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

until the sky was inky with morning. He brushed his teeth, spitting red into the sink, drove to hand-deliver a fat stack of handwritten motions. Then he went to see George, the court-appointed family services counselor who would determine Cullen’s future with his children.
    Charlie very much wanted to keep his kids, especially now. His young children were the unquestioning fans of a certain select version of himself. They were dependents, just like the patients under his care in the ICU. He believed that in time he might actually become the man that his children imagined him to be: A caring father. A good friend. A compassionate caregiver. Some people saw him that way. Some of his fellow nurses saw him that way. His mother had seen him this way. Adrianne had, once, and so had Michelle. Maybe, he thought, if he kept his kids, he could make them love him; they’d seen him this way, too. If Charlie was satisfied by their attentions, he might not be willing to risk losing them again. Maybe he’d have no reason to keep dosing patients at the hospital, such as Ms. Natoli. Charlie would be the good father and the good nurse, an outcome he believed George and the family court should want. George’s recommendations held the key to this potential future, and so Charlie was always sober for their mandatory interviews.
    Of course, George had no idea that Charlie was killing people. But he was very much aware that Charlie was regularly attempting to kill himself, or at least making grand gestures at it. George noted in Cullen’s file that suicide was “the most severe and ultimate form of abuse/neglect, rejection, and abandonment one could inflict on one’s children.” Later that weekAdrianne’s lawyer used the report in family court. Combined with a host of other evidence regarding Charlie’s drinking, the police calls, and Adrianne’s concerns that if Charlie was left alone with their daughters, he would “impulsively take his life and theirs.” Charlie had no standing in the courtroom. The only arena in which he still had gravitas was in the hospital.

24
    September 2002
    T he recruitment flyer was a high-quality mass-marketing mailer, a full-color appeal for qualified nurses. Charlie studied the brochure over the kitchen sink, turning it over in his hand. “Join the Team!” it said. Should he? His life’s path had been shaped by doors that opened at just the right time, fate showing him the downhill path. Charlie didn’t know Somerset Medical Center, or Somerset County, New Jersey, but it was obvious that after five medical centers 1 in less than four years, his name was burned in Pennsylvania. 2 He’d had problems in New Jersey, too, but it had been four years since he’d worked there, and New Jersey was a big state. 3 Although, Somerset County was only a fifty-minute drive from the house he’d been raised in, socially and economically, it was as far as Charles Cullen could hope to venture from his West Orange roots.

    S omerset was one of the oldest and richest counties in the United States, 4 a fertile farming settlement set between wooded hills and the overgrand country estates favored by financiers and industrialists. 5 John Dryden, a founder of Prudential Insurance, built his Versailles-like mansion in Bernardsville in the 1880s; a generation later, Brooke Kuser—soon to become Brooke Astor—would live in a manor called Denbrooke. In the boom years following the Civil War, these were the wealthiest citizens of the wealthiest nation on earth, and they could have anything they wanted. In 1898, what they wanted was a hospital.
    One death had done it, that of a sixteen-year-old boy with a blow to the head. Even in 1898, this was a far-from-fatal condition; drilling holes in the skull to relieve the pressure was a simple surgical procedure older thanthe Lenape arrowheads that still littered the Raritan River clay. But during the long wagon journey to Newark, the boy’s traumatized brain continued to swell like