Terror, Scandal Rock Town Where Teacher Is Accused of Framing Stalker

The last anonymous letter struck the hardest, terrorizing this tiny northeastern Connecticut town where kids have trooped into the same redbrick school for generations.

“OK Bitch, drop it all now or we shoot the kids. Bang. Bang. No more teacher, no more kids. DOA.”

After the note addressed to fifth-grade teacher Kathy Gerardi arrived in May, state police were posted at Hall Memorial School’s pillared entrance. Mug shots of the suspect were pinned in every classroom. Frightened parents yanked children from class, sports activities were canceled and nighttime adult aerobics sessions were moved across town.

Other notes had appeared in Gerardi’s mailbox and on her desk in the school, neatly pasted together with letters cut from magazines.

“I mean what I say and I know where to find you. One . . . Two . . . Three . . . POW! So long Sweetie.”

Everyone assumed that 22-year-old Brian Philbrick, one of Gerardi’s former students who had gone to jail for stalking her in the past, had written them. There was nothing to suggest that the real culprit was still in their midst.

Gerardi’s weight dropped to 90 pounds and she dropped out of school.

Rallying around their teacher, the town felt poisoned by fear. Nothing as unsettling had ever happened in this unspoiled rural sprawl of 6,000 people, where visitors come to sample the famous red potato pizza and admire the magnificent stone churches, where “deer crossing” and “homemade rhubarb” signs pop up more frequently than traffic lights on the rolling, windy roads.

Some folks shrugged off the crisis as nothing more than a former fifth-grader’s fixation with a popular teacher.

Others wondered if, 12 years earlier, Gerardi’s long brown ponytail and sweet girlish smile had triggered something deeper in the stocky, loudmouthed kid at the front of the class--something infinitely more sinister than a typical adolescent crush.

Something that, long after Philbrick and his family had left Willington, would blow apart a teacher’s life and shatter a town’s solitude.

The reign of terror lasted most of June. Town leaders called two emergency town meetings and everyone poured into the school gym. Forty-four-year-old Gerardi, pale and gaunt and sickly, attended both, sitting silently in the front row. Her husband Leonard, a physical education teacher, sat by her side.

Debate buzzed furiously about whether to shut down the school.

Still there was no hint of the shock to come--nothing to suggest that the gentle, caring teacher, the one who treats the entire eighth-grade basketball team to McDonald’s after games, was slowly turning into a crazed criminal herself.

At the back of the gym, in hushed tones so as not to upset Gerardi, neighbors and old schoolmates recalled the young Philbrick as a rock ‘n’ roll obsessed loner, who strummed “La Bamba” in his parents’ little gray cape overlooking the cornfield, worshiped his father and ran through the woods with other boys kicking balls and collecting frogs.

“He taught me how to play guitar,” said Aaron Lewis, his best friend at the time. “He was always trying to impress people, but otherwise he seemed pretty normal.”

Others remembered a dark side. Fellow schoolmate Julie Brandt, 21, was in sixth grade when Philbrick stole one of her favorite photographs from her school locker. Years later, in 1993, Brandt said Philbrick started phoning her in the middle of the night.

“He would say, ‘I want you. I’ve always wanted you,’ and I would just hang up,” said Brandt, who didn’t press charges at the time, but filed a statement with police after hearing about Gerardi.

“Even at school, I always thought he was weird.”

When Philbrick left town in his early teens and moved to Branford after his parents divorced, no one kept in touch or expected to hear from him again.

Now, nearly a decade later, the face of the unemployed ex-student glared ominously at the town from wanted posters.

The crisis threatened graduation. Worse, in the eyes of the 400 fourth- to eighth-grade students who occupy the pretty school building, it canceled their annual end-of-the-year ice cream social.

“This is sleepy little Willington. We don’t even have our own police officer,” said school board member Ellen Hoagland, a teacher, and mother of two Hall students. “Suddenly we’ve got Henry Lee.”

Lee, the state forensics laboratory director and one of the nation’s leading forensic scientists, was crucial in cracking the case.

He was called in after state police noticed an embossed rose on envelopes that contained two of the threatening letters. Gerardi had used similar envelopes to send thank-you cards to police after Philbrick’s earlier arrest.

Lee’s office detected Gerardi’s fingerprint on the sticky side of the tape used to attach the word “Pow” to one of the notes. Philbrick, who had been thrown back in jail as police investigated the letters, was released.

On July 2, Gerardi was arrested after confessing that she had written some of the letters herself, including the most explosive one threatening the children.

Gerardi pleaded for forgiveness from her town. In her apologetic, painful confession, she said she simply couldn’t cope with her fear.

For about two years, Philbrick had harassed her--including approximately 100 leering phone calls at all hours of night, and threats smeared on her car and delivered in the mail. He was arrested; he told police that he became sexually stimulated as he watched her house and peered through her classroom window.

When he was released after a brief jail term, the model teacher snapped. Risking her 15-year teaching career and reputation in the process, Gerardi admitted, she framed her tormentor to send him back to jail.

“I was terrified and I knew that this was not going to end,” she said. Her confession detailed how she had used scissors and glue to make the letters, and--following the example of Philbrick--scrawled “Die Bitch” in lipstick on the door of her house.

“I felt like Brian was everywhere I went and I could not feel safe, physically and emotionally, I feel my condition was deteriorating,” she said.

Philbrick, who was sent out of state by his lawyer, still faces harassment charges connected to earlier notes. As part of his probation, he had to enter a sex offender treatment program.

Gerardi has just been taken off a suicide watch in a psychiatric institution in Hartford. She is charged with 16 counts, four of them felonies, of fabricating evidence and making false statements to police; she could face a prison term.

She also faces questions about whether she can continue teaching--something the school board is expected to consider when the court case wraps up.

Meanwhile the town remains bitterly torn over who to support--the troubled former student who apparently still needs help, or the civic-minded teacher who duped her own community.

“I think it’s disgusting,” said Elaine Hockla, whose children and grandchildren were taught by Gerardi, and who lives on Latham Street a few houses down from where Philbrick grew up. “I don’t think they should let her teach anymore, after putting the kids through that.”

But the anger that simmers throughout town is mixed with a stream of sympathy for the teacher, whose reputation as a dedicated, caring educator had been golden.

“Who knows what she went through,” said Bill Morabito, a crusty retired prison warden who boasts about his “cynical mind.” He lives a few houses away from Gerardi.

“Fear is such an incredible emotion,” he said. “It inspires people to do things they wouldn’t normally dream of doing. We can’t judge what went on in her mind.”