Netflix’s The Good Nurse retells the story of a nurse who helped investigate the suspicious deaths of patients under her colleague’s care, but the movie doesn't directly say how many people the real-life Charles Cullen actually killed. The Good Nurse stars Jessica Chastain as protagonist Amy Loughren, an ICU nurse that starts doubting her colleague’s actions after patients start inexplicably dying, and Eddie Redmayne as Amy’s colleague Charlie. It’s based on the 2013 homonymous true-crime book by Charles Graeber and directed by Tobias Lindholm.
Netflix’s true crime The Good Nurse details both Amy and Charlie’s bonding over their jobs and Amy’s growing suspicion of him once the detectives’ words start lining up with Charlie’s odd actions and knowledge of the hospital systems. The Good Nurse’s ending, however, shows Charlie finally confessing to his crimes, and it then highlights the true story behind the crime drama. Collaborating with the police to avoid the death penalty, the real Charles Cullen confessed to killing as many as 40 people, despite only 29 being confirmed. However, the actual number of his victims cannot be known for sure, making many believe them to be up to 400.
How Many Life Sentences Did Charles Cullen Receive?
While true crime fans’ interest in real stories should push them to documentaries, The Good Nurse’s final shots offer glimpses of the real story, like many other true crime dramas do, confirming Charles Cullen’s sentence and future eligibility for parole. Cullen was sentenced to serve 11 consecutive life sentences at first in March 2006, which then were upped to 18. The updated sentence makes him eligible for parole only in 2403, making his criminal penalty effectively last potentially his entire life and some time more.
Why The Number Of Charles Cullen's Victims Will Never Be Known
The reason behind the inability to know the true number of his victims partially stems from the way Cullen overdosed his patients by using IV bags contaminated with insulin, digoxin, or epinephrine. However, it also has a lot to do with the systemic failures of the world Cullen worked in, just like Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story showed the systemic failures that let another serial killer go free. In Cullen’s case, the hospitals where he worked often didn’t look deep enough into suspicious deaths, and they neither reported Cullen to one another, to oversight agencies nor to law enforcement because they weren’t required to.
The Good Nurse wholly highlights how the hospitals tried to protect themselves, sometimes even by delaying contacting the authorities despite noticing wrongdoing. The ending shots not only show that many hospitals throughout Cullen’s 16-year career “harbored suspicion about him” without stopping him but also how there haven’t even been criminal proceedings against any of the hospitals involved. This way, The Good Nurse indeed showed how impossible entire systems made it for Cullen to be easily weeded out once his actions started raising doubts, making the number of all of Cullen’s victims effectively impossible to know for sure.