The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder (43 page)

They wrap the spit mask with a towel and push him into the chair, bunching the towel at the back of his head and screwing it tight, so that now all that’s left of the tantrum is the bass cadence, like a man screaming into a pillow while the families of the victims try to read. “You are a total waste of a human body… You are the worst kind of monster, a son of the devil…” Only fragments can be heard beneath Cullen’s gagged scream, and soon the sergeant’s hands begin to cramp. His grip loosens, and chorus by chorus, Cullen’s voice gets clearer, almost operatic. The judge scowls and the sergeant puts his back into it, wringing with both hands. Several women in the jury box raise their hands to their faces in horror.

“I will not allow him to leave this courtroom!” intones Judge Platt, but there’s no order in this court. Cullen’s getting off three
Your Honor
s per second now, and the sergeant motions to the judge, making a sign across his mouth. The judge nods and the sergeant ducks from the room and returns with a roll of duct tape the size of a dinner plate. They tape up his mouth like a cartoon, making a big X over his lips, which does essentially nothing. The victims read their personal statements, and Cullen screams his, like a nightmarish version of “Row Row Row Your Boat.”

“If my grandmother was alive right now, she’d say to you, ‘I hope you rot in hell, you sick son of a bitch…’ ”

“Your Honor you must step down Your Honor you must step down…”

“… three more life sentences, served concurrently with those already handed down…”

“… must step down Your Honor you must…”

And with a final “Such that you will remain in prison for the rest of your natural life,” it’s over. Once again, the court officers frogmarch Charles Cullen—bound, gagged, duct-taped—out of the courtroom and into a waiting elevator. He still is chanting when the doors close. The silence that follows is terrible, too.

Afterward, the families huddle in the hallway, shaken and unsatisfied. “I think he intentionally meant disrespect to everyone in that courtroom,” vents Julie Sanders, whose friend was OD’d by Cullen. “He says he is a compassionate man. He says he wants to donate a kidney to save someone’s life, he wants to do it out of compassion. Where’s the compassion now?” Sanders stabs her finger at the hole in the air where Cullen had been. “I needed to say something to him. Does he even know what he did? Does he know what he’s done to our lives?”

A
ll the precautions about me killing other patients,” Cullen sighed, and subtly rolled his eyes at the idea. Over the course of our visits, Cullen was becoming increasingly depressed. This recent depression was specific to the delays in his donation. Cullen likes to be helpful, but here he was, sitting in jail, while someone out there needed a piece of what he was sitting on.

“The state’s concerned that since my crimes were committed in a hospital, I might commit them again. Why did they think it was easier to kill yourself in a hospital than anywhere else?” he wondered. Especially when he’d be shackled to the bed and under guard. It made no sense. It was just another false stumbling block to his donation. And that was depressing him further. He had a signed order from the Somerset judge. His lawyer, Johnnie Mask, had been beavering away on the paperwork, Reverend Kathleen was working as a liaison between the recipient’s family and the hospital. And yet nothing was happening.

Cullen studied my hands across the glass, then stared back down at his piece of steel counter. “When we got past the blood tests I felt like, okay, this is going to happen,” he said. “But now I don’t know.

“I mean, I’m not getting anything special for this, I’m not asking for special treatment for jail, I’m not getting paid or anything… what’s the harm?” Cullen’s eyes scanned the glass for an answer. “What would the families rather I did, just sit here and watch TV?

“I grant that I certainly have done some very bad things, I’ve taken lives,” he said quickly. “But does that prevent me from doing something positive? The only thing I can do is sit in a cell and cost the taxpayer $40,000 a year. And I know that New Jersey doesn’t make license plates any more.” He motioned into the air and shook his head. “So what positive contribution can a person make in jail?

“I know people say I’m playing God, but I can’t really do that,” he said. “The only thing I am doing is giving an organ up. As for what happens afterward, that is in God’s hands. As a nurse they saw me directly taking life, but I can’t give life, I can’t extend life. We give love. To our children. But we don’t own them or control them. We do a lot of things but we don’t consider these things playing God. For some reason I matched, six out of six antigens. The recipient did put publicity out to get the good citizens of New York, to see if anyone matched. But nobody came forward. Not one person came forward. Not one single person.”

Cullen fixed me with a look, then took his glance away, as if to study my response in private. “It really depends on how you think of people,” he said. “And what you think people are capable of.”

A
fter his final sentencing at the Lehigh County Courthouse in Allentown, Charles was handcuffed and shackled and put in the back of a windowless van. No light entered his mobile cell, and as the van careened onto the New Jersey Turnpike, Cullen began to feel nauseous. He tried to use the techniques that Reverend Roney had taught him, visualizing Jesus in a halo of fire in the darkness, but then Jesus started to look nauseous, too, so he stopped and went back to the Jesus Prayer.

He was met at the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton by about ten guards, four of them in riot gear. He was led to a detaining cell, where two guards strip-searched him on camera. One guard told him that he had read about him in the newspaper. The other said that any move would be taken as a sign of aggression. He was given new clothes and taken to the prison psych ward, where they took the clothes away and strip-searched him again.
He was given a sort of toga made from plastic sheets he thought looked like the stuff they wrap around new TV sets, and put into a cell for seventy-two hours. The toga ripped after the first day, so for Monday and Tuesday he was naked and embarrassed under constant camera surveillance. He tried not to listen to the guards, the
Time for your insulin
comments, focusing instead on Psalm 25: “My enemies are many, they hate me. Deliver me, let me not be ashamed.” And gradually, he was given pieces of his new life. His cell was smaller than in Somerville, and the guards played games with him, telling him there was no library, giving him sneakers two sizes too small, little things. Things that taught him not to assume anything anymore. He was in the noncontact wing, locked down twenty-three hours a day and segregated from the other prisoners for his own safety. By the time he was eligible to see visitors for a phone visit, he was visibly thinner and had grown a gray beard, but his donation seemed no closer than it had five months earlier, and he was even more frustrated.

To Cullen, the delays just didn’t make sense. If this match was God’s will, if it was supposed to happen that he was a perfect match for a man who needed it, why then wasn’t it happening? Was it a sort of punishment, a sort of medical tantalization? Had there been some sort of mistake?

“And meanwhile, the kidney recipient is getting sicker and sicker,” Cullen said during one of our visits. This time, his speech was laconic, and he seemed both tired and depressed. “He’s back in the hospital, and averaging one complication a month. At least, that’s what I hear.”

He knew the families of the victims saw his donation as an exercise of his personal will, just the sort of freedom that prison was supposed to confiscate. “But the fact that I was even able to take a blood test, it’s not my will, it’s the efforts of a great number of people—Mr. Mask, Reverend Roney, Judge Armstrong. I’d mention the DA but, ah, he’s not on my good list,” he said. “And Ernie’s family has certainly gone through a lot of waiting.” He thought about it a second, shook his head slightly. “A lot of waiting.”

Cullen stopped for a moment, looking down, blinking away tears. Finally he breathes and tries again. “It’s hard, knowing that if I wasn’t in here they could go ahead and do this… It’s hard to see this as just playing God. It’s not like Ernie was given a choice between a good person and a bad person,” he said. “If he was offered a matching kidney from a good person, I’m sure he’d take it.” Cullen folded an arm tightly across his chest and studied the counter. “I still love people, I care about people. Maybe, maybe
people don’t think that I should be allowed to do something for people that I care about. But if I just picked someone out of the blue to donate to—people would think I’m just totally crazy.” He looked up. “That’s the funny thing. People think you’re crazy for doing something for someone else if you don’t know them personally.”

“I can’t take back the harm that I’ve done already, but a good thing, why can’t I do that?” Cullen asked me. “I know that [people] think that I should go straight to hell and take my kidney with me. People think that they can figure out how God thinks. But God alone knows somebody’s heart and soul and mind.”

Johnnie Mask had long been convinced that the process was derailed, and Roney had bet a dinner on it. After all, it was God’s plan, wasn’t it?

Ever since Charles had first arrived in her jail, people had treated Reverend Roney as an accomplice. Maybe she’d gotten too close and enjoyed the excitement a little too much, she could see that, it was a temptation. Kathleen didn’t agree with what Charles Cullen had done, of course, his crimes—nobody could—but she still didn’t understand the comments, some from people she’d once called friends, others from fellow pastors, Christians who would ask,
How could you possibly think a serial killer is a child of God?

One of the first letters she received was from an Evangelical Christian who warned her away from ministering to a monster. “He said, ‘If you save him and he goes to heaven, that’s not fair,’ ” Roney remembered. “That’s the way Evangelicals think. It was so stupid, but I was like hysterical for like two days after that.”

The hate mail followed, some of it threatening. Nothing came of it, of course, and she tried to shrug it off—it was understandable, natural even, that the community felt threatened by a man who had used a position of trust to murder their most vulnerable family members. Then around the time of the arraignment, she was walking from the jail when someone yelled at her, calling her “Satan’s pastor,” and threw something in her face. She didn’t know what kind of blood it was, probably pig’s blood like they use when protesting abortion clinics. She tried not to think about it and just went home and washed off the sticky brown mess. “Yes,” Kathleen laughed, “if there’s a heaven and I end up there, I should definitely get a crown.”

Of course, when the donation became public, it just made everything worse. “I have one friend, who is no longer a friend,” she said to me. “She
told me that by helping Ernie get a transplant from Charles Cullen, I was ruining his life, because I was helping him receive Satan’s kidney.”

Kathleen remembered when she first started in her job, she thought that if you were a decent human being and you were Christian, you would be nice to everybody. “Doesn’t that make sense?” Roney asked. “I mean, as much as my parents hated Hitler, they still said, ‘Well, he is a child of God.’ I thought that was the Christian way. But this trial changed it. Man, did I learn that Christianity can be vicious.”

Just the day before, Kathleen had gotten a call from Ernie Peckham’s mother, Pat. “She informed me that I was never to talk to them again,” she said. “Ever. Before she hung up on me, Pat basically said that it was me, and that damned lawyer, we were ruining her life! Well, I don’t mean to be cute about it, but if it wasn’t for me and Johnnie, they wouldn’t be thinking about getting a darned kidney!”

All she could hope was that the donation had been scheduled by the hospital, and since Charles was such a security threat, Pat had been told to be careful, to keep it as secret as possible. “I mean, I don’t expect flowers and chocolate cake, but we’re not trying to ruin Ernie’s life, we’re trying to save it.”