Charles Cullen was born in New Jersey in 1960. He claimed to have had a very unhappy childhood, rife with bullying and insecurity. His mother wound up dying when he was in high school, a result of a car accident. He dropped out of school, joining the United States Navy, which he hated and claimed he was hazed and bullied by other seamen. He attempted suicide while serving in the Navy, and took several trips to the Naval Psychiatric Hospital.He also stated that his first suicide attempt occurred at age nine. He drank chemicals from a chemistry set, but was unsuccessful...much to the dismay of everyone whose lives he ruined. He was recieved a medical discharge from the Navy, from there going to nursing school.

The first murders occured in 1988, where he tampered with IV bags and injected medications to patients. He left there for another hospital in 1992, injecting people with digoxin, a heart medication, causing death. One of his victims told a family member that a sneaky male nurse had given her a shot a few hours before she wound up dying. He repeated this process, moving to another hospital once he was allowed to resign for shenanagins or moving on when he felt the heat under the pan was too hot. In each hospital or care facility, he continued to access patient records, order and cancel medications, tamper with IV bags, inject patients, and act weird. The hospitals continued to cover up for him because they did not want to deal with the legal repercussions, which is disgusting to me. Healthcare should not be about profits, it should be about the patients. I won't go into how he was finally caught, but he was given a plea deal: no death penalty in exchange for full cooperation in the investigation. Authorities think that he may have killed up to 400 people, but because of issues with records and his inability to remember every patient name (and also not being at work on days when contaminated IV bags were used) an actual number is unlikely to ever be known. He did admit to the attempted murder of six people, and the actual murder of 29 people.

I bought this book for my mom a while ago. (She is a nurse and heard about this guy on a crime show she was watching.) She was cleaning up and decided to get rid of the book, so I figured I would read it. I had also watched an episode on Netflix or something about Nurses Who Kill and added this book to my want to read list. I felt that the book was very well researched. It went into a lot of detail about his career movements, as well as medical information. If you feel bogged down by medical information and court cases, this may not be the book for you. I thought it was very engaging and I was not bored reading it, even though I had watched some of these facts on the show a while back. I think the author did a good job getting his quotes from interviews as well. I thought this was a pretty good book over all.