Charles Cullen 16 Year Killing Spree
If you caught CBS 60 Minutes this weekend, they ran the story of Charles Cullen, a critical care nurse who managed to kill his patients for over 16 years before being held accountable.
What is so disturbing is that hospitals were suspicious of him for years and fired him–only to let him go forward to another institution–over and over again. That’s right–because they didn’t want to attract attention to their hospital and face lawsuits. And as a result dozens and dozens of people were killed. Some estimate as many as several hundred.
Pretty sad when that trumps human life.
It’s a difficult story to watch knowing that.
Charles Cullen is a fascinating study of human behavior. He gives amazing clues to the questions asked of him in the 60 Minutes interview.
From that interview, I truly believe that Charles Cullen enjoyed killing his victims. He got pleasure out of it–he just couldn’t admit it. He did, however, admit to killing at least 40 people over the 16 years.
This is one man that can never be released into society again. Chilling.
I thought it was telling that he was trying to slice and dice the definition of serial killing.
I thought the same thing. He admits to the killings, but he wants to claim they were all mercy killings. I wonder if he has just a tiny sliver of a conscience that makes him want to rationalize his true reasons for the murders or he may enjoy playing mental games trying to shock other people, who he thinks are stupid and beneath him. He mostly looks and talks in a robotic way, but I could see anger and contempt in some of his expressions. If the truth were known, we would most likely find out that anger and contempt is just about 95% of his emotions.
I don’t believe he has a conscience. I don’t believe you can kill hundreds of people (believed to have) and not have a conscience. He will never admit to how many people he’s killed.
It’s never their fault. It’s more likely that he’s playing the reporter, using whatever he can to his advantage. Psychopaths have emotions; they are not void of them or limited to just a few. They just don’t have emotions for other people.
I heard one psychologist explain that the emotions of psychopaths in regard to other people are very shallow. They may feel a little bit of caring for other’s, but the emotions pass very quickly. When measured against a normal person’s ability to feel empathy or sympathy, their emotions rate very low. Apparently, their feelings for anger, contempt, and rage rates very high.
I think of all these parents who kill their children. They kill their children, but they do little things to make themselves feel that they are not so bad. They do things like covering them with their favorite blanket and putting a favorite toy next to them. They may visit their hidden bodies on their birthdays, so they can say to themselves, ‘See, I’m not so bad.’ I think most people want to think they are good.
I’m no face-reader, but it looked like he was alight with joy & excitement in talking about his crimes, but doing his best to try & hide it, to try and seem matter-of-fact. His eyes sparkled a bit much when giving some of those details, gave me chills. (Edit: I am factoring in his general flat affect—I mean he was ‘alight’ for a fairly flat person. It was the eyes.)
I find it interesting also how much he loves to pounce on the fact that it’s ALL the hospitals’ fault, every one that employed him. While they are ALSO culpable if they knew, this man is so delusional as to try and focus the interviewer on an argument of, ‘Well nobody stopped me. Their fault.’ As if his actions were only a tiny part of it.
I would have to earn Steve Kroft money to sit and tolerate that CREEP.
In reply, “I find it interesting also how much he loves to pounce on the fact that it’s ALL the hospitals’ fault…”
Excellent point. I interview and hire people for a living. One of the more telling questions I can ask is, “tell me about the last time you made a mistake at work”. If someone says they never made a mistake, or (like this person, as Lisabeth Borden points out so well) blames everyone else, that is one of the largest red flags possible. Do NOT associate or hire or do business with those types of people. I’m not saying they are necessarily criminals like this guy, but they are walking trouble, and it’s just a matter of time.
It’s truly amazing what can be discerned from a very intelligent and well thought out question – and then watching the reaction very closely. As Yogi Berra said, I can observe a lot by just watching 🙂 The true gold is learning more and more what to watch for!
i found your question about when was the last time you made a mistake?” very interesting. What would be the correct anwser for that?
personally I had a hard time thinking of when was the last time I made a mistake at work. Not because I don’t make mistakes, but I think I move on.Learn from them and move on.
But i can;t think of a concrete “mistake” I know of times when i didn’t meet my goals. But that was not a mistake. It’s more I still have things to learn to better my work. What would you define as a mistake?
Hi Jeff,
This is pretty much like it sounds. A mistake is a mistake. For example, right now (today) I’ll be working through some billing errors I made and I’m working to correct. Earlier this week I had to end an employee’s assignment after a couple of days because I misread part of their documentation. Yesterday I started a guy working thinking that’s what the customer wanted, but that was not correct, so he won’t actually start until next week. All of these are just in the last couple of days and there are more that I made. People’s mistakes usually aren’t this big (nor are mine!), but I don’t think anyone who has worked any length of time has zero mistakes, either.
I’d much rather hire someone that can learn from mistakes than someone that says they never made one. Virtually every customer I’ve placed people with (many of them Fortune 500) are the same way.
One of the very best ways I’ve found for me to improve my work is to recognize and acknowledge mistakes. More to the point, people like Charles Cullen who think they never make any mistakes (including blaming others for their own actions, as he apparently did), are walking red flags. Many times the ones who refuse to acknowledge mistakes are the ones who make the biggest ones of all – not as bad Charles Cullen but you get the idea – even if they tell me they don’t think they ever did anything wrong.
Does this help?
This is especially useful in an interview situation where there’s an assumption that acknowledging a mistake will disqualify a person from being hired for the job (plus, looking for a job in itself typically makes it a higher stakes situation). It’s that baseline assumption and the subsequent willingness to lie or pretend reality away that makes the person a liability to the company. A person who doesn’t assume that making a mistake will mean they’d be disqualified for the job is someone who can be taught or corrected easily. And a person who can recognize that they make mistakes is usually someone who will learn to make extra efforts to avoid making them again.
For example, I tend to forget small, irregular tasks, both at work and in my personal life at home, and I tend to be really bad at keeping track of time and dates, resulting in semi-frequent mistakes being made in those areas. So to compensate for that, I keep a task list for important tasks, and schedule them with an alarm in my calendar when they have deadlines.
If I were instead to pretend that I didn’t make those mistakes, then I would have no incentive to compensate for them, and would make them over and over again continually. It’s easy to see how a problem like that would play out in an employment situation.
In my case, I also compensate for those shortcomings by looking for work where those areas won’t be primary features of the job I’ll be doing, or in the case of my working as a chauffeur in the past, a job where there are built-in safeguards designed to prevent those mistakes at multiple points.
Hi Keith,
Really good reply – you’re hired 🙂 OK, just kidding, but the kind of traits you show in your reply are the kind shown by employees who really care about their work, who are always trying to improve in one way or another, who are usually passionate about their work, and typically outperform the people who say they don’t make any mistakes at all.
Your idea of doing work where your mistakes have built in safeguards is brilliant – play to your strengths. Don’t try to be Michael Jordan in a White Sox jersey, put on #23 and show us how it’s done 🙂 More people would be extremely well served if they did what you do!
thank you all for your rich responses. Greatly appreciated
Oops, I guess my reply to Russ below should’ve been in reply to you, Jeff.
I didn’t see this, but I will watch it, tonight. It sounds interesting and informative. I always wonder what events or biology made these monsters. Some of them come from really good families, and all of the other children in the family turns out O.K.???
The thought of a critical care nurse, trained to help people who are weak and vulnerable, serially killing his patients is absolutely terrifying. Any of us could have the misfortune of being his patient/victim. Scary
A normal person could never make sense out of this man’s sick reasoning. He definitely kept the interview under tight control. He answered the questions he wanted to answer, and other questions he stalled and made little sense to keep from answering. Even in court he controlled the grieving families by refusing to look at them. I think he knew he was causing them more grief by not letting them have the satisfaction of knowing their words were even heard. They were deprived of even that little bit of closure.
It was said that he apologized during Kroft’s interview for what he did, but he didn’t know if he would have stopped the killing. I didn’t hear an apology. His words could have meant that he was sorry that he got caught. He had to get some kind of satisfaction to do this interview, just the same as what he got from the murders. The suggestion on the show may have been right. They said he wanted to play God and control.
His rationing that he couldn’t admit to what he was doing, because he would lose everything,
showed his interest was completely about what was good for him. I don’t think I have ever seen such dead, lifeless eyes on any human before. He has no soul and judging from his younger pictures, he never had a soul. It was hard for me to even look at him.
I think the author in one of the web extras hit on something– he said Cullen saw himself not being caught as a kind of justification to keep killing.
I also wonder if another aspect of why he did it wasn’t as a kind of self-medication– a way of trying to feel what he himself couldn’t by getting the patients he killed to feel it for him and watching it happen. A kind of morbid fascination, and a way of patching himself with their experiences, and then it became a kind of addiction, like a nicotine craving or something that he had to keep refilling over and over again.
Libby Munro– that is a scary thought isn’t it?
I’ve never had to stay in a hospital other than an hour or two in the ER a couple of times, but I can tell you this much… if I ever do have to, I can assure you that if anyone gives me the creeps or a visceral negative vibe, I will in no uncertain terms insist that they not be allowed anywhere near me or my IVs or any medications I’m given, and that everyone on the medical staff know it.
I think we all hope we can recognize danger, but in hospitals you may not be in a condition to do anything about it. In April after my surgery, I was wheeled into post-op unconscious. When I woke up, I was in extreme pain (minor problem with the cath) and after being vocal and trying to get out of bed because of it and because I was confused, I was held down (for my safety) and suddenly went out again. I don’t know if I was sedated or still under the affects of surgery. I know in my confusion I cause an uproar and attracted attention and I think that really pissed the after-care nurse off.
When I woke the second time, I was very sick and the nurse threw — yes threw– a vomit catcher at me and walked away. She looked at me scathingly and I so out of it, I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t able to call my husband to get up to me..I couldn’t even focus clearly. I was going in and out. I went out again and woke 3 hours later. I wondered if she really dosed me. It was totally possible. I will never know!! The nurse finally allowed my husband to see me and he was worried sick! In those 3 hours, I was extremely vulnerable.She could have easily caused me harm. I filed a complaint but will never know what becomes of her. She should never practice medicine.
As soon as I set my eyes on my husband, I told him in no uncertain terms the woman was scary and evil and not to leave me. I told him to get her name too and he did. I told everyone who came near me after I was away from her. I still get the chills from her.
My very limited understanding is that you as a patient are allowed to file a complaint with the state. Here is a list of links to boards of nursing in all 50 states from which people can file complaints:
https://www.ncsbn.org/contactbon.htm
Thanks for that info, Russ!
I think what you did in your situation is just what I would do in that situation. We might not be in a condition to recognize trouble a lot of the time when we’re in a hospital, or in a condition to be able to do anything about it, but when we are, we should. At the very least, in a case like this one, it would establish the pattern and a lot more people would have to deliberately ignore it, or when an investigation does finally take place, it’s a lot easier to narrow down the suspects.
Wow. That is scary to hear about. I wouldn’t be surprised at all that she put you out that long on purpose.
Thomas Sheridan has written a couple of books about recognizing psychopaths, and he mentioned a weird movement they make with their eyes – flitting to the side. I noticed that Cullen made those strange eye movements. He feels they make those eye movements because psychopaths are predators constantly on the prowl ,surveying their environment.
Hmm. That sure doesn’t bode well for what people think about me! My eyes have that weird movement. I’ve developed a habit of scanning everything around me from years of working as a sighted guide for a blind woman, and my eyes are constantly darting around. I often wonder if people think I’m crazy when I’m unable to hold their gaze as I habitually look for something low hanging or that could be tripped over. LOL