Charles Cullen Research Paper

Charles Cullen was born on February 22, 1960, in West Orange, New Jersey. He was the youngest of eight siblings. His father worked as a bus driver, and died at age 58 when Cullen was only seven months old. Two of his siblings also died in adulthood. His mother was a stay at home mom who raised the eight children. Charles Cullen described his life as miserable, he attempted suicide at age nine by drinking chemicals he got out of a chemistry set, he attempted suicide a total of twenty times throughout his life. On December 6, 1977, when Cullen was 17 years old his mother died in a car accident, while his sister was behind the wheel. After this accident, Charles Cullen was devastated and decided to drop out of high school and join the Navy. Cullen

was a petty officer third class which operated the ship's Poseidon missiles. Throughout his career in the Navy, Charles Cullen showed many signs of mental instability and even tried to kill himself several times, which lead to his medical discharge from the Navy in March 1984. When Cullen was discharged from the Navy; he attended Mountainside School of Nursing and got a job at St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, New Jersey, in 1987. In the same year Charles Cullen got married to Adrienne Taub, they had two daughters.
Charles Cullen’s first murder occurred on June 11, 1988, at Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, New Jersey.

The patient was 72 years old Judge John W. Yengo Sr. who was suffering from an allergic reaction to a blood-thinning drug. He was then given a lethal overdose of medication by Charles Cullen. Charles Cullen admitted to killing eleven other patients during his job as a nurse at Barnabas Medical Center. He quit his job at Barnabas Medical Center and took a job at Warren Hospital in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, in February 1992, after authorities began to investigate tampering with bags of intravenous fluid in January 1992, many believe that Charles Cullen was responsible for this tampering which lead to more people becoming ill or dying. At this hospital Charles Cullen went on to kill three elderly women by giving them overdoses of digoxin, a heart medication. In March 1993, Charles Cullen pleaded guilty to trespassing and was placed on a year's probation. He was charged with trespassing after one of his co-workers filed a complaint against Cullen for calling her frequently, leaving lots of messages and following her at work and around town. In an interview Charles Cullen stated that he would have quit nursing if he didn’t have to pay child support when his wife divorced him in January 1993. Cullen left Warren Hospital in December 1993 and took a job at Hunter Medical Center in Rarity Township, New Jersey. Charles Cullen worked at the hospital’s intensive care and cardiac care unit for three years, during two of those years Cullen claims he did not kill anyone but there is no proof of this because the hospital records were destroyed before his arrest. He did however, admit to killing five people in the first nine months of 1996 by giving them lethal doses of

digoxin.
In Pennsylvania in 1994 Charles Cullen became a licensed nurse. Cullen found work at Morris Memorial Hospital in Morris, New Jersey, in 1997. He was fired in August 1997 because of poor performance. He went on without a job for six months and stopped making child support payments. In February 1998, Cullen was hired by Liberty Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Allentown, Pennsylvania.