How was Charles Edmund Cullen caught?

Charles Cullen was born in West Orange, New Jersey on February 22, 1960. Charles was raised as the youngest of eight children in a working-class Irish Catholic family. When Charles was seven months old, his father Edmond, a bus driver, died on September 17, 1960. Cullen later described his childhood as “miserable,” claiming that he was constantly bullied by his classmates and the boyfriends of his sisters. He attempted suicide for the first time at the age of nine by drinking chemicals from a chemistry set. Cullen’s mother, Florence Cullen, immigrated to the United States from England after World War II and died in a car accident on December 6, 1977, when Cullen was in his senior year of high school, at the age of 55.

Cullen described his mother’s death as “devastating” and expressed disappointment that the hospital did not notify him immediately and cremated his mother’s body rather than returning it. Cullen dropped out of high school the following year and enlisted in the United States Navy, where he served aboard the submarine USS Woodrow Wilson. He passed basic training as well as the rigorous psychological tests required for submarine crews, who were expected to spend up to two months at a time submerged in a cramped vessel. Cullen advanced to the rank of petty officer second class as part of the team in charge of the Poseidon missiles aboard the ship. During his time in the Navy, he did not fit in and was hazed and bullied by his coworkers.

How was Charles Edmund Cullen caught?

Cullen returned to New Jersey in the fall of 2002 to work at Somerset Medical Center, where he murdered the majority of his known victims. One murder there, the Rev. Florian J. Gall, 68, in 2003, led to Cullen’s arrest and the investigation that led to his conviction in 2006.