What did Charles Cullen do?
Charles Cullen is an American serial killer who is believed to have murdered as many as 100 victims, with the possibility of more. Cullen was a nurse who killed his patients during a 16 year career. Cullen worked at a number of different hospitals and everywhere he went, patients died in mysterious circumstances. It is believed his first murders occurred while working at Saint Barnabas hospital in the late 1980s. He administered a lethal overdose of intravenous medication to one patient, and authorities think he killed more while working there.
One month after leaving Saint Barnabus, Cullen took a job at Warren Hospital in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. He murdered at least three elderly women there with overdoses of heart medication digoxin. After a bitter divorce, Cullen later claimed he wanted to quit nursing in 1993, but child support payments forced him to continue working.
Cullen’s next job was in the intensive care unit of Hunterdon Medical Centre in Flemington, New Jersey, where he spent three years, and he later admitted to killing five patients here between January and September 1996. He moved on to Morristown Memorial hospital, but was fired for poor performance.
Cullen spent time out of work but returned to nursing in 1998, and worked at numerous institutions. Deaths continued to follow him everywhere he went, and in 2003, the hospital he was working at alerted the police when a patient died of low blood sugar. This would be Cullen’s final victim, as his past started to piece together. Police kept him under surveillance for many weeks while they conducted an investigation. Investigators assigned one of his colleagues to wear a wire and visit Cullen off shift, and with this evidence, police arrested him.
What happened after Cullen was arrested?
Cullen was arrested in a restaurant in late 2003 and charged with one count of murder. Cullen ended up admitting to over 40 murders in his 16-year career. He pleaded guilty to killing 13 patients. As part of his plea agreement, Cullen would cooperate in order to avoid the death penalty. On the 2nd March, 2006, Cullen was sentenced to 11 consecutive life sentences.
Where is Charles Cullen now?
Charles Cullen is serving his sentence at the New Jersey State Prison. He is 63 years of age.
Cullen was the subject of the Netflix film, The Good Nurse, in 2022, with Eddie Redmayne taking on the role of Cullen. In the same year, a documentary was released called Capturing the Killer Nurse and included interviews with Cullen, his co-workers and detectives on the case.
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The statement that the hospital, Somerset Medical Center called the police resulting in the arrest is a gross overstatement. The NJ Poison Center alerted the NJ Department of Health in June of a cluster of strange overdoses in the ICU at Somerset Medical Center. There is evidence that the NJDOH ignored the findings of its own investigation and failed to report the situation to the police. The investigating detectives for Somerset County still had no idea who finally asked their office to investigate the situation, but they also stated that the hospital was not only not cooperative, but actually stonewalled their investigation. They reached out to the poison center which provided them with the information back to the June report and helped investigate other illnesses and deaths at that and other hospitals.