The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 (21 page)

 

T
HE
S
OMERSET
C
OUNTY JAIL
is a redbrick building conveniently catty-corner to the Somerville courthouse. On the other side of the metal detector is a wall of two-way mirrored plate glass backlit by video surveillance. Beyond that is the nine-by-five-foot cell where Charles Cullen had spent the past two and a half years of his life.

The sergeant buzzes me through a series of doors into a hallway partitioned into stainless-steel booths. Guards escort Charles Cullen onto the opposite stool. We nod mutely to each other across the bulletproof divide, and take a phone.

“Hello? Hello?”

“Hello?” I say. “Can you hear me?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I can make you out.” His voice is flat and quiet. I press the plastic phone hard to my ear, and Cullen notices. “Did you get in all right?” he says, louder.

“It took two hours,” I say.

Cullen glances up, reading my expression before retreating to the corners of the glass. “That happens,” he says. He nods once. “It changes in here, week to week.”

In pictures taken soon after his arrest, Cullen looks a little like Kevin Costner or a hollowed-out George Clooney—perhaps a bit colder, yet still a handsome guy with a bad haircut. But now, in the mercury vapor lights of the Somerset jail visiting room, Cullen looks chapped and anemic. Never an eater, he has become skeletal in jail. His face seems to hang from his cheekbones like a wet sail. A crucifix dangles from a chain over his collarbone, mixing with the sprigs of graying chest hairs where his shaven neck meets his prison togs—essentially mustard-yellow versions of hospital scrubs, insulated with a layer of white flannel underwear. His eyes dart and flash like a man holding his breath, waiting to talk.

He tells me about the afternoon when Reverend Roney came to his cell, excited to tell him that he was an “excellent match” for Ernie Peckham. Cullen was happy, but his years in jail had taught him that nothing would ever be simple. “The match means the donation will happen—it's meant to happen,” Roney told him. “Yeah,” Cullen responded. “Well, I hope the courts think that.”

Cullen knew that if word ever got out that he was trying to donate a kidney, the whole thing would probably be over right there. He needed to keep it secret; nobody could know. “I mean,
it's not like I'd want the publicity,” Cullen says. “But mostly I thought that if it got out, it would be bad for the donation. The way people think of me, they would think I was trying to do something. But someone leaked it—I think it was the D.A., but I don't really know. And now…” he rolls his eyes. The press was having a field day.

“I know people see me as trying to control things; they think I'm trying to get something out of it. But the idea that I was trading my appearance at sentencing for the donation are out-and-out lies,” he says. “I was told by my lawyer, Mr. Mask, that I didn't have to appear.” He shakes his head, and almost smiles. “I mean, you know, who would want to go? All those people that you—but the donation was important. The detectives suggested that I offer to go, to speed the donation along. They said I needed to give them something. But that's not me holding a gun to the prosecution. It's the other way around!

“I grant that I certainly have done some very bad things—I've taken lives,” he says quickly. “But does that prevent me from doing something positive?” Cullen folds a pale arm tightly across his chest and studies the counter. “That's the funny thing,” he says. “People think you're crazy for doing something for someone else if you don't know them personally.”

 

T
HE
N
EW
J
ERSEY OFFICE
of the Public Defender is two stories of red brick with handicapped spaces and shrub landscaping and 300-pound women in nightgown-size Tweety Bird T-shirts smoking menthols by the double glass doors. In the offices upstairs, there are families in sweatpants waiting under fluorescent lights and a hole in the Plexiglas where you can announce yourself by sticking your mouth in and yelling politely.

Johnnie Mask's office is in the back. The deputy public defender looks something like an Old Testament James Earl Jones—a big man with broad leonine features and a gray Ishmael beard
gone grayer over three years defending the biggest serial killer in New Jersey history.

It was a nice idea, giving a kidney, but Mask wasn't in it for the karma. “My motives were purely selfish,” Mask says. “Charlie was absolutely intent on making this donation happen. I was worried that if he didn't get his way, he'd mess up my case, and all my hard work would go down the drain. More work for me, more expenses for the state—there was no way I was going to let that happen.”

But right from the beginning, Mask saw signs that this thing might not go through. “Judge Armstrong signed the order for the blood test, but I don't think anybody really expected he'd actually be a match for Ernie,” Mask says. “When he was, and it got into the papers, suddenly there are all these problems. The judge and the prosecutor and the victims' families got up in arms about Cullen going into a hospital again—they figured he'd kill somebody, or probably himself. Then everyone would be cheated out of their ability to yell and scream at him.”

Mask was told that the donation was possible only after Cullen was sentenced. That was supposed to happen by December 2005, but a month later, two counties still hadn't even finished their investigations. “That's why on January 10, Charlie stopped cooperating with the prosecution, saying ‘Sentence me now.'” By breaking his plea agreement, Cullen seemed to be risking the death penalty for the donation, but really it was a tactical move by Mask. “It forced their hand. We realized that by the time they finished, Ernie might be dead.” (As of this printing, investigations in Essex and Morris counties are still open.)

They were months behind schedule, but, in theory, Cullen was about to be transported to Stony Brook Medical Center and donate his kidney side by side with Peckham. “But when [Attorney General Peter] Harvey wanted Cullen to cooperate, he was saying, you know, ‘We'll work out the details later, but it will happen,'” Mask recalls. “We were counting on those promises, but
he just wanted to wrap up the case before he took on his new job in the private sector.”

A few weeks later, weeks when Ernie Peckham's condition continued to deteriorate, Mask walked by the desk of Vaughn McCoy, who was then the director of New Jersey's Division of Criminal Justice. “I asked him what the status was. He pulled up some e-mails and said, ‘Well, apparently Stony Brook doesn't want Mr. Cullen in their hospital.' I tried to lean over and read it off his monitor, but he sort of blocked me.” Mask smiles joylessly. “Said it was confidential.”

By now it was February. “So what can you do? Then the old A.G. leaves, and the new attorney general's office tells us Cullen can't travel to New York anyway—it's not legally feasible!” Mask shakes his head at what's become an old joke.

“I don't know what's true now. We thought it would happen in January. Stony Brook keeps giving us new dates—they're saying April now; before, it was March. And Charlie's getting more aggravated every day. I think [allowing the] donation was always just a big dangling carrot to get Charlie to jump.” It was the only reason Cullen agreed to appear at the sentencing in New Jersey. Mask was still working toward the donation, but he'd bet Roney a dinner it would never happen.

It was a good bet, especially considering what was about to happen at Cullen's next court appearance.

 

T
HE
N
EW
J
ERSEY COURTS
were done with Charles Cullen, but Pennsylvania still had unfinished business, and so as Ernie Peckham's condition worsened even more, Cullen was transported west to stand trial for the six murders and three attempted murders he committed in Lehigh County, while working at the hospitals surrounding Allentown.

Allentown is a poor steel town living in the ruins of a rich one, and the downtown is a grand, ceremonial public space of im
ported stone and soaring columns and busted crazies rooting for cans, joined now by a small parade of families in dark, formal clothes with little blue stickers from OfficeMax gummed to their lapels to show they're families of the victims of the Angel of Death.

In a legal sense, sentencing Cullen for his Pennsylvania crimes is perfunctory—he won't be finished serving his New Jersey sentence until the year 2347—but for the families of patients Cullen killed here, today's sentencing is their only chance to confront the Angel of Death with their memories and their anger. It's also an opportunity for Cullen, a final shot at showing the world that he is, as he claims, a killer with compassion. A public demonstration of that compassion would go a long way toward saving Ernie Peckham's life. In Pennsylvania, Cullen could do what he hadn't done in New Jersey.

Just like the victims' families at Cullen's New Jersey trial, the families who fill the Allentown jury box have brought poems and speeches and photographs of the dead and are prepared to exercise their right to confront the killer. But this time, Cullen rises to speak—reciting, from memory, statements Cullen believes have been hostile to him that the judge has made to the press.

“And for this reason, your honor,” Cullen says, “you need to step down.”

Judge William Platt is not amused. “Your motion to recuse is denied,” he says.

“No, no, your honor,” Cullen insists. “You need—you need to step down. Your honor, you need to step down.”

“If you continue this, I will gag and manacle you,” the judge warns.

Cullen shouts over him. “Your honor, you need to step down!” he says. “Your honor, you need to step down! Your honor…”

The high marble walls make this court a beautiful room but a terrible courtroom, amplifying and distorting all sound. Cullen fills this room. The families wait as Cullen gets to speed-shouting
his statement ten times, 30, 40. He's not going to stop, and now the court officers are on him.

They pull a spit mask over his head—a mesh veil that keeps a prisoner from hawking loogies on his captors—but the noise continues. They wrap the spit mask with a towel and screw it behind his head and now Cullen sounds like a man screaming into a pillow. The families of the victims try to read. “You are a total waste of a human body.” “You are the worst kind of monster, a son of the devil.” But soon the sergeant's hands begin to cramp, and chorus by chorus, Cullen's voice gets clearer. Judge Platt nods, and the sergeant produces a roll of duct tape the size of a dinner plate, and tapes a big cartoonish
X
over Cullen's lips, which does nothing. And so the victims read their personal statements, and Cullen screams his, like a nightmarish version of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

“If my grandmother was alive right now, she's say to you, ‘I hope you rot in hell, you sick son of a bitch.'”

“Your honor, you must step down. Your honor, you must step down.”

“Six more life sentences, served concurrently with those already handed down.”

“Must step down. Your honor, you must…”

And with a final “Such that you will remain in prison for the rest of your natural life,” the court officers frog-march Cullen—bound, gagged, duct-taped—into a waiting elevator. He is still chanting when the doors close. The silence that follows is terrible, too.

Afterward, the families huddle in the hallway, shaken and unsatisfied. “I think he intentionally meant disrespect to everyone in that courtroom,” says Julie Sanders, a friend of one of Cullen's victims. Sanders stabs her finger toward the hole in the air where Cullen had been. “He says he is a compassionate man, that he wants to donate a kidney to save someone's life. I needed to say
something to him: Where's the compassion now? Does he know what he's done to our lives?”

 

N
OW WHAT
M
ASK AND
R
ONEY
had wasn't a legal problem—they had a court order authorizing the donation from Judge Armstrong—it was bigger. “Basically, there's not a lot of goodwill toward Charlie Cullen among the citizens of New Jersey,” Mask says. “Nobody wants to seem to be kowtowing to a serial killer's requests. Some of the families see his donation request as a slap in the face. It's like he's asking them for a favor.”

After the scene at Allentown, Cullen's kidney was simply too hot to handle. Roney would call the D.A.'s office, which told her to call the New Jersey Department of Corrections, who'd tell her to call the hospital. Months passed with no answers, no schedule, no deadline. If the donation was going to proceed, there were state and private institutions to coordinate, insurances to interface. The Corrections Department would need to guard Cullen in the hospital, against escape and vigilantes and, because he had already attempted suicide multiple times, Cullen himself. The only ones with real deadlines were Cullen and Ernie. Cullen's donor test was valid for only a year; Ernie might not even survive that long.

And then there was the kidney, which would need to travel 125 miles from Cullen's hospital in New Jersey to Peckham's hospital on Long Island fast enough to keep it viable. Depending on traffic, that could be a bitch of a drive. A construction snarl or a fender bender or even a Hamptons rush hour could imperil Ernie's life, but who was going to pay for a helicopter?

Ironing out the details would require a lot of hard, unpaid work by a great number of people, but at this point, Cullen was the last guy anyone wanted to do a favor for. That's how they saw it, a favor to Cullen, not a way to save another man's life. “It's his
choice, he's a grown man, but realistically, the stuff he does in front of the victims' families isn't winning him any points either,” Mask says.