foreign
how many do you think I would be I would be very surprised as would pretty much everyone
I've spoken to with any knowledge of of this case if it was not in the hundreds
multiple hundreds Charles Edmond Cullen born February 22nd 1960.
is a former United States sailor and nurse and he murdered dozens possibly hundreds
of patients during a 16-year medical career until being arrested in 2003
he confessed to committing as many as 40 murders and at least 29 of them have been confirmed
though interviews with police psychiatrists and journalists suggest he committed many more
but how is this possible how did he get away with so many murders
and why did he do it let's try and find out hello I'm Mike droberg a Marine Corps
veteran filmmaker history Enthusiast and investigator of the supernatural
and we will answer these questions on today's episode of Forgotten history
Charles Cullen was born in West Orange New Jersey he was raised in a working-class Irish
Catholic Family the youngest of eight children his father Edmund a bus driver died on September
17 1960 when he was only seven months old Colin later described his childhood as miserable and
claims to have been constantly bullied by his schoolmates and his sister's boyfriends when
he was nine he made the first of many suicide attempts by drinking chemicals from a chemistry
set Cullen's mother Florence Cullen immigrated to the U.S from England after World War II
and was killed in a car accident on December 6 1977 at the age of 55 when Cullen was a senior in
high school culinary called his mother's death as being devastating and described being upset that
the hospital did not immediately inform him of her death and cremated her body instead of returning
it that following year Cullen dropped out of high school and enlisted in the United States Navy
where he successfully passed basic training in the rigorous psychological examinations required for
submarine crews he served aboard the submarine the USS Woodrow Wilson and achieved the rank of petty
officer however he did not fit in during his time in Navy and was hazed and bullied by his fellow
crewmen he attempted suicide and was committed the Navy psychiatric ward several times over
the subsequent few years Cullen received a medical discharge from the Navy in 1984. shortly after his
discharge Cullen enrolled in Mountainside Hospital nursing school in Montclair New Jersey elected
president of his nursing class he graduated in 1986 and started to work at the burn unit
of Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston meanwhile Cullen met and married Adriana Baum
in 1987. their daughter Shauna the first of two girls was born later that year however Cullen's
wife became increasingly Disturbed at his unusual behavior and his abuse of the family dogs in 1993
she filed a restraining order against him based on her fear that he might endanger her and their
two children she claimed that Cullen had spiked people's drinks with lighter fluid burned his
daughter's books and left his daughter with a babysitter for a week Cullen denied these claims
saying his wife was exaggerating nevertheless she continued to insist that Cullen was mentally ill
the first murders to which Cullen later confessed occurred to say Barnabas on June 11 1988 he
administered a lethal dose of intravenous medication to a patient Cullen eventually
admitted to killing several other patients at Saint Barnabas including an aged patient
who died after he had been given an overdose of insulin colon left Saint Barnabas in January 1992
when Hospital authorities began investigating the contaminated IV bags the investigation
later determined that Cullen had most likely been responsible resulting in dozens of patients deaths
at the hospital one month after leaving Saint Barnabas Cullen took a job at Warren Hospital in
Phillipsburg where he murdered three elderly women with overdoses of the heart medication digoxin
his final victim said that a sneaky male nurse had injected her as she slept however family members
and the health care providers at the hospital dismissed her comments as unfounded the following
year Cullen moved into a basement apartment in Phillipsburg after a contentious divorce from
his wife Cullen later claimed that he wanted to quit nursing in 1993 but the court ordered child
support payments forced him to continue working in March 1993 Cullen broke her two co-workers home
while she and her young son slept but he left without waking them he then began stalking the
woman who filed a police report against him Cullen subsequently pleaded guilty to trespassing and
received one-year probation the day after his arrest he made another suicide attempt Cullen
took two months off from work and was treated for depression and two psychiatric facilities however
he attempted suicide twice more by the end of the year that September a 91 year old cancer patient
at Warren Hospital reported that Cullen who was not her assigned nurse had come into her room and
injected her with a needle she died the next day her son protested that her death was not natural
and the hospital administered or lie detector test a Cullen and seven other nurses which he passed
colon continued to work at Warren until the following spring Cullen began a three-year
stint at the Intensive Care Unit of Hunterdon Medical Center in Flemington he claimed that he
did not harm anyone during the first two years at Hunterdon however hospital records for that period
have been destroyed at the time of his arrest in 2003. Cullen admitted to murdering five patients
between January and September of 1996 again with overdoses of digoxin he then found work at the
Morristown Memorial Hospital but was soon fired for poor performance Cullen remained unemployed
for six months and stopped making child support payments after seeking treatment for depression
at the Warren Hospital emergency room he was briefly admitted into a psychiatric facility
in February of 1998 Cullen was hired by Liberty nursing and rehabilitation center in Allentown
Pennsylvania where he staffed a ward of respirator dependent patients there he was accused of giving
patients drugs at unscheduled times he was fired after being seen entering a Peyton's room with
syringes in hand and a counter that left a patient with a broken arm after leaving Liberty Cullen was
employed at Easton Hospital from November 1998 to march 1999. on December 30th 1998 he murdered
yet another patient a Coroner's blood test showed lethal amounts of digoxin in the patient's blood
but an internal investigation with Eastern hospital was inconclusive evidence did not
definitively point to Cullen as the murderer even with the history of mental instability and the
number of deaths during his employment at various hospitals Cullen continued to find work because
of a national shortage of nurses additionally no reporting mechanisms yet existed to identify
nurses with mental health or employment problems and liability concerns made hospitals unwilling to
take significant action against Cullen in March of 1999 Cullen took a job at the burn unit of
Allentown's Lehigh Valley Hospital Cedar Crest where he murdered one patient and attempted to
murder another one month later he voluntarily resigned from Lehigh Valley Hospital and took
a job working at Cardiac Care Unit at St Luke's Hospital in Bethlehem during subsequent three
years call and murdered at least five patients and is known to have attempted to kill two more
on January 11 2000 he once again attempted suicide by lighting a charcoal grill in his bathtub and
hoped to succumb to carbon monoxide poisoning his neighbors smelled the smoke and called the
fire department and police Cullen was taken to a hospital in a psychiatric facility but returned
home the following day no one suspected Cullen was murdering patients at St Luke's until a co-worker
found medication vials in a disposal bin the drugs were not valuable outside the hospital
and since they are not used in recreational drug use the theft was highly unusual an investigations
showed that Cullen had taken the medication and he was offered a deal by Saint Luke's to resign and
be given a neutral recommendation or to be fired he resigned and was escorted from the building in
June of 2002. seven of his co-workers at St Luke's later alerted the Lehigh County district attorney
of their suspicions that he had used drugs to kill patients investigators looked into Cullen's past
and the case was dropped nine months later for lack of evidence in September of 2002 Cullen began
working in the critical care unit of Somerset Medical Center in Somerville New Jersey Cullen
had killed at least 13 patients and attempted to kill at least one more by mid-2003 using
digoxin insulin and epinephrine on June 18 2003 he unsuccessfully attempted to murder Somerset
patient Phil Gregor who's later discharged and died six months later of natural causes Somerset
began to notice Cullen's wrongdoings when he accessed the rooms and computerized records
of patients to whom he was not assigned the hospital's computerized drug dispenser cabinets
showed that he was requesting medications that his patients had not been prescribed
his drug requests included many orders that were immediately canceled and many requests within
minutes of one another in July 2003 the executive director of the New Jersey poison information and
education system warned Somerset officials that at least four suspicious overdoses indicated the
possibility that an employee was killing patients the hospital laid contacting authorities until
October by then Cullen had killed at least five more patients and attempted to kill another when
a patient in Somerset died of low blood sugar in October 2003 the hospital alerted the New Jersey
State Police that patient with Cullen's final victim State officials castigated the hospital
for failing to report a non-fatal insulin overdose administered by calling in August an investigation
into his employment history revealed past suspicions about his involvement in patient
deaths Somerset fired Cullen on October 31st 2003 ostensibly for lying on his job application
the nurse Amy loughran alerted the police after she had become alarmed about Cullen's records of
accessing drugs and his links to Patient deaths police kept them under surveillance for several
weeks until they had finished their investigation investigators signed loughran to visit Cullen after
work hours and talked to him while she wore a wire with that evidence police had produced
enough probable cause for his arrest Cullen stated that he admitted overdoses to patients to spare
them from being encoded or going into cardiac or respiratory arrests as being listed as a code
blue emergency he told detectives that he could not bear to witness or to hear about attempts at
saving a victim's life Cullen also stated that he gave patients overdoses so that he could end
their suffering and prevent Hospital Personnel from dehumanizing them however not all of his
victims were terminal patients some like gal had been expected to recover before Cullen killed
them instead of using common painkillers and stimulants access to which was strictly regulated
by hospitals because of their value of street drugs Cullen chose instead to use as his tools
of choice drugs such as digoxin and Insulin which had little use outside hospital setting and were
less likely to attract attention investigators stated that Cullen may have caused patients to
suffer which contradicts his claims of wanting to save patients from suffering similarly Cullen told
investigators that although he observed patients suffering for several days the decision to commit
each murder was performed on impulse Cullen told detectives from 2003 that he lived most of his
life in a fog and that he had blacked out memories of murdering most of his victims he said that he
could not recall how many he killed or why he had chosen them in most cases Cullen adamantly denied
committing any murders at a given facility according to detectives and calling himself
several hospitals suspected him of harming or killing patients but failed to take appropriate
legal actions after Cullen's criminal conviction many of the hospitals at which he had worked were
sued by families of his victims the files and settlements against the New Jersey hospitals all
of which were settled out of court are sealed prompted by the Cullen case Pennsylvania New
Jersey and 35 other states adopted new laws which encouraged employers to give honest
appraisals a workers job performance and provide legal protections for reporting medical errors
the New Jersey laws in particular from the model other states would follow firstly the 2004 patient
safety act increased Hospital's responsibility for reporting serious preventable Adverse Events
the 2005 enhanced an act a supplement to the patient safety act required hospitals
to report certain details on their employees to the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs
and mandated that the complaint and disciplinary records relating to Patient Care be kept for at
least seven years the 2022 film the good nurse adapted from Charles Graeber's non-fiction book
the good nurse a true story of medicine Madness and murder that was released on Netflix has Eddie
Redmayne portraying Cullen and Jessica Chastain portrays co-worker Amy loughran the nurse who
helped implicate Cullen and assisted detectives by talking with colon after work hours while
she wore a wire I recently watched this film and highly recommend it thanks for watching today's
episode of Forgotten history please like share and subscribe send us your questions or comments
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