“Capturing the Killer Nurse” is a documentary about Charles Cullen, the serial killer whose chilling story is the basis for the Eddie Redmayne/Jessica Chastain film “The Good Nurse.” Both movies are being released on Netflix, in what has become a synergistic system of true crime as cross-promotion. What both versions show is that the Cullen saga may be the first case of a serial killer being enabled by corporate malpractice.
Cullen, a geek with a porn star mustache and a grinning grin who spent 16 years as a highly respected nurse in the Northeast, injected hospital drugs, primarily the heart failure drug Digoxin, into several patients, killing them "invisibly." He ”he He was arrested in December 2003 and confessed to the murder of 29 people; many think he killed close to 400. Given that his history of foul play dates back to the early 1990s, and that he worked at nine different hospitals, hopping from one to another, it seems likely that the total number of victims was much higher than the official account.
Director: Tim Travers Hawkins
Writers: Tim Travers Hawkins, Robin Ockleford
Stars: Charles Cullen, Amy Loughren, Donna Hargreaves
The key question in the Cullen case is: How did he get away with it for so long? That, of course, is a key question in almost every serial killer case, but the answer here isn't simply something like "He was sneaky and devilishly clever and presented a 'normal' surface to the outside world." All of that is true, but Charles Cullen was, in fact, not that smart. If you're a medical professional committing homicide in a hospital by injecting vulnerable patients with unprescribed drugs, and the level of toxicity in your system is measured after they're dead, you're practically giving investigators a path. map to catch you.
The deaths of Cullen's patients were "mysterious" (most were not terminally ill and many were preparing to be discharged). From the beginning, the hospitals he worked for saw red flags. But according to Charles Graeber, author of "The Good Nurse," Cullen's predatory behavior created an enigma to the corporate healthcare institutions he worked for. If a hospital admitted what he had done, he could be held accountable and take a catastrophic hit as a business. Aside from the exorbitant payments you might owe to the families of the victims, having a notorious killer on your staff doesn't exactly improve a hospital's brand.
And so, according to Graeber, hospitals, like St. Luke's in Pennsylvania, sat on the evidence and looked the other way. As featured in “Capturing the Killer Nurse,” healthcare executives acted much like the higher-ups of the Catholic Church toward sexually abusive priests. It was easier to turn a blind eye to the behavior of the priests and move them to another parish than to publicly expose a rat's nest of criminal depravity. Yet even knowing that healthcare is now big business, with its own corruptions, you watch “Capturing the Killer Nurse” and think: Really? Were there hospitals that overlooked the fact that a nurse on their staff was a psychotic murderer? If true, that says something profound about the way mainstream America is operating now.
Directed by Tim Travers Hawkins, “Capturing the Killer Nurse” does not claim to be a comprehensive or comprehensive documentary. He doesn't dig too much into Cullen's past. True to its title, the film focuses primarily on the two months during which police detectives in Somerset, NJ, where Cullen worked at Somerset Hospital, began closing in on him.
They faced much of the same obstructions that the other hospitals had thrown up. In this case, however, an official at the Newark Poison Control Center thought something was off when he received a call about a patient who had died from digoxin. Detectives wanted to see the computerized records of the Pyxis drug dispenser and were told that he only retained data for 30 days. They then contacted the manufacturer and found out that this was nonsense. They were being interpreted by hospital administrators.
As soon as they got the hard copies of the drugs being dispensed, they had hard evidence. And now, for the first time, they also had a whistleblower. It was Cullen's friend and colleague, Amy Loughren, a rather desperate single mother suffering from cardiomyopathy who supported her friend Charlie, even after he was fired by the police, until she saw those printouts. It was then that she knew. And that's when she agreed to cooperate with the police by wearing a bug and having a friendly dinner with Charlie.
Watch Capturing the Killer Nurse 2022 Movie Trailer
Comments
Post a Comment