#about a serial killer who killed his victims with a lethal injection of insulin or something

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Charles Cullen (1960-?)

Charles Cullen is an American serial killer who confessed that he had killed up to 40 of his patients during a 16-year nursing career, psychiatrists later came to believe it was many more, with experts estimating that Cullen may be responsible for up to 400 deaths. If this is true, it would make him the most prolific serial killer in American history.

Charles Edmund Cullen was born in West Orange, New Jersey, in 1960. He was the youngest of 8. His father was a bus driver and died when Cullen was just 7 months old. Cullen has described his early years as miserable, and at the age of 9 attempted suicide for the first time by drinking chemicals that came in a chemistry set. This was just the first of many suicide attempts throughout his life, even fantasising about stealing drugs from the hospital where he worked as a nurse and using them to end his life. In December 1977 Cullen’s mother died in a car accident – his sister was the driver. 4 months later, and devastated by his mother’s dead, Cullen dropped out of school and joined the Navy. He was assigned to the submarine service, serving aboard ballistic missile submarine USS Woodrow Wilson. Cullen was promoted to petty officer 3rd class and was part of the team that operated the sub’s Poseidon missiles. It was at this point that Cullen started showing signs of mental instability and he was quickly transferred to the supply ship USS Canopus. Cullen tried to kill himself a further 7 times over the next few years, eventually receiving a medical discharge from the Navy on March 30, 1984. The same month he enrolled at the Mountainside Hospital School of Nursing in Montclair, New Jersey – he was the only male student. He was later elected president of his nursing class and graduated in 1987 before taking a job at the burn unit of St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, New Jersey.

The first murders that Cullen would later confess to occurred while he was working at St. Barnabas. On June 11 1988 he gave Judge John W. Yengo, Sr. a lethal overdose of IV medication. Cullen also admitted to killing several other patients at St. Barnabas, including a patient with AIDS who died after being given a lethal dose of insulin. He left St. Barnabas in early 1992 after hospital authorities discovered he may have contaminated IV bags. An internal investigation at St. Barnabas determined it was more than likely that Cullen was responsible for this, resulting in dozens of patient deaths. He was not arrested for these crimes. A month after leaving St. Barnabas, Cullen began working at Warren Hospital in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, where he murdered 3 elderly women at the hospital by giving them overdoses of digoxin (a heart medication). His final victim told family members that a “sneaky male nurse” had injected her in her sleep, but they and healthcare providers dismissed these comments as there was no evidence. A year later, Cullen moved into a basement apartment on Shaffer Avenue in Phillipsburg after an acrimonious divorce from his wife – they shared custody of their daughters. He later claimed that he wanted to leave nursing in 1993 but the court-ordered child support payments forced him to continue working there.

In March of 1993, Cullen broke into the home of a co-worker while she and her young son were asleep, but left without disturbing them. He began to stalk the woman, who filed a police report against him. He subsequently pled guilty to trespassing and was given 1 year’s probation. The day after he was arrested, Cullen tried to commit suicide again. He took 2 months off work and was treated for depression in 2 different psychiatric facilities. He attempted suicide twice more before the end of 1993 before quitting his job at Warren Hospital. He then began a 3 year residency in the intensive care/cardiac care unit of Hunterdon Medical Center in Flemington. He later claimed not to have harmed anyone during the first 2 years, but conveniently, the hospital records for that time had been destroyed by the time of his arrest in 2003. He admitted to murdering 5 patients between January and September 1996, using overdoses of digoxin. Cullen then began working at Morristown Memorial Hospital in Morristown, New Jersey. He was fired for poor performance. Throughout the 2nd half of 1997, Cullen was unemployed and stopped making his child support payments. He sought treatment for depression in the Warren Hospital emergency room and ended up admitted to a psychiatric facility. He left a short time later. In February of 1988, Cullen began working at the Liberty Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Allentown, Pennsylvania where he was head of a ward of respirator-dependent patients. Whilst there, Cullen was accused of meddling with the patients drug schedules and was fired after being seen entering a patients room with syringes in his hands. The patient ended up with a broken arm but managed not to receive any injections. Cullen caused the death of a patient while working at Liberty but it was blamed on another nurse. After leaving Liberty Nursing and Rehab Center he worked at Easton Hospital in Easton, Pennsylvania between November 1998 to March 1999. On December 30, 1998 he murdered another patient using digoxin. A coroner’s inquest detected digoxin in the blood in lethal amounts but an internal investigation was inconclusive and nothing pointed to Cullen as the murderer.

Despite his history of mental instability and the amount of deaths that occurred during his shifts at various hospitals, Cullen continually managed to find work as a nurse due to a national shortage. At the time, no reporting procedures or systems existed to identify nurses with mental health issues or employment problems. Cullen began working in the burn unit of Lehigh Valley Hospital in Allentown, Pennsylvania in March 1999. During his time there he murdered 1 patients and attempted to kill another. In April of the same year Cullen voluntarily resigned before beginning to work at St. Luke’s Hospital in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in the cardiac care unit. Within the next 3 years Cullen is known to have killed at least 5 patients and to have attempted to murder 2 more. On January 11, 2000, Cullen attempted suicide yet again by putting a charcoal grill in his bathtub, lighting it, and hoping the carbon monoxide fumes would kill him. However, Cullen’s neighbours smelled the smoke and called the fire department and the police. Cullen was taken to a hospital and a psychiatric facility but was released the following day. Nobody suspected that Cullen was killing patients at St. Luke’s Hospital until a co-worker found vials of medication (some used, some not) in a disposal bin. The drugs were not worth any money outside the hospital and weren’t used by drug addicts so the theft seemed strange. An investigation ensued and showed that Cullen had taken the medication. He was offered a deal by the medical facility – resign and be given a neutral recommendation or be fired. He resigned and was escorted out of the building in June 2002. 7 of his co-workers at St. Luke’s later met up with the Lehigh County district attorney to alert authorities to their suspicions that Cullen had been using the drugs to kill patients. Investigators didn’t look into Cullen’s past and the case ended up being dropped 9 months later due to lack of evidence.

In September 2002 Cullen began working at the Somerset Medical Center in Somerville, New Jersey in the critical care unit. Around this time Cullen began dating a local woman, but his depression got worse, leading him to kill 8 patients and attempt at least 1 other murder by June 2003. His drugs of choice were digoxin, epinephrine and insulin. On June 18, 2003, Cullen tried to murder Philip Gregor, a patient at Somerset Medical Center but Gregor survived and was discharged before dying of natural causes 6 months later. Not long after this event, Somerset Medical Center began to notice things that indicated Cullen’s activities. The computer system showed that Cullen had been looking at the records of patients that weren’t his, co-workers began seeing him in the rooms of patients that his, and the hospital’s computerised drug-dispensing cabinets showed that Cullen was requesting medications that his patients didn’t need and had not been prescribed. His drug requests were odd, many orders were immediately cancelled and many repeat requests were made within minutes of each other. In July 2003 the executive director of the New Jersey Poison Information and Education System warned Somerset Medical Center officials that at least 4 suspicious overdoses meant that an employee was killing patients. The hospital did not contact authorities until October 2003 and by then Cullen had killed at least 5 more patients and attempted to kill another. When a patient in Somerset died due to low blood sugar in October 2003 the medical center finally alerted state authorities. That patient was Cullen’s last victim. State officials severely reprimanded the hospital for failure to report a nonfatal insulin overdose, administered by Cullen, in August. An investigation into his history revealed past suspicions about his involvement with prior deaths. Somerset Medical Center fired him on October 31, 2003, using the fact he had lied on his job application. Colleague and fellow nurse Amy Loughren called the police after becoming concerned about Cullen’s records of accessing drugs and his links to patient deaths. Police put him under surveillance for several weeks until their investigation had concluded.

Charles Cullen was arrested at a restaurant on December 12, 2003. He was charged with 1 count of murder and 1 count of attempted murder. 2 days later Cullen told detectives Dan Baldwin and Tim Braun about the murder of Rev. Florian Gall and the attempted murder of Jin Kyung Han (both patients at Somerset). Cullen also admitted killing as many as 40 patients over his 16 years as a nurse. In April 2004 Cullen pleaded guilty to killing 13 patients and attempting to kill 2 others by lethal injection while working at Somerset. As part of his plea agreement he agreed to cooperate with authorities if they took the death penalty off the table. 1 month later, he pleaded guilty to the murder of 3 more patients in New Jersey. In November 2004, Cullen pleaded guilty in an Allentown, Pennsylvania court to killing 6 patients and trying to kill 3 others. In July 2005 Cullen was in the Somerset County Jail in New Jersey as authorities continued to investigate the possibility of his involvement in other deaths.

Cullen is currently serving a sentence of life without parole for over 100 years to be served consecutively with his other sentences in Pennsylvania. On March 2, 2006, Cullen was sentenced to 18 consecutive life sentences in New Jersey and is not eligible for parole until 2403. He is currently held at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, New Jersey. On March 10, 2006, Cullen was brought into the courtroom of Lehigh County President Judge William H. Platt for a sentencing hearing. Cullen kept repeating “Your honour, you need to step down” for 30 minutes until Platt ordered Cullen to be gagged with cloth and duct tape. Even after being gagged Cullen continued to try and repeat the phrase. He was given another 6 life sentences. As part of a plea agreement Cullen was working with law enforcement officials to identify additional victims. Cullen originally told authorities about 40 patients he specifically remembered killing during his career. In August 2006, Cullen donated a kidney to the brother of a former girlfriend.