Charlie Cullen, the titular “Good Nurse”, is the most prolific serial killer that New Jersey’s ever produced, and possibly the most prolific serial killer in the history of the United States. Through interviews with police officers, family members, former co-workers and Cullen himself, Charles Graeber puts together the story of this horrifying man.
“Access to the vulnerable allowed him to manifest death without dying. He’d learned to kill himself by proxy.”
Cullen spent 16 years of his nursing career randomly killing patients in a variety of hospitals in New England. He was not a mercy killer — he didn’t focus on terminally ill or suffering patients who might have wanted to move on. Instead, he was just playing with pharmaceuticals by selecting random people, adding drugs to their IVs or giving them injections directly, and seeing what happened as a result. As time went on, he occasionally had to leave a job under less than idea circumstances, but no one ever really prosecuted him. He took this as evidence that his actions were basically being condoned, so he kept going on. He wanted to get caught, and it took a looooong time for it to finally happen.
The first half of the book is basically Cullen’s employment history. Most of it was taken from Cullen himself, who Graeber interviewed for his work. It’s almost painful to read — he was at this hospital, and killed these people in this way. Then he moves here, and kills these people like this. Almost everything, with the exception of a couple interviews with Cullen’s exes, comes from Cullen’s perspective, and you get a really icky view into his mind. When the police finally get involved, we get someone to root for, and the pace picks up considerably.
The Good Nurse is a fascinating read, and also a scary one. Not only because of what Cullen did, but how easily he did it. The hospitals and clinics he worked for often suspected wrongdoing, but were so afraid of lawsuits that they just swept it under the rug — therefore allowing him to continue doing it for years. Had less ambitious, hard-working police officers picked up the case, he might have continued for much longer.
