Charles Cullen

What the record shows

Charles Cullen is a former nurse who pleaded guilty to murdering 29 patients at hospitals and a nursing home in New Jersey and Pennsylvania between 1988 and 2003. The Associated Press reported that he pleaded guilty to 22 murders and three attempted murders in New Jersey and seven murders and three attempted murders in Pennsylvania, and that prosecutors in seven counties agreed not to seek the death penalty in return for his help identifying victims. In March 2006 he received 11 consecutive life terms in New Jersey and seven more in Pennsylvania, 18 in all, and is held at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton. Cullen has said he may have killed up to 40 patients; that is his own estimate, not a court finding.

According to the AP, the earliest known killing was that of John W. Yengo, a 72-year-old Jersey City municipal judge treated at Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, New Jersey, in 1988; Cullen admitted putting lidocaine into his intravenous line. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that he injected lethal doses of drugs, chiefly the heart medication digoxin but also insulin and lidocaine, into patients' IV lines or fluid bags at about ten facilities over 16 years. The Superior Court of Pennsylvania, in a 2010 opinion in civil suits against St. Luke's Hospital in Bethlehem, recorded that he worked in its coronary care unit from June 2000 until June 2002, when the hospital accepted his resignation after confronting him about diverted medications, and that he later confessed to killing five named St. Luke's patients, Irene Krapf, Samuel Spangler, Paul Galgon, William Park and Daniel George.

Cullen joined Somerset Medical Center in Somerville, New Jersey, in September 2002. According to CBS News's 60 Minutes, the 2003 death of the Rev. Florian Gall with very high digoxin levels was the second unexplained overdose in two weeks, prompting a pharmacist to alert the state poison control center. The Pennsylvania opinion records that Somerset attributed abnormal lab results to Cullen and fired him in October 2003. Somerset County detectives then built a case with the help of Amy Loughren, a nurse and friend of Cullen's, who reviewed drug-dispensing records, recorded calls and wore a wire at a restaurant meeting with him, CBS reported. He was arrested in December 2003 and confessed that month to New Jersey State Police to killing patients in both states.

The pleas came in stages. In April 2004 Cullen pleaded guilty in Somerset County to 13 murders and two attempted murders at Somerset. In December 2004, the AP reported, he pleaded guilty in Newark to the Yengo murder, bringing his admitted total to 24 murders. In June 2005 he admitted five more digoxin killings, reaching 29. On March 2, 2006, Superior Court Judge Paul Armstrong in Somerville imposed 11 consecutive life terms as victims' relatives addressed him; Cullen said he had nothing to say. On March 10, 2006, Lehigh County President Judge William Platt imposed six life sentences after Cullen repeatedly demanded the judge step down and was gagged, and a Northampton County judge sentenced him in absentia to life without parole for the 1998 death of Ottomar Schramm at Easton Hospital.

In August 2006, with the sentencing judge's permission, Cullen donated a kidney to a New York man, the Inquirer reported. The case produced New Jersey's Cullen Law requiring health care employers to report misconduct, and in 2010 the Pennsylvania Superior Court held that St. Luke's had a duty to tell next of kin when it should have known an employee had killed a patient. In a 2013 interview with 60 Minutes, Cullen said he had thought he was ending suffering but did not know whether he would have stopped. The 2022 Netflix film The Good Nurse dramatized the case.

Cullen was born in West Orange, New Jersey, on February 22, 1960, the youngest of eight children. According to the Wikipedia article, he served in the United States Navy before a 1984 discharge that followed psychiatric admissions, graduated from nursing school in Montclair and started at Saint Barnabas in 1987; he had a history of depression and suicide attempts. Detectives told the AP that Cullen said he acted out of depression; prosecutors rejected his mercy-killing explanation.