Charles Cullen
On February 22, 1960, The Angel of Death, otherwise known as Charles Edmund Cullen, was brought into a world where he’d face the death of loved ones and the cruelty of humanity. In September of 1960, when Cullen was just 7 months old, his father passed away. From then on, life became difficult for Cullen and his family. His mother, Florence, was left to raise eight children by herself, which affected her emotionally and financially. Growing up, Cullen was teased by his classmates and attempted suicide by mixing together different chemicals from a chemistry set and drinking it.
By his teenage years, the teasing turned into bullying, and around the same time, on December 6, 1977, his mother was killed in a car accident. During this hard time, he suffered from severe and chronic mental health issues, including severe depression and antisocial personality traits. He also had a history of suicide attempts and psychiatric hospitalizations. Because of this, he started to commit vile actions towards the people who tormented him. One incident of bullying happened at a party he was attending. As revenge, he spiked their drinks with rat poison, but it didn’t result in any deaths, which led to the incident being unreported at the time.
In April of 1978, Cullen dropped out of high school to enlist in the U.S. Navy, training to become a ballistic missile technician. Unfortunately, the military wasn’t any different from high school for Cullen. His fellow crew members would continue to taunt and ridicule him. Because of Cullen’s untreated psychological instability, he showed strange behavior in the work environment. An incident happened where Cullen was found wearing a stolen hospital gown, mask, and gloves, sitting on the missile control panel. After this incident, he was reassigned to another vessel. Three years later, he was discharged, but it wasn’t stated whether it was for medical or psychological reasons.
After his discharge, Cullen decided to attend the Mountainside Hospital School of Nursing in Montclair, New Jersey. In the spring of 1986, Cullen’s life started to come together when he graduated from nursing school and married Adrienne Taub. But that June, his brother James died of a drug overdose. Later that same month, he was accepted into his first job in the burn unit of Saint Barbara’s Medical Center in Livingston, New Jersey. Facing the grief of his brother and suffering from depression, that hospital became the place where Cullen committed his first murder.
Life with Cullen
Cullen’s first victim was a 72 year old patient named John Yengo. Yengo had been admitted to Saint Barbara’s burn unit with severe sunburn. A few days later, Cullen intentionally injected him with a fatal dose of lidocaine that ended Yengo’s life. From there, Cullen began to drink heavily and started to abuse his family. The abuse was worse during the winter: Cullen would turn the heat off and make his family endure frigid temperatures. He also tortured the family’s two Yorkshire Terriers by putting them in trash bins regularly.
In 1992, Cullen was fired from Saint Barbara’s Medical Center and took a job in Warren Hospital’s coronary care unit. That same year, his second daughter was born, but the abuse didn’t change, which resulted in his wife finally leaving him. She filed a domestic violence complaint and asked for a restraining order against him. But, according to the judge, Cullen was only guilty of “odd behavior, not threatening violence.” During the divorce process, Cullen began committing criminal activities again, claiming two other victims and even breaking into a woman’s home. As the years went on, his violence only worsened and his victim count continued to increase.
16 Year Spree
For 16 years, Cullen jumped from hospital to hospital, killing more and more patients until 2002. In September of 2002, he started working at Somerset Medical Center. During just one year of working there, he took the lives of 13 patients. One of those victims was 21-year-old Michael Strenko. Strenko was admitted for a spleen surgery that he should have recovered from easily. Instead, Cullen shortened his life by injecting him with a high dose of norepinephrine. It was odd for there to be so many unexplained deaths in one year, so rumors and speculations started, which drew suspicion to Cullen. The amount of negative attention he was getting was enough for an official investigation to begin.
The Investigation
Amy Loughren was a fellow nurse at Somerset Medical Center and one of Cullen’s close friends. Lead Investigators Tim Braun and Danny Baldwin, who worked for the Somerset County prosecutor’s office, asked Loughren to help them gather evidence to prove that Cullen was a murderer. They showed her Cullen’s irregular drug requests in computerized records and she immediately agreed to help them with the investigation. Loughren invited Cullen to have a meeting at a local diner. While they were talking, Loughren tried to manipulate Cullen into confessing his crimes (which he didn’t), but he did make incriminating statements. Cullen believed he was just having a normal meeting with a close friend, not realizing that there was a wire under Laughren’s coat that investigators utilized to hear Cullen the entire time. Cullen was arrested on December 13, 2003, and charged with one count of murder and one count of attempted murder. After his arrest, Cullen confessed to murdering at least 29 patients during his 16 year nursing career. Although, some experts estimate that his actual victim count may have been over 400.
In Court
To avoid the death penalty, Cullen reached a plea agreement and helped authorities identify his victims. He pleaded guilty to 29 murders and six attempted murders. In March 2006, he was sentenced to 11 consecutive life sentences by a New Jersey judge. He later received an additional six life sentences in Pennsylvania. In the courtroom, Cullen was very disruptive and taunted the judge by saying “your honor, you need to step down.” Authorities eventually had to gag and bind him with duct tape to allow the proceedings to continue without further disruptions.
Aftermath
After Cullen’s story was released, it highlighted many major failures in the healthcare industry, which led to new policies being formed to prevent anything like this from happening again. In response to this case, New Jersey passed the Healthcare Professional Responsibility Enhancement Act (often referred to as “Cullen Law”) in 2005. This law requires all hospitals in New Jersey to report misconduct and provide honest employee appraisals to prevent dangerous workers from working between facilities. There are also many other similar laws in other states all over the U.S.
In 2022, a movie called The Good Nurse was released; it is based on Cullen’s story. Soon after, Netflix released a documentary titled Capturing The Killer Nurse. The documentary features Amy Loughren herself, the detectives involved, and the audio recording of Charles Cullen.
Though the number of lives Cullen has taken away will probably never officially be determined, his nickname, “The Angel of Death,” is used to symbolize all the people whose lives he cut short. Cullen will go down in American history as one of the most prolific serial killers we have ever seen.
References:
“Angel of Death: Killer Nurse Stopped, but Not Soon Enough.” Www.cbsnews.com, 29 Apr. 2013, www.cbsnews.com/news/angel-of-death-killer-nurse-stopped-but-not-soon-enough-29-04-2013/.
BBC. “Woman’s Hour – “There’s No Way to Process It”: How I Found out My Friend Charlie Was a Serial Killer.” BBC, 11 Oct. 2022, www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3vCzxnrL21JTtP3RK04MWr1/there-s-no-way-to-process-it-how-i-found-out-my-friend-charlie-was-a-serial-killer.
Harvey, Austin. ““Angel of Death”: The Chilling Story of Charles Cullen, the Nurse Who Murdered up to 400 Patients.” All That’s Interesting, 27 Oct. 2022, allthatsinteresting.com/charles-cullen.
lehighvalleylive.com, Steve Novak | For. “When Killer Nurse Charles Cullen Admitted: I Killed 40 People | Historical Headlines.” Lehighvalleylive, 10 Dec. 2023, www.lehighvalleylive.com/news/2023/12/when-killer-nurse-charles-cullen-admitted-i-killed-40-people-historical-headlines.html.
“Pretending to Be a “Good Nurse,” Serial Killer Targeted Patients.” NPR.org, 15 Apr. 2013, www.npr.org/2013/04/15/177029738/pretending-to-be-a-good-nurse-serial-killer-targeted-patients.
Sky News. “Charles Cullen: The True Story of a Hospital Killer and “the Good Nurse” Who Brought Him to Justice.” Sky News, 31 Oct. 2022, news.sky.com/story/the-good-nurse-the-true-story-of-killer-charles-cullen-and-the-colleague-who-brought-him-to-justice-12729287.
“The Good Nurse.” Nursingcenter.com, 2023, www.nursingcenter.com/journalarticle?Article_ID=6576153&Journal_ID=54008&Issue_ID=6575364.
