“I will not allow him to leave this courtroom!” intones Judge Platt, but there’s no order in this court. Cullen’s getting off three Your Honors per second now, and the sergeant motions to the judge, making a sign across his mouth. The judge nods and the sergeant ducks from the room and returns with a roll of duct tape the size of a dinner plate. They tape up his mouth like a cartoon, making a big X over his lips, which does essentially nothing. The victims read their personal statements, and Cullen screams his, like a nightmarish version of “Row Row Row Your Boat.”
“If my grandmother was alive right now, she’d say to you, ‘I hope you rot in hell, you sick son of a bitch…’ ”
“Your Honor you must step down Your Honor you must step down…”
“… three more life sentences, served concurrently with those already handed down…”
“… must step down Your Honor you must…”
And with a final “Such that you will remain in prison for the rest of your natural life,” it’s over. Once again, the court officers frog-march Charles Cullen—bound, gagged, duct-taped—out of the courtroom and into a waiting elevator. He still is chanting when the doors close. The silence that follows is terrible, too.
Afterward, the families huddle in the hallway, shaken and unsatisfied. “I think he intentionally meant disrespect to everyone in that courtroom,” vents Julie Sanders, whose friend was OD’d by Cullen. “He says he is a compassionate man. He says he wants to donate a kidney to save someone’s life, he wants to do it out of compassion. Where’s the compassion now?” Sanders stabs her finger at the hole in the air where Cullen had been. “I needed to say something to him. Does he even know what he did? Does he know what he’s done to our lives?”
All the precautions about me killing other patients,” Cullen sighed, and subtly rolled his eyes at the idea. Over the course of our visits, Cullen was becoming increasingly depressed. This recent depression was specific to the delays in his donation. Cullen likes to be helpful, but here he was, sitting in jail, while someone out there needed a piece of what he was sitting on.
“The state’s concerned that since my crimes were committed in a hospital, I might commit them again. Why did they think it was easier to kill yourself in a hospital than anywhere else?” he wondered. Especially when he’d be shackled to the bed and under guard. It made no sense. It was just another false stumbling block to his donation. And that was depressing him further. He had a signed order from the Somerset judge. His lawyer, Johnnie Mask, had been beavering away on the paperwork, Reverend Kathleen was working as a liaison between the recipient’s family and the hospital. And yet nothing was happening.
Cullen studied my hands across the glass, then stared back down at his piece of steel counter. “When we got past the blood tests I felt like, okay, this is going to happen,” he said. “But now I don’t know.
“I mean, I’m not getting anything special for this, I’m not asking for special treatment for jail, I’m not getting paid or anything… what’s the harm?” Cullen’s eyes scanned the glass for an answer. “What would the families rather I did, just sit here and watch TV?
“I grant that I certainly have done some very bad things, I’ve taken lives,” he said quickly. “But does that prevent me from doing something positive? The only thing I can do is sit in a cell and cost the taxpayer $40,000 a year. And I know that New Jersey doesn’t make license plates any more.” He motioned into the air and shook his head. “So what positive contribution can a person make in jail?
“I know people say I’m playing God, but I can’t really do that,” he said. “The only thing I am doing is giving an organ up. As for what happens afterward, that is in God’s hands. As a nurse they saw me directly taking life, but I can’t give life, I can’t extend life. We give love. To our children. But we don’t own them or control them. We do a lot of things but we don’t consider these things playing God. For some reason I matched, six out of six antigens. The recipient did put publicity out to get the good citizens of New York, to see if anyone matched. But nobody came forward. Not one person came forward. Not one single person.”
Cullen fixed me with a look, then took his glance away, as if to study my response in private. “It really depends on how you think of people,” he said. “And what you think people are capable of.”
After his final sentencing at the Lehigh County Courthouse in Allentown, Charles was handcuffed and shackled and put in the back of a windowless van. No light entered his mobile cell, and as the van careened onto the New Jersey Turnpike, Cullen began to feel nauseous. He tried to use the techniques that Reverend Roney had taught him, visualizing Jesus in a halo of fire in the darkness, but then Jesus started to look nauseous, too, so he stopped and went back to the Jesus Prayer.
He was met at the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton by about ten guards, four of them in riot gear. He was led to a detaining cell, where two guards strip-searched him on camera. One guard told him that he had read about him in the newspaper. The other said that any move would be taken as a sign of aggression. He was given new clothes and taken to the prison psych ward, where they took the clothes away and strip-searched him again. He was given a sort of toga made from plastic sheets he thought looked like the stuff they wrap around new TV sets, and put into a cell for seventy-two hours. The toga ripped after the first day, so for Monday and Tuesday he was naked and embarrassed under constant camera surveillance. He tried not to listen to the guards, the Time for your insulin comments, focusing instead on Psalm 25: “My enemies are many, they hate me. Deliver me, let me not be ashamed.” And gradually, he was given pieces of his new life. His cell was smaller than in Somerville, and the guards played games with him, telling him there was no library, giving him sneakers two sizes too small, little things. Things that taught him not to assume anything anymore. He was in the noncontact wing, locked down twenty-three hours a day and segregated from the other prisoners for his own safety. By the time he was eligible to see visitors for a phone visit, he was visibly thinner and had grown a gray beard, but his donation seemed no closer than it had five months earlier, and he was even more frustrated.
To Cullen, the delays just didn’t make sense. If this match was God’s will, if it was supposed to happen that he was a perfect match for a man who needed it, why then wasn’t it happening? Was it a sort of punishment, a sort of medical tantalization? Had there been some sort of mistake?
“And meanwhile, the kidney recipient is getting sicker and sicker,” Cullen said during one of our visits. This time, his speech was laconic, and he seemed both tired and depressed. “He’s back in the hospital, and averaging one complication a month. At least, that’s what I hear.”
He knew the families of the victims saw his donation as an exercise of his personal will, just the sort of freedom that prison was supposed to confiscate. “But the fact that I was even able to take a blood test, it’s not my will, it’s the efforts of a great number of people—Mr. Mask, Reverend Roney, Judge Armstrong. I’d mention the DA but, ah, he’s not on my good list,” he said. “And Ernie’s family has certainly gone through a lot of waiting.” He thought about it a second, shook his head slightly. “A lot of waiting.”
Cullen stopped for a moment, looking down, blinking away tears. Finally he breathes and tries again. “It’s hard, knowing that if I wasn’t in here they could go ahead and do this… It’s hard to see this as just playing God. It’s not like Ernie was given a choice between a good person and a bad person,” he said. “If he was offered a matching kidney from a good person, I’m sure he’d take it.” Cullen folded an arm tightly across his chest and studied the counter. “I still love people, I care about people. Maybe, maybe people don’t think that I should be allowed to do something for people that I care about. But if I just picked someone out of the blue to donate to—people would think I’m just totally crazy.” He looked up. “That’s the funny thing. People think you’re crazy for doing something for someone else if you don’t know them personally.”
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br /> “I can’t take back the harm that I’ve done already, but a good thing, why can’t I do that?” Cullen asked me. “I know that [people] think that I should go straight to hell and take my kidney with me. People think that they can figure out how God thinks. But God alone knows somebody’s heart and soul and mind.”
Johnnie Mask had long been convinced that the process was derailed, and Roney had bet a dinner on it. After all, it was God’s plan, wasn’t it?
Ever since Charles had first arrived in her jail, people had treated Reverend Roney as an accomplice. Maybe she’d gotten too close and enjoyed the excitement a little too much, she could see that, it was a temptation. Kathleen didn’t agree with what Charles Cullen had done, of course, his crimes—nobody could—but she still didn’t understand the comments, some from people she’d once called friends, others from fellow pastors, Christians who would ask, How could you possibly think a serial killer is a child of God?
One of the first letters she received was from an Evangelical Christian who warned her away from ministering to a monster. “He said, ‘If you save him and he goes to heaven, that’s not fair,’ ” Roney remembered. “That’s the way Evangelicals think. It was so stupid, but I was like hysterical for like two days after that.”
The hate mail followed, some of it threatening. Nothing came of it, of course, and she tried to shrug it off—it was understandable, natural even, that the community felt threatened by a man who had used a position of trust to murder their most vulnerable family members. Then around the time of the arraignment, she was walking from the jail when someone yelled at her, calling her “Satan’s pastor,” and threw something in her face. She didn’t know what kind of blood it was, probably pig’s blood like they use when protesting abortion clinics. She tried not to think about it and just went home and washed off the sticky brown mess. “Yes,” Kathleen laughed, “if there’s a heaven and I end up there, I should definitely get a crown.”
Of course, when the donation became public, it just made everything worse. “I have one friend, who is no longer a friend,” she said to me. “She told me that by helping Ernie get a transplant from Charles Cullen, I was ruining his life, because I was helping him receive Satan’s kidney.”
Kathleen remembered when she first started in her job, she thought that if you were a decent human being and you were Christian, you would be nice to everybody. “Doesn’t that make sense?” Roney asked. “I mean, as much as my parents hated Hitler, they still said, ‘Well, he is a child of God.’ I thought that was the Christian way. But this trial changed it. Man, did I learn that Christianity can be vicious.”
Just the day before, Kathleen had gotten a call from Ernie Peckham’s mother, Pat. “She informed me that I was never to talk to them again,” she said. “Ever. Before she hung up on me, Pat basically said that it was me, and that damned lawyer, we were ruining her life! Well, I don’t mean to be cute about it, but if it wasn’t for me and Johnnie, they wouldn’t be thinking about getting a darned kidney!”
All she could hope was that the donation had been scheduled by the hospital, and since Charles was such a security threat, Pat had been told to be careful, to keep it as secret as possible. “I mean, I don’t expect flowers and chocolate cake, but we’re not trying to ruin Ernie’s life, we’re trying to save it.”
Roney stopped talking and let herself breathe. Slowly, the anger faded. And as it did, she began to cry.
They came for Charlie Cullen in the night, guards with keys and handcuffs. He was going to Saint Francis Medical Center. If they knew why, they wouldn’t say. They gave him the paper gown again, drew his blood, cuffed him to the bed. The television in the corner was always on, local news, Oprah. A day passed, and he thought, Here we go again. It wasn’t the donation. It was something else.
The guards came again in the morning. They were taking him downstairs, they didn’t say why. He was instructed to only address direct question. He was told that Charles Cullen was not his name. His name was now Johnny Quest. The doctor called him Mr. Quest. The nurses called him John. Cullen thought it was ridiculous. He didn’t know what was happening.
They gave him something to relax him—Valium, he thinks, they wouldn’t say. It made him woozy. They gave him forms to sign. He held the pen, unsure of which name to use. “Use the one you’re supposed to,” the doctor said. He’d watched the cartoons as a kid, he remembered the handsome blond boy and his adventures, a useful boy with skills, full of potential. Charlie signed the paper “Johnny Quest.” It wasn’t legally binding, of course, so they gave him another form that he was to sign “Charles Cullen, A.K.A. Johnny Quest.” The nurse looked away while he did this. It was supposed to be a secret. Then they gave him another shot and now he was feeling kinda gone.
An hour later, Johnny Quest’s kidney was tucked into a red Coleman cooler and loaded onto a Lifestar helicopter. They flew north from Trenton, kept Manhattan on their left, banked up Long Island. August 18 was a perfect summer night, and the traffic far below was heavy with Hamptons weekenders filing past the massive Stony Brook medical complex, lit on the dark hillside like Bilbao under construction.
I parked in the C lot. On weekend nights, hospitals are usually busy only after the bars close, and usually only in the emergency room. At 8:00, the main lobby was quiet as a dead department store. A guard read yesterday’s newspaper again, the gift shop was just Mylar balloons in darkness. Surgery is on the fourth floor with the burn unit and radiation. The kidney took the back elevator; I took the front.
In the surgical waiting room the TV is always on, approximating normalcy for the families camped there, the women and their mothers with running mascara, the men clutching Dunkin’ Donuts cups. This TV had the movie Freaky Friday, two people switching bodies and identities and, it being Hollywood—and Disney, at that—coming closer together as a result. But that was just a movie. For transplants, parts are parts. You take what you can get and survive.
And so, while Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan had their first mother-daughter argument about whose life was more difficult, Ernie Peckham lay faceup on a table, anesthetized and encircled by masked strangers in disposable blue clothes. Some traced a curved incision through the fat of his left abdomen; others parted the draped muscles of his belly wall with cool steel clamps. Johnny Quest’s kidney was about the size of a surgeon’s hand, a quivering bean-shape mottled in pinkish fat that nested neatly into the half shell of Ernie’s pelvis. A stump of renal artery, pruned only hours before from its owner’s aortal stalk, was patched into Ernie’s blood supply with 5-0 suture wire, and vein was stitched to vein. And, hours later, as Jamie Lee and Lindsay, back in their bodies again, smiled knowingly at each other across a climactic concert scene, a surgical clamp was removed from an external iliac artery, and Johnny Quest’s kidney swelled pink with oxygenated blood, alive again, and Ernie’s.
Underneath the xenon lamps, this medical miracle didn’t look like much more than cauterized gristle in a blue paper hole. It showed nothing of the millions of tiny tubules stacked inside its medulla, or the branches, as infinite as crystals in frost, which would filter and titrate his blood as a brain filters choices, sorting bad from good as well as humanly possible.
The civil trials followed on the heels of the criminal. The families of his victims, or potential victims, sued the various hospitals at which Charles Cullen had worked. All of the suits against hospitals in New Jersey were settled out of court.1 The files are sealed, as are the settlements. There have never been any criminal proceedings against any administrator at any of the hospitals that employed Charles Cullen.
The New Jersey State Legislature passed two new measures in reaction to the Charles Cullen case. The Patient Safety Act, passed in 2004, increased the responsibility of hospitals to report all “serious preventable adverse events”2 that occur at their health-care facilitates to the Department of Health and Senior Services. The following year this was supplemented by the Enhancement Act, which requires hospitals to report to t
he Division of Consumer Affairs (including the Board of Nursing) certain limited facts about the health-care professionals at their facilities, and to keep records of all complaints and disciplinary actions related to care of their patients for a period of seven years. These measures were adopted by thirty-five other states. A hospital in compliance with the provisions would not be liable for civil actions that might arise from their reportage. There is no penalty or civil liability for hospitals that fail to comply.
All of the hospitals at which Cullen worked were contacted in the course of researching this book. Several did not respond to repeated requests for interview or comment. Several were prevented from doing so due to the civil litigation by the families of victims, would not comment on Charles Cullen’s employment due to Human Resources policy, or stated that they did not want to “comment or be involved.” Somerset Medical Center continues to be one of the top health-care centers in the state of New Jersey. A spokesman stated that “Somerset Medical Center fully cooperated with all interested parties and agencies throughout the course of the Cullen investigation. At this time, we are devoting the full extent of our resources and efforts on delivering the highest quality of care to the members of our community.”
Tim Braun retired after Charles Cullen’s conviction. He now has a private investigation practice specializing in medical murder, and he volunteers as part of a national task force that mobilizes to help local law enforcement catch child murderers.
The murder of Ethel Duryea which had so plagued Tim Braun had partial resolution—in 2010 it was finally leaked that the murder weapon had been traced, years before, to another murder, as Tim Braun had known. But Duryea’s killer has never been named, and her case remains officially unsolved.
The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder Page 28