By 1998, the out-of-work nurse had run up large heating and accommodation bills and filed for bankruptcy, but his finances – and his spirits – improved when he landed a job at the Liberty Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Charles hadn’t worked in a nursing home before and was eager to be left alone with the mainly elderly residents. The building had a ventilator unit that helped seriously ill patients with their breathing and he was posted there. On 7th May, an elderly man who was recovering from injuries sustained in a car crash, began to vomit and tests showed abnormally high insulin levels. Medics stabilised him but, several days later, he went into a coma and died on the 19th May. Another nurse was blamed for giving the patient an accidental dose and she was suspended, though she pointed out that Charles, who was treating the dead man’s room-mate, was a likely suspect. She also pointed out that Charles was already under suspicion for taking medical supplies that he wasn’t authorised to use.
Three months later, nurses found Charles struggling with an elderly woman. He claimed that he was trying to give her an anti-anxiety drug but that she’d resisted him and broken her arm. As he wasn’t even her nurse, the hospital fired him.
Another nursing post
A week later Charles began working on the intensive care unit at Easton Hospital in Wilson, Pennsylvania. On paper, he looked good as he had no family, was prepared to work the unpopular graveyard shift and was very keen to do overtime. He also worked part-time at the burns unit in Leigh Valley Hospital, as he was keen to earn enough money to pay off his outstanding bills.
A month after the new nurse started, diabetic Ottomar Schramm was admitted to Easton Hospital’s emergency care unit having suffered a seizure. The cancer sufferer was a church elder who enjoyed playing in the church band. Ottomar’s relatives saw Charles Cullen in his room with a hypodermic and asked its purpose, and the nurse replied that it would be used if the patient’s heart stopped. Three days later, the octogenarian deteriorated rapidly and tests showed that he had a massive dose of digoxin in his system. His relatives were surprised when the thin, pale nurse told them not to ask for an autopsy, though he didn’t say why.
But an autopsy was performed and administrators were told that the patient shouldn’t have had any digoxin in his bloodstream as it hadn’t been prescribed for him. Indeed, he had no need of the drug as he had a pacemaker. Toxicology tests were still continuing in March 1999 when Charles quit the job.
Charles now worked exclusively at his other job, in the burns unit at Leigh Valley Hospital. On 31st August 1999, he gave a fatal digoxin overdose to 22-year-old accident victim Matthew Mattern, later claiming that he’d done so to prevent the young man going through painful surgery.
Another suicide attempt
Whilst killing his patients gave Charles a kind of quiet satisfaction, it wasn’t enough to quell his ongoing unhappiness. He disliked himself and his life and saw only loneliness in his future. On 3rd January 2000, in his latest attempt to end it all, he sealed his apartment and inhaled carbon monoxide fumes, having first put his recently acquired pet dog outside. However, a neighbour smelt kerosene, saw that towels were stuffed under the nurse’s door and alerted the emergency services. They took a still-conscious Charles to a counselling centre and he was freed to go home the next day. He now spent his non-working hours with one of his brothers, who was terminally ill, and seemed genuinely affected by the man’s pain
Once again, however, Charles’s colleagues became suspicious of the number of patients who were dying in his care and he left the hospital in April and began to look for another nursing job.
In June, he started work at the critical care unit at St Luke’s Hospital in Pennsylvania and, for a while, apparently managed to keep his murderous instincts in check. But by the start of 2001, the urge to take another life had become all-consuming and Charles began to study the patients’ records to ascertain who would be easiest to kill.
In February, another of his patients expired unexpectedly. The following month, Charles’s brother died of cancer and Charles seemed genuinely sad.
It didn’t stop him robbing other people of their relatives, though, and, in June, he gave heart-failure patient 79-year-old Irene Krapf a fatal injection of digoxin. She had been admitted to the ward less than an hour before to have a pacemaker fitted – something that would have given her a new lease of life.
The next patient to receive a potentially fatal overdose was Korean war veteran William Park. The nurse gave him various drugs but, each time, the 72-year-old recovered. On his fourth or fifth murder attempt, Charles returned to his old favourite, digoxin, and, on 8th November 2001, Mr Park died.
Perhaps Charles feared that his colleagues were becoming suspicious because it was December before he killed again, and this time the victim was 72-year-old radio personality Paul Galgon, who’d come in to have a pacemaker fitted. Charles gave him digoxin but Paul survived, whereupon the medic gave him a second dose. Paul died nine hours later. (Eventually Charles would be found guilty of Paul Galgon’s attempted murder.)
Later that same winter – in January 2002 – Charles killed eighty-year-old cancer patient Samuel Spangler, who was recovering from a slight heart attack, giving him a drug called nitroprusside, which reduces blood pressure. Samuel’s wife of sixty years was amongst the bereaved.
Daniel George, an 82-year-old restaurateur, was the next to suffer a premature death. In May, he was admitted to the ward for a bypass operation, but Charles injected digoxin into his IV tube and Daniel weakened and died. The following month, 72-year-old navy veteran Edward O’Toole met a similar fate, although this time Charles used a paralysing drug, vecoronium.
By now, the staff at St Luke’s were alarmed at the death toll, especially on Charles’s ward. The number of code blues (emergency resuscitation situations) had doubled since the pallid nurse arrived. When stolen medication was found in the needle bin, there was an investigation and suspicion centred on Charles. He resigned on 7th June 2002.
The administrators of St Luke’s reported their concerns over the stolen medication to the Pennsylvania State Nursing Board, but the nurse denied everything and the board took no action against him. One of the nurses, however, figured out that 67 patients had died between January and June 2002, and that 38 of them had died on Charles’s shift. She and several of her colleagues made phone calls to various hospital administrators, informing them of their fears.
Undaunted at almost being caught out again, Charles found gainful employment at the Sacred Heart Hospital in Allentown, but a nurse who’d previously worked with him warned staff that people died whenever he was around, so Charles was sacked and moved back to New Jersey, taking a job at the Somerset Medical Center. Meanwhile, various hospital administrators reported their fears to the authorities and detectives began to investigate the troubled nurse.
Addicted to murder
As soon as Charles was familiar with the layout of Somerset Medical Center, he resumed his killing spree. On 12th February 2003, he surreptitiously approached patient Eleanor Stoecker, who had cancer of the kidneys. Though he wasn’t her primary nurse, Charles gave her an intravenous injection, whereupon the sixty-year-old’s condition deteriorated and she was given the last rites. She died the following morning and the staff explained to her relatives that the cancer plus the chemotherapy had taken a fatal toll.
Eleven days later, Charles killed twice, injecting both 74-year-old Joyce Mangini and 89-year-old Giacomino Toto with a powerful muscle relaxant. The following month, he murdered again, injecting norepinephrine into 83-year-old army veteran John Shanagher, and, on 6th April, he took the life of eighty-year-old Dorthea Hoagland.
Charles was equally active in May. On the 5th, he fatally injected 66-year-old Melvin Simcoe with an anti-coagulant and, a few days later, gave 22-year-old Michael Strenko a lethal dose of norepinephrine. The young man, who had an autoimmune problem, had come to the hospital to have his spleen removed. He had been doing well but suddenly deterio
rated. Charles went to speak to his parents, who were anxiously waiting for news in a side ward, and told them that their son would probably die. He was right.
Meanwhile, the police had failed to prove that Charles was a serial killer, their task made difficult by the fact that he often worked on critical care wards where sudden death was to be expected, and there had been no suspicions about foul play when his patients were autopsied. They reluctantly closed the investigation and Charles was free to kill again.
Love my way
Charles Cullen had literally got away with murder and was equally fortunate when his latest girlfriend agreed to move in with – and became pregnant by – him. It was the lonely nurse’s opportunity for a new start, but killing was in his blood and he refused to stop.
On 16th June 2003, he injected forty-year-old cancer patient Jin Kyung Han with digoxin. Charles’s colleagues managed to resuscitate the mother of two but were baffled when tests showed that she had the drug in her system. They were equally perturbed to find that two bottles of the heart medication were missing from the medical supplies cupboard. Meanwhile, the patient recovered and was sent home, though, three months later, she died of her original illness. (He would later be found guilty of her attempted murder.)
The Very Reverend Florian Gall died the following month, also due to a digoxin overdose. Charles injected the medication into the Catholic priest’s IV tube as his relatives sat by his bedside. The 68-year-old went into cardiac arrest and could not be resuscitated. A concerned doctor informed the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services that six patients had abnormal drug levels in their systems.
Meanwhile, the emotionally damaged nurse continued to kill with impunity. Later that summer, he gave eighty-year-old Pasquale Napolitano an overdose of dobutamine, which fatally accelerated his heart rate. Charles’s next patient, carpenter Christopher Hardgrove, was only thirty-eight and recovering from a heart attack. On 11th August, he gave the father of two teenage daughters an injection of norepinephrine; he died within hours. The following month, Charles was working the graveyard shift when he murdered seventy-year-old Krishnakant Upadhyay. Three days later, he made a second attempt to kill 83-year-old James Strickland, who had survived a digoxin overdose in August. This time, the accomplished musician died. Alarmed, the hospital hired their own private investigator and subsequently took their findings to the prosecutor.
Unaware that he was now a person of interest, the male nurse killed again, injecting digoxin into the drip bag of 73-year-old hospital volunteer Edward Zizik. He had been married for forty-eight years.
By now, detectives had fully investigated Charles Cullen’s psychiatric history – the suicide attempts, the mental cruelty that he’d inflicted on his wife and children, the physical abuse of animals. They also found that he had ordered and taken receipt of drugs at the hospital, then cancelled the orders in the hope of putting investigators off the scent. At the end of October, Somerset Medical Center fired him, though they said it was because he had lied on his CV.
Charles immediately applied to another hospital for a job but, fortunately, details of the investigation appeared in a local newspaper. Relatives began to phone the police, citing how their own loved ones had died shortly after the nurse injected them…
Arrested
On 12th December 2003, detectives arrested the medic whilst he was out on a date with his girlfriend. The 43-year-old showed no emotion. He refused a polygraph test but soon agreed to talk to detectives about his unhappy childhood and equally miserable adult life.
He told them of his early and later suicide attempts, about being bullied in the navy, about his alcoholism and failed marriage and affairs. To their surprise, he talked with equal candour about his murder spree, saying that he wanted to die but feared death, and found it easier to have a sort of ‘death wish by proxy’, in which he killed patient after patient. He said that they had been elderly and suffering, that he had put them out of their misery, but this wasn’t entirely true. Some of Charles’s patients had been recovering well and were looking forward to resuming their lives in the outside world. His youngest victim, who admittedly had numerous serious health problems, was only twenty-two. Some of them hadn’t died when the nurse first poisoned them, so he had watched them suffer, be revived, feel ill and finally recover, only for him to administer another overdose and put them through the same hell again.
Charles was also very good at blaming other people for his problems, which was something he’d done all of his life. He said that security at many hospitals was lax, that no one cared enough to stop him. He’d have given up nursing but he needed the salary so that he could pay child maintenance. He also told detectives that he thought he’d stop killing when he had someone special in his life – but the reality was that he’d continued his murder spree after his girlfriend moved in with him and after she was expecting his child.
The nurse professed to be worried about the impending baby, afraid that people would shun the child because he, Charles, had murdered repeatedly. He confirmed that neither his girlfriend nor his colleagues had been aware that he was a serial killer.
As he had spent so much of his life in therapy, Charles confided his emotions and personal highs and lows to the detectives. When they steered him back to the murders, he admitted to committing thirty to forty – he’d lost count. He couldn’t remember most of the patients’ names but, given access to their files, was able to recall which fatal drugs he’d given them, how they’d responded, how their relatives had reacted and so forth. The act of killing and the aftermath were etched in his mind, yet the actual victims were unimportant and he had killed them as emotionlessly as most people kill a fly.
Charles told the police that he wanted to die, so he was put in a padded cell and kept on suicide watch. Meanwhile, investigators ordered that the body of one of his patients, Helen Dean, be exhumed. Although it had been ten years since the nurse allegedly murdered her, they knew that digoxin remains in the tissues for a very long time. Mrs Dean’s remains were autopsied and traces of digoxin were indeed present, indicating that Charles Cullen had told the truth.
On 22nd February 2004, the nurse celebrated his forty-fourth birthday in jail. No one visited him. The following month he was moved out of isolation and into the general prison population, where he shared a cell with another prisoner. Content to keep a low profile, he spent most of his time reading both novels and non-fiction books.
Court hearings
At his first court hearing, Charles admitted to killing thirteen patients at Somerset Medical Center. He said that he had injected them with various drugs with the intention of causing their deaths. Sixty relatives of the murder victims had come to see the murderous medic and many wept but the nurse remained emotionless.
Later, at a hearing in Warren County, he pleaded guilty to three murders at Warren Hospital. He also pleaded guilty to five murders at Hunterdon Medical Center. In total, he pleaded guilty to twenty-nine murders, namely John Yengo, Lucy Mugavero, Mary Natoli, Helen Dean, Leroy Sinn, Earl Young, Catherine Dext, Frank Mazzacco, Jesse Eichlin, Ottomar Schramm, Matthew Mattern, Irene Krapf, William Park, Samuel Spangler, Daniel George, Edward O’Toole, Eleanor Stoecker, Joyce Mangini, Giacomino Toto, John Shanagher, Dorthea Hoagland, Melvin Simcoe, Michael Strenko, Florian Gall, Pasquale Napolitano, Christopher Hardgrove, Krishnakant Upadhyay, James Strickland and Edward Zizik. He also pleaded guilty to six attempted murders, those of Stella Danielczyk, John Gallagher, Paul Galgon, Jin Kyung Han, Frances Agoada and Philip Gregor, and was cumulatively sentenced to 127 years in prison before becoming eligible for parole. In other words, he was now destined to die in jail.
18 Orville Lynn Majors
A smooth-talker, this nurse initially convinced many people of his innocence. With his hatred of the elderly, he is similar to Britain’s Colin Norris.
Early arrogance
Born in 1960, Orville grew into a young man who didn’t suffer fools gladly. He referred to those less f
ortunate than himself as ‘wasters’ and ‘trailer trash’ and hated anyone who claimed state benefits. He was bisexual and seemed very comfortable with this.
Death toll
In 1993, the somewhat overweight nurse began working in the intensive care unit at Vermillion County Hospital in Indiana. Over the next 22 months, 147 patients died, mostly in his care. He made it clear to his peer group that he hated elderly people and told a friend that they should all be gassed. A supervisor noted that the death rate increased whenever Orville was on duty but that it declined when he was away from the unit. As a result, an inquiry was launched and Orville was suspended on full pay. Seven bodies were exhumed but there were no traces of foul play and the nurse was not charged with anything, though he received negative press coverage.
A television star
By 1997, there were sixty lawsuits against Orville Lynn Majors as grieving relatives sought justice. The well-dressed medic appeared on an episode of The Montel Williams Show, which was highlighting false criminal accusations, and Orville was so plausible that he won over the host, audience and even a top criminologist. The relatives of several patients said that they’d seen him give medication to their elderly parents and that, moments later, that patient had unexpectedly died, but a plausible-sounding Majors pointed out that people died in hospital all the time.
Doctors Who Kill Page 13