Charles Cullen was arrested at a restaurant on December 12, 2003. At the time, it was reported the serial killer was on a date when detectives stormed the restaurant and apprehended him.
News outlets reported Cullen was sharing a meal of spring rolls and beer with a female companion.
That part was true. But it wasn't date.
Cullen was dining with his friend and colleague, Amy Loughren, the woman who helped authorities finally stop his killing spree.
Netflix's new true crime movie, The Good Nurse, tells the story of how Loughren (played by Jessica Chastain) worked with investigators to bring down Cullen (Eddie Redmayne) one of America's deadliest serial killers.
Watch the trailer for Netflix's The Good Nurse. Post continues below.
The series is adapted from 2013 book The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder by journalist Charles Graeber.
Born on February 22, 1960, in West Orange, New Jersey, Cullen's childhood was marred by tragedy.
According to The New York Times, Cullen's father died when he was a baby and his mother was killed in a car crash when he was in his senior year of high school. Two of his brothers would later die within years of each other.
After high school, Cullen enlisted in the US Navy. After several suicide attempts, he was medically discharged in March, 1984.
He then enrolled in nursing school at Montclair, New Jersey. While working at a Roy Rogers restaurant, he met a woman named Adrianne Baum, whom he married in 1987, the same year he graduated from nursing school.
His wife later filed for divorce, citing "extreme cruelty". In her filing, according to The Morning Call, she accused him of abusing two family dogs and turning the heating up to unbearable levels when she complained about the heat.
"He began turning the heat up to 80 degrees, making my bedroom and the children's bedrooms uncomfortably warm," the divorce documents state. "He, however, sleeps in the living room with the window open."
His first full-time job as a nurse was at St Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, New Jersey. His colleagues there later said he mostly kept to himself.
"You’d ask, 'Are you married?' or anything like that, and you’d get one-word answers," his former co-worker Jeanne T Hackett told The New York Times in 2004. "I remember the day I laid eyes on his car, and I said, 'Oh my God, now I know something about Charlie Cullen: I know what his car looks like.'"
After that first role, Cullen moved jobs frequently, shuffling through nine different jobs over the course of 11 years.
It's unclear when Cullen began killing his patients, by injecting them with a drug that stopped their heart.
It's widely believed his first victim could have been a man named John W Yengo Sr, a judge, who died in 1988 aged 72, after a 'rare allergic reaction'. After Cullen was arrested, it was discovered Yengo Sr was admitted into the hospital after an allergic reaction, but Cullen had killed him by injecting him with digoxin.
In 1993, 91-year-old Helen Dean was recovering from breast cancer, when Cullen entered her hospital room, asked her son to leave, and then gave her an injection. The next day, she became violently ill and died of heart failure.
In 1998, 78-year-old Ottomar Schramm was admitted to Easton Hospital after aspirating food into his lungs. His daughter remembered him being taken away "tests" by a "strange" man. He died a few days later.
In 2002, Cullen began working at Somerset Medical Center. There he met Loughren. According to Graeber, Loughren was "outspoken and honest" and "a shadow [Cullen] could shade himself by." The pair struck up a work friendship.
In 2003, when detectives began investigating a string of suspicious patient deaths, they got in touch with Loughren and shared their suspicions about Cullen. Loughren used hospital records to trace Cullen's modus operandi and then she shared her findings with the investigators.
"Amy found curious combinations of drugs that Charlie had consistently ordered. The list was long, sometimes half a dozen in a night. Amy knew these drugs to be more commonly used in a cardiac unit. Charlie was working in intensive care. His orders emptied the supply drawers," Graeber wrote in his book.
"Then, time and time again, Charlie ordered a restock from the pharmacy. His position meant he’d be the first to take the delivery. At the time, he was seen as being helpful. Now Amy wasn’t so sure."
Cullen would not confess, however, and the evidence was circumstantial, so they asked Loughren to help them get a confession. She wore a wire and asked Cullen to meet her for lunch.
When Loughren confronted Cullen about the murders, he told her, "I want to go down fighting".
Detectives arrested Cullen after the lunch but he still wouldn't talk to them, so Loughren travelled to the prosecutor’s office to speak with him again.
"I wasn’t very honest with him, and there’s a part of me – I still feel guilty about that. I was manipulating him a bit," Loughren told 60 Minutes in 2013. "I told him the investigators were also looking at me, and how could he think that I wasn’t somehow going to be implicated? I remember saying to him, 'So, who was your first victim? And was it a long time ago? Was it recent?' And he started to talk."
Eventually, Cullen confessed to killing 29 patients over seven hours. Authorities believe he could be responsible for many more deaths.
He received 11 life sentences in 2006 and remains imprisoned at the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton.
Both the public - and Cullen - found out about Loughren's involvement in his arrest when Graeber's book was released in 2013.
The Good Nurse is streaming on Netflix now.
Feature Image: Netflix.
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