Charles Edmund Cullen was born in West Orange, New Jersey, on February 22, 1960, the youngest of eight. His father died when he was an infant and his mother when he was seventeen, and he attempted suicide repeatedly from childhood onwards. He joined the Navy, was discharged on mental health grounds, and qualified as a nurse in 1987.
From that year until 2003 he worked at nine hospitals and a nursing home in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. He killed patients by putting digoxin, insulin, epinephrine or other drugs into intravenous bags, sometimes bags stored in a supply room that would be picked up at random, which meant he did not always know who would die.
Among those named in the record are John W. Yengo Sr, seventy-two; Lucy Mugavero, ninety; Mary Natoli, eighty-five; Helen Dean, ninety-one; LeRoy Sinn, seventy-one; Earl Young, seventy-six; Catherine Dext, forty-nine; Frank Mazzacco, sixty-six; Jesse Eichlin, eighty-one; Ottomar Schramm, seventy-eight; Matthew Mattern, twenty-two; and Irene Krapf, seventy-nine. William Park is also named in the record.
The essential fact of the case is not what he did but what the hospitals did. Suspicions were raised at institution after institution. He was investigated internally, questioned by police at least once, found removing drugs, dismissed or asked to resign, and in every case allowed to leave with a reference that said only his dates of employment. Legal advice about defamation exposure was the reason usually given. He then applied elsewhere and was hired.
He was arrested in December 2003 after a nurse at Somerset Medical Center, Amy Loughren, agreed to work with detectives and recorded him. He pleaded guilty in 2004 and afterwards to a series of counts covering twenty-nine deaths, and admitted about forty in interviews. He was sentenced to eighteen consecutive life terms with no parole before 2403, in exchange for cooperating in identifying victims. He told investigators he had lost count and that the figure could be several hundred; several states have put it at up to four hundred.
New Jersey and Pennsylvania both changed their law afterwards, requiring healthcare employers to report suspected wrongdoing and giving them immunity for honest references. The case is the subject of Charles Graeber's book The Good Nurse and the film made from it.