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GREED of US Hospitals Let Serial Killer CHARLES CULLEN Kill 300+Patients
Nurse Charles Cullen - The Most Prolific Serial Killer in American History.
Charles Cullen admitted to killing 29 victims but is believed to have killed more than 300 hospital patients while working as a nurse in New Jersey and Pennsylvania
BBC News 19 APR 2023
Charles Cullen admitted to killing 29 victims but is believed to have killed more than 300 hospital patients while working as a nurse in New Jersey and Pennsylvania
“The Good Nurse,” which debuted on Netflix, draws significantly from Charles Graeber’s forensically researched 2013 book, “The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness and Murder"
The film also scrutinizes the system that allowed Cullen, his nursing license up to date in two states and his record unblemished, to keep working at nine hospitals, leaving a trail of bodies behind at every one
NONE of the hospitals reported him nor were prosecuted
Cullen eventually admitted to killing 29 victims but is believed to have killed more than 300 hospital patients while working as a nurse in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
"The Good Nurse" scrutinizes the system that allowed Cullen, his nursing license up to date in two states and his record unblemished, to keep working at nine hospitals, leaving a trail of bodies behind at every one.
Cullen, the youngest of eight siblings, was a dedicated student and — in 1984 — the only guy in his class at the Mountainside Hospital School of Nursing in Montclair, N.J., according to Charles Graeber's 2013 book (and source material for the 2022 film) "The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness and Murder." The Navy veteran was even elected class president.
He met his future wife, Adrianne Baum, working at a Roy Rogers, one of the handful of part-time jobs he maintained to pay his tuition. Cullen proposed six months after their first date and they tied the knot the week after he graduated from nursing school. They cut their honeymoon to Niagara Falls a day short so he could report for work in the burn unit at Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, N.J., on June 11, 1987.
After stops at Morristown Memorial Hospital (fired for poor performance); Liberty Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Allentown, Pa. (fired after entering a resident's room with syringes and the resident ended up with a broken arm); Easton Hospital, also in Pennsylvania (an internal investigation into a suspicious death due to digoxin was inconclusive); Lehigh Valley Hospital–Cedar Crest in Allentown (voluntarily resigned); St. Luke's Hospital in Bethlehem, Pa. (suspected of stealing medications
He was given the chance to resign; a state pathologist was called in to investigate 69 patient deaths but couldn't confirm a pattern); and Sacred Heart in Allentown (fired after 16 days for not getting along with fellow nurses), Cullen landed at Somerset Medical Center in Somerville, N.J., in September 2002.
The following July, an assistant pharmacist contacted the New Jersey Poison Information and Education System after a series of suspicious deaths due, respectively, to digoxin and insulin overdoses, in the same ward. On poison control's recommendation, Somerset officials finally contacted New Jersey State Police in October 2003.
"It got pushed to the forefront, certainly, by an outside entity refusing to allow that internal process to continue to drag on," Graeber told NPR in 2013. "And it's terrifying to speculate as to what would've happened if [Dr. Bruce Ruck and his boss, Dr. Steven Marcus, at poison control] not pushed it."
Adept with technology, Cullen used the computerized Pyxis MedStation, designed to make keeping track of and checking out drugs more streamlined and secure, to his advantage. According to Graeber's book, authorities eventually saw a pattern: Cullen canceled many of his own orders, having realized that if he ordered but quickly canceled, the drawer had opened but there would be no computer record of the drug being removed.
Guessing investigators were onto him, he changed his method, instead ordering up a suspicious amount of acetaminophen (Tylenol)—which, his friend and fellow nurse Amy Loughren soon realized, shared a drawer with digoxin.
After interviewing many hospital staffers, authorities enlisted Loughren to help analyze the records of Cullen's drug orders. She too wondered why an ICU nurse was acquiring substances needed more in the cardiac wing, plus the combination of meds he was ordering was suspicious. He had also been accessing the charts of other nurses' patients.
After his arrest, in addition to confessing to the charges, Cullen told a detective he had killed 12 to 15 patients, explaining that he had administered lethal doses of digoxin to end their pain and suffering.
At his first hearing days later, where bail was set at $1 million, he told the judge, "I am going to plead guilty. I don't plan to fight this." By then he'd told investigators he had caused 30 or 40 deaths in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Prosecutor Wayne J. Forrest called the case against Cullen "by far the largest homicide investigation ever in Somerset County,'' and possibly the state. Investigators have said that the number of Cullen's victims could be closer to 400, but without his corroboration, most would be impossible to prove in a court of law.
All told, the case encompassed multiple counties, numerous exhumations of remains and months of testing.
Cullen ultimately pleaded guilty in 2005 to 29 counts of murder committed between 1988 and 2003 in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, as well as six attempted murders. Somerset County Superior Court Judge Paul W. Parker sentenced him in March 2006 to 11 consecutive life sentences for the 22 murders in New Jersey.
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