Image Source: Getty / Leon Bennett
Jessica Chastain is entrance and heart in Netflix’s newest true-crime movie “The Good Nurse” as heroic nurse Amy Loughren, a pivotal determine who helped take down her coworker turned serial killer, Charles Cullen.
In 2003, Cullen was arrested for the tried homicide of a affected person and the homicide of one other, which ultimately led to him confessing to 29 killings all through his 15-year profession as a nurse in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Oscar-winning actor Eddie Redmayne portrays Cullen within the movie, which examines the true story of Loughren’s difficult relationship with Cullen — whom she thought-about a detailed good friend — and the way her cooperation with investigators led to the tip of his murderous spree.
Amidst “The Good Nurse” hitting Netflix on Oct. 26, here is what Loughren is as much as at present.
Who Is Amy Loughren?
In 2002, Loughren labored as an ICU nurse at Somerset Medical Center in Somerville, NJ, the place she met Cullen, a nurse in the identical unit. At the time, she was a single mother and suffered from cardiomyopathy. This coronary heart situation ceaselessly affected her skill to breathe and even resulted in a visit to the ER whereas at work, per Vanity Fair.
Working lengthy shifts as a single mom with an usually debilitating bodily situation made Loughren exhausted and susceptible to these round her, making her bond with Cullen virtually instantly. “When you’re employed within the ICU in trauma, it is such as you’re troopers. . . . You trauma-bond. We shared secrets and techniques. I simply did not know the way deep his secrets and techniques actually had been,” she defined to The Times in October 2022.
Loughren and Cullen grew shut over the following yr, however by November 2003, a startling discovery involving Cullen, her closest work good friend, got here to mild: he was coincidentally the nurse assigned to a number of sufferers who mysteriously died from a sequence of medical errors.
How Did Amy Loughren Catch Charles Cullen?
While working collectively, Loughren seen that the mix of medicine Cullen ceaselessly used and ordered — particularly insulin and digoxin — was uncommon. At Somerset Medical Center, medical data had been stored and monitored by way of a computerized system known as Cerner. Upon nearer examination of affected person data by way of Cerner, Loughren noticed proof of Cullen’s murders. An excerpt of “The Good Nurse,” the ebook by Charles Graeber that impressed the movie, notes that Cullen’s digital recording of sufferers was “the worst charting Amy had ever seen. There had been blotches of phrases right here and there, blurts, spasms of hurried and misspelled observations.” Furthermore, Loughren discovered that Cullen was searching affected person charts, lots of whom he was not assigned to, for prolonged durations, as The New York Post reported.
At the time, Somerset Medical Center was launching its personal investigation into the suspicious deaths of 4 sufferers and ultimately concerned native regulation enforcement in extracting data from each the Cerner system and the hospital employees concerning the nature of the frequent sample of affected person deaths. Loughren was one of many employees members the detectives relied on through the investigation. Despite having circumstantial proof to arrest Cullen, a confession was what detectives Tim Braun and Danny Baldwin wanted.
Along with detectives Braun and Baldwin, Loughren organized a sit-down with Cullen at a diner, throughout which she wore a wire, hoping to get some sort of confession from her former good friend. Loughren recalled the unsettling moments main as much as the occasion to Glamour, saying in a 2022 interview, “It was terrifying stepping into, particularly after they wired me up, noticed my scar of a latest pacemaker implantation, and the detective stated ‘no, we will not put this wire on you.’ I stated, ‘Yes you may. I’m a cardiac nurse, I do know I’ll be okay.’ He went to his colleague they usually talked about shutting this down, so I needed to speak them into it. The reality is I did not know the way this may have an effect on my coronary heart, however I knew I wanted to go in there and get that confession. I used to be decided possibly, not courageous.”
The two sat throughout from each other and mentioned his actions for 3 hours, and Cullen ultimately gave sufficient data for the detectives to arrest him. According to The New York Times, Cullen was arrested on one depend of homicide and one depend of tried homicide on Dec. 12, 2003. He would later confess to killing 29 folks and was sentenced to 11 consecutive life sentences with out the potential for parole in March 2006, per CNN.
Where Is Amy Loughren Now?
Loughren retired from nursing and is now devoted to therapeutic from her experiences as a nurse alongside Cullen. Per her website, she enjoys touring and happening adventures. She’s “a Reiki Master, a Hypnotherapist, NLP Practitioner, Meditation Instructor, DreamSculptor Practitioner, Reconnective Healer, Integrative Energy Healer, Past Life Regressionist, Crystal Language Reader, [and] Medical Intuitive.” Loughren can also be an newbie activist amongst her different titles and seems to reside in Deland, FL, in keeping with her Twitter bio.
Outside of her skilled and religious endeavors, Loughren additionally labored with Redmayne and Chastain through the manufacturing of “The Good Nurse.” She revealed to Glamour, “Eddie took notes from my description of him, and I watched him take these notes and put these into his craft and artistry to turn into Charles. Jessica talked rather a lot too — she performed the model of me from 20 years in the past. . . . Jessica supplied a gentleness to that 20-year-old previous self that I did not notice I had and that to me was one of the crucial lovely issues that she put into play.”
Marvel on the heroic actions of Loughren in Netflix’s “The Good Nurse,” which is streaming on Netflix now, and watch the trailer beneath.
