The Good Nurse: What Happened to Amy Loughren and How She Discovered The Serial Killer
The Good Nurse, Netflix’s new crime film, tells the story of one of the most prolific serial killers in the history of the United States, whose method was very different from that of the rest of the criminals who were famous for their violent behavior. Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmaye star in this story, playing two nurses who made headlines when it was revealed that one of them had broken his oath not to harm any patient, and was secretly acting as some sort of angel of death, who decided who could live and who should die in the hospital where he worked.
Charles Cullen, the character played by Eddie Redmayne, worked in 9 hospitals in a period of 16 years, where he took the lives of more than 40 patients, but the number would have been much higher if Amy Loughren had not crossed his path. Loughren was a nurse in the Intensive Care Unit at a New Jersey hospital, and it was she who helped the authorities apprehend Cullen, an unlikely killer who outnumbers many monsters in the body count.
The Good Nurse: Summary
The film opens in the wards of Parkfield Memorial Hospital, a US health facility where nurse Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain) works, single mother of two girls with cardiomyopathy that makes her daily life increasingly difficult; a new nurse arrives in the intensive care unit, a sweet and caring man who, however, seems to hide a troubled past. When some ICU patients begin dying suspiciously and frequently, Amy senses that Charles Cullen’s hand could be behind those deaths.
The English-language debut of the Scandinavian director and screenwriter Tobias Lindholm is a feature film made with skill and precise ideas, particularly respectful of the real story and the people involved. Cold, with gaudy glacial tones, The Good Nurse is a real nightmare on the hospital ward, where you can breathe an aseptic and deadly atmosphere at every moment.
Who Was Charles Cullen from The Good Nurse?
On the surface, Charles Cullen was a dedicated and concerned nurse for his patients. He worked in about 9 hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania over 16 years and, according to The New York Times, suffered from mental problems and erratic behavior. According to Graeber‘s book, Cullen had a childhood marked by abuse, in addition to having problems with his brother-in-law and even trying to kill him using poison. Worse, the most alarming is that he was responsible for the murder of at least 40 patients (although experts believe the number is much higher) who were under his care.
But Charles thought he was a hero and that he was acting mercifully when he began to murder his victims, whom he watched die. “What kind of person can kill someone and be there while they die and not seem to affect their day at all, or affect their future behavior negatively for 16 years?” Graeber wrote. It is believed that he began killing in 1988, and what he did was sneak into the rooms of patients (mainly elderly) at night, when no one was looking, and inject them with a lethal dose of a heart drug called digoxin.
Some of his victims were people who were terminally ill or dying, but many others were healthy and recovering. According to The Morning Call, one of her victims, Michael T. Strenko, was only 21 years old when she injected him with the dose of norepinephrine that killed him. Many patients were dying for no reason, so that prompted two detectives from Jersey to start investigating, and it was they who noticed that many of them had very high doses of drugs in their systems. With this information, they contacted a nurse named Amy Loughren (Chastain in the film), who began to investigate on her behalf and discovered that Charles was ordering medications that did not belong to her and that they were not suitable for the patients she had to supervise. In addition, she used the hospital’s computers to access the files of other patients who were not in her area.
The Good Nurse: What Happened To Amy Loughren And How She Discovered The Serial Killer
The character played by Oscar winner Jessica Chastain is based on a real person. Amy Loughren was a nurse at Somerset Hospital in New Jersey, where she worked many of her shifts alongside Charles Cullen. In an interview with People magazine, Loughren says that she and Cullen were friends, that he was a fun person and that they worked well together, but everything changed when a series of suspicious deaths began to happen in the hospital, and the detectives in charge of the case they enlisted the help of Loughren, whom they considered smart and determined, to find out what was going on and if someone might be behind it.
Loughren hadn’t noticed anything strange about Cullen’s behavior until she began to investigate, telling The Times that “I was blind to the monster in front of me. No one jumps from questioning a medical decision to: ‘Maybe he’s trying to harm the patient.’ I went to: ‘You must have a reason to treat this patient like this.’ When I realized that he murdered them, my guilt was off the charts”. Soon, the nurse found out that Charles Cullen had had the shifts where the patients had died and that he might be responsible for the mysterious deaths, so she agreed to use a microphone to record their conversations, and that’s how she managed to get a confession.
Cullen revealed to his co-worker that he had been injecting drugs (mainly insulin, in very high doses) into patients, through the IV bags and other drugs they had connected, so she asked him to turn himself into the police. Already with the confession, Cullen was arrested and accused of at least 29 deaths (although People says that there is suspicion that he killed around 400 patients in different hospitals) and was brought to trial in 2006, where he was sentenced to 11 life sentences.
For her part, Amy Loughren had to learn to overcome the trauma of discovering that a person so close to her was a serial killer, but currently, she continues to work as a nurse and was in contact with Chastain during the creation of the Netflix film, where the focus is not only on the criminal but on the woman who risked her own life to stop him from killing.
