even began complaining. But no matter what the nurses said, Trainor wouldn’t stop yelling. So they tried their best to carry on with their normal business and ignore the screaming that now played irritably in the background as if it were a car alarm no one could shut off.

  Then, at one point, as one of the nurses was tending to another patient, she stopped what she was doing for a moment and realized that she hadn’t heard Trainor yell for some time.

  When she went in to check on him, Trainor was dead. There had been no code or medical emergency called. He was, as one nurse later put it, “Dead, dead, dead!” Just like that. “One minute he was alive and screaming at the top of his lungs, and the next he was dead. D-E-A-D. I remember it was the strangest thing.”

  One of the nurses later checked to see who his primary care nurse had been. It was Kristen Gilbert.

  “It was weird because there wasn’t any real reason for him to have died. He wasn’t sick particularly,” a nurse later recalled. “It didn’t dawn on me that night, but years later, after I got to thinking about it, I know Kristen had something to do with it. She was the only nurse around.”