After his December 2003 arrest, registered nurse Charlie
Cullen was quickly dubbed “the angel of death” by the media. But Cullen was no
mercy killer, nor was he a simple monster. He was a favorite son, husband,
beloved father, best friend, and celebrated caregiver. Implicated in the deaths
of as many as three hundred patients, he was also perhaps the most prolific serial
killer in American history.
Cullen’s murderous career in the world’s most trusted
profession spanned sixteen years and nine hospitals across New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
When, in March of 2006, Charles Cullen was marched from his final sentencing in
an Allentown, Pennsylvania, courthouse into a waiting police van, it seemed
certain that the chilling secrets of his life, career, and capture would
disappear with him. Now, in a riveting piece of investigative journalism nearly
ten years in the making, journalist Charles Graeber presents the whole story
for the first time. Based on hundreds of pages of previously unseen police
records, interviews, wire-tap recordings, and videotapes, as well as exclusive
jailhouse conversations with Cullen himself and the confidential informant who
helped bring him down, The Good Nurse
weaves an urgent, terrifying tale of murder, friendship, and betrayal.
Graeber’s portrait of Cullen depicts a surprisingly
intelligent and complicated young man whose promising career was overwhelmed by
his compulsion to kill, and whose shy demeanor masked a twisted interior life
hidden even to his family and friends. Were it not for the hardboiled,
unrelenting work of two former Newark homicide detectives racing to put
together the pieces of Cullen’s professional past, and a fellow nurse willing
to put everything at risk, including her job and the safety of her children,
there’s no telling how many more lives could have been lost.
In the tradition of In
Cold Blood, The Good Nurse does
more than chronicle Cullen’s deadly career and the breathless efforts to stop
him; it paints an incredibly vivid portrait of madness and offers a penetrating
look inside America’s medical system. Harrowing and irresistibly paced, this
book will make you look at medicine, hospitals, and the people who work in
them, in an entirely different way.
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