Charles Cullen - The Angel of Death

Candice DeLong (0:00)

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There is a particular kind of villain we have come to expect from hospitals. She wears a white uniform, her hair is perfectly arranged, her voice is calm, and she is always watching. In 1962, Ken Kesey gave that villain a name, Nurse Ratched. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Nurse Ratched controls her patients through humiliation, intimidation, and absolute authority. She is, well, the bad nurse, the caregiver who has forgotten how to care. And we recognize her immediately because she looks like what we think evil is supposed to look like. But Charles Cullen, he was something else. He was a nurse too. And if Nurse Ratched represented the nightmare of a caregiver who openly abused her power, Cullen represented something far more difficult to see, the caregiver who appeared to be doing his job. He was not standing over patients, threatening them or screaming at them. He was not cruel. On the surface, he was just a caregiver giving medications, checking vital signs and moving quietly through hospital corridors. He was doing the work that patients and their families trusted him to do. But behind that ordinary routine was something extraordinary and horrifying. Charles Cullen was killing his patients. For years, Cullen moved from hospital to hospital, leaving behind unexplained deaths and questions that were often asked far too late. And that is what makes his story so disturbing. Because while Nurse Ratched teaches us to fear the bad nurse, Charles Cullen forces us to confront something much harder. What if the bad nurse does not look bad at all?

And what if the very thing that makes you trust him, the uniform, the training, the promise to care for you, is also what gives him the opportunity to hurt and even kill you?

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Candice DeLong (4:24)

From Audible Originals and Treefort Media, I'm Candice DeLong and this is Killer Psyche.

For five decades, I studied people's minds through my work as an FBI profiler and psychiatric nurse.

I've interviewed countless murderers, including many serial killers.

Why did they do it?

To get a satisfying answer, we have to dive deep into their minds so that I can give you my best analysis of what made them do what they did.

This episode is Charles Cullen, The Angel of Death.

A hospital is a place where people die. It is in some ways the one place where death can seem almost ordinary. A monitor flatlines, a nurse calls a code blue, doctors rush into the room, medications are pushed through an IV, and sometimes despite everything modern medicine can do, the patient dies, which means that if someone wanted to kill inside a hospital, there was perhaps no better place to hide a murder. That was the world Charles Cullen entered in 1987 He was a nurse, and over the next 16 years, he would work in nine different hospitals and health care facilities across New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Charles Cullen had discovered the perfect hunting ground, critical care, night shift, a place where the line between life and death was already impossibly thin and where the drugs he had access to could make murder look like nature taking its course. Digoxin, insulin, epinephrine, medications that belonged in a hospital, medications that in the right circumstances could kill, which meant something even more chilling. Sometimes, Cullen did not necessarily have to know exactly who would die. He could simply put the poison into the system and wait. Cullen had been working as a nurse for about a year when the first known victim entered his orbit. His name was John W. Yengo Sr. He was 72 years old and in June of 1988, he was a patient at St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, New Jersey. Yengo died after receiving a fatal dose of lidocaine. At the time, there was no obvious reason to think a nurse had murdered him. He was sick, he was in a hospital and people in hospitals die. But then there were other incidents. The hospital began investigating IV bags that appeared to have been contaminated with insulin. Something was wrong and Cullen was working there. But before the investigation could lead anywhere, Cullen was gone. He slipped away from St. Barnabas while questions were still being asked. There was no murder charge, no criminal record and, critically, nothing that would prevent another hospital from hiring him. That would become his pattern. Not just the killing, but the escape. Five years after the death of John Yengo, Cullen was working at Warren Hospital in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, and this time, there was a witness. The victim's name was Helen Dean. She was 91 years old and recovering from cancer surgery. Her son Larry was visiting her. According to Larry Dean, he saw a nurse enter his mother's room with a syringe. The nurse was Charles Cullen. Larry watched him approach his mother, and then Helen said something that would stay with her son for the rest of his life. He stuck me. The next day, Helen Dean was dead. And when investigators later looked at her death, there was a disturbing detail. Three elderly women at Warren Hospital had died with digoxin in their systems. Digoxin is a legitimate heart medication. In small controlled doses, it slows the heart rate and steadies a failing heart. But in large doses, it turns on the patient. The electrical signal that tells the heart when to beat stops getting through what we call complete heart block. The rhythm goes wild and the patient dies of what looks like a cardiac arrest. Still, the evidence was not enough. Cullen denied doing anything wrong and he passed a polygraph examination.