The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

The night before the interview, Charlie selects James Strickland as his next patient to overdose. He decides on insulin, which when injected into an unconscious patient goes undetected until it causes seizures. By that time, the brain has usually been deprived of nutrients to the extent that damage is permanent.

Charlie waits until the hospital grows quiet at night before going to Strickland’s room and injecting him with insulin. He leaves at the end of his shift, returning the next day. He hears how Strickland’s blood sugar level reached zero, a medical improbability, and he ultimately had seizures until he coded. He was resuscitated. However, he remains in the hospital for two weeks before Charlie kills him with a digoxin injection. The chapter ends with a reflection on some of his victims.

The book’s focus shifts to Tim Braun, a homicide detective who began his career in Newark. In the 1990s, Newark had a reputation for being dangerous and corrupt. The adrenaline and stress of his job made him drink and put pressures on his marriage until he attended rehabilitation on his 30th birthday, taking martial arts classes and overcoming his addiction. He grappled with the emotional turmoil of trying to solve crimes in an increasingly violent, drug-filled area. He was particularly stricken by the homicide of nurse Ethel Duryea, who was killed while walking down the sidewalk. Tim pursued the case and discovered that she was killed because she discovered an insurance scam and was attempting to speak out against it. Tim’s superiors demoted him to a courthouse position briefly when he refused their orders to drop the case, showing the extent of corruption.

Tim’s guilt over not being able to close Ethel’s case leads him to find a new position as detective sergeant in Somerset. It’s a position with less work and danger, and Tim moves into it hoping to retire in several years.

On October 3, 2003, Tim receives a call about a hospital death. He assigns the case to Danny Baldwin, a detective who worked with Tim in Newark and followed him to Somerset. Danny also works undercover for the FBI when the cases in Somerset get too slow. Danny goes to the Medical Examiner’s office to observe the autopsy of McKinley Crews and then calls Tim to debrief him. The men are confused because Crews isn’t significant in the community and they don’t understand why they were called to witness the autopsy.

Four days later, Tim and Danny are called to Somerset Medical Center to attend a meeting, where the lawyer, Paul Nittoly, explains that they’re not reporting a homicide but have experienced several unexplainable deaths at the hospital over the last few months. The medical jargon and insistence that a murder wasn’t being reported confuses the detectives, who exit the meeting and privately express their frustrations. Danny starts to survey the medical charts and concludes that someone is poisoning patients. They stop to buy a medical dictionary and Tim, contemplating the timeline, thinks that the hospital knows the culprit.

The detectives receive a package that supposedly contains information from the hospital about their internal investigation. They find it lacking, with only a memo about an interview with a nurse named Charles Cullen. The package includes no other memos or mentions of interviews. Danny attends a meeting with Mary Lund, trying to get information about Reverend Gall and Charles Cullen but making little progress. Danny asks for the drug request records from the Pyxis machine, but Mary informs him that they store only a month’s worth of data, and Reverend Gal’s death was two months earlier. Mary reveals suspicions about a man named Edward Allatt, a phlebotomist. At lunch, Danny relays their conversation to Tim and notes that Mary had little information.