The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder (23 page)

D
anny followed up with a call to the Pennsylvania State Police, nodding at Tim while the state trooper, Robert Egan, tried the name a couple ways. Digoxin had been found in the blood work of a patient who’d died of a suspected overdose at Easton Hospital six years ago. Apparently, this Charles Cullen had been working as a nurse at Easton at the time of the incident, and a couple years later there was an investigation, and the Pennsylvania State Police had pulled his file. That was it. The investigation had long since been abandoned, and the State Police had nothing else on Cullen. Danny was so excited he wanted to run right through the wall. Instead, he just bounced his leg and thanked the trooper, keeping his voice cool until he got off the phone. Digoxin. What were the chances? Braun honestly had no idea what to say. Either this was one of the biggest coincidences in the history of homicide, or somebody was seriously fucking with them. But just who, and for what purpose, he didn’t yet know.

33

D
anny Baldwin’s list had half a dozen places of employment for Charles Cullen, and that number was growing. All were medical centers located in New Jersey and northern Pennsylvania, and some dates overlapped—Danny had tried to work it up chronologically, but the info just wasn’t there.
¹
He and Tim sat in Tim’s office, flipping through what was available, trying to make some order. As far as Danny could tell, Cullen’s career started back in 1987 with Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, New Jersey.

“Saint Barnabas?” Tim said. “You’ve got to be shitting me.” This guy’s first nursing job just so happened to be at the same place Tim Braun had his first security job. Braun laughed it off, another coincidence in this case. “I’ll take this one,” Tim said, and grabbed his coat. Danny didn’t mind. He had a case to run.

The drive from Somerville took him between the hills to a suburban main drag that had outgrown the houses lining it—front doors opened onto traffic, porches piled with dead toys. The money was all up on the hilltops, fake manor houses with yard signs advertising burglar alarms. The Saint Barnabas complex was built upon a rise, halfway between high and low. It was here, just past the old swim club, where Tim used to park for his shift. He didn’t so much remember it as he knew it instinctively. He felt a tingling numbness of recognition as he pulled into the lot. It had been decades since he had been here.

He’d first worked at Saint Barnabas nights and weekends during high school in the late ’70s, commuting from his parent’s home in a ’63 Bel Air he called the Beer Wagon. After graduation he put what he’d saved into a brand new ’78 Mustang, four-speed, midnight blue—a good car, but he beat the shit out of that, too, enjoying the present too much to think about much
else. Tim enrolled that fall semester at Wesley College, and had started on a football career there, even being named Defensive Player of the Week after their game against Penn State, and receiving a personal congratulation from legendary coach Joe Paterno. But Wesley didn’t stick. Tim enrolled in the academy and was wearing a real badge within a year. In between, he had the job at the hospital.

At Saint Barnabas, Tim was entry-level, but the rent-a-cop blues and iron-on badge conveyed instant authority, just like nurses’ scrubs or a doctor’s white coat. Tim was amazed to discover what a guy in a uniform could get away with.

The Saint Barnabas Tim had known was buried beneath nearly half a billion dollars of construction done in the past six years alone, floated on bonds risk-rated AAA, as safe as betting on death and taxes. He pulled the Crown Vic past the smudged guard booth where he had collected parking dollars and marveled at the unfamiliar building.

Units, annexes, and offices had been added. The facility offered both an obesity treatment center and a twenty-four-hour McDonald’s. The trip down memory lane was making Tim feel a little old, and maybe a little dizzy. He stopped to take stock at the new gazebo, a little oompah-pah Disneyworld thing where off-duty nurses could smoke during break. It was the sort of cheerful place you might stop in for coffee if you didn’t know better. And why not? Tim’s son had been born at Saint Barnabas. And at some point beyond retirement, Tim would probably end up here, too, tied to machines, watched by nurses in disposable green uniforms. Everyone ends up here, sooner or later.

The smokestack he remembered was still standing tall but no longer spewed smoke. And he could no longer locate exactly where the helipad had been. At that time Coast Guard divers flew to Saint Barnabas, with the largest hyperbaric chamber in the world and the state’s only burn unit—Tim had felt proud every time, a kid saluting the military airmen. You could hear the Sea King before you saw it, a tractor trailer with wings. Behind the piped-in muzak of the lobby’s built-in ceiling speakers, Tim swore he could still hear those big blades churning, bringing burn victims by the load.

34

T
he idea was to take a look at Charles Cullen’s old personnel files, hope to find something, anything, about the guy. It was a fishing expedition, blind information gathering, but that’s how investigations work. He didn’t figure there was much chance of a hospital spilling its guts to a homicide detective, not when their former employee was the suspect; call up the HR department, and next thing you know you’d be transferred to a lawyer. Anything a hospital didn’t want Tim to see, that was exactly what he was looking for.

Tim had called in a favor, or tried to, looking for a back door. He’d asked a former cop who’d retired to Saint Barnabas security to pull files, whatever the medical center had on Charles Cullen, briefing the guy about the investigation in the process. Cop to cop was usually better than a subpoena, though Tim wasn’t sure if the rule still applied when one of the cops was now making solid six figures for the corporation. The front desk had a manila envelope waiting with his name on it. Tim waited until he was back behind his desk with a coffee to flip through the twenty-two-page file, finding copies of Cullen’s CPR license, W-4, and vaccination records. The rest consisted of fragments of medical charts with names blacked out, and handwritten reports on mimeographed Unusual Occurrence Forms. He read a few, squinting at the handwriting before picking up the stack and walking it down to Danny’s office.

He flopped the file on Danny’s desk. “You see these?”

Danny flipped through. “Huh.”

“Yeah, huh,” Tim said.

Danny got to the last page and started again at the beginning. “Write-ups, looks like.”

“Well, yeah,” Tim said. “Pieces of them, anyway. Who the hell does their filing?”

The file seemed oddly incomplete, fragmentary even—but then, it was something of a surprise that they had any records at all, over a decade later. The takeaway was that something had clearly gone down with Charles Cullen at Saint Barnabas Medical Center. But the file was short on the sort of details that make sense, or a criminal case.

It didn’t look like much, even if they could read the handwriting and decipher the medical shorthand. The paperwork made no mention of the internal investigations
¹
that had framed Cullen’s final year at Saint Barnabas.
²
But within the photocopied scrawl were a half-dozen reports for when Charlie hadn’t properly signed out a drug, withheld prescribed medication, hung an unprescribed IV, repeatedly shut down a critical patient’s respiratory vents or written orders for unprescribed insulin.
³
Though they couldn’t see it, and Saint Barnabas surely hadn’t realized it, Charles Cullen had, in effect, been caught in the act, at the hospital where his killing career had started. But Cullen’s write-ups were not sufficient to be reported as nurse-practice issues to the State Nursing Board or the Department of Health and Senior Services. Cullen had simply been cleaned from their system. A few years later the hospital underwent renovations, and the paperwork for the investigation, the evidence bags with tainted IVs, a couple file drawers’ worth of notes—all that got cleaned out, too. Even the metal filing cabinet was removed. The only indication that a criminal investigation had ever existed was now a rust outline on linoleum.

D
anny Baldwin drove back out to Livingston the next morning. The HR department directed him upstairs to the office of Ms. Algretta Hatcher, the nurse recruiter for Medical Center Health Care Services, the wholly owned staffing agency for Saint Barnabas.
⁴
Hatcher didn’t know Charles Cullen personally, but she could illuminate some of the nursing-practice issues. Several were serious; in a handwritten note dated March 14, 1991, one supervisor wrote about a “deep concern re: Charles’ attitude toward making this dual medication error.” She felt that Cullen was “not at all concerned re: the error, or the welfare of the patient.”

Danny asked Hatcher to define “dual medication error”—did that mean giving a patient twice the amount of a drug as was prescribed?
⁵
Ms. Hatcher
didn’t know, and there was no further mention of it in the file. Danny had a skeleton, but no meat. Ms. Hatcher didn’t know where the rest of the file had gone, but she guessed it had been destroyed. Danny didn’t think Hatcher was lying; the paperwork was fifteen years old. But why save some pieces and not others?

According to the state records, Cullen had moved from Saint Barnabas to a job at Warren Hospital in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. Tim called the Warren HR secretary and left a message. The callback came later that afternoon from a senior Warren administrator. Warren Hospital could not locate Mr. Cullen’s records. Tim promised them a subpoena and slammed the phone. An hour later, a Warren lawyer called back with the information that Charles Cullen’s personnel file had been destroyed. Meanwhile, one office down, Danny was on the phone with Hunterdon Hospital, getting their HR and another dead end. Minutes later, Hunterdon confirmed it by fax.

“Hunterdon says they store the files with an archiving company,” Danny said. “And the archiving company can’t find Cullen’s personnel file.”

“No kidding,” Tim said. He tossed his pen on his desk and leaned back in his chair. “So they destroyed it?”

“They can’t find it, is what they say,” Danny said. “Cullen’s file is just lost.”

“Lost,” Tim said. “I know the feeling. What kind of happy horseshit is this?”

They had one more hospital on their New Jersey list: Morristown Memorial. Tim called, asking for background on a former employee; this time, he didn’t mention anything about a homicide investigation, and Morristown didn’t say they’d lost or destroyed Cullen’s personnel file. He’d take the trip north to pick up the paperwork, then he and Danny would swing over to talk to the Somerset Medical Center lawyers.

S
omerset Medical Center’s internal investigation was being handled by Paul Nittoly, one of the lawyers they’d met at the briefing. Nittoly’s firm had been brought in by the Somerset Medical Center administration on September 19, nearly a month after the insulin incident with Patient 5, Francis Agoada, and nearly a week before Somerset reported that incident to the Department of Health.
⁶
Tim didn’t know Nittoly, except that before
hanging his shingle with the Drinker Biddle and Reath law firm, the guy had been an assistant prosecutor in Essex County. The Newark PO pedigree told him Nittoly was probably smart and a scrapper, familiar with what homicide detectives needed to make a case. Braun and Baldwin hoped the former AP would be his ace in the hole, especially with the background they’d already dug up on Charles Cullen.