The idea was to take a look at Charles Cullen’s old personnel files, hope to find something, anything, about the guy. It was a fishing expedition, blind information gathering, but that’s how investigations work. He didn’t figure there was much chance of a hospital spilling its guts to a homicide detective, not when their former employee was the suspect; call up the HR department, and next thing you know you’d be transferred to a lawyer. Anything a hospital didn’t want Tim to see, that was exactly what he was looking for.
Tim had called in a favor, or tried to, looking for a back door. He’d asked a former cop who’d retired to Saint Barnabas security to pull files, whatever the medical center had on Charles Cullen, briefing the guy about the investigation in the process. Cop to cop was usually better than a subpoena, though Tim wasn’t sure if the rule still applied when one of the cops was now making solid six figures for the corporation. The front desk had a manila envelope waiting with his name on it. Tim waited until he was back behind his desk with a coffee to flip through the twenty-two-page file, finding copies of Cullen’s CPR license, W-4, and vaccination records. The rest consisted of fragments of medical charts with names blacked out, and handwritten reports on mimeographed Unusual Occurrence Forms. He read a few, squinting at the handwriting before picking up the stack and walking it down to Danny’s office.
He flopped the file on Danny’s desk. “You see these?”
Danny flipped through. “Huh.”
“Yeah, huh,” Tim said.
Danny got to the last page and started again at the beginning. “Write-ups, looks like.”
“Well, yeah,” Tim said. “Pieces of them, anyway. Who the hell does their filing?”
The file seemed oddly incomplete, fragmentary even—but then, it was something of a surprise that they had any records at all, over a decade later. The takeaway was that something had clearly gone down with Charles Cullen at Saint Barnabas Medical Center. But the file was short on the sort of details that make sense, or a criminal case.
It didn’t look like much, even if they could read the handwriting and decipher the medical shorthand. The paperwork made no mention of the internal investigations1 that had framed Cullen’s final year at Saint Barnabas.2 But within the photocopied scrawl were a half-dozen reports for when Charlie hadn’t properly signed out a drug, withheld prescribed medication, hung an unprescribed IV, repeatedly shut down a critical patient’s respiratory vents or written orders for unprescribed insulin.3 Though they couldn’t see it, and Saint Barnabas surely hadn’t realized it, Charles Cullen had, in effect, been caught in the act, at the hospital where his killing career had started. But Cullen’s write-ups were not sufficient to be reported as nurse-practice issues to the State Nursing Board or the Department of Health and Senior Services. Cullen had simply been cleaned from their system. A few years later the hospital underwent renovations, and the paperwork for the investigation, the evidence bags with tainted IVs, a couple file drawers’ worth of notes—all that got cleaned out, too. Even the metal filing cabinet was removed. The only indication that a criminal investigation had ever existed was now a rust outline on linoleum.
Danny Baldwin drove back out to Livingston the next morning. The HR department directed him upstairs to the office of Ms. Algretta Hatcher, the nurse recruiter for Medical Center Health Care Services, the wholly owned staffing agency for Saint Barnabas.4 Hatcher didn’t know Charles Cullen personally, but she could illuminate some of the nursing-practice issues. Several were serious; in a handwritten note dated March 14, 1991, one supervisor wrote about a “deep concern re: Charles’ attitude toward making this dual medication error.” She felt that Cullen was “not at all concerned re: the error, or the welfare of the patient.”
Danny asked Hatcher to define “dual medication error”—did that mean giving a patient twice the amount of a drug as was prescribed?5 Ms. Hatcher didn’t know, and there was no further mention of it in the file. Danny had a skeleton, but no meat. Ms. Hatcher didn’t know where the rest of the file had gone, but she guessed it had been destroyed. Danny didn’t think Hatcher was lying; the paperwork was fifteen years old. But why save some pieces and not others?
According to the state records, Cullen had moved from Saint Barnabas to a job at Warren Hospital in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. Tim called the Warren HR secretary and left a message. The callback came later that afternoon from a senior Warren administrator. Warren Hospital could not locate Mr. Cullen’s records. Tim promised them a subpoena and slammed the phone. An hour later, a Warren lawyer called back with the information that Charles Cullen’s personnel file had been destroyed. Meanwhile, one office down, Danny was on the phone with Hunterdon Hospital, getting their HR and another dead end. Minutes later, Hunterdon confirmed it by fax.
“Hunterdon says they store the files with an archiving company,” Danny said. “And the archiving company can’t find Cullen’s personnel file.”
“No kidding,” Tim said. He tossed his pen on his desk and leaned back in his chair. “So they destroyed it?”
“They can’t find it, is what they say,” Danny said. “Cullen’s file is just lost.”
“Lost,” Tim said. “I know the feeling. What kind of happy horseshit is this?”
They had one more hospital on their New Jersey list: Morristown Memorial. Tim called, asking for background on a former employee; this time, he didn’t mention anything about a homicide investigation, and Morristown didn’t say they’d lost or destroyed Cullen’s personnel file. He’d take the trip north to pick up the paperwork, then he and Danny would swing over to talk to the Somerset Medical Center lawyers.
Somerset Medical Center’s internal investigation was being handled by Paul Nittoly, one of the lawyers they’d met at the briefing. Nittoly’s firm had been brought in by the Somerset Medical Center administration on September 19, nearly a month after the insulin incident with Patient 5, Francis Agoada, and nearly a week before Somerset reported that incident to the Department of Health.6 Tim didn’t know Nittoly, except that before hanging his shingle with the Drinker Biddle and Reath law firm, the guy had been an assistant prosecutor in Essex County. The Newark PO pedigree told him Nittoly was probably smart and a scrapper, familiar with what homicide detectives needed to make a case. Braun and Baldwin hoped the former AP would be his ace in the hole, especially with the background they’d already dug up on Charles Cullen.
Nittoly met the detectives at his secretary’s desk: midfifties, broad-featured, graying in that distinguished way money guys do, the good dark suit with an Easter-egg tie. Danny clocked the clothes down to the wingtips as Nittoly led them back to an office outfitted with the usual leather-bound tomes and introduced them to his private investigator, a hulking guy named Rocco E. Fushetto. Then Nittoly settled in behind a desk while Rocco stood to the side, arms tight across his chest.
Nittoly’s notes, interviews, recordings, and contact master list for the CCU staff would represent a jump start on the investigation and keep the detectives from wasting their time covering old ground. The Somerset Medical investigation had spanned five months; Tim figured they’d have a heart-to-heart on the details of the five-month investigation, free of the medical mumbo jumbo. He figured he’d be lugging back file boxes of raw data.
But as Tim Braun would later remember it,7 Nittoly seemed determined to keep the meeting brief. He said that he and his private investigator, Rocco, had investigated the occurrences but had not identified the person responsible. They hadn’t generated any final reports, Nittoly told them, and they had failed to reach any definite conclusions. As soon as they realized they had a police matter, they contacted the Prosecutor’s Office.
“How about your interviews with the nurses, then?” Tim said. “Anything at all would be helpful.”
“We didn’t generate any type of report,” Nittoly said.
“Do you have the tapes, or—”
Nittoly shook his head. “These were informal sessions,” he said. “We didn’t record anything.”
“Okay, just anything,” Tim said. “A legal pad, rough notes on the investigation, or—”
“We didn’t take any notes,” Nittoly said.
Tim blinked. “No notes.” He and Danny exchanged a look.
“We didn’t really write anything down,” Nittoly said.
“How about names and contact info?” Danny said. “For the staff. You know, so we don’t trample the same ground.”
Nittoly looked over at Rocco. “Sorry. We’ve already given you everything we have. You got the package?”
“Yeah,” Tim said. The four pages. They got it.
“About that memo,” Danny said. “There’s a nurse mentioned, a nurse Charles Cullen. You speak to him?”
“He was one of the nurses we interviewed on the unit,” Nittoly said.
“Anything special, or—”
“Nothing comes to mind,” Nittoly said. “But I remember he was kind of a strange guy.”
“An odd duck,” Rocco said.
“Okay, okay,” Tim said. “An odd duck.”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t write anything down when you talked to this nurse?”
“No,” Nittoly said. “Sorry.”
Tim was trying to keep it cool but his mind kept screaming the same question: What kind of a lawyer doesn’t write stuff down? Tim thought about asking him. Then he thought about punching him. Then he thought about the parking lot.
Nittoly started to turn the questions around, asked if the detectives had any leads yet, anything off background, but Tim and Danny weren’t playing. Five minutes later, they were done. Tim waited until they were back on the highway before he let loose and smacked the steering wheel. “Okay,” he said. “Wanna tell me, what the fuck was that happy horseshit?”
“It’s bullshit, what it is,” Danny said. Everything ends up on paper in an investigation. Detectives knew that, lawyers—especially former prosecutors—knew that, too. There were printouts, records, memos, date books. You make lists, you make notes in interviews—at the very least, you’ve got names and phone numbers on a piece of paper, so you know who to talk to. A five-month investigation, six suspicious deaths, and a unit’s worth of nurses, and the guy came out without so much as a doodle on a legal pad?
“And these are lawyers,” Tim said. He was driving hard, flashing cars out of the fast lane. “What else are they good for, except making paper? How did they even do the billing?”
“Maybe they just don’t wanna look stupid,” Danny said. “Show a couple detectives how bad they fucked this thing up.”
Tim could imagine it—Rocco, the private investigator, looking through those medical charts, probably making as little sense of it as they did. It was a nice picture, but it didn’t change the facts.
They’d given them nothing but a memo and a name: Charles Cullen. An “odd duck,” who wasn’t a suspect. A guy with red flags in his past. Danny sat, watching the highway, wondering why they’d given them that, if they didn’t have anything else.