The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

Now, in a riveting piece of literary investigative journalism nearly ten years in the making, award winning journalist Charles Graeber presents an exclusive and terrifying tale of murder, friendship and betrayal, based on hundreds of pages of previously unseen police records, interviews, wire-tap recordings and videotapes, as well as years of exclusive jailhouse conversations with both Cullen and the confidential informant who helped bring him down.

Cullen's murderous career in the world's most trusted profession spanned sixteen years and nine hospitals across New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Amazingly, Cullen was repeatedly fired or allowed to quit, but always managed to keep good references and find new work, and victims. When, in March of 2006, Charles Cullen was marched from his final sentencing in an Allentown, Pennsylvania, courthouse into a waiting police van, it seemed certain that the chilling secrets of his life, career, and capture would disappear with him. Cullen will spend the rest of his life in prison; the administrators who passed him from hospital to hospital for 16 years got raises and promotions. 

Graeber's portrait of Cullen depicts a surprisingly intelligent and complicated young man whose promising career was overwhelmed by his compulsion to kill, and whose shy demeanor masked a twisted interior life hidden even to his family and friends. Were it not for the hardboiled, unrelenting work of two former Newark homicide detectives racing to put together the pieces of Cullen's professional past, and a fellow nurse willing to put everything at risk, including her job and the safety of her children, there's no telling how many more lives could have been lost.