Sunday, September 8, 2013
Charles Cullen: A Hire Too Good To Be True
Posted By Leonard Gill on Sun, Sep 8, 2013 at 2:51 PM
Cullen told detectives of 40 "incidents" in a seven-hour statement inside an interrogation room in late 2003. He didn't use the word "kill." And they weren't — mercy killings, if that's what you're thinking. It may even be a mistake to label the official statement Cullen made a "confession." More like a "story" that isn't over yet. Because Charles Cullen cut a deal with prosecutors, who agreed to remove the death penalty if he cooperated in further investigations.
How does a man go from being "a patient advocate … organized, very giving of his time, so much to offer, very bright, witty & intelligent" (as one supervisor called Cullen) to being the probable cause in the mysterious deaths of so many?
Graeber knows his way around a hospital, including its nursing stations. Growing up, he often accompanied his physician father on his rounds, and he's a former medical student himself. He can write of CernerPowerCharts (a mobile computer database nurses use to track patient care) and the pill-dispensing Pyxis machine — key sources for tracking Cullen's hidden nursing activity — without losing the reader in the process. When The Good Nurse turns to the work of New Jersey detectives Danny Baldwin and Tim Braun, the book doesn't bog down in police procedures. And when Amy Loughren, a nurse who befriended Cullen and acted as his confidante, leads to his undoing, this story takes on the ingredients of suspense thriller. But slow down and do not overlook the book's end notes. They contain vital information. And do admire Graeber's insights into one man's madness.
Why did Charles Cullen kill? As Graeber writes:
"His intervention on behalf of his patients was a compulsion that had little to do with the patients themselves; often, in fact, he failed to notice the patients at all, only their outcomes. Each spasm of control offered [Cullen] a period of relief and afterglow."
And:
"Access to the vulnerable allowed [Cullen] to manifest death without dying. He'd learned to kill himself by proxy." •
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