The Good Nurse

A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

By: Charles Graeber

Narrated by: Will Collyer

Length: 11 hrs and 35 mins

Publisher's summary

Coming to Netflix this fall starring Eddie Redmayne and Jessica Chastain⁠—a “stunning book...that should and does bring to mind In Cold Blood” and takes you inside the mind of America's most prolific serial killer, whose 16-year long "nursing" career left as many as 400 dead. (New York Times)

After his December 2003 arrest, registered nurse Charlie Cullen was quickly dubbed "The Angel of Death" by the media. But Cullen was no mercy killer, nor was he a simple monster. He was a favorite son, husband, beloved father, best friend, and celebrated caregiver. Implicated in the deaths of as many as 300 patients, he was also perhaps the most prolific serial killer in American history.

Cullen's murderous career in the world's most trusted profession spanned sixteen years and nine hospitals across New Jersey and Pennsylvania. 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. Now, in a riveting piece of investigative journalism nearly ten years in the making, journalist Charles Graeber presents the whole story for the first time. Based on hundreds of pages of previously unseen police records, interviews, wire-tap recordings and videotapes, as well as exclusive jailhouse conversations with Cullen himself and the confidential informant who helped bring him down, The Good Nurse weaves an urgent, terrifying tale of murder, friendship, and betrayal.

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.

In the tradition of In Cold Blood, The Good Nurse does more than chronicle Cullen's deadly career and the breathless efforts to stop him; it paints an incredibly vivid portrait of madness and offers a penetrating look inside America's medical system. Harrowing and irresistibly paced, this book will make you look at medicine, hospitals, and the people who work in them, in an entirely different way.

©2013 Charles Graeber (P)2013 Hachette Audio

He's got to get the medical terms correct!

The reader did a great job except when it came to speaking medical terms, especially the short version for digoxin. It could have been corrected SO easily.

Interesting murder story

I'm not done with this book yet, so I may have to come back and edit. Basically, it's a true crime story of a nurse who murdered many people in the course of his work in critical care hospital units. I find it interesting, as a nurse myself, to hear of how the hospitals covered up for the murderer because they didn't want a murder case to sully their hospital's reputation. Chilling!
The thing that is hardest for me to listen to is the constant mispronunciation of the medical nickname for "digoxin." The "G" in "digoxin" is pronounced the same way as the "G" in "digital." Medical professionals often shorten the name of this common drug to "dig" but it is pronounced with the same "G" sound as in "digoxin" or "digital," not a hard "G" as though you're talking about digging a hole. The narrator did a great job with the names of so many drugs in the story, but not the one that is spoken of the most. It's very distracting!

Interesting

Charles Graeber does a great job of profiling this disturbed person. I felt like I really knew him and what he was doing from his perspective and from the perspective of the investigators. I just wanted him to get caught already! It drags out just a tiny bit at the end, but overall captivating.

Gripping story, poor execution

I have been a registered nurse for over 50 years . Over the course of my career, I have seen administrations circle the wagons to protect themselves and their organizations from litigation and negative public opinion. However, the extent to which these entities conspired to not only shield themselves but to allow a killer to move from hospital to hospital continuing with his murderous rampage is unfathomable. All involved have blood on their hands. My thanks to the author for shining a light on this aberration . I do also need to add that the narrator repeatedly and annoyingly mispronounced the shortened version of Digoxin as "dig".All nurses pronounce this as "Dig "with a soft G.

The Good Nurse

Fascinating story, though a little tedious. Could have been edited to a shorter length. But a worthwhile listen.

Un-bleeping-believable!

Fascinating story; what impacted me the most about the events was how so many people who were supposed to be in charge, and who had nagging doubts, just looked the other way. It’s nothing short of scandalous! Like pedophile-priests being shuffled to other parishes.

The “not in my back yard” motivation left hundreds of innocent people dead. It’s mind blogging.

fabulous book

loved listening to this story, it's an easy listen on hot summer days in middle Tennessee.

Gripping story

This was a well written book about a true story that affected many families. This book of a very troubled dangerous man working in a profession that is supposed to keep patients safe.

Skip to the middle

First half of the book is very repetitive, and both the story and the narrator improve in the second half.

And Evil Management Unpunished

When we think of serial killers, we think of stalkers who enjoy tormenting their victims and watching them die. We think of killers who chop their victims up and enjoy the torture, maybe even eat parts of them. You probably don’t think of a nurse, a male nurse, who always arrives to work early, who is happy to take the night shifts that no one else wants, who is always willing to help other nurses, reducing their load, who seems to be such a gentle, and caring man. He didn’t just do the minimum required, but spent hours looking up details of their illnesses and various medications and treatments. He was greatly appreciated by his coworkers, but as a good nurse, not as a friend. He was bland and uncommunicative. He had few friends.That was Charles Cullen. 

And yet, as far as we know, he was America’s most prolific serial killer, maybe the world. No one, not even Charles, knows the true number but some estimates are more than 400, over a period of 16 years, at 9 different hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. 

We learn that Charles had a very difficult childhood and was abused. We learn that he made more than 20 suicide attempts, but in each one, it was clear that he didn’t really want to die. He needed the attention and the sense of control, knowing that he could do it if he wanted to. We know that he chose his victims at random, using various drugs at different times, sometimes insulin, sometimes digoxin, sometimes a cocktail of different drugs. When he was arrested in 2003, the evidence was circumstantial and police hoped he would confess, but he wouldn’t. 

But, this book is not written to give notoriety to a killer. At the end, you still feel you don’t know Charles Cullen. What gets your attention in the book is how he got away with it so long. It’s not that there were no suspicions, which is why he worked at so many hospitals. There was none who were willing to risk their reputations or the lawsuits of victims’ families. They were satisfied to let him go. 

Most of us have been in the hospital before. We’ve had many different nurses, changing from day to day and shift to shift. If the nurse says that we need this shot, or this medication, or an IV, we trust them. That is one of the chilling things about this book. But, what is more chilling is how the administration and the risk management supervisor focused more on looking for some natural explanation instead of the lab test right in front of them that showed a huge amount of some medication in the blood with no explanation of how it could have gotten there. And, we read of how one hospital, when the police began to investigate, blatantly covered up the existence of records. The “madness” in the book’s title is not just Charles Cullen, but the system itself. 

And, in this is also the story of a couple of detectives whose experience was in “traditional” murders, with guns, knives, strangling, etc. They had no experience in medicine and at first could not even comprehend why they were being assigned an investigation into the death of an elderly man who was in critical care with serious health problems. But, they stuck with it and pushed to follow up every lead they had. And, there was Charles’ best friend, who would not be cowed by the hospital, but who also could not believe that Charles could really kill anyone. She did know that the hospital was covering up something and she was willing to help. 

I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone expecting a hospital stay and maybe it is not what I should have read at this time of Covid-19 risk. But, once I started it, it was hard to put down. It was well researched and well written. I appreciated that it was not written in such a way as to give the killer notoriety, though it did show him as more complicated than just evil. And, I’ll share one spoiler that will make it easier to want to read this and that is that the laws governing hospitals’ responsibility have been rewritten in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and that similar laws have been adopted in most states. But, no criminal charges were brought against any persons involved other than Charles Cullen. There were many accessories to murder who went unpunished. And that is another sad part of this book.