Charles Cullen
Charles Edmund Cullen is an American serial killer. While working as a nurse, Cullen murdered dozens—possibly hundreds—of patients during a 16-year career spanning several New Jersey and Pennsylvania medical centers until finally being arrested in 2003. He confessed to committing as many as 40 murders at least 29 of which have been confirmed, though interviews with police, psychiatrists and journalists suggest he committed many more. Researchers have suggested that Cullen may have murdered as many as 400 people. However, most murders cannot be confirmed due to lack of records.
Early life
Charles Cullen was born in West Orange, New Jersey, the youngest of eight children. His father, Edmond, a bus driver, died on September 17, 1960, when Charles was seven months old. His childhood was impoverished; Cullen later described it as "miserable" and claimed to have been constantly bullied by his schoolmates and sisters' boyfriends. He made the first of many suicide attempts when he was approximately nine years old, drinking chemicals from a chemistry set. Cullen's mother, Florence Cullen, was born in England and emigrated to the US after World War II as a war bride. She was killed in a car accident on December 6, 1977, when Cullen was 17 and a junior in high school. He claimed that he was not immediately informed of her death, and instead of returning the body to the family, the hospital chose to cremate her.The following year, Cullen graduated from West Orange High School and enlisted in the United States Navy. He served aboard the submarine USS Woodrow Wilson. He successfully passed basic training and the psychological examinations required for submarine crews. Cullen rose to the rank of petty officer second class as part of the team that operated the vessel's Poseidon missiles. He did not fit in during his time in the Navy and was hazed and bullied by his fellow crewmen.
A year into his service, Cullen's leading petty officer aboard Woodrow Wilson discovered him seated at the missile controls wearing a surgical gown, mask, and gloves rather than his uniform. Cullen was disciplined for that action but never explained why he had dressed that way. The Navy reassigned him to a lower-pressure job on the supply ship USS Canopus. He attempted suicide and was committed to the Navy psychiatric ward several times for depression before being discharged in 1984 for undisclosed reasons.
Soon after his discharge, Cullen enrolled at Mountainside Hospital's nursing school in Montclair, New Jersey. He graduated in 1987 and started work at the burn unit of Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, New Jersey.
Shortly before securing his nursing license in 1987, Cullen married Adrienne Taub, a computer programmer. The first of their two children was born later that year.
Murders
The first murders to which Cullen later confessed occurred at Saint Barnabas. On June 11, 1988, he administered a lethal overdose of intravenous medication to a patient. Cullen eventually admitted to killing several other patients at Saint Barnabas, including an AIDS patient who died after Cullen gave him an overdose of insulin. Cullen left Saint Barnabas in January 1992 when the hospital authorities began investigating contaminated IV bags. The investigation later determined that Cullen had most likely been responsible, resulting in dozens of patient deaths at the hospital.One month after leaving Saint Barnabas, Cullen took a job in the coronary care unit at Warren Hospital in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. In August 1993, a 91-year-old cancer patient at Warren Hospital told her son that Cullen, who was not her assigned nurse, had come into her room and injected her with a needle. She died the next day. The hospital administered a lie detector test to Cullen and several other nurses, which they all passed. He later pleaded guilty to killing her with an injection of digoxin.
Cullen's home life was increasingly disordered. He had a drinking problem, and his wife was disturbed by his unusual behavior and his abuse of the family dogs. In January 1993, she filed for divorce, and four months later she applied for a restraining order against him based on her fear that he might endanger her and their children. The restraining order was granted after Cullen had been treated at two psychiatric institutions. The divorce became final in December 1994, and he moved into a basement apartment in Phillipsburg. In March 1993, Cullen broke into a co-worker's home while she and her young son slept, but he left without waking them. He then began stalking the woman, who filed a police report against him. Cullen subsequently pleaded guilty to trespassing and received one year of probation.
Cullen left Warren Hospital at the end of 1993 and began a three-year stint in the intensive care unit of Hunterdon Medical Center in Flemington, New Jersey, where he received an employee award. He claimed that he did not harm anyone during the first two years at Hunterdon. However, hospital records for that period had been destroyed at the time of his arrest in 2003. Cullen admitted to murdering five patients between January and September 1996, again with overdoses of digoxin. He then found work at Morristown Memorial Hospital but was soon fired for poor performance. Cullen remained unemployed for six months. After seeking treatment for depression in the Warren Hospital emergency room, he was briefly admitted to a psychiatric facility.
In February 1998, Cullen was hired by the Liberty Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he staffed a ward of respirator-dependent patients. On 7 May 1998, Francis Henry, 83, was transported to the Lehigh Valley Hospital after choking on his own vomit. Henry's nurse at Liberty, Kimberly Pepe, was contacted three times by Lehigh to ask why he had been administered a "toxic dose of insulin." She was fired over the incident within the next two months despite claims that she did not give Henry the medication. In her 2000 wrongful termination lawsuit, Pepe accused Liberty of "violating her civil rights" and accused the hospital of not investigating Cullen, who already had "problems with his performance" and was also working the evening of Henry's death. She reached an out of court settlement with the hospital in 2001, the terms of which were sealed. In December 2003, HCR Manor Care, Liberty's parent company, released a statement denying Pepe's charge regarding Cullen and reported that he was not investigated in May 1998 but was fired for mishandling medication later that year. The spokesperson of Manor Care also confirmed that a 1998 internal investigation did not connect him to Henry's death, and that Cullen was fired after entering the room of another patient he was not assigned to, holding syringes; the patient's arm was broken in the encounter. Cullen filed for bankruptcy in 1998.
After leaving Liberty, Cullen was employed at the Easton Hospital in Northampton County, Pennsylvania from November 1998 to March 1999. He was hired through a temporary agency called Healthforce of Harrisburg. On 2 December 1998, John R. Sakala, 86, was admitted to the hospital for a persistent cold and “inexplicably” died the following day. During an autopsy, a hospital pathologist found his blood contained “abnormally high level of insulin” but the “extremely low serum glucose level” was not determined to be the cause of death. Sakala’s death was not investigated by the county coroner. Between 29 December 1998 and 31 December 1998, Cullen worked two overnight shifts in the hospital’s 4 North West wing where Ottomar Schramm, 78, was receiving treatment for a seizure. On 30 December 1998, Schramm’s blood tested positive for non-prescribed digoxin. After his death on 31 December 1998, the hospital’s owner, Two Rivers Corporation, alerted the Northampton County Coroner Zachary Lysek in January 1999 for further inquiry. Lysek was concerned that Schramm had been a victim of an “angel of death” but his investigation was deemed inconclusive in 2000 after he was informed by the hospital officials that their internal probe had not produced a suspect. In January 2001, Schramm’s widow sued the Easton hospital and several other parties in a wrongful death lawsuit.
In March 1999, Cullen took a job at the burn unit of Allentown's Lehigh Valley Hospital–Cedar Crest, where he murdered one patient and attempted to murder another. One month later, he voluntarily resigned from Lehigh and took a job working in the cardiac care unit at St. Luke's Hospital in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. During the subsequent three years, Cullen murdered at least five patients and is known to have attempted to kill two more. On January 11, 2000, he once again attempted suicide by lighting a charcoal grill in his bathtub and hoped to succumb to carbon monoxide poisoning. His neighbors smelled smoke and called the fire department and police. Cullen was taken to a hospital and a psychiatric facility but returned home the following day.
No one suspected Cullen was murdering patients at St. Luke's until a co-worker found medication vials in a disposal bin. The drugs were not valuable outside the hospital, and since they were not used in recreational drug use, the theft was highly unusual. An investigation showed that Cullen had taken the medication. He was offered a deal by St. Luke's to resign and be given a neutral recommendation, or to be fired. He resigned and was escorted from the building in June 2002. Seven of his coworkers at St. Luke's later alerted the Lehigh County district attorney of their suspicions that he had used drugs to kill patients. Investigators never looked into Cullen's past and the case was dropped nine months later for lack of evidence.
In September 2002, Cullen began working in the critical care unit of the Somerset Medical Center in Somerville, New Jersey. He began dating a local woman around then, but his depression worsened. Cullen had killed at least 13 patients and attempted to kill at least one more by mid-2003, using digoxin, insulin, and epinephrine. On June 18, 2003, he unsuccessfully attempted to murder Somerset patient Philip Gregor, who was later discharged and died six months later of natural causes.
Somerset began to notice Cullen's wrongdoing when he accessed the rooms and computerized records of patients to whom he was not assigned. The hospital's computerized drug-dispensing cabinets showed that he was requesting medications that his patients had not been prescribed. His drug requests included many orders that were immediately canceled and many requests within minutes of one another. In July 2003, the executive director of the New Jersey Poison Information and Education System warned Somerset officials that at least four suspicious overdoses indicated the possibility that an employee was killing patients. By October, Cullen had killed at least five more patients and attempted to kill another.
When a patient in Somerset died of low blood sugar in October 2003, the hospital alerted the New Jersey State Police. That patient was Cullen's final victim. State officials castigated the hospital for failing to report a nonfatal insulin overdose administered by Cullen in August. An investigation into his employment history revealed past suspicions about his involvement in patient deaths. Somerset fired Cullen on October 31, 2003, ostensibly for lying on his job application.