March 4, 2016
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WOW! Has it been that long?
HELLO MY DEAR READERS!
Shit! It's March already - Time sure has flown!
Finding the right monster to share with you can be time intensive.
Hours upon hours of researching and typing, making sure that what you write doesn't
sound like shit...making sure the T's are dotted and the I's are crossed...er
you know what I mean.
Here's this issue's Monster
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CHARLES EDMUND CULLEN
(The Angel of Death)
Charles Edmund Cullen was born in West Orange, New Jersey in February of 1960 and was the youngest of nine children of a deeply religous Catholic, working class family. His father, worked as a bus driver and was 58 years old at the time of Cullen’s birth and had died 8 months later. His mother, was a housewife, who in 1977, died in an automobile accident with one of his sisters at the wheel and it was this accident which lead him to dropping out of High School and enlisting in the United States Navy a few months later in April of 1978. Cullen Served in the Navy until 1984, when he was medically discharged for showing signs of mental instability. Later on, Cullen would describe his childhood years as miserable and even as a child he showed signs of mental illness. At the age of nine he’d made his first of a number of suicide attempts by drinking the chemicals from a chemistry set and later working as a nurse, he would often fantasize about stealing drugs from the hospital where he was employed and using them to commit suicide. In one attempt at killing himself, he took a pair of sissors and jammed them into his head. He was rushed to the hospital and had to have emergency surgery done to remove them.
Following his discharge from the Navy, Cullen attended Mountainside School of nursing and proceeded after to get a job at St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston New Jersey in 1987. It was in that same year he married Adrienne Taub. They would have two children together.
Cullen’s first murder occurred on June 11, 1988. His victim was Judge John W. Yengo Sr. who had been admitted to St. Barnabas suffering from an allergic reaction to a blood thinning drug. Cullen administered a lethal overdose of medication to Judge Yengo Sr by intravenous injection. Ten more victims would follow, including an AIDS patient who died after Cullen gave them an overdose of insulin. When Investigations began by hospital authorities began to try and find who might be tampering with bags of intravenous fluids in 1992, Cullen left his job at St. Barnabas and took a position at Warren Hospital in Phillipsburg, New Jersey where his killing spree continued with three elderly women by giving them overdoses of the heart medication digoxin.
In January of 1993, Cullen’s wife filed for divorce along with two domestic violence complaints, both which depicted Cullen as an alcoholic who abused pets, who poured lighter fluid into other people’s drinks at parties and made prank calls to funeral homes. At the divorce proceedings, he was allowed to share custody of his daughters. He moved to a basement apartment located in Phillipsburg, on Shaffer Avenue. According to Cullen, he wanted to quit nursing in 1993, but the court-ordered child support payments had forced him to keep working.
In March of that same year, Cullen’s erratic mental state intensified when he broke into the home of a co-worker while she and her young son slept, but he left without waking them. He then began phoning her frequently, leaving numerous messages and also followed her at work and around town. The woman filed a complaint and he pleaded guilty to tresspassing for which he was placed on probation for a year. A day after his arrest, Cullen attempted suicide and taking two months off of work, he was treated for depression in two different facilities. Before the end of the year, Cullen would make two more suicide attempts.
Cullen left Warren Hospital in December of 1993 and took a job at Hunter Medical Center in Rarity Township, New Jersey early in 1994 where he worked in the hospital’s intensive care/cardiac care unit for three years. According to Cullen, during his first two years at the hospital he claims that he murdered no one. Hospital records for that time period had already been destroyed by the time of his arrest in 2003, which prevented any investigation into his claim, but he did however, admit to murdering five patients in the first nine months of 1996, once more administering overdoses of digoxin to his victims. In 1994, Cullen became a licensed nurse in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
In 1997, Cullen went to work at Morris Memorial Hospital in Morris, New Jersey but was fired in August of that same year for poor performance and he remained unemployed for six months. In October, he appeared in the Warren Hospital emergency room and sought treatment for depression. He was admitted to a psychiatric facility but left a short time later, the treatment he’d received had not improved his mental health. Neighbors would say that he could be found chasing cats down the street in the dead of night, yelling or talking to himself and making faces at people when he thought they were not looking.
In February of 1998, Cullen was hired by Liberty Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Allentown, Pennsylvania where he worked in a ward for patients who needed ventilators to breathe. While working for Liberty, Cullen filed for bankruptcy that spring, claiming nearly $67,000.00 in debts and that following October, Liberty fired him when he was seen entering a patient’s room with syringes in his hand. The patient ended up with a broken arm but apparently no injections were made. Cullen was accused of giving patients drugs at unscheduled times.
Cullen began working at Elston Hospital in Elston, Pennsylvania in November of 98 and worked there until March of 1999, where he murdered yet another patient with digoxin in December of 98. A coronor’s blood test showed lethal amounts of the drug in the patient’s blood but an investigation was inconclusive and nothing pointed definitively to Cullen.
Cullen continued to find work with a nationwide nursing shortage that made it difficult for hospitals to recruit nurses, and at the time no reporting mechanisms or other systems existed to identify nurses with mental health issues or employment problems. In March of 1999, Cullen took a job in the burn unit at Lehigh Valley Hospital in Allentown where he murdered one patient and attempted to murder a second. He worked there only a month before taking a job at St; Luke’s Hospital in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania where he worked in the cardiac care unit. Over the next three years, he murdered five more people and attempted to murder two others. No one suspected Cullen was murdering patients at St. Luke's Hospital until a co-worker accidentally found vials of unused medications in a disposal bin. The drugs were not valuable outside the hospital, and were not used by recreational drug users, so their theft seemed curious. An investigation showed that Cullen had taken the medication, and he was fired and escorted from the building in June 2002.
Seven St. Luke's nurses who worked with Cullen later met with the Lehigh County district attorney to alert the authorities of their suspicions that Cullen had used drugs to kill patients. They pointed out that, between January and June 2002, Cullen had worked 20 percent of the hours on his unit but was present for nearly two-thirds of the deaths. But investigators never looked into Cullen's past, and the case was dropped nine months later for lack of evidence.
In September 2002, Cullen found a job at Somerset Medical Center in Somerset, New Jersey. Cullen worked in Somerset's critical care unit. Cullen's depression worsened, even though he had begun dating a local woman. Cullen murdered eight more patients and attempted to murder another by June. Once more, his drugs of choice were dioxin and insulin. On June 18, 2003, Cullen attempted to murder Philip Gregor, a patient at Somerset. Gregor survived and was discharged; he died six months later of natural causes. Soon afterward, the hospital's computer systems showed that Cullen was accessing the records of patients he was not assigned to. Co-workers were seeing him in patient's rooms. Computerized drug-dispensing cabinets were showing that Cullen was requesting medications that patients had not been prescribed.
The executive director of the New Jersey Poison Information and Education System warned Somerset Medical Center officials in July 2003 that at least four of the suspicious overdoses indicated the possibility that an employee was killing patients. But the hospital put off contacting authorities until October. By then, Cullen had killed another five patients and attempted to kill a sixth. He then proceeded to have sex with the victims. State officials penalized the hospital for failing to report a nonfatal insulin overdose in August. The overdose had been administered by Cullen. When Cullen's final victim died of low blood sugar in October, the medical center alerted state authorities. An investigation into Cullen's employment history revealed past suspicions about his involvement with prior deaths. Somerset Medical Center fired Cullen on October 31, 2003, for lying on his job application. Police kept him under surveillance for several weeks until they had finished their investigation.
Cullen was finally arrested on December 12, 2003 and charged with one count of murder and one count of attempted murder. On December 14th, he admitted to homicide detectives, Sam Baldwin and Tim Braun, to the murder of Rev. Florian Gail and the attempted murder of Jin Kyung Han, both patients at Somerset. In addition, he admitted that he had murdered as many as 40 other patients over his 16 year career.
n April of 2004, Cullen pleaded guilty in a New Jersey court to killing 13 patients and attempting to kill two others by lethal injection while employed at Somerset. As part of his plea agreement, he promised to cooperate with authorities if they did not seek the death penalty for his crimes. A month later, he pleaded guilty to three more murders in New Jersey. In November of 2004, he pleaded guilty in Allentown, Pennsylvania to killing six and trying to kill another three.
In March of 2006, Cullen was sentenced to 18 consecutive life sentences in New Jersey and is not eligible for parole until 2403. Days later, he was sentenced in Pennsylvania to an additional 6 life sentences.
As for a motive, Cullen stated that he administered overdoses to patients in order to spare them from being “coded” - going into cardiac or respiratory arrest and being listed as code blue emergency. Cullen told detectives that he could not bear to witness or to hear about attempts at saving a victim’s life and gave them overdoses to end their suffering and prevent hospital personnel from de-humanizing them. However, many of his victims were not terminal and were to be released from the hospital shortly...
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