Nurse who killed 40 patients admits murdering judge in 1988

? A former nurse who claims to have killed more than 40 patients at hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania pleaded guilty Thursday to murdering a Jersey City judge in 1988.

Charles Cullen, 44, admitted he killed Municipal Judge John W. Yengo by putting lidocaine, a local anesthetic and heart medication, in the judge’s IV.

The drug made his heart stop.

The plea agreement calls for a sentence of life in prison without parole for 30 years, to be served on top of Cullen’s other sentences. Prosecutor Paula Dow said it ensured Cullen would spend “the rest of his life behind bars.”

Cullen agreed to help investigators identify his victims in exchange for a promise they would not seek the death penalty.

The admission makes the judge Cullen’s earliest known victim. Yengo died at St. Barnabas Hospital in Livingston a year after Cullen graduated from nursing school. Cullen worked at the hospital nearly five years.

Cullen has now pleaded guilty to killing 24 patients and trying to kill five others, mostly by injecting them with heart drugs.

His lawyer said that Cullen believed his victims were terminally ill and that it was dehumanizing to prolong people’s lives by artificial means.

Dow said she refused to accept compassion as a motive; not all the people Cullen killed had terminal illnesses.

“Some could label Cullen as an ‘Angel of Death.’ But who gave Cullen that right? Who gave Cullen that power?” she said after the hearing. “I prefer to call Cullen what he was: a cold-blooded killer.”

The judge’s daughter, Suzy Yengo, said her father entered the hospital after medicine he was taking triggered an allergic reaction to the sun. He was 72.

“I was always suspicious because it happened so quickly,” Yengo said. “Without knowing anything different, I assumed it was God’s will. Clearly it wasn’t.”