The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

by Charles Graeber

  Tim was expecting a smartass answer, a fuck you or whatever. That was what Tim would have done, a guy stuck his arm out and said that. Charlie just nodded and turned and walked slowly back to his house. Like it didn’t touch him. He didn’t need to say fuck you. He was a free man and they didn’t have enough on him to arrest him. To Tim, that was fuck you enough.

  55

  While Braun, Baldwin, and Capt. Andy Hissim had worked on Charles Cullen in Somerset, another team had approached his home in Bethlehem. SCPO detectives Lou DeMeo, Andrew Lippitt, Edward Percell, and Douglas Brownlie, accompanied by SCPO assistant prosecutor Tim Van Hise, Deputy Chief Norman Cullen, and Lt. Stuart Buckman, had been joined by Detective Delmar Wills, a liaison from the Northampton County District Attorney’s Office. They served a warrant on Charlie’s girlfriend, Catherine Westerfer, at her front door, then spent three hours combing through Cullen’s house and car, searching chiefly for controlled substances Charles Cullen might have stolen from the hospital.

  The search had come up with one blister pack of pills, one bottle of CVS allergy medication, and one bottle of ibuprofen. Each was emptied and the capsules and tablets counted, photographed, and bagged for storage in the Northampton DA’s evidence facility. Analysis of these drugs would turn up nothing stronger than cold medicine.1

  Braun and Baldwin rode the interstate home from Cullen’s house in uncomfortable silence. Danny Baldwin was more than aware that as lead detective on this case, the fallout from what they’d just done would fall on his head first. It was Danny who had gone to Assistant Prosecutor Tim Van Hise, asking the man to trust him as he vouched for probable cause on the search warrant, working with him for hours to get the legal language just so. It had been a risky move, and before Van Hise had headed over with him to the judge’s quarters he’d said, “Baldwin, this is your ass on the line—you sure about this?” Danny had said yes, absolutely. Now he wasn’t so certain. He knew better than to bother trying to talk it through just yet, not in the car. Frustration radiated from his partner like heat off an animal.

  They’d gone at Cullen for six hours, throwing everything they had at him. Charlie had been perfectly willing to go through his personal history. He showed no surprise that the detectives knew about the allegations at Saint Barnabas, Saint Luke’s, and Warren hospitals. Charlie didn’t deny the allegations. He only said he’d never been charged, and the hospitals had cleared him. After that, he didn’t see any reason to say anything else. So the detectives tried to overwhelm him with their knowledge of his secret methods for getting digoxin.

  They told him they had his Pyxis records. They had seen his requests and cancels for dig on June 15 and 27. In fact, as Danny had first noticed, Cullen was canceling orders all the time on Pyxis. What did Charlie think about that? Could he explain it? He said he couldn’t. He didn’t have to.

  “Maybe I hit the wrong button,” Charlie told them. Then later, he offered, “Maybe I wasn’t wearing my glasses.”

  That didn’t make sense, and the detectives told him so. If he’d made a mistake, and hit the wrong button, why didn’t he follow up by hitting the correct one? Charlie didn’t know. They asked him again, and he just shrugged, then stared at the floor. He knew he wasn’t under arrest. He was going to walk. Braun wanted to stop the guy, physically if he could, just put him down before he killed again. But there’s only so much you can push a guy when he knows he can walk away any time he wants.

  Finally, their pushing hit a dead end. The detectives kept asking him questions, and Cullen kept repeating the same answer over and over, how he “couldn’t talk about that.” That word, couldn’t. It wasn’t a denial, but it wasn’t a confession, either. So the detectives pushed harder.

  About six hours of this and Charlie was in tears. The prosecutor had told them finally, shut it down. And now here they were, worse off than when they’d started. On the ride back, that was the first thing Danny actually said out loud. It was blown. And it was picking the guy up without enough evidence for the arrest that had blown it. The guy was spooked now. He knew he was being watched, knew he was being investigated.

  “You know the next call we’re gonna get,” Danny said finally.

  Tim figured Cullen would have that lawyer by morning and that would be it, game over. They’d rolled the dice on getting a confession. But their chances of ever getting anything out of Cullen now were about zero.

  Charlie waited until Cathy was gone for work before calling Amy. He had so many things to tell her, the week had been exciting, big-time crazy. He could hardly wait to tell her. So when he got Amy’s machine, Charlie told it instead.

  “Thursday—a big, big-big-big commotion!” Charlie said breathlessly. “Taken down for questioning, and Cathy was taken, um, was questioned for a couple hours and—for five hours. Big big ordeal, um, and, I guess, the whole thing at, ah, Somerset is probably getting a little bit… bigger. Um, but yeah, uh, well, um, Friday’s possible. I didn’t even think I was going to get to go home on Thursday,” Charlie continued, “but, uh, so far nothing new that… anyway,” he said. “Uh, I talk too much!”

  Charlie hung up before he realized that in his excitement, he’d forgotten to tell Amy the other big news. She’d been right—those new job-search websites really did work. Charlie was going to be a nurse again.

  57

  Even in the middle of the night, Tim answered the phone, a cop habit, the same as doctors or plumbers. That thing about good news always waiting until morning, it was true, but it was the job description. Nobody called doctors and plumbers with good news, either.

  Tim tried to get in a few hours of sleep after Amy’s call, but he eventually stopped pretending and found his suit and gun. The office was the place to be right now. He was alone there. He could think.

  Tim sat in the dark, counting his certainties. Charlie Cullen was a bad guy. And they’d get him, Tim had to believe that. Sooner or later, they would. But as he’d learned in the Duryea case, later was too late. In Charlie Cullen’s case, it had been too late for a long time.

  Tim watched the sun come up through the office windows, watched the first kids climb their new sleds up the courthouse hill. Then he closed his door to make a private call.

  Tim dialed 411 in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and connected to the Montgomery Hospital switchboard. They passed him up the line through administration until he landed at the desk of Vice President Barbara Hannon.

  Tim was calling as a private citizen, but he introduced himself as Sergeant Braun of Somerset County Homicide anyway, knowing the effect it would have. Tim told Hannon that if she wanted to keep her patients alive, she needed to pull their new nursing hire off that night’s shift schedule. That got the woman’s attention. She promised to do it right away.

  Tim couldn’t tell her who Cullen was, or even his background. He couldn’t say that she had hired a serial killer, not in those words; it wasn’t legal. It probably wasn’t even legal for him to be making a call like that in the first place. Tim figured, fine; Cullen could sue him later.

  The morning meeting was a full boat, everybody grousy and tired from the workload and the new winter weather, then even grousier when the report came in that the suspicious deaths at Somerset were about to hit the papers. Somehow, it had leaked. The DOH, Somerset Medical Center, and the prosecutor’s office had already received calls from reporters. Tim thought maybe those calls were going both ways. Sometimes it felt like the prosecutor’s office had press agents on the payroll.

  So, gathering facts under the media radar was finished. Charlie’s name wasn’t out yet, but it was only a matter of time. And once the media got a name, the lights would go on. Everybody would freeze up with a lawyer, and the rest would play out in court. The circumstantial case they were building over nearly two and a half months wasn’t anywhere close to bulletproof, but it was done. The FBI had been right on this one; this case was a bitch to work.

  Making any case on circumstantial evidence, you wanted to involve the suspect direc
tly, get him to talk, even ask him to help you understand the case, hoping he’d hang himself in a web of lies. Then later, in jury trial, you display those lies, tearing each one down and destroying all reasonable doubt. That’s how circumstantial cases get built, lie by lie. But if the suspect lawyers up, it’s over. There wasn’t a lawyer alive who would let his client talk in a situation like this. Let alone confess.

  Cullen wouldn’t talk to detectives, but maybe he’d still talk to a friend. Tim and Danny talked it out, then they called Amy at home and told her they needed one more thing.

  It was a move they hadn’t intended to make for months, but they no longer had a choice. Amy had to get Cullen talking, and quick. And she had to do it face-to-face.

  58

  The mic was just a little pack, like in the movies. The tech helped rig it up, a professional process undermined by Amy making jokes because it had to be placed high, between her breasts. It was the first time the detectives had seen her pacemaker scar.

  And that changed the mood. They offered to let her parachute on the whole deal, right now, not wanting her to die from the stress or whatever. Amy assured them it was fine, and, despite her hammering heart, made it believable with practiced calm. The next question was to the tech, asking, Hey, is the pacemaker gonna screw up the mic?

  After the tape-up Amy excused herself to the bathroom and locked the door. Quiet. She planted her purse across the sink and studied herself in the mirror. She looked the same. But wasn’t there a hint of her secret mission, the secret-agent gizmo?

  Amy shot herself a fierce look, the kind she’d flash her daughter to get her to behave. She fixed her hair and then felt silly about it and unfixed it. Then she flicked the light and stepped back out onto the homicide floor, wired for sound.

  Amy had set the lunch date with Charlie and tried to keep it short. Charlie had wanted off the phone anyway. He said it was probably bugged. That seemed to amp the romance of their rendezvous for Charlie. In fact, it was Amy’s phone that was tapped.

  Afterward Amy called Tim with the details on the meet, at an Italian restaurant called Carrabba’s. Tim was impressed—the girl was choosing food she actually wanted to eat, thinking not just about bringing down her friend as a serial killer but about expensing some homemade sausage, too. Hell, Amy wasn’t just the most fun CI he’d ever run, she might even be the best, he thought. If the girl ever wanted to quit nursing, she’d make one heck of a cop.

  The detectives had outlined the plan in the squad room earlier that afternoon. The goal was to have Amy draw Cullen over the state line so they could put the nippers on him in New Jersey, to avoid the extradition process. While they were at it, they’d put Amy on a wire, hoping to God she could get Cullen to talk. But when Tim and Danny drove over to scout the location, they found Carrabba’s closed. It was an accident, but a good one. Meeting at a closed restaurant, seeming to switch it up on the fly—if Cullen was paranoid, this would make it look unplanned.

  Tim and Danny set up in the unmarked Crown Vic, parked idling in a vantage spot. They saw Amy get out of her car, Charlie come in from his blue Escort, the two of them saying hi and complaining about the restaurant being closed. By the time Danny had gotten her tuned in on the box she was back in the car again, Charlie following in his. The detectives rolled with them.

  Amy was freaking. She could drive, turn the key, press the gas and use the signal, but she couldn’t hear the signal, or anything except the wooly whoosh of blood in her ears. She tried a few sentences out loud—to herself, to the gods, to the detectives—telling them she was on her way to a new location, a place called The Office, trying to be official. And then when that two seconds was over she decided, Screw it, and cranked the dial on the stereo, letting a solid sonic wall of FM power metal wash it all away.

  Amy saw Charlie’s little car still wobbling in her rearview as she signaled right into the Office parking lot, felt a fresh spike of panic over the challenge of parking between yellow lines, and killed the engine to inhale a half second of silence.

  Then she bobbed to the rearview, shot herself a Be Cool look and sprung out into the air, calling, “Hi, sweetie!”

  59

  The wireless unit was borrowed from Narcotics. They both knew it was a piece of shit, a tool not much used on the mean streets of Somerset County but hopefully good enough. They heard a car door slam, greet-greet Hi-Hi chitter-chatter and double doors into restaurant noises, the rhubarb of laugh and talk, bright sounds of tine and plate. They heard Amy ask for a quiet booth, Good girl. Tim and Danny slid reflexively into their leather buckets listening hard.

  Hi hon-ney, how are you?”

  Charlie winces at the December sun. “Oh, all right,” he says.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Oh-kay.”

  Amy nods at the bloody nicks below his nose and lip. “Well, you shaved.”

  Charlie rolls his eyes. “Yeah, I shaved too closely.” He touches his chin, feeling dried blood. “I shaved once, then I looked at myself in the mirror, said, Oh my god! With my glasses on.”1

  They push through the double doors into the good-time décor, a beer-o-clock theme with hanging mugs for regulars and tables out behind. Amy now takes another look at Charlie. The too-close double-shave, the new haircut and, okay—he did look like he’d dressed for a date.

  “Look at you!” Amy says. “With the decked-out shirt.”

  “I know,” Charlie says. Despite the December weather, he was in dated tropical wear—a loose shirt in the same ice-cream white as his pants and shoes. “I’m all white.” If not for the repeating jungle leaf print running along one side of the shirt, he might have been in uniform.

  Amy tells the hostess they’re playing hooky from work, sneaking smiles at Charlie, making it fun as they follow the waitress to the back of the bar. Charlie and Amy slide into opposite sides of a vinyl booth.

  “So,” Charlie says, jumping right in. “They were talking about me on the radio.”

  “Wait—when?”

  “Oh, when I was driving here,” Charlie says. He’d been following the news closely for several days. Newark Star-Ledger reporter Rick Hepp had an unnamed source confirming that the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office was investigating a string of possible homicides at Somerset Medical Center, with an unnamed local male nurse as the lead suspect. The news leak had exploded from there, gathering scope and juicy specificity by the hour. “I was listening to the classics station, it was a local station, like 99, a local oldies station. Or, it was—”

  “And it said…?”

  “My name,” Charlie says. “ ‘Charles Cullen.’ And, you know, and the other one, 101.5, it just mentioned that it was a nurse. I’d read it too, before—the investigation, they’d mentioned it.”

  “And this is…”

  Charlie had been following himself in the papers. “The Newark Star.2 And I read it in the Morning Call—it’s a local paper—that they’d contacted the nurse’s employer, what they thought would be the employer, and—what they thought—that’s Montgomery, so…”

  “Oh, Montgomery,” Amy says. “Is that—”

  “How’s everybody doing today?” the server, Joel, asks. “Maybe you folks wanna start off with a couple drinks?”

  Charlie glances at Amy, unsure. Amy’s having a Corona. But Charlie’s been sober for weeks now. He promised his daughter he’d stay that way.

  “Um, yeah,” Charlie says. “Um… Miller? Or Michelob?”

  “We have Michelob Ultra.”

  “Yeah,” Charlie says quickly. “Good, good…”

  “That’s, like, low-carb, dude,” Amy says.

  “Oh is it?” Charlie says. “Oh, ha-ha. No no no, not that. I’ll have a Corona.”

  Charlie waits until the waiter is gone before he continues. “Yeah, and so my eldest is thirteen,” he says. “So I just told her, I took care of that.”

  “So you just told her… because you were worried it was going to hit the papers?”

&
nbsp; “Well, I didn’t talk to her until a couple of days ago,” Charlie says. “When they took me up for questioning. Because they told me, you know, next time they see me, they’re going to put handcuffs on me and take me in, so I wanted to call her and let her know.”

  Charlie tells Amy he’d been waking up and going to bed wondering, Can I sleep through the night, or are they already at the door? When the call did come, it wasn’t the police at all, but a reporter from a newspaper. Charlie is famous. He wants Amy to know this is way bigger than his recruitment flyer. “And, well—it was in the New York Times, so—”

  “Did you folks have a chance to look over the menu, or…” It’s the waiter again.

  Charlie drops his head and studies his placemat until the kid disappears and he has Amy’s attention again.

  “Okay,” he says. “So… you want me to start from the beginning?”

  Over the wire the noise grew by degrees, with the early after-work crowd becoming louder round by round, plus there was an electrical something interfering with the mic frequency—air traffic control or a pager or the girl’s pacemaker; they didn’t know, only that it was a strain to listen to.

  The men leaned in, ties hanging, as if getting closer to the box was going to help with the headphones. They heard Amy tell Charlie, “All right, let’s start from the beginning,” which made them lean in even more.

  When—when everything happened at Somerset, they only said—”

  “That there was an issue with my application,” Charlie says. “You know, something like that. I mean I went to the first interview, that was fine, then when I went to the second interview, when they pulled me off the floor—the first one was at upper management, that was for the Reverend…”