Angels of Death. Emily Webb
the unprescribed medication and identified Cullen as the offender. This investigation represented the chance to stop Cullen in his murderous tracks, yet the drug digoxin was left off the list of medications that her body was tested for. Cullen and other nurses at the hospital were given lie detector tests. When Cullen was arrested in 2003, Warren Hospital was quick to tell the media and investigators that Cullen had passed the lie detector and that no conclusive evidence had been found to charge him with Mrs Dean’s death. Mrs Dean’s body was exhumed in 2004 to undergo chemical testing as part of the investigations into Cullen’s killings.
Cullen continued to work at the hospital, and the fact that he had been convicted of the harassment of a work colleague and had been suspected of giving a patient unprescribed medication was not even grounds for his dismissal.
Cullen left under his own steam, and in April 1994, started work at Hunterdon Medical Center in New Jersey as an intensive care unit (ICU) nurse. Cullen had again placed himself in an environment where he was caring for the most vulnerable of patients.
His divorce had been finalised the year before and he was able to see his children unsupervised. On the surface, Cullen’s life was improving – he had gained a nursing licence to work in the state of Pennsylvania and he had started dating again.
There were more murders in the years between 1993 and 1998 and several incidents where Cullen could have been stopped. In 1997 he was fired from News Jersey’s Morristown Memorial Hospital for ‘poor performance’ and then in 1998 dismissed from Pennsylvania’s Liberty Nursing and Rehabilitation Center for ‘accidentally’ breaking a patient’s arm. Cullen, whose mental state was fragile at the best of times, was succumbing to the stressors in his life, which included failed relationships and being forced to declare personal bankruptcy.
At the Liberty Nursing and Rehabilitation Center a nurse took the fall for the death of a patient who, of course, Cullen had murdered, this time with a fatal dose of insulin. Cullen worked at the nursing home for around eight months in 1998. Night-shift nurse Kimberley Pepe was assigned to care for the patient Cullen murdered – an 83-year-old man named Francis Henry. Ms Pepe denied to hospital administrators that she had given Mr Henry any insulin but she pointed the finger of suspicion at Cullen, who had been caring for the other patient in the room. Ms Pepe was fired from her position at the facility and later filed a lawsuit against the nursing home, which was settled out of court.
The New York Times reported that the nursing home sacked Cullen following the incident in which a patient’s arm was broken, after Cullen had been seen going into the room of the elderly female with syringes in his hand (she was not injected, but her arm was somehow broken).
Time and time again Cullen was able to find work despite his dubious employment record – and always in high dependency wards such as burns or ICU. At the end of 1998 he took on two jobs – one in ICU at Easton Hospital in Pennsylvania and the other as a night-shift nurse in the burns unit of Lehigh Valley Hospital in New Jersey.
Cullen’s killing spree continued and it was at Lehigh Valley Hospital, in 1999, that he murdered his second-youngest known victim, 22-year-old Matthew Mattern, with digoxin. Mr Mattern had been severely burned in a car accident. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that when Cullen confessed to this murder in 2004, he said it was to ‘end his [Mr Mattern’s] suffering’.
Rumours circulated about Cullen and despite being under the radar of the hospital authorities at several of his workplaces, he would often leave before anything could be discovered about his murders.
St Luke’s Hospital in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, reported Cullen to the state’s nursing board in September 2002 – he had killed at least five patients there over two years – because they were suspicious that he had mishandled medication. Cullen had left the hospital amid growing suspicions of his conduct and the nursing board embarked on an investigation and shared their findings with police. Nurses who spoke to police shared their grave concerns – which were later proven – that Cullen was the cause of patient deaths while he’d worked at St Luke’s and they were upset that the hospital had allowed him to leave and take up employment elsewhere.
The nurses had played detective more convincingly than hospital authorities or the police and had compiled their own notes and theories about Cullen being a killer. Why had he left so abruptly? Why did there seem to be more patient deaths when Cullen was on shift?
Time and time again investigations of Cullen fell short. No links could be established between deaths of patients and the hospitals where he worked. According to the New York Times 2004 feature article ‘Death on the Night Shift’, if Cullen’s nursing history had been scrutinised, they would have seen that he had been accused of a patient death at one hospital … implicated in a medical ‘mistake’ at another. This information should have raised alarm bells and warranted a more thorough look at Cullen. But Cullen had no criminal charges relating to his work or disciplinary actions from state nursing boards so he was able to work unrestricted. New Jersey and Pennsylvania, like many US states, were experiencing nursing shortages in the late 1990s and early 2000s and this made it easier for Cullen to gain employment.
Cullen’s last post was his deadliest. He started work at Somerset Medical Center in New Jersey in September 2002. Cullen killed at least 13 patients and attempted to murder two others.
One of the patients murdered by Cullen was the Very Reverend Florian J Gall, 68, who had been admitted to hospital with heart disease and other medical problems. Father Gall had been very ill but the priest was making a good recovery. Doctors prescribed digoxin to calm Father Gall’s rapid heartbeat – a normal use of the drug – and a blood test after his last dose of the drug showed normal levels. Father Gall had started to come out of his drug-induced coma. But on 27 June 2003, Cullen took a dosage of digoxin from a medication cart, slipped into Father Gall’s room and injected him with the drug.
When new blood tests showed Father Gall’s digoxin levels were almost five times the normal and safe level, panic mode set in and the hospital tried an antidote to save Father Gall’s life. But it was to no avail. The hospital knew Father Gall’s death came from a massive overdose of digoxin but did not mention this to his loved ones, including his sister Lucille Gall, who was also a nurse. Lucille had spent time with her brother at his bedside and was there as staff tried to save him.
Father Gall’s family and parishioners were shocked by his death but assumed that ill health and his advancing age were the causes. However, it was Father Gall’s death on 28 June 2003 that set Cullen’s downfall into motion. Computerised records later showed hospital administrators that Cullen had taken the drug and had also checked the medical records and status of Father Gall.
In his final months at the hospital, co-workers reported seeing Cullen in rooms he was not meant to be in and the hospital’s computer systems showed that he was accessing records of patients he was not assigned to, as well as requesting medications for patients that had not been prescribed. The New Jersey Poison Information and Education System was first to alert Somerset Medical Center that a recent pattern of drug overdose deaths at the hospital could be the work of an employee killing patients.
The hospital pondered this information for several months until October 2003, when it contacted authorities with its concerns about Cullen. In that time Cullen had killed five more patients and attempted to kill a sixth.
Cullen was fired from Somerset Medical Center in October 2003. Just two months later, he was arrested on suspicion of murder and the whole, terrifying truth of one of America’s worst serial killers started to emerge.
Cullen was at dinner with a female friend when police entered the restaurant on 12 December 2003 to arrest him on the suspicion of murdering 68-year-old Father Florian Gall.
Cullen was also charged with the attempted murder of 40-year-old Jin Kyung Han, whom he had tried to kill a week before Father Gall. Ms Han had cancer and health problems. She survived Cullen’s murderous attempt on her life but she later died of cancer.
It was the computerised drug-dispensing machine at Somerset Medical Center that provided rock-solid evidence for prosecutors that Cullen had administered lethal doses of digoxin to patients. The machine recorded