Criminal Minds

by Jeff Mariotte

  It didn’t take long, given this record, for the police to pick Bosket up. The boy was intelligent but disrespectful and foul-mouthed, even in court. At fifteen, he claimed to have committed more than two thousand crimes, many of them stabbings. His father had gone to prison for robbery and murder, and now it was his turn. He entered a guilty plea and received a sentence of five years in a Division of Youth facility. He would be out by the age of twenty-one.

  In response to Bosket’s case, the New York legislature passed the Juvenile Offender Act of 1978, allowing kids as young as thirteen who commit murder to be tried as adults.

  Bosket broke out of his facility, and although he was recaptured within hours, he had turned sixteen before his breakout, which made his escape a felony. He was sentenced to four years in a state prison. After his release at twenty-one, he was accused of another robbery, and while in court he was involved in a scuffle that ended with him being convicted of assault, resisting arrest, and contempt of court—another felony count.

  In prison again, convinced that he would never be released, Bosket assaulted some guards and set fire to his cell, which resulted in a third felony conviction. Because of the “three strikes” law, Bosket was right: he was in prison for life. Once he realized that, he became even more belligerent and dangerous: he stabbed a guard, clubbed another guard with a lead pipe, continually set fire to his cell, and even mailed a death threat to President Ronald Reagan. By 1989 he had been confined to a special dungeon cell in upstate New York, with a Plexiglas wall behind the bars, so he can’t throw things or strike at the guards. Several video cameras keep him under surveillance at all times.

  For his crimes in prison he has earned multiple life sentences, ensuring that he’ll never leave custody. Yet determined to live despite his circumstances, Bosket said, “If they bring back the death penalty, I won’t kill. I’ll just maim. I want to live every day I can just to make them regret what they’ve done to me.”

  THE YOUNG KILLERS in “Hopeless” (504) are older than Conley, Bustamante, and Bosket when they committed their murders. But the final homicides of the group killers in the episode are set off by the press and police giving credit for the crimes to a flash-mob riot, in which young people of various ages tear apart Washington, D.C.’s, Dupont Circle. Flash-mob riots are still a new thing, and, one hopes, not a growing trend. A flash mob is a group of people who have been summoned by cell phone and social messaging sites to congregate in one place. In most cases (despite the name mob), their purpose is peaceful—more participatory performance art than violent chaos. But in some cases, these events turn bad.

  A flash-mob riot in Philadelphia on May 30, 2009, caused thousands of dollars of loss to a looted store, damage to businesses and vehicles, assaults on individuals, and criminal charges filed for assault, theft, and rioting. More than a hundred teens and young adults turned out for the flash mob, in which a fifty-three-year-old man, riding his bike home from work, was grabbed, thrown over the hood of a car, and beaten. The victim, who is now on disability, has been having seizures ever since the incident.

  At the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, the police were called when a flash mob of about a thousand stormed the university library in April 2009 after having been messaged to attend a party there. The students dispersed after the police emerged from the library and sprayed the crowd with pepper spray.

  Young people have always been drawn to violence, and in too many cases they are victimized by it. Some statistics show that the number of young violent offenders is growing even as overall violent crime in the United States is shrinking. This is a trend that everyone should hope will quickly be reversed.

  10

  Angels and Heroes

  THE PHRASE “Angels of Death” comes up occasionally on Criminal Minds, notably in the episodes “Penelope” (309) and “A Higher Power” (315). Angels of Death murder people who are suffering in some way; the unsub in “A Higher Power” kills people who lost their loved ones in a tragic fire. A similar concept, “Hero Homicide,” arises in “L.D.S.K.” (106) and in “Doubt” (301). Hero Homicide occurs when someone puts people at risk in order to save them and be granted hero status for doing so. It’s a common form of murder for health-care practitioners, for instance, who sometimes endanger patients so that they can be credited with saving their lives; if the patients die anyway, the practitioners can tell themselves that the patients’ pain was so great that they did their victims a favor.

  Some of history’s most prolific serial killers fit into these two categories. Angels of Death can be hard to catch, and because their victims are at risk anyway, the deaths are often not recognized as murders. Some, like Dr. Jack Kevorkian—used as an example in the episode “Children of the Dark” (304)—publicize their activities. Kevorkian has made a career and a cause of physician-assisted suicide, claiming that patients have the right to die if they so choose. He says that he’s responsible for helping to end the lives of at least 130 patients. In 1999 he was sentenced to a prison term of ten to twenty-five years for second-degree murder. He was paroled in 2007 for good behavior. Kevorkian continues to draw crowds with his lectures and to make the case for the right to die.

  Kevorkian’s patients actually do want to die, and in most cases they carry out the final steps of their procedures themselves, with his coaching and assistance. Most Angels of Death are far less discriminating.

  IN “LIMELIGHT” (313), FBI agent Jill Morris declares that the unsub she’s after “may be the most prolific serial killer since Charles Cullen.” Cullen’s exact body count is uncertain, like the counts of some other murderers in competition for that particular dishonor, but in any listing of the worst U.S. killers, he’s definitely in the running.

  Cullen was born on February 22, 1960, in West Orange, New Jersey. He was the youngest of eight children; his father, Edmond, was fifty-eight years old when Charles came along. Edmond died when Charles was seven months old, and during his youth two of Charles’s siblings also died. His mother perished in an auto accident while he was in high school.

  After high school, Cullen enlisted in the navy. An officer once found him at a submarine’s control panel for nuclear missiles, dressed in a green surgical gown, a mask, and gloves that he had taken from a supply cabinet. He was disciplined for the transgression—and he could not have fired the missiles—but he never explained why he was so attired. Cullen was socially awkward and a constant target of ridicule by his shipmates.

  In “Children of the Dark,” Hotchner and the team suspect that two unsubs may be working together in a series of brutal home invasions and murders taking place in a Denver suburb.

  After the submarine incident, Cullen transferred to a supply ship and was discharged after a suicide attempt. He went back to New Jersey and in 1987 graduated from nursing school, married, and got his first nursing job, at St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, New Jersey. He stayed at that job for four years, a record in a career in which he raced through nine jobs in the next eleven years.

  His second nursing job, at Warren Hospital in Philipsburg, New Jersey, put him in the cardiac and intensive care units—where it’s not uncommon for patients to die. Cullen preferred the graveyard shift, when he was largely unsupervised and had alone time with many patients and ready access to potentially dangerous drugs.

  He and his wife had two daughters, but she filed for divorce in 1993, claiming that he wouldn’t talk to her or have sex with her and that he beat their Yorkshire terriers and spiked people’s drinks with lighter fluid. He lost custody of the children and moved into a basement apartment. Around this time he began harassing another nurse at the hospital, trying to date her and even give her an engagement ring. Finally he broke into her home while she and her six-year-old son were sleeping, and Cullen was arrested. The day after his arrest, he tried to commit suicide again.

  Later that year, Cullen was accused of murder for the first time. It would not be the last.

  On August 30, 1993, he gave a ninet
y-one-year-old breast cancer patient an injection that had not been ordered by her doctor. She complained, but no one at the hospital took action, and she was released. She died the next day. Her son claimed that Cullen had killed her, but the autopsy missed the evidence: although screening for a hundred different toxins, it didn’t include the potentially deadly heart medicine digoxin—one of Cullen’s favorites. A polygraph test was inconclusive, and the prosecutor didn’t pursue the case. The hospital took no disciplinary steps on the murder accusation or the stalking and trespassing charges, and Cullen left his job voluntarily at the end of that year.

  Throughout the next decade, he worked at several more hospitals, leaving behind a trail of unexplained deaths. On December 12, 2003, he was finally arrested and charged with one murder and one attempted murder. Cullen not only chose not to contest the charges against him, he also upped the ante by telling the investigators that in sixteen years he had poisoned thirty or forty patients—he had lost count—at ten different hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

  The investigators had to study hundreds of cases, and they will never be certain how many people Cullen killed. Various institutions along the way had suspected him, but when he hopped to a new job, no warnings or negative evaluations followed him. Despite his homicides, his attempts at suicide, and his psychiatric hospitalizations, he was always rehired and able to kill again.

  Cullen’s initial explanation was that he had killed to end the suffering of his patients. That didn’t meet the smell test, because some victims were recovering just fine without his “help.” He had also put insulin into stored intravenous bags; he didn’t know if that had claimed any victims, but he had no way of knowing what patients would get which bags, so he wasn’t particular about whom he hurt. Finally, he said, “I couldn’t stop myself. I just couldn’t stop.”

  The pattern of Cullen’s crimes through the years indicates that he struck when things were going badly in his personal life: when his wife divorced him, when he got into trouble for stalking his fellow nurse, when he filed for bankruptcy in 1998. Powerless against the pressures of life, he sought the power of life and death over others.

  Cullen offered hospitals advice on how to protect patients from people like himself, but it was couched in a self-aggrandizing way. The implication was that the hospitals were ultimately responsible for letting him get away with his crimes; the murders weren’t his fault because they could have been prevented.

  Forced to appear in court against his wishes, Cullen sat silently and was unapologetic when he received eleven consecutive life sentences in New Jersey. Made to show up for trial a week later in Pennsylvania, he interrupted a sentencing hearing by repeating, “Your honor, you need to step down” over and over. The judge had been quoted in a newspaper saying that he would make Cullen attend the hearing, and apparently Cullen took offense at that.

  Cullen continued his chant even after the court officers had gagged him with cloth and duct tape. The families and loved ones of the victims tried to speak, but even muffled, Cullen was audible, disturbing their last chance to have their say. The judge, ignoring Cullen’s complaint as best he could, sentenced Cullen to six more life sentences. He’ll be in prison in New Jersey for the rest of his life.

  COMPARED TO DR . HAROLD SHIPMAN’S murder score, Charles Cullen’s was amateur.

  Harold Frederick Shipman was born in Nottingham, England, on January 14, 1946, and graduated from medical school in 1970. By the time he was arrested in 1998, he had, according to a massive British government investigation called the Shipman Inquiry, killed at least 250 of his patients, and possibly twice that number. On January 31, 2000, despite insisting on his innocence, Shipman was convicted of fifteen murders and sentenced to life imprisonment. That sentence didn’t last long, because he hanged himself in his cell on January 13, 2004, without ever satisfactorily answering the question of why he had killed so many.

  ANGELS OF DEATH and Homicide Heroes are not always male. During a two-month period in 1982, at a pediatrics clinic in Kerrville, Texas, seven children suffered seizures while under the clinic’s care. The clinic’s director, Dr. Katherine Holland, didn’t find this suspicious, but the clinic staffers knew that something was wrong. Then a one-year-old infant died on the way to the hospital—a child who had not even been very sick to begin with.

  In the days after that incident, a licensed vocational nurse named Genene Jones told Dr. Holland that she had found a bottle of a powerful muscle relaxant that had been missing for three weeks. The cap was missing, and the rubber top had been punctured. Later, Holland found that what looked like medicine in the bottle was really saline water—someone had used up the bottle’s real contents. When another bottle was found to be missing, Dr. Holland fired Jones.

  Damage had already been done to Dr. Holland’s practice, however, and to her personal life. Her husband wanted a divorce. A Kerr County grand jury held hearings about the suspicious rash of seizures at the clinic.

  A separate grand jury convened in San Antonio in February 1983 to study forty-seven suspicious deaths of children at the Bexar County Medical Center Hospital—where Genene Jones had worked before joining the staff at Dr. Holland’s clinic.

  Jones liked to feel needed and important. She made judgment calls that were better left to doctors, and she harangued new nurses into turning to her when they had problems. She was fascinated with doctors and saw them as powerful beings. She had a hero complex, wanting to bring children to the brink of death so she could save them.

  As her seniority at Bexar had grown, she’d been able to pick her own shifts, so she was able to arrange for most of the critically ill children in the hospital to be under her care. Her odd behavior was noted: Jones once grabbed a dead infant from the arms of a family member and ran down the hospital corridor; on another occasion she used a syringe to squirt fluid on a dead child in the shape of a cross, then repeated the gesture on herself.

  The hospital decided to replace its licensed vocational nurses with registered nurses, and Jones resigned, so no further action was taken. It is believed that at the two facilities she killed between eleven and forty-seven children. The staff at Bexar destroyed thousands of documents that were under subpoena by the grand jury, so the full extent of Jones’s crimes is uncertain.

  Kerr County charged Jones with one count of murder and brought charges of causing injury to the other seven children there. San Antonio brought a charge of attempted murder. Jones was sentenced to 159 years in prison, but because of a law intended to reduce prison overcrowding, she’ll be automatically paroled in 2017.

  GENENE JONES is mentioned in “The Uncanny Valley” (512), along with another Angel of Death, Amy Archer-Gilligan. Archer-Gilligan did not directly inspire any episodes of Criminal Minds, but she is believed to have been an inspiration for the famous play Arsenic and Old Lace. In 1907, Archer-Gilligan, called Sister Amy by her patients, opened a nursing home for the elderly in Connecticut. Her business model was to extract a payment of a thousand dollars, in advance, for lifetime care.

  Once she had the money, she made sure that “lifetime” was brief indeed. Between 1911 and 1918, forty-eight people under her care died, including her two husbands, who each died within a year of marrying her. When someone finally got suspicious, some of the bodies were exhumed, and high levels of arsenic were found. She was charged with only six murders and convicted of just one. She got a life sentence, which she served in a mental institution.

  A DOCTOR is a murder suspect in “L.D.S.K.” (106). He’s arrogant and conceited, and Jason Gideon thinks the BAU is dealing with a Homicide Hero—someone who, like Genene Jones, puts people in danger so he can save them. The doctor, in this case, turns out not to be the killer. But Spencer Reid compares him to a similar type of killer, Richard Angelo, a nurse at Good Samaritan Hospital in West Islip, New York. Angelo had a history of wanting to do good works, as an Eagle Scout and a volunteer firefighter.

  At the hospital, Angelo’s plan was to inject el
derly patients with muscle-paralyzing drugs that would lead to respiratory failure. Then, when the Code Blue sounded, he would rush to the scene and save the patients.

  Angelo’s problem was that he wasn’t very good at the saving part. As a result, the patients kept dying. When one patient caught him making an unknown, unordered injection, he used his call button to summon help before he succumbed. After a search of Angelo’s locker and home revealed stores of the problem drugs, the police arrested him and exhumed the bodies of some possible victims.

  Angelo, who was believed to have committed at least twenty-five murders, was convicted on December 14, 1989, of two counts of depraved-indifference murder, one count of second-degree manslaughter, and associated crimes. He was sentenced to sixty-one years to life.

  INDIRECTLY RELATED to Angels of Death is the problem of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Munchausen syndrome is a disorder in which a person reports imaginary illnesses out of a craving for the care and sympathy with which the ill are treated. Unlike hypochondria, in which a person’s delusion of having an illness is based on an underlying emotional conflict, Munchausen syndrome is characterized by the feigning of an illness out of a pathological desire to undergo diagnostic tests, hospitalization, surgery, and other medical procedures.

  Munchausen syndrome by proxy, however, adds a sinister twist: the perpetrator acts as if someone else is sick—usually a child, a spouse, or a person under his or her care. The perpetrator’s drive to indirectly “benefit” from medical care lavished upon the victim is so great that cases have been seen in which, for example, a parent actually harms a child (such as by poisoning), falsifies the child’s medical history, or tampers with the child’s medical specimens in order to create a situation that appears to require medical attention.