Criminal Minds (27 page)

Cullen offered hospitals advice on how to protect patients from people like himself, but it was couched in a self-aggrandizing way. The implication was that the hospitals were ultimately responsible for letting him get away with his crimes; the murders weren’t his fault because they could have been prevented.

Forced to appear in court against his wishes, Cullen sat silently and was unapologetic when he received eleven consecutive life sentences in New Jersey. Made to show up for trial a week later in Pennsylvania, he interrupted a sentencing hearing by repeating, “Your honor, you need to step down” over and over. The judge had been quoted in a newspaper saying that he would make Cullen attend the hearing, and apparently Cullen took offense at that.

Cullen continued his chant even after the court officers had gagged him with cloth and duct tape. The families and loved ones of the victims tried to speak, but even muffled, Cullen was audible, disturbing their last chance to have their say. The judge, ignoring Cullen’s complaint as best he could, sentenced Cullen to six more life sentences. He’ll be in prison in New Jersey for the rest of his life.

 

 

COMPARED TO DR . HAROLD SHIPMAN’S
murder score, Charles Cullen’s was amateur.

Harold Frederick Shipman was born in Nottingham, England, on January 14, 1946, and graduated from medical school in 1970. By the time he was arrested in 1998, he had, according to a massive British government investigation called the Shipman Inquiry, killed at least 250 of his patients, and possibly twice that number. On January 31, 2000, despite insisting on his innocence, Shipman was convicted of fifteen murders and sentenced to life imprisonment. That sentence didn’t last long, because he hanged himself in his cell on January 13, 2004, without ever satisfactorily answering the question of why he had killed so many.

 

 

ANGELS OF DEATH
and Homicide Heroes are not always male. During a two-month period in 1982, at a pediatrics clinic in Kerrville, Texas, seven children suffered seizures while under the clinic’s care. The clinic’s director, Dr. Katherine Holland, didn’t find this suspicious, but the clinic staffers knew that something was wrong. Then a one-year-old infant died on the way to the hospital—a child who had not even been very sick to begin with.

In the days after that incident, a licensed vocational nurse named Genene Jones told Dr. Holland that she had found a bottle of a powerful muscle relaxant that had been missing for three weeks. The cap was missing, and the rubber top had been punctured. Later, Holland found that what looked like medicine in the bottle was really saline water—someone had used up the bottle’s real contents. When another bottle was found to be missing, Dr. Holland fired Jones.

Damage had already been done to Dr. Holland’s practice, however, and to her personal life. Her husband wanted a divorce. A Kerr County grand jury held hearings about the suspicious rash of seizures at the clinic.

A separate grand jury convened in San Antonio in February 1983 to study forty-seven suspicious deaths of children at the Bexar County Medical Center Hospital—where Genene Jones had worked before joining the staff at Dr. Holland’s clinic.

Jones liked to feel needed and important. She made judgment calls that were better left to doctors, and she harangued new nurses into turning to her when they had problems. She was fascinated with doctors and saw them as powerful beings. She had a hero complex, wanting to bring children to the brink of death so she could save them.

As her seniority at Bexar had grown, she’d been able to pick her own shifts, so she was able to arrange for most of the critically ill children in the hospital to be under her care. Her odd behavior was noted: Jones once grabbed a dead infant from the arms of a family member and ran down the hospital corridor; on another occasion she used a syringe to squirt fluid on a dead child in the shape of a cross, then repeated the gesture on herself.

The hospital decided to replace its licensed vocational nurses with registered nurses, and Jones resigned, so no further action was taken. It is believed that at the two facilities she killed between eleven and forty-seven children. The staff at Bexar destroyed thousands of documents that were under subpoena by the grand jury, so the full extent of Jones’s crimes is uncertain.

Kerr County charged Jones with one count of murder and brought charges of causing injury to the other seven children there. San Antonio brought a charge of attempted murder. Jones was sentenced to 159 years in prison, but because of a law intended to reduce prison overcrowding, she’ll be automatically paroled in 2017.

 

 

GENENE JONES
is mentioned in “The Uncanny Valley” (512), along with another Angel of Death, Amy Archer-Gilligan. Archer-Gilligan did not directly inspire any episodes of
Criminal Minds
, but she is believed to have been an inspiration for the famous play
Arsenic and Old Lace
. In 1907, Archer-Gilligan, called Sister Amy by her patients, opened a nursing home for the elderly in Connecticut. Her business model was to extract a payment of a thousand dollars, in advance, for lifetime care.

Once she had the money, she made sure that “lifetime” was brief indeed. Between 1911 and 1918, forty-eight people under her care died, including her two husbands, who each died within a year of marrying her. When someone finally got suspicious, some of the bodies were exhumed, and high levels of arsenic were found. She was charged with only six murders and convicted of just one. She got a life sentence, which she served in a mental institution.

 

 

A DOCTOR
is a murder suspect in “L.D.S.K.” (106). He’s arrogant and conceited, and Jason Gideon thinks the BAU is dealing with a Homicide Hero—someone who, like Genene Jones, puts people in danger so he can save them. The doctor, in this case, turns out not to be the killer. But Spencer Reid compares him to a similar type of killer, Richard Angelo, a nurse at Good Samaritan Hospital in West Islip, New York. Angelo had a history of wanting to do good works, as an Eagle Scout and a volunteer firefighter.

At the hospital, Angelo’s plan was to inject elderly patients with muscle-paralyzing drugs that would lead to respiratory failure. Then, when the Code Blue sounded, he would rush to the scene and save the patients.

Angelo’s problem was that he wasn’t very good at the saving part. As a result, the patients kept dying. When one patient caught him making an unknown, unordered injection, he used his call button to summon help before he succumbed. After a search of Angelo’s locker and home revealed stores of the problem drugs, the police arrested him and exhumed the bodies of some possible victims.

Angelo, who was believed to have committed at least twenty-five murders, was convicted on December 14, 1989, of two counts of depraved-indifference murder, one count of second-degree manslaughter, and associated crimes. He was sentenced to sixty-one years to life.

 

 

INDIRECTLY RELATED
to Angels of Death is the problem of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Munchausen syndrome is a disorder in which a person reports imaginary illnesses out of a craving for the care and sympathy with which the ill are treated. Unlike hypochondria, in which a person’s delusion of having an illness is based on an underlying emotional conflict, Munchausen syndrome is characterized by the feigning of an illness out of a pathological desire to undergo diagnostic tests, hospitalization, surgery, and other medical procedures.

Munchausen syndrome by proxy, however, adds a sinister twist: the perpetrator acts as if
someone else
is sick—usually a child, a spouse, or a person under his or her care. The perpetrator’s drive to indirectly “benefit” from medical care lavished upon the victim is so great that cases have been seen in which, for example, a parent actually harms a child (such as by poisoning), falsifies the child’s medical history, or tampers with the child’s medical specimens in order to create a situation that appears to require medical attention.

While most cases of Munchausen syndrome by proxy don’t make headline news, perhaps because of the vulnerable nature of the victims and the intimate relationship they have with their victimizers, a notable exception is the case of Julie J. Gregory. Gregory wrote a book called
Sickened
that details her victimization at the hands of her mother, who fed her books of matches, pills that caused blinding headaches, and more. Gregory spent what seemed like much of her childhood in doctors’ offices and hospitals, and underwent a needless heart catheterization. If not for the resistance of one doctor, Gregory’s mother would have succeeded in forcing Gregory to undergo open-heart surgery.

In the episode “Risky Business” (513), Will Summers is an emergency medical technician (EMT) who poisoned his wife gradually, sending her to the hospital many times before her eventual death. Now he’s persuaded his own son, and other teenagers, to play a dangerous “choking game.” As an EMT, he knows he’ll be sent out on calls and can revive the participants. He has done so many times with his son, but in other cases it has been too late for the victims.