Nurses Who Kill Charles Cullen

Angels of Death tells how nurse Charles Cullen killed patients.

January 5, 2015

HIS job was to look after the sickest of the sick. People recovering from horrific burns and life-threatening illnesses. But ‘Satan’s Son’ betrayed their trust in the greatest way imaginable murdering dozens of patients. Emily Webb tells his story in a new book.

LOVE was what Charles Cullen, a nurse in New Jersey, USA, believed could save him from the death wish that had been his companion since he was a child.

At just nine years of age, Cullen had made his first suicide attempt by drinking a mixture from a home chemistry set. The attempts to end his life would continue for years until he found another way to channel the self-disgust, low self-esteem and depression that had plagued him for most of his life. In fact, Cullen’s mental torment and victim mentality belied a rat cunning that saw him prey on some of the most helpless, sick and trusting patients whose families believed they were safe and would be nursed with care and compassion.

Little did they know that their loved ones were in grave danger at the hands of Nurse Cullen, who had a compulsion to kill. Cullen was able to hide away by working graveyard shifts in intensive care units (ICUs). The unsociable hours and inability for patients to communicate with him meant that Cullen could murder easily. There was no one to watch him and there was effortless access to his weapon of choice — prescription drugs.

Cullen is serving multiple life sentences at Trenton State Prison, New Jersey, for the murders and attempted murders of 29 patients — he also pleaded guilty to seven murders and three attempted murders while he was working in Pennsylvania. After he was arrested in 2003, Cullen told investigators that he estimated he had killed between 30 and 40 patients during his 16-year career at 10 healthcare facilities. These are the crimes that he confessed to but investigators believe there were many, many more victims, possibly hundreds.

Cullen tried desperately to hide his dark desires by trying to squeeze himself into a so-called normal life that he had craved since childhood. Divorced with two daughters, Cullen was living with a nurse who was pregnant with his third child at the time of his arrest. This was his attempt to find the love he had always felt was missing from his life. He told investigators, during a marathon seven-hour interview, that he believed love could halt the sickness in his mind that made him kill.

But Cullen was always a loner and his life was not a success. Neighbours who knew Cullen as a child and young man, described him as socially inept and strange.

Charles Edmund Cullen was born on 22 February 1960 in West Orange, New Jersey, the last of eight children. His family were working class and strong Catholics. Florence Cullen kept the home, as most women did those days, and Edmond Cullen drove buses to pay the bills and feed his brood. Little did the couple know but their little Charlie would grow up to bring shame and shock to the ‘Garden State’.

New Jersey (NJ) is famous for musicians Bon Jovi, Frank Sinatra and Bruce Springsteen, among others, but also has a disturbing crime history. Mass murderer John List annihilated his family — mother, wife and three children — in 1971 in their Westfield, NJ, home and then disappeared for 18 years. He was arrested in Virginia in 1989, after a tip to television show America’s

Most Wanted when it revisited the crime and revealed a life-like, age-progressed bust of what List may have looked like.

The state is also home to the first documented ‘lone gunman’ killing spree in modern American history. In 1949, Howard Unruh, a 28-year-old war veteran, gunned down random strangers in a street in the town of Camden and killed 13 people, including three children. Unruh died in 2009 at age 88, having spent 60 years in a psychiatric institution.

Tragedy struck the Cullen family when Charles was just seven months old. His father, who was in his late 50s at the time of his youngest son’s birth, died and left his wife to struggle alone, raising her children on a pension.

Growing up, little Charles was not popular and was the target of bullies. He was a weedy, pale kid and one that teachers and fellow students would have found hard to remember, had it not been for the fact that he grew up to be one of America’s most prolific murderers. He was intelligent but odd and this was what attracted the attention of the other children who would target Cullen’s weaknesses and inability to connect with his peers and tease him.

Such was his unhappiness with life that Cullen made his first attempt at suicide by drinking a concoction made from a chemistry set. It did not give him the escape he craved so he plunged deeper into a fantasy life and a nihilistic view of the world. He had few friends at Our Lady of Lourdes Grammar School and later, West Orange High School.