Charles Cullen was a nurse who in New Jersey and Pennsylvania murdered more than four hundred of his patients - despite being caught by hospital staff more than one time.
Charles Graber's The Good Nurse begins in 1960 when the aforementioned Charles Cullen was born in New Jersey. When Cullen was born, his father was already nearly sixty years old. And only six months after Cullen's birth, his father tragically died. Because of this, Cullen struggled for much of his life. He was close with his mother, but his sisters and their various boyfriends psychologically and physically tortured him. As a result of this torture, Cullen attempted suicide for the first time at 9.
At 17, Cullen's mother tragically died in a car accident, which sent him into a tailspin. To get some structure and gain a purpose in his life, Cullen joined the Navy. Very quickly, however, Cullen attempted suicide in the Navy and received a medical discharge.
After his stint in the Navy, Cullen joined a nursing school, where he was the only male student there. At the school, Cullen meets a woman called Adrianne Baum, whom he marries. Quickly thereafter, Cullen graduates from school, gets his nursing license, and gets a nursing job. Then, the two have a child, named Shauna. But Adrianne quickly becomes disturbed by Cullen's behavior with their daughter and with the family's dog, who he abused.
At the same time, at the St. Barnabas hospital, hospital officials start to think that Cullen is killing patients (in one instance, by putting insulin in the patient's IV bag). An investigation starts, but Cullen leaves the job before the investigation can gain any traction and gets another job. At his next job, Cullen was not only arrested for breaking into a coworker's house, he was suspected of administering lethal doses of heart medication to female patients. Cullen's wife left him around this time.
Cullen again attempted suicide and was committed to a psychiatric hospital. After his stint in a psychiatric hospital, Cullen got another job at a hospital as a nurse, where he also killed patients. Cullen then jumped between countless hospitals, all while killing patients along the way.
Then at Cullen's final job, he faced a problem: a coworker who used software to track how much of each drug was administered to each patient. And that is how he got caught. One of Cullen's coworkers (who later was instrumental in his collection) referred the matter to the police, but they were slow to act.
Cullen claimed that he killed the patients to ease their suffering, but many of his patients were expected to recover from their injuries and were nowhere near death. The book then covers Cullen's trials and exposes the corruption of the hospital system.
