Charles Cullen’s Biography, Net Worth, Fact, Career, Awards and Life Story
Cullen’s first confessed murders occurred at St. Barnabas. On June 11, 1988, he administered a lethal overdose of intravenous medication to a patient. He admitted to killing several other patients at St. Barnabas, including an AIDS patient who died after being given an overdose of insulin. Cullen left St. Barnabas in January 1992 when hospital authorities began investigating who had contaminated IV bags; the investigation determined that Cullen was most likely responsible, resulting in dozens of patient deaths at the hospital.
One month after leaving St. Barnabas, Cullen took a job at Warren Hospital in Phillipsburg, where he murdered three elderly women by giving them overdoses of the heart medication digoxin. His final victim said that a “sneaky male nurse” had injected her as she slept, but family members and healthcare providers at the hospital dismissed her comments as unfounded. The following year, Cullen moved into a basement apartment in Phillipsburg following a contentious divorce from his wife; he shared custody of his daughters. He would later claim that he 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 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, Cullen attempted suicide again. He took two months off work and was treated for depression in two psychiatric facilities, but attempted suicide twice more before the end of 1993. That September, a 91 year old cancer patient 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 non-natural and Warren Hospital administered lie detector tests to Cullen and several other nurses, which he passed. He continued to work at Warren until leaving the following spring.
Cullen began a three-year stint in the intensive care/cardiac care unit of Hunterdon Medical Center in Flemington. He claimed that he did not harm anyone during the first two years, but hospital records for that time period had been destroyed by the time he was arrested in 2003. He did admit to murdering five patients between January and September 1996, again with overdoses of digoxin. Cullen then found work at Morristown Memorial Hospital, but was soon fired for poor performance. Cullen remained unemployed for six months and stopped making child-support payments. After seeking treatment for depression in the Warren Hospital emergency room, Cullen was admitted to a psychiatric facility but left a short time later.
In February 1998, Cullen was hired by the Liberty Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he staffed a ward of respirator-dependent patients. There, Cullen was accused of giving patients drugs at unscheduled times and was fired after being seen entering a patient’s room with syringes in his hand. The patient ended up with a broken arm, but apparently received no injections. Cullen caused a patient’s death at Liberty Hospital, which was blamed on another nurse. After leaving Liberty, he was employed at Easton Hospital in Easton, Pennsylvania, from November 1998 to March 1999. On December 30, 1998, he murdered yet another patient with digoxin. A coroner’s blood test showed lethal amounts of digoxin in the patient’s blood, but an internal investigation within Easton Hospital was inconclusive; nothing pointed definitively to Cullen as the murderer.
Even with his history of mental instability and the number of deaths during his employment at various hospitals, Cullen continued to find work due to a national shortage of nurses. Additionally, no reporting mechanism existed at the time to identify nurses with mental health or employment problems and hospitals, concerned about liability, were unwilling to take significant action against him. In March 1999, Cullen took a job at the burn unit of Allentown’s Lehigh Valley Hospital, where he murdered one patient and attempted to murder another. One month later, he voluntarily resigned from Lehigh Valley Hospital and took a job working in the cardiac care unit at St. Luke’s Hospital in Bethlehem. Within the next three years, Cullen murdered at least five patients and is known to have attempted to kill two more. On January 11, 2000, he once again attempted suicide by lighting a charcoal grill in his bath tub, hoping to succumb to carbon monoxide poisoning. Cullen’s neighbors smelled smoke and called the fire department and police. He was taken to a hospital and a psychiatric facility, but returned home the following day.
No one suspected Cullen was murdering patients at St. Luke’s until a co-worker found vials of medication in a disposal bin. The drugs were not valuable outside the hospital and were not used by recreational drug users, so their theft seemed curious. An investigation 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 from the building in June 2002. Seven of his co-workers at St. Luke’s later alerted the Lehigh County district attorney about their suspicions that Cullen had used drugs to kill patients. Investigators never looked into Cullen’s past, and the case was dropped nine months later due to lack of evidence.
In September 2002, Cullen began working in the critical care unit of the Somerset Medical Center in Somerville, New Jersey. He began dating a local woman around this time, but his depression worsened. Cullen killed around 13 patients and attempted to kill at least one more by mid-2003, using digoxin, insulin, and epinephrine. On June 18, 2003, Cullen unsuccessfully attempted to murder Somerset patient Philip Gregor, who was later discharged; he died six months later of natural causes.
Soon afterward, Somerset began to notice clues indicating Cullen’s wrongdoing. The hospital’s computer system showed that Cullen was accessing the records of patients to whom he was not assigned, co-workers began seeing him in the rooms of patients’ to whom he was not assigned, and the hospital’s computerized drug-dispensing cabinets showed that he was requesting medications that his patients had not been prescribed. Cullen’s drug requests were strange, with many orders that were immediately canceled, and many repetitive requests within minutes of each other. In July 2003, the executive director of the New Jersey Poison Information and Education System warned Somerset officials that at least four suspicious overdoses indicated the possibility that an employee was killing patients. The hospital delayed contacting authorities until October. By then, Cullen had killed at least another five patients and attempted to kill a sixth.
When a patient in Somerset died of low blood sugar in October 2003, the hospital alerted the New Jersey State Police. That patient was Cullen’s final victim. State officials castigated the hospital for failing to report a nonfatal insulin overdose, administered by Cullen, in August. An investigation into his employment history revealed past suspicions about his involvement with prior deaths. Somerset fired Cullen on October 31, 2003, ostensibly for lying on his job application. Fellow nurse Amy Loughren alerted the police after becoming alarmed about Cullen’s records of accessing drugs and links to patient deaths. Police kept him under surveillance for several weeks, until they had finished their investigation.
Police investigators assigned nurse and co-worker Amy Loughren to visit Cullen after work hours and talk with him while wearing a wire. From this, they were able to produce enough evidence for probable cause of arrest.
