Perfect Poison Read Online Free PDF Page A

mine!” Pamela snapped.
    â€œNo. You’re mistaken. It’s mine!”
    These were little things, of course. But bigger things were on the horizon.
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    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.
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    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