S7 Ep.3: Ward C

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This podcast explores themes of violence, self-harm, and murder. Listener discretion is advised. Please note, some of the voices you hear in this series have been performed by actors. Previously on Mind of a Monster, The Killer Nurse. Suddenly, Stanley Jagadowski began to scream out, stop, stop. It's burning me. It hurts. I said I want an autopsy.

Kristen Gilbert is a healthcare serial killer convicted of murdering four patients, attempting to murder two more, and suspected of killing dozens of others. Her victim count could be as high as in the hundreds.

From ID and Arrow Media, I'm criminal psychologist Dr. Michelle Ward, and this is Mind of a Monster, the Killer Nurse. Chapter 3, Ward C. It's late December 1995, and as Christmas draws closer, 72-year-old World War II veteran Francis Marrier is admitted to Ward C. A diabetic...

Marrier has been a frequent visitor to the medical facility for a long while. His admittance this time is simply to treat ulcers. His heart is fine, so much so that the medical team doesn't see a need to fix him to a heart monitor. He's in a regular room, not the ICU. On December 20th, all his signs that day have been normal. But something changes within an hour of nurse Kristen Gilbert taking over his care.

Tonight, she has plans of her own. She wants to go out to socialize, but her request to leave has been denied by the charge nurse. Entering Marrier's room, she notes that his blood sugar levels have dropped alarmingly low. and claims to have administered a strong glucose injection to help bring the levels back up again. Only instead of helping, the injection she claims triggers a cardiac arrest. An emergency code is called

and the medical team descends. Marrier pulls through. For a man who has survived D-Day, it is another extremely close call. But like D-Day, his sudden cardiac arrest defies all odds. It is unheard of for a patient to encounter serious heart issues following an injection of glucose What has gone wrong?

Christmas comes and goes, and Kristen's relationship with VAMC, Veterans Affairs Medical Center, police officer James Perrault continues to develop. Soon after the possible poisoning of her husband, Glenn, in November 1995, Kristen moves out of the family home and into an apartment by herself. She and James spend almost all of their free time together. James Peralt. I had strong feelings for her.

I wasn't in love with her at the time, but I was very attracted to her and I thought that would potentially have something in the future. We would stop and have our meals and take our breaks together. I'd go up to see her in the ICU and she would come down to admissions and see me down there. By early January 1996, we have two unexpected deaths linked to Kristen Gilbert, those of Stanley Jagodowski and Henry Hudon, plus the curious instance with Francis Marrier.

But I've been looking at the statistics related to this case, and the numbers are astonishing. During the year of 1995, there are four times as many deaths on Kristen's evening shift than either of the other two shifts on Board C. Close to 40 compared to 10 and less on each of the others. And it's not just the deaths that stand out. There's also this huge rise in emergency codes, too. From 1989 to 1995.

Kristen activates the emergency alarm 72 times, compared to a total of 70 for all of the other nurses combined. Usually, there are five or six members working on each shift, depending on the number of patients on the ward, meaning Kristen had around four times more deaths on her shift. Some are for patients who are resuscitated multiple times before dying.

I can't help but think that this should be ringing more than just emergency alarm bells. Beatrice Yorker is a nurse and a professor of criminal justice at California State University. I just want to point out, because this is common throughout the healthcare serial murders, when a patient flatlines, they die. They're dead. And that CPR... is really only successful if something has altered the pattern of the heart's beat. For example, an electric shock.

struck by lightning, a drowning, something like that. For most patients, when you die, you die, and no amount of resuscitation will get you back. You're dead. So what is particularly interesting in the healthcare serial killers and what has tipped colleagues and co-workers off is the fact that the number of resuscitations... is significantly higher and then people go well wait a minute why did this patient's heart stop it wasn't because they were dying a natural death

something caused their heart to flatline or to go into an arrhythmia. That's fascinating. For Henry Hudon's sister Christine, who was a nurse herself, The circumstances of her brother's death, which include multiple flatlines and resuscitations, simply do not make sense. She wants answers and returns to Northampton VA.

And I don't know what got into me because I have never, I've always been a fairly quiet person outside of when you're in a group with your friends or coworkers. I never thought I would have had it in me. I went back, and it was just a day or two later after he passed away. And I asked for his medical records. Now, at the most, it was two days after. I get to stand there and I'm waiting and I'm waiting and it's almost an hour. And another woman finally comes out and she says,

You're going to have to wait longer for them because his medical records have been sent to Washington. That's curious. Why? Is that standard procedure? She says, well. No, but somebody requested his records. At that point, I was positive. The doctor really messed up. I was positive of that. Henry's death was not a result of his doctor's wrongdoing.

But Christine is right to question the circumstances of her brother's death. Henry Houdon's autopsy is conducted on December 10, 1995, just two days after his death. It leaves the coroner perplexed. There is no visible cause of death. Since then, the coroner has sent numerous samples to the Massachusetts Crime Laboratory for toxicology testing. They have all come back clean.

or revealing tiny traces of drugs that the coroner already knows Henry was administered during his stay at the VAMC. Without a cause of death, he cannot release a death certificate. Toward the end of 1995, it's not just Christine and the coroner asking questions. A few nurses are starting to have serious concerns about the disturbing number of deaths in Ward C.

Mary Sullivan is a former nurse and a pioneer in forensic nursing. So what is it about nurses that make them better able to pick up on these things than perhaps a doctor? Well... Nurses know each other. They know patients. Nurses know how hospitals are run, where things are kept, who comes and goes. Doctors come and go. They make rounds.

They see their patient. They might stay at the desk for a while and visit with somebody or do their notes in the computer. But generally, they see their patients. They go back to their office or wherever, do their notes, and they're gone. And they don't know the patient as intimately as the nurse would, right? Correct. And the nurse also knows the family and could ask the family what's typical with this person. The doctor typically isn't as involved with...

with hospital life as everybody thinks they are. We do everything. That's right. So we're aware of everything. And when something is out of kilter, you know, if you do the same thing every shift over and over for those people who work.

uh steadily back then you were hired for a shift and that's what you worked unless you were assigned another shift so you know what became routine from at least november 1995 Registered nurse Kathy Ricks, who was on shift during Francis Marrier's cardiac arrest, has been privately monitoring patient deaths and codes in Ward C. She's beginning to come to the uncomfortable realization that Kristen Gilbert...

The nurse who knows codes and medication better than most is the common denominator. And you know what happens when the routine is broken. So when there were enough codes... Kathy started wondering, why are all these people coding on our shift? Why are we always the one that are busy? You know? Interesting. And did she notice she was busier when Kristen was on? And then that's the next step.

Then she noticed it was Kristen that was usually in the center of things. Good for Kathy. And it was kind of, you know, like, oh, no, I don't want to think this. I don't want to. She fought it. She said she fought. She didn't want to think it. It was just, it was happening too often. I mean, their unit started getting a reputation after a while, and she was curious. Most security systems react after a break in begins. That's too late. SimpliSafe is different.

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If Kristen is triggering cardiac events in patients, how is she getting away with it? And what drugs is she using to do it? Beatrice Yorker is an expert on healthcare serial killers. I turned to her to help shed some light on how medical murderers typically kill, how prevalent they are, and where Kristen Gilbert fits in. How do medical serial killers usually kill and why? All right. So the vast majority...

kill with injection and the vast majority of those injections are into an intravenous tube that is already in the patient. You don't even have to prick the patient. I've heard of insulin being used before, but what else is used? Then we have the respiratory paralyzing agents. succinylcholine, which is used to intubate a patient to stop them from fighting when the tube goes in, when you're going to take over their breathing.

It paralyzes your breathing muscles, okay? So that's very popular. Then we have potassium chloride. wickedness of potassium chloride is that it's a normal electrolyte we all need it in our bodies half the time when you get an iv to rehydrate you or to fix your electrolyte imbalance it's got potassium chloride in it so Potassium chloride also is very undetectable, as are insulin and epinephrine, which are normal hormones in our bodies. So to detect that, you know.

is a lot harder. And what we are seeing on the increase is things like bleach and air. Now air is... not a toxic substance, but if you draw up a syringe with 10 cc's of air, and you inject that air into an IV line, you will cause a heart attack. It's why nurses are always just flicking every little bubble out of our tubing. We don't want even a bubble of air to go into a patient's bloodstream. That little amount will cause 10 cc's. Oh, 5 cc's of air.

One of the first things you learn in nursing school is get the air out of the IV lines. We don't want air going into your bloodstream. And then there are some other methods. oral medications. So the nurses' aides do not have access to IV medications. Nurses' aides can give pills and nurses' aides also put a tongue depressor.

on an older patient's tongue who's senile or with dementia and pour water into their lungs i'm sorry come again oh my god that happened in austria and then there's smothering So some nurses' aides have just put pillows over the patient's faces and smothered them. Oh my gosh. I thought this was the rarest of rare. Oh no.

No, it's just covered up a lot and it's not even detected. And then there's that nurse who would go into the IV closet. Okay, so we have a closet that has IV bags, lots of them stacked up. Bags of normal saline, bags of potassium chloride, and mostly just fluid water. And they would inject into the bag. There's a little port so you can add medicines to the IV bag and drip them in slowly. These nurses would go into the closet, inject toxic amounts.

of potassium chloride or a respiratory paralyzing agent and then they wonder like roulette Which doctor, which nurse is going to pick up that IV bag and hang it in a patient and kill them and it will not come back to me? Was there more than one person doing this? Yeah, yeah, there's a couple. We are calling these the chaos motive, that yes, there's an element of creating a crisis, but they also are using their skills to create chaos.

where their colleagues are being suspected of killing patients because they hung a tainted iv bag okay things you never knew even after studying killers as long as i have wow Thank you. You've like opened my eyes too. I'm not retiring yet. There's a lot left to do. Wow.

So I'm just thinking about Kristen Gilbert, and it seems to be the drama of the code and the attention it brings that really excites her. Well, interestingly, that was her modus operandi. She loved the code. and Janine Jones in Texas. She loved the code. There's been quite a few of our health care series, and right now we have a database of over 150. healthcare providers who have been prosecuted for serial murder of patients in their care. 150.

150 and 86% of them are nursing staff. The majority are registered nurses. There's a handful of practical nurses and then, you know, some proportion of the nurses are nurses aides. 12% of the 150 are doctors, like Dr. Harold Shipman. and Swango, who was also in the VA system. And then 2% are respiratory therapists, if you remember Efren Saldivar at Glendale Hospital. Yes.

I do. A respiratory therapist injected patients to cause them to stop breathing. To give a little context to the individuals Beatrice and I are discussing, Dr. Harold Shipman was a British doctor and serial killer. who is believed to have murdered upwards of 250 patients over 30 years, injecting them with diamorphine and then forging their wills to his benefit.

Dr. Michael Swango is believed to have poisoned up to 60 patients in the U.S. and Zimbabwe, changing his name to avoid record checks. And Efren Saldvar... who is an American respiratory therapist who is believed to have murdered more than 200 patients. I'm out walking the dog, and it's a bit of a busy street, so it might be noisy, but I wanted to capture my thoughts about...

That conversation I just had with Beatrice Yorker, the nurse, but also a professor of criminology. And she's really opened my eyes to an arena of violent crime that I hadn't totally considered before. And I can't help but think of this 150 people in her database of killers. And that, for all we know, is just the tip of the iceberg. It's a terrifying fact. They have so many weapons at their disposal in the healthcare fields.

The fact that these methods are so premeditated, sneaky, there's no chance that it's due to accident. So they're not just thinking about how to get away with the murder, they're thinking about how to disguise the fact that a murder had taken place at all.

They're weaponizing not just the medicine that they have at their fingertips, they're also weaponizing patient trust. And we know that Kristen is an exceptional killer in so many ways, but what I'm learning is that something that I thought was really rare... This health care serial killing is actually far more widespread than I've ever known. And it really makes me think long and hard about this case. Also, how difficult it must have been for these extraordinarily brave.

nurses and doctors to call out this bad behavior. They're putting their own careers at risk. There is an additional dimension as well that I haven't really considered yet. Kristen Gilbert is working within the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and her patients are more often than not men who have fought wars, experienced combat. So there is an interesting subversion of power that is coming into play as well.

Special investigator Bruce Sackman insightfully describes hospitals as... A place with a strong and assertive... become the meek and mild. You ever see a big construction worker, big tough construction worker in the emergency room, scared of this little nurse coming over with a big needle? And they don't ask questions. No. They just...

kind of accept the treatment that they're getting. Well, because they're hurting. They're vulnerable. They want help. And if they don't have an advocate with them, you know.

Nurse Kathy Ricks is on shift again on January 22, 1996, alongside Kristen Gilbert. In the ICU is a 60-year-old veteran named Thomas Callahan, who has been in the facility for a few days to treat pneumonia. Unsurprisingly, given his condition, he has a cough and he's agitated. But his heart rate is normal and it is repeatedly noted as such. While under Kristen's direct care...

Thomas Callahan suddenly goes into cardiac arrest. Kristen claims the episode was triggered by a sudden cough. The team manages to resuscitate him. But Kathy Ricks cannot shake the bizarreness of the cardiac arrest out of her mind, so she takes a look at the EKG strips which are used to measure heart rate. The elevation is strikingly high, as she describes.

I went down to the unit to take a closer look at the strips that had happened while the patient had been in distress. It made me even more curious, and I wondered what could have happened to cause his heart rate to get that high. Her colleague, Nurse John Wall, who has been developing suspicions of his own, is also in the room. John and I were both discussing what possibly happened to Mr. Callahan that evening and what might have precipitated it.

We began to discuss what medication could have possibly been given to a patient that might have caused his heart to go into such a fast rhythm. I just looked around to see if there were any medications that might have been used We thought perhaps potassium or epinephrine. Potassium is very hard on the heart. Epinephrine increases the heart rate. Kathy Ricks checks the needle bin in the ICU.

I saw epinephrine vials were broken and used. I was stunned. I didn't really expect to find anything, so when I saw them, I couldn't figure out why they would be there. We weren't using epinephrine on anybody. Everything makes sense when epinephrine is taken into account. The unexpected deaths, the complaints of burning arms. To describe epinephrine, a return to Beatrice Yorker. So epinephrine is adrenaline.

Anybody who knows about being an adrenaline junkie, it's like you love that rapid heartbeat, that eyes wide open, that... the world slows down, you jump off a bungee jump, something like that. It's a hormone and it's a neurotransmitter that are key to your fight or flight response. Epinephrine is therapeutic. If you have severe asthma, if you have an anaphylactic reaction to peanuts, and if you code because you were struck by lightning.

or one of those things that causes your heart to stop. So you inject epinephrine and it just quick starts, jump starts your heart back into a rapid heartbeat, but nevertheless. For an otherwise failing heart, epinephrine gives it a boost. There are two more things you need to know about epinephrine.

The first is that if it is used when not needed, it can literally force the heart to beat itself to death. The second is that it fades within a dead body, and because it's naturally occurring, it is rarely tested for in an autopsy. To clarify, although epinephrine is stored in the hospital, it is only ever used in very specific emergencies. Because the epinephrine isn't being used a lot, it's not being closely monitored in the storage closet.

The only time stocks are replenished is by the pharmaceutical tech who comes into the hospital to replenish any meds being used. Nurses Kathy Ricks and John Wall confide in another nurse, Renee Walsh, who also shares their concerns. On January 25th, 1996, Kathy Ricks goes on vacation, but before she leaves, she notes that there are 18 vials of epinephrine stored in the ICU. The next day, on January 28th,

A young respiratory nurse, Bonnie, is on shift. 74-year-old veteran Michelle Cascon has been admitted to the ICU in Ward C with pneumonia. He's been at the facility for two days. And while Bonnie is working, he experiences multiple cardiac arrests, triggering codes. Bonnie has asthma and has to rush over from a different ward every time the emergency is called. By the third code, she sees Kristen in the corridor.

Bonnie tells Kristen... If I have to keep running over here, I'm going to start wheezing. She describes Kristen's response. She reached into her... With her right hand, she reached into her pocket and pulled out something and asked me if I needed any epinephrine. Epinephrine is not something that is issued by nurses as a matter of course. So why on earth would Kristen be carrying it around in her hospital scrubs? Bonnie is shocked.

and reports Kristen to the charge nurse, John Wall, who we already know is suspicious. Also on Ward C at the end of January and early February is 40-year-old Kenneth Cutting. Kenny is a well-liked long-term patient at the facility. He joined the Army shortly after graduating high school, wanting to follow in his father's footsteps and serve his country. He enrolled at Fort Devin's Army Reserve.

But at the age of 21, he was diagnosed with MS, multiple sclerosis. Now 40, he has many health issues, but there's nothing to indicate a risk of death. And he's making really good progress with a fever. His wife, Nancy, visits him often and is pleased after being told he will be discharged from Ward C soon. But on February 2, 1996, Kristen Gilbert starts her shift at 4 p.m. He is the only patient in the ICU, and she has dinner plans.

I was planning on going out because I was off that night and she said that she'd probably get the evening off early and I asked if I could go out or she could go out with me. Kristen approaches the charge nurse, who is her supervisor during the shift, and asks, If Kenneth dies tonight, can I go home early? Around 15 minutes later, Kristen notes in her chart that Kenny's heart rate dropped to a dangerous level. Nancy Cutting shared her memories of the day with reporters.

at seven o'clock she went back and said her patient was dead and she went home before she went home she called me to tell me that he had died and you want to know what happened the guy died and she was home by nine o'clock that night. And she killed him. She started a code. And that guy was stable in the ICU, as I was told. Kenneth Cutting was admitted to the VIMC because of a fever.

The otherwise healthy and relatively young man dies in the hospital from cardiac arrest. Kristen is out of that hospital by 8.15, ready for her date with James Peralt. The lack of empathy from Kristen here is absolutely chilling. She's just committed a murder and acts as if nothing has happened. Old school security kicks in after the break-in. Too late. SimpliSafe rewinds the story, stopping crime before it starts.

ActiveGuard Outdoor Protection uses AI-powered cameras to detect intruders, alert live monitoring agents, and can deter intruders before they reach your door. It's proactive protection, plus a 60-day money-back guarantee and no contracts. To get 50% off your new system, go to simplisafe.com slash podcast. That's simplisafe.com slash podcast. There's no safe like SimpliSafe. Hey, Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now, I don't know if you've heard, but Mint's premium wireless is $15 a month.

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I want to understand Kristen's motives and behavior better. So I speak to forensic psychologist Dr. Katherine Ramsland. When were you first made aware of the Kristen Gilbert case? I was interested in this very specific subcategory of serial killer because what sets them apart from most serial killers is that they can be proactively... predicted. Some people call it profiling. It's not really profiling, but because we have a set of traits and behaviors that many of them share in common.

I wanted to collect as many cases as I could, and she was one of them. Nurses have the highest percentage. of healthcare serial killers. But she was an interesting one in that her motivation for whatever it was, was unusual, was different from what we ordinarily see.

Do you mind talking to us about those characteristics that are common among these medical serial killers? Some of the things that we have seen is that the in rooms of patients who... unexpectedly die and they're not necessarily the nurse assigned to that patient they like to predict that a patient will die sometimes taking bets on it they like to hang around when

Loved ones are told that the patient has died. They like to be part of that process. Sometimes they like to wash down the body. Some of them are aroused by this. but others just simply enjoy the emergency aspect of it. Sometimes they will put patients at risk so that they can revive them and be heroes. So you'd find a lot of codes on their shifts, more than the average person, and sometimes a lot more than the average person.

They will have lied about things, sometimes about innocuous things like their birth date or their license plate number or something. They tended to have a... constant set of lies going on in their lives. They skip from one facility to another quite often. They get names like Dr. Death or Angel of Death or something like that. people jokingly refer to them that way patients will say they did something to them so there are a number of things that we we find among them they'll have

medications in their house that they really aren't authorized to have. They'll have books on medications and poisons such things as that. They'll often try to prevent others from checking on a patient. They'll choose late shifts where fewer people are around. They will complain about patients. They'll talk about patients being a burden.

They'll say things like, we have too many patients now. Often they want to be the center of attention. They want to demonstrate their skills. These are not people who are slackers. They're typically people who do. you know, overwork, who come in and take extra hours because they want to be around when these things happen. Wow. As I'm looking at it, Kristen had most of those.

yeah the the high number of codes the the way she was around patients i mean we had an example of her wanting to leave early and saying if this person dies can i can i leave and then suddenly he dies so these are the kinds of things you're looking for there's two kinds of healthcare serial killers many kinds but essentially they might go into a healthcare facility as predators

because they know it's a vulnerable place, a place that operates on trust, so they know they can exploit that and find easy victims. We have had a few like that, but more often... It's something about the job. It's opportunities that they find on the job, and maybe they'll start with a mercy killing, and then they'll continue to kill, but claim that it's mercy. You know, if they're caught, inevitably, it's never mercy in these cases. And in both situations, they are people who...

view patients as a means to an end. They don't value them as human beings. Even those who claim they were doing the patient a favor, they didn't ask the patient if they wanted this favor done. So they're not really treating their patients with any kind of respect. And in some cases, it's really just a pawn in their game.

I cannot ignore Kristen's violent and volatile past. The damage to her college boyfriend's car, the threats of suicide, the reports of violent behavior towards her husband, Glenn Gilbert. But my instinct is to put Kristen Gilbert in the ladder box. I do not think she enters nursing to specifically kill. I think that once she's in the hospital setting, she finds the perfect playground for her attention-seeking tendencies, and codes become integral to that.

I think triggering codes and killing her patients is something that Kristen discovers she likes and, crucially, finds she can get away with. Beatrice Yorker. And Kristen Gilbert is like many of the other...

nurses who've taken it into their own hands in that they see their patients as objects to further their need for attention, for control, for sadistic... I couldn't agree with you more. You believe that Kristen had a condition called Munchausen by proxy. Can you describe that condition and then afterward describe why you believe Kristen had it?

Munchausen by proxy is when instead of making yourself sick, you make a dependent in your care sick for the purpose of medical attention. Why would somebody want... unneeded medical attention. Well, there's lots of reasons. Pretty much all children have faked being sick. sometime in their lives, okay? You did it, I did it. We didn't want to go to school, we didn't want to go to church or synagogue, or we just wanted to stay home and watch TV and have mom make us chicken soup. So...

Faking illness is a fairly normal behavior. However, there are some people for whom faking illness becomes exceedingly It either gets them out of a very unpleasant situation or it becomes their main source of validation. as to who they are it get it becomes the only way that they really feel cared for it happens by people who have a self-concept that is low and they go

I have to trick people into liking me. Wow. So they get attention that they wouldn't get from their normal social connections. Do you see Munchausen by Proxy with other serial killers? Other nurse serial killers? Yes. Yes. So Richard Angelo in New York, he was injecting patients with epinephrine and causing codes. But anyway, so Richard Angelo confessed once he was caught.

He was caught red-handed. There was evidence. A patient pointed him out. There was an eyewitness. It was a done deal. But when he confessed... He talked about how he had experimented with injections on rats when he was younger and in college. And then he said the most telling thing. He said, I'm like those firefighters who set... That is the essence of the Munchausen and the Munchausen by proxy crisis causer. They like the excitement.

It enlivens their work. Kathy Ricks returns from her vacation on February 6th, 1995. She's been away for 10 days. Remember, before she left, there were 18 vials of epinephrine in the ICU storage cupboard. She checks again. There are now three. There is no reason for this particular concentration of epinephrine to have been used in Ward C. She counts again on February 10th. Still three. As Valentine's Day arrives...

Patient mortality appears to be far from Kristen Gilbert's mind. She sends a gushing card to her lover, James Peralt. I love you so much, Jim. Let's hope this will be only the first of many happy days together. Love, Kristen. On February 15th, Ed Squires Sr. is admitted to Ward C of the VAMC. He's a new patient born in Holyoke, Massachusetts in 1927. He is yet another patient who is about to become a pawn in Kristen Gilbert's sadistic game. His son, Ed Squira Jr., tells his story.

How would other people describe my dad? My dad was probably the greatest person most people knew because he was just... He was two different people. To the outside world he was a great guy and to his own family he was a strange guy. My father joined the army shortly after the war because he wasn't old enough to go into combat. But he went to Europe during what they call the cleanup. This was World War II. My father's time in the Army he spent as a mechanic and a driver, truck driver, which...

sort of led to his career after the military. He was a truck driver later on. Ed Squira Sr.'s granddaughter, Sarah, remembers what she was told about her grandparents' first meeting. I think they met. at a polka concert of some kind. And so I remember hearing about that. My grandma listened to polka music all the time up until she passed, so it was a big part of their kind of life at home. My grandma would make him laugh a lot.

Luckily, she lived till she was 94 and only died a few years ago. And so I do remember them interacting and my grandpa finding her funny. I would describe my father as being tall and masculine, somebody powerful. I don't know, like I always thought my grandpa looked... kind of like a movie star in his younger age. He was like very handsome and they were like a good looking couple, I would say. Like a lot of veterans, Ed Squira Sr. struggles with addiction issues.

He's an alcoholic and has been treated as such at various medical centers over the years. I don't think it was until I was a teenager that I understood he even went to the hospital because of alcoholism. I think I knew that he was an alcoholic but I don't know if I knew to what extent. Before arriving at the VAMC, Ed Squira has been at a facility in Worcester for detox treatment. I would always get these phone calls to take my father for detoxing.

This particular time was not unlike other times. Ed Squires Sr. is transferred to the VAMC for specialist care. On the day of his arrival, February 15th, Kathy Ricks checks the epinephrine storage in the ICU at 4 p.m. There are still three. Kristen Gilbert is the only nurse working in the ICU part of Board C that shift. Ed Square's heart rate begins to increase and an emergency code is called by Kristen. I got home that day and got a phone call that he had had a heart attack.

Squira is stabilized, but his life hangs precariously in the balance. When Kathy Ricks gets to the ICU, she immediately checks the epinephrine supplies. The store is empty. What? Next thing I know, they told me he was going to go to Bay State. They were transferring him there. So I drove to Bay State and... they said that there wasn't anything they could do that he had had a heart attack and that he had an aneurysm and there was nothing they could

There was no operation they could do to save him, so he anticipated he was going to die. That evening, Kathy Ricks, John Wall, and Renee Walsh make a call to the nurse manager. How many patients has Kristen used the epinephrine on? They cannot let her victim count grow any further. Coming up on Mind of a Monster, the killer nurse.

Courageous whistleblowers step forward, risking their careers and reputations to expose the deadly truth lurking in Ward C. I knew better, at least as far as my brother is concerned. This sounds pretty crazy. Like, this can't really be going on. Who here thinks Kristen Gilbert murdered the patients? And all the investigators raised their hand. Wow. Wow. Mind of a Monster, the Killer Nurse is produced by Aeromedia, a Fremantle company for ID. I'm your host, Dr. Michelle Ward.

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