The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder (14 page)

C
harlie still had the benefit of neutral references from Saint Luke’s. The hospital would later assert that Laughlin’s investigation, the chart reviews by Risk Manager Rader and Nursing Supervisor Koehler, and additional inquiries by Saint Luke’s general counsel Sy Traub all failed to identify any suspicious deaths related to the empty bottles of vec, or any other actions by Charles Cullen in their hospital. But Saint Luke’s administrators didn’t want Cullen working in their health-care system. And they apparently believed that other hospitals would have reason not to want him working in theirs, either

In August 2002, Charles D. Saunders, Saint Luke’s senior vice president of medical and academic affairs, had called his colleagues in the local Bethlehem area, asking whether they had experienced any unusual incidents with a nurse named Charles Cullen, and telling them that Cullen was beyond consideration for rehire. CEO Vince Joseph
³
and Attorney Paul Laughlin did the same.
⁴
But Saunders, Joseph, and Laughlin apparently weren’t passing these warnings on to the public,
⁵
the cops, or the State Nursing Board.
⁶
And unfortunately for the patients of Somerset Medical Center, they weren’t on the call list, either.
⁷

24

September 2002

T
he recruitment flyer was a high-quality mass-marketing mailer, a full-color appeal for qualified nurses. Charlie studied the brochure over the kitchen sink, turning it over in his hand. “Join the Team!” it said. Should he? His life’s path had been shaped by doors that opened at just the right time, fate showing him the downhill path. Charlie didn’t know Somerset Medical Center, or Somerset County, New Jersey, but it was obvious that after five medical centers
¹
in less than four years, his name was burned in Pennsylvania.
²
He’d had problems in New Jersey, too, but it had been four years since he’d worked there, and New Jersey was a big state.
³
Although, Somerset County was only a fifty-minute drive from the house he’d been raised in, socially and economically, it was as far as Charles Cullen could hope to venture from his West Orange roots.

S
omerset was one of the oldest and richest counties in the United States,
⁴
a fertile farming settlement set between wooded hills and the overgrand country estates favored by financiers and industrialists.
⁵
John Dryden, a founder of Prudential Insurance, built his Versailles-like mansion in Bernardsville in the 1880s; a generation later, Brooke Kuser—soon to become Brooke Astor—would live in a manor called Denbrooke. In the boom years following the Civil War, these were the wealthiest citizens of the wealthiest nation on earth, and they could have anything they wanted. In 1898, what they wanted was a hospital.

One death had done it, that of a sixteen-year-old boy with a blow to the head. Even in 1898, this was a far-from-fatal condition; drilling holes in the skull to relieve the pressure was a simple surgical procedure older than
the Lenape arrowheads that still littered the Raritan River clay. But during the long wagon journey to Newark, the boy’s traumatized brain continued to swell like a baking loaf, crushing itself against the confining skull. By the time he reached Newark, the boy’s pupils had bloomed dead, and the cry for a local hospital was taken up.

With an initial donation of $5,500, a house on East Main Street was outfitted with electricity and running water and the latest technology of modern medicine, including a German machine that could photograph the human interior by means of ‘unknown’ or ‘X’ rays, and a surgical theater sunned by a new electrical bulb recently invented by Thomas Edison of neighboring Menlo Park. It started with ten doctors to attend twelve beds. As the county grew, the hospital expanded in step, adding wings and annexes until the simple wood-framed town house had molted into a redbrick city catering to dozens of specialized medical procedures, with over 350 beds for overnight patients and thousands of highly paid professionals to attend to them. It was blessed with abundant parking and a convenient location between the highways, and prosperous enough to offer a $10,000 bonus to experienced nurses willing to sign on for a six-month hitch.

On August 15, 2002, Charlie sat down at the desk of Somerset Human Resources and filled the familiar blanks.
⁶
Nurse Cullen presented a tempting hire. He indicated truthfully that he was a certified and registered nurse, lied righteously about not having a criminal conviction, and wondered not at all whether they bothered researching those answers. He preferred Critical Care but would work in any ward, and was open to all hours, rotating shifts, on-call shifts, nights, weekends,
⁷
and holidays. For references, Charlie listed Saint Luke’s, indicating that he had left only because he “needed change,” which was true enough. He also listed his years at the Lehigh Valley Hospital Burn Unit, which “did not work for him,” and Liberty Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, where “there weren’t enough hours available.” All were, in a fashion, true; it would be up to the Somerset Medical Center HR department to try and color in the details.

Cullen’s former supervisor at Warren Hospital confirmed that Charlie had indeed worked there, and extolled Charlie’s work ethic, conscientiousness, and intelligence. And as promised, the Saint Luke’s HR gave his dates of employment and verified his former position.
⁸
In September 2002, Charlie was offered a job working full-time with some of the most vulnerable patients on the Somerset Medical Center CCU.

C
harlie quickly became a popular night nurse at Somerset. Usually, the handoff between the day and night shifts could last an hour, depending on the nurse, but Charlie was quick, he didn’t ask questions, and the day nurses were always thrilled to see him on the schedule. They could give him a quick report and go home, knowing he was already off down the hall with his little Cerner PowerChart, the mobile computer database of patient charts. His fellow night nurses appreciated Charlie even more; he started early, worked efficiently, and was always the first to finish. His colleagues would return from their initial patient checks to find Charlie already standing by the Pyxis machine, helping lay out their IV bags for the evening. Later, they would see him again, helping out at the code.

Each night shift nurse had an independent schedule, and each night saw a different composite crew. Charlie was quickly singled out by one of the nurses he was often on with, a tall, pretty blonde named Amy Loughren.
⁹
She was a self-proclaimed “pain in the ass,” which meant she was outspoken and honest, the kind of person who cast a shadow Charlie could shade himself by. Charlie was quiet around her at first, but over the long overnight shifts Charlie began slipping in wry comments about hospital bureaucracy while waiting for the Pyxis machine, or sending a dramatic eye roll across the room during a particularly labored evening report. Late at night, after all the drips had been hung and their respective patients tended, Charlie offered up slapstick tales of debilitating depression, bad luck, and bullied victimization with a wry honesty he believed Amy would connect to; she’d reply with laughter and the maternal attentions Charlie needed. As the weeks passed, they graduated from familiars to friends.

A
my Loughren had emerged from an abusive childhood with a bold defiance toward the fundamental bullshit of life and a mystical conviction that the universe owed her one. Thirty-six hard, impulsive years had brought Amy ten boyfriends, two daughters, an RN degree, and a leased white Jaguar, but behind the blonde highlights lay a void she struggled to name. Her off days were punctuated by panic attacks that sometimes kept her from even leaving the house, and her nights were spent either working or drinking wine. She split her time between her house in upstate New York
and her job in New Jersey, her personality between home and hospital, and worked hard to maintain the shelter of that division. She didn’t share herself fully with her daughters or boyfriends or most of her coworkers; only her new friend, Charlie Cullen, made her feel totally safe. Charlie seemed to need her protection, too.

W
hen Charlie had first started working at Somerset that September, Amy knew, almost right away, that she liked the new guy—not ‘liked-liked’; she was single, but not that single, not in a million years, and she sensed the new guy understood that. He seemed to know his limitations. Amy was blonde, nearly six feet tall and conspicuously curvaceous, even in scrubs, and she was accustomed to unwelcome attentions. But Charlie seemed safe to Amy. He paid attention without an obvious agenda, and he never hit on her. And if he didn’t always keep eye contact, at least it wasn’t because he was trying to steal glances down her scrub tops. He was quiet, too, at least at first, and Amy was instinctively drawn to quiet people.
This guy,
she thought,
has secrets, too, just like me.

The new male nurse also seemed as serious about the job as Amy was, maybe more so—efficient and attentive to the point of obsession. He was a little eccentric, but he wasn’t flakey. Charlie tended his patients alone, with the door closed and the blinds drawn. He stripped them naked and bathed them before lathering them comically pearlescent with moisturizer. Amy called them his “Butterball turkeys,” too greasy to turn. His other eccentricity was an obsessive use of the Cerner machine. Charting was the necessary paperwork of nursing but Charlie took it to an extreme, spending hours tapping away on the mobile unit far from the scrutiny of the nurses’ station. Amy teased him that he was writing a novel. Uncharacteristically, he welcomed her teasing, recognizing it as guileless affirmation.