The Best American Crime Reporting 2008

by Jonathan Kellerman

  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.

  THE REVEREND KATHLEEN RONEY 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?”

  EVERY EQUINOX, REVEREND RONEY 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.

  THE SOMERSET COUNTY 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.”

  THE NEW JERSEY 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.

  THE NEW JERSEY 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 imported 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?”

  NOW WHAT MASK AND RONEY 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.”