Killer on Call

Why no one stopped the Angel of Death.

"He Stuck Me!"

Helen Dean was one of those lucky people who had managed to grow old gracefully. At 91 she was still active in the Eastern Star order, a sister group to the Masons. She was alert, quick to laugh, and looked much younger than her years. "She didn't have a lot of wrinkles," says her niece Sharon Jones.

In late August 1993, she was enjoying a smooth recovery from colon surgery at Warren Hospital in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, when a thin, sharp-featured male nurse entered her room. The nurse told Helen's son Larry to leave; when he finished his work and Larry returned a few minutes later, Helen angrily announced, "He stuck me!"

Larry thought that was odd, as his mother wasn't scheduled to receive any medications. Strange, too, was the location of the shot -- on her inner thigh, where it was very hard to see. Just to be certain, Larry whipped out his Swiss Army knife and trained the magnifying glass on the spot. Sure enough, there was a tiny puncture wound in the skin. Later that day, the same nurse came in to clear dishes. "That's the man who stuck me!" Helen said again. Larry told his mother's doctors and other nurses, but beyond questioning some hospital staffers, they did nothing.

The next day, Helen began vomiting inexplicably, delaying by several hours her discharge to a nursing home, where she was to receive physical therapy before going home. It came as a tremendous shock to her relatives when she died of heart failure that afternoon.

That night, Helen's son called the local prosecutor and told him that she'd been murdered. He had a suspect in mind. It was the male nurse who gave Helen the mysterious injection, and he knew his name -- Charles Cullen.

Sharon Jones had remembered the nurse's name because Helen Dean's middle name happened to be Cullen. But not much else about Charlie Cullen stood out. An emotionally withdrawn man who could barely bring himself to converse with his own wife, Cullen had hidden in plain sight for years -- blending in and getting by, despite a history of bizarre behavior.

Cullen was born in 1960 in West Orange, New Jersey, a densely populated blue-collar enclave of double-decker houses and winding streets. He was the youngest of eight kids -- five of them girls -- in a tight-knit Roman Catholic household that included his parents -- Florence and bus driver Edmond -- and an aunt who was a social worker. There might have been more children, but when Charlie was almost seven months old, his father died of an undisclosed illness, at age 56.

Growing up without a father in a large family consisting mainly of women, Charlie developed into an awkward kid who kept to himself. When neighbors can place him, they vaguely recall a boy who didn't have much to say. Robert Hull remembered that Cullen seldom responded with anything more than a perfunctory "fine" when asked how he was doing. In fact, things weren't so fine. When Charlie was 17, his mother was killed in a car accident.

Exactly how Cullen handled the loss of his second parent is unclear -- but soon afterward he joined the Navy, serving as a technician for ballistic missiles on the Woodrow Wilson, a nuclear submarine.

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