‘Angel Of Death’: The Chilling Story Of Charles Cullen, The Nurse Who Murdered Up To 400 Patients

For 15 yrs, Charles Cullen slipped deadly doses of drugs into his patients’ IVs — earning him the nickname the “Angel of Death.”

Through his 16-year health care job, Charles Cullen bounced again and forth between various hospitals and nursing residences throughout New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Even so, the nurse’s repeated relocation was not born out of a desire to support as quite a few people as doable. He was actually killing his sufferers and then fleeing right before everyone caught on.

Concerning 1988 and 2003, Cullen murdered at least 29 of his clients by injecting them with lethal doses of treatment. It wasn’t only unwell people who fell sufferer to Cullen’s dim urges, possibly. In reality, a selection of his victims ended up on the highway to recovery, and their life were being reduce limited by a guy who was intended to assistance them.

When he was finally caught in 2003, investigators recognized that Cullen may possibly have killed far additional than 29 individuals. Some even believe his accurate target count was nearer to 400, which would make him the deadliest serial killer in background.

So how is it that Charles Cullen managed to assert so quite a few life and get absent with it for so lengthy?

Charles Cullen’s Everyday living Just before The Murders

Prior to he was a ruthless serial killer, Charles Cullen was a child surrounded by demise and triumph over by depression and nihilism.

According to a timeline from Radford University’s Office of Psychology, Cullen was only 7 months old when his father handed absent in September 1960. At age nine, Cullen tried to get rid of himself by mixing collectively an assortment of substances from a chemistry established and ingesting it.

He had handful of good friends and was generally teased at college. In his teenager many years, he fell in adore with the is effective of Dostoyevsky, specifically the novel Crime and Punishment, which tells the tale of a guy who commits murder. All around the same time, Cullen’s mother was killed in a motor vehicle accident.

The teasing experienced also turned to bullying by higher college, and when he the moment attended a party the place his bullies tormented him, he retaliated by spiking their drinks with rat poison. Fortunately, the poisoning didn’t end result in any fatalities.

In April 1978, Cullen dropped out of higher college and enlisted in the U.S. Navy, the place he acquired training to turn out to be a ballistic missiles technician.

However, the Navy proved to be just as tumultuous as significant school. He was often taunted, ridiculed, and hazed by his fellow crew associates, who dubbed him “Fish-Tummy,” according to Medium.

At 1 stage, he was uncovered putting on a stolen hospital robe, mask, and gloves, sitting down at the missile regulate panel. The incident was described, and Cullen was reassigned to a further vessel. Three a long time afterwards, he was discharged, however data never state whether it was for professional medical or psychological motives.

On his discharge, Cullen enrolled in the Mountainside Medical center School of Nursing in Montclair, New Jersey.

In the spring of 1987, a number of important variations happened in Cullen’s daily life. He graduated from nursing college and married a pc programmer named Adrienne Taub — but the celebrations ended up overshadowed by the dying of Cullen’s brother James.

That June, Cullen also acknowledged his initially nursing career in the burn up unit of Saint Barnabas Health-related Heart in Livingston, New Jersey. Within just a calendar year, he would murder his first sufferer.

Charles Cullen’s 15-Year Killing Spree

Charles Cullen’s to start with sufferer was a 72-yr-aged patient named John Yengo, a retired Jersey Town decide, The New York Times described. Yengo had been admitted to the Saint Barnabas burn off unit with critical sunburn only times before Cullen intentionally administered him a deadly overdose of lidocaine.

From there, Cullen’s interior darkness came to encapsulate him. He started consuming seriously and abusing his relatives.

His abuse was especially cruel in the winter season months, when he would change the warmth off in the family’s residence and power his wife and their youthful daughter to endure frigid temperatures. He also started off to torture the family’s two Yorkshire terriers by routinely sticking them in trash bins.

He was fired from Saint Barnabas in 1992 and subsequently took a position at Warren Hospital’s Coronary Treatment Device. That exact calendar year, his next daughter was born, but the ongoing abuse at household inevitably led to his wife leaving him. She filed a domestic violence criticism versus him and questioned for a restraining order, but in accordance to Criminal offense and Investigation, a decide said Cullen was only guilty of “odd actions, not threatening violence.”

In the wake of their divorce, Cullen tried suicide two times and ramped up his felony routines, professing at least two more victims and even breaking into a woman’s dwelling.

Regretably, his penchant for violence only greater in the several years to occur.

Charles Cullen’s Arrest And Demo

Above the following ten years, Cullen jumped from medical center to healthcare facility, killing clients where ever he went. In September 2002, he began doing work at Somerset Medical Heart, where by he went on a 12 months-prolonged killing spree that left at minimum 13 people lifeless.

One of these victims was 21-calendar year-previous Michael Strenko, who experienced been admitted for a spleen operation that he ought to have simply recovered from. In its place, Cullen brought his small everyday living to an end by injecting him with a significant dose of norepinephrine.

Following so quite a few fatalities in just one 12 months, rumors and suspicion about Cullen lastly drew adequate consideration that an official investigation commenced.

Cullen’s reckoning in the long run came in December 2003. In accordance to Investigation Discovery, an investigation at the medical center exposed that Cullen was accessing clinical records of patients who weren’t assigned to him and buying odd combinations of medication.

At his trial, he claimed that he’d required to conclude his victims’ struggling, in spite of the truth that quite a few of his clients ended up on the street to recovery when they died. He believed that he’d killed about 40 patients, and detectives have been in a position to formally tie him to 29 murders — but the accurate amount might be much more than ten times that.

Charles Cullen was ultimately sentenced to 11 consecutive life terms devoid of the risk of parole. An real motive for his crimes has hardly ever been founded.

When he was confronted by his victims’ households at trial, Cullen sat stoically with his eyes shut as the daughter of a single of his patients said, “He was supposedly some sort of angel of mercy, ending peoples’ struggling. Properly, he should seem all over the courtroom.”

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Charles Cullen may perhaps have been just one of the most prolific killer nurses, but he was not the only 1. Go through the story of Beverly Allitt, a different “Angel of Death.” Then, study about Leonarda Cianciulli, the serial killer who turned her victims into bars of soap.