The story of Charles Cullen, the evil nurse who became a serial killer

Charles, as his acquaintances called him, spent two decades of his life working as a nursea profession characterized by caring for others. However, that was not a quality that Cullen shared with his colleagues, who after several situations, began to suspicious of man’s behaviorwhich after a while became one of the America’s most prolific serial killers.

At midnight on December 14, 2003, an extensive interrogation was taking place in the corner of a police office in New Jersey, in it, was Cullen.

“I did not want people to see me as this, what I am,” declared the man after taking so long in his confession. “I am a man, a person who was trusted and caused many deaths. I hate myself for it because I don’t think I have the right, but I can’t stop, I couldn’t”.

Cullen had been arrested on one count of murder and one count of attempted murder of patients at Somerset Medical Center. Both accusations were recognized as “formal” two days before his arrest and interrogation, but seven hours later they made the difference to discover the trail of lives that were chasing him.

The nurse confessed to committing the crimes of those who accused him, adding 40 more to the list, the same ones that occurred in his last 16 years of career.

Timeline of overdose everywhere

His first murder occurred in 1988. Cullen administered a lethal medication overdose intravenously to a patient who had suffered an allergic reaction to a drug. It would be the first of a total of 11 homicides that he would commit in St. Barnabaswhere he worked until later, until 1992.

With auras of suspicion on his shoulders, the male nurse entered another place, the Warren Hospital on Phillipsburg, also in New Jersey. In it, he ended the lives of three older women with an overdose of digoxin.

His wife was also a victim, although she did not end up like her previous targets, due to domestic violence she asked for a divorce. In the judicial process they went through, Charles was described as a very aggressive alcoholic who he stuffed pets into bags and trash cans, poured lighter fluid into other people’s drinks, and pranked funeral homes. In his interrogation, he said that the suicidal thoughts returned that year.

Cullen began to create a strategy, every time his employers suspected him, the nurse resigned and started working in another hospital. In each of them he found new victims, most of them were killed due to heavy medication overdosebut he had a favorite and that he repeated constantly.

By the end of the 1990s, Charles’s career began to be filled with doubts. However, due to the shortage of nurses in the United States, the killer continued to find work. In ’99 he accepted a position in a burn unit at a hospital in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he completed yet another homicide. Some time later, in St. Luke’s Hospital in BethlehemPennsylvania, in the cardiac care unit, murdered five patients throughout his three years of work.

The breaking point in his chain of homicides was in 2002, when a colleague discovered medicine bottles unused in a dumpster, with it he was able to prove that it was Cullen who had stolen the drugs, so He was fired in June of that same year.

They were seven nurses who met with the Lehigh County Prosecutor and declared everything they knew about Cullen. However, the evidence was not enough for the researchers, so they dropped the case up to seven months later. Time in which Charles surprisingly got a job again in the same health area.

A year later, colleagues from another hospital claimed to see him enter and leave rooms that did not correspond to him, in addition, They discovered that he was requesting medication without a prescription.

In July 2003, the New Jersey Poison Information and Education System warned Somerset Medical Center that at least four suspected overdoses at its facility may have been caused by an employee. In the three months that the investigation took Cullen murdered 5 more people.

The hospital was sanctioned and Charles was placed under investigation after being fired. In December of that year the murderer was arrested and confessed everything, alleging that he wanted to “end his suffering” and that he did not even know the real number of victims he killed. The police authorities assured that they could be much more than the 40 declared.

On March 2, 2006, the nurse was sentenced to eleven consecutive life sentences in New Jerseyand it was also considered as ineligible for the benefit of parole for 397 yearsso to this day remains serving the sentence in the New Jersey State Prison, in Trenton.

The events caused such a stir in the country that in 2022 a film about his death will be released. macabre modus operandi and efforts to arrest him. (I)