The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder (35 page)

I
t was different from the other police cars Charlie had been in: roomier, more comfortable, and with no divider between the front and back seats. The detectives were all chitchatty during the drive, keeping it loose. They talked about work, sports, even the weather. Tim knew the pizza place near the intersection where Charlie grew up in West Orange, he remembered the mascot of Charlie’s high school team. They drove Cullen across the state line, and showed him, unofficially, the interrogation room of the Somerset County police station. And when Charlie seemed loose enough, they let it rip.

Back in Newark Tim used to have guys handcuffed to an eyebolt on his desk. He’d look up from typing their statement and there’s the guy, asleep in the chair. In for murder, going away for twenty years, snoring away. It took Tim a while to realize that for some guys, the stressful part was getting away with it, day by day. Getting caught was a relief. Getting caught meant at least there was nothing left to worry about, at least for some guys. But not, Tim realized, for guys like Charlie.

I
t was 2 a.m. when Braun’s unmarked Crown Vic pulled back in front of Cullen’s house. They had nothing. Cullen slid out across the backseat and headed silently toward his door. Braun rolled down his window.

“Yo, Charlie,” he said. “Look at me.”

Charlie squinted against the high beams.

“Next time you see me,” Braun said, “you’re wearing handcuffs.”

Then Tim Braun stuck an arm out the window, a fist balled at the end of his leather jacket. He knew it was ridiculous, but there it was, he couldn’t help it. He was so frustrated. His fist out a window was as close as he could get to a threat.

Tim was expecting a smartass answer, a
fuck you
or whatever. That was what Tim would have done, a guy stuck his arm out and said that. Charlie just nodded and turned and walked slowly back to his house. Like it didn’t touch him. He didn’t need to say
fuck you
. He was a free man and they didn’t have enough on him to arrest him. To Tim, that was
fuck you
enough.

55

W
hile Braun, Baldwin, and Capt. Andy Hissim had worked on Charles Cullen in Somerset, another team had approached his home in Bethlehem. SCPO detectives Lou DeMeo, Andrew Lippitt, Edward Percell, and Douglas Brownlie, accompanied by SCPO assistant prosecutor Tim Van Hise, Deputy Chief Norman Cullen, and Lt. Stuart Buckman, had been joined by Detective Delmar Wills, a liaison from the Northampton County District Attorney’s Office. They served a warrant on Charlie’s girlfriend, Catherine Westerfer, at her front door, then spent three hours combing through Cullen’s house and car, searching chiefly for controlled substances Charles Cullen might have stolen from the hospital.

The search had come up with one blister pack of pills, one bottle of CVS allergy medication, and one bottle of ibuprofen. Each was emptied and the capsules and tablets counted, photographed, and bagged for storage in the Northampton DA’s evidence facility. Analysis of these drugs would turn up nothing stronger than cold medicine.
¹

Braun and Baldwin rode the interstate home from Cullen’s house in uncomfortable silence. Danny Baldwin was more than aware that as lead detective on this case, the fallout from what they’d just done would fall on his head first. It was Danny who had gone to Assistant Prosecutor Tim Van Hise, asking the man to trust him as he vouched for probable cause on the search warrant, working with him for hours to get the legal language just so. It had been a risky move, and before Van Hise had headed over with him to the judge’s quarters he’d said, “Baldwin, this is your ass on the line—you sure about this?” Danny had said yes, absolutely. Now he wasn’t so certain. He knew better than to bother trying to talk it through
just yet, not in the car. Frustration radiated from his partner like heat off an animal.

They’d gone at Cullen for six hours, throwing everything they had at him. Charlie had been perfectly willing to go through his personal history. He showed no surprise that the detectives knew about the allegations at Saint Barnabas, Saint Luke’s, and Warren hospitals. Charlie didn’t deny the allegations. He only said he’d never been charged, and the hospitals had cleared him. After that, he didn’t see any reason to say anything else. So the detectives tried to overwhelm him with their knowledge of his secret methods for getting digoxin.

They told him they had his Pyxis records. They had seen his requests and cancels for dig on June 15 and 27. In fact, as Danny had first noticed, Cullen was canceling orders all the time on Pyxis. What did Charlie think about that? Could he explain it? He said he couldn’t. He didn’t have to.

“Maybe I hit the wrong button,” Charlie told them. Then later, he offered, “Maybe I wasn’t wearing my glasses.”

That didn’t make sense, and the detectives told him so. If he’d made a mistake, and hit the wrong button, why didn’t he follow up by hitting the correct one? Charlie didn’t know. They asked him again, and he just shrugged, then stared at the floor. He knew he wasn’t under arrest. He was going to walk. Braun wanted to stop the guy, physically if he could, just put him down before he killed again. But there’s only so much you can push a guy when he knows he can walk away any time he wants.

Finally, their pushing hit a dead end. The detectives kept asking him questions, and Cullen kept repeating the same answer over and over, how he “couldn’t talk about that.” That word,
couldn’t
. It wasn’t a denial, but it wasn’t a confession, either. So the detectives pushed harder.

About six hours of this and Charlie was in tears. The prosecutor had told them finally, shut it down. And now here they were, worse off than when they’d started. On the ride back, that was the first thing Danny actually said out loud. It was blown. And it was picking the guy up without enough evidence for the arrest that had blown it. The guy was spooked now. He knew he was being watched, knew he was being investigated.

“You know the next call we’re gonna get,” Danny said finally.

Tim figured Cullen would have that lawyer by morning and that would be it, game over. They’d rolled the dice on getting a confession. But their chances of ever getting anything out of Cullen now were about zero.

C
harlie waited until Cathy was gone for work before calling Amy. He had so many things to tell her, the week had been exciting, big-time crazy. He could hardly wait to tell her. So when he got Amy’s machine, Charlie told it instead.

“Thursday—a big, big-big-big commotion!” Charlie said breathlessly. “Taken down for questioning, and Cathy was taken, um, was questioned for a couple hours and—for five hours. Big
big
ordeal, um, and, I guess, the whole thing at, ah, Somerset is probably getting a little bit… bigger. Um, but yeah, uh, well, um, Friday’s possible. I didn’t even think I was going to get to go home on Thursday,” Charlie continued, “but, uh, so far nothing new that…
anyway
,” he said. “Uh, I talk too much!”

Charlie hung up before he realized that in his excitement, he’d forgotten to tell Amy the other big news. She’d been right—those new job-search websites really did work. Charlie was going to be a nurse again.

57

E
ven in the middle of the night, Tim answered the phone, a cop habit, the same as doctors or plumbers. That thing about good news always waiting until morning, it was true, but it was the job description. Nobody called doctors and plumbers with good news, either.

Tim tried to get in a few hours of sleep after Amy’s call, but he eventually stopped pretending and found his suit and gun. The office was the place to be right now. He was alone there. He could think.

Tim sat in the dark, counting his certainties. Charlie Cullen was a bad guy. And they’d get him, Tim had to believe that. Sooner or later, they would. But as he’d learned in the Duryea case, later was too late. In Charlie Cullen’s case, it had been too late for a long time.

Tim watched the sun come up through the office windows, watched the first kids climb their new sleds up the courthouse hill. Then he closed his door to make a private call.

Tim dialed 411 in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and connected to the Montgomery Hospital switchboard. They passed him up the line through administration until he landed at the desk of Vice President Barbara Hannon.

Tim was calling as a private citizen, but he introduced himself as Sergeant Braun of Somerset County Homicide anyway, knowing the effect it would have. Tim told Hannon that if she wanted to keep her patients alive, she needed to pull their new nursing hire off that night’s shift schedule. That got the woman’s attention. She promised to do it right away.

Tim couldn’t tell her who Cullen was, or even his background. He couldn’t say that she had hired a serial killer, not in those words; it wasn’t legal. It probably wasn’t even legal for him to be making a call like that in the first place. Tim figured, fine; Cullen could sue him later.

T
he morning meeting was a full boat, everybody grousy and tired from the workload and the new winter weather, then even grousier when the report came in that the suspicious deaths at Somerset were about to hit the papers. Somehow, it had leaked. The DOH, Somerset Medical Center, and the prosecutor’s office had already received calls from reporters. Tim thought maybe those calls were going both ways. Sometimes it felt like the prosecutor’s office had press agents on the payroll.

So, gathering facts under the media radar was finished. Charlie’s name wasn’t out yet, but it was only a matter of time. And once the media got a name, the lights would go on. Everybody would freeze up with a lawyer, and the rest would play out in court. The circumstantial case they were building over nearly two and a half months wasn’t anywhere close to bulletproof, but it was done. The FBI had been right on this one; this case was a bitch to work.

Making any case on circumstantial evidence, you wanted to involve the suspect directly, get him to talk, even ask him to help you understand the case, hoping he’d hang himself in a web of lies. Then later, in jury trial, you display those lies, tearing each one down and destroying all reasonable doubt. That’s how circumstantial cases get built, lie by lie. But if the suspect lawyers up, it’s over. There wasn’t a lawyer alive who would let his client talk in a situation like this. Let alone confess.

Cullen wouldn’t talk to detectives, but maybe he’d still talk to a friend. Tim and Danny talked it out, then they called Amy at home and told her they needed one more thing.

It was a move they hadn’t intended to make for months, but they no longer had a choice. Amy had to get Cullen talking, and quick. And she had to do it face-to-face.

58

T
he mic was just a little pack, like in the movies. The tech helped rig it up, a professional process undermined by Amy making jokes because it had to be placed high, between her breasts. It was the first time the detectives had seen her pacemaker scar.

And that changed the mood. They offered to let her parachute on the whole deal, right now, not wanting her to die from the stress or whatever. Amy assured them it was fine, and, despite her hammering heart, made it believable with practiced calm. The next question was to the tech, asking, Hey, is the pacemaker gonna screw up the mic?