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Speaker 5: You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking
Speaker 5: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 5: written about them. Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every
Speaker 5: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 5: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
Speaker 5: journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Speaker 7: Good Evening. This episode of True Murder is brought to
Speaker 7: you by Audible, the world's leading name in digital audiobooks.
Speaker 7: If you visit audiblepodcast dot com slash True Murder right now,
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Speaker 7: slash True Murder. After his December two thousand and three arrest,
Speaker 7: registered nurse Charlie Cullen was quickly dubbed the Angel of
Speaker 7: Death by the media. But Cullen was no mercy killer,
Speaker 7: nor was he a simple monster. He was a favorite son, husband,
Speaker 7: beloved father, best friend, and celebrated caregiver, implicated in the
Speaker 7: deaths of as many as three hundred patients, He was
Speaker 7: also perhaps the most prolific serial killer in American history.
Speaker 7: Cullen's murderous career in the world's most trusted profession spanned
Speaker 7: sixteen years and nine hospitals cross New Jersey and Psylvania.
Speaker 7: When in March of two thousand and six, Charles Cullen
Speaker 7: was marched from his final sentencing in an Allentown, Pennsylvania
Speaker 7: courthouse into a waiting police van, it seems certain that
Speaker 7: the chilling secrets of his life, career and capture would
Speaker 7: disappear with him.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 7: In a riveting piece of investigative journalism nearly ten years
Speaker 7: in the making, journalist Charles Graeber presents the whole story
Speaker 7: for the first time, based on hundreds of pages of
Speaker 7: previously unseen police records, interviews, wiretap recordings, and videotapes, as
Speaker 7: well as exclusive jailhouse conversations with Cullen himself and the
Speaker 7: confidential informant who helped bring him down. The Good Nurse
Speaker 7: weaves an urgent, terrifying tale of murder, friendship, and betrayal
Speaker 7: were it not for the hard boiled, unrelenting work of
Speaker 7: two former Newark homicide detectives racing to put together the
Speaker 7: pieces of Cullen's professional past, and a fellow nurse will
Speaker 7: to put everything at risk, including her job and the
Speaker 7: safety of her children, There's no telling how many more
Speaker 7: lives could have been lost. The book that we're featuring
Speaker 7: this evening is The Good Nurse, a true story of medicine,
Speaker 7: madness and murder, with my special guest journalist and author,
Speaker 7: Charles Graber. Welcome to the program, and thank you very
Speaker 7: much for Greenedness interview. Charles Graber.
Speaker 6: Thanks for having me Dan, I really appreciate it.
Speaker 7: Thank you very much. Very interesting story and again, even
Speaker 7: though we've done this for five years, this is a
Speaker 7: completely different take on murder. Definitely. Absolutely. Let's get to
Speaker 7: one of my favorite questions, what specifically brought you to
Speaker 7: this Why? Of all the stories you could have picked, what,
Speaker 7: why would Why were you compelled to write this book,
Speaker 7: The Good Nurse.
Speaker 6: That's a great question and it's kind of a long answer.
Speaker 6: So I'm glad you've got a I'm glad you've got
Speaker 6: a solid block of time for your program. I hope
Speaker 6: hopefully it's uh, it actually doesn't peter out informationally it
Speaker 6: it wasn't my intention to write. I didn't walk into
Speaker 6: this story and the information that led up to the
Speaker 6: story thinking I was writing a book. I I started
Speaker 6: with a newspaper article. Like anybody else, I'm looking through
Speaker 6: the paper, and I've got an eye out for especially
Speaker 6: crime items, obviously and especially freaky ones. And I believe
Speaker 6: the headline, if it didn't say this exactly, it certainly
Speaker 6: it was something like it was a you know, angel
Speaker 6: of death serial killer attempts to donate kidney from jail.
Speaker 6: And I'd never seen that combination of words anywhere obviously before.
Speaker 6: And it was it was a small small piece. It was,
Speaker 6: you know, maybe a two inch column, and uh, it
Speaker 6: was a star about a guy they were calling the
Speaker 6: Angel of Death who was attempting to donate a kidney,
Speaker 6: as I said, from Jalen's being stopped from doing so
Speaker 6: because as as one might imagine, he that didn't fit well.
Speaker 6: It was something he wanted to do, and and him
Speaker 6: doing what he wanted to do from at that point
Speaker 6: jail because he hadn't been sentenced. It really didn't fit
Speaker 6: many people's idea of punishment, So he was being stopped
Speaker 6: from doing that, even though there was somebody that was
Speaker 6: actually going to most probably die without that that guinea.
Speaker 6: So this is a hugely ironic and kind of crazy situation.
Speaker 6: And I just thought it was it was it caught
Speaker 6: my eye and I put it in my in my wallet, uh,
Speaker 6: for whatever reason. And and then I was having a
Speaker 6: lunch with a magazine editor that uh, that I just
Speaker 6: finished a piece with about about something else, and he said,
Speaker 6: isn't there anything else you want to do for us?
Speaker 6: And I really didn't want to do anything else for them,
Speaker 6: but I but he said, isn't there anything you're keeping
Speaker 6: you up nights? Sort of? And I said, well, I've
Speaker 6: got this thing. And I pulled out my wallet and
Speaker 6: I had this, you know, this, this one cutout, cut
Speaker 6: out piece and the thing about it. At that point,
Speaker 6: Charlie Colin had been arrested. He was arrested in December
Speaker 6: on December twelfth, two thousand and three, when he was
Speaker 6: leaving a restaurant in New Jersey and a. At that point,
Speaker 6: it was accused of of one one murder and one
Speaker 6: attempted murder. He'd already been fired from his last nursing position.
Speaker 6: And he at that point had he really refused to speak.
Speaker 6: And then eventually he did speak, and and it turns
Speaker 6: out that what they were, you know, what they were
Speaker 6: accusing him of was really on the tip of the iceberg.
Speaker 6: But and he sang a song that included some forty
Speaker 6: people would know that to be probably wrong by factor
Speaker 6: of ten at this point. But but what what we'd
Speaker 6: heard as of a of a story Charlie Collen was
Speaker 6: was about a maybe maybe a mercy killer. The only
Speaker 6: a guy who wasn't going to say anything else. He'd
Speaker 6: spoken to the cops. Once he spoken to the detectives,
Speaker 6: he wasn't going to address anyone else. He never addressed
Speaker 6: the press, he never addressed the families of the victims.
Speaker 6: He wouldn't speak in court except to say, uh, you know, yes, yes,
Speaker 6: your honor and he and he planned to go away
Speaker 6: like that.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 6: And so there was no way he was ever going
Speaker 6: to speak to me. But I gave it a shot,
Speaker 6: and he he responded to my letter, mostly because I
Speaker 6: I think I I I told him it was you know,
Speaker 6: it was it was sort of up to him whether
Speaker 6: or not he wanted h He was willing to put
Speaker 6: a little bit of himself on the line in order
Speaker 6: to donate that kidney, because I thought actually donating the
Speaker 6: kidney was was a good thing. And I told him,
Speaker 6: you know, there's stuff he did good and bad, and
Speaker 6: and I'm I'm just I'm just here to try and
Speaker 6: talk about, you know, what happened, not to judge you.
Speaker 6: I'm not your you know, your your ethical accountant. So
Speaker 6: just you know, if you want to talk to me,
Speaker 6: you'll talk to me, and you'll get maybe get that
Speaker 6: thing done. And if you don't, you know, good luck
Speaker 6: to you. And he got back. And once I started
Speaker 6: talking to him, I started meeting with him, and you know,
Speaker 6: his own his lawyer couldn't believe that he was talking
Speaker 6: to me because he wasn't talking to anybody. And I
Speaker 6: started meeting with him in in the Somerville Jail in
Speaker 6: Somerset County in New Jersey, where it's being held. And
Speaker 6: once I started speaking with with him, I was also
Speaker 6: speaking with his priest and his lawyer and and and
Speaker 6: in those conversations a very different picture emerged. It was
Speaker 6: very different from this angel of death, angel of mercy
Speaker 6: kind of character. It's very different from a picture of
Speaker 6: a of a guy who had operated for sixteen years
Speaker 6: different hospitals and nursing home without being detected at all,
Speaker 6: and then suddenly the system that was designed to catch
Speaker 6: him caught him, you know, and justice was served in
Speaker 6: a monstrous put away. What I discovered was something much
Speaker 6: more complicated, christ I discovered that the the serial killer himself,
Speaker 6: Charlie Cohen, was more charming than you might think, but
Speaker 6: not charming in a bundane sense, just sort of someone
Speaker 6: that he didn't automatically dismiss, you know. He actually had
Speaker 6: a lot of complexity. He was a smart guy, and
Speaker 6: he wasn't smug, He didn't come off that way. And
Speaker 6: I also learned that, as you know from from reading
Speaker 6: the book, that the big surprise wasn't you know? The
Speaker 6: question I get asked all the time is you know,
Speaker 6: why why wasn't you know? Why wasn't Charlie Cohen caught sooner?
Speaker 6: And the shocking answer turned out to be he was
Speaker 6: over and over again, and somehow we kept on getting
Speaker 6: let go passed on what you know, however you might
Speaker 6: want to put it, And he had a remarkable perspective
Speaker 6: on that he found it. I guess you'd say funny.
Speaker 6: And when I realized that, I realized, there there's a
Speaker 6: story here that needs telling. And it was a complicated story.
Speaker 6: It involved drug drug names and and the you know,
Speaker 6: the chemistry of the human body, and and a lot
Speaker 6: of psychology and and some character. There are no explosions,
Speaker 6: there are no knives, there's no blood, not in that sense,
Speaker 6: and yet it's the most grizzly story I could imagine.
Speaker 6: It was going to take some subtle telling. Luckily, you know,
Speaker 6: happily I got the you know, once I was talking
Speaker 6: to to Colin, and I was the one guy, uh
Speaker 6: that could maybe carry that weight. Even though I had
Speaker 6: to keep it secret for a long time, it became
Speaker 6: known to other people, including the detectives who caught him
Speaker 6: and some confidential informants, and gradually people came out of
Speaker 6: the woodwork. But the more people that came out, the
Speaker 6: more comp okay it got, which is why ultimately this
Speaker 6: story took. It took eight years to tell it, to
Speaker 6: tell it fully. So that's how that's how that whole
Speaker 6: thing got. But if i'd known, I mean, I'm really
Speaker 6: glad to have been able to tell the story and
Speaker 6: be able to write it out like I like I did,
Speaker 6: and I've been pleased with the reaction to it, and
Speaker 6: it was good to get it out of my system,
Speaker 6: if you will, and get into the world. But I
Speaker 6: never would have guessed in that moment when that first
Speaker 6: letter came sliding underneath my door with it. I've spent
Speaker 6: eight years later, they'll be a you know, neck deep
Speaker 6: in it. If not deeper.
Speaker 7: Sure, let's go back to Charles Cullen, because you've got
Speaker 7: the audience. Certainly the interest has been piqued in terms
Speaker 7: of what has happened, and but we are just going
Speaker 7: to touch on how on earth this could have happened
Speaker 7: for sixteen years and how a character like Charles Cullen
Speaker 7: almost got away for channel's how many more years and
Speaker 7: how many deaths and and will and you go into
Speaker 7: great detail. You really do capture the the detail of
Speaker 7: some of these horrible deaths. So we're not talking about
Speaker 7: an angel of mercy, an angel of death, stort of
Speaker 7: sounds like that, like some benevolence somewhere involved here, and
Speaker 7: we're talking about ill people. But we're not talking about
Speaker 7: that at all. So let's go back to again. A
Speaker 7: lot of people want to know how on earth some
Speaker 7: of these people are shaped and what could have contributed,
Speaker 7: not really to blame, but contributed to how they end
Speaker 7: up and in these particular situations. So tell us about
Speaker 7: the background of Charles Cullen, where he grew up and
Speaker 7: uh and how he got to be a nurse. And
Speaker 7: we're talking about quite a few years ago where a
Speaker 7: male nurse was not something very common.
Speaker 6: Was it. So tell us, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're you're
Speaker 6: absolutely right his you know it's I'm I'm I'm a fan.
Speaker 6: I'm a fan of the form. I'm a fan of
Speaker 6: the genre. I'm a fan of uh uh, of of
Speaker 6: of serial killer stories of all stripes. But this is
Speaker 6: the first serial killer and I've actually known personally the
Speaker 6: first one I worked with, and I mean luckily as
Speaker 6: I put in some time with it. But some of it,
Speaker 6: some of it fit the mold, and a lot of
Speaker 6: it broke it for me in that you know, I'll
Speaker 6: just I'll describe the background. I'll describe how it all
Speaker 6: came to be. And you can see in the book
Speaker 6: as you read it, you can sort of understand see
Speaker 6: the pieces lining up. You can you can understand the
Speaker 6: pathology come together, you can see patterns forming in the
Speaker 6: guy's head and how they and they start to perhaps
Speaker 6: manifest in his crimes and his murders. But but it's
Speaker 6: not a completan equation. It's not like this plus this
Speaker 6: plus this equals automatically a silk serial killers. It's a
Speaker 6: there's there's there's a real, a real mystery to it.
Speaker 6: So I'll just describe, I describe what we know. Uh,
Speaker 6: you know. Charlie Combs born in East Orange, New Jersey.
Speaker 6: He was born in nineteen sixty. He was a late
Speaker 6: life baby for his parents, who was I guess you
Speaker 6: call him a mistake. Really, They hadn't plan on having
Speaker 6: a kid. Everyone else was older by decades. He had
Speaker 6: the other nine children, it was you know, they were
Speaker 6: a family that worked and got by. Except his father
Speaker 6: died when he was just a few months old, and
Speaker 6: so that became harder and harder. Some of those older
Speaker 6: kids were into some rough stuff, and they were, it seems,
Speaker 6: dealing out of the house, drugs, out of the house,
Speaker 6: bringing people around. And that was an old wooden house
Speaker 6: that I think was filled with a lot of hurt
Speaker 6: and a lot of strangeness For Charlie, Coleen, that's a hard,
Speaker 6: hard thing for him to talk about. Our interviews were
Speaker 6: anything but a confessional. I got what I could get,
Speaker 6: and I had to investigate the rest. And he shuts
Speaker 6: down on certain stuff. And this is the part where
Speaker 6: absolutely it's it's as dark going through his memories as
Speaker 6: it would through an unlit through story house. So there
Speaker 6: are some dark quarters in there that even he can't
Speaker 6: walk into anymore. But when his mother died in a
Speaker 6: car accident when he was seventeen years old, it was
Speaker 6: in nineteen seventy seven, it was he learned about it.
Speaker 6: He used to play sick, pleased to call in sick
Speaker 6: to school quite a bit, and he was very very
Speaker 6: much attached to his mother, and he enjoyed that time
Speaker 6: that he got to spend with her, especially, and she
Speaker 6: protected him from the chaos of those rooms upstairs and
Speaker 6: the older boys and the people that came around to
Speaker 6: see the older daughters and took them away sometimes and
Speaker 6: then brought them back the black eyes. And he depended
Speaker 6: on his mother in that way and enjoyed being sick,
Speaker 6: I suppose in that way. And one of his sisters
Speaker 6: took his mom out to get some Marin's done and
Speaker 6: uh and never came back. And the police came around
Speaker 6: to tell him that there had been an accident. They
Speaker 6: didn't tell him that his sister hadn't taken her medication
Speaker 6: and had an appleptic seizure at the wheel. And they
Speaker 6: didn't tell until Charlie that his mother was dead. And
Speaker 6: he went to that hospital and discovered that not only
Speaker 6: was his mother dead, but they told him is her
Speaker 6: body was gone. He never saw her again, and he
Speaker 6: was very bitter about that. That's something he cannot speak
Speaker 6: about at all, and he he he held that forever.
Speaker 6: Now just to you know, I'm going to break the
Speaker 6: chronology here, but a fascinating thing for me. I you know,
Speaker 6: I spoke to Charlie Collen dozens of times and in
Speaker 6: jail during his sentencing and and later when he was
Speaker 6: in a maximum security walk up and Trent as a
Speaker 6: non com you know, and with the guys that are
Speaker 6: going to get killed by by everybody else if they
Speaker 6: if they come out of their cell. And he wouldn't
Speaker 6: ever speak about this part of part of things. But
Speaker 6: but one thing that did come out during our discussions
Speaker 6: was a different version of the events I'm about about
Speaker 6: to tell you at all. And and and so I
Speaker 6: just want to highlight that as we as we go
Speaker 6: through because when when his mother, when his mother died,
Speaker 6: he was it was one of the first times he
Speaker 6: attempted suicide. It was actually the second first being when
Speaker 6: he was eight years old, at least what he said.
Speaker 6: So when he he he dragged the contents of a
Speaker 6: of a chemistry set that he'd gotten for Christmas. It
Speaker 6: was part of the you know, the church charity box
Speaker 6: because the columns at that point were getting by on
Speaker 6: on a lot of the kinds of strangers and fellow
Speaker 6: church members. Uh. After his father died, and but that
Speaker 6: was self reported, so it's impossible to say for sure.
Speaker 6: But he but SUSI didn't work. But instead he chose
Speaker 6: the Navy. And I think that the Navy appeared to
Speaker 6: him at first but was really a bad fit. He
Speaker 6: was a smart guy. He got along very well in school,
Speaker 6: but and and applied and and trying to be a
Speaker 6: missile technician. But once he got into the subs themselves,
Speaker 6: it was like the locker room for hell from hell,
Speaker 6: you know. He uh, he was just trapped in with
Speaker 6: a bunch of guys. He's a guy that really liked
Speaker 6: hanging out with his sisters and being protected by women,
Speaker 6: and here he was with exactly the opposite. And he,
Speaker 6: you know, he didn't want to pee in front of
Speaker 6: other guys. He didn't want to be It was just
Speaker 6: it was a situation that that that didn't didn't work
Speaker 6: for him at all, And and he developed a drinking
Speaker 6: habit at that point. He demonstrated a clear issue with
Speaker 6: authority at that point, and he tried to get himself
Speaker 6: out of that thing, a situation repeatedly by different types
Speaker 6: of suicide, idiations and and and the like. He finally
Speaker 6: got out. Now here's the here's the part where the
Speaker 6: story is diverge. You know, this is a this is
Speaker 6: a true story, so and it's a I needed this
Speaker 6: this you know, I wanted to tell it like a thriller.
Speaker 6: I wanted to I wanted to be able to rip
Speaker 6: through it and understand the details and really feel them
Speaker 6: and smell them, use every tool that uh that a
Speaker 6: novelist gets to use and h but I wanted to
Speaker 6: be rooted absolutely in the greatest journalism that we that
Speaker 6: we you know, just irrefutable as truth is as I
Speaker 6: was able to access. So I had to be very
Speaker 6: careful because there's some things that you know, you'd like
Speaker 6: to paint in these stories and and you and you
Speaker 6: can't because you can't really confirm them properly. So and
Speaker 6: I solved that partially by sometimes explaining what Charlie said
Speaker 6: and what Charlie thought, because I knew what he thought,
Speaker 6: because he you know, it came it come from him.
Speaker 6: And then I had to make a little differentiation between
Speaker 6: what I knew the absolute truth to be. Charlie Colin
Speaker 6: told me how he got into nursing, and he told
Speaker 6: me it was because during these times of trouble in
Speaker 6: the submarine, when he really didn't have another friend, he
Speaker 6: spent a lot of time in two places in the
Speaker 6: in the sick bay where he liked to help out,
Speaker 6: giving injections and being useful and and uh and seen
Speaker 6: as valuable. And also with the chaplain. Uh, you know,
Speaker 6: he was a He spent a lot of time with
Speaker 6: the Catholic Catholic chaplain there. He he had a Catholic background,
Speaker 6: and the chaplain told him, you know that he thought
Speaker 6: he would do well in it, maybe taking some some
Speaker 6: courses on I didn't properly a real well.
Speaker 7: We seem to have an interruption here apparently he has
Speaker 7: contacted this via Skype. I'm not sure if that's exactly
Speaker 7: what's going on, but we wait for his reconnection. We're
Speaker 7: talking with Charles Graber, author of The Good Nurse. We'll
Speaker 7: have this break. I can talk about Audible right now.
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Speaker 7: true Murder. Here we will reconnect with Charles Graber. Good evening, Good.
Speaker 6: Evening, So sorry to have lost you. I told you
Speaker 6: I was going to have some technical difficulty here. I
Speaker 6: apologize for that.
Speaker 7: Ah, no problem, we understand it's weather related.
Speaker 6: It's actually Chris crazy here. Yeah. So so just picking
Speaker 6: picking up where where we're at, if I should, I
Speaker 6: just jump right.
Speaker 7: In sure where you last left off talking about Charles
Speaker 7: and uh and his again new affinity for for medicine.
Speaker 7: And so we're at that point where he's gotten some
Speaker 7: advice from this chaplain and tell us exactly.
Speaker 6: The chaplain at this point is telling him, look, you know,
Speaker 6: I've seen you. I've seen that you're very useful and
Speaker 6: in the medical war that you actually enjoyed. Why don't you?
Speaker 6: Why don't you? And this is Charlie telling me all.
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Speaker 6: Why don't you send away for some some correspondence courses?
Speaker 6: And Charlie did. He did very well with them, He
Speaker 6: enjoyed them, and so he sent away for some more.
Speaker 6: And this is this is where the stories differ. And
Speaker 6: when I heard this story, it was it was remarkable
Speaker 6: to me, and it taught me so much. I had
Speaker 6: a hard time putting in the book except in the
Speaker 6: in the end notes, because I wanted to be very
Speaker 6: careful of of of reflecting the verifiable truth. What Charlie
Speaker 6: told me was that he when he got out of
Speaker 6: the Navy, when it was finally when I was finally
Speaker 6: discharged from the Navy, he discovered that that last correspondence
Speaker 6: course that he'd sent away for turns out it wasn't
Speaker 6: actually another course, it was an application and he'd been
Speaker 6: accepted to nursing school. And this was you know, this
Speaker 6: was a sign from God. This was just this is
Speaker 6: fate showing him the path forward. And in a way
Speaker 6: it's a it's very similar to a lot of his thinking,
Speaker 6: which is to say it wasn't it's it's ultimately not
Speaker 6: his responsibility that he did what he did, That he
Speaker 6: that he was involved with what he was involved with,
Speaker 6: you know, a priest and and happenstance, and that what
Speaker 6: might might equal fine providence actually put him on the
Speaker 6: path to frankly becoming a serial killer. Interestingly enough, what
Speaker 6: he didn't tell me, which conflicts with this somewhat, is
Speaker 6: that those I discovered that that that that hospital that
Speaker 6: I had spoken about earlier, where they'd taken his mother
Speaker 6: away and where he'd never seen her again, and where
Speaker 6: he decided you could never trust hospitals again, and that
Speaker 6: he had developed a certain attitude towards uh, you know
Speaker 6: what part of the world owed him one that hospital
Speaker 6: was exactly where he went to nursing school. That was Mountainside,
Speaker 6: and and that wasn't coincidence, that wasn't providence, and that
Speaker 6: wasn't a place that actually had even had a correspondence
Speaker 6: course at that point. So so so that was I
Speaker 6: thought a remarkable thing that Charlie Cohen went to the
Speaker 6: place where his mother's body disappeared, a place where he
Speaker 6: held hospitals responsible for taking away the thing that was
Speaker 6: protecting him from the world and that he held most dear.
Speaker 6: And that's where he trained to be actually rather good
Speaker 6: nurse and ultimately a really proficient serial killer. But at
Speaker 6: that point, as you say, there weren't many male nurses.
Speaker 6: He was, as a result, a natural choice to be
Speaker 6: the president of his class, and was the president of
Speaker 6: his class, much celebrated, and he loved the attention that
Speaker 6: they gave him. It was a that was a highlight
Speaker 6: moment for him. He worked his way through a nursing
Speaker 6: school with a series of odd jobs, you know, at
Speaker 6: sort of quickie marts and cow doors and Roy Rogers
Speaker 6: and and the like. Met a met a young woman
Speaker 6: and they married and put sent down some money on
Speaker 6: a house, and he got an offer for a position
Speaker 6: in the Saint Barnabas Burn Service in in Doingston, New Jersey,
Speaker 6: and uh with a good hourly rate. And he graduated
Speaker 6: and they cut their hontingmoon short to make sure that
Speaker 6: they could they could start start on time on Saint
Speaker 6: Barnabas Day. And it's looked like they had a wife together,
Speaker 6: and certainly his wife seemed happy, but he started killing
Speaker 6: people almost right away.
Speaker 7: Now, how is it? You really go into great detail,
Speaker 7: and it is very very necessary that you explain the culture,
Speaker 7: the hospital culture, and which also includes the administration, because
Speaker 7: we go into how they get their wagons in a
Speaker 7: circle at some point, and so there's all these divergent
Speaker 7: interest we'll say, But tell us about the hospital itself
Speaker 7: and his role as a nurse and administering drugs, and
Speaker 7: tell us about again, start off with some of the
Speaker 7: terminology again, coding and code, and tell us how Charles
Speaker 7: or any nurse has access to the drugs and how
Speaker 7: that all works.
Speaker 6: Absolutely, so Charlie starts calling, I'm sorry, using my own
Speaker 6: my own name. Sometimes Charlie Cullen and Charlie Graber get
Speaker 6: mixed up, not just in the process of eight years
Speaker 6: of writing about him, but also in the telling. That's
Speaker 6: Charlie Cullen started in nineteen eighty seven Saint Barnabas Medical Center.
Speaker 6: His first his first job there was in the burn service,
Speaker 6: which is a really particularly gruesome job. But over the
Speaker 6: course of the next sixteen years he worked all manner
Speaker 6: of shift and all manner of words. He had all
Speaker 6: sorts of all the right qualifications to work pretty much anywhere,
Speaker 6: and he was in fact of valued veteran experienced nurse
Speaker 6: that you know, that earned good money and could in
Speaker 6: theory do good work. His job differed from really from
Speaker 6: ward to ward, whether it was the intensive carry unit
Speaker 6: or the or the burn unit or any or the
Speaker 6: carniac carr unit or any of the others. But to
Speaker 6: describe it in the most general terms, there there were
Speaker 6: certain rituals of care that need to be given run
Speaker 6: from the beginning of shift and then through throughout in
Speaker 6: terms of uh, you know, checking on a patient, checking charts,
Speaker 6: bathing them and the like. There's a schedule of drugs
Speaker 6: that they're supposed to receive UH, and there's a whole
Speaker 6: ritual around that. And then there's sort of your worst
Speaker 6: case scenario, which happens with greater frequency. Greater frequency on
Speaker 6: the wars where people are the most fragile UH burn units,
Speaker 6: there's particularly fragile CCU units. UH somewhat, I see you
Speaker 6: intensive care by just by virtue of the name, you
Speaker 6: know it's it isn't intent and that is the code
Speaker 6: if you're ever in a hospital, and I hope you
Speaker 6: know in fact, and we all are. Most of us
Speaker 6: are born there, many of us will probably die there,
Speaker 6: and we have a lot of moments there in between.
Speaker 6: It's a really important, important places watershed moment. Places they
Speaker 6: have announcements over the last speak of the here, and
Speaker 6: they rarely say, everyone quickly runs a room two thirteen,
Speaker 6: there's something terrible happening. What you hear instead is something
Speaker 6: a lot more calm, something like you know, you know,
Speaker 6: doctor quick, doctor quick, please report to room two thirteen.
Speaker 6: Or a doctor blue or these are various codes, and
Speaker 6: code bluis essentially means that a patient is has arrested
Speaker 6: and measures need to be taken to bring that patient
Speaker 6: and the heart stopped, the life process has stopped, and
Speaker 6: measures need to be taken fairly quick uh to bring
Speaker 6: that patient back. Now, people that really enjoy those codes,
Speaker 6: and those codes are these codes are many things. But uh,
Speaker 6: and you know, and and and in working in this book,
Speaker 6: I hope you'll excuse what may come across as as
Speaker 6: a gallows sensibility. But one of the things that they
Speaker 6: can be is if you're working there is exciting. Doesn't
Speaker 6: mean it's good. It's like the way a fire is
Speaker 6: exciting to a firefighter, right, It's kind of what you're
Speaker 6: there for. It's the moment of action. And people that
Speaker 6: seem to live too much for that excitement, they sometimes
Speaker 6: call them code freaks. The nurses that worked with him
Speaker 6: didn't consider Charlie to be quote a code freak, but
Speaker 6: at the same time he was particularly good at the codes.
Speaker 6: He would go in with a what's called a crash cart,
Speaker 6: which was the card of all the of all sorts
Speaker 6: of medications that might be used to stimulate the heart
Speaker 6: or or you know, razor or blood pressure or the
Speaker 6: way kepnifferent nor perdifferent and things of this nature, and
Speaker 6: so that they were in ready access and he seemed
Speaker 6: to know even before the residents did or anyone else
Speaker 6: that was responding with these codes what the patient might
Speaker 6: need uh in order to be quickly brought back. In
Speaker 6: many cases, now it was in most cases because he
Speaker 6: himself had brought about that code. So Charlie Cullen, who
Speaker 6: worked through poisons, he killed people by delivering overdoses of
Speaker 6: of therapeutic drugs that are usually used therapeutically, like did
Speaker 6: j oxon or dig right, which is a heart medication
Speaker 6: that usually regulates blood pressure. He would take these these
Speaker 6: drugs and use them in excess, sometimes for that weren't
Speaker 6: prescribed them at all, or excess for people that were
Speaker 6: prescribed them, and sometimes in concert with other drugs as
Speaker 6: a sort of cocktail or sort of symphony, so that
Speaker 6: the whole range of effects would be going on through
Speaker 6: the body. Would be very difficult for someone else to decode.
Speaker 6: But as Charlie Collen came in the room and responded
Speaker 6: vigorously to this code, he could in that moment well
Speaker 6: perhaps revive the patient, but also seemed very smart indeed,
Speaker 6: but that wasn't his only m was he went, you know,
Speaker 6: I mean those are the patients he saved. We have
Speaker 6: a record of many more he didn't, but that was
Speaker 6: his basic story of how he what he did with
Speaker 6: some of the patients. Now, those are people he also
Speaker 6: wanted to see and wanted to be involved with. There's
Speaker 6: another range of people that for whom he acted. He
Speaker 6: delivered a dose of medication and then left his shift
Speaker 6: and left someone else essentially to take responsibility for it.
Speaker 6: It was the way of covering his tracks. There's a
Speaker 6: whole other group. And this really dispels, as you said,
Speaker 6: any any sensibility that this that Charlie Colin was a
Speaker 6: mercy killer, whatever one might think of what mercy killer means,
Speaker 6: and any merit to that. That's really the first thing
Speaker 6: I always hear about this, Oh that guy who's a
Speaker 6: mercy here. Then they mentioned Kavorkian. They had nothing to
Speaker 6: do with the will of patience. Nobody asked him to
Speaker 6: do this. It was all about Charlie Colin, not about
Speaker 6: anyone else. You know, we're all terminal, frankly, uh and
Speaker 6: the people in hospitals are are far more fragile. Some
Speaker 6: of them may be on a faster track that terminator
Speaker 6: than others, but that's not really the way he operated.
Speaker 6: If you like killing people and you don't want to
Speaker 6: and you'd like to continue doing in hospital. The hospital
Speaker 6: is a wonderful place to work. And that's the way
Speaker 6: Charlie Collen treated it. And that's clear really right from
Speaker 6: the onset in his first job mentioned the seventies in
Speaker 6: the burn unit for for it's at Saint Barnabas for
Speaker 6: five years, and during that time, he's spiking bags of
Speaker 6: saline in the storm, which is to say, the ivy bags.
Speaker 6: They're just basically salt water to increase your blood pressure.
Speaker 6: So the best way to think of it, he's taking
Speaker 6: those bags that are supposed to be completely benign, you know,
Speaker 6: and you can add something to them, but most just
Speaker 6: to keep your blood pressure going, and he's secretly injecting
Speaker 6: them with insulin. He's creating a diabetic situation for people
Speaker 6: that think that they're just getting, you know, a benign
Speaker 6: bag of saline, and he doesn't know where they're going
Speaker 6: to go out. So so right from the beginning, you
Speaker 6: know he's not a he's not a mercy killer. Right
Speaker 6: from the beginning, he's he's killing people essentially a random
Speaker 6: and demonstrating, uh, demonstrating his control, so that I'd say
Speaker 6: that was his his basic mo, I mean it changed.
Speaker 6: What was one of the most interesting things about this
Speaker 6: is I really got into the nuance of of of
Speaker 6: what he did. And as we speak, by the way,
Speaker 6: I'm looking at a massive spreadsheet that I've created. I mean,
Speaker 6: it's like a hand drawn thing that goes through all
Speaker 6: the years, and it's covered with eight years worth of
Speaker 6: worth of notes and arrows and so forth. And as
Speaker 6: as I learned more and more about this, I you know,
Speaker 6: as as I'm sure your your your listeners might imagine,
Speaker 6: as you might you might imagine you you see patterns
Speaker 6: where you haven't seen patterns before. You realize you you
Speaker 6: you recognize that things start to connect up. You sort
Speaker 6: of put yourself more and more in the mind of
Speaker 6: of the of of the killer. Frankly, and and as
Speaker 6: that happened, you it actually the crime multiplies. It becomes
Speaker 6: less of a you know, a statistical thing or a
Speaker 6: number a numbers thing that he just realized exactly how
Speaker 6: how insidious it is. At the same time, you can
Speaker 6: also appreciate perhaps some of what the killer himself appreciated,
Speaker 6: which is to say that there is a mountain complexity
Speaker 6: to what he did, that that it just in terms
Speaker 6: of a game was actually quite clever. So the exact
Speaker 6: m of how he went about getting his drugs, exactly
Speaker 6: how he went about delivering them, and the and the
Speaker 6: effect upon the people, I mean, the ultimate effect, of
Speaker 6: course for everyone was terminal. But but but the but
Speaker 6: the but the means to that end. Uh is so
Speaker 6: more complicated, so much more complicated by the end of
Speaker 6: his murderous career than it was at the beginning. It's
Speaker 6: almost as if he started off, you know, sort of
Speaker 6: a garage band playing bass and he ends up as
Speaker 6: a you know, creating full symphonies by the very end.
Speaker 6: And I don't mean to suggest any beauty in any
Speaker 6: of that, but only only complexity. So it's it's it's
Speaker 6: I don't want to, you know, over overwhelm the answer
Speaker 6: with that complexity, but that is that is the arc
Speaker 6: for him.
Speaker 7: Now, Charles, we're gonna what I'm going to do is
Speaker 7: take just a short break here to talk about Audible
Speaker 7: and the offer that they have this month, and to
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Speaker 7: back to our story and introduce a couple other characters
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Speaker 7: this incredible case, what I wanted you to express to
Speaker 7: the audience is really what I found the most shocking,
Speaker 7: and I think we alluded to this as well, is
Speaker 7: that the system, and again I talked about it, the
Speaker 7: culture of the administration, and we're going to get to
Speaker 7: that because there is this resistance, and maybe you can
Speaker 7: explain how on earth there could have been people that
Speaker 7: suspected Charles Cullen of actually killing people or spiking them,
Speaker 7: that it was no accident that these things racked up
Speaker 7: that these things made sense and fingers were pointed towards him,
Speaker 7: and yet he continually was able to get jobs despite
Speaker 7: those suspicions, despite those deaths, and easily got jobs and
Speaker 7: had recommendations. You really go into in this book how
Speaker 7: that's possible. And that's I think one of the scariest
Speaker 7: aspects of this story and this book.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, you nailed it there. That's first of all,
Speaker 6: that's what took eight years? You know, talking about one
Speaker 6: creep doing bad stuff. Doesn't it really take that long
Speaker 6: if that's what I was going to be doing? What
Speaker 6: I The reason this became a book, and the real
Speaker 6: reason this became an obsession and the book it became,
Speaker 6: uh for for me, was because the everyone had gotten
Speaker 6: it wrong. When you know, the killer wasn't going to speak.
Speaker 6: The hospitals at which the killer had worked were issuing
Speaker 6: some press statements, but you know, they weren't really talking much,
Speaker 6: and mostly it was self congratulatory We caught him great. Uh.
Speaker 6: The families of the victims were locked up in lawsuits
Speaker 6: and then ultimately uh, you know, locked up in in
Speaker 6: in the terms of those suits, which is to say,
Speaker 6: you want the money, you don't talk and the ultimate witnesses. Uh,
Speaker 6: you know, of course they're silent because those they're because
Speaker 6: they're dead. And the detectives who caught this guy in
Speaker 6: the end, I mean the ones that were successful in
Speaker 6: bringing this thing through and stopping him. Uh, they were
Speaker 6: silenced by a series of forces as well, and they
Speaker 6: were also very frustrated, frankly so that you weren't hearing
Speaker 6: from any of those guys. And I waited into the
Speaker 6: mill this thinking, Wow, this is a this is a loser.
Speaker 6: I mean, this is gonna be hard to How do
Speaker 6: I how do I begin to tell this story? But
Speaker 6: as I, as I started to accumulate the pieces and
Speaker 6: started to realize the truth and speak truth to the
Speaker 6: people that knew it already and knew it bed and
Speaker 6: I at that point I found, I found, I found
Speaker 6: eager you know, eager listeners and eager participants, and gradually
Speaker 6: and gradually they they joined me and trying to trying
Speaker 6: to uh oh and in giving me access to stuff
Speaker 6: I'm sure I shouldn't have access to uh And and
Speaker 6: that was really really thrilling. And the picture that emerged, uh,
Speaker 6: the story that I wouldn't have guessed at uh, going
Speaker 6: into This wasn't the story of one bad guy with
Speaker 6: bad ideas in his head that got put away and
Speaker 6: this you know, everything's fine and the bad guy's gone.
Speaker 6: It was the story of all this. It was a
Speaker 6: story of of of of the system that we depend upon.
Speaker 6: And I say a system, but I mean a system
Speaker 6: of people, a series of people that we depend upon
Speaker 6: to take care of our most vulnerable people, our mothers
Speaker 6: and daughters and grandmothers and children and every and everybody else,
Speaker 6: the hospital administration as a whole. And it really this
Speaker 6: really touches obviously upon it's very sensitive time for this
Speaker 6: whole topic. There's a business of medicine, which the fact
Speaker 6: that there is that the medicine is a business isn't
Speaker 6: in and of itself h less noble than than than
Speaker 6: medicine itself. It was already vilified. But but but this
Speaker 6: was a particularly ugly aspect of it. That what I
Speaker 6: found was in many cases, those same those folks had
Speaker 6: taken a very narrow definition of their of their job,
Speaker 6: which was, you know, if they're supposed to be, say
Speaker 6: a risk manager or a lawyer for a hospital, and
Speaker 6: their job is to protect their institution from from harm
Speaker 6: from fiscal ruin to prepare it for potential lawsuits and
Speaker 6: the like. All jobs I understand and respect, and and
Speaker 6: you know, this is what modern society requires. But they'd
Speaker 6: taken this definition to such an extent that actually almost
Speaker 6: seemingly willfully and I have to be careful with my
Speaker 6: words here. As I was, it was my writing ignored
Speaker 6: the fact that they had a serial killer working amongst
Speaker 6: amongst their staff, intentionally harming their patients, and rather than
Speaker 6: ever acknowledge that fact and therefore, uh, you know, lose
Speaker 6: any sort of litigation, you know, to say, I'm sorry,
Speaker 6: we have a serial killer in our midst We must
Speaker 6: remove this person. We have a nurse who is uh
Speaker 6: you know, at at at best incompetence, but at worst
Speaker 6: and most probably uh uh you know, associath uh and
Speaker 6: and serial murderer.
Speaker 7: Uh.
Speaker 6: To admit that would be would be so devastating, uh
Speaker 6: financially to to any institution, to a hospital, that that
Speaker 6: the protection of of the institution became paramount, but the
Speaker 6: protection of the patients, the people that were actually being harmed,
Speaker 6: somehow fell away. So you have instances where Charlie Colin
Speaker 6: is caught red handed, uh, stashing drugs. They say, well,
Speaker 6: they said stashing drugs. What he was doing is he
Speaker 6: was sticking well wherever Charlie. Charlie Colin is kind of
Speaker 6: sort of a brat. You have to picture picture him
Speaker 6: as a as a bratty, uh, frustrated guy. He's still
Speaker 6: mad at the hospitals, uh, you know, twenty something years
Speaker 6: on and he's so he's he's sort of throwing away
Speaker 6: some of their medicines just to waste of money and
Speaker 6: and be rude, and he's having a bad time, you know,
Speaker 6: with with in his life at that point. So he
Speaker 6: thinks he's justified that he's also killing patients at the
Speaker 6: same time, which is a version to to him of
Speaker 6: the of the same thing. And it's discovered that that
Speaker 6: you know, that they're they're trash cans basically full of
Speaker 6: this stuff, including empty bottles of something called vaccuronium bromider
Speaker 6: what they call vect, which is a paaragook.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 6: It's very rarely used, very it's used in very very
Speaker 6: small doses. They find enough doses to uh to kill
Speaker 6: the entire ward and they find that those doses have been,
Speaker 6: if not used, they've been somehow loaded into a needle
Speaker 6: it's the only way to get out of the bottle
Speaker 6: and and put somewhere on on on the unit. Now
Speaker 6: he did use it that that very night, and and
Speaker 6: he uh and and and people died and they and
Speaker 6: they knew it was suspicious. He's discovered outside council has
Speaker 6: brought in uh, Charlie colin is is is marched out
Speaker 6: of the unit, uh with with the you know, the
Speaker 6: with the nurses staring. After being offered an option, he's
Speaker 6: he's offered the possibility of quitting or being fired. If
Speaker 6: he's fired, he doesn't get neutral references. He's got an
Speaker 6: employment problem if he if he's if he allows himself
Speaker 6: to quit or retire from that position. Really the references
Speaker 6: are his call, and he can do do what we will,
Speaker 6: what he will. He does that. He moves down the
Speaker 6: street to another hospital and starts killing patients. Send me
Speaker 6: another eighteen patients right right down the street. The president
Speaker 6: of that hospital calls his colleagues and asks about this
Speaker 6: guy and passes on the information that this guy is
Speaker 6: that do not rehire. It hit his hospital. But he
Speaker 6: doesn't call well, he doesn't call your hospital. He doesn't
Speaker 6: call your mother's hospital. He doesn't call your wife or
Speaker 6: daughter's hospital. He doesn't call anyone else but the people
Speaker 6: he knows. He warrants some and not others. He makes
Speaker 6: it unofficial. And that and Charlie Collen moves on, and
Speaker 6: that happens over and over and over again. And that story,
Speaker 6: which is not a story of a monster, you know,
Speaker 6: sort of a pre made monster doing monstrous things and
Speaker 6: getting stopped. This isn't a this isn't a you know,
Speaker 6: a wolfman story or you know, a God's Hillo type story.
Speaker 6: It's a it's a it's a human story. And those people,
Speaker 6: by the way, in my book, whom I name my
Speaker 6: name in The Good Nurse, I name everyone. That's the
Speaker 6: reason it took eight years is to make sure I
Speaker 6: actually got it right, and that you know that there
Speaker 6: was there's no way to go back on it, you know,
Speaker 6: unlike Charlie Collen, who's going to be in jail for
Speaker 6: the rest of his natural life, and if not in
Speaker 6: New Jersey then in Pennsylvania, where though they'll kill them after,
Speaker 6: you know, after he serves a couple hundred years in
Speaker 6: in New Jersey, they're they're waiting for him there. Those
Speaker 6: folks actually got promoted, their vice presidents. Now they actually
Speaker 6: have an extra zero in the back of their salary,
Speaker 6: and they're still waiting the detectives who finally caught these guys,
Speaker 6: and I know, well, you know you touched on that,
Speaker 6: but the detectives were incredibly frustrated. The detectives were saying,
Speaker 6: these guys are accessories the murder. They're they're they they
Speaker 6: they actively interrupted our investigation in order to make sure
Speaker 6: that we wouldn't we couldn't put it together in this
Speaker 6: exact way. And they asked for a grand jury, and
Speaker 6: and that grand jury.
Speaker 4: Was not.
Speaker 6: And the interesting thing about a grand jury, and the
Speaker 6: interesting thing about those charges is that there's no statute
Speaker 6: of limitation, so that so that might that might still
Speaker 6: happen as more and more readers take this cause on
Speaker 6: where we're seeing a call for that. So that's that's
Speaker 6: what's exciting about this book. It's not a it's not
Speaker 6: a cold case told. It's actually a story that kind
Speaker 6: of lives on where readers actually become part of the
Speaker 6: ultimate ultimate answer. Because I think I think there's a monster,
Speaker 6: there are monsters in all of this, or you know,
Speaker 6: perhaps I'm telling too much about myself. There's certainly one
Speaker 6: in me, and I'm not going to do that. But
Speaker 6: it's a matter of choices, you know, It's not a
Speaker 6: matter of just being good or bad. It's a matter
Speaker 6: of choosing to do that. And that story was much
Speaker 6: more interesting and much more important, I thought to tell.
Speaker 7: You talk about these hard boiled detectives, Tim Brawn and
Speaker 7: Danny Baldwin. So a couple guys that are teamed together
Speaker 7: to try to look at this case. And at first
Speaker 7: and you really get into this and one of the
Speaker 7: books I really enjoyed, well, I really enjoyed the whole book,
Speaker 7: but I really enjoyed this because the humanization of these
Speaker 7: two guys, these too tough, skeptical cops been involved in
Speaker 7: murders and now they're involved and some sleepy little somerset
Speaker 7: here and they're not sure if it's a murder, and
Speaker 7: and so they go in very very skeptical, thinking that
Speaker 7: this is going to be nothing. And and then finally
Speaker 7: a fire is lit in both these guys, and but
Speaker 7: briefly tell us about the Again, the thing that really
Speaker 7: cracked this case was the phone call and that file
Speaker 7: that was there, and then the second part of that
Speaker 7: file where they talk about the digy Oxen, So tell
Speaker 7: us about that whole incident, because I think it's.
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, absolutely not. Man. I fell in love with
Speaker 6: these guys. I thought I knew what the what the
Speaker 6: book was. And then I started spending time with these
Speaker 6: two former Newer homicide detectives and I call my Salt
Speaker 6: and Pepper detectives, one black, one one white, both former
Speaker 6: linebackers uh and uh and and both they've seen everything,
Speaker 6: and I just I wanted, all of a sudden the
Speaker 6: book was them, you know. And it took me a
Speaker 6: while to reach recalibrate that because they were seen so
Speaker 6: much and they knew so much, but what they'd never seen,
Speaker 6: uh you know, what they were used to was Newark,
Speaker 6: the Toesch Streets in Newark, where which is the murder
Speaker 6: capital of the world. While they were there where everything
Speaker 6: started with drugs and with a gun, and it was basically,
Speaker 6: there's a hole in somebody and they have to figure
Speaker 6: out who put the whole hole in the guy. And
Speaker 6: so it was a physical thing they put the hole
Speaker 6: in the guy, and who was holding the thing, the
Speaker 6: physical thing that put the hole in the guy. It's
Speaker 6: I mean that sounds a little reductive, but that's actually
Speaker 6: what it is. You know, That's why I put the lines,
Speaker 6: you know, the string. So and it's not it's not stupid,
Speaker 6: it's it's it's just that it's there's a basic element
Speaker 6: to that. This was chemical you're talking about poisoning, you're
Speaker 6: talking about it was shifts, you're talking about all the
Speaker 6: chemistry and all that. And so these guys were lost.
Speaker 6: One of them told me, he said, you know, get
Speaker 6: you know, uh, you know all that all this Latin
Speaker 6: is Greek to us. Is how they put it. One
Speaker 6: of the ways they put they put it. So having
Speaker 6: said that, you know, they assume that, okay, so as
Speaker 6: the hospital's got having a problem. Hospital doesn't say it's murder.
Speaker 6: They don't know exactly why they're there. They just know
Speaker 6: there's a problem. They assume the hospital's gonna be their
Speaker 6: friend and tell them about this because it's it's filled
Speaker 6: with you know, people with degrees and so and so forth.
Speaker 6: So they're looking for a handhold on this because we
Speaker 6: sha our field of expertise, and that's theirs. What they
Speaker 6: found was the opposite that they if they didn't get
Speaker 6: way to ask for it, and they didn't know what
Speaker 6: to ask for uh, they weren't. They weren't being given
Speaker 6: given any help. They didn't think they could catch this thing.
Speaker 6: And they had a sense and not too long after
Speaker 6: they started that this is probably this is a ticking
Speaker 6: bomb that there's because they were right there that syrakill
Speaker 6: was still working and still killing people the entire time
Speaker 6: they're investigating. So so what are they going to do?
Speaker 6: And they catch a break. They they figure out that
Speaker 6: from the from the paperwork that somebody called in that
Speaker 6: there was actually a call to New Jersey Poison Control.
Speaker 6: And you know, they they're they're really getting fed up
Speaker 6: with the with the with with not getting straight talk.
Speaker 6: They don't really know how to talk to anybody about
Speaker 6: any of the stuff. They don't they don't get it.
Speaker 6: There's a call in New Jersey Poison Control. They they
Speaker 6: they call into New Jersey Poison Control. They gets to
Speaker 6: the same sort of line. They actually go visit the
Speaker 6: guy finally who funds New Jersey Poison Control, and what
Speaker 6: they find is a kind of a surprising scene. A
Speaker 6: cranky guy at his desk, underfunded, who's been waiting for
Speaker 6: the cops to show up for six months because he
Speaker 6: got the call and knew that they that that some
Speaker 6: muchI Medical center had a problem. He knew right away
Speaker 6: that that the pattern that they were not trying to describe,
Speaker 6: but that somebody was required to call in and ask
Speaker 6: for help with the math. He knew that that meant something.
Speaker 6: And when they showed up, he gave them finally, you
Speaker 6: know that the lawyers gave them said they had no paperwork.
Speaker 6: There's a six months of work and the lawyers they
Speaker 6: don't have a single piece of paper. Were the hospital
Speaker 6: saying a very similar thing. They've got three pieces of paper.
Speaker 6: Doctor Stephen Marcus and New Jersey Poison Control and doctor
Speaker 6: Bruce Ruck New Jersey Poison Control are saying, we've got
Speaker 6: these calls. And by the way, we recorded them, and
Speaker 6: that's the only reason you got called is because we
Speaker 6: announced that we recorded them. And what those calls show
Speaker 6: is that there was a pattern and that the hospitals
Speaker 6: knew and were trying to control this thing. And once
Speaker 6: they have that, you know, you just see Tim Brown
Speaker 6: slapping his desk and saying, you know, we can't. First
Speaker 6: of all, the people that we thought we were on
Speaker 6: the same side of those are the guys we're against.
Speaker 6: Now we have to unfortunate. We have to treat everybody
Speaker 6: like an animey except maybe this guy. And I got
Speaker 6: those tapes. If we had more time, I play him
Speaker 6: for you, and they are unbelievable. You hear right away
Speaker 6: how frightened the pharmacy assistant and has to call in
Speaker 6: and she knows just what's happening. And this, by the way,
Speaker 6: is well Charles Colin is still he's still got another
Speaker 6: we I would estimate probably fifteen people that he kills
Speaker 6: after these calls are made. She knows there's something going on,
Speaker 6: she knows she's not supposed to say anything. She's under
Speaker 6: a lot of pressure. So this is a I mean,
Speaker 6: you know, this is a story of This is the
Speaker 6: story of office politics as much as it is about
Speaker 6: serial murder. And it's amazing when those two things collided,
Speaker 6: So you know what it was beyond my imagination.
Speaker 7: It seems too that there's the official and then people
Speaker 7: that will work outside of that, like the people that
Speaker 7: informed on Charles, that were suspicious, that went to administration
Speaker 7: and demanded right away early on, and still nothing was done.
Speaker 7: But at least later when Braun looked at this, there
Speaker 7: was a record of these of these people and it
Speaker 7: was documented. But also when he looked for things, he
Speaker 7: because he worked security. Again, one of the coincidences of
Speaker 7: this was that the same hospital that he did his
Speaker 7: security that he started off as a security guy, is
Speaker 7: exactly the same hospital that Charles Collins started at. And
Speaker 7: so I also knew how to go. He also knew
Speaker 7: how to go to security and say, listen, I know
Speaker 7: I'm not supposed to get this information, but could you
Speaker 7: give me some information?
Speaker 6: And so that was well, yeah, that was that was
Speaker 6: That was so fascinating to me because this is I'm
Speaker 6: I'm this is that ended up being I'm not I'm
Speaker 6: not from New Jersey. I don't really know New Jersey.
Speaker 6: This ends up being a start, but it could be,
Speaker 6: it could be anywhere. It would end up being a
Speaker 6: really vocal story. These these two guys, detective and killer.
Speaker 6: Uh you know when they got each when when the
Speaker 6: detective and the killer were in the name squad car
Speaker 6: And this isn't even this isn't even when the killers
Speaker 6: geting arrested. This is at a preemptive moment, when when
Speaker 6: when the detective is is so desperate that to try
Speaker 6: and take this guy down that he's just going to
Speaker 6: pick him up for for essentially nothing, and he almost
Speaker 6: ruined the whole investigation by doing that. But you can
Speaker 6: understand this past. They're talking about the school mascots, they're
Speaker 6: talking about their competing football teams at that point. Now
Speaker 6: the you know, it's really jock versus nerd in that moment,
Speaker 6: it's it's detective versus serial killer. Uh, that dynamic in
Speaker 6: that small space, you know, that really cost or phobic
Speaker 6: but small area. Maybe the most prolific serio in American history.
Speaker 6: And I and I've the information, I've got back set
Speaker 6: up pretty solidly. But he this was this, This was
Speaker 6: entirely personal, and this was really really really small stuff.
Speaker 6: In a way, it's always personal, I think when you
Speaker 6: when you do something like this, it's it's really all
Speaker 6: about some little hurt you've got. It's really not about
Speaker 6: the whole world. It's not it's it's it has massive effects,
Speaker 6: but it's really just about some little party that got hurt,
Speaker 6: usually as a kid, you know.
Speaker 1: M hm.
Speaker 7: Now, we don't have time to go into all this,
Speaker 7: and I don't want to give a lot of this
Speaker 7: book away too, because a big portion of this is
Speaker 7: what you were able. You managed and you were capable
Speaker 7: of gathering from Charles Cullen. And that's really where the
Speaker 7: gold mine of information comes is from a killer himself,
Speaker 7: from his own perspective. Not that they ever tell all
Speaker 7: of the truth, or if they, it's hard to know
Speaker 7: what exactly is truth, but some incredible truths you have
Speaker 7: dragged out of this person. So tell us just a
Speaker 7: little bit without getting too much away, but tell us
Speaker 7: about how long this correspondence was and just how you
Speaker 7: sort of managed to get some of this out. What
Speaker 7: was if there is any technique that you employed, what
Speaker 7: did you have to employ to be able to get
Speaker 7: some information from this Charles Cullen.
Speaker 6: Sure, absolutely, It's this is a a tough one because
Speaker 6: here you've got a guy who well, I mean, you know,
Speaker 6: let's let's let's just put a point. Do you trust him?
Speaker 6: You know, you might want to hear his story because
Speaker 6: it's interesting, but do you trust it? And I was
Speaker 6: gonna and I was determined to write the true story.
Speaker 6: It wasn't a toe all from Charles Collen. It wasn't
Speaker 6: his story, and he he was upset about that, I'm sure,
Speaker 6: but that was never. That was never never. In the
Speaker 6: cars I use his words when his words are appropriate.
Speaker 6: But I never rely on his truth.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 6: You know, he he tips me off to his thinking.
Speaker 6: Uh he he tells me, uh sort of where you know,
Speaker 6: metaphorically where the where the bodies are buried. But he
Speaker 6: but I never I never rely on him. He's that's
Speaker 6: that That wouldn't work for anybody, especially with something so important,
Speaker 6: because you also have people who are respected members of society,
Speaker 6: who are still respected members of society when this book
Speaker 6: comes out, and I don't want to pit his truth
Speaker 6: against theirs when I'm when I'm in the middle of
Speaker 6: things legally, and also when the reader needs to know
Speaker 6: what's really happening. Having said that, first, I just wanted
Speaker 6: to know his truth. I just wanted to know how
Speaker 6: he felt about things, and I wanted to know his
Speaker 6: story as he as he remembered it. And I and
Speaker 6: Charlie Collins a lot of things. But aside from that
Speaker 6: one story, I I specifically laid out about about, you know,
Speaker 6: how how his his priest led him to to become
Speaker 6: a nurse or how you know how he accidentally became
Speaker 6: a nurse through through correspondence. I've never found him to
Speaker 6: be a liar. He never outright lied, and I think
Speaker 6: that must be that's I think that's sort of an
Speaker 6: omission of memory rather than you know, which which will
Speaker 6: happen with him all the time. Of course, because in
Speaker 6: Charlie's mind, he's he's a decent guy. He's not hating
Speaker 6: himself or doing this. He is, you know, he's he's
Speaker 6: not a proud, egomaniacal character. That's you know that there
Speaker 6: wants to be boastful in any way. And he's not
Speaker 6: ashamed of his his cleverness and out smarting the system.
Speaker 6: And and I and I know that there's a secret
Speaker 6: part of him, although he would never confess it publicly,
Speaker 6: that is very very happy to be the most prolific
Speaker 6: serial killer in American history. And interestingly enough, he started
Speaker 6: his career only days after that that record had been somehow,
Speaker 6: if you could put it that way, broken publicly by
Speaker 6: another nurse. But but having said that, I I had
Speaker 6: my own, you know, So that's Charlie Colin and he's
Speaker 6: doing his thing. Meanwhile there's there's me. And I consider
Speaker 6: myself to be a moral person as well. And I
Speaker 6: had my own problem, which is to say, and I
Speaker 6: think I think every journalist that attempts to talk to well,
Speaker 6: attempts to talk to a source who did terrible things,
Speaker 6: has this problem, which is to say, you and how
Speaker 6: do you how do you how do you not come
Speaker 6: how do you not be false? How do you not
Speaker 6: misrepresent yourself? How do you not betray somebody? Because I
Speaker 6: don't want to betray anybody, including a serial coop. I
Speaker 6: didn't befriend him. We were never friends. It was always
Speaker 6: very clear right from my first letter that I was
Speaker 6: not his ethical accountant. As I said, I was not
Speaker 6: here to, you know, somehow balance charmic points or the
Speaker 6: like at this. At the same time, I also made
Speaker 6: clear because he was he didn't want to talk about
Speaker 6: the bad stuff, never wanted to talk about the bad stuff.
Speaker 6: We did not talk about murder. It's it's it will
Speaker 6: surprise you to hear that, because this is a murderer.
Speaker 6: But murderer was the one thing. You know, first of all,
Speaker 6: you'd never say the word. Second of all, you'd never
Speaker 6: he'd never talk about it. And and uh and if
Speaker 6: you did, you'd heat shut down. And I don't mean
Speaker 6: shut down like I don't feel like talking. I mean
Speaker 6: shut down like you'd watched a robot start shutting down.
Speaker 6: That wasn't a part of he was, That wasn't something
Speaker 6: he was his his his full psyche, he was equipped
Speaker 6: to actually deal with. I don't know that he was
Speaker 6: a split personality and that in that sense, but he
Speaker 6: certainly acted like one, and he would he you you
Speaker 6: that that was the end of the of the discussion.
Speaker 6: I meanwhile, I'd be traveling seven hours at a stretch
Speaker 6: to get to him, and I'd say the wrong word
Speaker 6: and I'd watch the whole So I got flipped the switch.
Speaker 6: So I wanted to understand as much as I could
Speaker 6: and then go follow up, follow up on that. You know,
Speaker 6: so you know? So, so what is it you you
Speaker 6: you do learn? You learn about? Uh? Well, first of all,
Speaker 6: you do a lot of listening and a lot of probing.
Speaker 6: There's some things he wants to talk about and every boring,
Speaker 6: like sitting next to someone on a bus that want
Speaker 6: that's really obsessed with some nice thing that happened to them.
Speaker 6: That he was that guy sometimes. But sometimes he'd talk
Speaker 6: obsessively about things that you knew that you would understand
Speaker 6: were enormously important, and you'd and you'd uh, and you realize,
Speaker 6: we're actually the coda to everything, and that was that
Speaker 6: was actually children. That was children in the burn unit.
Speaker 6: And uh, the way the children that came in when
Speaker 6: he was first starting as a nurse would come in
Speaker 6: sort of like I mean almost like i'd say, like
Speaker 6: baked potatoes, but in that they with a hard jacket
Speaker 6: of scar and that they could never grow again unless
Speaker 6: you cut them and cut them, and it was terrible
Speaker 6: to cut them, but you'd have to cut them, and
Speaker 6: you'd have to put them in these terrible sort of
Speaker 6: wet suit like garments called pressure suits, and to squeeze them.
Speaker 6: And without any of that, they would they would be
Speaker 6: stuck in this sort of cocoon of childhood, this cocoon
Speaker 6: of of of of of of trauma. And he didn't
Speaker 6: put it in those in those terms and by any means,
Speaker 6: but it was very clear to me right away that
Speaker 6: that was that was that was Charlie Cohen, That was him.
Speaker 6: He was he was that kid. He recognized those kids.
Speaker 6: You talk about how he wanted to help them, how
Speaker 6: I wanted to treat them, how how bad sad he was.
Speaker 6: When we we we'd be talking about anything and we
Speaker 6: might end up back at that topic at any given time,
Speaker 6: at any given year. You know when it was again
Speaker 6: when I saw him in jail, when I saw him
Speaker 6: when I had to buzz through ten layers of security
Speaker 6: and and pat downs, you know, across the the scarred
Speaker 6: plexiglass of the of the non com UH nighttime visitor
Speaker 6: center and trying to maximum security. It didn't matter when
Speaker 6: it was that that was always on his mind. It
Speaker 6: never left him how those kids had suffered, and somehow,
Speaker 6: how those kids had suffered. Their little burns reminded him
Speaker 6: of himself. They reminded him of of how he'd been
Speaker 6: burned in in the Navy. They reminded him of little
Speaker 6: problems he'd had as a child. It was all tickling backwards,
Speaker 6: always over and over and over again. And I wanted
Speaker 6: to make sure he knew I wasn't his friend, but
Speaker 6: I was listening, and he knew that he understood that.
Speaker 6: I think, Charlie Colin, he needs to watch I can
Speaker 6: say that's what's great certainty after eight years of dealing
Speaker 6: with him, Charlie. Charlie Collen needs to feel like a victim,
Speaker 6: or needs to certainly seem like a victim in his
Speaker 6: own mind, no matter what it is he's a victim
Speaker 6: of his mother disappearing. He's a victim of of of
Speaker 6: whatever system, he's a victim of staffing irregularities at whatever hospital,
Speaker 6: or or or a victim of his divorce or whatever
Speaker 6: might be happened. And he's certainly going to be a
Speaker 6: victim of of this writer. I'm I'm aware of that,
Speaker 6: and I was aware of that going in. But the
Speaker 6: truth is he's very much in control of what he's
Speaker 6: he's not, he doesn't he's not fully aware of what
Speaker 6: he's saying, but he's very much aware of the fact
Speaker 6: that he's uh, that he's expressing a version of his
Speaker 6: self image that he's proud of, and that version is shy,
Speaker 6: that version is controlled, that version is contrite, that version
Speaker 6: is the good nurse, and that and that and that
Speaker 6: guy is is real. That that guy, that guy is real,
Speaker 6: and that guy exists for Charlie Collen. But the truth
Speaker 6: at the same time is that there's another guy living
Speaker 6: inside of Charlie Colin that Charlie Cullen can't acknowledge, and
Speaker 6: that guy is the guy you've got to eventually talk to.
Speaker 6: And it doesn't just come out like some weird voice
Speaker 6: or something like that in the movies. He used to
Speaker 6: have to eventually wait for the information to percolate down
Speaker 6: to that other guy. For those and for those two
Speaker 6: people to have a little bit of a negotiation. The uh,
Speaker 6: the the the outside shy uh self deprecating guy that
Speaker 6: lived with his mom and didn't want to get beaten
Speaker 6: up or sodomized or anything else, and the and and
Speaker 6: the and and the guy that secretly is making clippings
Speaker 6: of the of the fact that they're onto the fact
Speaker 6: that maybe there's a killer nurse in New Jersey. And
Speaker 6: when those two guys have a proper negotiation, that's when
Speaker 6: you can actually actually speak. But he but he'll he'll
Speaker 6: never speak straight. He won't lie, He just won't. He
Speaker 6: They're just some things he won't be able to tell you.
Speaker 6: So for instance, when he tells, uh, you know, if
Speaker 6: you if you ever see his his confession, uh, you know,
Speaker 6: I've seen his full confession tapes, you know, the you
Speaker 6: and if you see those that full confession. At first
Speaker 6: he's he seems sort of defeated in some way, and
Speaker 6: then he putches up like a cat and then he,
Speaker 6: I'll say, sings a song. He starts in the present tense,
Speaker 6: and he goes backwards for six hours with things that
Speaker 6: you would not remember off the top of your head
Speaker 6: for six hours in a manner that makes it very
Speaker 6: clear that he has you know, he had an hour
Speaker 6: commute each way every day for a long time. Makes
Speaker 6: it very clear that he'd been singing this song to
Speaker 6: himself for a very long time, that he always knew
Speaker 6: exactly what he did. And I would suspect very strongly.
Speaker 6: In fact, I would be I would bet anything that
Speaker 6: there is a long roll of butcher paper somewhere in
Speaker 6: this world that has the name of every the victim
Speaker 6: he was ever responsible for, written out in chronological order.
Speaker 6: Uh and and uh and it was great accuracy somewhere
Speaker 6: out there. And I'll but he knows it'll it'll come out,
Speaker 6: it'll come out later. So trying to deal with Charlie,
Speaker 6: I mean, you're you're both playing a game. And that
Speaker 6: hurt me too, because I consider myself a good guy.
Speaker 6: Uh and uh And unfortunately, one of the things that
Speaker 6: you're supposed to do sometimes as a journalist, what they
Speaker 6: want you to do is is uh, you know, trick
Speaker 6: someone to get the story. And I won't I won't
Speaker 6: do that. So luckily we had the kidney between us,
Speaker 6: you know, when he was first trying to donate that
Speaker 6: that that kidney, and and you know, and and and
Speaker 6: that's that's what we ended up, uh, I ended up
Speaker 6: focusing on. So he pretends he's mad at me. Now
Speaker 6: he won't, he wouldn't, he won't speak to me. And
Speaker 6: I absolutely know that he's consciously upset with me, and
Speaker 6: and unconsciously probably very policed, and that bothers me a lot, frankly.
Speaker 7: So he's he's angry at you regarding what I know.
Speaker 7: He'd be happy about the limelight, that he's a that's
Speaker 7: happening one way or another, bad guy or good guy.
Speaker 7: But why why is he angry at you for betrayal?
Speaker 3: What?
Speaker 6: Well, it's it's funny, I mean, it's it's it's almost
Speaker 6: the opposite. I mean, he's he's you. You you. The
Speaker 6: persona that Colin gives is one of a guy that
Speaker 6: doesn't want to be bothered, doesn't want to doesn't want
Speaker 6: to talk about this. It was all quiet, it was
Speaker 6: all well, it was all mercy killing. And he used
Speaker 6: to call what I did what I was doing, uh,
Speaker 6: you know, uh, basically promoting people to crane their next
Speaker 6: at a car wreck. He also faulted, of course, the
Speaker 6: hypocrisy of one of the hospitals he worked at, Saint
Speaker 6: Luke's Hospital, which he considered to be a Catholic hospital.
Speaker 6: Uh as he was he was raised Catholic. His takeaway
Speaker 6: where he'd killed numerous people at Saint Luke's and there
Speaker 6: were the hospital that that actually moved him on, you know,
Speaker 6: having caught him in the middle of the night. Uh
Speaker 6: and and never mentioned it, he said, the hypocrisy of that,
Speaker 6: a Catholic hospital, of all places. It's again, he always
Speaker 6: has to find some way to uh, find find a
Speaker 6: higher ground, if you will. Uh And you know, and
Speaker 6: and and and and someone else to blame so for
Speaker 6: for this The only reason I know he's he's happy
Speaker 6: with this. And again actually this is a supposition, so
Speaker 6: I you know, I would never have put that he's
Speaker 6: happy in this in the book. For instance, is that
Speaker 6: when when he meets at the very end with a
Speaker 6: confidential informant, he happens to he's clipped out of the
Speaker 6: out of the uh, out of the paper. Some pieces
Speaker 6: that suggest that there's somebody has been killing people at
Speaker 6: these hospitals it's not it's not certain whom yet and uh,
Speaker 6: and and and the pride that he has in that
Speaker 6: one fact, the fact that he actually collected that is
Speaker 6: one of the few indicators that I have of exactly
Speaker 6: you know who he is in that regard. But he
Speaker 6: is he is, he's uh, he's furious of me, and
Speaker 6: he's certainly not happy at all the way I painted him.
Speaker 7: Oh sure. One question I have for you before we
Speaker 7: conclude this interview is uh, and I just thought it
Speaker 7: was important, So I will ask you how important do
Speaker 7: you think it was? And first off, I want to
Speaker 7: ask where you got this bit of information where you
Speaker 7: paint a very vivid scene in the navy where he
Speaker 7: is humiliated. So I want you to tell us about
Speaker 7: that scene. And then I want to ask you where
Speaker 7: you got that information and was it from Charles himself
Speaker 7: and all that information from his perspective? And how important
Speaker 7: do you think that was in his murderous spree?
Speaker 6: Oh right, that's a that's a great question. Uh, that
Speaker 6: was in some ways the well you know that it's
Speaker 6: it's a it's a relatively short book, I mean, considering
Speaker 6: how how long it started out as so I had
Speaker 6: to pick my spots. The humiliation within the Navy, A
Speaker 6: lot of that came from Charlie himself, and that was uh,
Speaker 6: you know. And so the actual scenes of Charlie being
Speaker 6: humiliated in the Navy as a first person or as
Speaker 6: an empirical account are pretty limited because because that because
Speaker 6: that that's that was hard to verify. I found that
Speaker 6: the Navy sources that I looked into were or could
Speaker 6: I couldn't get second party verification. The New York Times
Speaker 6: published some things. A number of places published, uh you know,
Speaker 6: published accounts. You know, there were people that uh you know,
Speaker 6: for for example, uh, the newspapers at the time were
Speaker 6: publishing accounts of Charles Collen being found at the uh
Speaker 6: well you know. One said at the at the nuclear
Speaker 6: controls with a you know, in surgical scrubs and and
Speaker 6: a mask. Another said that he was just goofing around
Speaker 6: in the same same gear. Other other guys had other stories.
Speaker 6: I didn't find any of those to be It's not
Speaker 6: that they weren't credible, it's just that I couldn't really
Speaker 6: verify them with multiple sources. So in terms of the humiliation,
Speaker 6: what I had to do is take single source humiliation.
Speaker 6: Uh uh you know, uh sourcing and stories, and combine
Speaker 6: that with Charlie Collins's own recollection, which doesn't amount to
Speaker 6: to double sourcing, but but turn that into his uh
Speaker 6: his recollection, because that was certainly his sensibility. I wouldn't
Speaker 6: want to present that as story history. Anyone that I
Speaker 6: found that ever served with him in the Navy said
Speaker 6: he was They called him fish belly. Uh he was
Speaker 6: uh miss you know, mistreated. He was always uh treated
Speaker 6: like a new guy. And and his uh you know,
Speaker 6: uh sort of gym lockers sensibility about about what it
Speaker 6: is to to live in a submarine. Now, partially I
Speaker 6: knew that when he was talking about that, he was
Speaker 6: speaking to me, because the truth is that, you know,
Speaker 6: anyone that's chosen at this point in life for you know,
Speaker 6: or to be a writer and uh uh and probably
Speaker 6: was and probably was a writer for the last thirty years,
Speaker 6: very very probably has a lot more in common with
Speaker 6: the guy that's going to speak like that than someone
Speaker 6: that right away knew that they were going to go
Speaker 6: into being, say a beat cop or something like that.
Speaker 6: It's really rare and interesting when you find that combination.
Speaker 6: I love crime and true crime because I love that combination.
Speaker 6: I really want to you know, that's that's that's where
Speaker 6: I live. But I know that's what Charlie was trying
Speaker 6: to play, is that middle ground and his his memory
Speaker 6: of cruelty I had to tone down, uh massively, because
Speaker 6: of course, remember every every in every story, he's he's
Speaker 6: a victim in the last one of the last hospitals
Speaker 6: he was in. His great memory was of of of
Speaker 6: how the other nurses they were male nurses at this point,
Speaker 6: because remember where we started with female nurses. We started
Speaker 6: in in a world where where nursing was almost entirely female.
Speaker 6: And then largely because the salary shifted and that it
Speaker 6: largely became, it started to get an increasingly male component.
Speaker 6: He became increasingly uncomfortable and he he didn't enjoy that dynamic,
Speaker 6: and his his ability to uh to wield power really
Speaker 6: really changed. And when that when that happened, he felt
Speaker 6: like he felt like he was being victimized. I think
Speaker 6: even when when he wasn't frankly, uh, you know, he
Speaker 6: was the patients were perhaps being treated with a gallous
Speaker 6: humor he didn't respect. But but again that was a
Speaker 6: you know, an aspect of perspective that he brought, he
Speaker 6: brought to this uniquely, so so you know, that's that's
Speaker 6: that's that's something that I had to treat very very carefully.
Speaker 7: It just seems that and he's not the only guy
Speaker 7: that the person that I experienced, and all the research
Speaker 7: that I have too is that they always killers, always
Speaker 7: point to somebody else, point out their weaknesses and their
Speaker 7: foibles and their you know, the of course, the the
Speaker 7: the injustice of their court case, the the ineffectiveness of
Speaker 7: their counsel. That's why they end up representing themselves or
Speaker 7: wanting to represent themselves. So it's always these people. Everybody,
Speaker 7: their wives, their family have have treated them badly, and
Speaker 7: so I don't find that so unusual. I would say
Speaker 7: that in how affected were you from this entire experience?
Speaker 7: Was it? Were you in it? Was there any depression
Speaker 7: or was there any real uh serious outcome from having
Speaker 7: lived through this pretty tragic tale.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I'll be honest. I mean I didn't. The tragic
Speaker 6: aspect didn't hit me. I know it should have. My
Speaker 6: first interaction with Charlie was with a guy who you know,
Speaker 6: kind of you know, waved to me hey across the
Speaker 6: uh you know, across the plate glass or across the
Speaker 6: place of glass and I wave back and he and
Speaker 6: he said, you know that. Essentially, he said, this is
Speaker 6: kind of a weird situation, and I said, yeah, it
Speaker 6: is because it was weird for me. And maybe you know,
Speaker 6: he's obviously playing me there, but I also knew it
Speaker 6: was true, and I I didn't like him. I knew
Speaker 6: what he'd done, but I felt like I could I
Speaker 6: could talk to the guy. Uh I UH. A later
Speaker 6: interaction came when I started going to court and the
Speaker 6: victims' families who had been dealing with this for a
Speaker 6: lot longer and had a very very different reality and
Speaker 6: and frankly, I think a more realistic take on this.
Speaker 6: They were they were angry, and they were and it
Speaker 6: was ugly. It was really ugly. Then I found it
Speaker 6: really unpleasant and I got deeper and deeper. These are
Speaker 6: just the first few months.
Speaker 3: UH.
Speaker 6: I got deeper and deeper, started going in with the detectives.
Speaker 6: In a couple of years, UH started UH and then
Speaker 6: started really getting into well, I started writing from Charlie
Speaker 6: Collums perspective. That's what really what really did it, Because
Speaker 6: what I realized at a certain point is, well, I
Speaker 6: don't it wasn't like, it wasn't an intellectual decision. It
Speaker 6: was just the truth of it. You I wasn't. I
Speaker 6: wasn't writting from his voice, it wasn't. I did decided that,
Speaker 6: But at the same time, I wanted to uh to
Speaker 6: give a sense of who he was without being, you know,
Speaker 6: overly dramatic about it, but at least to allow people
Speaker 6: to understand what it is, at least to be a nurse.
Speaker 6: Let's start there. So you know you're you're a nurse
Speaker 6: in a burn unit. You have a something called the
Speaker 6: rule of nines where you know that someone burned over
Speaker 6: x percentage of their body times nine, that's the percentage
Speaker 6: of that there plus the age. That's the percentage that
Speaker 6: they're going to die. So that the majority of people
Speaker 6: that come into your unit in these terrible situations, you're
Speaker 6: doing everything you can, They're in terrible pain, you're you're
Speaker 6: taking extraordinary measures, and they're going to die. So I
Speaker 6: wanted I want most people will never have to face that.
Speaker 6: I lived for a very short time in that reality.
Speaker 6: For for this, I actually started sadowing night nurses and
Speaker 6: burn units. And it was heart it was heartbreaking and
Speaker 6: and very difficult but I wanted I wanted that sort
Speaker 6: of first person perspective and that choice making what you do.
Speaker 6: But then ultimately, if you're going to be a serikiller,
Speaker 6: there's a very different uh choice pattern that happens every
Speaker 6: time you meet someone. There's a different drop down menu.
Speaker 6: Let's just you know, take it from a sort of
Speaker 6: a computer perspective, and the and the drop down menu
Speaker 6: isn't sort of you know, uh, you know, greet them,
Speaker 6: shun them, ignore them, uh you know, court them and
Speaker 6: the like. It also includes kill them. Because it was
Speaker 6: very casual. For for Charlie, it didn't really mean to
Speaker 6: him what it what it meant maybe to a lot
Speaker 6: of people. And interestingly enough, I think that's what we
Speaker 6: ask of our soldiers as well. It's so and and
Speaker 6: the fact is it's not a casual drop down menu.
Speaker 6: So to suggest it is a casual drop down menu
Speaker 6: and then treat it like it's not, which we might
Speaker 6: do with soldiers returning home, is to really miss it.
Speaker 6: So I I took it upon myself to put that
Speaker 6: drop down menu in my own in my own head,
Speaker 6: and and that actually that actually actually did screw me
Speaker 6: up for a while. So I had bail posted pretty
Speaker 6: pretty regularly on a distant case, just just so I
Speaker 6: knew that at any given moment, I could I could
Speaker 6: go over any line. And I walked around for a
Speaker 6: while with that, with that sensibility and and just to
Speaker 6: see what that was like. And I say it for
Speaker 6: a while, I mean for a couple of years probably
Speaker 6: actually now that I look back on it, and it
Speaker 6: actually it actually truths to me told I think it
Speaker 6: messed me up. It was it was. It was hard.
Speaker 6: I mean, I'm glad I went through it. And a
Speaker 6: lot of people and you know, anyone listening to this
Speaker 6: that uh you know actually you know went to war,
Speaker 6: did any of that stuff? I did not, you know,
Speaker 6: so you know, screw me. So you're absolutely right. But
Speaker 6: that was I did. I did my best with that
Speaker 6: and and that and and it was that was that
Speaker 6: was that was tough. I mean for me and I
Speaker 6: think for uh and for my relationships and for and
Speaker 6: for all that. But it was I think very for
Speaker 6: my understanding of that because it was because it's really
Speaker 6: about honestly, it's think about I mean, think about what
Speaker 6: what's how crazy that is to have to have uh,
Speaker 6: you know, shakes hands killed this person as being one
Speaker 6: of the options. I mean, it's it's sort of a
Speaker 6: it's a it's a it's a a video game option,
Speaker 6: you know, for every interaction. And yet this is exactly
Speaker 6: the the the reality for for this guy to make
Speaker 6: that casual and to sort of treat that as a
Speaker 6: casual thing for the book was it was good, and
Speaker 6: I'm and I'm glad, but I'm I'm hoping, I've I've
Speaker 6: gotten none of that, I guesse, I say, but yeah,
Speaker 6: I think I'll put to you this way at the
Speaker 6: very end, when I was really when I knew too much,
Speaker 6: and really I just needed to make the book happen,
Speaker 6: you know, because because ultimately what happens to a lot
Speaker 6: of people that know that this that research something this long,
Speaker 6: is you want to make a book that's ten thousand
Speaker 6: words or two millions words wrong. You want you know
Speaker 6: that it's it's a life, it's it's lives, it's all,
Speaker 6: it's the victims lives, it's everything. You want to do
Speaker 6: everything for this thing, and you realize, you know, ultimately
Speaker 6: it needs to fit between two covers, and it needs
Speaker 6: to fit into a pocket, and you just need to
Speaker 6: get out at the door and needs to be got,
Speaker 6: you know, uh at some you know, at some point,
Speaker 6: so you know, you know, right about when when when
Speaker 6: that when that was happening, and I was thinking, you
Speaker 6: know what, what to choose? Everybody is important, every every
Speaker 6: all these all these thoughts are important, all these victims
Speaker 6: aren't How do you? Uh? The Japanese tsunami happened and
Speaker 6: tens of thousands of people died, and it was terrific.
Speaker 6: And uh, I went as a journalist and went right
Speaker 6: into the middle of it and lived, you know, with
Speaker 6: with with with my camping gear, blew my back out
Speaker 6: carrying all my stuff, and moved in the middle of
Speaker 6: it with with some remarkable people, and just completely wiped
Speaker 6: out almost all those thoughts I just described to you
Speaker 6: in a way, I mean just you know, it was
Speaker 6: the same sort of thing like it was. It was
Speaker 6: a survival mentality, but it was I got I got
Speaker 6: this sort of small cyclical evil part of it out
Speaker 6: of my head, and I came and I, you know,
Speaker 6: I quickly wrote that story. And and then I came
Speaker 6: back and and just like took the book and and
Speaker 6: and and and finished it. And that was really really important.
Speaker 6: It was really really vital that I had that aspect
Speaker 6: of it. So yeah, this is I found it devastating,
Speaker 6: but ideally it's therapeutic and and I have a hope
Speaker 6: for it in the end, you know, which is actually
Speaker 6: still happening, because it looks like it's a it's a
Speaker 6: movie now, which is not. Yeah, which is not, by
Speaker 6: the way, what I'm I was going for. But you know,
Speaker 6: to the extent that there's a there's this, there's a
Speaker 6: social message and social social right. The social message, by
Speaker 6: the way, isn't isn't don't killing us and people the
Speaker 6: the the social message is uh, you know, uh uh
Speaker 6: is more like is more Nuremberg frank than that. It's uh,
Speaker 6: you know, don't don't you know, don't don't think you
Speaker 6: can you know, you know, make make a salary, right well,
Speaker 6: you know, don't think you can make a salary, uh,
Speaker 6: you know, guarding the concentration camp and not get called
Speaker 6: on it and h and and that's and that's where
Speaker 6: there are a lot of people that have done that,
Speaker 6: and that that I think might still come out. I'm
Speaker 6: hoping my my great hope now is that it is
Speaker 6: is that there will be that grand jury and those
Speaker 6: the technics are still waiting for it, and and right now,
Speaker 6: uh Lionskate and uh and there's a director. I'm hoping
Speaker 6: they were gonna announce it soon. Well, but you'll you'll
Speaker 6: know who I'm talking about are actually taking this honest
Speaker 6: as social cause, and I'm helping they. Uh, frankly, screw
Speaker 6: you know, screw screw those admins the way they at
Speaker 6: least as badly as Charlie got done.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, that's really what I saw from this
Speaker 7: book too, is that if you see this in a movie,
Speaker 7: would be the Aaron Brockovich again, the you know, the
Speaker 7: again somebody trying to fight a goliath in terms of
Speaker 7: these two cops looking at this and other people and
Speaker 7: victims again, victims, families, surviving family members of victims like this,
Speaker 7: and seeing that the administration looks more at the bottom line,
Speaker 7: covering up their own reputation, looking at the charity that's
Speaker 7: given to them, And that's the way they're looking at
Speaker 7: it completely, And it really does turn into a cover
Speaker 7: up when you have a lawyer, not even as bron said,
Speaker 7: the guy didn't even take any notes. He says, I
Speaker 7: wanted to punch the guy in the face. I want
Speaker 7: to thank you very much Charles for coming on and
Speaker 7: talking about The Good Nurse, A true story of medicine,
Speaker 7: madness and murder. For those that might want to contact you,
Speaker 7: continue this conversation or Facebook, give us how people might
Speaker 7: contact you if they are so inclined.
Speaker 6: Oh well, I'm Charles Graeber with that's a ae ber
Speaker 6: dot com and that's got all sorts of you know,
Speaker 6: contact information in there. But you can always find me
Speaker 6: and I always write back. And I really appreciate the
Speaker 6: fact that you know, this book's resonated, especially with nurses
Speaker 6: in this country. There there are three million of them,
Speaker 6: and honestly, if they all set up for this, we'd
Speaker 6: get a grand jury and you'd get those guys would
Speaker 6: be in jail. So so let me.
Speaker 7: Know, Yeah, absolutely tarnishes all the great work that nurses
Speaker 7: and doctors do. But just looking at the profession of
Speaker 7: nursing itself to all the great dedicated people and something
Speaker 7: like this is just a black mark in the entire
Speaker 7: industry itself. So yeah, I would see them definitely standing
Speaker 7: behind something like this and and rallying for uh, for
Speaker 7: the rights of these people that they profess to take
Speaker 7: care of. Every each and every day. So I want
Speaker 7: to thank you very much Charles for coming on and
Speaker 7: talking about the good nurse and you have yourself a
Speaker 7: great evening and hope to talk to you again in
Speaker 7: the near future.
Speaker 6: Thank you, Thank thanks man. I really appreciate it. You're
Speaker 6: you're you're you're a great and if you're that's wonderful.
Speaker 7: Thank you very much, Charles, good night, good night,