Netflix is the place for crime documentaries – the next to drop is Capturing the Killer Nurse and there’s a chilling true story behind it.
Directed by Tim Travers Hawkins (XY Chelsea, Persona: The Dark Truth Behind Personality Tests), Capturing the Killer Nurse details the horrifying history of serial killer Charlie Cullen and is set to hit the streaming site on November 11.
Netflix’s Capturing the Killer Nurse
Based on The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder, the best-selling book written by Charles Graeber, Netflix’s Capturing the Killer Nurse uses interviews with the nurses who blew the whistle on their coworker.
The 94-minute feature also uses interviews with the detectives who cracked the case of Charlie Cullen – one of history’s most prolific serial killers, with a body count potentially numbering in the hundreds across multiple medical facilities in the Northeast
The documentary also features audio from Charlie Cullen himself as it unravels the twisted path to his conviction.
Capturing the Killer Nurse True Story
For 16 years Charlie Cullen was employed as a nurse throughout various hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Her was an experienced registered nurse, trusted and beloved by his colleagues, but he also had a dark secret – he was an unrelenting serial killer.
After a tumultuous childhood, dropping out of high school and enrolling in the navy, Charlie eventually trained as a nurse and got married and had two daughters. But that wasn’t to be – his wife, Adrienne Taub, filed for divorce in 1993, telling police she was “afraid of her husband” and believed he was dangerous due to the access to drugs he had at the hospital. She even got rid of the family pets in fear her husband would hurt them.
Did anyone listen? Not really. When Adrienne applied for a restraining order and stated all of this and more the judge denied it stating Charlie was only guilty of “only odd behaviour, not threatening violence”.
After the divorce Charlie’s behaviour spiralled and he would go on to murder people in his care. He first killed three people in his care at Warren Hospital in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, giving them fatal doses of the drug digoxin.
Over the next nine years Charlie would move on to different health care facilities, working night shifts mainly and killing patients.
He was eventually brought down when working at Somerset Medical Center, in New Jersey, by a colleague who suspected his involvement with the number of patients who’d died with the drug digoxin in their system.
As Charlie was already suspected by police nurse Amy Loughren wore a wire and attempted to get a confession out of him. Eventually Charlie was arrested and admitted to the murders.
While only 29 murders could be confirmed, Charlie claimed he killed up to 40 people during his nursing career, but investigators think his number of victims could be around the 400 mark. He is now currently still serving multiple life sentences in prison.
The Good Nurse
Similar to releasing Dahmer, the dramatised series about the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and then Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes, Capturing the Killer Nurse comes after Netflix’s movie The Good Nurse comes out on October 26 and is a dramatised version of events.
In the movie Eddie Redmayne will portray Charlie Cullen, while Jessica Chastain will play one of his colleagues, a whistleblower who started unraveling the twisted mystery surrounding Charlie.