Is The Good Nurse based on a true story?
Sometimes, a story sounds just too crazy to be true. That’s the case with The Good Nurse, but could it actually be based on truth?
There are times that you look at a story for a movie or a book and think “that would never happen.” It’s common with crime thrillers, as you think that surely the police should be able to catch the criminal before they actually do.
The Good Nurse is one of those stories. It just seems far too out there to have any sort of connection to reality. How did the police miss things? Why did it take so long for Charlie Cullen to get caught? Well, truth is stranger than fiction.
It turns out that the movie, which comes to Netflix on Wednesday, Oct. 26, is based on a true story. Eddie Redmayne plays a real serial killer, and here are all the gory details.
The true story behind The Good Nurse
The movie is focused on Amy Loughren, a single mother who helped to bring an end to a killing spree. That killing spree was at the hands of one of her colleagues, Charlie Cullen. Charles had gone 16 years without being caught until Amy realizes that something wasn’t quite right.
Charles Graeber wrote about the story in The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder. Since the release of the movie, the real Loughren shares that she now has a reason to be proud of herself. The only reason Charlie is no longer “still murdering is because of my friendship with him,” according to PEOPLE.
Charles worked as a nurse in hospitals in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The first hospital he killed at was Somerset Medical Center, where he injected patients’ IV bags with lethal doses of insulin and heart medication.
He would move from hospital to hospital, and he was fired or forced out of at least six of them. In five hospitals, the staff knew he was hurting patients and yet he got neutral references to keep working!
Things came to a head in 2003. Detective Danny Baldwin and Detective Tim Braun noticed abnormal lab reports after several patient deaths. They went to various hospitals, and Loughren was at one of them. She was able to help put the pieces of the puzzle together, making sure patients were kept safe.
Cullen was eventually arrested that year, but it would take three years for him to go to his final sentencing. It was all thanks to Loughren, who agreed to secretly record him. She was understandably conflicted, as she knew Cullen as a friend, but in the end, she had to do what was right for the patients.
Watch The Good Nurse on Netflix on Wednesday, Oct. 26.