Paul Laughlin

Paul Laughlin was a young corporate lawyer and former Philadelphia assistant district attorney drawn into Saint Luke’s Hospital’s response to missing drugs and suspected medication tampering. He became the lawyer who questioned Charles Cullen and helped shape the hospital’s internal inquiry; later testimony raised a harder question about whether warnings that patients might have been harmed were heard and then set aside.

Background and Assignment

Laughlin worked for the Stevens and Johnson law firm, whose corporate practice included criminal law and malpractice defense. Saint Luke’s risk manager Janice Rader and risk management director Ken Vail sought legal counsel after dangerous heart drugs had gone missing and large quantities of vecuronium bromide, a paralyzing agent, had been activated and disappeared. Cullen was due back on shift in less than eight hours. The hospital’s immediate concern was what would be best for the institution, and its in-house counsel, Sy Traub, brought in the firm.

By two o’clock that afternoon, Laughlin had been briefed at the hospital’s administrative offices and then went home to wait. Shortly after midnight, the CCU called: Cullen was back at work, and another cache of drugs had been found in a sharps box. Laughlin returned and waited in an empty room at the end of the hall. A male nurse, Brad Hahn, brought Cullen to him. Cullen had not anticipated the meeting and told Hahn, “You know, you could have given me a heads-up.” The encounter thus began not as a formal police interrogation but as an institutional interview arranged after a new discovery.

Interview with Cullen

Laughlin opened by asking Cullen about his background and work habits. Cullen described arriving early to stock the drug totes, saying he liked to come in around 6:30 and that the work took about ten minutes. Asked what he had done afterward, he acknowledged being in the medication room. As Laughlin continued, he laid out the pattern of discoveries: the drugs had been found on shifts corresponding to Cullen’s, and the vecuronium required preparation and withdrawal by syringe. The conversation narrowed toward who could have placed the drugs there.

Cullen saw the interview as an accusation whose conclusion had already been reached. He looked around the office and at the patient records, blood work, laboratory reports, and vecuronium vials. To him, the questions amounted to bullying: “You’ve already made up your mind about it,” he said. The hospital offered him a choice between resigning with a neutral reference and keeping the incident off his record, or facing some other course that Cullen regarded as barely a choice at all. He accepted the resignation arrangement while imagining himself the wronged party. Security escorted him through the unit and left him in the parking garage.

Conflicting Accounts of the Investigation

The record of what Laughlin knew about possible patient harm is disputed. In later testimony, Laughlin recalled proposing a review of patient charts to determine whether diverted vecuronium had been improperly administered and caused harm. He indicated that particularized suspicion that Cullen had harmed patients had not been brought to his attention. The surviving notes and other testimony, however, allowed a different inference; the accounts do not establish a single uncontested version of what he knew or concluded at the time.

Nurse Patricia Medellin testified that she met with Laughlin on the night he confronted Cullen and that he asked her to call if she had further thoughts. After learning that opened vecuronium containers had been found and that nurses feared patients might have been harmed, she called him around June 7. She said she explained that unauthorized vecuronium could slow a patient’s heart rate until the patient coded, and that no one in the CCU should have been receiving the drug. According to her testimony, Laughlin replied that the investigation was closed and that he was confident Cullen was not harming patients.

Medellin challenged that assurance, pointing out that Laughlin had acknowledged not comparing drugs sent from the pharmacy with drugs actually used on patients, or comparing the number of patient codes on day and night shifts when Cullen worked. She testified that he relied on his eight years as a Philadelphia prosecutor to express certainty, then again told her the inquiry was closed to further review. Medellin also said that clinical coordinator Thelma Moyer and CCU nurse manager Ellen Amedeo dismissed her concerns. She compiled a list comparing deaths in the CCU with Cullen’s shifts, but, fearing repercussions after her concerns were rejected with what she described as almost anger, did not present it.

Later Reviews and Warnings

After Sy Traub returned from leave in July, he directed Laughlin to prepare a report and ordered additional chart reviews. Rader and nursing supervisor Koller reviewed charts for patients who had died during the weekend when the diverted drugs were found. Koller testified that she had never previously conducted such a review and did not know its purpose when asked to examine the charts. Rader later said Laughlin had reported finding no evidence of foul play. The reviews identified neither suspicious vecuronium administration nor suspicious deaths, and the hospital’s chief executive referred Cullen to the state nursing board for follow-up as it saw fit. After prosecutors referred the matter to law enforcement, an outside physician also reviewed charts; Saint Luke’s still did not conclude that Cullen had harmed patients. Cullen later confessed to killing patients at the hospital, including the five whose families brought the civil cases discussed in the account; seven patients in total were specifically identified as killed by him at Saint Luke’s.

In August 2002, Saint Luke’s senior vice president Charles D. Saunders contacted colleagues in the Bethlehem area to ask whether they had experienced unusual incidents involving Cullen and to say he was not to be considered for rehire. Laughlin and executive vice president Vince Joseph also called colleagues. These warnings were not passed to the public, police, or state nursing board, and Somerset Medical Center was not among those contacted. A separate record from Laughlin’s call to Easton Hospital, obtained during the police investigation, says he gave no specifics but warned against reconsidering Cullen for employment: the handwritten note on the personnel file read “Don’t.”

Narrative Significance

Laughlin’s story turns on the gap between an investigation’s formal steps and the unresolved meaning of the evidence gathered around them. He participated in questioning Cullen, in chart-review efforts, and in communications that discouraged other hospitals from rehiring him. Yet the hospital’s reviews did not identify suspicious deaths, while Medellin’s testimony described a direct warning about a plausible mechanism of patient harm and an explicit decision to close the inquiry. The civil cases kept that conflict in view: Saint Luke’s argued that the families’ claims were too old to proceed, but a judge ruled the matters relevant, and the hospital ultimately settled with the families out of court. The settlement terms remained sealed. Laughlin is therefore presented neither through a fully settled finding about his knowledge nor as a mere bystander, but at the intersection of institutional investigation, contested recollection, and the consequences of failing to resolve warning signs before Cullen’s later confessions established what the internal reviews had missed.