The Netflix crime movie “The Good Nurse” is about a serial killer named Charles “Charlie” Cullen. He kills several patients who are admitted to the hospitals where he works.
As the movie shows, Cullen’s killing spree ended when his co-worker Amy Loughren thought he was behind the strange deaths at Somerset Medical Center, where they both worked.
Amy helped catch the serial killer by working with detectives Tim Braun and Danny Baldwin. Cullen had worked in several hospitals in Pennsylvania and New Jersey before he got to Somerset hospital and met Amy. We can help you find out more about the same hospitals if you want to.
Charles Cullen worked at how many hospitals?
Charles Cullen worked in 9 hospitals, one of which was Somerset Medical Center. Cullen started working at Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, New Jersey, in 1986, after she finished nursing school. In 1988, Cullen killed a judge in Jersey City named John W. Yengo Sr., which is thought to have been his first murder. But Charles Graeber’s book, which the movie is based on, says that the serial killer said he killed an AIDS patient in 1987, but he hasn’t officially told the police about it. During his five years at St. Barnabas, he was only found guilty of one murder.
In 1992, after an investigation into contaminated IV bags, Cullen had to leave Saint Barnabas. His coworkers didn’t know why he was leaving. After that, he started working at Warren Hospital in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. Graeber’s book says that he kept killing people, including Helen Dean, who was recovering from breast cancer surgery when she was killed. Cullen went to work at the Hunterdon Medical Center in Flemington, New Jersey, after he left.
Cullen killed Jesse Eichin at the center by giving him a dose of digoxin. But Eichin might not be the only one who gets hurt in Hunterdon. Graeber wrote in his book that Cullen didn’t really remember the names of the people he injected and killed in Hunterdon. Then, he went to work at the Morristown Memorial Hospital in Morristown, New Jersey. According to Graeber’s source text, Cullen was sure he had killed at Morristown Memorial, but he couldn’t say how many or how few. Cullen’s next job was at the Liberty Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Francis Henry was killed by Cullen at the hospital. After his time in Liberty, Cullen went to Easton Hospital in Easton, Pennsylvania. While Cullen was in Easton, Ottomar Schramm died. There was a lot of digoxin in his body, but Schramm’s doctor didn’t give him the same amount. Cullen started working at Lehigh Valley Hospital-Cedar Crest in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in March 1999. “Cullen remembered killing four or five patients at Lehigh Valley,” Graeber’s book says, but only Matthew Mattern and Stella Danielczyk were named by the police.
The nurse later worked at St. Luke’s Hospital in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Reports say that he killed at least six of his patients in St. Luke. After leaving St. Luke, Cullen moved to Somerset, where he worked with Amy and killed at least 13 and maybe even 16 patients. The last hospital where Cullen worked before he was arrested was Somerset.
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Why didn’t any hospital tell the police about Charles Cullen?
Cullen had only officially admitted to killing 40 patients, but it is thought that the real number is closer to 400. Several of his workplaces did think he had something to do with the deaths that didn’t make sense. Reports say that none of the nine hospitals reported him, though. Not only did they not report him, but they also helped him get hired at other hospitals by writing good things about him. This made it easier for him to kill again. But why didn’t they tell anyone about him? Well, the main reason has to be that the hospitals need to keep their good name.
The hospitals where Cullen worked might have thought that if the world found out that they had hired a serial killer, it would hurt their reputation and credibility. More than saving people’s lives, it seems like these hospitals cared more about protecting their reputation by hiding the fact that one of the most prolific serial killers in history killed people there. Even after Cullen was caught, a group of hospitals said they weren’t to blame for the murders Cullen had done.
If they had told the police right away about the unnatural deaths of the patients and their suspicions that Cullen was involved, their claim would have been true. The hospitals must have given good references to the other companies so that they would hire Cullen. A bad reference could have been seen as an admission of wrongdoing in those hospitals, so the hospitals must have given good references. The hospitals must not have told anyone about Cullen because they didn’t want to deal with expensive lawsuits from the families of the dead patients.
Early years
Charles Cullen was born in West Orange, NJ, on February 22, 1960. He was the youngest of eight children in an Irish Catholic working-class family. His father, Edmond, was a bus driver. He died when Charles was only seven months old, on September 17, 1960. Later, Cullen said that his childhood was “terrible” and that he was constantly picked on by his classmates and the boyfriends of his sisters. He tried to kill himself for the first time when he was 9 years old. He did this by drinking chemicals from a chemistry set.
Florence Cullen (née Ward), Cullen’s mother, moved to the United States from England after World War II. She died in a car accident on December 6, 1977, when Cullen was in his senior year of high school. She was 55 years old. Cullen said that his mother’s death was “devastating,” and he was upset that the hospital didn’t tell him right away and burned her body instead of giving it back to him.
The next year, Cullen quit high school and joined the U.S. Navy. He served on the submarine USS Woodrow Wilson. He did well in basic training and the tough psychological tests that were required of submarine crews, who were expected to spend up to two months at a time submerged in a small boat. Cullen became a second-class petty officer because he was part of the team that ran the Poseidon missiles on the ship. During his time in the Navy, he didn’t fit in with the rest of the crew, so they made fun of him and picked on him.
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A year into his service, Cullen’s leading petty officer on the Woodrow Wilson found him sitting at the missile controls while wearing a surgical mask, gloves, and scrubs instead of his uniform.
Cullen got in trouble for that, but he never said why he was dressed like that. The Navy gave Cullen a job on the supply ship USS Canopus that was less stressful. He tried to kill himself, and over the next few years, he was sent to the Navy psychiatric ward several times. Cullen got a medical discharge from the Navy in 1984 for reasons that were not made public.
Cullen went to the nursing school at Mountainside Hospital in Montclair, New Jersey, soon after he got out of the hospital. He was elected president of his nursing class, graduated in 1986, and started working at Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston at the burn unit.
Cullen met Adrianne Baum in 1987, and they got married the same year. Later that year, their first of two girls, Shauna, was born. But Cullen’s wife became more and more upset by his strange behavior and the way he treated the family dogs. She got a restraining order against him in 1993 because she was afraid he would hurt her or their two children. She said that Cullen had put lighter fluid in people’s drinks, burned his daughter’s books, and left his kids with a babysitter for a week. Cullen said that these claims were not true and that his wife was making things up. She kept saying, though, that Cullen had a mental illness.
Later, Cullen said that the first murders he did were at Saint Barnabas. On June 11, 1988, he gave a patient an intravenous drug overdose that killed them. Cullen eventually said that he had killed a few other people at Saint Barnabas, including an AIDS patient who died after being given too much insulin. When the hospital started looking into the contaminated IV bags in January 1992, Cullen left Saint Barnabas. The investigation later found that Cullen was most likely to blame, which led to the deaths of dozens of hospital patients.
After leaving Saint Barnabas for a month, Cullen got a job at Warren Hospital in Phillipsburg. There, he killed three older women by giving them too much of the heart medicine digoxin. His last victim said that a “sly male nurse” had given her an injection while she was sleeping. But her family and the doctors and nurses at the hospital told her that she was wrong.
After a fight with his wife, Cullen moved into a basement apartment in Phillipsburg the following year. Cullen said later that he wanted to stop being a nurse in 1993, but that he had to keep working because he had to pay child support. In March 1993, Cullen broke into a coworker’s house while she and her young son were sleeping. He left without waking them up. The woman then called the police because he was following her around. After that, Cullen pleaded guilty to trespassing and was put on probation for a year. The day after he was arrested, he tried to kill himself again.
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