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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, God, 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