"Over the course of his sixteen years, Charles Cullen had been the subject of dozens of complaints and disciplinary citations, and had endured four police investigations, two lie detector tests, perhaps twenty suicide attempts, and a lock-up, but none had blemished his professional record. He’d jumped from job to job at nine different hospitals and a nursing home, and been 'let go,' 'terminated,' or 'asked to resign' at many of them."
The litany of clues to pointing to Charles Cullen as the most distinctly unfit nurse candidate to ever apply for a job is the kind of thing that one usually finds in a book after that evidence has been discovered. It is perhaps surprising, then, that this quote actually begins the third paragraph of the book. What this decision indicates is that this true-crime book is clearly not intended to be a mystery. Or, if so, it is of the Columbo-type mystery in which the murderer is revealed at the beginning and the mystery lies in how his crimes were solved. It is an effective strategy. By situating this crucial information about the subject so early in the book, the reader who is not that familiar with the story is provided with a shocking context quite likely to stimulate further interest.
"He pulled a 10 cc syringe from his scrubs pocket and injected four ampoules of insulin into the port of Mr. Strickland’s IV, throwing the syringe and ampoules in the sharps bin. Then he signed out and went home. He never saw Mr. Strickland go through his convulsions, but he had the commute to imagine."
What really sets this true-crime book apart from so many others is the description of the crimes themselves. That the murders committed by Charles Cullen took place in the shadowy emptiness of night in half-abandoned facilities is nothing new; most murders do tend to take place in the shadows. Where this tale differs from those of the typical serial killer or gangsters or crimes of passion or most others of the genre is in the actual commission. The quote above is a full description of a man engaged in the act of attempted murder. The very ordinariness of it is chilling enough. Adding to that chill is the horror and dread of recognizing—at some level—the potential of being there. When reading true-life accounts of some of the more lurid crimes to attain infamy, the one element which may is often missing is that ability for a reader to honesty imagine being in that situation.
"On the phone, 1 the FBI agent had explained…that 99 percent of the serialists of the medical-murder type were female. And with women, they said, you tended to get two things. Either I’m going to be the hero or It’s a mercy thing—I really hate to see them suffer. A male medical killer was rare but not unheard of. Their motivations tended to be sexual, or based on power and control. As far as the Quantico profilers could determine, Cullen didn’t fit any of the types."
One of the most predictable things about reading crime fiction and then reading true-crime stories is that real-life FBI profiles are never as useful as the ones in fiction. This quote can be added to a huge pile of similar scenes from true-crime novels involving FBI profiles that point to a fundamental lack of genuine usefulness. At least in comparison to how often they prove to be useful in crime fiction. What is unusual about this scene is that it actually provides insight into why criminal profiling often comes across as something similar to psychic readings. The stated reason given by an actual FBI agent used to working with criminal profiles on the subject of why a profile would have been all but useless in this case is that Charles Cullen failed to match any of the previous known types of medical murderers. Another name for criminal profile is “psychological” profile which strongly suggests that the profile is developed from a behavioral basis related to the suspect in a specific crime. Instead, the FBI agent here is not merely suggesting, but stating outright that these profiles are based upon precedence. In other words, if the previous ninety-nine people convicted of this crime were women, the odds of the FBI identifying Cullen earlier through a criminal profile would have been about zero percent simply because he didn’t conform to what had become a solid brick wall of expectations. And, of course, the pervasiveness of that kind of closed-minded thinking is—to a great extent—precisely why Cullen was able to get away his crimes for so long even in the face of the litany of clues pointing to him being distinctly unfit for hire.
