INTRODUCTION
Charles Edmund Cullen was born on February 22, 1960, and is an ex-nurse and a convicted angel of the death-type serial killer. Cullen confessed to the authorities in December 2003 that he had murdered up to 45 patients during his 16 years long career as a nurse in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. However, successive interviews with police, psychiatrists, etc., revealed the fact that he had killed many more, whom he could not remember the name. This revelation led to the estimation that he may have been responsible for about 400 deaths making him the most prolific serial killer in history.
BACKGROUND OF THE CASE
Charles Cullen was the eighth and the youngest child born in a working-class Irish Catholic family in West Orange, New Jersey. His father Edmond, who was a bus driver, died when Charles was just an infant. Two of his siblings also died in their adulthood. His stepfather, Meme Cullen raped him when he was just a child and he used to get bullied by his schoolmates. All these events led Cullen to describe his childhood as “miserable” and became a reason for his first of many suicide attempts at the age of 9, by drinking chemicals from the chemistry lab. The death of his mother in a car accident proved devastating to Cullen and led him to drop out of high school. He later got enrolled in the U.S. Navy. But during his time in the Navy too, he was bullied by his crewmen. Cullen attempted suicide several times during his time in the Navy till he received a medical discharge from the Navy in 1984.
Shortly thereafter, he graduated from Mountainside Hospital School of Nursing in Montclair in 1986 and started working at St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston. As a nurse, he fantasized about stealing drugs from the hospital and using them to end his life. Around the same time, he met and married his wife Adrianne Baum. The couple had two daughters.
ALL EVENTS AND CRIMES
The first of the many murders Cullen committed to which he later confessed, occurred at St. Barnabas on June 11, 1988. He administered an overdose of intravenous medication to a patient which proved to be lethal. Cullen later confessed to killing many other patients before he left St. Barnabas in January 1992 when the hospital authorities began getting suspicious about the contaminated IV bags.
After sometime, he took a job at Warren Hospital, where he committed the murder of three elderly women with an overdose of heart medicine digoxin. Cullen said that he wanted to quit nursing, but the child support payments ordered by the court forced him to continue working. In March 1993, Cullen started stalking a co-worker and even broke into her home while she was asleep. He subsequently pleaded guilty to trespassing and received one year of probation. He had again attempted suicide thrice before the end of 1993. Cullen worked at Warren for some time.
Cullen also admitted murdering five patients in the year 1996, again with overdoses of digoxin while working at Hunterdon Medical Center in Flemington. He remained unemployed for six months and was under treatment for depression in the Warren Hospital emergency room. Cullen was accused of giving patients drugs at unscheduled times at Liberty Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Pennsylvania. He caused a patient’s death at Liberty Hospital, which he blamed on another nurse. He murdered another patient at Easton Hospital with digoxin.
In 1999, Cullen then took a job at Allentown’s Lehigh Valley Hospital, where he murdered one patient and attempted to murder another. During the subsequent three years, he murdered at least five patients and attempted to kill two more at St. Luke’s Hospital in Bethlehem. An investigation showed that Cullen had taken the medication at St. Luke’s. In 2002, he started working at Somerset Medical Center in Somerville and killed at least thirteen patients and attempted to kill at least one more by mid-2003, using digoxin, insulin, and epinephrine. The hospital began suspecting Cullen because the hospital’s computer system showed that he accessed the records of patients to whom he was not assigned and was requesting medications that his patients had not been prescribed. Cullen had killed at least five patients and attempted to kill a sixth by the month of October 2003. The death of a patient because of low blood sugar in Somerset, caused the hospital to inform the New Jersey State Police. That patient was Cullen’s final victim. Somerset finally fired Cullen on October 31, 2003.
MOTIVE
Cullen said that he administered overdoses to patients to spare them from all the suffering and from being “coded” i.e., going into cardiac or respiratory arrest, and to prevent the hospital from “dehumanizing” them.
MODUS OPERANDI
Just like an Angel of Death, Cullen targeted patients at hospitals at which he worked. Most of his victims were no younger than 60. He killed them by contaminating their IV bags, with high doses of insulin, digoxin, or epinephrine.
FORENSIC INVESTIGATION
Exhumation of some of the victims and subsequent toxicological analysis showed that the victims had been administered unnatural amounts of insulin, digoxin, etc. which might have ultimately caused their death.
JUDGEMENT
The arrest of Cullen took place on December 12, 2003, being charged with one murder and one attempt to murder. On December 14, he admitted to detectives Dan Baldwin and Tim Braun that he had murdered Florian Gall and attempted to murder Jin Kyung Han at Somerset. Also, Cullen admitted that he had murdered as many as 40 patients over his 16-year career. In April 2004, he pled guilty in a New Jersey court to killing 13 patients and attempting to kill two others at Somerset. After a month, he pled guilty to the murder of three more patients in New Jersey. In November 2004, he pled guilty in an Allentown court to killing six patients and trying to kill three others. He continuously interrupted the proceedings and taunted the judge with the chant, “Your Honor, you need to step down.” On March 2, 2006, Cullen was sentenced to eleven consecutive life sentences in New Jersey and is not eligible for parole until the year 2403. Currently, he is held at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton. In the hearing on March 10, 2006, Platt gave him an additional six life sentences for interrupting the proceedings.
REFERENCES
- Yorker, B.C., Kizer, K.W., Lampe, P., Forrest, A.R.W., Lannan, J.M. and Russell, D.A., 2006. Serial murder by healthcare professionals. Journal of Forensic Sciences, 51(6), pp.1362-1371.
- https://www.mcall.com/news/all-complications1221-story.html
- https://murderpedia.org/male.C/c/cullen-charles.htm
- https://criminalminds.fandom.com/wiki/Charles_Cullen
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Cullen
Author
J S Swetha
Intern, Dept. of Forensic Science and Criminal Investigation
Legal Desire Media & Insights