Helen Dean was a 91-year-old woman from the Phillipsburg–Lopatcong Township area who entered Warren Hospital in 1993 for cancer surgery and never came home. While her son Larry sat vigil beside her, a thin male nurse asked him to step out of the room; when Larry returned his mother complained the nurse had stuck her with a needle and showed a fresh puncture on her inner thigh. Hospital staff reportedly dismissed the concern. Helen’s recovery then abruptly collapsed and she went into heart failure, dying on September 1, 1993; the initial post-mortem did not test for digoxin and her death was attributed to her underlying illness.

A decade later investigators reopened the case after nurse Charles Cullen was arrested in December 2003. Cullen admitted in court that he secretly administered lethal doses of digoxin and, as part of plea agreements, pleaded guilty in Warren County to murdering three elderly patients at Warren Hospital, including Helen Dean. Her body was exhumed in January 2004 for toxicological testing and her death was reclassified as a homicide tied to Cullen’s later confessions.