The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder (44 page)

Roney stopped talking and let herself breathe. Slowly, the anger faded. And as it did, she began to cry.

T
hey came for Charlie Cullen in the night, guards with keys and handcuffs. He was going to Saint Francis Medical Center. If they knew why, they wouldn’t say. They gave him the paper gown again, drew his blood, cuffed him to the bed. The television in the corner was always on, local news,
Oprah
. A day passed, and he thought,
Here we go again.
It wasn’t the donation. It was something else.

The guards came again in the morning. They were taking him downstairs, they didn’t say why. He was instructed to only address direct question. He was told that Charles Cullen was not his name. His name was now Johnny Quest. The doctor called him Mr. Quest. The nurses called him John. Cullen thought it was ridiculous. He didn’t know what was happening.

They gave him something to relax him—Valium, he thinks, they wouldn’t say. It made him woozy. They gave him forms to sign. He held the pen, unsure of which name to use. “Use the one you’re supposed to,”
the doctor said. He’d watched the cartoons as a kid, he remembered the handsome blond boy and his adventures, a useful boy with skills, full of potential. Charlie signed the paper “Johnny Quest.” It wasn’t legally binding, of course, so they gave him another form that he was to sign “Charles Cullen, A.K.A. Johnny Quest.” The nurse looked away while he did this. It was supposed to be a secret. Then they gave him another shot and now he was feeling kinda gone.

An hour later, Johnny Quest’s kidney was tucked into a red Coleman cooler and loaded onto a Lifestar helicopter. They flew north from Trenton, kept Manhattan on their left, banked up Long Island. August 18 was a perfect summer night, and the traffic far below was heavy with Hamptons weekenders filing past the massive Stony Brook medical complex, lit on the dark hillside like Bilbao under construction.

I parked in the C lot. On weekend nights, hospitals are usually busy only after the bars close, and usually only in the emergency room. At 8:00, the main lobby was quiet as a dead department store. A guard read yesterday’s newspaper again, the gift shop was just Mylar balloons in darkness. Surgery is on the fourth floor with the burn unit and radiation. The kidney took the back elevator; I took the front.

In the surgical waiting room the TV is always on, approximating normalcy for the families camped there, the women and their mothers with running mascara, the men clutching Dunkin’ Donuts cups. This TV had the movie
Freaky Friday
, two people switching bodies and identities and, it being Hollywood—and Disney, at that—coming closer together as a result. But that was just a movie. For transplants, parts are parts. You take what you can get and survive.

And so, while Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan had their first mother-daughter argument about whose life was more difficult, Ernie Peckham lay faceup on a table, anesthetized and encircled by masked strangers in disposable blue clothes. Some traced a curved incision through the fat of his left abdomen; others parted the draped muscles of his belly wall with cool steel clamps. Johnny Quest’s kidney was about the size of a surgeon’s hand, a quivering bean-shape mottled in pinkish fat that nested neatly into the half shell of Ernie’s pelvis. A stump of renal artery, pruned only hours before from its owner’s aortal stalk, was patched into Ernie’s blood supply with 5-0 suture wire, and vein was stitched to vein. And, hours later, as Jamie Lee and Lindsay, back in their bodies again, smiled knowingly at
each other across a climactic concert scene, a surgical clamp was removed from an external iliac artery, and Johnny Quest’s kidney swelled pink with oxygenated blood, alive again, and Ernie’s.

Underneath the xenon lamps, this medical miracle didn’t look like much more than cauterized gristle in a blue paper hole. It showed nothing of the millions of tiny tubules stacked inside its medulla, or the branches, as infinite as crystals in frost, which would filter and titrate his blood as a brain filters choices, sorting bad from good as well as humanly possible.

T
he civil trials followed on the heels of the criminal. The families of his victims, or potential victims, sued the various hospitals at which Charles Cullen had worked. All of the suits against hospitals in New Jersey were settled out of court.
¹
The files are sealed, as are the settlements. There have never been any criminal proceedings against any administrator at any of the hospitals that employed Charles Cullen.

The New Jersey State Legislature passed two new measures in reaction to the Charles Cullen case. The Patient Safety Act, passed in 2004, increased the responsibility of hospitals to report all “serious preventable adverse events”
²
that occur at their health-care facilitates to the Department of Health and Senior Services. The following year this was supplemented by the Enhancement Act, which requires hospitals to report to the Division of Consumer Affairs (including the Board of Nursing) certain limited facts about the health-care professionals at their facilities, and to keep records of all complaints and disciplinary actions related to care of their patients for a period of seven years. These measures were adopted by thirty-five other states. A hospital in compliance with the provisions would not be liable for civil actions that might arise from their reportage. There is no penalty or civil liability for hospitals that fail to comply.

All of the hospitals at which Cullen worked were contacted in the course of researching this book. Several did not respond to repeated requests for interview or comment. Several were prevented from doing so due to the civil litigation by the families of victims, would not comment on Charles Cullen’s employment due to Human Resources policy, or stated that they did not want to “comment or be involved.” Somerset Medical Center continues to be one of the top health-care centers in the state of New Jersey. A spokesman stated that “Somerset Medical Center fully cooperated with
all interested parties and agencies throughout the course of the Cullen investigation. At this time, we are devoting the full extent of our resources and efforts on delivering the highest quality of care to the members of our community.”

T
im Braun retired after Charles Cullen’s conviction. He now has a private investigation practice specializing in medical murder, and he volunteers as part of a national task force that mobilizes to help local law enforcement catch child murderers.

The murder of Ethel Duryea which had so plagued Tim Braun had partial resolution—in 2010 it was finally leaked that the murder weapon had been traced, years before, to another murder, as Tim Braun had known. But Duryea’s killer has never been named, and her case remains officially unsolved.

Danny Baldwin transferred out of Somerset County and now works as a detective with the Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office. He’s also an adjunct professor of criminal justice.

Both Danny and Tim received numerous commendations and awards for their investigative work on the “Angel of Death” case, as the prosecution of Charles Cullen came to be known. Their distinctions include several official congressional citations and the National Association of Police Organizations’ “Top Cops Award.”

In their acceptance speech, the detectives gave special thanks to the confidential informant identified only as “Agent Amy.”

A
my Loughren quit nursing soon after Charlie’s arrest. She is now married, and works as a hypnotist and past-life regression therapist, a calling directly inspired by her experiences with Charlie.

Her involvement in Cullen’s arrest and conviction was never made public; this book marks the first acknowledgment of her existence as a CI in this case. Even Charlie wasn’t told what Amy had done.

In October 2012, Amy traveled to the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, to see Charlie for the first time since his confession. Amy asked for his forgiveness; Charlie told her it wasn’t her fault.

Amy still has not told Charlie that she was the confidential informant.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to acknowledge the anonymous sources, the families of the victims for allowing me to wade into their grief, and the shocked family of Charles Cullen, particularly Adrianne “Baum” and her daughters. I also need to acknowledge the contribution of Charles Cullen himself for talking to me. He said he didn’t want this book—that he wanted to disappear. Perhaps now he can. My hope for all parties is that the truth will be some consolation.

Special thanks to all those who were assigned the role as lead detectives within each of their respective jurisdictions, and those whose untold stories and diligent investigative work greatly contributed to the overall success of the case, including: Somerset County CID Commander Det./Capt. Nick Magos; Det./Sgt. Russell Colucci; homicide detectives Doug Brownlie, Lou Demeo and Matt Colucci; Somerset County assistant prosecutor Tim Van Hise; and of course Somerset County prosecutor Wayne Forrest; as well as Somerville PD Det. Ed Purcell; Essex Co. homicide detective Tom Kelly and Agent Jack McGarry; Essex Co. assistant prosecutor Howard Zuckerman; Morris County Prosecutor’s Office detective Barry Bittenmaster; Raritan Twp. (Hunterdon County) detective Scott Lessig; Warren County Major Crimes Det./Lt. Richard “Dick” Dalrymple and Det. Stephen Matuszak; Pennsylvania State Police detectives Ron Garza, Robert Egan, Tpr. Bruchak; Lehigh County district attorney Jim Martin; NJ Regional Medical Examiner’s Office doctors Nobby C. Mambo (lead ME) & state toxicologist George Jackson; and Northampton Co. coroner Zachary Lysak. Detective Sergeant and Unit Commander Tim Braun and Lead Detective Daniel Baldwin gave especially generously of their time and honored this book with their honesty and patience, and a vetting and corrections of the manuscript. Amy Park Loughren shed her anonymity
and broke her silence for this book; her time, energy and bravery made every difference. Sustaining support came from Jim and Joan Reichardt, Julian Porta, Saskia Lane, Mike Didovic, Scott Jardine, Jeff and Mina Kauffman, Lisa Santandrea, Richard Ketchum, Nick Gault and Caroline Cole. Steve Byers at National Geographic Adventure schooled this young writer on priorities. Adam Fisher at
New York Magazine
saw a story in the ragged news clipping in my wallet; Diana Mason, PhD, RN, Rudin Professor at the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing and Co-director, Hunter College Center for Health, Media and Policy, offered fierce vigilance for the profession and reached whistleblowers too frightened to speak to anyone else. Mary Jennings, Muse of Madakat, knew that writers need to read too. Maura Egan was the brilliant editor and friend who gave advice, work and her apartment so I could begin this book; her sister, the hilarious writer and producer Kathy Egan, gave me hers so I could continue it; Reverend Kathleen Roney shared her spiritual insight on the humanity of Charlie Cullen behind the headlines; and I owe a debt to Barbara Morgan, and the island of Nantucket, where there’s always work to support a writing habit. The patient judicial clerks of NJ and PA lent many hours, especially particularly Steve and Sal at the Middlesex County Court archive. The work was buoyed by the early encouragement of legendary mystery man Otto Penzler and his anthologizing the original article from which this book grew; the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts provided crucial monastic months for its writing, as did the staff of the New York Writer’s Room, which generously keeps desks cheap and clear twenty-four hours a day and where Donna Brodie traffics in luck and magic. The brilliant editorial insights of the unflappable Ann Patty helped tame madness into structured narrative—she gave more than she had to, and just what I needed. Fine writers and editors including David Evanier, Bliss Broyard, Jill Frayne, Michael Fitzgerald, Owen Matthews, Brad Wieners, Tom Downey, Thomas Coleman, George Hodgeman, Jane Ciabattari, Thomas Pettit, and the talented Douglas Rogers provided advice, comfort, the taunting example of their own work and also sometimes bought drinks, as did the late and legendary sportswriter Trent Frayne, who first warmly welcomed me to “the toy department” and who with his wife, June Callwood, graciously treated this kid as a peer. Bill Abbott and the Allens of Harpswell, Maine, lent desks with an E.B. White view. The painter Karl Franke helped re-engineer inaudible
audio overhears into dialogue, the designer Ahmer Kalam generously lent his valuable design talents, and celebrated surgeon and author Dr. Jamie Koufman generously kept me walking and talking. And it was Robert L. Powley, Esq., of Powley & Gibson P.C., whose assurances of having my back made moving forward possible. The esteemed John T Schulz III, MD, PhD, associate chair, Department of Surgery and Medical Director of the Connecticut Burn Unit, facilitated my weeks shadowing burn nurses under Jacqueline Laird, RN, on the long and often heartbreaking overnight shifts at the Bridgeport Hospital Yale-New Haven Health System. They face the unbearable with uncommon grit, compassion and soul-saving humor and exemplify the greatest of the good nurses everywhere. Personal thanks too to the nurses of Des Moines General, the University of Iowa Medical Center, Manhattan’s Beth Israel Hospital, New York Presbyterian and Weill Cornell Hospitals, the Nantucket Cottage Hospital, the dialysis units of Newington and New Britain General Hospital, and especially the nurses of C5 at the Hospital of Central Connecticut, with whom I spent my sixteenth birthday in traction.