Then, in August 2005, an envelope arrived at the Somerville jail. By now Cullen was inured to the interview requests and the hate mail, even the odd “fan letter,” but this was something new: a thin clipping from a Long Island community newspaper with a few paragraphs about a man named Ernie Peckham and a margin note jotted in girlish cursive: “Can you help?”
Cullen knew Peckham—a guy about Charlie’s age, with four kids and a wife at home and a job shaping metal for window casings and revolving doors in Farmingdale. He was the brother of Catherine Westerfer—Charlie’s estranged ex-girlfriend and the mother of his youngest child, whom he had never seen and probably never would. Maybe he and Ernie had said hey at a wedding a few years ago, Charlie couldn’t recall, but they weren’t friends, they weren’t even acquaintances, they certainly weren’t close enough to swap organs. But according to the article, that was what Ernie needed.
Doctors don’t know exactly how or when, but at some point in 2003, Ernie contracted strep. Probably it was just a little scratch that got infected, the sort of thing that either swells up and goes away or takes you out for a week with a sore throat and a dose of antibiotics. But Ernie didn’t notice the infection, and it spread. His immune system attacked the burgeoning bacteria, creating complex protein knots that caught in the microscopic filters in both his kidneys. Normally, these filters would have been removing toxins from Ernie’s blood and excreting them with his urine; now, they were like a sink clogged with hair. Ernie’s body began to bloat with its own poisons, swelling his hands and face and turning his urine the color of cocoa. By the time he saw a doctor, his kidneys were dead. Untreated, he’d be next.
Charlie had never worked as a nephrological nurse, but he knew that once a kidney’s filters are bunged up, you can’t really fix them. Dialysis is the most common option, a method of removing fluid and filtering blood through a machine. Ernie regarded his three weekly two-hour dialyses at Stony Brook Hospital “another full time job,” and the hassle hadn’t stopped his deterioration. His access veins kept clotting off. The access port that surgeons had sewn into the major vein in his neck was like a wound that never closed, and it opened him to dangerous new infections. Ernie had been forced to give up his scoutmaster post and had scaled back his time at the local VFW. But if he really wanted to get his life back, dialysis wasn’t going to do it. What he really needed was a new kidney.
At the time, there were around sixty thousand people waiting for a kidney in this country. Most would come from cadavers (donation rates are highest in early spring, when new motorcyclists take to roads still edged with winter sand). But a cadaver kidney has a lessened life expectancy of six years compared to that of a live donor; the waiting list for such a random cadaver donor was between five and seven years long—a wait that, as Ernie’s health deteriorated, was beginning to look like a death sentence.
The best way to match kidney with recipient is through a blood relative, but nobody in Ernie’s family was medically eligible to donate one of theirs. Now his only chance was to find the perfect stranger. Unfortunately, the odds of one random individual being a perfect tissue-typed match for another random individual—of a donation being personal—are staggeringly small. Ernie Peckham had a better chance of being struck by lightning. Ernie’s mother, Pat Peckham, had already mortgaged her house to help with her son’s medical bills, and she contacted the local paper to run a public-interest item with Ernie’s blood type and the hospital’s donation hotline number. She was hoping for a miracle donor. But no miracle donor called. Pat was running out of options for saving her son; she was willing to try anything or anyone who might help. And what would it take except a stamp? So she clipped the article out of the paper, stuck it in an envelope addressed to the Somerville prison, and waited for her miracle. The thing about miracles: you couldn’t really predict what form they might take, or what wings would bear them. It might be anyone, even the serial killer who had knocked up her daughter.
But Cullen’s plea to become an organ donor from jail struck such a nerve, especially with the victims’ families. The nurse who killed dozens of sick people suddenly wanted to save one? It seemed at the least ironic, at worst manipulative. In theory, the state had neutralized Charles Cullen in prison. Then, suddenly, there he was again—he wasn’t neutralized, he was in the headlines, manipulating court proceedings, “playing God” with yet another life and using his own bodily organs as his last piece of collateral. Was Charles Cullen motivated by compassion or a sick compulsion? Was it all just an attempt to redeem himself in the eyes of his baby mama, or Jesus Christ, or himself? It was impossible to know. Most of those answers lay within Charles Cullen himself, and Charles Cullen wasn’t talking.
“People look at Charles, they look at what he’s done, and they see a monster,” explained the Rev. Kathleen Roney, Cullen’s chaplain in the Somerset County Jail. “You can understand why of course—Charles has killed people, more than you’ll ever know. The families of the victims are owed something for that. But he isn’t a monster,” she added. “He isn’t the Angel of Death. Charles is much more complicated than that.”
Charles Cullen sat on the bed of his cell, reading and rereading Pat Peckham’s note. Can you help? He wasn’t sure. Cullen understood the medical implications of Ernie’s disease—which might kill him soon—and the benefits of having a living donor, which might extend the kidney’s life by six years over a cadaver donation. But he also knew the downside. He was the Angel of Death. He didn’t think about himself in this way, but that’s how he was known, the papers said so. And he knew: the Angel of Death donates an organ, that’s going to bring some publicity. In giving a piece of himself to Ernie, he’d be giving Ernie a piece of the Angel of Death, and a piece of that publicity. Not just for him, but for his family as well. In jail, Cullen often agonized over “the scary stuff” happening to his family outside—the reporters who followed his ex-girlfriend and threatened to print her address unless she talked, the man who cornered his eleven-year-old daughter in the driveway.
“I know I’ll be afraid of what is going to happen after I die, but I’m more afraid of seeing, feeling what I think my kids will have to go through for the rest of their lives,” Cullen told me, during one of our visits. Cullen didn’t like that his children would have to grow up as “the kids with the serial killer dad.” And he didn’t wish that for Ernie’s kids, either. Which was why he wondered: could the Angel of Death really help Ernie Peckham?
Charles always liked to be helpful, especially medically. He was always an especially enthusiastic donor, having given some twelve gallons of blood and registering to become a bone marrow donor—not that he personally knew anyone who needed his marrow, but just in case someone ever did. Cullen was healthy and still relatively young; odds were he’d be at least physically eligible to donate one of his kidneys to someone. Being a specific match for a random request was a long shot; the best-case scenario, being a 6-for-6 antigen match, would take a miracle. But Charlie was in prison, and, he told me, somebody asked for something he could give. It was worth a try.
During his time in Somerville, he had a weekly service with the visiting Catholic deacon, and now Cullen asked him a question, casually, like an idle curiosity: was it possible for an inmate to donate a kidney? Deacon Tom Sicola wanted to sit down—they didn’t teach him anything about this sort of thing in seminary. After lockdown he went back to his office, closed the door, and dialed the extension of his supervisor, Reverend Kathleen.
Kathleen Roney wears rock-collection-sized birthstone rings on her fingers and Celtic charms around her clerical collar, and her brown eyebrows flicker like pinball flippers as she talks. She’d dropped two hundred pounds from illness and surgery that year, but she still maintained the command of her old heft, and she has the bullhorn voice and direct manner that first earned her the Somerville jailhouse nickname of the “kick-ass Reverend.” Roney and I met at a small wooden table behind the magazine rack of the Bridgewater, New Jersey, Barnes and Noble. R
oney’s into Templar stuff, Irish spirituality, Druid mysticism; Charles liked spy novels and whodunnits. “But nothing about murder,” she said. “Do you know how hard it is to find a mystery that doesn’t have murder in it?”
Kathleen started ministering to Charles when he came to the Somerset jail in 2003, and she had recently begun teaching him the meditation techniques of the Desert Fathers. She figured whatever worked for the first-century Christian mystics who kept their faith alive during years of hermetic desert asceticism might come in handy for a man spending his life in a nine-by-five box. The “Jesus Prayer,” which Charles recited during his Somerset sentencing, had come from one of these tutorials. Jail only intensified the need for religion’s comforts, and Charles had a lot of catching up to do; most of his knowledge of Christianity was either from grainy memories of Catholic grade school or the Technicolor drama of Cecil B. DeMille epics, which he preferred.
Over the course of nearly three years, Roney had gotten to know Charles, but that didn’t mean she understood him. She didn’t understand, for instance, why Charles had killed so many people. And she couldn’t quite understand why, exactly, he suddenly wanted to donate. “So that night I went to the jail and I grilled him. I needed to know his heart on this, to make sure I wasn’t being used.
“I asked him, is someone going to pay you? Are you doing it for fame? Are you thinking this is some sort of a deal with God, a bargain: ‘I’m going to save this life, and this wipes out the lives I took’?”
The questions seemed to hurt his feelings. “But that was okay,” she told me. “I needed to know his heart on this, if I was going to get involved especially.” So Roney asked him another question: was this a sort of passive suicide attempt—did he think he might die on the table?
No, he told her. That’s not it.
So a third time she asked him, Charles, why this? Why now? Would you have done this ten years ago, seventeen years ago, before everything changed, before all this started?
“ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And why? Because I can, it’s possible. Somebody asked for something that is possible. Why now? Because this is when it was asked. And I think it’s the right thing to do.’
“I believed him,” she said. She pushed aside her grande iced tea and took my hands between her painted fingers. “Charles had an absolutely horrible childhood, and all sorts of problems, but he has never once blamed any of that on anyone else, or made any excuses to me for what he did. That person that killed all those people is the same person who would make this decision. Absolutely.”
The kit from the hospital contained a series of color-coded tubes for Cullen to bleed into. Afterwards, Stony Brook Hospital would test the antigens in his blood against the antigens in Ernie’s, the most basic matching criteria to see if Cullen could actually donate his kidney. “That’s how I became the blood mule,” Roney laughed.
The odds of Charles actually matching were incredibly long, but there was a life at stake, and she had made a promise, one she was still struggling to understand the full ramifications of. That night, when she asked her friends to help her with prayer, she didn’t tell them what they were praying for, or for whom. “We needed to keep it secret,” she said. “And besides, could you ask every person to pray for a serial killer?”
Every equinox, Reverend Roney and like-minded Celtic Christians spent a week at a Druid spiritual retreat near the Pocono Mountains. It was a spiritual time for her, a time of dancing around bonfires and meditating to icons and spirit-voyaging among life-size reproductions of Stonehenge and unbounded acres of blonde Pennsylvania Dutch farmland. Every morning she’d walk the hard earth between the corn stubble, reciting her prayers under the recessive blue sky, feeling the ancient wisdom, looking for a sign. It was then that she felt the vibration.
This, of course, was her cell phone—they encourage silence at these things, so she had to keep it on vibrate—and right away, she knew what had happened. And her prayer group knew, too. In fact, the whole of the spiritual retreat knew what had happened, she can’t say why, she’d never told them, they just felt it and started to cry, because they knew. And she thought, This is it, it’s meant to be.
She was crying now, ruining her mascara as she remembered how Charles was a perfect 6-for-6 antigen match, like winning the Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. She wiped the tears away with a Starbucks napkin. “Honestly, we thought it was a miracle,” she said. There would be more tests, X-rays, CAT scans, tests with machines you couldn’t send to the jail by mail. But these were trivial compared to this spotlight in the darkness, a sign of God’s larger plan.
“At the time, I didn’t know this was just the beginning,” she remembered. “But when I told Johnnie, all he could do [was] shake his head. He knew this was going to open up a whole can of worms.”
The New Jersey Public Defenders office is four stories of chocolate brick with handicapped spaces and shrub landscaping and three-hundred-pound women in nightgown-sized Tweety Bird T-shirts smoking menthols by the glass double doors. In the offices upstairs, there are people waiting nervously under yellow mercury-vapor lights, and a hole in the Plexiglas where you can announce yourself by sticking your mouth in and yelling politely. Johnnie Mask’s office was in the back, one of the few in the building with both windows and a door. With his gray Ishmael-like beard and broad leonine features, the Somerset County deputy public defender looked something like an Old Testament James Earl Jones, and he spoke with the same authoritative baritone. “Someone,” he said, “is trying to shit-can this donation.” After nearly three years representing the biggest serial killer in New Jersey history, Mask was tired, and playing point man for the legal side of Cullen’s donation hadn’t made his job any easier. “I made a promise to try and get this donation to go through,” he sighed. “But it feels like we’re getting played.” Mask squinted and shook his head at what had become an old joke. “Basically, I don’t think anyone’s very motivated to make this happen for a serial killer.”
The Lehigh County Courthouse
Allentown, Pennsylvania
March 20, 2006
Allentown is a poor steel town living in the ruins of a rich one, and the downtown is a grand, ceremonial public space of imported stone and soaring colonnades and busted crazies rooting for cans, joined now by a small parade of families in dark, formal clothes with little blue stickers from OfficeMax gummed to their lapels to show they’re victims of the Angel of Death.
The old courthouse is largely gutted, part of a stalled renovation project, and the family members are guided through a spooky house tour of rooms stripped to the lathing and rooms of chrome-green file cabinets, up stairs, and through flicker-lit halls. At the end of this trip is a surprisingly bright, nineteenth-century Italianate courtroom. It is a high-box gilt with every splendor of Beaux Arts rococo and every pound of marble that steel money could buy. The ceiling is forty feet above and wreathed with concentric rings of filigree and medusa chandelier, under which sits the judge, cordoned off by a giant desk festooned with Federalist-style lamps and railings as intricate as the back of a two-dollar bill.
Cullen’s hands are chained in front of his groin, and his legs are manacled into loops of institutional leather, giving him the air of being extremely physically dangerous. Of course, he isn’t, at least not in this context, but the effect is that for perhaps the first time, Charles Cullen looks like what one expects from a serial killer. One senses that if Lehigh County could have put a grilled mask on him and bound him to a dolly, they surely would have. As it happens, Charlie will give them their chance.
After all of our conversations about Cullen’s sensitivity to the suffering of other people, one might think that he would be on his best behavior here, especially if his one remaining action in public life—the donation of a kidney—still hung in the balance of public opinion. At the least, one wouldn’t expect him to take his public opportunity to torture the families, short-circuit their grief, and build more bad will. But strangely, that’s exactly what he does.
Cullen begins the process by reciting, from memory, statements that Judge William Platt has made to the press.
“And for this reason, Your Honor,” Cullen says, “you need to step down.”
“Your motion to recuse is denied,” says Judge Platt.
“No no, Your Honor,” Cullen interrupts, “you need, you need to step down. Your Honor, you need to step down.”
“If you continue this I will gag and manifold you,” the judge warns. But Cullen shouts over him. “Your Honor, you need to step down! Your Honor, you need to step down! Your Honor…”
The court is a beautiful room, but a terrible courtroom, formed entirely of hard marble surfaces that amplify and distort sound. Charles Cullen fills this room. The families wait, holding their carefully prepared statements to their chests, as Cullen gets to speed-shouting his statement ten times, thirty, forty. He is not going to stop, and now the court officers are on him. They pull a spit mask over his head—a mesh veil that keeps a prisoner from hawking lugies on his captors—but the noise continues.
They wrap the spit mask with a towel and push him into the chair, bunching the towel at the back of his head and screwing it tight, so that now all that’s left of the tantrum is the bass cadence, like a man screaming into a pillow while the families of the victims try to read. “You are a total waste of a human body… You are the worst kind of monster, a son of the devil…” Only fragments can be heard beneath Cullen’s gagged scream, and soon the sergeant’s hands begin to cramp. His grip loosens, and chorus by chorus, Cullen’s voice gets clearer, almost operatic. The judge scowls and the sergeant puts his back into it, wringing with both hands. Several women in the jury box raise their hands to their faces in horror.
The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder Page 27