Criminal Minds (26 page)

One of the most vicious young offenders in U.S. history, Willie Bosket is already in prison, where he will spend the rest of his life. But for Bosket, prison doesn’t necessarily mean an end to violent crime.

Bosket was fifteen when he killed for the first time, on March 19, 1978, but he already had an extensive criminal history. He once attempted to rob a snoozing New York City subway passenger, but the man woke up. Bosket pulled a .22, sold to him by his mother’s boyfriend, and shot the man through the eye and in the temple, killing him instantly. Within days, the boy was robbing again, in and around the transit system, and on March 27 he killed again.

It didn’t take long, given this record, for the police to pick Bosket up. The boy was intelligent but disrespectful and foul-mouthed, even in court. At fifteen, he claimed to have committed more than two thousand crimes, many of them stabbings. His father had gone to prison for robbery and murder, and now it was his turn. He entered a guilty plea and received a sentence of five years in a Division of Youth facility. He would be out by the age of twenty-one.

In response to Bosket’s case, the New York legislature passed the Juvenile Offender Act of 1978, allowing kids as young as thirteen who commit murder to be tried as adults.

Bosket broke out of his facility, and although he was recaptured within hours, he had turned sixteen before his breakout, which made his escape a felony. He was sentenced to four years in a state prison. After his release at twenty-one, he was accused of another robbery, and while in court he was involved in a scuffle that ended with him being convicted of assault, resisting arrest, and contempt of court—another felony count.

In prison again, convinced that he would never be released, Bosket assaulted some guards and set fire to his cell, which resulted in a third felony conviction. Because of the “three strikes” law, Bosket was right: he was in prison for life. Once he realized that, he became even more belligerent and dangerous: he stabbed a guard, clubbed another guard with a lead pipe, continually set fire to his cell, and even mailed a death threat to President Ronald Reagan. By 1989 he had been confined to a special dungeon cell in upstate New York, with a Plexiglas wall behind the bars, so he can’t throw things or strike at the guards. Several video cameras keep him under surveillance at all times.

For his crimes in prison he has earned multiple life sentences, ensuring that he’ll never leave custody. Yet determined to live despite his circumstances, Bosket said, “If they bring back the death penalty, I won’t kill. I’ll just maim. I want to live every day I can just to make them regret what they’ve done to me.”

 

 

THE YOUNG KILLERS
in “Hopeless” (504) are older than Conley, Bustamante, and Bosket when they committed their murders. But the final homicides of the group killers in the episode are set off by the press and police giving credit for the crimes to a flash-mob riot, in which young people of various ages tear apart Washington, D.C.’s, Dupont Circle. Flash-mob riots are still a new thing, and, one hopes, not a growing trend. A flash mob is a group of people who have been summoned by cell phone and social messaging sites to congregate in one place. In most cases (despite the name
mob
), their purpose is peaceful—more participatory performance art than violent chaos. But in some cases, these events turn bad.

A flash-mob riot in Philadelphia on May 30, 2009, caused thousands of dollars of loss to a looted store, damage to businesses and vehicles, assaults on individuals, and criminal charges filed for assault, theft, and rioting. More than a hundred teens and young adults turned out for the flash mob, in which a fifty-three-year-old man, riding his bike home from work, was grabbed, thrown over the hood of a car, and beaten. The victim, who is now on disability, has been having seizures ever since the incident.

At the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, the police were called when a flash mob of about a thousand stormed the university library in April 2009 after having been messaged to attend a party there. The students dispersed after the police emerged from the library and sprayed the crowd with pepper spray.

Young people have always been drawn to violence, and in too many cases they are victimized by it. Some statistics show that the number of young violent offenders is growing even as overall violent crime in the United States is shrinking. This is a trend that everyone should hope will quickly be reversed.

THE PHRASE
“Angels of Death” comes up occasionally on
Criminal Minds
, notably in the episodes “Penelope” (309) and “A Higher Power” (315). Angels of Death murder people who are suffering in some way; the unsub in “A Higher Power” kills people who lost their loved ones in a tragic fire. A similar concept, “Hero Homicide,” arises in “L.D.S.K.” (106) and in “Doubt” (301). Hero Homicide occurs when someone puts people at risk in order to save them and be granted hero status for doing so. It’s a common form of murder for health-care practitioners, for instance, who sometimes endanger patients so that they can be credited with saving their lives; if the patients die anyway, the practitioners can tell themselves that the patients’ pain was so great that they did their victims a favor.

Some of history’s most prolific serial killers fit into these two categories. Angels of Death can be hard to catch, and because their victims are at risk anyway, the deaths are often not recognized as murders. Some, like Dr. Jack Kevorkian—used as an example in the episode “Children of the Dark” (304)—publicize their activities. Kevorkian has made a career and a cause of physician-assisted suicide, claiming that patients have the right to die if they so choose. He says that he’s responsible for helping to end the lives of at least 130 patients. In 1999 he was sentenced to a prison term of ten to twenty-five years for second-degree murder. He was paroled in 2007 for good behavior. Kevorkian continues to draw crowds with his lectures and to make the case for the right to die.

Kevorkian’s patients actually do want to die, and in most cases they carry out the final steps of their procedures themselves, with his coaching and assistance. Most Angels of Death are far less discriminating.

 

 

IN “LIMELIGHT”
(313), FBI agent Jill Morris declares that the unsub she’s after “may be the most prolific serial killer since Charles Cullen.” Cullen’s exact body count is uncertain, like the counts of some other murderers in competition for that particular dishonor, but in any listing of the worst U.S. killers, he’s definitely in the running.

Cullen was born on February 22, 1960, in West Orange, New Jersey. He was the youngest of eight children; his father, Edmond, was fifty-eight years old when Charles came along. Edmond died when Charles was seven months old, and during his youth two of Charles’s siblings also died. His mother perished in an auto accident while he was in high school.

After high school, Cullen enlisted in the navy. An officer once found him at a submarine’s control panel for nuclear missiles, dressed in a green surgical gown, a mask, and gloves that he had taken from a supply cabinet. He was disciplined for the transgression—and he could not have fired the missiles—but he never explained why he was so attired. Cullen was socially awkward and a constant target of ridicule by his shipmates.

In “Children of the Dark,” Hotchner and the team suspect that two unsubs may be working together in a series of brutal home invasions and murders taking place in a Denver suburb.

After the submarine incident, Cullen transferred to a supply ship and was discharged after a suicide attempt. He went back to New Jersey and in 1987 graduated from nursing school, married, and got his first nursing job, at St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, New Jersey. He stayed at that job for four years, a record in a career in which he raced through nine jobs in the next eleven years.

His second nursing job, at Warren Hospital in Philipsburg, New Jersey, put him in the cardiac and intensive care units—where it’s not uncommon for patients to die. Cullen preferred the graveyard shift, when he was largely unsupervised and had alone time with many patients and ready access to potentially dangerous drugs.

He and his wife had two daughters, but she filed for divorce in 1993, claiming that he wouldn’t talk to her or have sex with her and that he beat their Yorkshire terriers and spiked people’s drinks with lighter fluid. He lost custody of the children and moved into a basement apartment. Around this time he began harassing another nurse at the hospital, trying to date her and even give her an engagement ring. Finally he broke into her home while she and her six-year-old son were sleeping, and Cullen was arrested. The day after his arrest, he tried to commit suicide again.

Later that year, Cullen was accused of murder for the first time. It would not be the last.

On August 30, 1993, he gave a ninety-one-year-old breast cancer patient an injection that had not been ordered by her doctor. She complained, but no one at the hospital took action, and she was released. She died the next day. Her son claimed that Cullen had killed her, but the autopsy missed the evidence: although screening for a hundred different toxins, it didn’t include the potentially deadly heart medicine digoxin—one of Cullen’s favorites. A polygraph test was inconclusive, and the prosecutor didn’t pursue the case. The hospital took no disciplinary steps on the murder accusation or the stalking and trespassing charges, and Cullen left his job voluntarily at the end of that year.

Throughout the next decade, he worked at several more hospitals, leaving behind a trail of unexplained deaths. On December 12, 2003, he was finally arrested and charged with one murder and one attempted murder. Cullen not only chose not to contest the charges against him, he also upped the ante by telling the investigators that in sixteen years he had poisoned thirty or forty patients—he had lost count—at ten different hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

The investigators had to study hundreds of cases, and they will never be certain how many people Cullen killed. Various institutions along the way had suspected him, but when he hopped to a new job, no warnings or negative evaluations followed him. Despite his homicides, his attempts at suicide, and his psychiatric hospitalizations, he was always rehired and able to kill again.

Cullen’s initial explanation was that he had killed to end the suffering of his patients. That didn’t meet the smell test, because some victims were recovering just fine without his “help.” He had also put insulin into stored intravenous bags; he didn’t know if that had claimed any victims, but he had no way of knowing what patients would get which bags, so he wasn’t particular about whom he hurt. Finally, he said, “I couldn’t stop myself. I just couldn’t stop.”

The pattern of Cullen’s crimes through the years indicates that he struck when things were going badly in his personal life: when his wife divorced him, when he got into trouble for stalking his fellow nurse, when he filed for bankruptcy in 1998. Powerless against the pressures of life, he sought the power of life and death over others.