The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 (22 page)

“And Charlie doesn't really feel bad about any of this. He's concerned how it affects his kids, but he doesn't feel bad. And Charlie's not the kind of guy to fake it,” says Mask. “It makes some people feel like he's getting away with something.” Prison was supposed to take away his options. And yet there he was, still making demands.

 

A
FTER
A
LLENTOWN, HIS FINAL SENTENCING,
Cullen was shackled in the back of a windowless van. He was met at the Trenton prison by guards in riot gear. They strip-searched him, gave him prison clothes, and led him to the psych ward, where they took the clothes away and strip-searched him for a second time. He was handed a disposable gown like medical patients wear, but it was made from the stuff they wrap around new TV sets, and he was put into a padded room for a 72-hour observation period. The gown shredded after the first day. He tried not to listen to the “time for your insulin” comments from the guards, focusing instead on Psalm 25: “My enemies are many, they hate me. Deliver me, let me not be ashamed.” Then he was given clothes again and moved into DD Block, where he was to serve his now eighteen life sentences, and where I visit him again.

From the Trenton River Line train, the prison appears as a block of brick and razor wire across the highway from a McDonald's. Another minute's walk past the front gate gets you to a security check-in with a metal detector and a uniformed guard. After a pat-down, you're buzzed through three bolted steel doors and into a guarded hallway partitioned into steel booths. I find Cullen waiting in the third one, waving a little hello. We nod mutely across the bulletproof divide, and plug in our phones. There is static, then breath.

Cullen and I had been communicating through letters for nearly a year, and I had learned a lot about the man—his accidental entry into nursing school and his first job scrubbing dead skin from burn victims, the depressions and suicide attempts and marital problems, his drinking and his hospitals and his sixteen-year murder spree. But even knowing the facts, I was still unable to fully connect the mild man across the glass with the serial killer and his monstrous crimes.

I tell him that some of the families of his victims are against the kidney donation, that they see it as special treatment for a serial killer, and nothing more. “I'm trying to get something? I'm in prison, I can't control—there's nothing to bargain for—no island off the coast of New Jersey that they send you to torture you, no Guantánamo Bay. All I can do is sit in a cell. And I know that New Jersey doesn't make license plates anymore, so what would the families rather I did, just sit and watch TV?”

Cullen is indignant at a system that he said was willing to sacrifice an Ernie Peckham to punish a Charles Cullen. Saving a relative stranger's life is undoubtedly heroic—would
you
give up a kidney?

Of course, heroic compassion is easier to talk about than mass murder. I can admire Cullen for the one and hate him for the other, but I have no idea how to connect the two—they seemed to be the actions of two very different men. And so I ask him: Is it any wonder people question your motives? You're in prison for having taken dozens of lives, and yet now you're fighting to save one. It seems…inconsistent.

Cullen is only a foot away, on the other side of the glass, but I cannot decipher his expression. Then he glances to the side of the glass, as if reading there, and slowly begins to speak.

“If you're asking if I knew what I was doing was wrong,” he says, “I saw that I was stopping pain, removing pain. I saw it as shortening the duration of the pain, ending pain. Sometimes the pain was patients who were suffering and terminal; sometimes it
was the pain of families being ripped apart; sometimes it was the lives of patients that would only be tied up in an endless series of procedures and complications and pain.

“But if you're asking—well, I knew that it was illegal,” Cullen says. “And that it wasn't my choice to make. But it's how I thought about it. I felt compelled to do what I did. I didn't see it as bad. I did know it was illegal.”

Cullen is looking at the table but not looking at it. I don't know what he sees. “But, if you're asking, when I was asked to donate a kidney, I felt that I did what I would normally do, in any circumstance. To be helpful. It was something that I could do. It was something that was needed. I was asked to do it, and it's possible. And I felt compelled to, because I could do it and I was asked to.”

I don't know what I expected from his answer. Ultimately, the only answer to the question of “why” is, simply, “because.” Cullen did what he felt he needed to, or wanted to, or could; at some point, they had become the same thing. In such a tyranny, bad and good don't figure. It's a simple answer, but it's the only one that makes sense.

Cullen fixes me with a look, then takes his glance away, as if to study my response in private. “I know a lot of people find it surprising that someone like me would want to do this, donate. But for me, it's totally consistent. For me, as a nurse, it's what I would do, what I would have always done. It's who I am. But if you need to wonder why I should, or why someone like me would, well, it really depends on how you think of people. And what you think people are capable of.”

 

A
S IT HAPPENS,
it was a Tuesday when the waiting ended. They came for Cullen in the night, guards with keys and handcuffs. He was going to the prison's medical center at St. Francis hospital. If they knew why, they wouldn't say. They gave him the
paper gown again, drew his blood, cuffed him to the bed. The television in the corner was always on, local news,
Oprah.
A day passed, and he thought,
Here we go again.
He had only fourteen more days before his donor tests expired, but this wasn't the donation. It was something else.

The guards came again in the morning. They were taking him downstairs; they didn't say why. He was instructed to respond only to direct questions. He was told that Charles Cullen was not his name. His name was now Jonny Quest. The doctor called him Mr. Quest. It was a security measure, but also someone's idea of a joke. Cullen thought it was funny. “It could have been worse,” he said later. “Saddam Hussein or something.”

They gave him something to relax him, Valium, he thinks; they wouldn't say. It made him woozy. They gave him forms to sign. He held the pen, unsure of which name to use. “Use the one you're supposed to,” the doctor said. He'd watched the cartoons as a kid, he remembered the handsome blond boy and his adventures, a helpful boy with skills, full of potential. He signed the paper “Jonny Quest.” It wasn't legally binding, of course, so they gave him another form that he was to sign “Charles Cullen, a.k.a. Jonny Quest.” The nurse looked away when he did this. It was supposed to be a secret. Then they gave him another shot, and now he was feeling kinda gone.

An hour later, Jonny Quest's kidney was tucked into a cooler and readied for its journey. It would have been crazy to risk traffic, so it likely flew via a Life Star helicopter, northeast from Trenton, keeping Manhattan on its left, banking up Long Island. That day the traffic far below was heavy with Hamptons weekenders, a line of lights leading past the massive Stony Brook medical complex, lit on the dark hillside like Bilbao under construction.

I parked in the C lot. On weekend nights, hospitals are usually busy only after the bars close and usually only in the emergency room. At 8
P.M.
, the main lobby was as quiet as a dead department
store. A guard read yesterday's newspaper again; the gift shop was just Mylar balloons in darkness. Surgery is on the fourth floor, with the burn unit and radiology. The kidney took the back elevator; I took the front.

In the surgical waiting room, the TV is always on, approximating normality for the families camped there, the children and their mothers holding each other, the men clutching Dunkin' Donuts cups. This TV played the movie
Freaky Friday,
two people switching bodies and identities and, it being Hollywood and Disney at that, coming closer together as a result. But that was just a movie. For transplants, parts are parts. You take what you can get to survive.

And so, while Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan had their first mother-daughter argument about whose life was more difficult, Ernie Peckham lay face up on a table, anesthetized and encircled by masked strangers in disposable blue clothes. Some traced a curved incision through the fat of his abdomen, others parted the draped muscles of his belly wall with cool steel clamps. Jonny Quest's kidney was about the size of a surgeon's hand, a quivering bean shape mottled in yellowish fat that nested neatly into the half-shell of Peckham's pelvis. A stump of renal artery, pruned only hours before from its owner's aortal stalk, was patched into Ernie's blood supply with 5-0 suture wire; vein was stitched to vein. And later, as Jamie Lee and Lindsay, back in their own bodies again, smiled knowingly at each other across a climactic concert scene, a surgical clamp was removed from an external iliac artery, and Jonny Quest's kidney swelled pink with oxygenated blood, alive again—Ernie Peckham's kidney now.

Underneath the xenon lamps, this medical miracle didn't look like much more than cauterized gristle in a blue paper hole. It showed nothing of the millions of tiny tubules stacked inside its medulla, or the arterial branches, as infinite as crystals in frost, that would filter his blood as a brain filters choices, sorting bad from good as well as humanly possible.

 

C
HARLES
G
RAEBER
is a National Magazine Award–nominated contributing editor at
Wired
and
National Geographic Adventure
magazines. A former medical student, breakfast chef, and bar columnist for the
Budapest Sun, The Cambodia Daily,
and the
Phnom Penh Post,
Graeber has also written for
The New Yorker, GQ, New York
magazine, the
New York Times Magazine, Ha'aretz, Men's Journal,
and numerous others. Born in Iowa, he now moves between a Brooklyn apartment and a Corten steel icebreaker anchored off Nantucket Island.

Coda

Apparently it's common wisdom that we are the sum of our actions, or the sum of our parts, or both. In this story, the actions included both murder and cure, and the parts were actual body parts moved man-to-man, Frankenstein-style. And all of this in a series of hospitals, the buildings where so many of life's mundane mysteries unfold. From the first moment it was obvious that this story would beg bigger questions than it answered—as good a reason for writing as I could imagine. It started with the morning paper and a two-inch column about a killer nurse who wanted to save a life. The weirdness of that one stayed with me for days. Cullen had never spoken to anyone, but I wrote him anyway. His response pushed me into a crossroads.

Twenty-first-century writers chronicling their relationship with a convicted killer do so in the shadow of both the genre and its ethical hangover; not only are you trespassing through the creaking mansion of
In Cold Blood
, but you're also haunted by the cautions of Capote. And so while one (thankfully former) editor high-fived me for “tricking” a famous killer into delivering a mother lode of salacious material, my mother mourned the sure-blackening of her son's pure lowan soul. I tried hard to keep them both wrong—and myself sane—by playing it straight with Charlie Cullen. The fact was, I was invested in his kidney donation at
tempt—I have a family history with medicine that ranges from Revolutionary War surgeon great-grandpappies to a passionate nephrologist father to my own aborted stints in med school and kidney medical research. Also, I'm not a heartless dick. But it was also true that I was only writing about this kidney donation because the donor had murdered dozens, if not hundreds, of people. Realistically, my ability to tell Cullen's kidney story at proper length, in a popular magazine, was dependent on access to his dirty details. So I told him: I believed the donation was a good thing, the murders were bad, and that I was a writer, not an accountant. I wouldn't average his life into a simple sum. Cullen didn't like hearing this calculus and I didn't enjoy explaining it. The truth helped my sleep but not my reportage. To Charlie Cullen, public interest in his murders is no different than that of motorists slowing to ogle a grisly accident. And Charlie's right; part of the “true crime” appeal is the pornography of horror presented as news. But that's not all of it. Because of his (true) crimes, Charles Cullen is commonly referred to as the “Angel of Death,” or more simply, a “monster.” Personally, I don't believe in either—or rather, I believe that we are all potential angels or monsters, depending on the directions we walk from various crossroads. Cullen's crimes are terrible, but not inhuman—comprehensible if only in the context of his own life and mind. In my first meeting with Cullen, the bulletproof Plexiglas seemed to me like a smudged mirror. There are no monsters, there's only ourselves through the lens of another life. There are a few questions I always get about this story, the first of which is, of course: Why did Charlie kill all those people? But forget that one. What answer would suffice? The second regards the story's final scene, my access, and all the dovetailing details. This one is easier. At the time I'd been on the story for about a year. Cullen's donation appeal seemed dead. Months passed with no news, and Cullen had been sentenced to eternity. Nobody official would talk to me, so I started cold-calling the hospital desks. One night I found an E. Peckham checked
in, surgical ward—the recipient. It was happening, maybe. The drive from Brooklyn took an hour, and the whole time I wondered what the hell I was going to do when I got there. The place was dead. I felt like a tabloid creep just for showing up. I decided to shadow the operation, but not intrude—following the route of the kidney, lurking the halls, eyeballing the too-appropriate Disney movie. After six hours I was on friendly terms with the janitors and the shattered families in the waiting room—complications from birth, a baby born with intestines outside his body and a hole in his heart—and why was I there? Waiting on a friend. I tried to be present for this family, talking when they wanted to talk, reciting the oblique reassurances of waiting and hope, and wondering why I had chosen writing over medicine, watching over doing. Like nurse Cullen, I was in the gritty backstage of the purportedly grand human pageant, where we are born and will die among OfficeMax furniture and a muted TV. When Ernie was wheeled into recovery through the saloon-style doors I could see where the family was hovering, big women with big purses, the nurses in sanitary blue, the anesthetized guy in industrial pajamas. Ambition threw an elbow in my ribs, my moment to be the great writer from the mold of the Capotes and Mailers, whose need for truth and access required jumping every hurdle. I ignored that moment and drove home in silence, knowing it was done and thinking about a newborn, the sum of broken parts, lying on a table with a hole in his heart.