claimed that her husband’s state of mind and access to medications in his role as a nurse could put her and her daughters at risk. After each domestic violence complaint that Ms Taub filed, Cullen attempted suicide.
Just over a month after his first attempt in 1993 to die at his own hand, Cullen took the life of a woman who was initially believed to be his first victim, 90-year-old Lucy Mugavero, at the Warren Hospital in Phillipsburg. Mrs Mugavero was killed with an overdose of the heart drug digoxin, which became Cullen’s murder weapon of choice. Digoxin is used to treat the symptoms of congestive heart failure such as shortness of breath and rapid heartbeat. Particular caution is needed when using the drug for elderly patients who often require lower maintenance doses. So for Cullen, the drug provided a quick and easy method of murder in the elderly victims that he killed.
For the Mugavero family, the reason for their loved one’s death only became apparent in 2004. The family had never suspected her death was unnatural until the prosecutor’s office contacted them for a photograph of Lucy Mugavero to show to Cullen.
‘I had closure, but this opens everything back up. It makes it seem as though she died yesterday,’ Philip Mugavero, Lucy’s grandson told the New York Times in 2004.
It turned out that Mrs Mugavero wasn’t actually the first person Cullen killed. The first victim he admitted to murdering (and only Cullen knows how many people he killed) was in 1988. In 2004, as he was facing court in New Jersey for murdering 24 of his former patients and attempting to kill five others, Cullen also confessed to the 1988 murder of retired New Jersey municipal judge John Yengo Sr, 72, with a fatal dose of lidocaine, a local anaesthetic. Mr Yengo had been admitted to the burns unit of Saint Barnabas Medical Center for severe sunburn in the days before his death.
Events escalated for Cullen after he killed Lucy Mugavero. A few weeks after he administered a fatal injection to her, Cullen was arrested for stalking Michelle Tomlinson, a nurse he worked with at Warren Hospital – specifically, for breaking into her home while she and her son slept. The harassment began after Cullen took Ms Tomlinson out to dinner. The New York Daily News reported that as well as breaking into her home, Cullen proposed to her at work and bombarded her with phone calls. Again, Cullen attempted suicide a few days after his arrest. He pleaded guilty to trespass.
The next years of Cullen’s life were marked by more job changes and murders. Everywhere Cullen worked, there was a cloud of suspicion. He left Warren Hospital in December 1993 and it was under suspicion of murder. Cullen had killed 91-year-old Helen Dean, who was recovering from breast cancer surgery, in the September of that year. He administered a lethal dose of digoxin to Mrs Dean as she was about to be discharged from hospital. In fact, Cullen entered her room, asked Mrs Dean’s son Larry to leave and then gave her the injection. Cullen was not even assigned to Mrs Dean’s room and after he left, Mrs Dean and her son complained to other nurses and doctors about the unexpected medication. The next day Mrs Dean died at home from heart failure.
Larry Dean knew his mother’s death was not of natural causes and complained to the county prosecutor’s office. An investigation proceeded and a medical examiner and the prosecutor’s office corroborated Mr Dean’s story about the unprescribed medication and identified Cullen as the offender. This investigation represented the chance to stop Cullen in his murderous tracks, yet the drug digoxin was left off the list of medications that her body was tested for. Cullen and other nurses at the hospital were given lie detector tests. When Cullen was arrested in 2003, Warren Hospital was quick to tell the media and investigators that Cullen had passed the lie detector and that no conclusive evidence had been found to charge him with Mrs Dean’s death. Mrs Dean’s body was exhumed in 2004 to undergo chemical testing as part of the investigations into Cullen’s killings.
Cullen continued to work at the hospital, and the fact that he had been convicted of the harassment of a work colleague and had been suspected of giving a patient unprescribed medication was not even grounds for his dismissal.
Cullen left under his own steam, and in April 1994, started work at Hunterdon Medical Center in New Jersey as an intensive care unit (ICU) nurse. Cullen had again placed himself in an environment where he was caring for the most vulnerable of patients.
His divorce had been finalised the year before and he was able to see his children unsupervised. On the surface, Cullen’s life was improving – he had gained a nursing licence to work in the state of Pennsylvania and he had started dating again.
There were more murders in the years between 1993 and 1998 and several incidents where Cullen could have been stopped. In 1997 he was fired from News Jersey’s Morristown Memorial Hospital for ‘poor performance’ and then in 1998 dismissed from Pennsylvania’s Liberty Nursing and Rehabilitation Center for ‘accidentally’ breaking a patient’s arm. Cullen, whose mental state was fragile at the best of times, was succumbing to the stressors in his life, which included failed relationships and being forced to declare personal bankruptcy.
At the Liberty Nursing and Rehabilitation Center a nurse took the fall for the death of a patient who, of course, Cullen had murdered, this time with a fatal dose of insulin. Cullen worked at the nursing home for around eight months in 1998. Night-shift nurse Kimberley Pepe was assigned to care for the patient Cullen murdered – an 83-year-old man named Francis Henry. Ms Pepe denied to hospital administrators that she had given Mr Henry any insulin but she pointed the finger of suspicion at Cullen, who had been caring for the other patient in the room. Ms Pepe was fired from her position at the facility and later filed a lawsuit against the nursing home, which was settled out of court.
The New York Times reported that the nursing home sacked Cullen following the incident in which a patient’s arm was broken, after Cullen had been seen going into the room of the elderly female with syringes in his hand (she was not injected, but her arm was somehow broken).
Time and time again Cullen was able to find work despite his dubious employment record – and always in high dependency wards such as burns or ICU. At the end of 1998 he took on two jobs – one in ICU at Easton Hospital in Pennsylvania and the other as a night-shift nurse in the burns unit of Lehigh Valley Hospital in New Jersey.
Cullen’s killing spree continued and it was at Lehigh Valley Hospital, in 1999, that he murdered his second-youngest known victim, 22-year-old Matthew Mattern, with digoxin. Mr Mattern had been severely burned in a car accident. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that when Cullen confessed to this murder in 2004, he said it was to ‘end his [Mr Mattern’s] suffering’.
Rumours circulated about Cullen and despite being under the radar of the hospital authorities at several of his workplaces, he would often leave before anything could be discovered about his murders.
St Luke’s Hospital in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, reported Cullen to the state’s nursing board in September 2002 – he had killed at least five patients there over two years – because they were suspicious that he had mishandled medication. Cullen had left the hospital amid growing suspicions of his conduct and the nursing board embarked on an investigation and shared their findings with police. Nurses who spoke to police shared their grave concerns – which were later proven – that Cullen was the cause of patient deaths while he’d worked at St Luke’s and they were upset that the hospital had allowed him to leave and take up employment elsewhere.
The nurses had played detective more convincingly than hospital authorities or the police and had compiled their own notes and theories about Cullen being a killer. Why had he left so abruptly? Why did there seem to be more patient deaths when Cullen was on shift?
Time and time again investigations of Cullen fell short. No links could be established between deaths of patients and the hospitals where he worked. According to the New York Times 2004 feature article ‘Death on the Night Shift’, if Cullen’s nursing history had been scrutinised, they would
