Charles Cullen

Charles Edmund Cullen (born February 22, 1960) 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 who are intimately involved in the case believe 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 on February 22, 1960, in West Orange, New Jersey. His father, Edmond, a bus driver, died on September 17, 1960, when Charles was seven months old. Cullen later described his childhood as "miserable" and claimed to have been constantly bullied by his schoolmates and sisters' boyfriends. When he was age nine, he made the first of many suicide attempts by 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. Cullen, then 18 years old, was in his senior year of high school. Cullen recalled his mother's death as being "devastating" and described being upset that the hospital did not immediately inform him of her death and cremated her body instead of returning it.

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 (who were expected to spend as long as two months at a time being submerged in a cramped vessel). 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 (like his school days) 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 mask, gloves, and scrubs rather than his uniform. Cullen was disciplined for that action but never explained why he had dressed that way. The Navy reassigned Cullen to a lower-pressure job on the supply ship USS ''Canopus''. He attempted suicide and was committed to the Navy psychiatric ward several times over the subsequent few years. Cullen received a medical discharge from the Navy in 1984 for undisclosed reasons.

Shortly after his discharge, Cullen enrolled at Mountainside Hospital's nursing school in Montclair, New Jersey. Elected president of his nursing class, he graduated in 1987 and started work at the burn unit of Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, New Jersey.

Meanwhile, Cullen met and married Adrianne Baum in 1987. Their daughter, the first of two girls, was born later that year. However, Cullen's wife became increasingly disturbed at his unusual behavior and his abuse of the family dogs. In 1993, she filed a restraining order against him based on her fear that he might endanger her and their two children. She claimed that Cullen had spiked people's drinks with lighter fluid, burned his daughter's books, and left his daughters with a babysitter for a week. Cullen denied these claims, saying that his wife was exaggerating. Nevertheless, she continued to insist that Cullen was mentally ill.

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 the 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 at Warren Hospital in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, where he murdered three elderly women with overdoses of the heart medication digoxin. His final victim said that a "sneaky male nurse" had injected her as she slept. However, family members and health care providers at the hospital dismissed her comments as unfounded.

The following year, Cullen moved into a basement apartment in Phillipsburg after a contentious divorce from his wife. Cullen later claimed that he had wanted to quit nursing in 1993, but the court-ordered child support payments forced him to continue working. 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. The day after his arrest, he made another suicide attempt.

Cullen took two months off from work and was treated for depression in two psychiatric facilities. However, he attempted suicide twice more by the end of the year. That September, a 91-year-old cancer patient at Warren Hospital reported that Cullen, who was not her assigned nurse, had come into her room and injected her with a needle. She died the next day. Her son protested that her death was not natural, and the hospital administered a lie detector test to Cullen and several other nurses, which he passed. Cullen continued to work at Warren until the following spring.

Cullen began a three-year stint in the intensive care unit of Hunterdon Medical Center in Flemington, New Jersey

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases