Angels of Death. Emily Webb
a bit. I told him the investigators were also looking at me and how could he think that I wasn’t somehow going to be implicated,’ she said.
‘I remember saying to him, “Who was your first victim?” He started to talk and said it was a long time ago.’
Journalist and author Charles Graeber, who wrote the definitive book on Cullen called The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder, said, ‘We’ll never know how many people Charlie Cullen killed.’
‘I would be very surprised, as would pretty much everyone I have spoken to with any knowledge of this case if it was not in the hundreds, multiple hundreds,’ Mr Graeber said.
Cullen said he was sorry for his crimes during the interview but added chillingly, ‘Like I said, I don’t know if I would have stopped.’
Megan Haines
- Callous Killer -
Judith “Charli” Darragh says her life fell apart after her mother Marie was murdered by a person who was meant to care for her.
Marie Darragh was 82 and living at St Andrews Aged Care in Ballina, New South Wales. Mrs Darragh had several health issues, however Charli said her mum was cognitively sharp and despite needing assistance with personal care and moving around, was a positive, cheerful woman.
On the night of 9 May 2014, Charli said her mother was in good spirits because her beloved Brisbane Broncos Rugby League team had won.
‘Mumma was an avid Broncos supporter, whoever they played I would back the other team and whichever one of us backed the losing team would have to buy the other a $2 scratchie card,’ Charli said in an email to the author.
Ringing her mother that night Charli told Marie she loved her “to the moon and back”, as she always ended their calls.
That was the last time.
Sometime overnight Marie fell into a coma and was unresponsive when staff found her the next morning.
Another woman, Isabella Spencer, was also found in a coma on the morning of 10 May 2014. Isabella had come to St Andrews after having a stroke that affected her mobility. She’d lived in Melbourne most of her life but was moved to Ballina, which was closer to family, including her brother Don Spencer.
She’d only lived at the facility for three months when she was murdered.
Registered nurse Megan Haines was on the shift from 9 to 10 May 2014 and was the only staff member on at St Andrews. This is not an unusual practice for aged care facilities. As a registered nurse (RN), she was responsible for the oversight and care of the elderly residents.
Haines was born in South Africa in 1967 and moved to Australia in 2000. Haines grew up mixed race amid the political regime of Apartheid. Her mother was white and her father was Indian and she felt her race caused her to be the victim of bullying at school and at home, saying her mother treated her two white siblings better than her.
A registered nurse in her birth country, Haines gained her registration as a nurse in Victoria in 2001 with the then Nurses Board of Victoria. Since 1 July 2010 nurses, as well as other health professionals, must be registered with the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA). AHPRA is also responsible for the handling of complaints made against practitioners and ensures that the health field is regulated across the country. During the early 2000s she worked as a nurse in several facilities around Melbourne’s Eastern suburbs, including Caulfield, Box Hill and Ringwood.
Haines had not been working at St Andrews for long, just weeks, when she committed the double murder of Isabella and Marie.
‘I use to ring (Marie) every morning and she told me a new nurse had started Nite (sic) shift and she didn’t like her one bit,’ Charli wrote in an email to the author dated 2 August 2018.
‘Mum was a very good judge of character,’ Charli said.
‘At lunch the next day a few of the residents were talking amongst themselves after lunchtime of how mean this new nurse was, very ruff (sic) handling, pushing and shoving them to and from the toilet to their beds etc. calling them useless etc.’
On the night the women died, Haines, as the sole RN on shift, was the only one with access to the secure rooms where medication, including insulin, were stored. Her personalised swipe card enabled her to enter some of the rooms. The system had been damaged in a lightning strike so the records of who entered weren’t recorded. So it couldn’t be established immediately whose swipe card had been used but it could only have been a certain group of employees (registered nurses) who could gain entry, including Haines – and she was the only RN on shift that night.
When confronted with these facts, Haines claimed she didn’t know the pin code to one of the rooms that held medication and she had to ask some other staff who knew it, therefore trying to cast some doubt on the suspicions about her actions that night.
However it was later discovered in a stocktake that insulin ampoules found in a bin at the facility, which belonged to a male resident of the nursing home (the particular mix of insulin was only used for him), had been taken from the medication room by Haines. She’d slipped them into her pocket to use as her silent murder weapon.
As for motive, the night before the murders, the Director of Care at St Andrews, Wendy Turner spoke to Haines about complaints that had been made against her by three residents. They were serious and Ms Turner outlined the nature of these complaints. Ms Turner revealed the names of two of the women who’d made the complaints to Haines -– Marie Darragh and Marjorie Patterson.
According to court records Turner told Haines the complaints breached the terms of her employment and her professional practice standards. Haines was facing disciplinary action and was invited to a meeting the following week and Ms Turner told Haines she shouldn’t approach Marie or Marjorie to discuss the complaints, or enter either of their rooms to give them treatment unless she was accompanied by another staff member.
Marie had complained of an incident where she’d asked Haines for some medicated cream to be applied to her vagina and the nurse told her to cover up as she looked “disgusting”.
Another resident, Marjorie Patterson, 88, said that Haines handled her roughly when she was assisting Patterson back to bed after using the bathroom. Marjorie said that Haines’s handling of her caused her to injure her ankle, however Wendy Turner couldn’t see any signs of injury.
The last complaint was made by Isabella Spencer, (whose name was not revealed to Haines by Ms Turner), who’d asked for assistance to go to the toilet and Haines refused, dismissively telling her to just ‘piss in her (continence) pad’.
On the night of the murders Haines, trying not to arouse any suspicions, told a care worker not to bother checking on Isabella Spencer as she was asleep. This was no doubt to ensure that the morning staff would find her victim dead and assume she’d fallen ill overnight.
Most nurses will go through their whole careers and never have a serious complaint made against them. Haines’s career in Australia was under a cloud with several complaints in 2005, 2007 and 2008 that now, with hindsight, were ominous. She worked in various hospitals including Box Hill Hospital and Maroondah Hospital, part of Eastern Health in Melbourne. At both these hospitals Haines was the subject of complaints – one for failing to provide care for a patient and another about concerns that she’d threatened to access patient information.
In the case of the 2007 complaint at Box Hill Hospital the nurses’ board found she’d engaged in unprofessional conduct. The Maroondah Hospital complaint, also in 2007, about Haines’s threat via text messages to delve into patient’s records, took until the end of 2011 to come to a conclusion and she was found guilty of professional misconduct.
Further complaints followed that Haines had physically assaulted a patient at a medical facility in Caulfield.
In a precursor to what happened to the women at St Andrews in Ballina, Haines was suspected of intentionally drugging two women, on separate occasions, with insulin. There