The Good Nurse: The True Story of The Murderer Who Inspired The Terrifying Netflix Movie
The Good Nurse tells the story of a man named Charles Cullen and is the Netflix movie to watch if you’re a fan of true crime and serial killers. Starring Oscar winner Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne, the film (opening this year, though an exact date has not been revealed) is produced by Darren Aronofsky and is based on Charles Graeber’s 2013 book of the same name. , where he explored the crimes of an unusual killer (Graeber was the only journalist who managed to interview Cullen in prison).
Charles Cullen became known as The Angel of Death (he is one of several real-life killers who bear a strong resemblance to Stephen King’s Misery) and is currently considered the most prolific serial killer in history, responsible for attacking victims more vulnerable. Redmayne will play Cullen in this film that shows the dark side of a nurse who decided to go against the code he had been taught and take the lives of dozens of people.
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 in a negative way 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 had used the hospital’s computers to access the files of other patients who were not in her area.
Loughren turned his findings over to the police and with that, they were able to arrest Charles in 2003. “Charlie Cullen doesn’t know how many people he killed. There was a big part of his life that was a fog during which he couldn’t remember,” Graeber said in an interview with NPR. “But during that fog, he said there were probably multiples a week.” On March 2, 2006, Cullen pleaded guilty to the murder of 29 patients and was sentenced to 11 life sentences, the only reason he did not receive the death penalty was that he agreed to collaborate with authorities to determine the number and identities of their victims.
The Good Nurse: Is The New Netflix Movie Based On A True Story?
The new Netflix movie is based on a true story, in which a New Jersey nurse discovered that her co-worker and friend were responsible for the deaths of approximately 40 patients. According to an article published on April 14, 2013, by the New York Post, Amy Loughren was a nurse at Somerset Medical Center who had a close friendship with another hospital employee, Nurse Charles Cullen. When Detectives Tim Braun and Danny Baldwin contacted her about a significant number of deaths at the hospital where she worked, Nurse Loughren investigated.
According to the New York Post, the victims had suspicious levels in their bodies of a drug to treat heart disease called digoxin. With this information, the nurse reviewed the pharmacy’s order list and discovered in November 2003 that her friend Charles Cullen was the person who requested the supply of this type of medication the most in the entire hospital.
The Good Nurse: How Did The Nurse Discover The Killer?
Amy also checked the medical record and discovered that Charles was the only nurse who offered to take care of patients who were not assigned to him. According to the newspaper, one of them was the Rev. Florian Gall, who went into cardiac arrest on the morning of June 28, 2003, and died 45 minutes later. The hospital database revealed that Cullen had been reviewing Florian Gall’s medical record three hours before his cardiac event. According to what the nurse told the New York Post, this case was not the only one, since there was evidence that Charlie Cullen reviewed hundreds of records during the night shift.
According to the book The Good Nurse by Charles Graeber (written on which part of the story of the Netflix series is based), Amy discovered that her friend used the information from the system to prepare a deadly cocktail of drugs for his victims. The New York Post explained in its article that Charles Cullen did not even need to be in the same room to kill his targets, since he injected the medicine into the serum bags that his fellow nurses supplied to the patients he had previously chosen. The nurse, with all the information she found in the hospital records, went to the authorities to put an end to the terror at Somerset Medical Center.
New York Magazine, in an article published on April 5, 2007, explained that Charles Cullen had been arrested on December 12, 2003, and the next day he confessed to detectives that he had been responsible for 40 murders. According to that source, Charles Cullen claimed that he killed the sick to end their suffering, but that idea was discarded when it was discovered that he also killed non-terminal patients. He was sentenced to 17 life sentences for the 40 murders he confessed to in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but authorities believe he may have been responsible for at least 400 deaths.
