Hes just been fired for what hes told is a discrepancy between dates on his resume. And you have to go hospital-by-hospital, case-by-case and really look at which incidents should have been reported. It's all circumstantial. By browsing this site, we may share your information with our social media partners in accordance with our, Amy Kuperinsky | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder. Steve Kroft: What's going through your mind? And I had a relationship with him that was very fun, very funny. In the film, Amy is surprised to find her 77-year-old patient has died after being treated for an adverse reaction to amoxicillin. Daniel Baldwin: After speaking with the trooper he informed me that his agency had conducted an investigation on Mr. Cullen with the suspicion that he was murdering patients in Pennsylvania as well. Serial killer Charles Cullen may have previously suggested that he killed 29 people out of mercy, but in reality it was not about the patients' wellbeing but fulfilling his own need and. First published on April 29, 2013 / 9:35 AM. Steve Kroft: Why wouldn't the hospitals do some background checks? He estimated that hed killed around 40 patients, and detectives were able to officially tie him to 29 murders but the true number may be more than ten times that. 'The Good Nurse' Ending, Explained: What Happens To Charles Cullen? But like I said, I don't know if I would've stopped. Charles Graeber: It was never about anyone but Charlie Cullen. Steve Kroft: What did you tell her, do you remember? And for a hospital to ask too much or say too much became a liability. Fortunately, the poisoning didnt result in any deaths. Cullen, a nurse, murdered dozenspossibly hundredsof patients during a 16-year career spanning several New Jersey medical centers until being arrested in 2003. - Div 1992) father: Meme Cullen mother: Florence Cullen Born Country: United States Serial Killers American Men Recommended Lists: American People Male Criminals Pisces Criminals At the very worst was just, you know, intentionally violating rules and procedures of hospitals. "Most employers today, if asked about a former employee, will not say anything derogatory about that former employee. Today Cullens name is synonymous with cold, clinical barbarity. Cullen suggested several times that his actions were merciful, but the evidence doesn't support it. For a decade, he operated at . It was also readily available in critical care units, and Cullen figured out ways to conceal his digoxin withdrawals from an automatic drug dispensary system called Pyxis, which required nurses to type in the name of the patient and the drug to be administered. The scenes where Amy knows hes a killer, but he doesnt know she knows, play out like a thriller. He said he'd killed as many as 40 patients during the course of his nursing career. He graduated from nursing school and married a computer programmer named Adrienne Taub but the celebrations were overshadowed by the death of Cullens brother James. Where Is Charles Cullen Now? The Good Nurse: True Story Makes Netflix I have to believe that the nurses on the floor saw other things that were going on, and probably reported it to their supervisor," says Gall. Yes. The patient was John Yengo, a judge from New Jersey, who was suffering from a severe case of sunburn, until Cullen injected him with a fatal overdose of lidocaine. "And when I got to the hospital, which might have been maybe 20 (minutes) to half-hour later, after the initial phone call, he was already blue, and they were pumping on his chest," recalls Gall. Charles Graeber, who penned "The Good Nurse," is the only journalist to have interviewed Cullen in prison. I learned a lot about my friend Charlie and it scared the hell out of me after I read the book, because I really didnt know, she says. "When it comes to health care, why wouldn't these people care? Cullen was a nurse who worked at nine hospitals (and one nursing home) in New Jersey and Pennsylvania over the course of 16 years. Charles Graeber: Right, he actually took a call asking him back on shift from a psych ward. In April 1978, Cullen dropped out of high school and enlisted in the U.S. Navy, where he received training to become a ballistic missiles technician. Charles Graeber: He sees himself as a victim. "And I asked them to please stop, because I really thought it was God's will.". And my wife told Cullen, "That's enough. I plan to plead guilty.". People didn't tell us he was fired. Cullen is portrayed as being mindful of her illness and offering a lifeline when Amy desperately needed it. You know what I did there is no justification. Steven Marcus: That we know of, that you're saying. Charles Cullen was ultimately sentenced to 11 consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole. And that culture of silence also hampers the state agencies that license nurses. But Cullen refused to say anything. He could be the first to go in there. There's no reason that I should've been a practicing nurse after that. Charles Cullen: No, I thought that people weren't suffering anymore. Charlie and I were very trauma-bonded in the same way that soldiers bond, says Loughren, who now lives in DeLand, Florida with her daughters and grandchildren. Before he was a ruthless serial killer, Charles Cullen was a child surrounded by death and overcome by depression and nihilism. Some suspect it was a lot more. When he told me about that, I said, 'Well, somebody gave him something. And it was the Pyxis printouts. And I asked what the needle was for, and he told me that was in case my father's heart stopped. He'd put lighter fluid in the vodka, which is sort of an early example of what would become his pattern for life: a way of passively dealing with things. "This was a working-class single mom who was a superhero," Wilson-Cairns says.Jemal Countess | Getty Images, The Good Nurse focuses very much on the human condition, which is extremely flawed, extremely complicated, extremely layered, Loughren says. "The only information that we have available to us, as is with anybody, is what people were willing to tell you and give you," says Miller. And so I actually doubted myself in questioning him. In 1988, Cullen committed what's believed to be his first murder by killing a Jersey City judge named John W. Yengo Sr. Charles Cullen: I mean, I remember one and that's the only person I've been able to identify. And they did provide us two names in particular but did not identify them as any type of suspect or anything like that. It was more or less, you know, it felt like I needed to do something. He felt a compulsion to kill. That June, Cullen also accepted his first nursing job in the burn unit of Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, New Jersey. He had few friends and was often teased at school. Cullen would work at eight other hospitals and be suspected of harming patients at six of them, but those suspicions never reached subsequent employers and Cullen continued to murder patients with virtual impunity. And we have been trying to investigate this to get some more information before we made any kind of rush to, you know, judgment. . He holds a bachelor's degree in screenwriting (widely considered to be a bad move) from Point Park University. Steve Kroft: They offered you some kind of a deal? Never did she think filmmakers would see her as the driver of the story as the good nurse in The Good Nurse.. If they would have stopped this man back in 1998, look how many people would still be alive.". But the films postscript includes a sobering line: There have never been criminal proceedings against any of the hospitals., Charles Cullen at a 2005 appearance in Superior Court in Somerset County. Loughren says the impulse was an attempt at denial one way to digest the awful truth of what Cullen did. But almost as disturbing were the red flags officials ignored. Following his arrest in December 2003, he confessed to killing 29 patients, often by administering drug overdoses . Throughout his 16-year medical career, Charles Cullen bounced back and forth between various hospitals and nursing homes throughout New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Charles Cullen: I think that I had a lot of trouble accepting that word for a long time. Is it because what theyre sayings true?. His mother, Florence, struggled to raise the children on her own. Schramm died later that night. But it was Amys story that Lindholm, 45, found most compelling. Cullen admits to killing one patient at New Jersey's Somerset Medical Center. He spent six years in the Navy, most of them as a missile technician on a nuclear submarine. 'The Good Nurse' details Charles Cullen's killing spree Since Correspondent Morley Safer first reported on this story last April, Cullen has begun the process of identifying his victims, and has already pleaded guilty to 16 murders. Um, I just think that the only thing I can say is that I felt overwhelmed at the time. And as a victim, he's entitled to lash out in any way he wants to make things right. And on some occasions, walked right out of the psych ward and right into a job as a critical care nurse. What it does focus on is the love that people had for their family members that were patients, the love that Amy had for her patients, for her patients loved ones, and how invested she was in fighting against a system that was set up not only to harm her, but harm other people.. I think that as storytellers, we have a responsibility to have a reason to enter the darkness, the director says. In his new book, The Good Nurse, Graeber pieces together the elements of Cullen's story. Steve Kroft: You said at one point that you thought it was about power and control. And I was devastated. After so many deaths in just one year, rumors and suspicion about Cullen finally drew enough attention that an official investigation began. It was the suspicious death of a Roman Catholic priest named Florian Gall that set in motion the events that would eventually expose Charles Cullen. You can't penalize a nurse for seeking counseling, for seeking treatment, for going to a rehab center successfully. There were. The following is a script from "Angel of Death" which aired on April 28, 2013. Some of them were very young. Cullen would turn out to be one of the nation's most prolific serial killers, murdering dozens, perhaps hundreds of people in nine hospitals over a 16-year period. In September 2002, he started working at Somerset Medical Center, where he went on a year-long killing spree that left at least 13 patients dead. But what is the point of the nursing board if criminal investigations are not reported to the board? Charles Cullen: No. And at St. Luke's Hospital, he was suspended for stockpiling lethal medications. And there was no reason to suspect that Cullen had murdered five patients at his last job. The confirmation arrived after she pressed rewind on her own memories. I strongly suspected that she was wired when she was asking me those questions, so, you know, that didn't stop me having the same opinion of Amy, which is that she's a good nurse, that she's a caring nurse, and that she did it because she felt it was the right thing to do. I mean, I was a confidential informant for so long, and talking about it, I thought, was going to just be too much, too triggering, Loughren says. "I don't know if it surprises me, because I have so many questions. They wanted to explore Loughren's point of view and the way she stood up to a negligent system.Netflix. #inline-recirc-item--id-a63660ec-8c88-11e2-b06b-024c619f5c3d ~ .item:nth-child(5) { A staff writer for All That's Interesting, Austin Harvey has also had work published with Discover Magazine, Giddy, and Lucid covering topics on mental health, sexual health, history, and sociology. They just saw it as a lot easier to not put themselves in a position of getting sued. True Crime: New Jersey's 'Angel of death' The screenwriter, who hails from Scotland, had never heard of Cullen until Graebers book. The other residents remember him jumping on the chest of a patient in just the sort of the most dramatic fashion. I want to go down fighting. Pretending To Be A 'Good Nurse,' Serial Killer Targeted Patients April 29, 2013 / 9:35 AM I think more than anything, I wanted so badly to believe that he was a mercy killer, she says. Cullen worked for 16 years at hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The file there also contained a Post-it note saying that the Pennsylvania State Police had called just a few weeks earlier asking similar questions. Rick Hepp. Everything The Good Nurse Gets Wrong About The True Story St. Franziskus-Hospital Mnster Mnster 620 Klinikum Dortmund Dortmund 1422: www.klinikumdo.de: Albertinen-Krankenhaus Hamburg 569 Stdtisches Klinikum Karlsruhe Karlsruhe 1,057 Krankenhaus Nordwest Frankfurt am Main 509 Mnchen Klinik Bogenhausen Munich 959 Marienhospital Stuttgart Stuttgart 761 She has visited him there, but not after 2013. Exactly what happened to the child is not clear. By his own count, Cullen had already murdered 11 people. There were suspicions at nearly all of them that Cullen was harming patients, yet none of them passed that information on to subsequent employers. Trending News Charles Cullen Biography - Facts, Childhood, Family Life & Achievements A nurse who worked with Cullen says she told administrators he may have used those drugs to kill people. Cullen began working at Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, New Jersey, in the year 1986. Cullen killed patients by giving them intravenous medications like insulin and digoxin (a heart medicine). In July of 2003, Marcus set up an urgent conference call with the hospital's medical director, Dr. William Cors, and taped the conversation in which he told the hospital to notify the authorities. So once again the police turned to Amy Ridgway for help. That he was using digoxin to murder patients. Charlie's older brothers battled drug addiction and his sisters became entangled in bad relationships. Steve Kroft: And that was the first place that you gave someone medication that caused them to die? 'The Good Nurse': Did the Families of Charles Cullen's Victims Ever Charles Cullen, The 'Good Nurse' Who Killed Up To 400 Patients No patients shown in the film are based on individual victims or use real names, though Cullens methods are the same, Wilson-Cairns says. She filed a domestic violence complaint against him and asked for a restraining order, but according to Crime and Investigation, a judge said Cullen was only guilty of odd behavior, not threatening violence.. Amy Loughren, at left, the nurse who became a confidential informant and helped police investigate serial killer Charles Cullen. Detective Baldwin called the trooper who made the inquiry and hit paydirt. And we have taken that grief from those families. "He could . In 2008, families of 22 victims from Somerset Medical Center, Saint Barnabas, Warren Hospital in Phillipsburg, Hunterdon Medical Center in Flemington and St. Lukes Hospital in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania reached a confidential settlement after filing wrongful-death lawsuits. By Rebecca Leung April 2, 2004 / 1:01 PM / CBS When police in New Jersey arrested a male nurse named Charles Cullen last year, he made a terrible. She says she hopes the film can encourage people to stand up to systems that are not set up for our success and really dont care about us at all.. display: none; When Amy Loughren learned there would be a film about Charles Cullen, she assumed the movie would examine the life of the serial killer. Yet you went off to Somerset and kept doing exactly the same things and it looks like, to me, that you wanted to get caught. It was the last stop in a career that could have been ended years earlier, according to John Morganelli -- one of seven prosecutors investigating Cullen. Protecting himself from his own demons has been more difficult. When he was finally caught in 2003, investigators realized that Cullen may have killed far more than 29 patients. Why not? she asks. It was a pattern that began 26 years ago at St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, New Jersey, Cullen's very first nursing job. So that was my way in.. So, I mean, there was a lot of pain, a lot of suffering. I was afraid that people were going to judge me as harshly as I was judging them, Loughren says. Neither does the lifeless body of a new mother found to be overdosed on insulin. Charles Graeber: He was the main suspect for poisoning random bags of saline. They were way higher than you would ever shoot for by using the drug therapeutically. And the reason they won't is because their lawyers will tell them not to," says New Jersey's Attorney General Peter Harvey. This immediately pointed to the possibility that Charles was perhaps doing something wrong at all the places, and the hospitals wanted to keep it shut to avoid any consequences . They gave you an opportunity to leave. Failure to report Cullen's behavior: Hospital managers and administration did not report Cullen's behavior or their suspicions to the police or state board of nursing. At Warren Hospital, he was investigated for a suspicious patient death. Author Charles Graeber interviewed Cullen more than a dozen times for his book. asks Toth. Copyright 2023 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. "We had been advised by his doctors that he was doing better. Gall had died of a digoxin overdose. asks Morganelli. They don't usually talk to reporters. "The wrong medication. What I found in this story was this was a working-class single mom who was a superhero.. In exchange for his cooperation, he'll be spared the death penalty. "He told me that somebody had given my father the wrong medication," recalls Toth, who is convinced Cullen killed her father. Steve Kroft: Did you think you had your man? According to Investigation Discovery, an investigation at the hospital revealed that Cullen was accessing medical records of patients who werent assigned to him and ordering odd combinations of drugs. Inside chilling life of warped nurse Charles Cullen who 'killed up to There were allegations about him at other facilities for doing similar things that that were going on at Somerset Medical Center. Loughren is the New Jersey nurse-turned-whistleblower and informant who helped police build a case against Cullen, the killer nurse depicted in the Netflix film playing in select theaters and premiering Oct. 26 on the streaming service. A lot of the heroes that we see that are put on TV and in film are sort of these billionaires in batsuits, theyre billionaires in Ironman suits or theyre bit by a radioactive spider, says Wilson-Cairns, 35. Steve Kroft is the correspondent. Including Somerset Medical Center, Charles Cullen worked in 9 hospitals. I felt betrayed by my own intuition. Steve Kroft: How did you choose who you're going to give this medication to? In 2003, police in Somerset County, N.J., arrested a hospital nurse named Charlie Cullen who was suspected of injecting patients with lethal doses of a variety of medications. She was the risk manager in a situation of unprecedented consequence in lives and jobs and dollars. How Charles Cullen killed 29 patients in 16 years: The true story He did not know that I worked for the New Jersey prosecution until that book came out.. Cullen pleaded guilty to killing at least 29 people from 1988 to 2003 when he worked at hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. There was a lot of domestic abuse surrounding that. Mary Lund: Where is Ex-Somerset Director Now? - The Cinemaholic Netflix Throughout "The Good Nurse," audiences suspect that Charles' mental health isn't in a great place. After his trial, Charles Cullen sought to gain permission to donate one of his kidneys. You don't even have the guts to look this way do you? I know you did this. They never told Lucille Gall the real cause of her brother's death. An actual motive for his crimes has never been established. Google's AI experts on the future of artificial intelligence Steve Kroft: Did you get pleasure out of it? Charles Cullens first victim was a 72-year-old patient named John Yengo, a retired Jersey City judge, The New York Times reported. No. And then, the heart is very irregular. Graham Messick, producer. I realized we are all layered people, we all disassociate in some way, Loughren says. }, First published on April 2, 2004 / 1:01 PM. Amy Ridgway: He was always early, always on time, crisp. When Charles Cullen's arrest first made the news, the former nurse was reported to have been sharing a meal of spring rolls and beer with a female friend . Like, there was an entire book about Charles Cullen and this tiny little portion of that book that was only a few chapters, they wanted to adapt into a movie, so I didnt believe it, Loughren says. In Cullen's case, all his victims were patients assigned to hospital units where he worked as a nurse. The True Story Behind Netflix's 'The Good Nurse'