Police Secretly Track Cullen’s Vehicle

Police Secretly Track Cullen’s Vehicle was a surveillance operation designed to contain the danger posed by Charles Cullen without alerting him that investigators were watching. Because the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office could not yet tie him definitively to a crime at Somerset Medical Center, detectives used a court-authorized tracker to follow his movements rather than arrest him and risk losing sight of him.

Why Surveillance Replaced Arrest

By the time the tracking plan was put into motion, Tim Braun and Danny Baldwin believed they were dealing with a killer. Investigators had learned of Cullen’s troubled work history, including at least three earlier investigations and possibly a fourth, as well as a personal history that included perhaps a dozen suicide attempts and at least one arrest. Their certainty about their suspect, however, was not the same as proof a jury could use: the facts they had assembled did not definitively connect Cullen to a crime at Somerset Medical Center.

Two patients offered possible routes to a case. Reverend Gall was being considered as a murder victim, and Jin Kyung Han as the victim of an attempted murder. Doctors agreed that deadly levels of drugs had entered their systems, but investigators still could not link those events to Cullen. The distinction shaped the operation: suspicion justified close surveillance, but not an arrest that would disclose the investigation without securing a prosecution.

The Evidence Gap

The drug-access records seemed to offer a possible bridge between the suspected poisonings and the nurse. Investigators had been told that the Pyxis system retained medication-access data for only thirty days. Reverend Gall had been dead nearly four times that long, so, according to the hospital, the relevant records were gone. Without them, the investigators could not trace the drugs to a specific user in the way they might trace a bullet to a gun.

That missing link left the detectives with victims, suspected weapons, and a suspect, but no definitive connection among them. The danger was not abstract: they believed Cullen remained free to move through ordinary public places and might kill again. Surveillance was therefore a temporary means of containing risk while the case was built, not a substitute for proving what had happened to the patients.

Installing the Tracker

Braun and Baldwin developed the plan together. Danny Baldwin and Assistant Prosecutor Tim Van Hise obtained a judge’s order authorizing the tracking device. The stop itself was a pretext: the night before Cullen was fired, he was detained over a bogus parking-ticket problem while detectives removed a door panel from his impounded Ford and installed a radio tracker.

The deception allowed the investigators to begin following Cullen without telling him that he was a suspect under surveillance. An unmarked car kept a safe distance, with a detective from the Major Crimes Unit and another from the Narcotics Squad taking turns on shifts around the clock. The operation turned his vehicle into a moving source of information, while keeping the detectives themselves out of his immediate view.

What the Operation Could—and Could Not—Do

The tracker addressed the investigators’ immediate concern that Cullen might disappear or harm someone else, but it did not resolve the central evidentiary problem. Following his movements could show where he went; it could not, by itself, prove that he had poisoned Reverend Gall or Jin Kyung Han. The detectives still needed to connect him to at least one killing or attempted killing before they could safely move from watching him to stopping him.

The operation thus held two opposing facts in view: the detectives believed they knew who their suspect was, yet they could not prove the suspected crimes in a way that justified arrest. The concealed device gave them a way to keep watch while the investigation continued, but Cullen remained at large, and the risk that he might kill again remained unresolved.