Capturing the Killer Nurse (2022) Movie Script
You know, in my life,
I've gotten a lot of happiness
out of helping people.
So I thought
it would be a good thing for me
to become a nurse.
I started off working at night.
I would find myself...
feeling overwhelmed.
Feeling like
I couldn't watch people hurt.
At times, the only thing I could do...
was to try and end their suffering.
I couldn't stop.
You are my sunshine
My only sunshine...
Breaking news now
from New Jersey.
The whole town is reeling
from the revelations.
When skies are gray...
A nurse has been
murdering patients in a hospital
in Somerset County.
The nurse may be
the most prolific serial killer
in American history.
Please don't take my sunshine away
I was a single mom,
and I started working at Somerset
as a critical care nurse.
My two daughters, I would drop them off
at school and drive to New Jersey.
Oh, it was a great,
great little town.
The hospital was the heart
of the community.
I was young. I was energetic.
I was a little on the hyper side.
I know one of the senior nurses
had banned me from drinking coffee.
Amy was really special.
You know, it was always nice when we were
working on the same side together.
I loved being an ICU nurse.
Those patients, I loved feeling
like I was their protector.
And I was going to do everything
that I could to make sure they were okay.
We deal with death.
We literally step
in front of the face of danger.
It's a very precarious place to be.
So we had to rely on each other.
And Charlie was the best teammate.
I loved working with him.
He was an excellent nurse,
and he always had a way of saying
something that would make me laugh.
The three of us worked together
most of the time.
Get another IV.
Wewere named The Three Musketeers.
We worked together really well.
Charlie.
After that came out,
I called him the Somerset spokesmodel,
which he was.
And everyone saw that flyer.
Everyone associated Somerset
Medical Center with Charles Cullen.
He has his quintessential smirk,
and you can even tell
from that particular photo
he's very proud
that someone wants to take his picture
and someone's asking his opinion.
You know, I always felt
that he was the boy that was bullied.
That was the air that I got from him.
And I always wanted to protect him.
My brother, Florian,
always wanted to be a priest.
I think people might have said
that, you know, he was shy,
but when it came to things
that he felt strongly about,
he was very passionate.
He was not only a brother, but a friend.
One day, he called me
about two o'clock in the morning.
He said, "I'm having
some trouble breathing."
So I said,
"Fine, I'll meet you at the hospital."
He was going to Somerset.
The doctor in the ER saw him.
But he was getting
very, very short of breath.
They came and said
that they had to intubate him.
I remember Reverend Gall
because he was there for quite some time.
And his sister
was always at the bedside.
The doctor said,
"He made it through the night."
"Let's give it time, you know.
We're being cautiously optimistic."
"He seems to be better."
"He's stable."
I remember being there and saying,
"Well, Florian, I'm gonna go."
And I could see he, like, perked up.
Like, you know, he heard me.
Reverend Gall was getting better.
He had actually been moved
from one area of the ICU over to the CCU.
I was shocked when I heard
he'd coded and died,
because he was doing better.
Thank you for calling
the New Jersey Poison Control Center.
Please stay on the line. A poison
specialist will be with you shortly.
Poison Control Center,
can I help you?
Hi, I'm calling
from Somerset Medical Center.
We're trying to investigate
a toxicity that occurred in a patient.
We had gotten a call at the poison center
from a nurse who was asking about Digoxin.
Digoxin is normally used
to treat heart failure.
It would strengthen your contraction.
It would make it stronger.
But as that level gets higher and higher,
your heart rate starts to slow down.
And you die.
She tells me that she has a patient
who hadn't gotten their dose of Digoxin
in about two days,
but the level is continuing to climb.
And I said, "That makes no sense."
That was on the 16th.
On the 28th, in the same unit,
we had another Dig-toxicity.
- Same unit?
- Yeah.
First thing I think of
is lab error.
He... He died.
I said, "Anything else strange going on?"
"Any patients with low blood sugars?"
What we call hypoglycemia.
Off the record, there were
two people in the hospital before this
that went hypoglycemic really strangely.
- Uh-huh.
- And we were starting to panic.
I'm gonna put it
right in your hands.
You now have a police matter.
At Somerset Medical Center,
patient safety comes first.
Hi, I'm looking for Nancy.
I'm just trying to follow up the outcome.
What did you decide to do?
Actually, administration
has kind of taken over the investigation.
They've called in our attorneys.
And they've asked me really not to talk
to any outside agencies at this point.
So you don't know
if they've gone to the authorities yet?
I don't know that, no.
And I've probably shared
more than I should have right now.
And then there was dead silence.
We heard nothing.
On Friday, October 3rd,
I received a call
from the Somerset County prosecutor
about a death
that occurred at Somerset Medical Center.
My on-call detective at the time
happened to be Danny Baldwin.
Danny was new into the office
and new into our unit.
I felt a bit of pressure,
being the new guy.
I wanted to do a good job
and show that I deserved to be there.
We weren't exactly invited
into a meeting.
We were ordered into a meeting.
I felt tension in the air.
I realized I was sitting
in the presence of high-ranking members
of the Somerset Medical Center.
The administrators,
along with their legal team,
had been looking into the deaths
of several patients.
Mary Lund, a risk manager,
turned out to be our point of contact
with the hospital
with regards to this case.
Somerset Medical Center
had conducted an internal investigation
surrounding incidents
where patients at that facility
experienced abnormal laboratory findings.
The first two incidents
were low glucose levels.
The following two
were elevated Digoxin levels.
So we requested also the internal
investigation that they conducted.
The following day, after receiving
the internal investigation from Mary Lund,
I was expecting to receive
a binder of information.
It was a document
written by an attorney.
And it was very sparse.
They did not uncover
any suspicious activity.
They did mention a professional
registered nurse, Charles Cullen.
but did not identify acts of foul play
or anything of that nature.
But we did conduct
a routine background check.
It came up with two arrests.
Drunken driving in the 1980s,
and criminal trespass.
I reached out to Palmer Police
to try to get
some additional background information.
As I was on the phone,
I can hear the clerk in the background
rummaging through
what sounded like filing cabinets.
And apparently, attached to the report,
there was a stick 'em note.
And that little stick 'em note
indicated that, a few months earlier,
Pennsylvania State Police had requested
basically the same information
I was seeking about Cullen.
There was a Pennsylvania State Police
detective's name and phone number.
I contacted the Pennsylvania State Police
and spoke with Trooper Egan,
and he informed me that he was conducting
an investigation on Charles Cullen
with regards to stockpiling medications
up at St. Luke's Hospital.
In our line of work,
you come to learn
that things happen for a reason.
Had that not been attached to the file...
this case would not have exploded
the way it did.
If, in fact, Cullen was involved...
he still had access to the patients.
We were up against the clock.
As Cullen became
a focal point of our case...
Danny and I approached
individuals close to him.
We started interviewing family members.
We learned that Charles Cullen
was a very smart individual.
A loving father, cared about his kids.
While they did not know
the scope of our investigation,
they did not appear surprised that we were
knocking on their door, talking about him.
I never really liked
being who I was.
After my mother's death,
I didn't cope with it very well.
Mother was the only person at that time
that sort of kept a cushion
between what was happening in the house...
...and me.
With her gone...
I...
I just felt very...
unprotected.
June of '87,
I graduated my nursing school.
It was the only thing
I thought I could do.
And I felt like I was helping people.
I remember I was
at the nurse's station,
and I checked my pulse,
and I'm like, "Fuck!"
About 180.
And Charlie saw me.
And he said, "Are you all right?"
And I started to go down.
He got me into a room,
sat me in one of the chairs,
and he said, "What is going on?"
So I explained to him
what was really going on with me.
I was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy
while I was working at Somerset.
It would literally feel like my heart
was going to jump out of my chest.
The medications weren't helping,
and that disease can be fatal.
My prognosis wasn't good.
I didn't know really how much time
I was going to have with my daughters.
But I didn't want anyone to know
that I was that sick.
I was worried
about not being able to pay my bills,
not being able to have insurance.
And the only way
that we were able to have insurance
was through our jobs.
I trusted Charlie with that secret,
even though if it got out,
it could cost me everything.
He said, "We need to get you into the ER,"
and I'm like, "I can't."
"I have three patients tonight.
I absolutely cannot."
So he said, "Stay here."
And when he came back...
he opened his hand, and it was Cardizem.
And I took it.
I never really thought
about where he got the medication.
That night, he not only
took care of my patients,
he also documented for me.
He never told anyone.
And that was not the only time
that he took care of me.
After talking to Trooper Egan,
it was learned Cullen had worked
at several other hospitals,
so Tim and I began putting together
a timeline of Charles Cullen's career.
I was able to get Charles Cullen's resume
to backtrack every facility
that he had worked at.
Nine hospitals and one nursing home.
We interviewed people
associated with Charles Cullen.
We found out he had been known
to abuse his family pets, his dogs,
and actually, in one case,
he may have poisoned one animal
that was a family pet.
They also referred to an incident
at Warren Hospital.
While the details were minimal,
it was through that tip
that we went
to the Warren County Prosecutor's Office
and learned about their case.
My name is Sharon Jones,
and I'm the niece of Helen Dean
and the cousin of Larry Dean.
She was like a mother to me.
And Larry and I
were like brother and sister.
This is Larry's library, this room.
It has his books, his pipes.
Larry was very close with his mother.
Extremely close. Larry never married.
His mother was everything.
His mother was his world.
Helen went to Warren Hospital
for a procedure,
and prior to being discharged,
she was doing fine.
They were going to send her
to the Coventry Center for rehabilitation
so that she could go home.
Larry was there,
visiting his mother,
and this fellow came in, a male nurse,
and asked him to leave the room.
The male nurse
pulled the curtain around her.
And Larry's out at the nurse's station
and he heard her holler, "Ouch!"
He went into the room,
the male nurse came running out,
and he said to his mother,
"What happened?"
She said, "He stuck me with a needle."
Larry always carried a Swiss army knife,
and he pulled out the knife
with the magnifying glass and looked,
and sure enough, there was a prick mark
on her anterior right thigh.
Later in the afternoon, they took her
by ambulance, did the transport,
and Larry stopped at home on the way
to pick up her slippers,
and he no sooner got in the door
and the phone rang.
And it was the Coventry Center
telling him that his mother had died,
within, like, five minutes upon arrival.
My cousin that night
went to the prosecutor's office
to report that his mother was murdered.
And Larry knew in his heart and his soul
that this man who was in her room,
who she identified before she died
as the man giving her a lethal injection...
So they did toxicology testing.
They tested for every single drug
you could imagine, except one.
Digoxin.
The Warren investigation was closed.
They did have suspicion,
but they did not have the evidence
to prove a criminal case.
Cullen was allowed to move on.
We found that
following the investigation at Warren,
Cullen admitted himself
to a psychiatric facility.
I wanted very much to
quit being a nurse
after Warren Hospital.
But they were telling me
that I was a deadbeat dad.
That I had to continue
to support the children.
I knew that if I was placed
in these situations,
that I would feel the need to...
to end suffering.
I didn't know
how to say it.
What was happening,
what I was feeling, what I was doing.
Most of us start our lives in hospitals,
most of us will end our lives in hospitals
and we'll visit them throughout.
They're universal.
But those who staff the hospitals
for the most part,
especially the nurses,
they really are treated
as interchangeable parts.
Staffing agencies often are filling slots.
People are filling in all the time.
People come and go,
and being transient is somewhat expected.
The institution of private, for-profit
healthcare, the business of healthcare,
is one that Charlie Cullen
was perfectly suited for.
You become invisible,
and he was, to many, a man without a face.
The idea that a nurse might be
harming or killing patients
was very disturbing,
but even though Cullen's background
was painting a dark picture,
we knew our prosecutor
would not sign an arrest warrant
based on hearsay and rumors.
He was a public safety risk
at this point.
It was very concerning for us that he was
still working at Somerset Medical Center
while we were continuing to gather
enough information to make an arrest.
Donna and I were noticing
that our lab results
were completely skewed.
And I could hear other nurses also calling
and saying, "Yep,
my blood sugar's 22 again this morning."
We thought there was
something wrong with the lab.
And if we weren't sure about something,
we would go straight to Charlie
and ask him.
He knew medications
like I have never seen.
I think he had a passion for understanding
the way that medications worked.
I used Digoxin because...
it would work...
over a period of a couple hours.
The nurses I was working with...
they didn't know what was going on.
I wish
I was stopped years ago.
I thought I would be.
We needed to build a case.
Medical homicides are a bitch to work.
They're tough cases to prove.
There's no eyewitnesses,
there were no cameras,
and we did not have any crime scenes
that were preserved.
I visited Mary Lund, the risk manager
at Somerset Medical Center.
I asked her whether or not
there were any more documents.
She told me she had given us
everything she had.
When we went back to Warren Hospital
to see if there were records available
that we could delve deeper into,
the documents had been destroyed.
It was a dead end.
We were kind of like fish floundering.
My stress level
was noticeable to my loved ones
and, you know, people around me.
We were desperate
for a breakthrough in the case.
We needed help.
We needed outside help.
Thank you for calling
New Jersey Poison Control Center.
Please stay on the line and a poison
specialist will be with you shortly.
New Jersey Poison Control Center,
can I help you?
Got the call, and it was a detective from
the Somerset County Prosecutor's Office,
who basically was asking about Digoxin.
I said, "Are you calling
about Somerset Medical Center?"
Absolute dead silence on the phone,
and he said, the detective said,
"What are you talking about?"
I said, "We've been telling them they have
a murderer on their hands for a while."
And he said, "I'm gonna be
down in your office in about 15 minutes."
Bruce said, "Damn tootin'
we know about it."
"We've been trying
to get somebody to be involved."
They said, "Are you willing
to talk to us?"
That's when Bruce got hold of me and said,
"Are you willing to talk to them?"
I said, "Damn straight."
We got to Dr. Marcus's office,
and as soon as he greeted us,
he said words to the effect,
"Where have you been?
You should've been here months ago."
He had a recording
of phone calls he had with the hospital.
Who's speaking?
- Good morning.
- Hi, is this Bruce?
- Yes, how are you?
- Hi, Bruce. This is Mary Lund.
Hi. Dr. Marcus will be here
in one second.
As Tim and I listened to the recordings,
it became apparent to us
that the hospital wasn't telling us
everything that was going on.
Here he is.
Dr. Marcus,
could you kind of summarize
what you've already spoken to Nancy about?
Dr. Marcus had been in touch
with the hospital months earlier.
If there is somebody
out there that is purposely doing this,
if you don't report it to the police
and somebody else dies...
I would not waste time.
- Okay.
- All right.
Well, we appreciate your input.
It took three more months before
the hospital made any notification to us.
And even at that,
the information they provided us
at the start of the investigation
was minimal.
I said it then, I'll say it now.
The hospital was covering up.
They were afraid of being sued.
If the word is, "Don't go there,
you have a high risk of death,"
people aren't gonna go.
Doctors don't want
to bring their patients there.
Doctors don't want
to bring their patients there,
community doesn't want to go there,
the hospital's gonna lose a lot of money.
The hospital loses money,
and the board starts firing people.
And they figured, "You know what?
Let's just sweep it under the rug."
Danny and I wondered,
how many other hospitals where Cullen
had worked had been doing the same thing?
Covering up and not reporting.
We needed to know
what had happened at the other hospitals
as soon as possible.
So Danny went out
to meet the Pennsylvania State Police
to glean deeper information
into their investigation.
It went from that little stick 'em note
with the Pennsylvania State Police
detective's name and number.
During my initial phone call
with Trooper Egan,
he informed me that he believed
that medications were being stolen
by Charles Cullen.
But he didn't go into details
over the phone.
It wasn't until after we met
he began to tell us
everything that had transpired.
Trooper Egan, he was looking into
the mortality rate at St. Luke's Hospital.
He showed me some of his reports.
Then he informed me
that a nurse had advised him
that Charles Cullen was killing patients,
and that she had the courage
to tell what was going on.
So this all started in 2002.
I worked with Charles Cullen
in a small ICU at St. Luke's Hospital
in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
We had a really nice, tight group
of people that worked well together.
He was quirky.
Had his oddities.
But, you know,
ICU nurses are kind of weird.
I was there the night
that he was taken out
and was allowed to resign,
two or three o'clock in the morning,
and everything was very hush-hush.
A day or so later,
I was calling one of my coworkers,
saying, "Do you have any idea
what is going on here?"
They told me that there were
more than 50 vials of medications
that were found
discarded in the needle box.
Many of them were unused,
but some were used.
So I began to think about the whole thing.
Prior to him being led out of there,
there was a time, twice within a week,
almost exactly a week,
I had had patients who were very stable
and they coded.
It didn't make any sense to me.
So I compiled a list of all the people
who had expired during that time,
and then I went back to gather the dates,
the times, the names and so forth,
put all that together.
There were 67 deaths.
I thought it was statistically reasonable
for Charlie to have been on duty
for a quarter of them,
so it came out to around 17.
I saw 40.
More than twice the number
that would even statistically make sense.
I believe that there were two people
in particular of mine that he targeted.
People that I had a real fondness for.
One of them's name was Sam.
And Sam was a huge man.
His hands were like baseball mitts.
He was enormous.
And when he came to our unit,
he was completely locked in.
He didn't open his eyes, he didn't talk,
he didn't respond in any way.
And days into taking care of Sam,
all of a sudden, we heard this...
I thought, "What in the world?"
And it took us a little while
to realize that he was talking.
It was this low, rumbling voice,
and this big, big man,
and it took us hours to realize
that he was very slowly saying,
"Oh, I love you."
And he was responding,
whenever I was on duty, that way.
And in a matter of days after that,
he started singing "You Are My Sunshine"
when I'd be in the room.
So a dear, sweet man.
And, um...
he coded when Charlie was on.
I reached out to my manager,
to my director,
and said, "I am now sure
that he was killing people."
And they all said, "Nope."
"We are sure he wasn't."
And said, "We've already investigated that
and we've ruled it out."
You are my sunshine
My only sunshine
You make me happy
When skies are gray...
I drove home crying that morning.
You'll never know...
And I called a dear friend,
who was a police captain.
How much I love you...
I called him on the way home and I said,
"John, I don't even know what
to do with this. I don't know what to do."
"Nobody will listen.
Nobody's taking any action to stop him."
But I am now absolutely certain
that he's killing patients,
and not just one or two,
he's killing a lot of patients,
and I can't get anybody to listen.
And after multiple days
of trying to get the hospital to listen...
we turned it over to the state police.
But the investigation was very slow.
And then I was on duty one evening,
and the CEO of St. Luke's Hospital
called all the nurses into our lounge
and announced
that the investigation was closed,
and that the state police had found
that Charlie had not done anything wrong.
After that, I started hearing
a lot of rumors amongst my coworkers.
Things like, "Whoever the nurse is
who reported this
created a lot of havoc
and nearly cost St. Luke's
the construction of their new site."
To borrow money to do the construction,
they had to report any potential lawsuits,
and that was their focus.
They didn't want to be penalized.
They didn't want to lose money.
It was easier to give Charlie
a nice reference and let him go on,
rather than deal with the repercussions
of this whole thing.
St. Luke's is a US top 100 rated hospital,
an enormous ecosystem of healthcare,
and it was still expanding.
They had a bond rating out
for a whole new campus at the time.
They just wanted him out of there
as quietly as possible,
whether, again, by...
...by intention or coincidence,
in a manner that was the most likely
to minimize danger of lawsuit.
One that protected the institution
at the cost of protecting the patients.
Gall.
The pattern we were seeing
with the cases involving Cullen,
the one in Pennsylvania,
the one in Warren,
with the Helen Dean incident,
the investigations stopped
due to lack of evidence.
The hospital administrators themselves
suspected that Cullen was up to no good.
Strickland.
Hardgrove.
Shanagher.
These types of incidents
followed Cullen
in almost every place he worked,
and we did not want our case
to fall the way the other cases did.
One of the things that I really wanted
to focus in on and look at
was the Pyxis transactions.
The Pyxis machine is really a computerized
medication dispensing machine.
I wanted to see what type of medications
Charles Cullen was withdrawing.
During my first meeting with Mary Lund
back in early October,
she informed me that the Pyxis
only held information up to 30 days.
That seemed very odd to us.
I actually contacted
the manufacturer in California.
The representative was shocked.
They said all data needed
was retrievable from the unit.
We were being played
by the hospital administrators.
It was flatly criminal,
what they were doing.
I immediately went over
to Mary Lund's office.
And explained to Ms. Lund that
if she did not give us this information,
that we were going to confiscate
the Pyxis machines
and have the FBI forensic team
do a forensic analysis.
Immediately after our conversation,
she picked up the phone,
started making calls...
and, uh, surprisingly...
...she was able to retrieve
the information for me.
It was a crucial piece of evidence.
We were able to put certain medications
in the possession of Charles Cullen
at the time that particular incidents were
occurring with the patients on the unit.
But we were a ways away
from actually charging Cullen,
so we needed
to get him away from patients.
With the information
we had gathered in his background,
we came up with a discrepancy
in one of his job applications.
We used that as the guise
for Somerset Medical Center
to basically fire him.
He was led
out of the building by security.
I was absolutely floored. Shocked.
"Why would you..."
"Why would you get rid of him?"
"Why would they fire such a good nurse?"
And I went into protection mode.
Saved message.
Monday, 6:57 p.m.
Hey, Amy. This is Charlie.
Just returning your call.
Um... Ugh, I...
There's a big story to tell.
There was a big, big commotion.
Give me a call back, all right?
When I called, I was like,
"Honey, what happened?"
I was so upset,
and he said that they fired him
because he had not been
completely honest on his application.
We talked for quite some time.
I was very concerned about him.
He seemed depressed.
I told him
that I would give him a reference,
and that we would be okay.
Now Cullen was removed
from the hospital,
it was time to speak with his co-workers
to see if anybody may have witnessed him
doing something strange.
There were detectives at work,
and they were asking
a whole bunch of questions.
We start running things in our own minds.
All of us.
If Charlie could get fired,
then any of us could get fired.
We wanted to move the process along
as fast as we could,
but there was a request from the hospital
that went through
my upper chain of command
that a hospital administrative
representative would be present.
As it turned out, Mary Lund
was the representative who sat in,
and the nurses feared
truthfully cooperating
in front of their boss.
We're getting nowhere.
We had gone through
pretty much the entire staff
and the one name that kept popping up
was Amy Loughren,
the last to be interviewed.
And I made the decision that I wanted
to be the one to interview Amy.
When I went in
to the little back room,
Mary Lund, who was the risk manager,
went in with me.
She had coached me and said,
"Everything's gonna be fine."
I just told him right out
that absolutely this is all just bullshit.
I think I said "bullshit" a lot.
And then, for some reason,
Mary Lund had to leave.
I was getting good vibes from Amy.
I likedthat she was defending her friend.
So I felt that she would be
worth the risk of me showing her
and revealing to her
some of the information that I had.
He pushed a piece of paper
across the desk.
It was Charlie's Pyxis printouts.
She shook her head.
It was like a totally different person.
It was like she let her guard down.
And she said, "Wow."
Like she started thinking in her head,
what I'm telling her
could possibly be truthful.
It was so obvious
that there was something sinister
in that paperwork.
I just blanked out.
And my vision came in.
I remember being at the nurse's station.
I saw a patient go into V-tach.
I yelled out, "Code blue."
I got to the room,
and Charlie was already with this patient.
And Charlie was injecting the patient.
I asked Charlie,
"What medication are you giving?"
And he said, "Lidocaine."
And I thought that was odd.
It was a moment, a brief moment,
where I thought,
"Why is he giving lidocaine?"
As we're in the middle of the code,
doing CPR, continuing with lidocaine,
the resident arrives.
I give him, as the code leader,
"This is the progress of our code blue."
And he said,
"Who gave this patient lidocaine?"
I said, "I did. I gave lidocaine."
"I'm the code leader.
I ordered lidocaine."
He said, "She's allergic to lidocaine."
So I walked in on him
murdering someone, and I didn't...
I didn't see it.
And I didn't think about it.
After I had that revelation,
I watched Danny,
and I watched for his response.
And Danny
mouthed the words, "Will you help me?"
I don't remember driving home that day.
I just remember,
when I got home, I called Donna.
It felt like a tidal wave, you know?
It felt like...
For the patients, the families...
The fact that I trusted him.
I really trusted him.
A day or so after the interview
with Amy Loughren,
we decided to travel to her home.
If we could convince Amy to work with us,
we'd have someone on the inside.
When they arrived at my house,
Tim and Danny were looking
at all of this paperwork that they had
as a completely different language.
They didn't speak the language.
And so they asked me
what I saw on the Pyxis printouts.
And I saw
multiple cancellations.
Those cancellations
included deadly medications.
So he would go in under a patient's name...
he would push "Digoxin,"
the drawer would pop open,
and he would take some medicine.
Then he would cancel
that particular interaction.
As we are getting
into all of those conversations...
...my phone rings.
And it's the risk manager, Mary Lund.
I was shocked, and a little suspicious.
Why is she calling me at home?
And then she really started
questioning me about,
had I spoken to the detectives
after our meeting?
She then also advised me that it would be
a good idea to not talk to them
unless there was a representative
from the hospital with me.
Trying to scare me
away from talking to the detectives.
While I'm talking to her on the phone,
Danny and Tim are trying
to listen in on this conversation.
I had a lot to lose.
A career, a family.
I had cardiomyopathy.
I was worried about being disabled,
about not being able to have insurance.
I needed to talk to my daughter.
It had to be a family decision.
So, when she came home from school,
we sat down,
and I told her
that Mommy was working with someone
that very possibly
could be hurting people,
possibly killing people,
and that I have an opportunity
to perhaps prevent him
from hurting anyone else.
She said, "If we have the opportunity
to maybe stop a killer,
of course we have to stop him.
Of course we have to do this."
An 11-year-old had more moral aptitude
than someone who is responsible
for risk management.
Amy agreed to allow us to record
her conversations with Charles Cullen.
One of the essential roles for me
in the investigation
was to keep
that relationship with Charlie.
We had a mass murderer on the loose
and we had to make sure,
one, he wasn't gonna take off
and go somewhere
where we couldn't track him,
or, two, find another position as a nurse
in another facility
where he would go back to his old tricks.
We knew that he was
looking for a job.
We knew that, emotionally,
he was becoming more depressed.
It was hard, when I would hear his voice.
I would feel like
I was betraying him.
But I just knew it in my bones,
he was going to continue to kill,
and he would just get better at it.
My mind raced.
There was fear...
of being caught.
I couldn't stop.
I had applied...
for a full-time position
at a different facility.
And I knew that it would happen again.
Amy came to our office
and gave us advice on patterns
we should be looking for.
As I kept going there,
I really felt like I was part of the team.
And I realized, maybe I was a small voice,
but what I had was a language
none of them could speak.
I also asked them,
"Where's the charts from Cerner?"
And Danny and I
kind of looked at each other
and basically said, "Who is Cerner?"
She said, "It's not, 'Who's Cerner?
What's Cerner?'"
I said, "That's all of the records
of the patients."
Without the Cerner printouts,
it was going to be so hard
to put that syringe in his hand.
When I went back to work,
I started printing out the patient records
so that I could look at them.
Apparently, when nobody was watching her,
she would go to the computer and print out
reams of information about patients,
knowing that she could have been
charged by the institution.
That took a tremendous
amount of fortitude.
Putting myself under
that kind of stress,
I was already concerned about my health.
And yet I knew that,
even if I was risking my life...
I knew I had to help them.
We used all of these
different pieces of information
to cross-reference each other.
It was a paper trail going back to Cullen.
If we could prove one death...
we got him.
We needed a body.
We needed to obtain Digoxin
from the tissue.
We felt that Reverend Gall
was probably our strongest case,
in spite of the fact
that he'd died several months prior.
Never in a million years
would I have thought
he would walk in my door
and basically say,
"Your brother was killed."
That moment, I was angry.
Because I...
This is impossible.
This can't, you know... This can't happen.
He said that they would
probably want to exhume the body.
Would I give my consent?
That's a lot
for any family to have to deal with.
You know, and go through
a whole reburial again at the cemetery.
You almost want to say,
"Let him rest in peace."
But I said, "It's not a problem.
I will give you my consent."
I remember her telling me that her brother
spent his whole life helping people,
and now, even in death, he has
the opportunity to help people as well.
After the exhumation,
Reverend Gall's remains
were transported to the state
regional medical examiner's office
in anticipation of a, uh, autopsy.
Because of the amount of Digoxin
that was found in Reverend Gall's body,
that gave us enough
to change the cause and manner of death
from a natural death,
that the hospital reported, to homicide.
But we were lacking a couple pieces
that a jury sometimes would like to see.
Something physical.
That syringe, or that IV bag
that was contaminated.
It's not always that easy.
Charlie called me
to tell me he was so excited
that he had gotten a job.
So I called Tim to let him know.
If he took a job,
the likelihood of Cullen
killing more people was very, very strong.
We were out of time.
Without a confession,
he was going to continue to murder.
He was going to continue to kill.
So they asked me if I would meet with him
and wear a wire.
Saved message.
Hey, Amy. This is Charlie.
Just returning your call.
Friday's possible. I don't know
what time you were thinking of.
But sure, yeah, I'd like to get together.
We had Amy wired up,
and we were positioned in the parking lot.
I was terrified.
When I walked into the restaurant,
Charlie hugged me for the very first time,
and I was so afraid
that he would feel that black box
that was taped to the small of my back.
- How are you?
- Okay.
- Yeah?
- Yeah.
There was a lot of background noise
in the restaurant, a lot of loud music.
It was almost like a happy hour.
I had a problem
when I first started out.
An incident with low blood sugar.
And at Warren Hospital, a patient had died
24 hours after I'd been her nurse.
Someone said, the son had said,
that I injected her.
And what about Father Gall?
What happened? Charlie, what happened?
I can't...
I know you can.
I see you, and I'm not stupid.
So why?
You're so good.
Why?
Let me help you.
And then the wire itself went dead on us.
I said, "I know you did this."
"I know you did this and everything's
gonna be okay. I still love you."
But for the first time,
it wasn't Charlie.
He became very pale.
He stiffened...
turned his head.
His voice changed.
I was not with my friend Charlie.
I was not.
It was emptiness.
It wasn't darkness,
it wasn't a monster.
It was just nothingness.
He didn't care about me.
He didn't care about anything.
He just said,
"I want to go down fighting."
If Cullen went free,
he'd be killing more people.
You can't take chances with that.
So Danny and I confronted him
and asked him if he'd, uh,
take a ride with us.
And we advised him
that he was being placed under arrest
for the murder of Reverend Gall.
Once Cullen was
brought into our office,
we proceeded with the interview.
When Tim and I was talking to him,
it wasn't anything confrontational.
It wasn't that we were yelling at him,
screaming at him.
We were talking to him
like I'm talking to you now,
and he just said, "I just can't."
He wrapped himself, pulled his knees
to his chest as if in a fetal position
while he's answering us.
And you can see him
literally holding in what's inside him.
It was just there,
but just not coming out.
We were still willing to give it more gas,
but, you know, those observing us...
uh, you know, said enough was enough.
I felt our chance
with a confession was gone.
I get a call from Tim,
and they had devised a plan
for me to talk to Charlie.
And Charlie came in, shackled...
in scrubs
and his little laceless sneakers,
and...
I just
lost it.
Just seeing him that way.
It was like seeing a child.
I didn't feel anger toward him.
I didn't feel
like there was a monster.
I felt like, once again,
that wave of guilt, of betraying a friend.
They took off his shackles,
and Charlie and I just started talking
like normal.
Like it was perfectly normal for us
to just be sitting there on a couch,
him in scrubs.
It was just bizarre how ordinary it felt.
But then, I thought about
who I was really
supposed to be protecting.
He had murdered
some of the most vulnerable people.
They were tied down,
medicated,
unable to protect themselves.
It was my job to defend them,
and I hadn't.
I knew I would do anything
to get a confession out of him.
And then I said to him...
"My life
as I know it is about to end,
because I'm being implicated."
"You get to be my hero today."
"You get to do that. You do."
"And I'm gonna ask you one question."
"How...
did you kill Father Gall?"
And he said he injected him with Digoxin.
With that, we had enough.
So we pulled her out,
and we brought him in to another room,
our interview room,
and basically told him,
"Now you can talk."
My name is Detective Sergeant Tim Braun.
With me is Detective Dan Baldwin.
Today is Sunday, December 14th, 2003.
The time is approximately 6:14 p.m.
Did you have an opportunity
to talk to a friend of yours
prior to going on tape?
Yes, I did.
Was it after that conversation
you had with your friend,
you decided to talk to us
about particular incidents?
Yes, it was.
Let's talk about the matter
pertaining to Florian Gall.
Uh...
Are you responsible for his death?
Yes, I am.
And why is that, Charlie?
Um, because I injected him
with a medication called Digoxin.
How did that make you feel?
I...
I was relieved that he wasn't...
attached to all those machines anymore.
We were hoping for
one confession at best.
We were not totally prepared
for the journey he took us on.
I felt very compelled,
very driven to end suffering as I saw it.
I would go long periods of time
with nothing, but then,
I would find myself getting back,
feeling overwhelmed,
feeling like I couldn't watch people hurt,
die, be treated like nonhumans.
I... have...
...destroyed not only those people's...
God... destiny,
and...
caused probably a lot of suffering
of those families,
but I have also hurt people that I love
very much.
And didn't, for the world,
want to do that.
I love...
my children very much,
and very much wanted to be
a part of their lives.
But I
just couldn't stop myself.
I did not want the people
to see me as this... what I am.
What are you, Charles?
A person who was trusted,
and have been responsible
for a lot of people dying.
I contaminated IV infusion bags
with insulin.
I don't remember
the specific patients or whatever.
Is there any particular reason
why you might do that? Just pot luck?
I guess the majority of patients
were very critical.
I was waiting in a room
with the perfect view
on one of the monitors
when I heard he was using the bags.
I go back to those moments
where I picked up those bags.
I was the one
delivering those deadly medications.
All of the nurses,
all of the team members,
we prepared his victims for him.
And then we delivered his poison for him.
I wanted him to be a mercy killer.
I wanted to believe
he was putting people out of their misery,
but he was not.
Many of the patients that he killed
were on the road to recovery.
In some cases,
patients were being prepared for discharge
because their condition had improved.
This isn't anything
you can understand.
It isn't something you can reason.
One of the medications
that Charlie used was Vecuronium.
Vecuronium is a paralytic.
A person would be
completely alert and awake,
aware of what's going on,
but unable to speak, blink, breathe,
or anything else.
So they literally would be paralyzed
in their awake body,
unable to breathe
as they proceeded to death.
Just horrific.
Can you tell us, in total,
throughout your entire 15, 16 years,
how many patients
have you helped to their death?
Um, possibly 30 to 40 patients.
Okay, 30 to 40 patients in total?
Yes.
Good evening, everyone. I'm Jackie Hyland.
A former nurse at a hospital in New Jersey
is accused of killing his patients.
Lots of them.
If it's true what he says,
he left a trail of death behind him.
As he sees it,
he only helped people who were suffering,
but police call him
nothing more than a mass murderer.
Vanessa Tyler is in Somerville
with more on all this.
Well, this nurse
may have killed more people
than anyone else
in the history of New Jersey,
in a career spanning many years,
involving many hospitals,
including Somerset Medical Center,
where the nurse claims
to have killed a dozen people here alone.
I think people were in shock
in general, as far as the staff.
But the community,
um, some of the older patients,
would make comments like, um,
"You're not gonna kill me
like Charles Cullen killed patients?"
The first time someone said that to me,
I went in the bathroom and cried.
Because he didn't represent who we were.
Charles Cullen confessed
to killing a 40-year-old cancer patient,
and Catholic priest Father Florian Gall.
That brings the total
number of murders to 23.
He didn't show any remorse in court today.
I don't wish to be represented.
I don't plan to contest the charges.
I plan to plead guilty.
My late husband was in the hospital
and very ill 14 years before he passed.
My eldest grandson
was able to grow up with my husband,
knowing his Pop-Pop...
because my husband
lived through that crisis.
My husband had a tremendous impact
in his life and his values.
And that's what Charlie
took away from people.
He took away holidays
with their loved ones,
and graduations, and weddings,
and birthdays, and life lessons,
and all the things
for dozens, perhaps hundreds of people.
He stole from their families
and from them.
I guess I wanted
the opportunity to see him.
Today is the sentencing hearing
for State v. Cullen.
And I wanted him to know
what kind of person my brother was.
Good morning. I'm the sister
of the Reverend Florian J. Gall.
He was a very shy,
humble, quiet, and caring man.
He was extremely trusting of others.
He never looked at anyone.
And I said,
"I'm ashamed that you were a nurse."
"I'm a nurse. We're taught to save lives,
not to kill people."
He never made a comment
to say, "I'm sorry."
Your Honor,
Charles Cullen is charged
with the murder of Pasquale Napolitano.
I want to tell you
a little bit about my dad.
My dad was bigger than life. He nurtured
and supported me throughout my life.
You may have taken her physical body away,
but her spirit and character
is in this room now.
You don't even have the guts
to look this way.
It's a shame.
My heart, it aches for my son.
It bleeds for my son!
I walk around with a hole in my heart
that will never be filled again.
It's unbelievable that one person
could impact that many lives.
A registered nurse,
who is supposed to be a caretaker,
took the life of my brother...
...for his own personal,
selfish, and twisted gain.
I am so lost without my brother.
When we were younger,
we did everything together.
He was my best friend.
Larry had passed away in 2001...
hoping and praying
that this man would be found out.
And none of it happened
in his lifetime, unfortunately.
If only people had listened to him.
For these crimes
and for this betrayal,
you are sentenced to consecutive sentences
as set forth in the global plea agreement.
Do you understand?
Thank you all, then.
Cullen has signed a plea deal
that will spare him the death penalty
if he participates fully
with the investigation.
There are other people
responsible for the actions
of Charles Cullen, besides Charles Cullen.
Most of the hospitals
I've worked at...
they strongly suspected that there were
deaths associated with me.
Why didn't they take it further?
I think they were worried
about the publicity.
If protecting human life
wasn't a priority for them,
it's impossible to guess
how low someone could stoop
to protect their financial interest
and the interest of the hospital.
There are many questions
about how he was apparently able to
get away with murder
in hospitals for so long.
Dennis Miller is CEO
and president of Somerset Medical Center.
- Do you take any responsibility for this?
- Absolutely not.
We take responsibility for investigating
this guy, leading to his arrest.
I'm extremely proud
of Dr. Cors and Mary Lund,
who led the investigation at our hospital.
We're the first hospital to identify him,
leading to his arrest.
Could you have done
a more thorough background check?
Absolutely not. The problem is
the other employers that we called.
And we did
a complete criminal background check
and a complete reference check,
and everybody said the following.
He left in good standing
and his license was intact.
The question that gets asked,
how does somebody operate in a hospital,
how does somebody
kill people in hospitals,
over and over and over again for 16 years?
Again, nine hospitals and a nursing home.
Why didn't he get caught?
And the answer turns out to be, he was.
Over and over and over again.
And those that caught him, or had reason
to suspect that something was wrong,
um, they passed him on,
with positive or neutral references,
and he always found another job.
That's the scandal.
And Charlie Cullen
will spend the rest of his life in prison,
but those who passed him on,
those who are paid big bucks
to be responsible,
have never been held responsible.
They did a very good job at their job,
which was more to do with the institution
of private, for-profit healthcare,
but they didn't do good.
They didn't do good
by what that health system
is theoretically there to do,
which is to protect patients,
to provide patient care.
So they... they failed,
and have yet been rewarded
for their success in protecting
the institution over the patients.
I've gotten a lot of happiness
out of helping people.
So I thought
it would be a good thing for me
to become a nurse.
I started off working at night.
I would find myself...
feeling overwhelmed.
Feeling like
I couldn't watch people hurt.
At times, the only thing I could do...
was to try and end their suffering.
I couldn't stop.
You are my sunshine
My only sunshine...
Breaking news now
from New Jersey.
The whole town is reeling
from the revelations.
When skies are gray...
A nurse has been
murdering patients in a hospital
in Somerset County.
The nurse may be
the most prolific serial killer
in American history.
Please don't take my sunshine away
I was a single mom,
and I started working at Somerset
as a critical care nurse.
My two daughters, I would drop them off
at school and drive to New Jersey.
Oh, it was a great,
great little town.
The hospital was the heart
of the community.
I was young. I was energetic.
I was a little on the hyper side.
I know one of the senior nurses
had banned me from drinking coffee.
Amy was really special.
You know, it was always nice when we were
working on the same side together.
I loved being an ICU nurse.
Those patients, I loved feeling
like I was their protector.
And I was going to do everything
that I could to make sure they were okay.
We deal with death.
We literally step
in front of the face of danger.
It's a very precarious place to be.
So we had to rely on each other.
And Charlie was the best teammate.
I loved working with him.
He was an excellent nurse,
and he always had a way of saying
something that would make me laugh.
The three of us worked together
most of the time.
Get another IV.
Wewere named The Three Musketeers.
We worked together really well.
Charlie.
After that came out,
I called him the Somerset spokesmodel,
which he was.
And everyone saw that flyer.
Everyone associated Somerset
Medical Center with Charles Cullen.
He has his quintessential smirk,
and you can even tell
from that particular photo
he's very proud
that someone wants to take his picture
and someone's asking his opinion.
You know, I always felt
that he was the boy that was bullied.
That was the air that I got from him.
And I always wanted to protect him.
My brother, Florian,
always wanted to be a priest.
I think people might have said
that, you know, he was shy,
but when it came to things
that he felt strongly about,
he was very passionate.
He was not only a brother, but a friend.
One day, he called me
about two o'clock in the morning.
He said, "I'm having
some trouble breathing."
So I said,
"Fine, I'll meet you at the hospital."
He was going to Somerset.
The doctor in the ER saw him.
But he was getting
very, very short of breath.
They came and said
that they had to intubate him.
I remember Reverend Gall
because he was there for quite some time.
And his sister
was always at the bedside.
The doctor said,
"He made it through the night."
"Let's give it time, you know.
We're being cautiously optimistic."
"He seems to be better."
"He's stable."
I remember being there and saying,
"Well, Florian, I'm gonna go."
And I could see he, like, perked up.
Like, you know, he heard me.
Reverend Gall was getting better.
He had actually been moved
from one area of the ICU over to the CCU.
I was shocked when I heard
he'd coded and died,
because he was doing better.
Thank you for calling
the New Jersey Poison Control Center.
Please stay on the line. A poison
specialist will be with you shortly.
Poison Control Center,
can I help you?
Hi, I'm calling
from Somerset Medical Center.
We're trying to investigate
a toxicity that occurred in a patient.
We had gotten a call at the poison center
from a nurse who was asking about Digoxin.
Digoxin is normally used
to treat heart failure.
It would strengthen your contraction.
It would make it stronger.
But as that level gets higher and higher,
your heart rate starts to slow down.
And you die.
She tells me that she has a patient
who hadn't gotten their dose of Digoxin
in about two days,
but the level is continuing to climb.
And I said, "That makes no sense."
That was on the 16th.
On the 28th, in the same unit,
we had another Dig-toxicity.
- Same unit?
- Yeah.
First thing I think of
is lab error.
He... He died.
I said, "Anything else strange going on?"
"Any patients with low blood sugars?"
What we call hypoglycemia.
Off the record, there were
two people in the hospital before this
that went hypoglycemic really strangely.
- Uh-huh.
- And we were starting to panic.
I'm gonna put it
right in your hands.
You now have a police matter.
At Somerset Medical Center,
patient safety comes first.
Hi, I'm looking for Nancy.
I'm just trying to follow up the outcome.
What did you decide to do?
Actually, administration
has kind of taken over the investigation.
They've called in our attorneys.
And they've asked me really not to talk
to any outside agencies at this point.
So you don't know
if they've gone to the authorities yet?
I don't know that, no.
And I've probably shared
more than I should have right now.
And then there was dead silence.
We heard nothing.
On Friday, October 3rd,
I received a call
from the Somerset County prosecutor
about a death
that occurred at Somerset Medical Center.
My on-call detective at the time
happened to be Danny Baldwin.
Danny was new into the office
and new into our unit.
I felt a bit of pressure,
being the new guy.
I wanted to do a good job
and show that I deserved to be there.
We weren't exactly invited
into a meeting.
We were ordered into a meeting.
I felt tension in the air.
I realized I was sitting
in the presence of high-ranking members
of the Somerset Medical Center.
The administrators,
along with their legal team,
had been looking into the deaths
of several patients.
Mary Lund, a risk manager,
turned out to be our point of contact
with the hospital
with regards to this case.
Somerset Medical Center
had conducted an internal investigation
surrounding incidents
where patients at that facility
experienced abnormal laboratory findings.
The first two incidents
were low glucose levels.
The following two
were elevated Digoxin levels.
So we requested also the internal
investigation that they conducted.
The following day, after receiving
the internal investigation from Mary Lund,
I was expecting to receive
a binder of information.
It was a document
written by an attorney.
And it was very sparse.
They did not uncover
any suspicious activity.
They did mention a professional
registered nurse, Charles Cullen.
but did not identify acts of foul play
or anything of that nature.
But we did conduct
a routine background check.
It came up with two arrests.
Drunken driving in the 1980s,
and criminal trespass.
I reached out to Palmer Police
to try to get
some additional background information.
As I was on the phone,
I can hear the clerk in the background
rummaging through
what sounded like filing cabinets.
And apparently, attached to the report,
there was a stick 'em note.
And that little stick 'em note
indicated that, a few months earlier,
Pennsylvania State Police had requested
basically the same information
I was seeking about Cullen.
There was a Pennsylvania State Police
detective's name and phone number.
I contacted the Pennsylvania State Police
and spoke with Trooper Egan,
and he informed me that he was conducting
an investigation on Charles Cullen
with regards to stockpiling medications
up at St. Luke's Hospital.
In our line of work,
you come to learn
that things happen for a reason.
Had that not been attached to the file...
this case would not have exploded
the way it did.
If, in fact, Cullen was involved...
he still had access to the patients.
We were up against the clock.
As Cullen became
a focal point of our case...
Danny and I approached
individuals close to him.
We started interviewing family members.
We learned that Charles Cullen
was a very smart individual.
A loving father, cared about his kids.
While they did not know
the scope of our investigation,
they did not appear surprised that we were
knocking on their door, talking about him.
I never really liked
being who I was.
After my mother's death,
I didn't cope with it very well.
Mother was the only person at that time
that sort of kept a cushion
between what was happening in the house...
...and me.
With her gone...
I...
I just felt very...
unprotected.
June of '87,
I graduated my nursing school.
It was the only thing
I thought I could do.
And I felt like I was helping people.
I remember I was
at the nurse's station,
and I checked my pulse,
and I'm like, "Fuck!"
About 180.
And Charlie saw me.
And he said, "Are you all right?"
And I started to go down.
He got me into a room,
sat me in one of the chairs,
and he said, "What is going on?"
So I explained to him
what was really going on with me.
I was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy
while I was working at Somerset.
It would literally feel like my heart
was going to jump out of my chest.
The medications weren't helping,
and that disease can be fatal.
My prognosis wasn't good.
I didn't know really how much time
I was going to have with my daughters.
But I didn't want anyone to know
that I was that sick.
I was worried
about not being able to pay my bills,
not being able to have insurance.
And the only way
that we were able to have insurance
was through our jobs.
I trusted Charlie with that secret,
even though if it got out,
it could cost me everything.
He said, "We need to get you into the ER,"
and I'm like, "I can't."
"I have three patients tonight.
I absolutely cannot."
So he said, "Stay here."
And when he came back...
he opened his hand, and it was Cardizem.
And I took it.
I never really thought
about where he got the medication.
That night, he not only
took care of my patients,
he also documented for me.
He never told anyone.
And that was not the only time
that he took care of me.
After talking to Trooper Egan,
it was learned Cullen had worked
at several other hospitals,
so Tim and I began putting together
a timeline of Charles Cullen's career.
I was able to get Charles Cullen's resume
to backtrack every facility
that he had worked at.
Nine hospitals and one nursing home.
We interviewed people
associated with Charles Cullen.
We found out he had been known
to abuse his family pets, his dogs,
and actually, in one case,
he may have poisoned one animal
that was a family pet.
They also referred to an incident
at Warren Hospital.
While the details were minimal,
it was through that tip
that we went
to the Warren County Prosecutor's Office
and learned about their case.
My name is Sharon Jones,
and I'm the niece of Helen Dean
and the cousin of Larry Dean.
She was like a mother to me.
And Larry and I
were like brother and sister.
This is Larry's library, this room.
It has his books, his pipes.
Larry was very close with his mother.
Extremely close. Larry never married.
His mother was everything.
His mother was his world.
Helen went to Warren Hospital
for a procedure,
and prior to being discharged,
she was doing fine.
They were going to send her
to the Coventry Center for rehabilitation
so that she could go home.
Larry was there,
visiting his mother,
and this fellow came in, a male nurse,
and asked him to leave the room.
The male nurse
pulled the curtain around her.
And Larry's out at the nurse's station
and he heard her holler, "Ouch!"
He went into the room,
the male nurse came running out,
and he said to his mother,
"What happened?"
She said, "He stuck me with a needle."
Larry always carried a Swiss army knife,
and he pulled out the knife
with the magnifying glass and looked,
and sure enough, there was a prick mark
on her anterior right thigh.
Later in the afternoon, they took her
by ambulance, did the transport,
and Larry stopped at home on the way
to pick up her slippers,
and he no sooner got in the door
and the phone rang.
And it was the Coventry Center
telling him that his mother had died,
within, like, five minutes upon arrival.
My cousin that night
went to the prosecutor's office
to report that his mother was murdered.
And Larry knew in his heart and his soul
that this man who was in her room,
who she identified before she died
as the man giving her a lethal injection...
So they did toxicology testing.
They tested for every single drug
you could imagine, except one.
Digoxin.
The Warren investigation was closed.
They did have suspicion,
but they did not have the evidence
to prove a criminal case.
Cullen was allowed to move on.
We found that
following the investigation at Warren,
Cullen admitted himself
to a psychiatric facility.
I wanted very much to
quit being a nurse
after Warren Hospital.
But they were telling me
that I was a deadbeat dad.
That I had to continue
to support the children.
I knew that if I was placed
in these situations,
that I would feel the need to...
to end suffering.
I didn't know
how to say it.
What was happening,
what I was feeling, what I was doing.
Most of us start our lives in hospitals,
most of us will end our lives in hospitals
and we'll visit them throughout.
They're universal.
But those who staff the hospitals
for the most part,
especially the nurses,
they really are treated
as interchangeable parts.
Staffing agencies often are filling slots.
People are filling in all the time.
People come and go,
and being transient is somewhat expected.
The institution of private, for-profit
healthcare, the business of healthcare,
is one that Charlie Cullen
was perfectly suited for.
You become invisible,
and he was, to many, a man without a face.
The idea that a nurse might be
harming or killing patients
was very disturbing,
but even though Cullen's background
was painting a dark picture,
we knew our prosecutor
would not sign an arrest warrant
based on hearsay and rumors.
He was a public safety risk
at this point.
It was very concerning for us that he was
still working at Somerset Medical Center
while we were continuing to gather
enough information to make an arrest.
Donna and I were noticing
that our lab results
were completely skewed.
And I could hear other nurses also calling
and saying, "Yep,
my blood sugar's 22 again this morning."
We thought there was
something wrong with the lab.
And if we weren't sure about something,
we would go straight to Charlie
and ask him.
He knew medications
like I have never seen.
I think he had a passion for understanding
the way that medications worked.
I used Digoxin because...
it would work...
over a period of a couple hours.
The nurses I was working with...
they didn't know what was going on.
I wish
I was stopped years ago.
I thought I would be.
We needed to build a case.
Medical homicides are a bitch to work.
They're tough cases to prove.
There's no eyewitnesses,
there were no cameras,
and we did not have any crime scenes
that were preserved.
I visited Mary Lund, the risk manager
at Somerset Medical Center.
I asked her whether or not
there were any more documents.
She told me she had given us
everything she had.
When we went back to Warren Hospital
to see if there were records available
that we could delve deeper into,
the documents had been destroyed.
It was a dead end.
We were kind of like fish floundering.
My stress level
was noticeable to my loved ones
and, you know, people around me.
We were desperate
for a breakthrough in the case.
We needed help.
We needed outside help.
Thank you for calling
New Jersey Poison Control Center.
Please stay on the line and a poison
specialist will be with you shortly.
New Jersey Poison Control Center,
can I help you?
Got the call, and it was a detective from
the Somerset County Prosecutor's Office,
who basically was asking about Digoxin.
I said, "Are you calling
about Somerset Medical Center?"
Absolute dead silence on the phone,
and he said, the detective said,
"What are you talking about?"
I said, "We've been telling them they have
a murderer on their hands for a while."
And he said, "I'm gonna be
down in your office in about 15 minutes."
Bruce said, "Damn tootin'
we know about it."
"We've been trying
to get somebody to be involved."
They said, "Are you willing
to talk to us?"
That's when Bruce got hold of me and said,
"Are you willing to talk to them?"
I said, "Damn straight."
We got to Dr. Marcus's office,
and as soon as he greeted us,
he said words to the effect,
"Where have you been?
You should've been here months ago."
He had a recording
of phone calls he had with the hospital.
Who's speaking?
- Good morning.
- Hi, is this Bruce?
- Yes, how are you?
- Hi, Bruce. This is Mary Lund.
Hi. Dr. Marcus will be here
in one second.
As Tim and I listened to the recordings,
it became apparent to us
that the hospital wasn't telling us
everything that was going on.
Here he is.
Dr. Marcus,
could you kind of summarize
what you've already spoken to Nancy about?
Dr. Marcus had been in touch
with the hospital months earlier.
If there is somebody
out there that is purposely doing this,
if you don't report it to the police
and somebody else dies...
I would not waste time.
- Okay.
- All right.
Well, we appreciate your input.
It took three more months before
the hospital made any notification to us.
And even at that,
the information they provided us
at the start of the investigation
was minimal.
I said it then, I'll say it now.
The hospital was covering up.
They were afraid of being sued.
If the word is, "Don't go there,
you have a high risk of death,"
people aren't gonna go.
Doctors don't want
to bring their patients there.
Doctors don't want
to bring their patients there,
community doesn't want to go there,
the hospital's gonna lose a lot of money.
The hospital loses money,
and the board starts firing people.
And they figured, "You know what?
Let's just sweep it under the rug."
Danny and I wondered,
how many other hospitals where Cullen
had worked had been doing the same thing?
Covering up and not reporting.
We needed to know
what had happened at the other hospitals
as soon as possible.
So Danny went out
to meet the Pennsylvania State Police
to glean deeper information
into their investigation.
It went from that little stick 'em note
with the Pennsylvania State Police
detective's name and number.
During my initial phone call
with Trooper Egan,
he informed me that he believed
that medications were being stolen
by Charles Cullen.
But he didn't go into details
over the phone.
It wasn't until after we met
he began to tell us
everything that had transpired.
Trooper Egan, he was looking into
the mortality rate at St. Luke's Hospital.
He showed me some of his reports.
Then he informed me
that a nurse had advised him
that Charles Cullen was killing patients,
and that she had the courage
to tell what was going on.
So this all started in 2002.
I worked with Charles Cullen
in a small ICU at St. Luke's Hospital
in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
We had a really nice, tight group
of people that worked well together.
He was quirky.
Had his oddities.
But, you know,
ICU nurses are kind of weird.
I was there the night
that he was taken out
and was allowed to resign,
two or three o'clock in the morning,
and everything was very hush-hush.
A day or so later,
I was calling one of my coworkers,
saying, "Do you have any idea
what is going on here?"
They told me that there were
more than 50 vials of medications
that were found
discarded in the needle box.
Many of them were unused,
but some were used.
So I began to think about the whole thing.
Prior to him being led out of there,
there was a time, twice within a week,
almost exactly a week,
I had had patients who were very stable
and they coded.
It didn't make any sense to me.
So I compiled a list of all the people
who had expired during that time,
and then I went back to gather the dates,
the times, the names and so forth,
put all that together.
There were 67 deaths.
I thought it was statistically reasonable
for Charlie to have been on duty
for a quarter of them,
so it came out to around 17.
I saw 40.
More than twice the number
that would even statistically make sense.
I believe that there were two people
in particular of mine that he targeted.
People that I had a real fondness for.
One of them's name was Sam.
And Sam was a huge man.
His hands were like baseball mitts.
He was enormous.
And when he came to our unit,
he was completely locked in.
He didn't open his eyes, he didn't talk,
he didn't respond in any way.
And days into taking care of Sam,
all of a sudden, we heard this...
I thought, "What in the world?"
And it took us a little while
to realize that he was talking.
It was this low, rumbling voice,
and this big, big man,
and it took us hours to realize
that he was very slowly saying,
"Oh, I love you."
And he was responding,
whenever I was on duty, that way.
And in a matter of days after that,
he started singing "You Are My Sunshine"
when I'd be in the room.
So a dear, sweet man.
And, um...
he coded when Charlie was on.
I reached out to my manager,
to my director,
and said, "I am now sure
that he was killing people."
And they all said, "Nope."
"We are sure he wasn't."
And said, "We've already investigated that
and we've ruled it out."
You are my sunshine
My only sunshine
You make me happy
When skies are gray...
I drove home crying that morning.
You'll never know...
And I called a dear friend,
who was a police captain.
How much I love you...
I called him on the way home and I said,
"John, I don't even know what
to do with this. I don't know what to do."
"Nobody will listen.
Nobody's taking any action to stop him."
But I am now absolutely certain
that he's killing patients,
and not just one or two,
he's killing a lot of patients,
and I can't get anybody to listen.
And after multiple days
of trying to get the hospital to listen...
we turned it over to the state police.
But the investigation was very slow.
And then I was on duty one evening,
and the CEO of St. Luke's Hospital
called all the nurses into our lounge
and announced
that the investigation was closed,
and that the state police had found
that Charlie had not done anything wrong.
After that, I started hearing
a lot of rumors amongst my coworkers.
Things like, "Whoever the nurse is
who reported this
created a lot of havoc
and nearly cost St. Luke's
the construction of their new site."
To borrow money to do the construction,
they had to report any potential lawsuits,
and that was their focus.
They didn't want to be penalized.
They didn't want to lose money.
It was easier to give Charlie
a nice reference and let him go on,
rather than deal with the repercussions
of this whole thing.
St. Luke's is a US top 100 rated hospital,
an enormous ecosystem of healthcare,
and it was still expanding.
They had a bond rating out
for a whole new campus at the time.
They just wanted him out of there
as quietly as possible,
whether, again, by...
...by intention or coincidence,
in a manner that was the most likely
to minimize danger of lawsuit.
One that protected the institution
at the cost of protecting the patients.
Gall.
The pattern we were seeing
with the cases involving Cullen,
the one in Pennsylvania,
the one in Warren,
with the Helen Dean incident,
the investigations stopped
due to lack of evidence.
The hospital administrators themselves
suspected that Cullen was up to no good.
Strickland.
Hardgrove.
Shanagher.
These types of incidents
followed Cullen
in almost every place he worked,
and we did not want our case
to fall the way the other cases did.
One of the things that I really wanted
to focus in on and look at
was the Pyxis transactions.
The Pyxis machine is really a computerized
medication dispensing machine.
I wanted to see what type of medications
Charles Cullen was withdrawing.
During my first meeting with Mary Lund
back in early October,
she informed me that the Pyxis
only held information up to 30 days.
That seemed very odd to us.
I actually contacted
the manufacturer in California.
The representative was shocked.
They said all data needed
was retrievable from the unit.
We were being played
by the hospital administrators.
It was flatly criminal,
what they were doing.
I immediately went over
to Mary Lund's office.
And explained to Ms. Lund that
if she did not give us this information,
that we were going to confiscate
the Pyxis machines
and have the FBI forensic team
do a forensic analysis.
Immediately after our conversation,
she picked up the phone,
started making calls...
and, uh, surprisingly...
...she was able to retrieve
the information for me.
It was a crucial piece of evidence.
We were able to put certain medications
in the possession of Charles Cullen
at the time that particular incidents were
occurring with the patients on the unit.
But we were a ways away
from actually charging Cullen,
so we needed
to get him away from patients.
With the information
we had gathered in his background,
we came up with a discrepancy
in one of his job applications.
We used that as the guise
for Somerset Medical Center
to basically fire him.
He was led
out of the building by security.
I was absolutely floored. Shocked.
"Why would you..."
"Why would you get rid of him?"
"Why would they fire such a good nurse?"
And I went into protection mode.
Saved message.
Monday, 6:57 p.m.
Hey, Amy. This is Charlie.
Just returning your call.
Um... Ugh, I...
There's a big story to tell.
There was a big, big commotion.
Give me a call back, all right?
When I called, I was like,
"Honey, what happened?"
I was so upset,
and he said that they fired him
because he had not been
completely honest on his application.
We talked for quite some time.
I was very concerned about him.
He seemed depressed.
I told him
that I would give him a reference,
and that we would be okay.
Now Cullen was removed
from the hospital,
it was time to speak with his co-workers
to see if anybody may have witnessed him
doing something strange.
There were detectives at work,
and they were asking
a whole bunch of questions.
We start running things in our own minds.
All of us.
If Charlie could get fired,
then any of us could get fired.
We wanted to move the process along
as fast as we could,
but there was a request from the hospital
that went through
my upper chain of command
that a hospital administrative
representative would be present.
As it turned out, Mary Lund
was the representative who sat in,
and the nurses feared
truthfully cooperating
in front of their boss.
We're getting nowhere.
We had gone through
pretty much the entire staff
and the one name that kept popping up
was Amy Loughren,
the last to be interviewed.
And I made the decision that I wanted
to be the one to interview Amy.
When I went in
to the little back room,
Mary Lund, who was the risk manager,
went in with me.
She had coached me and said,
"Everything's gonna be fine."
I just told him right out
that absolutely this is all just bullshit.
I think I said "bullshit" a lot.
And then, for some reason,
Mary Lund had to leave.
I was getting good vibes from Amy.
I likedthat she was defending her friend.
So I felt that she would be
worth the risk of me showing her
and revealing to her
some of the information that I had.
He pushed a piece of paper
across the desk.
It was Charlie's Pyxis printouts.
She shook her head.
It was like a totally different person.
It was like she let her guard down.
And she said, "Wow."
Like she started thinking in her head,
what I'm telling her
could possibly be truthful.
It was so obvious
that there was something sinister
in that paperwork.
I just blanked out.
And my vision came in.
I remember being at the nurse's station.
I saw a patient go into V-tach.
I yelled out, "Code blue."
I got to the room,
and Charlie was already with this patient.
And Charlie was injecting the patient.
I asked Charlie,
"What medication are you giving?"
And he said, "Lidocaine."
And I thought that was odd.
It was a moment, a brief moment,
where I thought,
"Why is he giving lidocaine?"
As we're in the middle of the code,
doing CPR, continuing with lidocaine,
the resident arrives.
I give him, as the code leader,
"This is the progress of our code blue."
And he said,
"Who gave this patient lidocaine?"
I said, "I did. I gave lidocaine."
"I'm the code leader.
I ordered lidocaine."
He said, "She's allergic to lidocaine."
So I walked in on him
murdering someone, and I didn't...
I didn't see it.
And I didn't think about it.
After I had that revelation,
I watched Danny,
and I watched for his response.
And Danny
mouthed the words, "Will you help me?"
I don't remember driving home that day.
I just remember,
when I got home, I called Donna.
It felt like a tidal wave, you know?
It felt like...
For the patients, the families...
The fact that I trusted him.
I really trusted him.
A day or so after the interview
with Amy Loughren,
we decided to travel to her home.
If we could convince Amy to work with us,
we'd have someone on the inside.
When they arrived at my house,
Tim and Danny were looking
at all of this paperwork that they had
as a completely different language.
They didn't speak the language.
And so they asked me
what I saw on the Pyxis printouts.
And I saw
multiple cancellations.
Those cancellations
included deadly medications.
So he would go in under a patient's name...
he would push "Digoxin,"
the drawer would pop open,
and he would take some medicine.
Then he would cancel
that particular interaction.
As we are getting
into all of those conversations...
...my phone rings.
And it's the risk manager, Mary Lund.
I was shocked, and a little suspicious.
Why is she calling me at home?
And then she really started
questioning me about,
had I spoken to the detectives
after our meeting?
She then also advised me that it would be
a good idea to not talk to them
unless there was a representative
from the hospital with me.
Trying to scare me
away from talking to the detectives.
While I'm talking to her on the phone,
Danny and Tim are trying
to listen in on this conversation.
I had a lot to lose.
A career, a family.
I had cardiomyopathy.
I was worried about being disabled,
about not being able to have insurance.
I needed to talk to my daughter.
It had to be a family decision.
So, when she came home from school,
we sat down,
and I told her
that Mommy was working with someone
that very possibly
could be hurting people,
possibly killing people,
and that I have an opportunity
to perhaps prevent him
from hurting anyone else.
She said, "If we have the opportunity
to maybe stop a killer,
of course we have to stop him.
Of course we have to do this."
An 11-year-old had more moral aptitude
than someone who is responsible
for risk management.
Amy agreed to allow us to record
her conversations with Charles Cullen.
One of the essential roles for me
in the investigation
was to keep
that relationship with Charlie.
We had a mass murderer on the loose
and we had to make sure,
one, he wasn't gonna take off
and go somewhere
where we couldn't track him,
or, two, find another position as a nurse
in another facility
where he would go back to his old tricks.
We knew that he was
looking for a job.
We knew that, emotionally,
he was becoming more depressed.
It was hard, when I would hear his voice.
I would feel like
I was betraying him.
But I just knew it in my bones,
he was going to continue to kill,
and he would just get better at it.
My mind raced.
There was fear...
of being caught.
I couldn't stop.
I had applied...
for a full-time position
at a different facility.
And I knew that it would happen again.
Amy came to our office
and gave us advice on patterns
we should be looking for.
As I kept going there,
I really felt like I was part of the team.
And I realized, maybe I was a small voice,
but what I had was a language
none of them could speak.
I also asked them,
"Where's the charts from Cerner?"
And Danny and I
kind of looked at each other
and basically said, "Who is Cerner?"
She said, "It's not, 'Who's Cerner?
What's Cerner?'"
I said, "That's all of the records
of the patients."
Without the Cerner printouts,
it was going to be so hard
to put that syringe in his hand.
When I went back to work,
I started printing out the patient records
so that I could look at them.
Apparently, when nobody was watching her,
she would go to the computer and print out
reams of information about patients,
knowing that she could have been
charged by the institution.
That took a tremendous
amount of fortitude.
Putting myself under
that kind of stress,
I was already concerned about my health.
And yet I knew that,
even if I was risking my life...
I knew I had to help them.
We used all of these
different pieces of information
to cross-reference each other.
It was a paper trail going back to Cullen.
If we could prove one death...
we got him.
We needed a body.
We needed to obtain Digoxin
from the tissue.
We felt that Reverend Gall
was probably our strongest case,
in spite of the fact
that he'd died several months prior.
Never in a million years
would I have thought
he would walk in my door
and basically say,
"Your brother was killed."
That moment, I was angry.
Because I...
This is impossible.
This can't, you know... This can't happen.
He said that they would
probably want to exhume the body.
Would I give my consent?
That's a lot
for any family to have to deal with.
You know, and go through
a whole reburial again at the cemetery.
You almost want to say,
"Let him rest in peace."
But I said, "It's not a problem.
I will give you my consent."
I remember her telling me that her brother
spent his whole life helping people,
and now, even in death, he has
the opportunity to help people as well.
After the exhumation,
Reverend Gall's remains
were transported to the state
regional medical examiner's office
in anticipation of a, uh, autopsy.
Because of the amount of Digoxin
that was found in Reverend Gall's body,
that gave us enough
to change the cause and manner of death
from a natural death,
that the hospital reported, to homicide.
But we were lacking a couple pieces
that a jury sometimes would like to see.
Something physical.
That syringe, or that IV bag
that was contaminated.
It's not always that easy.
Charlie called me
to tell me he was so excited
that he had gotten a job.
So I called Tim to let him know.
If he took a job,
the likelihood of Cullen
killing more people was very, very strong.
We were out of time.
Without a confession,
he was going to continue to murder.
He was going to continue to kill.
So they asked me if I would meet with him
and wear a wire.
Saved message.
Hey, Amy. This is Charlie.
Just returning your call.
Friday's possible. I don't know
what time you were thinking of.
But sure, yeah, I'd like to get together.
We had Amy wired up,
and we were positioned in the parking lot.
I was terrified.
When I walked into the restaurant,
Charlie hugged me for the very first time,
and I was so afraid
that he would feel that black box
that was taped to the small of my back.
- How are you?
- Okay.
- Yeah?
- Yeah.
There was a lot of background noise
in the restaurant, a lot of loud music.
It was almost like a happy hour.
I had a problem
when I first started out.
An incident with low blood sugar.
And at Warren Hospital, a patient had died
24 hours after I'd been her nurse.
Someone said, the son had said,
that I injected her.
And what about Father Gall?
What happened? Charlie, what happened?
I can't...
I know you can.
I see you, and I'm not stupid.
So why?
You're so good.
Why?
Let me help you.
And then the wire itself went dead on us.
I said, "I know you did this."
"I know you did this and everything's
gonna be okay. I still love you."
But for the first time,
it wasn't Charlie.
He became very pale.
He stiffened...
turned his head.
His voice changed.
I was not with my friend Charlie.
I was not.
It was emptiness.
It wasn't darkness,
it wasn't a monster.
It was just nothingness.
He didn't care about me.
He didn't care about anything.
He just said,
"I want to go down fighting."
If Cullen went free,
he'd be killing more people.
You can't take chances with that.
So Danny and I confronted him
and asked him if he'd, uh,
take a ride with us.
And we advised him
that he was being placed under arrest
for the murder of Reverend Gall.
Once Cullen was
brought into our office,
we proceeded with the interview.
When Tim and I was talking to him,
it wasn't anything confrontational.
It wasn't that we were yelling at him,
screaming at him.
We were talking to him
like I'm talking to you now,
and he just said, "I just can't."
He wrapped himself, pulled his knees
to his chest as if in a fetal position
while he's answering us.
And you can see him
literally holding in what's inside him.
It was just there,
but just not coming out.
We were still willing to give it more gas,
but, you know, those observing us...
uh, you know, said enough was enough.
I felt our chance
with a confession was gone.
I get a call from Tim,
and they had devised a plan
for me to talk to Charlie.
And Charlie came in, shackled...
in scrubs
and his little laceless sneakers,
and...
I just
lost it.
Just seeing him that way.
It was like seeing a child.
I didn't feel anger toward him.
I didn't feel
like there was a monster.
I felt like, once again,
that wave of guilt, of betraying a friend.
They took off his shackles,
and Charlie and I just started talking
like normal.
Like it was perfectly normal for us
to just be sitting there on a couch,
him in scrubs.
It was just bizarre how ordinary it felt.
But then, I thought about
who I was really
supposed to be protecting.
He had murdered
some of the most vulnerable people.
They were tied down,
medicated,
unable to protect themselves.
It was my job to defend them,
and I hadn't.
I knew I would do anything
to get a confession out of him.
And then I said to him...
"My life
as I know it is about to end,
because I'm being implicated."
"You get to be my hero today."
"You get to do that. You do."
"And I'm gonna ask you one question."
"How...
did you kill Father Gall?"
And he said he injected him with Digoxin.
With that, we had enough.
So we pulled her out,
and we brought him in to another room,
our interview room,
and basically told him,
"Now you can talk."
My name is Detective Sergeant Tim Braun.
With me is Detective Dan Baldwin.
Today is Sunday, December 14th, 2003.
The time is approximately 6:14 p.m.
Did you have an opportunity
to talk to a friend of yours
prior to going on tape?
Yes, I did.
Was it after that conversation
you had with your friend,
you decided to talk to us
about particular incidents?
Yes, it was.
Let's talk about the matter
pertaining to Florian Gall.
Uh...
Are you responsible for his death?
Yes, I am.
And why is that, Charlie?
Um, because I injected him
with a medication called Digoxin.
How did that make you feel?
I...
I was relieved that he wasn't...
attached to all those machines anymore.
We were hoping for
one confession at best.
We were not totally prepared
for the journey he took us on.
I felt very compelled,
very driven to end suffering as I saw it.
I would go long periods of time
with nothing, but then,
I would find myself getting back,
feeling overwhelmed,
feeling like I couldn't watch people hurt,
die, be treated like nonhumans.
I... have...
...destroyed not only those people's...
God... destiny,
and...
caused probably a lot of suffering
of those families,
but I have also hurt people that I love
very much.
And didn't, for the world,
want to do that.
I love...
my children very much,
and very much wanted to be
a part of their lives.
But I
just couldn't stop myself.
I did not want the people
to see me as this... what I am.
What are you, Charles?
A person who was trusted,
and have been responsible
for a lot of people dying.
I contaminated IV infusion bags
with insulin.
I don't remember
the specific patients or whatever.
Is there any particular reason
why you might do that? Just pot luck?
I guess the majority of patients
were very critical.
I was waiting in a room
with the perfect view
on one of the monitors
when I heard he was using the bags.
I go back to those moments
where I picked up those bags.
I was the one
delivering those deadly medications.
All of the nurses,
all of the team members,
we prepared his victims for him.
And then we delivered his poison for him.
I wanted him to be a mercy killer.
I wanted to believe
he was putting people out of their misery,
but he was not.
Many of the patients that he killed
were on the road to recovery.
In some cases,
patients were being prepared for discharge
because their condition had improved.
This isn't anything
you can understand.
It isn't something you can reason.
One of the medications
that Charlie used was Vecuronium.
Vecuronium is a paralytic.
A person would be
completely alert and awake,
aware of what's going on,
but unable to speak, blink, breathe,
or anything else.
So they literally would be paralyzed
in their awake body,
unable to breathe
as they proceeded to death.
Just horrific.
Can you tell us, in total,
throughout your entire 15, 16 years,
how many patients
have you helped to their death?
Um, possibly 30 to 40 patients.
Okay, 30 to 40 patients in total?
Yes.
Good evening, everyone. I'm Jackie Hyland.
A former nurse at a hospital in New Jersey
is accused of killing his patients.
Lots of them.
If it's true what he says,
he left a trail of death behind him.
As he sees it,
he only helped people who were suffering,
but police call him
nothing more than a mass murderer.
Vanessa Tyler is in Somerville
with more on all this.
Well, this nurse
may have killed more people
than anyone else
in the history of New Jersey,
in a career spanning many years,
involving many hospitals,
including Somerset Medical Center,
where the nurse claims
to have killed a dozen people here alone.
I think people were in shock
in general, as far as the staff.
But the community,
um, some of the older patients,
would make comments like, um,
"You're not gonna kill me
like Charles Cullen killed patients?"
The first time someone said that to me,
I went in the bathroom and cried.
Because he didn't represent who we were.
Charles Cullen confessed
to killing a 40-year-old cancer patient,
and Catholic priest Father Florian Gall.
That brings the total
number of murders to 23.
He didn't show any remorse in court today.
I don't wish to be represented.
I don't plan to contest the charges.
I plan to plead guilty.
My late husband was in the hospital
and very ill 14 years before he passed.
My eldest grandson
was able to grow up with my husband,
knowing his Pop-Pop...
because my husband
lived through that crisis.
My husband had a tremendous impact
in his life and his values.
And that's what Charlie
took away from people.
He took away holidays
with their loved ones,
and graduations, and weddings,
and birthdays, and life lessons,
and all the things
for dozens, perhaps hundreds of people.
He stole from their families
and from them.
I guess I wanted
the opportunity to see him.
Today is the sentencing hearing
for State v. Cullen.
And I wanted him to know
what kind of person my brother was.
Good morning. I'm the sister
of the Reverend Florian J. Gall.
He was a very shy,
humble, quiet, and caring man.
He was extremely trusting of others.
He never looked at anyone.
And I said,
"I'm ashamed that you were a nurse."
"I'm a nurse. We're taught to save lives,
not to kill people."
He never made a comment
to say, "I'm sorry."
Your Honor,
Charles Cullen is charged
with the murder of Pasquale Napolitano.
I want to tell you
a little bit about my dad.
My dad was bigger than life. He nurtured
and supported me throughout my life.
You may have taken her physical body away,
but her spirit and character
is in this room now.
You don't even have the guts
to look this way.
It's a shame.
My heart, it aches for my son.
It bleeds for my son!
I walk around with a hole in my heart
that will never be filled again.
It's unbelievable that one person
could impact that many lives.
A registered nurse,
who is supposed to be a caretaker,
took the life of my brother...
...for his own personal,
selfish, and twisted gain.
I am so lost without my brother.
When we were younger,
we did everything together.
He was my best friend.
Larry had passed away in 2001...
hoping and praying
that this man would be found out.
And none of it happened
in his lifetime, unfortunately.
If only people had listened to him.
For these crimes
and for this betrayal,
you are sentenced to consecutive sentences
as set forth in the global plea agreement.
Do you understand?
Thank you all, then.
Cullen has signed a plea deal
that will spare him the death penalty
if he participates fully
with the investigation.
There are other people
responsible for the actions
of Charles Cullen, besides Charles Cullen.
Most of the hospitals
I've worked at...
they strongly suspected that there were
deaths associated with me.
Why didn't they take it further?
I think they were worried
about the publicity.
If protecting human life
wasn't a priority for them,
it's impossible to guess
how low someone could stoop
to protect their financial interest
and the interest of the hospital.
There are many questions
about how he was apparently able to
get away with murder
in hospitals for so long.
Dennis Miller is CEO
and president of Somerset Medical Center.
- Do you take any responsibility for this?
- Absolutely not.
We take responsibility for investigating
this guy, leading to his arrest.
I'm extremely proud
of Dr. Cors and Mary Lund,
who led the investigation at our hospital.
We're the first hospital to identify him,
leading to his arrest.
Could you have done
a more thorough background check?
Absolutely not. The problem is
the other employers that we called.
And we did
a complete criminal background check
and a complete reference check,
and everybody said the following.
He left in good standing
and his license was intact.
The question that gets asked,
how does somebody operate in a hospital,
how does somebody
kill people in hospitals,
over and over and over again for 16 years?
Again, nine hospitals and a nursing home.
Why didn't he get caught?
And the answer turns out to be, he was.
Over and over and over again.
And those that caught him, or had reason
to suspect that something was wrong,
um, they passed him on,
with positive or neutral references,
and he always found another job.
That's the scandal.
And Charlie Cullen
will spend the rest of his life in prison,
but those who passed him on,
those who are paid big bucks
to be responsible,
have never been held responsible.
They did a very good job at their job,
which was more to do with the institution
of private, for-profit healthcare,
but they didn't do good.
They didn't do good
by what that health system
is theoretically there to do,
which is to protect patients,
to provide patient care.
So they... they failed,
and have yet been rewarded
for their success in protecting
the institution over the patients.