The Best of Reader's Digest

by Editors of Reader's Digest

  For a brief time, Woods also regained his physical freedom. In 1987, he finished his sentence and moved back to Cumberland, where he lived in a shack and worked occasionally for a man who cleaned offices. Books had expanded Woods’s world, but they hadn’t made it any easier for him to stay out of trouble. One night, Woods says, he drove to one of the offices he’d helped clean, knocked out a window, and stole several thousand dollars’ worth of equipment.

  The next day, he went to a local club and, over a game of pool, tried to sell some of the equipment. When a group of state troopers walked in the side door, he didn’t put up a fight. Not even two years had passed since his release, and Woods was once again incarcerated at the prison in Hagerstown—an institution he had come to detest. Because of his prior record, Woods received a harsh sentence: 16 years for two counts of breaking and entering. In 1991, after Woods got caught up in a prison riot, his sentence was extended by seven years.

  * * *

  There are a few ways that books enter prisons. They’re sold at prison commissaries and lent by prison libraries; nonprofits also distribute donated books to prisoners. There are state and federal restrictions, of course: In some institutions, hardcover books may be sent to an inmate only if they’re from a publisher, a book club, or a bookstore; the U.S. Bureau of Prisons also prohibits texts that are “detrimental to the security, good order, or discipline of the institution” or that “may facilitate criminal activity.” Many prisons also add their own idiosyncratic rules.

  Even so, Woods managed to assemble a small library in his cell. “A lot of prisoners put emphasis on how many Nike shoes they have,” he says. “I would wear a pair of prison tennis shoes if necessary, but I had eight or nine hundred dollars’ worth of books.” Woods ordered his encyclopedia through the mail after reading about it in a catalog. When it arrived, he says, it was carefully inspected for contraband.

  * * *

  In late November 2004, when Mark Stevens received his first letter from Robin Woods, he responded on Merriam-Webster, Inc., letterhead. “I believe you’re the first to have spotted the error in the Toghrïl Beg entry; by 1955 Toghrïl was no longer exactly in his prime,” Stevens wrote. “Please stay on the lookout for more.” Woods was thrilled, and soon he wrote again, highlighting errors in the entries for Edward the Confessor and ‘Uthmn ibn ‘Affn—“not as a critic, but as a friend,” he explained in his letter. “For I believe that M.W.I. is the crème de la crème. I would like to help it to stay that away [sic]!”

  Over the next two years, Stevens sent 18 letters to Woods; Woods sent several dozen to Stevens. They discussed the life of Cleopatra and the self-education of Malcolm X, but Woods barely discussed his criminal record, and Stevens never asked. “They were perfectly executed letters, and very courteous,” Stevens says. “It still seems astonishing to me.” One letter concluded, “I have the honor to be, Sir, your most obedient servant.”

  But in 2005, it seemed as if all of that was about to change. Woods learned that he would be transferred, without a clear explanation, to a supermax prison in Baltimore. Officials told him he wouldn’t be allowed to bring his books.

  Woods protested. Within days of arriving at his new cell, he went on a hunger strike. “I’ve gone crazy and will not eat until they allow me to keep my books,” he wrote to Stevens. Several weeks later, he wrote another letter, this one short and despondent: “I look like walking death. But I’m hardheaded and shall not give up.” Locked in a single room, Woods lost about 70 pounds.

  One day, as Woods remembers it, he saw a shadow on the wall of his cell. It was the Maryland commissioner of corrections, who asked about his health. “He had a very curious look on his face,” Woods recalls. Finally, the commissioner asked, “Who is this Mark Stevens?”

  Woods remembers thinking, How does he know Mr. Stevens? As it turns out, Stevens had written to two prison wardens, and eventually word had gotten to the commissioner, who called him. They spoke about Woods and the encyclopedia. Not long after that, the commissioner offered Woods a deal. If he would end his hunger strike and follow the rules for a year, the commissioner would cut short the extended sentence and send Woods home. In the meantime, his books would be restored to him.

  “I feel like a kid getting out of high school,” Woods wrote to Stevens near the end of 2006. “The whole world is waiting for me!” In January 2007, 18 years after the start of his incarceration and five years before the scheduled conclusion of his extended sentence, Robin Woods was discharged from prison. He had about $50 to his name, the minimum required by law.

  Woods once more moved back to Cumberland, where he was given housing by a local pastor. Every few months, he called Stevens. The calls continued for a decade before they finally arranged to meet.

  When Woods visited Stevens at his home in Amherst in June 2016, they were soon acting like old friends. “I never met you until today, but I love you very much,” Woods told Stevens. “You’re a good man.” They took hikes, went to a play, and visited the home of Emily Dickinson, where a plaque quotes her lines: “There is no Frigate like a Book / To take us Lands away.” On Sunday, after a goodbye hug, Woods began the long drive home.

  Woods rarely reads anymore—partly, he says, because it takes considerable effort just to pay the bills and keep clear of the law. But he still keeps a copy of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia close.

  “While my body is here in prison, my mind has seen the world,” Woods once wrote to Stevens. “There are a lot of places that I hope to see that I have read about in my many books.” Stevens responded by quoting another book, T. H. White’s The Once and Future King.

  “The best thing for being sad,” Merlyn says in the novel, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails.”

  Originally published in the December 2017/January 2018 issue of Reader’s Digest magazine.

  Killer on Call

  by Max Alexander

  Terror takes the form of a caretaker in this chilling tale of a disturbed man’s true crime.

  Helen Dean was one of those lucky people who had managed to grow old gracefully. At 91 she was still active in the Eastern Star order, a sister group to the Masons. She was alert, quick to laugh, and looked much younger than her years. “She didn’t have a lot of wrinkles,” says her niece Sharon Jones.

  In late August 1993, she was enjoying a smooth recovery from colon surgery at Warren Hospital in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, when a thin, sharp-featured male nurse entered her room. The nurse told Helen’s son Larry to leave; when he finished his work and Larry returned a few minutes later, Helen angrily announced, “He stuck me!”

  Larry thought that was odd, as his mother wasn’t scheduled to receive any medications. Strange, too, was the location of the shot—on her inner thigh, where it was very hard to see. Just to be certain, Larry whipped out his Swiss Army knife and trained the magnifying glass on the spot. Sure enough, there was a tiny puncture wound in the skin. Later that day, the same nurse came in to clear dishes. “That’s the man who stuck me!” Helen said again. Larry told his mother’s doctors and other nurses, but beyond questioning some hospital staffers, they did nothing.

  The next day, Helen began vomiting inexplicably, delaying by several hours her discharge to a nursing home, where she was to receive physical therapy before going home. It came as a tremendous shock to her relatives when she died of heart failure that afternoon.

  That night, Helen’s son called the local prosecutor and told him that she’d been murdered. He had a suspect in mind. It was the male nurse who gave Helen the mysterious injection, and he knew his name—Charles Cullen.

  * * *

  Sharon Jones had remembered the nurse’s name because Helen Dean’s middle name happened to be Cullen. But not much else about Charlie Cullen stood out. An emotionally withdrawn man who could barely bring himself to converse with his own wife, Cullen had hidden in plain sight for years—blending in and getting by, despite a history of bizarre behavior.

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p; The Liberty Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Allentown, Pennsylvania, one of the many facilities where Cullen worked.

  Cullen was born in 1960 in West Orange, New Jersey, a densely populated blue-collar enclave of double-decker houses and winding streets. He was the youngest of eight kids—five of them girls—in a tight-knit Roman Catholic household that included his parents—Florence and bus driver Edmond—and an aunt. When Charlie was almost seven months old, his father died of an undisclosed illness, at age 56.

  Growing up without a father in a large family consisting mainly of women, Charlie developed into an awkward kid who kept to himself. When neighbors can place him, they vaguely recall a boy who didn’t have much to say. Robert Hull remembered that Cullen seldom responded with anything more than a perfunctory “fine” when asked how he was doing. In fact, things weren’t so fine. When Charlie was 17, his mother was killed in a car accident.

  Exactly how Cullen handled the loss of his second parent is unclear—but soon afterward he joined the Navy, serving as a technician for ballistic missiles on the Woodrow Wilson, a nuclear submarine.

  “Charlie was one of those people everyone picked on.”

  All new sub recruits endure a period of “hazing,” but shipmates say Petty Officer Second Class Charles Cullen was singled out for his flinching, geeky demeanor. “Charlie was one of those people everyone picked on,” says Marlin Emswiler, his bunkmate.

  Still, Emswiler says Cullen was basically a nice guy. “Charlie would give you the shirt off his back,” he says. He was particularly helpful to the ship’s doctor, according to Emswiler, who remembers Cullen volunteering to give vaccinations when sailors lined up for shore leave.

  But Cullen’s interest in medicine took a bizarre turn one day when Petty Officer First Class Michael Leinen found Cullen manning the missile controls while wearing a surgical gown, mask, and gloves. At the time, Leinen thought Cullen was just trying to be funny, but years later, he came to believe Cullen had been deeply troubled. “He didn’t have a grasp on reality,” he says. Eventually, Cullen was transferred out of sub duty, but his problems continued. Leinen heard Cullen attempted suicide a few years later, which may have led to his discharge in 1984. (Citing privacy rules, Navy officials will not confirm a suicide attempt.)

  After his release, Cullen enrolled in the Mountainside Hospital School of Nursing, located just a few miles from where he grew up. He graduated in May 1987—two months after his brother James died suddenly at age 31, possibly from a drug overdose. A week later, Cullen married Adrienne Taub, a computer programmer, who has refused to speak to the press about her former husband. Shortly thereafter, Charles Cullen, RN, landed his first nursing job at Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, New Jersey.

  Chief burn technician Jeanne Hackett worked with Cullen in a Saint Barnabas unit for severely burned patients. “His job was to make sure they were comfortable during their bandage change,” she says. “It’s the hardest time for the patients, and Charlie seemed very appropriate. He didn’t have the warm, coddling part in him, but there weren’t too many guys who did.”

  Home was a subject that rarely came up, says Hackett. “He never talked about his family life. I worked with him for a while before I found out that he had a wife and children.” (Charlie and Adrienne’s two daughters are now 16 and 12.) The male nurse certainly never shared his problems—including the breakup of his marriage.

  * * *

  In divorce papers filed in January 1993, Adrienne Cullen described a dysfunctional relationship in which her sullen, remote husband slept on the couch for three years and never took her out. Instead he immersed himself in his work. “He consistently works 12 to 36 hours of overtime each week,” she wrote. “When I approach him about working less overtime, he implies that I am being unreasonable and selfish.”

  At home, Adrienne claimed that her husband repeatedly turned the heat off in winter—and when she complained, he retaliated by cranking the thermostat to 80. While his wife and daughters roasted in their bedrooms, “He sleeps in the living room with the window open,” Adrienne charged.

  Cullen apparently reserved much of his anger for the family’s two Yorkshire terriers. “I was awakened many nights by the screams of these dogs,” Adrienne said. Cullen once zipped a misbehaving pup into a bowling bag.

  He was also losing it on the road, racking up tickets and fender benders left and right. In 1989 he was pulled over for speeding. In 1990 he ran a stop sign in Phillipsburg and caused a minor accident. Less than five months later, he ran another stop sign. By the time of his arrest, his driving record showed three accidents and three speeding tickets.

  The ride was getting bumpy at work too. The nursing agency through which Cullen was then working at Saint Barnabas fired him in January 1992 for undisclosed reasons, and a month later he was hired at Warren Hospital in Phillipsburg. There, shortly after Adrienne filed for divorce, Cullen became obsessed with a nurse named Michelle Tomlinson, buying her an engagement ring after just one dinner date. One morning, soon after Tomlinson got back together with her old boyfriend, she woke up to find the glass smashed out of her back door and evidence that someone had entered her Palmer Township, Pennsylvania, home during the night. Later that morning, Cullen called and admitted to the break-in.

  “I wanted to check on you,” he told Tomlinson. “You know, to make sure you were okay, that you did not try anything—like suicide.” Tomlinson was so shaken that she pressed charges.

  When police called Cullen, says Palmer Township Police Chief Bruce Fretz, “he came right in and admitted to everything.” After being fingerprinted, photographed, and arraigned, Cullen left and attempted suicide—ending up a patient in the same intensive-care unit where he worked at Warren Hospital. He was later admitted to Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in Parsippany, New Jersey.

  Less than five months later, Cullen pleaded guilty to misdemeanor trespassing in the Tomlinson incident and was sentenced to a year’s probation. At his plea hearing, Cullen said, “I have never in my life intentionally tried to inflict any distress or harm on anyone.” Days later he appealed, representing himself and filing pages of handwritten motions detailing his assertion that he had not been stalking Tomlinson. “Their [sic] was a sexual, intamate [sic] relationship between Michelle Tomlinson and myself,” he scrawled on one document to the court. Court and police papers show that Warren Hospital officials were well aware of Cullen’s arrest and suicide attempt. Yet two months after breaking into Tomlinson’s home and while still undergoing treatment for depression, he was back working long hours.

  In an April 2014 plea agreement, Cullen pleaded guilty to murdering 13 patients.

  Cullen definitely needed the money: In his pretrial application for a public defender, he listed monthly expenses of $1,460 for child support, $300 for psychiatric treatment, and $346 in minimum-balance credit card payments. (In 1998 he filed for bankruptcy.) But his enthusiasm for work apparently went beyond compensation. Exactly three weeks after his conviction, Cullen walked into Helen Dean’s hospital room and asked her son to leave.

  An autopsy on Dean was inconclusive, but because no injection had been ordered by a doctor, the hospital made Cullen take a lie detector test. He passed—then quit his job. The matter was dropped.

  * * *

  Cullen next stepped onto a merry-go-round of short-term positions, working at eight more hospitals or nursing homes in the next nine and a half years. He favored the hard-to-fill night shift, a time when nurses are less supervised. Meanwhile, his private life continued to spiral. In 1997, during a brief period when he was unemployed after being fired for poor performance from Morristown Hospital in New Jersey, Cullen was back as a patient in Warren’s emergency room, being treated for a depression-related illness that may have been another suicide attempt.

  He was working the night shift at the Liberty Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on May 7, 1998, when an elderly patient received an unauthorized dosage of insulin and e
ventually died. The man, Francis Henry, had been in a car accident and appeared to be in severe pain—barely able to mouth “I love you” to his wife. The nurse in charge of Henry, Kimberly Pepe, was fired over the incident.

  Pepe claimed that the nursing home should have instead suspected Cullen, who had a patient in the same room and was already being monitored by the pharmacy for stealing drugs, including morphine and digoxin, a medication that is used to regulate the heart and can cause cardiac arrest if administered improperly. The nursing home denies Cullen was under investigation at the time, but Liberty eventually did fire him in late 1998 for failing to follow guidelines on medication delivery. Less than a week later, Cullen landed a job at Easton Hospital in Easton, Pennsylvania.

  * * *

  Kristina Toth had a bad feeling about the gaunt-looking male nurse who wheeled her 78-year-old father, Ottomar Schramm, out of Easton’s emergency room. “I thought he was real cold,” Toth recalls. “He didn’t show any emotion.” In his hand was a hypodermic needle. “What’s that for?” Toth asked.

  “In case his heart stops,” replied the nurse.

  Schramm’s heart did indeed stop three days later, the last day of 1998. An autopsy revealed a digoxin overdose. Schramm, a retired steelworker, had been admitted after experiencing seizures; there was no medical reason for the digoxin in his system. Although the pathologist concluded the death was accidental, Toth suspected otherwise. By then Cullen was living in a basement apartment on a tidy block in Phillipsburg. “He kept to himself,” says Charles Cook, who lived two doors down. “He was a nice neighbor; in the summer he kept his yard beautiful. On weekends sometimes his kids would visit.”

  But there were no children around on the morning of January 3, 2000. Upstairs neighbor Karen Ziemba woke to the smell of a strong fuel odor coming from the basement. When Cullen didn’t come to the door, she called the police. Officer Bernie Kelly arrived, forced his way in, and found a charcoal hibachi grill burning in the bathtub. Cullen had removed batteries from smoke detectors and blocked heat vents with insulation. “He wouldn’t admit it was a suicide attempt,” says Kelly. “He said he was trying to stay warm. I said, ‘Charlie, you’re a nurse. You know and I know what’s going on here.’ ”