Charles Cullen

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Charles Cullen (born February 22, 1960 in West Orange , New Jersey ) is a former male nurse and to this day the most dangerous serial killer in New Jersey history. In December 2003, Cullen confessed to authorities that he had murdered up to 45 patients during the 16 years he worked in a total of 10 hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania .

Childhood and early life

Charles Cullen was born in West Orange, New Jersey, the youngest of eight children to a deeply religious Catholic family. His father was a bus driver while his mother raised the children as a housewife. His father died while Cullen was a toddler . Two of his siblings also died in early adulthood .

Cullen himself describes his childhood as pathetic. At the age of nine, he made his first suicide attempt by drinking chemicals from a chemistry kit. However, this should only be the first of around 20 suicide attempts in the course of his life . Was later employed as Cullen as a nurse, he developed fantasies about drugs to steal from the hospital where he worked, to take with them suicide to commit.

When he was 17 years old, Cullen's mother died in a car accident in which one of his sisters was behind the wheel. Devastated by his mother's death, Cullen dropped out of high school and enrolled in the US Navy in 1978 . He was deployed in the Underwater Corps and served aboard the USS Woodrow Wilson submarine . Cullen rose as a member of the team that operated the UGM-73 Poseidon missile , up to the rank of Petty Officer Third Class.

At this point, Cullen was already showing signs of mental instability . He once did one shift, wearing a green surgeon's gown , protective mask and latex gloves that he stole from the medicine cabinet. He was then transferred to the supply ship USS Canopus . In the following years, Cullen tried several times to take his own life. His last attempt in March 1984 resulted in his discharge from the US Navy.

Upon his discharge from the United States Armed Forces , Cullen attended Mountainside School of Nursing and in 1987 got a job at St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston , New Jersey. In the same year he married Adrienne Taub, with whom he has two daughters.

Murders

Cullen committed his first murder on June 11, 1988. Judge John W. Yengo, Senior, was admitted to St. Barnabas Medical Center for an allergic reaction to a blood thinner. Cullen gave him a fatal overdose intravenously . Cullen confessed to killing 11 patients at St. Barnabas Medical Center, including an AIDS patient who succumbed to an insulin overdose . He quit his job at St. Barnabas in January 1992 when hospital management began investigating who was tampering with the IV bags .

In February 1992, Cullen began a new job at Warren Hospital in Phillipsburg , New Jersey. There he murdered three elderly women by giving them an overdose of the heart medicine digoxin . His latest victim said a sneaky male nurse injected her with something while she was sleeping. Her family members and other medical staff ignored her statements.

In January 1993, Adrienne Cullen filed for divorce. She later also reported two cases of domestic violence against her husband. The divorce papers and domestic violence lawsuits portrayed Cullen as an alcoholic who tortured pets by putting them in bowling bags or trash cans, mixing lighter fluid with other people's drinks, and making prank calls to the homes of the deceased. Cullen was given split custody of his daughters and moved to an apartment on Shafer Avenue in Phillipsburg.

Cullen claimed he wanted to give up nursing in 1993, but court-ordered alimony forced him to continue working.

In March 1993, he broke into a colleague's apartment while she and her young son were sleeping. He left the apartment - but without waking the two of them. As a result, Cullen began calling her frequently, leaving her tons of messages, and following her both at work and around town. The woman sued Cullen and he declared himself the trespassing guilty. He was sentenced to one year and was suspended. The day after he was released, Cullen attempted another suicide. He took two months' leave and was treated for depression in a mental hospital . By the end of the year, Cullen made two more suicide attempts.

Cullen left Warren Hospital in December 1993 and took a job at Hunterdon Medical Center in Raritan Township, New Jersey, early the following year. He worked there for three years in the intensive care unit and the cardiology ward. In 1994, Cullen even became a recognized nurse in Pennsylvania. He claims to have committed no other murders in the first two years of his service. The hospital's records were destroyed while he was in custody in 2003. Hence, Cullen's claims can neither be proven nor disproved. Even so, Cullen confessed to having committed five more murders in the first nine months of 1996. Again he gave the patients overdoses of the drug digoxin.

Subsequently, Cullen found work at Morristown Memorial Hospital in Morristown , New Jersey. There he was released in August 1997 due to poor performance. He remained unemployed for six months and stopped child support for his daughters.

In October 1997, Cullen showed up at Warren Hospital asking for treatment for his depression. He was transferred to a psychiatric institution, but left it a short time later without any success from the treatment. Neighbors said he chased cats in the street in the middle of the night, talked to himself or yelled, and made faces at people when he thought they couldn't see him.

In February 1998, Cullen was hired from the Liberty Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Allentown , Pennsylvania. There he worked in a hospital ward that looked after patients who needed ventilators to survive. In May, Cullen filed for bankruptcy after accumulating nearly $ 67,000 in debt. The Liberty Nursing and Rehabilitation Center fired him in October 1998 after Cullen was seen walking into a patient room with syringes in hand. The patient ended up with a broken arm, but no injections were made. Still, Cullen was accused of improperly administering medication to patients.

Cullen then worked at Easton Hospital in Easton , Pennsylvania from November 1998 to March 1999 . There he killed another patient on December 30th with a digoxin overdose. The by a coroner Although conducted blood test showed the deadly proportion of the drug in the blood of the patient, but a subsequent investigation into the incident ended without result. Nothing could beyond doubt prove Cullen's guilt for the patient's death.

However, Cullen continued to find work. The need for nurses at that time was significantly larger than the existing workforce, which made it difficult for hospitals to find new staff. In addition, no system was in place to identify nurses with mental health problems or to uncover difficulties with previous employers. As a result, Cullen was able to start his new job in March 1999 at the Burn Injury Ward at Lehigh Valley Hospital in Allentown, Pennsylvania. While employed at Lehigh Valley Hospital, Cullen again murdered a patient and failed in another attempt to kill himself.

In April 1999, Cullen voluntarily stopped working at Lehigh Valley Hospital. He took a job at St. Luke's Hospital in Bethlehem , Pennsylvania. There he worked on the cardiology ward. Over the next three years, Cullen attempted to murder seven patients, succeeding five times and failing twice.

In January 2000, Cullen attempted suicide again, which failed. He was sent to a mental hospital, but was allowed to leave the following day.

No one suspected Cullen of murdering patients at St. Luke's Hospital until a colleague accidentally found unused vials of medicine in a trash can. These drugs were worthless outside of the hospital and were not used by casual drug users. Hence her theft seemed strange. An investigation found that Cullen was taking the medicine. In June 2002, he was released and removed from the hospital.

Seven of the nurses at St. Luke's Hospital later met with Lehigh County authorities to inform them of their suspicions that Cullen was killing patients with drugs. They argued that while Cullen was only present on his ward 20% of the time, nearly two-thirds of the patients died during his working hours. However, since the investigation never shed light on Cullen's past, the suspicion was abandoned nine months later due to lack of evidence.

Cullen subsequently worked for a short time at the Sacred Heart Hospital in Allentown, Pennsylvania. There, however, he couldn't get along with his colleagues and left voluntarily.

In September 2002, Cullen found a job at Somerset Medical Center in Somerville , New Jersey. There he worked in the emergency medicine department. Cullen's depression worsened as he started dating local women. He murdered eight more patients and made another attempt that failed. Again he used the drugs digoxin and insulin for his actions.

On June 18, 2003, Cullen attempted to murder a patient named Philip Gregor. Gregor survived, was released and died of natural causes six months later.

Soon after, evaluations of access to the hospital computer showed that Cullen was retrieving data from patients for whom he was not assigned. Colleagues had also seen him in the patient rooms. In addition, evaluations of the computer-controlled medicine cabinets showed that Cullen was asking for medication that his patients had not been prescribed.

The chief executive of New Jersey's Poison Information and Education System warned those in charge of Somerset Medical Center in July 2003 that at least four suspicious administrations of overdoses would indicate the possibility that one of the staff would kill patients. But the hospital postponed contact with the authorities until October of that year. By then, Cullen had killed five more patients and tried a sixth.

The state authorities fined the hospital for failing to report a non-fatal insulin overdose. The administration of the overdose had been administered by Cullen. When Cullen's last victim died in October of low blood sugar , Somerset Medical Center alerted authorities. An investigation into Cullen's employee past finally uncovered the suspicions that had arisen in previous deaths.

Somerset Medical Center fired Cullen on October 31, 2003 on the grounds that he lied on his application. The police monitored him for a few weeks until they finished their investigation.

Arrest and confessions

Cullen was arrested on December 14, 2003 on charges of murder and attempted murder in a restaurant. On the same day he confessed to the murder of the Reverend Florian Gall and the attempt to kill Jin Kyung Han. Both were patients at Somerset Medical Center.

In April 2004, Cullen confessed in a New Jersey court that he had murdered 13 patients in Somerset and had attempted two more lethal injections. As part of his confession, he promised to cooperate with the authorities if they did not seek the death penalty for him. A month later, he again confessed to three patient murders in New Jersey.

Cullen's confessions continued in November 2004. In a Pennsylvania court, he admitted that he killed six more patients and made three attempted murders.

Since July 2005, Cullen has remained in Somerset County Jail in New Jersey while authorities are still investigating possible involvement of his person in other deaths.

Cullen is currently serving a life sentence with no parole before the end of 30 years. In addition, he immediately has to serve the sentences from Pennsylvania, where he was sentenced on March 2, 2006 to eleven consecutive life sentences. They are not eligible for parole for 397 years. He is being held in the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton , New Jersey.

On March 10, 2006, Cullen was taken to the courtroom of Lehigh County's Chief Justice William Platt for judgment . Cullen, upset with the judge, repeated the phrase "Your honor, you need to step down" for 30 minutes. Finally Platt Cullen was with a cloth and duct tape gag , nor to repeat but also tried at this time Cullen sentence. Cullen was sentenced to a further six life sentences by Platt.

Along with all other judgments, Cullen has a total of 18 life sentences.

motive

Cullen said he gave the patients the overdoses to relieve them of their suffering and to prevent hospital staff from " de-humanizing " them. He allegedly feared that those affected were on the verge of needing ventilators or similar life-support machines to survive, which he wanted to spare them. Cullen told the detectives that he couldn't stand it anymore when people talked about trying to save lives, or even witnessed them.

Investigators said Cullen was often confused and absent. For example, he seemed to understand that his actions brought misery to the patients' families and inflicted suffering on the patients themselves. Nevertheless, he could not see the resulting contradiction to his statement that he only wanted to spare the patient suffering and pain.

At the same time, Cullen told the investigators that his actions were mostly spontaneous decisions, although he had seen the patients in question "suffer" for a long time and thought about their murder.

He told detectives in December 2003 that he had lived in a fog for most of the time and that he had simply hidden the memory of the murder of most of his victims. Cullen went on to say that he couldn't remember many of them, who they were or why he'd chosen them. In some cases he even rigorously denied his responsibility for murders in certain institutions. After reviewing the medical records, he later confessed that he was involved in the cases.

Legislative implications

Cullen has found it easy to move from one facility to the next without attracting attention over the years. Experts claim that this was due to the lack of reporting requirements and insufficient legal protection for employers .

Like most other states , New Jersey and Pennsylvania only required health care facilities to report suspicious deaths in extremely exceptional cases. In addition, the penalties for failing to submit such a report were comparatively insignificant. Many states also did not allow employers to research where applicants had previously worked. As a result, employers did not investigate the history of their employees because they feared a bad reputation and legal consequences.

Immediately after the Cullen case became known, 37 states, including Pennsylvania and New Jersey, passed new laws to encourage employers to give honest assessments to their employees. These certificates protect the employer if they are written truthfully. Many other laws that were passed in 2004 and 2005 also strengthened the reporting obligations of health facilities. In addition, the legal protection for the facilities that reported insufficient patient care by their staff was extended. Licensed healthcare workers, such as the nationally recognized nurse Charles Cullen, have since been required to approve investigations into a possible criminal background and to store their fingerprints at their own expense .

literature

  • Charles Graeber: The Good Nurse - A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder. Twelve, New York 2013, ISBN 978-0-446-50529-1 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thomas Widmer: The death nurse. In: Tages-Anzeiger of August 27, 2013

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Cullen, Charles
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American serial killer
DATE OF BIRTH February 22, 1960
PLACE OF BIRTH West Orange , New Jersey