the small interview room in Woodstock, Ontario, Wettlaufer sits barefoot, in a red top and black trousers calmly confessing to her crimes.
‘I did have a sense when my marriage broke up God was going to use me for something…,’ Wettlaufer told the detective. (In 1997 she married Daniel Wettlaufer, a truck driver she’d met at church and the pair separated in 2007.)
‘After a while…some of the murders…whether it was God or the Devil pulling me…’
Susan Horvath, whose father Arpad Horvath was murdered by Wettlaufer told a media pack after the nurse pleaded guilty that she was traumatised by how her father had died and would never forgive the killer nurse.
‘She created all this to get caught…she planned this step by step…she wanted to get caught…’ Ms Horvath said.
‘I mean if anyone wants to destroy their life, this is how you do it…she just pulled the plug on herself…’
Ms Horvath called on changes to happen to nursing homes – better policy, more due diligence on the hiring of staff and improvements in the administration of aged care.
‘I don’t want my dad’s death and everybody’s death to be wasted…we have to make a change.
‘I know one thing, my mom is not stepping into a nursing home.’
Wettlaufer received the automatic sentence for first degree murder under Canadian law – 25 years before eligibility to apply for parole.
The ripple effect of Wettlaufer’s crimes not only affected family and friends of her victims but also the overall psyche of people (and their loved ones) who would spend the last months or years of their lives in aged care.
At the inquiry Dian Shannon, the then head of Telfer Place, Wettlaufer’s last place of employment said; ‘Pretty much everyone wants to die before you move into long-term care, given the option’.
‘We were trying really hard to create that environment where people felt good about moving into long-term care. She stole that away from everybody, that idea that “this can be OK, I’m not betraying my parents, I’m not betraying my loved one”.’
There is a school of thought that Wettlaufer confessed for attention and played on her mental health so she could be sent to a forensic facility rather than prison. Wettlaufer was transferred to Institut Philippe-Pinel de Montreal in Quebec in late 2018.
Canadian-based Podcast Stat released an episode on 7 January 2019 of an interview with mental health nurse “Stacey” a former friend of Wettlaufer who provided a perspective behind the headlines about the serial killer.
Stacey told host Karen Wickiam, a retired Emergency RN, that when she found out about her friend’s shocking crimes on that news she ‘immediately went to the washroom and threw up...’
Stacey lived in the same apartment block in Woodstock and they spent a lot of time together.
‘The Beth (Elizabeth) I knew is the one that loved her parents immensely and looked after my dog when I had to travel for work...but this Beth was also a monster and took a lot of lives.’
Stacey described Wettlaufer as outgoing and extremely friendly and the pair would sometimes share dinner and drinks.
‘I did see a different side of her and was in total disbelief when I found out what she had done and the crimes she committed...’
She also felt Wettlaufer’s transfer to a medium security facility was disrespectful to her victims and their loved ones.
‘I just feel like she’s getting exactly what she’s always wanted, which is the attention she always wanted,’ Stacey said.
‘Now she’s able to do gardening and baking and do all these things that she’s always loved to do…
‘I don’t feel like she’s really paid a price for what she’s done to these families...It makes me wonder now...whether she is a master manipulator...’
Charles Cullen
- Satan’s Son -
Charles Cullen, a nurse in New Jersey USA, had suicidal tendencies from an early age. At just nine years old, Cullen had made his first suicide attempt by drinking a mixture from a home chemistry set. The attempts to end his life would continue for years until he found another way to channel the self-disgust, low self-esteem and depression that had plagued him for most of his life. In fact, Cullen’s mental torment and victim mentality belied a rat cunning that saw him prey on some of the most helpless, sick and trusting patients whose families believed they were safe and would be nursed with care and compassion. Little did they know that their loved ones were in grave danger at the hands of Nurse Cullen, who had a compulsion to kill. Cullen was able to hide away by working graveyard shifts in intensive care units. The unsociable hours and inability for patients to communicate with him meant that Cullen could murder easily. There was no one to watch him and there was effortless access to his weapons of choice – prescription drugs.
Cullen is serving multiple life sentences at Trenton State Prison, New Jersey, for the murders and attempted murders of 29 patients – he also pleaded guilty to seven murders and three attempted murders while he was working in Pennsylvania. After he was arrested in 2003, Cullen told investigators that he estimated he had killed between 30 and 40 patients during his 16-year career at 10 healthcare facilities. These are the crimes that he confessed to but investigators believe there were many, many more victims; possibly hundreds.
Cullen tried desperately to hide his dark desires, to an extent, by trying to squeeze himself into a so-called normal life that he had craved since childhood. Divorced with two daughters, Cullen was living with a nurse who was pregnant with his third child at the time of his arrest. This was his attempt to find the love he craved. He told investigators, during a marathon seven-hour interview, that he believed love could halt the sickness in his mind that made him kill.
But Cullen was always a loner and his life was not a success. Neighbours who knew Cullen as a child and young man, described him as socially inept and strange.
Charles Edmund Cullen was born on 22 February 1960 in West Orange, New Jersey, the last of eight children. His family were working class and strong Catholics. Florence Cullen kept the home, as most women did those days, and Edmond Cullen drove buses to pay the bills and feed his brood. Little did the couple know but their little Charlie would grow up to bring shame and shock to the Garden State.
New Jersey (NJ) is famous for musicians Bon Jovi, Frank Sinatra and Bruce Springsteen, among others, but also has a disturbing crime history. Mass murderer John List annihilated his family – mother, wife and three children – in 1971 in their Westfield, NJ home and then disappeared for 18 years. He was arrested in Virginia, in 1989 after a tip to television show America’s Most Wanted when it revisited the crime and revealed a life-like, age-progressed bust of what List may have looked like.
The state is also home to the first documented lone-gunman killing spree in modern American history. In 1949, Howard Unruh, a 28-year-old war veteran, gunned down random strangers in a street in the town of Camden and killed 13 people, including three children. Unruh died in 2009 at age 88, having spent 60 years in a psychiatric institution.
Tragedy struck the Cullen family when Charles was just seven months old. His father, who was in his late 50s at the time of his
