The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 (20 page)

Many of the guards were upset that Crittendon had given murderers a national platform, and that the inmates were being taped in front of a memorial to eleven San Quentin employees killed in the line of duty. The next day, as it happened, Crittendon was the
master of ceremonies at the rededication of the memorial, and he made sure he was seen scolding Morris for shaking my hand “on the day for honoring our dead.” “Vernell wears a lot of hats,” Morris told me, wryly. “If he's walking through with the warden, wearing his ‘safety and security of the institution' hat, I'll just keep stepping by.”

That same month, a new warden, Robert Ayers, Jr., took over at San Quentin, and his prison policy emphasized safety and order rather than rehabilitation. Crittendon decided to retire in December, four months short of thirty years; his deputy, Eric Messick, replaced him as the prison's spokesman, but the innumerable other duties that Crittendon had assumed over the years were absorbed—or sloughed off—by the system. His role in executions will be divided among a number of officers, who will be guided not by a protean expert in avoiding embarrassment but by written procedures. Two weeks after Crittendon retired, Ayers banned visitors from the cellblocks, long a staple of Crittendon's tours; he has since won praise from officers—and aroused concern in inmates—by putting an end to all Crittendon-style shortcuts and unilateralism. Ayers declined to talk about Crittendon or his legacy, but observed, “If you just pick which rules you want to follow, the prison is a very capricious place.”

 

I
N
M
ARCH,
V
ERNELL
C
RITTENDON
visited San Francisco's Tenderloin Community School to give a Real Choices briefing to a group of fourth and fifth graders, many of whom he would soon take on a tour of the prison. Crittendon, who by then was three months retired and contemplating an eventual run for the Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors, was wearing a black San Quentin polo shirt, a black San Quentin warmup jacket, and a ring with a tiny image of San Quentin that an inmate had made for him in metal shop. But the twenty kids he met with in a basement classroom were not intimidated by the visible tokens of
incarceration. And when Crittendon tried to impress them with the importance of choosing their friends wisely, catcalls filled the air. “We'll wait for these gentlemen to finish,” he said evenly.

Crittendon had brought two ex-cons with him. One of them, Michael Tomlinson, a drug dealer turned pastor who was wearing a jogging suit that covered white-supremacist tattoos, took the floor and said, “There's no tough guys in the room—you're not tough.”

“
You
ain't tough,” a boy named Tyrell, who had long cornrows and was slouched in his chair, replied.

“There's no one so tough the Man can't beat him down,” Tomlinson said, and the bleak authority in his voice silenced the room.

Afterward, heading out, Crittendon found himself in the school's vestibule, and remarked, “Just like a prison—the sally port.” We went across the street to a Peet's coffeehouse, where he said that the kids wouldn't listen to him, a policeman, and that his real role was to introduce the ex-cons. “The principal would never say, ‘Come on in, Michael T., drug taker and drug dealer, killer of blacks, and talk to our kids.' I vouch for Michael, now that he's a pastor—but I never want to forget that he's a bad guy.” Crittendon likes to say that he doesn't judge someone by a single bad deed, but neither does he judge someone by ten years of good deeds. “The best analogy I can think of—and this is definitely the way I thought about Stanley Williams—is the circus,” he said. “You know how you see a five-foot-eight balding man with a potbelly walk into the lion's cage and snap his whip, and the lion rolls over and grovels in the dirt? You put that lion back in the jungle, and if that same man walks down a bushy path he becomes lion lunch. I will always be
friendly
to former inmates, but I won't be
friends.
”

The conversation turned again to the executions. He'd been thinking about Manny Babbitt's, in 1999. “That always stood out in my mind,” he said. “A war hero who saved a guy's life in Viet
nam by diving on a grenade, an African-American, and it appeared that his crime centered on post-traumatic-stress syndrome—he sexually assaulted and murdered this woman, then tied a toe tag on her body, like they did in Vietnam. When I spoke with Manny in the deathwatch cell, he stood at attention three inches from the bars and always said, ‘Sir, yes sir!' His brother had turned him in with the caveat that the detectives would help him and not seek the death penalty, and here I was standing with his brother, watching him be executed.” Crittendon stirred his espresso. “My dad's brother was in Vietnam, and he came back with a lot of psychological problems, and he—he ended his life early by his own hand. It connected with my life experience. I didn't go around saying, ‘Poor Manny,' but it was what I was thinking. You've got to make sense of this thing.”

Did he ever?

“I left it in God's hands. There must be a purpose in the Lord putting me where He did, even though I would never have chosen for my legacy ‘He put to death people who grew up in terrible, deprived circumstances and didn't have much chance.' When I move in black communities, the very first thing people say to me is ‘You really handled your business well up there on TV—you were impartial.' So I've shown we can do it. I was the face and the voice of a major organization. I broke down Europeans' stereo-types—the articulate black man. Maybe,” he said, slowly, “maybe it's not that these lives were just sacrificed but that there was a greater good to my being able to serve as a role model on those very public occasions. But there's all these layers on top of layers,” he continued. “Because if they were to tell me tomorrow, ‘Vernell, there will be no more executions in the state of California,' Vernell would not be sad.”

 

T
AD
F
RIEND
is a staff writer at
The New Yorker
, where he writes the magazine's “Letter from California.” He is at work on a family memoir.

Coda

This story held my attention because I like sorting through ambiguity, and Vernell Crittendon is extremely complicated. So are the people he dealt with. During my reporting I attended some of the college classes taught inside the prison, and one evening, during a break, I spoke with Louis Branch, Jr., a courtly-seeming black man. Branch had a history of sex crimes and was serving a life sentence, but he was a diligent student. When I asked him about Crittendon—who, concerned about Branch being near young, trusting female volunteers, had unsuccessfully sought to persuade the program's director to bar him from the classroom—the inmate picked up his pen. “Vernell Crittendon is very active in giving us a plethora of chances to improve ourselves,” he said, as he wrote on a piece of foolscap. “That's the success side. The failure side is the philosophy of
revenge.
Why not challenge Tookie's compassion, challenge him to live up to Vernell's philosophy of restorative justice, of giving back? What would we have to lose? Our hate, our violence. That's all.” He showed me the sentence he'd written: “Vernell Crittendon is a prisoner of the penal system, as we all are.” Several months later, Branch was committed to the prison's Adjustment Center for allegedly trying to overpower a nurse. He subsequently earned more time in solitary for trying to seize a guard through the slot in his cell door.

FROM
New York
MAGAZINE

T
HE
A
NGEL OF
D
EATH LOOKS SLEEPY.
His face shows nothing. His eyes are closed. Charles Cullen sits motionless in the wooden defendant's chair of the Somerset County Courthouse as, hour after hour, his victims' families take the stand. They read poems and show photographs, they weep and yell. If Cullen hears them, he doesn't say; he never does. During his three years in custody, Cullen has never apologized or made excuses. He has never issued a statement, offered a public word, never faced the families of his victims. In fact, the only reason he's in court today is because he wants to give away one of his kidneys.

To that end, he has cut a deal with prosecutors, agreeing to appear at his sentencing on the condition that he be allowed to donate an organ to the dying relative of a former girlfriend. To many of the families of his victims, this deal is a personal insult—the man in shackles still calling the shots, the serial-killer nurse wanting to control the fate of yet another human life. But for the families of his New Jersey victims, this is the first and last chance to confront Charles Cullen. So they are here, and they are angry.

“My only consolation is that you will die a thousand deaths in the arms of Satan,” yells the daughter of a man Cullen spiked with insulin. “I hope, with all my heart, that you are someone's bitch in prison.”

“You are a pathetic little man,” says the woman whose mother-in-law Cullen killed with digoxin. “In prison, perhaps someone will choose to play God with Mr. Cullen, as he has played God with so many others.”

“Charles!” cries a round woman in a lime-green pantsuit. Her body shakes in rage and grief; her hands grip a photograph of her 38-year-old son, a picture taken before Charles Cullen stopped his heart. She is screaming. “Charles, why don't you look up at me, huh? What are you, asleep?”

In fact, Charles Cullen is very much awake. His shackled hands, which look from a distance as pale and still as sleeping doves, twitch slightly in his lap, counting off silent prayers,
Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me
, as if on invisible rosary beads; the expressionless shield of his cheek still tics when “burn in hell” hits his ear. His eyes open slightly, like a child pretending to be asleep, Cullen can see only a twilight view of the table, the cups, the stenographer with her leg crossed over the other, light shining hard off her shoes.

“The state asks for thirteen life sentences,” says the assistant prosecutor, and there is a wrinkle on Charles Cullen's brow, a flexed cheek enunciating “thirteen,” then the blankness returns, and there is again just what Cullen can see in front of him: the wooden table, the stack of pastel Dixie cups, a black plastic pitcher, and beyond, lit by her own little spotlight of halogen, the stenographer, her hands bouncing like puppets. And then Judge Armstrong is asking if the defendant has anything to say on his own behalf, anything at all about these horrendous crimes against man and nature, and the stenographer's hands stop and wait. Cullen has no comment. With a rap of the gavel and screeching of chairs,
it is over. Charles Cullen is hustled into a back room with men in riot gear holding automatic weapons, then he is gone, leaving behind a courtroom full of questions.

 

A
S FAR AS THE LAW IS CONCERNED
, there isn't much left for Cullen to say. On December 12, 2003, Cullen was brought in for one first-degree murder and one attempted murder as a critical-care nurse at Somerset Medical Center in Somerville. The next day, he shocked Somerville detectives by confessing to many more murders. Cullen told detectives that he killed the sick in order to end their suffering, but at some point, as Cullen spiked bags of IV saline in supply closets and killed patients who were not terminal, his compassion became compulsion, and when his personal life became stressful, killing became his outlet.

Exactly how many patients he murdered, we will never know: His memory of his crimes, he says, “is foggy,” and he drank heavily to make it foggier. He worked graveyard shifts in intensive-care units, largely unsupervised in a dark punctuated only by the beeps and breaths of medical machines. Many of the medical charts are missing or incomplete; the dead are now dust. His method was to overdose with drugs so common that sorting Cullen's private death toll from the general cadence of hospital mortality is nearly impossible.

Cullen guessed that he had killed 40 people. So far, investigators have positively identified 29 victims (confirmation of a 30th victim is currently pending). It's unlikely that the tally will ever be complete; even Cullen's lawyer, Johnnie Mask, told prosecutors they weren't finished. Some investigators with an intimate knowledge of the case are convinced that the real number is over 300. By that reckoning, Charles Cullen would be the biggest serial killer in American history.

After Cullen was arrested, New Jersey prosecutors agreed to
take the death penalty off the table in exchange for his full cooperation. Cullen would help identify his dead, then spend the rest of his life in prison. He was 44 years old.

Months turned to years at the Somerville jail, and Charles Cullen's life assumed a regularity he had rarely known as a free man. He had his cell, his spy novels, time to exercise or shower. Uniformed men turned the light off and on, governing day from night. Once a week, he met with his Catholic deacon or the head chaplain, the Reverend Kathleen Roney, and every so often, he never knew when, the guards would escort him across the lawn to the prosecutor's office, to pull through the case files.

Cullen studied the scrawled medical charts, the arrhythmic EKGs, the final flatlines, and the blood work afterward—the primary investigator in the search for his own victims. There were new charts nearly every week, boxes of them, covering sixteen years of death at nine hospitals. Winter became spring and winter again, but Cullen just kept squirreling through the files with a cup of black coffee, getting thinner, getting it done; eventually, when the investigations were closed and the shouting echoed out, he could take his life sentences into a cell and disappear completely.

Then in August 2005, an envelope arrived at the Somerville jail. By now, Cullen was inured to the interview requests and the hate mail, even the odd “fan letter.” He never answered any of them, of course, but this was something new—a story about a man named Ernie Peckham, clipped with kitchen scissors from a local newspaper on Long Island. In the margin was a note in a girlish cursive: “Can you help?”

Cullen knew about Ernie—a guy about ten years younger than Cullen, with four kids and a wife at home and a job shaping metal in Farmingdale. Ernie was the brother of Cullen's estranged ex-girlfriend, who was the mother of Cullen's youngest child—a little girl he had never seen. Maybe he and Ernie had said hi once at a wedding years ago; Cullen couldn't recall, but they weren't
friends, they weren't even acquaintances, they certainly weren't close enough to share organs. But an organ is what Ernie Peckham needed.

 

D
OCTORS DON'T KNOW
exactly how or when, but at some point in 2002, Ernie contracted strep. Probably it was just a little scratch that got infected, the sort of thing that either swells up and goes away or takes you out for a week with a sore throat that can be treated with a dose of antibiotics. But Ernie didn't notice the infection, and it spread, overloading the microscopic filters in both of his kidneys.

Normally, these filters would have been removing toxins from Ernie's blood; now they were like a sink clogged with hair. Ernie's body began to bloat with its own poisons, swelling his hands and face and turning his urine the color of cocoa. By the time he saw a doctor, his kidneys were dead. Untreated, he'd be next. Doctors could filter Ernie's blood three times a week with dialysis, but this was a stopgap measure; what Ernie really needed was a new kidney. Unfortunately, so did 60,000 other Americans. As Ernie's health deteriorated, the seven-year waiting list for a cadaver donor would become a death sentence.

His only other option was to receive a kidney from a living donor (although most everyone has two kidneys, you only need one). The best way to match kidney with recipient is through a blood relative—but nobody in Ernie's family, nor any of his friends, was medically eligible to donate. His only chance was to find the perfect stranger. But how many people are willing to donate an organ to someone they don't know? Worse, the odds that Peckham would be a perfect six-for-six tissue-typed match with any one random donor were incalculably small. Ernie Peckham actually had a better chance of being struck by lightning.

Ernie's mother, Pat Peckham, contacted the local paper to run
a public-interest item with Ernie's blood type above the hospital's donation-hotline number. No miracle donor called.

Pat was running out of options for saving her son. And what would it take except a stamp? So, without telling Ernie, she clipped the article out of the paper, stuck it in an envelope to the Somerville prison, and waited for her miracle.

The thing about miracles, you can't really predict what form they might take. They might come from anyone, even the serial killer who had knocked up her daughter.

 

T
HE
R
EVEREND
K
ATHLEEN
R
ONEY
wears rock-collection-size birthstone rings on her fingers and Celtic charms around her clerical collar and paint-on eyebrows that flick like conductor's batons as she talks. Roney started ministering to Cullen soon after his arrest. She figured the meditation techniques of the Desert Fathers would be appropriate for a man spending life in prison: The “Jesus Prayer” Cullen recited through his Somerset sentencing came from one of Roney's tutorials.

Over the course of nearly three years, Roney had gotten to know Cullen, but that didn't mean she understood him. She didn't, for instance, understand why Cullen had killed so many people—but her job wasn't to comprehend the serial killer, only to minister to the man. And she couldn't quite understand why, suddenly, he was so desperate for her help to donate a kidney; 22 years as a jail chaplain, and nobody had ever asked for anything like it. “So that night I went to the jail and questioned him,” she says. “To make sure I wasn't being used.”

Roney isn't a big woman, but she's blessed with the bullhorn voice and big-girl swagger that jail work requires, and she can turn it on when she has to. She called for Cullen, who was reading in his cell, and she asked him: “Why this? Why now? Do you want it for fame, or to rehabilitate your public image? Do you think you're making some deal with God, to save a life to wipe
out the lives you took?” Or did he hope that he might die on the operating table in some sort of passive suicide attempt?

“The questions seemed to really hurt his feelings,” Reverend Roney says. “But that was okay. I needed to know his heart.”

Roney said she'd think about it, and drove through the dark to pray in front of her icons. Charles had told her he was serious, that he wanted to see if he was a match. He wanted to donate because he was asked, and it was good. But should she believe him? The more she examined the question, the simpler it became. She was a minister, a Christian, and there was a life at stake, a guy on Long Island named Ernie. Cullen could never orchestrate a donation alone from behind bars. He needed her help—they needed her help. How could a compatibility test be a moral dilemma?

The hospital sent color-coded tubes for Cullen to bleed into. She would be the blood mule; Stony Brook hospital on Long Island would test his antigens against Ernie's. From what she read on the Internet, a match was an incredible long shot. But at least everybody could say they tried.

When she asked her friends to pray with her that weekend, she didn't tell them what they were praying for or for whom. “We needed to keep it secret,” she says. “And besides, could you ask every person to pray for a serial killer?”

 

E
VERY EQUINOX
, R
EVEREND
R
ONEY
and like-minded Celtic Christians spend a week at a Druid spiritual retreat in Pennsylvania. It's a profound time for her, a time of dancing around bonfires and meditating before icons and spirit-voyaging through unbounded acres of blond American farmland. Every morning, she'd walk the hard earth between the corn stubble, reciting her prayers, feeling the ancient wisdom, looking for a sign. It was then that she felt the vibration.

That was her cell phone—they encourage silence at these things, so she had it on vibrate—and right away, she knew what
had happened. And her prayer group knew, too. In fact, the whole spiritual retreat knew what had happened; they just felt it and started to cry, because they knew. And she thought,
This is it, it's meant to be.

She's crying now, retelling the story over an iced tea, ruining her mascara, remembering how Cullen was a perfect six-for-six antigen match, a match like winning the Publisher's Clearing House sweepstakes, and she wipes the tears away with a Starbucks napkin. “Honestly, we thought it was a miracle,” she says. There would be more tests, X-rays,
CAT
scans, tests with machines you couldn't send to the jail by mail. But these were trivial compared with this spotlight in the darkness, a sign of God's larger plan.

In that halcyon moment, Reverend Roney couldn't imagine the lost friendships of her fellow Christians; she thought it was as easy as helping Charles donate to save a dying man. It was September; if she acted fast, the kidney would be like an early Christmas present.

When Roney called Pat Peckham, Pat didn't believe her. “Are you sure?” she asked. It was so improbable, it was so—then Pat started to scream. “Then I'm screaming, then she's crying, then I'm crying,” Roney remembers.

Roney would have loved to have seen the look on Ernie Peckham's face when Pat told him the news. But Pat wasn't going to tell her son, not for a while, and she certainly wouldn't tell him the name of the donor. As sick as Ernie was, Pat was sure Ernie wouldn't accept a kidney if he learned it came from Charles Cullen.