Name: The Nurse Who Murdered His Patients
Uploaded: 2026-03-11T14:31:02.000Z
Duration: 9 min 42 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

What's worse, a nurse who is also a secret serial killer, or the hospital that tries to cover it all up.

This is the twisted, murderous story of Charles Cullen, New Jersey's own angel of death and the hospitals that thought nobody would notice.

Basic passive voice

Charles Cullen was born and raised in northern New Jersey, and

right off the bat, things didn't go well for him as a young child.

He lost his father and then his mother before he was even out of high school.

These traumas left deep psychological scars that only worsened because of bullying and isolation.

Charles knew he needed structure in his life, so he enlisted in the Navy and spent years living under the ocean in a nuclear submarine.

Unfortunately, the bullying did not stop.

He was depressed, socially awkward, and increasingly turned to alcohol, which only worsened his behavior in isolation.

One time in the Navy, he went ashore and drank so much that he passed out under the hot sun, barefoot.

When he woke up hours later, his feet were burnt to a crisp.

His superior showed him no sympathy either, forcing him to work in a pair of shoes too small for his feet and only giving him mild painkillers.

Ultimately, he didn't fit in well with his bosses, who were always looking over his shoulder.

He needed a job with less oversight, like a night nurse in the icu.

So Charles was discharged from the Navy and decided to enroll in nursing school.

Despite his bizarre personality, he maintained steady work, got married, even had two children.

And while on the surface things appeared normal, behind closed doors at the hospital, Charles was killing people left and right.

His murders weren't all exactly the same, but they usually followed a pattern.

He often worked night shifts in the intensive care unit, treating burn victims and other seriously ill patients.

When they were short staffed and no visitors were present to begin, he would identify a victim, a 72 year old judge, a 21 year old college student.

Here, Charles did not discriminate and often killed randomly.

So just by being his patient, your life was instantly in danger.

Then Charles would head to the Pyxis machine, a computerized drug dispenser, to get a dose of a drug called digoxin.

In normal doses, it can help control the rhythm of the heart.

In an overdose, it can trigger lethal heart arrhythmias.

It was also a drug that was not routinely tested for in autopsies, meaning that there was a good chance nobody would even notice it in a patient's system.

Then, while patients slept in their beds and other night shift nurses were out of the room, Charles would either inject the medication into A patient directly or tamper with their IV saline bag.

He murdered patients like this over a career that spanned 15 plus years.

But why did it take so long for him to get caught?

Because so many of Charles's victims were already in the icu, Their deaths weren't often very suspicious.

They were on the brink of death anyway, so nobody suspected any foul play.

Also, Charles was clever in how he got hold of the digoxin.

He took advantage of the flawed Pyxis machines, entering the code for Tylenol that happened to share the same drawer.

Or he would enter the code for digoxin, cancel the order immediately, and the drawer would open anyway.

These workarounds created a confusing paper trail.

Lots of canceled orders and odd Pyxis activity, But

little direct proof that he'd actually given the drug to patients.

But more importantly, while it did take over a decade to put Charles behind bars, that's not because he never got caught.

In fact, he got caught over and over again.

On numerous occasions, a hospital where Charles worked would find the circumstances of a patient's death unusual, and

Charles was repeatedly implicated in these investigations, but his bosses could never quite prove it.

Well, they could call the police, begin a proper criminal investigation, and

open themselves to a liability and PR nightmare.

They'd hired a serial killer to care for patients.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement to visit for your next checkup.

So these hospitals did what now seems unthinkable.

If he resigned, they'd end their investigation and give him neutral references.

This left Charles without a job, but with an active nursing license and a spotless record.

He ultimately worked at about 10 hospitals, leaving a trail of death behind him as he kept getting more and more work.

One time, Charles even received a phone call offering him a nursing position while he himself was being held in a psychiatric facility while having a mental breakdown.

Charles happily worked grueling ICU night shifts.

And it wouldn't be right to deny him a job for simply seeking mental health support, would it?

So Charles kept working and kept killing.

Up and down the New Jersey Turnpike he went, injecting recovering patients with digoxin or insulin at whichever hospital would give him a look.

At Somerset Medical Center, a cluster of patients started dying with bizarre lab results, including unexplained spikes in insulin and digoxin.

And that final finally got someone's attention.

And after three months, during which time Charles killed five more people, the authorities were finally called.

With a mountain of circumstantial evidence before them, detectives picked up the phone and called around the state, learning that similar deaths had occurred at other hospitals where Charles had worked.

He had a police record, too, having been arrested years before for stalking a former co worker and breaking into her house.

The detectives could tell Charles was their man, but they couldn't quite prove it.

There were no eyewitnesses, no late night security camera footage.

The hospitals that swept Charles murderers under the rug were panicking about legal ramifications.

So they stonewalled detectives and rarely gave up legit evidence.

Somerset Medical center, the scene of the crime, made it particularly hard to investigate the case.

They barred their staff from speaking to police unless their lawyer was present.

They told police the Pyxis machines only kept records for 30 days.

It was only after detectives called the manufacturer that they learned this wasn't even true.

Somerset either didn't know how the machines worked, or they flat out lied.

There was only one they needed a confession.

Detectives enlisted nurse Amy, a co worker of Charles, to help bring him in.

At first, Amy laughed off the idea that Charles was a murderer.

He took shifts nobody else wanted and was one of her closest friends.

Then they walked her through the entire story, showing her all the evidence they'd gathered so far.

This made her nervous, so she contacted an old friend of hers that had worked with Charles years before.

She corroborated the story, saying he was a creep and that she was surprised to learn that he was still nursing.

Amy thought back on previous patients who had died.

Charles was a murderer, and it was up to her to bring him down.

If Somerset found out she was secretly working with detectives, and

Amy believed she could lose her job and her health insurance.

So Amy invited Charles out to lunch at a diner.

Her heart was pounding through her chest as they sat down.

Charles was all smiles, a lunchtime cheeseburger with his friend Amy.