Cullen’s Drug-Overdose Suicide Attempt Before Going to the Police Station

Charles Cullen’s drug-overdose suicide attempt unfolded alongside his promise to surrender to police: he took Xanax and Darvocet, drove to the station, and expected to collapse in custody, where he believed someone would save him. Instead, the police processed and released him. The episode turns on that mismatch between the rescue he had imagined and the procedure he encountered, leaving him impaired in a parking lot and finally waiting for a ride to the hospital.

The Warrant and the Plan

The sequence followed Cullen’s intrusion into Michelle Tomlinson’s home. He had told her that he wanted to check on her and make sure she had not tried to kill herself; he also said he would understand if she called the police. After a Palmer County Police officer phoned to say a warrant had been issued for C. Cullen, identified by height, weight, hair, and mustache, Cullen acknowledged that the warrant was for him. He promised to drive directly to the police station and give himself up.

The call presented him with what he understood as two actions that could be made to coincide: appearing at the station and attempting suicide. He reasoned that he could take the drugs, collapse in a jail cell, and be seen and saved. In his imagined version, he would occupy both roles at once, criminal and victim. The plan therefore depended not just on taking an overdose, but on its happening in a place where someone would find him.

The Overdose Before Surrender

Cullen took a handful of the 0.05-milligram Xanax prescribed by a doctor at the psychiatric ward. He added twenty Darvocet tablets, narcotic painkillers he had kept from his wife’s gallbladder operation. He then drove to the police station, following through on the promise he had just made. The account presents the order as deliberate: the drugs were taken before he went in, not after he had been detained.

He pictured the scene as a performance of sincere surrender and romantic suffering. In that imagined role, he would arrive on time as a concerned, earnest health-care professional, then become a lover overcome by poison. The performance he expected to enact did not match the practical purpose he had assigned to the overdose: to be found and rescued. The distance between those versions of himself—publicly cooperative and privately planning collapse—shapes the episode’s central contradiction.

Processing Without a Jail Cell

The drugs took effect while Cullen answered the officers’ questions. Xanax acted first, and the Darvocet added heaviness; he felt high and loose. He submitted his fingers for prints, watched the sergeant roll them onto an ink pad and then onto corresponding squares, and had his photograph taken. He was then seated at a desk with a typewriter. These ordinary steps of identification and processing carried him through the station without producing the confinement on which his plan depended.

The police did not intend to hold him in a jail cell. A complaint had been filed, and they had his address and telephone number; they expected to find him if he failed to appear in court. Cullen was released to the parking lot. The crucial reversal was procedural rather than dramatic: he had entered expecting that custody would place him under observation, but the officers’ decision to release him removed the setting in which he thought he would be discovered and saved.

The Call for Help

By the time Cullen reached his car, he was nearly floppy. It was late winter, the sun was almost gone, and cold rain fell as he sat behind a blurred windshield. He could not remain in the parking lot, where nobody would see him, but he drove out onto the main road while struggling to follow the white line and brake lights. He pulled off near a motel, opened the car door, and stopped halfway out in the rain, uncertain whom to call.

Michelle Tomlinson was not an appropriate person to contact, and he could not call Adrianne Cullen either. The only telephone number he could remember belonged to the babysitter. After making that call, he sat on the curb and waited for a ride to the hospital. The ending replaces the jail cell he had anticipated with a wet roadside and a practical request for help. The attempt thus does not culminate in the rescue scene he had planned at the police station; it ends with his dependence on someone else to take him to medical care.