The Angel of Death - Charles Cullen

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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Karl Denke - The Cannibal of Ziebice

January 24, 2016

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HELLO AGAIN DEAR READERS!

I must apologize for my lack of getting another article published any sooner

but all that matter's is that I have not forgotten about you, and so here we are with

today's little tidbit of knowledge

Does the Boogyman really exist? Oh, I think he does! But He is not one person

but several, dozens in fact and with each of these pages you are able to see that as fact.

I do hope you enjoy today's entry onto my blog.

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Karl Denke

“The Cannibal of Ziebice”

     We do not know a lot about Karl Denke’s early life.

     We do know that he was born in Munsterberg/Silesia in Germany (today’s Ziebice, Poland) on August 12, 1870. He was considered a somewhat dull child, if not retarded in nature by the age of ten, and upon reaching the age of twelve he left home and went to work as an apprentice with a gardener. His father died when Karl was twenty-five and his brother took over the family farm while Karl received a small amount of money with which he was to buy land. He did but proved to be such a poor farmer, he sold the land and bought a house in town on what is now Stawowa Street. Not long after, he was forced to sell this house and move into a small apartment and shed in the backyard of the house.

     Karl Denke enjoyed a decent reputation in this town of 8 thousand.  He led an honest, lower middle class lifestyle.  He helped beggars, and even allowed some of them to stay overnight in his apartment.  It was no wonder, then, that Ziębice Police agreed to give him a vending license.  The peddler sold leather suspenders, belts, shoe laces, etc. In Wrocław, he also offered pickled “boneless pork.” And between 1918 and 1924, he also ran a rooming house  where many of his tenants would refer to him as “Papa.” Generally well liked by the community also was an organ blower at the local church. But it was on December 21, 1924, that the world came crashing down upon him and the truth of who and what he was came to light. One of Denke's tenants, a coachman by the name of Gabriel, heard cries for help which seemed to emanate from Denke's room, downstairs. Afraid the landlord might be injured, Gabriel rushed down to help only to find a young man staggering along the corridor, blood streaming from his open scalp. Before he fell unconscious on the floor, the victim blurted out that "Papa" Denke had attacked him with an ax. Police were summoned and arrested Denke, scouring his flat for evidence. 

     They turned up identification papers for twelve traveling journeymen, plus assorted items of male clothing. In the kitchen, two large tubs held meat pickled in brine; with the assorted bones and pots of fat, detectives reckoned that it added up to thirty victims, more or less. In Denke's ledger, they found listed names and dates, with the respective weights of bodies he had pickled dating back to 1921. In a report given by Fredrich Pietrusky in 1926 the discovery was described in this way: 

     “The first findings made in Denke’s house during the search were bones and pieces of meat. The latter were in a salt solution found in a wooden drum. There were altogether fifteen pieces with skin. Two parts of the breast, which is strongly hairy. The torso is cut through the middle, three fingers above the navel. Its lateral limit is the front shoulder blade. In the piece of the anterior abdominal wall, the middle of the navel is visible. The remaining pieces belong to the side and back parts. The largest is about forty by twenty centimeters large. Particularly striking was a very clean anus with hand large parts of both buttocks. The meat is brownish red and does not feel as if the body would have lost much blood. On the back some soft-bluish discoloration is visible as well as livor mortis, which leads to the conclusion that the disassembly of the body took place several hours after death.

     There is no evidence of vital reaction of the bodies to the cuts made, which means that the latter were not made while the victims were still alive. Nevertheless some skin and muscles from the necks were missing, as well as extremities [arms and legs], head and sexual organs. Lesions could not be determined, nor the nature of death or the tool of crime. In three medium-sized pots filled with cream sauce, some cooked meat, partially covered with skin and human hair was found. The meat was pink and soft. All pieces seemed cut from the gluteal area [buttocks]. One pot had only half a portion. Denke must have eaten the other piece shortly before being arrested.”

     The next part of the report is concerned with findings, that didn't seem to have anything in common with the transforming of human tissue. Nevertheless further investigation revealed that Denke experimented with human leather and soap making based on human fat, although his methods remained utterly primitive.

     "Among Denke’s suspenders, three pairs were made of human skin. They are about six centimeters wide and seventy centimeters long. The leather is not smooth and at one spot broken. It seems not tanned but only free of sub-skin tissue and dried. At one spot it is obvious, that he made the cuts under the nipples, which are still clearly visible. Four are patched with human skin taken from the pubic area. [...] Some traces of louse nits were also discerned under microscope. All suspenders show traces of use and one of them Denke was found on Denke himself. Beside suspenders, Denke had also leather straps cut out of human skin, that he treated with shoe polish and parts of which were sawn together with pieces and rags of cloth. Many of these laces were made of human hair: one sample was one centimeter long, grey-white and - according to study - was taken from the head. From which area of the body came the other pieces, this cannot be said.”

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     The majority of Denke’s victims were vagabonds and runaways, the first believed to be Emma Sander, age 25, in 1909 and his last attempt was on that December day in 1924, Vincenz Oliver who escaped his being killed and only wounded. He has been credited with at least thirty murders over a fifteen year time span, but some claim that number to be much higher. We also will never know why he murdered and cannibalized his victims, even selling some of the victim’s meat and flesh at the Wroclaw market. Karl Denke hanged himself in his cell with a pair of his own suspenders the day after his arrest in 1924.

Nannie Doss - The Giggling Grandma

January 5, 2015

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Hello There! I'm glad that you've chosen to come pay another visit to my nice little blog.

You know

Not all Human Monsters are men.

Throughout History, there have been many a female who has

given in to her dark side and on this occasion, allow me to introduce you

to just one of them.

ENJOY!
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Nannie Doss
The Giggling Grandma

     Nannie Doss was born Nancy Hazle on November 4, 1905, in Blue Mountain Alabama, which is now a part of the town of Anniston just west of Birmingham. On the outside, she was a friendly, happy and likable neighbor, wife and mother, but on the inside there lurked the heart and mind of a cold blooded murderess who almost completely wiped out her entire family which goes to show that not all serial killers are men.

     She was one of five children born to James and Louise Hazle, and her childhood was an unhappy one. Both she and her mother hated her father who was a strict and controlling man with a nasty streak in him who would keep her and her siblings out of school for long periods of time in order for them to work on the family farm. Starting at the age of five, Nannie as she came to be called even at an early age, was made to cut wood and clear the fields of weeds and debris in order to make it ready for planting. And if her or her siblings, who were right beside her working the field or barn or house didn’t do their fair share as her father James saw it, then the belt was used on them. Nannie’s mother too was not left out of the strict way James ran the household. If the house was not clean to his liking or dinner was late on the table, Lou (Louisa) would also suffer from a beating. Louisa feared her husband but in those days, wife beating was ignored for the most part.

     At Seven, Nannie suffered a head injury while traveling by train and for many years after, she suffered severe headaches, blackouts and bouts of depression. When she was allowed to go to school, she was a poor student who never learned to read well due to the erratic amount of education she received. Rules and life was strict for her, there was no “fun times” in her life she would later say; No dances, no parties, and few friends. Adding to this dark childhood were the numerous molestations she had to suffer by a string of local men before she’d reached the age of 15.

     Her first marriage took place in 1921, at the age of 16 to a man named Charley Braggs whom she’s met at the Linen Thread factory. The marriage was blessed by her father after 4 months of she and Charley dating. Braggs was lived with his mother and never knew his father and even after the marriage, Braggs mother continued to live with her son and had taken over Nannie’s life completely, replacing if you will, the role of Nannie’s over-bearing father, James. Braggs mother took up a lot of his attention and often kept her from doing things she wanted. However, the marriage produced four children between 1923 and 1927, all girls. Under the stress of having to deal with her over bearing mother-in-law, the children and her relationship with her husband, she began to drink and smoke heavily. Both suspected the other of having affairs, which they were. Braggs would vanish for days at a time. It was an unhappy marriage.

     In the early part of 1927, the two middle daughters died and it was suspected their deaths were from food poisoning. Suspecting that his not-so-happy wife had killed them, Braggs fled from her, taking the eldest daughter, Melvina with him and leaving their newborn, Florine with Nannie Doss. It was also around this same time that Braggs mother died as well.

     Braggs returned in the summer of 1928 to the area and with him, a divorcee with her own child. Doss and Braggs divorced shortly after his return to town and she returned to her mother’s home takin her two surviving daughters with her. Braggs always maintained that he’d left because he was frightened of his wife.

     Living and working in Anniston, Doss eased her lonliness by reading True Romance magazine and other such material. She also began to once more read the lonely hearts column in the paper and wrote to men advertising there. It was there where she found her second husband, Robert (Frank) Harrelson, a 23 year old factory worker from Jacksonville,. He would send her romantic poetry and she would send him a cake. They finally met and married in 1929 when she was 24 and 2 years after her divorce from Braggs. A few months following their marriage, Doss discovered that Frank was an alcoholic and had a criminal record for assault. But despite this, the two stayed married for 16 years.

 

     In 1943, Nannie's eldest, Melvina, gave birth to Robert Lee Haynes in 1943. Another baby followed 2 years later but died soon afterward. Exhausted from labor and groggy from ether, Melvina thought she saw her visiting mother stick a hatpin into the baby's head. When she asked her husband and sister for clarification, they said Nannie had told them the baby was dead—and they noticed that she was holding a pin. The doctors, however, couldn't give a positive explanation. The grieving parents drifted apart and Melvina started dating a soldier. Nannie disapproved of him, and while Melvina was visiting her father after a particularly nasty fight with her mother, her son Robert died mysteriously under Granny's care on July 7, 1945. The death was diagnosed as asphyxia from unknown causes, and 2 months later Nannie collected the $500 life insurance she had taken out on Robert. It was also the same year in which Doss’s husband, Frank died. After an evening of heavy drinking, he raped Doss. The following day, as she was tending to her garden, she came across Harrelson’s whiskey jug. Topping it off with rat poison, she placed it back where she’d found it and Harrelson died a painful death that evening.

     Nannie’s third husband was Arlie Lanning and the two were married three days after meeting through another lonely hearts column. He was in many ways, like his predecessor, Harrelson: he was an alcoholic and a womanizer. However, in this marriage, it was Doss who often disappeared for months on end. When she was at home, however, she played a doting housewife, and when her husband died of what was said to be heart failure, the whole town turned up to his funeral in support of her. Afterwards, the house the couple lived in burned to the ground. It had been left to Lanning's sister, and had it survived it would have gone to her. As it happened, the insurance money went to Doss, and she quickly banked it. She soon left North Carolina, but only after Lanning's elderly mother had died in her sleep. She ended up at her sister Dovie's home. Dovie was bedridden and soon after Doss's arrival she died.

     Next came Richard L. Morton of Emphoria, Kansas and while he did not have a drinking problem like the two before him, he was a womanizer. However, before Doss could poison him, she ended up killing her mother in 1953 when she came to live with them. Morton was not spared however and met his death three months later. Husband five came in June of that year; Samual Doss He was a clean cut, church going man and disapproved of Nannie’s romance novels and stories. In September he was admitted into hospital with flu-like symptoms and was diagnoses with severe digestive tract infection. On October 5th, he’d been treated and released and Nannie killed him that evening in her rush to collect the two life insurance policies she’d taken out on him. It had been his sudden death that alerted his doctor and who ordered an autopsy, which revealed a huge amount of arsenic in his system. Nannie was promptly arrested.

     At first, Nannie refused to acknowledge her role in Sam Doss' poisoning. He was her husband, she said, and wouldn't have harmed him. But, the police wouldn't let up. Arsenic, they reminded her, does not come naturally with pork meat or coffee beans. In fact, when Sam was admitted into the hospital a month earlier, he had just devoured a plateful of her prunes.

     "Were they poisoned, too, Nannie?" they asked.

     I don't know what you're talking about," she giggled at the ridiculousness of their line of questioning. "Me? Poison?"

     Hours upon hours went by of detectives questioning her and trying to get her to tell them the truth. Ordinarily, the police wouldn’t have let the interrogation go on for the length that it did, but it was all too difficult to them to get rough with her, this sweet grandmotherly type woman with an innocent giggle. Finally however, she opened up to the police and admited first to killing Sam Doss. And then about Morton, Arnie Lanning, her sister Dovie and nephew Robert, her mother, the list went on. From Kansas to North Carolina and Alabama, the bodies were all exhumed and tests made. Each one was found to contain Arsenic.

     She pled guilty on May 17, 1955 in the Criminal Court of Tulsa, Oklahoma during a brief hearing. She received a life sentence and it was in prison where she spent the remainder of her days, finally dying of Leukemia in a prison hospital ward in 1965.