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The pale man with the grayish black hair and the blank look in his eyes sat in the courtroom in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Although generally a quiet man, he was not quiet on this day in March of 2006. Affixed over his head was a spit mask of fine mesh, designed to keep prisoners from spitting on their accusers or the deputies or anyone else who got within distance. But the mesh mask did little to silence him.
The man was Charles Cullen, and he was shouting at the judge to step down, to recuse himself from the case. That wasn't going to happen, but it didn't keep Cullen from repeating the same phrase over and over again. "Your Honor, you must step down!" Meanwhile, the family members who had gathered for the sentencing hearing waited impatiently for Cullen to stop.
but he didn't stop. He kept yelling, his voice reverberating around the room, amplified by the domed ceiling. Soon, the judge nodded, and one of the deputies pulled a towel around the man's head. It lowered the volume, but it didn't stop him, and the deputy had to hold it in place. Before long, the officer's hand was too tired. Cullen still hadn't stopped, so they tried duct tape
But since he was still wearing the spit mask, it did little to help. The family members of some of Cullen's victims spoke anyway. They weren't about to let Cullen take this away from them too. So they shouted over him, telling him that he was a monster and that they knew he would rot in hell. Still, Cullen yelled and yelled. He continued to yell as the judge condemned him to serve multiple life sentences.
and then he was whisked out of the room, heading back to jail and eventually to prison, where he wouldn't be eligible for parole until sometime in the 24th century. The silence in the courtroom was deafening. Part One: Early Life There's often a common thread among the serial killers we profile here on Crime Hub. In those cases where the killer's past is well known, there's usually some indication that they were abused as children.
Sometimes this is sexual abuse, sometimes it's physical, as in beatings from relatives or caretakers. Much of the time, it's both. This is not to say that everyone who suffers these kinds of horrible abuses become a killer. Far from it. But those who decide to take the lives of others recall terrible abuse at the hands of those who were supposed to protect them. Charles Cullen, it seems, is not one of these killers.
He did not suffer abuse from his mother or father. However, that doesn't mean he had a normal childhood. Born in West Orange, New Jersey in 1960, Cullen was the youngest of eight children. His father was a bus driver and his mother a stay-at-home mom. But before Charles even turned one, his father died. Charles was only seven months old.
This left the burden of raising eight children up to Colin's mother, Florence. Colin said he had a miserable childhood. As a quiet child, he was bullied by kids at school. His older sisters had boyfriends that would give him a hard time. Around the age of nine, Charles purposely drank chemicals from a chemistry set in an apparent suicide attempt. He later admitted that he'd suffered from severe depression from a very early age.
And his father's death wasn't the only family tragedy he had to deal with. When Charles Cullen was a senior in high school, his mother was involved in a head-on collision when she had an epileptic attack while driving. According to Charles, he was alerted to the accident, but he wasn't immediately told that his mother had died.
Also, according to him, the hospital cremated Florence Cullen's remains without giving him the opportunity to retrieve her body for burial. It's unclear where his siblings were or whether they had anything to do with this decision. Cullen described the death of his mother as devastating. He soon dropped out of high school and joined the Navy. Interestingly, he passed the psychological and physical exams to determine if he could serve on a submarine.
Since submariners spend as long as two months at a time in the cramped confines of the submarine, not every recruit is cut out for the rigors of that job. But at the age of 18, Cullen was deemed fit to be a submariner. He was eventually assigned to serve aboard the USS Woodrow Wilson, a nuclear submarine. Cullen said that, during his time in the Navy, he was hazed and bullied by his peers.
He later told interviewers that he recalled the military decision to move from a footing of mutual assured destruction to a first-strike policy. When this happened, after President Ronald Reagan took office, Cullen felt he could no longer serve on the nuclear submarine. He objected to the possibility that the nuclear missiles on the Woodrow Wilson could be used to target civilian populations.
While he was still serving on the Woodrow Wilson, a superior officer walked into the missile control area to find Cullen dressed in scrubs, surgical gloves, and a surgical mask. Cullen sat at the controls quietly, apparently having pilfered the clothes from a medical storage locker. While there was no way he could have launched any missiles, there are serious protocols in place and Cullen was only a petty officer. This incident was an early indication of his strange behavior.
When asked for an explanation, Cullen could provide no coherent answer as to why he was out of uniform and not where he was supposed to be. He was disciplined and eventually moved to the USS Cannabis, a supply ship where he worked a less stressful job. While on the Cannabis, Cullen apparently attempted suicide and was taken into psychiatric care. In 1984, he received a medical discharge from the Navy.
The specific reasons for the discharge were never publicly disclosed. Once out of the Navy, Cullen started studying to be a nurse at Mountainside Hospital in Montclair, New Jersey. He excelled in his studies and was elected president of his nursing class. While working to put himself through nursing school, Charles met Adrian Baum. They dated for less than a year before Cullen proposed and Adrian said yes.
In 1986, Cullen graduated from nursing school and started working in the burn ward at St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, New Jersey. The next year, in 1987, he and Adrienne were married. A year later, the couple had their first daughter. They would eventually have a second daughter together. Things seemed good for a little while. Charles was doing well at work, and he had started a family. There was a period of happiness during the late 1980s.
but it didn't last long. Soon enough, Adrienne would find that she no longer knew her husband, and even worse, she feared him. And in 1991, as we now know, Cullen showed the first indication that something was very wrong. Part two, taking lives. Charles Cullen's first victim, as far as he can remember, was in June of 1988.
This was three full years before anyone suspected Cullen of wrongdoing. As we continue to talk about his victims, it's important that you know there's no official number of them. He managed to work as a nurse for so many years and picked his victims at random. It's nearly impossible to determine how many people Cullen really killed. The problem is people die in hospitals.
And the way Cullen did things made it very difficult when it finally came out that he'd been killing people for years. In addition, he often worked in intensive care units, burn units, and nursing homes where terminal patients could be found. Much later, years after he was arrested, Cullen tried to claim in an interview that he was an angel of mercy. But as we discuss his victims, you'll see that this is not the case.
Some of his victims may have been in pain and on the brink of death, but others were far from it. Even if they had been all terminal patients, it wouldn't excuse his heinous actions and the inability of the medical establishment to stop him before he destroyed numerous lives. John Yango Sr., Cullen's first official victim, was 72 when Cullen injected him with a fatal overdose of lidocaine.
He died at St. Barnabas Medical Center on June 11th, 1988, after being submitted to the burn ward for a severe sunburn. It wasn't until 1991 that hospital staff at St. Barnabas realized something was wrong. And unfortunately, there's no way to tell for sure how many people Colin killed between his first victim in 1988 and a couple of attempted murders in 1991.
It was a patient named Anna Byers that indirectly alerted staff members that something strange was going on. She was getting prepped for heart surgery with an IV drip of the drug heparin. When the nurse assigned to her came back to check in on Byers, the woman was confused, sweating, and nauseous. The nurse checked Byers' insulin levels and found them to be extremely high. They decided to counteract the high insulin levels with a drug called dextrose administered with an IV drip.
From an abundance of caution, the surgeon who was to perform heart surgery on Byers decided to postpone the operation until she was stabilized. Since they no longer needed it to prepare her for the surgery, the nursing staff removed the heparin drip. After they removed the drip, Byers quickly got better. A few hours later, she was stable enough for the surgery, so she was on the heparin drip once again. Not long after she was put back on the drug, she was declining.
They unhooked all her IV lines and rushed her to the intensive care unit. But by the time they got her to the unit, she was already doing better. At this point, the hospital staff members were starting to suspect that something was wrong with the bag of heparin. As if to confirm their suspicions, something similar was happening to a man in an adjacent room. He was experiencing adverse effects when the heparin IV was hooked up.
The nurses took both IV bags and sent them to be tested. The tests came back. The bags of heparin had been tampered with. Someone had injected them with insulin. Upon closer inspection, they could see the little holes at the edges of the bags where the syringe had been inserted. Hospital security was soon alerted, and they started an investigation. Every single nurse was interviewed, and all but one of them cooperated with the investigation.
Charles Cullen was the one who refused. Investigators were immediately suspicious, so they decided to do some more digging. They compared mortality rates at the hospital, looking at before Cullen was hired and after. They found a significant difference. It seemed that, on average, more people had died in the hospital while Cullen had been working there. Still, this was not proof.
They needed to catch Colin in the act in order to alert the authorities. Otherwise, the evidence was all circumstantial. So they put a camera in the supply room, hoping to see him injecting the bags. It didn't work. They found nothing. And in the meantime, two more patients deteriorated and both their bags of heparin were found to contain insulin. But Charles knew they were suspicious of him
After all, he was the only one who'd refused to talk to the hospital's investigators. So he simply decided to stop coming to work and the issues stopped. While this wasn't exactly a smoking gun, it was enough to tell hospital administrators at St. Barnabas that Cullen was likely responsible for more than one death on their watch. And being the responsible people they were, they made sure that Cullen never worked at another hospital again.
They reported him to the authorities and put the word out that Cullen shouldn't be trusted. And in so doing, they saved countless lives. At least, that's how things should have gone. Unfortunately, the reality was very different. In fact, the administrators at St. Barnabas did nothing. It seems they didn't so much as give Cullen a negative report when his subsequent employers called for a recommendation. They didn't say he was bad at his job,
which would have been the very least they could do. And they certainly didn't share their suspicions. They had a moral obligation to prevent Cullen from killing again, and they did nothing. Less than a month after leaving St. Barnabas, Cullen was working at Warren Hospital in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. He even listed St. Barnabas as his previous employer. And he told the interviewer at Warren that he was changing jobs for a shorter commute.
It was around this time that Cullen's wife, Adrienne, filed for divorce. Their daughters were four and one, and Cullen later revealed that his depression was at its worst around this time. After Cullen was arrested and charged with multiple murders, reporters gained access to the divorce papers, the details of which give insight into the man's troubled mind. According to the divorce papers,
Cullen had been sleeping on the couch for three years. He was distant, sullen, and antisocial. He never went out with his wife and spent little time with his daughters. But things were often worse than indifference or coldness. Adrian recalled waking up in the middle of the night to the whimpers of their two Yorkshire Terrier dogs. Apparently, Cullen tormented them in various ways, prompting cries from the poor animals. This wasn't a single occurrence.
she said it happened several times. According to one of Cullen's neighbors in Phillipsburg, one of the family dogs was left outside for long periods, even in extreme weather. In fact, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals eventually came and rescued the dog. Before Charles Cullen was served with divorce papers, Adrienne knew she had to be careful. She had an upcoming surgery at Warren Hospital, where Cullen worked.
She knew he would soon be served the papers and was worried that she would be vulnerable to his wrath while at the hospital. By this time, she knew he'd been investigated at his previous job, but she didn't know exactly what Cullen had or hadn't done, but she had her suspicions. So when the day of her surgery came, her father accompanied her to the hospital and stayed by her side the entire time.
This proved fortunate because Cullen was served with the divorce papers while at work. He stormed to Adrian's room, but his father-in-law prevented Cullen from coming in. Adrian got out of the hospital without incident, but she wasn't clear of Cullen yet. When it seemed as if things had cooled down, she let Cullen stay in the house with her and her daughters until he could find a place of his own. Unfortunately, this was a mistake.
She had to file two different domestic violence reports, citing extreme cruelty and fear for her safety. She said that Cullen's access to medications put her and her daughters at risk. She was afraid Cullen would try to harm them. After each of these domestic violence incidents, Cullen attempted suicide. The second attempt, in which he chased a handful of pills down with a bottle of wine, landed him in a psychiatric hospital.
After he checked himself out, the divorce was finalized. Adrian was granted full custody of both their daughters, as well as a restraining order against Cullen. It's unclear how many people Charles Cullen killed during this dark period in his life, but it seems that he took his frustrations out on the very people he was supposed to help. He later recalled killing 90-year-old Lucy Magovaro with an overdose of the drug digoxin during this time.
When she died, Lucy Mugavaro's family had no indication that foul play was involved. Unfortunately, this was the same for many of Cullen's elderly victims. It wasn't until years later, after Cullen was arrested, that the family learned about her murder. But hospital patients weren't the only people affected by Cullen's dark side. After his divorce was finalized, Cullen went looking for a new relationship.
and he soon found one in a fellow nurse at Warren Hospital. Part Three: Losing Control In 1993, Charles Cullen moved into a basement apartment. He was newly divorced and had spent some time in a psychiatric hospital after attempting suicide, but he was soon back to work and pursuing another woman, Michelle Tomlinson. They went on a date and Charles was smitten. Things moved fast, at least on his part.
He began bringing her presents and showing up on his day off to see her. Soon enough, he proposed. The whole thing was too much for her. Michelle grew distant, hoping he would get the message and back off. Charles noticed this and assumed she was depressed, thinking she needed him more than ever. So he called, leaving messages on her answering machine.
Eventually, this prompted the woman to seek help from an ex-boyfriend who called Charles and told him to leave Michelle alone. This didn't dissuade Cullen. He continued to call, even though she never picked up. He even went so far as to drive to her house. When seeing a light on and her car there, he raced back to his house, afraid she was calling to talk to him while he was out, but she hadn't called.
Seeing that she hadn't left any messages, Cullen, in his delusion, figured she must be in trouble. That could be the only reason she wasn't calling him. So he drove back over to her house and broke in through a sliding glass door. After finding her and her son asleep, he left again. When he called her the next day, she finally picked up. He admitted that he'd broken into her house
Worried that things were quickly getting out of hand, Michelle told the police, who contacted Cullen. They asked him to come into the station, thinking that he would be arrested. Cullen took a handful of pills and drove to the police station, figuring he could overdose in the jail cell. But the police didn't arrest him. They asked him some questions, took his fingerprints, and let him go. Cullen began to feel the effects of the pills while in the parking lot.
He tried to drive home but found that he couldn't, so he pulled over and called an ambulance. He was taken to the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital and soon recovered. Not long after, he was back at work at Warren Hospital, but the woman he'd been stalking, Michelle, had filed a restraining order. Colin eventually admitted to harassment and trespassing. He was sentenced to five years on probation. Later that year in September 1993,
A 91-year-old woman named Helen Dean was recovering from breast cancer surgery at Warren. Her son was in the recovery room with her when a male nurse came into the room and told her son, Larry, to leave. As soon as Helen's son was gone, the nurse injected her in the thigh with a syringe. By the time Larry came back into the room, the nurse was gone. Helen complained, saying that the nurse had injected her with something. She pointed to the spot on her inner thigh.
Knowing something was wrong, Larry told the doctor immediately, but the doctor brushed the concern off, saying it was probably a bug bite. After all, he hadn't ordered any injections. Ellen Dean died the next day from heart failure. Larry did some digging and found out the name of the nurse who'd injected his mother, Charles Cullen. He told the county prosecutor and Cullen was questioned. Of course, he denied everything.
The area around the injection site on Helen Dean's thigh was tested, but nothing was found because none of the more than 100 tests had been for digoxin, Cullen's drug of choice. Cullen was put on paid leave while the investigation was underway, as was his tendency whenever things got hard for him. He attempted suicide again. He took a bunch of pills and called 911. He even made sure to leave the front door unlocked for the paramedics.
After he was out of the hospital, the prosecutor spoke to him again. He denied everything. So they had him take a polygraph. Somehow, he passed the polygraph test. There could be several reasons for this, not the least of which is that polygraphs are notoriously unreliable and, as a result, are usually inadmissible in court.
Or it could be that Colin felt no remorse for what he did and had no problem lying. So his vitals didn't change much while they were asking him questions. By the end of 1993, administrators at Warren were suspicious of Colin, but they couldn't prove anything. He continued working there, despite the fact that a fellow nurse had a restraining order against him and that he was suspected of murdering at least one patient. In early 1994,
Cullen decided not to go back to work at Warren. It's important to note here that he wasn't fired. He left on his own, getting a job at Hunterdon Medical Center in Flemington, New Jersey. Once again, hospital administrators, this time at Warren, made no mention of their suspicions to Hunterdon. They chose to protect their facility for fear of lawsuits rather than potentially saving lives by telling other hospitals that Cullen shouldn't be trusted.
He soon began dating a nurse at Hunterdon who had separated from her husband. During their relationship, it seems that Cullen didn't take any lives. Although this may or may not be true, he was a model employee and things seemed to be going well for him, but it didn't last. Everything changed when the woman broke things off with him to reconnect with her husband. This sent Cullen into a downward spiral and he was soon being written up constantly for medication mistakes.
but they weren't mistakes. During the first nine months of 1996, Cullen killed five patients at Hunterdon, all of them with digoxin overdoses. Leroy Sinn was 71 when Cullen killed him. Earl Young was 76. Catherine Dext was 49. Frank Mazzocco was 66. And Jesse Eichlen was 81. When one of his supervisors noticed that these mistakes might have been intentional,
They took him aside and told him if it happened again, he'd be fired. This was indicative of the way hospitals dealt with issues like this. Instead of going to the authorities, which could potentially open the floodgates to wrongful death lawsuits, they opted to deal with things on their own. This is truly disturbing, to say the least. And while murderous doctors and nurses are incredibly rare, this kind of self-governing allows other kinds of mishaps.
Nurses who operate under the influence or are simply bad at their jobs can go for years in the industry. If they're fired, they'll often file wrongful termination lawsuits and then go to work for another hospital. So when Cullen was threatened with firing, he simply quit and found another job at Morristown Memorial Hospital. He was fired in less than a year for medication mismanagement.
In February 1998, Cullen got a job at Liberty Nursing Home in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He was reprimanded for administering medication to patients at the wrong times. One incident involved him trying to inject a patient with something. The patient fought him off, but Cullen broke the patient's arm in the process. Despite this incident, he was still not reported to authorities. He was fired and allowed to move on to another nursing job.
In 1998, he took two jobs at once. One was at Easton Hospital in the intensive care unit and the other in Lehigh Valley Hospital's burn ward. When a 78-year-old man named Audemars Schramm died at Easton Hospital on December 30th, 1998, administrators suspected Cullen, but the hospital never proved his involvement.
In 1999, a 22-year-old man named Matthew Matter died at Lehigh Valley Hospital from a digoxin overdose. Cullen later admitted to murdering both men. This is a good place to take a moment to reflect on the medical industry. Nurses and doctors have difficult jobs, and most of them are very compassionate people who want to do what's best for their patients. But as in any industry, you will have people that aren't good at what they do.
And even doctors and nurses with the very best intentions make mistakes on occasion. Unfortunately, these mistakes sometimes result in deaths. This is one reason why hospitals see so many lawsuits and do what they can to avoid them. When turning a profit or securing donations are concerns, a rash of lawsuits can cause problems for the bottom line. They can erode trust in the institution.
making it hard for the hospital to recruit doctors, nurses, and even patients. This doesn't mean there's nothing that can be done about people like Charles Cullen. In fact, as we'll see later in the episode, there were changes made as a result of Cullen's case after he was caught. In most states at the time, there was little incentive to report suspicious deaths. If it was found that hospitals failed to report suspicious deaths, they would receive little more than a slap on the wrist.
The law didn't compel hospitals to report wrongdoing against nurses unless charges were filed. And Cullen always seemed to sidestep any damning evidence. So no official charges were filed, which meant the hospitals didn't have to report him. Most hospital administrators were told by their lawyers not to report their suspicions for fear that Cullen would sue them for giving negative references. But it wasn't just Cullen. This was common practice all across the industry.
And, of course, reporting the murders to authorities could have meant that family members would file wrongful death lawsuits against the hospitals. The overarching fear of lawsuits prevented these hospitals from reporting their suspicions about Cullen's behavior. And the urgent demand for nurses at the time allowed Cullen to quit one job and quickly find another. This was fairly common among nurses since hospitals were offering competitive pay to get nurses on their staff.
and it certainly helped that he was willing to work night shifts. He even preferred it since there were fewer people around, which meant less supervision. This combination of factors and the unspoken code of silence among hospitals allowed Cullen to jump from job to job without his prospective employers batting an eye. Eventually, Cullen quit Lehigh and got a job at St. Luke's Hospital in Easton, Pennsylvania.
While Cullen was working at this medical facility, another nurse found empty digoxin vials and a trash can. This was strange because digoxin can't get you high. It has no street value. Theft of the drug was, and still is, incredibly uncommon. So the nurse started to look into it. And by looking at the records kept by automated drug dispensing machines, the nurse determined that Cullen had been the one to retrieve the vials.
After this was brought to the administration's attention, they offered Cullen a deal. He could either resign from St. Luke's and be given what they referred to as a neutral recommendation, or he could be fired. Cullen resigned and soon got another job. He later admitted to killing five people while working at St. Luke's. After it was clear that St. Luke's wasn't going to report Cullen to the authorities, a couple of nurses went to the district attorney with their concerns.
a case was opened, but there wasn't enough evidence. Eventually, it was dropped without any charges ever being filed. When St. Luke's finally came around and reported their suspicions to the Pennsylvania Nursing Board, Cullen was already working at Somerset Medical Center in New Jersey. And thanks to the work of the one brave nurse at Somerset, Cullen's murder spree would finally end. Part four, heroes wear scrubs. As you have surely noticed by now,
There were people working to stop Charles Cullen. They just weren't hospital administrators or lawyers. They were nurses. Throughout Charles Cullen's 16-year career, nurses did more to try to stop him than any administrators at the nine hospitals he worked for. Unfortunately, this wasn't often enough.
Individual nurses didn't have the information, authority, or power to stop Cullen's reign of terror until Amy Loughran came along. At first, Loughran and Cullen were fast friends. They met at Somerset Medical Center where Loughran had already been working when Cullen got hired. Loughran later said that Charles was funny, crisp, and always showed up ready to work. They bonded quickly and grew fairly close.
But patients started dying mysteriously at Somerset after Cullen started working there. And in late June of 2003, a 68-year-old reverend named Florian Gaul was admitted to the hospital with several medical issues, including heart disease. However, things were looking up. He'd been given a dose of digoxin as part of his medical treatment, and he was given a blood test shortly after.
The levels of the drug were in the expected range. Soon enough, Gall wasn't considered a terminal patient. Doctors thought he was on the road to recovery. But on the night of June 27th, 2003, Gall was failing. A new blood test showed extremely high digoxin levels. The hospital staff did all they could to save his life, but they failed. Reverend Gall died on June 28th, 2003.
Hospital brass were well aware that such high levels of digoxin could only have gotten there through injection. This, coupled with some other suspicious deaths, put them on the alert. Even though they knew that Gall was likely poisoned, they did not tell his sister this. She was a nurse by profession and had been there as staff members tried to save her brother's life. She wasn't aware that foul play was suspected because no one told her.
Not then, anyway. Suspicious after Gall's death, the staff at Somerset did some digging. They found that Cullen had been accessing files for patients he wasn't assigned to. They also found that the drug dispersal machine, called a Pixis machine, had logged him taking several medications that none of his patients needed. These machines operated on the use of an employee ID number and unique password.
They logged every medication dispensed and the numbers input by nurses. But unlike any machine, they relied on people, hospital administrators and supervisors, to utilize the information it collected. But it wasn't even the hospital that really started the chain of events that would lead to Cullen's arrest. It was the New Jersey Poison Information and Education System. Dr. Steven Marcus was the director of New Jersey's Poison Control Center in 2003.
He received calls from a pharmacist at Somerset asking for help with dosage information. During the conversation, the pharmacist let slip that a couple of patients had turned up with high levels of insulin. This prompted Marcus to do some digging, and what he found led him to believe that someone was murdering patients at Somerset Medical Center.
In July 2003, Marcus set up a call with the hospital's medical director, Dr. William Kors, and urged the director to contact the authorities. Kors was clearly worried about the implications, saying that he wanted more information before throwing the whole institution into chaos. Armed with this information, the hospital started an internal investigation, an investigation that dragged on for three months.
while Cullen was still allowed to work at the hospital. During the three months it took for Somerset Medical Center to contact the authorities, Charles Cullen killed five more patients. Around this time, Somerset decided to fire Cullen in order to distance themselves from potential lawsuits. They cited incorrect information on his employment application as the reason for termination, but they made the bizarre decision to let him work one full shift before giving him the news.
even after learning that he was likely responsible for several patient deaths. According to Cullen, he didn't murder anyone during that shift, but it seems he easily could have, and in essence, the hospital would have let it happen. Although Somerset had finally fired Cullen, they would still present an obstacle to a criminal investigation.
When detectives Tim Braun and Danny Baldwin finally started looking into the death of Reverend Gall, the hospital seemed to actively oppose their investigation. It was October when the two detectives began gathering evidence. The hospital handed them a list of staff members to check out from their own investigation. One name on that list was Charles Cullen. While researching Cullen, the detectives found that he'd been arrested in Pennsylvania for breaking into the home of a female nurse.
There was also a note on the file that said the Pennsylvania State Police had called a few months earlier asking about Cullen in regard to some other cases. One of the detectives called the Pennsylvania State Police back and learned that Cullen was under suspicion for murdering patients using digoxin while working as a nurse in that state. They also went and interviewed nurses who had worked with him at St. Luke's, and they found a common thread.
The nurses there suspected Cullen of killing patients with the digoxin. Just like that, they were sure they had their man, but proving it would be a different matter. The detectives asked Somerset about records from the Pyxis drug dispensing machine. They wanted to get records going back to when Cullen had first started, but the hospital informed them that the machines only kept records for 30 days. When the detectives contacted the manufacturer, they learned that the hospital had lied to them
There was no limit on how long the records were kept. As long as there was space on the hard drive, there was room for records. After getting a court order for the relevant records, the hospital relented and gave over the information requested. The records were suspicious to be sure, but they weren't damning.
There was a flaw in the system that allowed Cullen to order a drug from the machine and then press cancel. The problem was, if the cancel button was pressed late enough, the machine would still dispense the drug. But on paper, it looked as if the transaction had been canceled. Hardly a smoking gun, they needed something else. They needed to make sure Cullen went away for a long, long time.
So they approached Amy Loughran. At first, she didn't believe that Colin could be a serial killer. To her, he was a soft-spoken, funny, and attentive friend. But the detectives persisted, and they showed her the paperwork from the Pixis, all the canceled transactions. When she saw the printouts, she knew something was up, and she agreed to help bring Colin down.
Amy Loughran wore a wire while with Cullen, recorded their phone conversations and did other things to help investigators prove Cullen's guilt. When she finally broached the subject with him head on during a meal one day, telling Cullen she knew what he'd done, the man's response was that he wanted to go down fighting. That was enough for investigators. They arrested Cullen on December 12th, 2003. He was 44 years old, but it still wasn't over.
Cullen hadn't actually admitted to committing any of the murders. And for justice to be served, the detectives wanted to learn how many people he'd actually killed. Unfortunately, Cullen was refusing to talk to the detectives. Once again, they called in Amy Laughlin. She convinced Cullen to talk by telling him a lie. She told him that the police were going to make her an accomplice to the murders. And if he didn't admit to what he'd done, she would go to jail.
some little piece of empathy was still alive in Cullen. He agreed to confess. Detectives came in and took over. Cullen told them all he could remember, going over his 16-year career and his work in two different states. His confession lasted seven hours. Unfortunately, he couldn't remember the names of a lot of his victims. He'd been a heavy drinker for much of his career. Combine that with the numerous medications he'd been prescribed for his depression,
and his memory was less than stellar. He equated many years of his life to walking through a fog. He told investigators that he was dosing people three to four times a week when he worked at St. Barnabas. He didn't always know the outcomes of the patients he'd dosed, and he had spiked IV bags at random. So there was really no way to know who'd been killed when other nurses hooked up the tainted bags. But investigators wanted more. The prosecutor offered Cullen a deal.
If he agreed to work with authorities to identify all his victims, he would avoid the death penalty. Cullen agreed, and for years, he stayed at Somerville Jail in New Jersey, poring over medical files from the hospitals he'd worked at, trying to point out people he killed. In the end, he admitted to killing 29 people,
Between charges in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, he was ultimately given 18 life sentences. Some familiar with the case estimate he killed close to 400 people over his 16-year career. And as Cullen worked to remember the lives he took, the families of some of his victims waited to say their piece. They wanted to tell Cullen what they thought of him, and they deserved to have their day in court.
But even from jail, Cullen wasn't done touching people's lives. The man who'd used hospitals as his own personal killing grounds soon found himself negotiating to step foot in a hospital again, but this time, he was hoping to save a life. While at Somerville Jail, he received a letter from an ex's mother asking for his help. The woman's son, his ex's brother, needed a kidney transplant.
The problem was, none of his friends or family members were matches. In a desperate plea, the man's mother asked Cullen to get tested for compatibility. With the help of his lawyer and a priest, Cullen got tested and was found to be a match. He wanted to give one of his kidneys to this man to save his life.
Not that it would make up for all the lives he took, but he felt compelled to do it. What he didn't feel compelled to do was attend the sentencing hearing scheduled in Pennsylvania in March of 2006. His lawyer had already told him he didn't have to attend, but the judge wasn't having it. This was the only chance the victim's families would have to tell Cullen what he'd done to them, the hurt he'd caused.
So the judge told Cullen that he could get permission to do the kidney transplant only if he came to Pennsylvania for the hearing. Cullen agreed, but he was clearly not happy about it.
He was upset with the judge for some public comments the man made to the media, so he quickly turned the sentencing hearing into a circus. Soon after the hearing started, Cullen asked the judge to recuse himself. That wasn't going to happen. "Your Honor, you must step down," Cullen said. He was quiet yet insistent at first, but soon he was yelling.
The judge ordered one of the bailiffs to put a spit mask over Cullen's head, but it did little to silence him. Still, the serial killer yelled, repeating the same six words: "Your Honor, you must step down!" Soon, one of the deputies tied a towel around Cullen's mouth. It didn't work for long. Next, they tried duct tape. It was of little use. Meanwhile, the hearing went on as planned.
Family members had to yell to be heard, but Cullen didn't seem to be listening. They told him how he would rot in hell and how he was a monster. Still, Cullen yelled and yelled. He continued to yell as the judge condemned him to multiple life sentences. And then he was whisked out of the room, heading back to jail and eventually to prison, where he wouldn't be eligible for parole until long after his death.
Cullen was allowed to give his kidney to the man in need. And, in what could be considered a silver lining, there were laws passed in Pennsylvania and New Jersey as a result of the Cullen case. In New Jersey, a law was passed requiring hospitals to report negligence, misconduct, and incompetence to the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs.
In Pennsylvania, legislation was enacted to protect employers in the state from being sued for disclosing employment histories about former employees. The two detectives on the case in New Jersey asked for a grand jury, which would have allowed an investigation into the hospitals where Cullen worked. This request was denied.
While some of the hospitals settled with patients' families, there were no criminal charges filed against any hospital administrators in connection with the dozens of murders Cullen committed. As for Cullen, he maintained relative silence until 2013, when he granted an interview that aired on 60 Minutes. In the interview, he claimed he was an angel of mercy. He said that he'd been trying to stop the suffering of those patients he killed. Maybe he thought people wouldn't remember his heinous crimes.
Maybe he thought enough time had passed that he could guide the narrative, or maybe he just wanted the attention. But the truth is, Charles Cullen is a sociopath and a cold-blooded murderer. Trying to see reason in his actions glosses over the lessons we can learn from his murder spree. Lessons that can allow good nurses to thrive, while malicious nurses are stopped before they can damage so many lives.
and, maybe one day, lessons that can help put people first and profit second in the American healthcare industry.