The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder Read Online Free PDF Page A

the wake of her domestic-violence call to the police, formed the core arguments in her request for full custody of their children. The polygraph was Charlie’s idea. Arrangements were made on June 18, two months after Charlie was released from Greystone. According to the machine, Charlie passed the test; he was telling the truth. But this was only a small victory within the bizarre war he had been waging in the courtroom, and twelve days later Adrianne was granted a final restraining order against her husband.
    If the divorce proceedings in the Warren County family court system were not going well for Charlie, neither was his case in the Northampton County Court of Common Pleas. Charlie had been charged with stalking, breaking and entering, and trespass and harassment. This was a criminal situation, far more complicated than his divorce, and pursued by an aggressive and intimidating government prosecutor. Charlie had initially decided to represent himself but quickly realized that he was in over his head.
    Charlie needed to demonstrate financial need in order to qualify for a public defender. But while his application listed his necessary outside expenses, such as $1,460 a month in child support, psychological counseling fees, and credit card minimums, he neglected to list his most basic personal, day-to-day living expenses such as rent and food. It wasn’t a chance oversight—the droll expenses of his physical sustenance simply were not the needs that mattered. Charlie did not list them, because they did not exist for him. He was flat broke, but his net income appeared too healthy for the court, and his application for public counsel was denied. Now Charlie needed to pay for a defense lawyer, too, putting him further into debt. 2 He picked one from the yellow pages and paid the retainer. The relationship lasted three days before the lawyer quit, claiming that Charles Cullen was “too difficult” a personality to represent as a client. With no outlet to vent his frustrations in the courtroom, Charlie directed his rage against his former lawyer instead. He wrote long, ranting letters to the court, comparing the legal profession to his own. Would a nurse simply walk out on a patient? he asked. No, he would not. Why not? It was unethical, and therefore unprofessional. The venting didn’t improve his situation. Now he had no choice but to represent himself.
    Charlie was nearly incoherent in court, and he knew it. On August 10, he gave up and simply pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of harassment and defiant trespass. He was given a fine and probation but no jail time. He was free to go home, where he tried suicide again, this time with pills and wine, driving himself to Warren Hospital and admitting himself to the emergency room. The familiar combination of his own willful actions and his resulting helplessness relieved some of the stress, like a sneeze or a compulsion acted upon, but the relief was short-lived, and the next evening Charlie was released to drive back home in the fog.
    The basement apartment was oddly cool, even in August. The onlysound was the soft tchuckk, tchuckk, tchuckk of the stove clock, counting the seconds. Michelle had a phone, and he knew where she lived, but using either was a violation of his probation. He had been squashed and silenced, but still needed to speak. He was clicking in time with the clock again, teeth edges together, tchuckk. tchuckk . Winking one eye then the other, watching the wine bottles in their parallax dance, left, right, his elbows hard on the kitchen Formica as he put the words down on paper for the judge.
    “Their was a sexual intamate [ sic ] relationship between Michelle Tomlinson and myself,” 3 he wrote. This judge didn’t see him, not as Charlie wanted to be seen. But Charlie had seen judges. They had been his patients in the Saint Barnabas Burn Center—fragile men stripped of their robes, reduced to probabilities, breathing by the grace of a machine. He wrote