Amy Loughren

Last updated
Amy Loughren
NationalityAmerican
OccupationNurse
Known forassisting in the arrest and prosecution of serial murderer Charlie Cullen.

Amy Loughren is an American reiki master [1] and former registered nurse who is known for assisting in the arrest and prosecution of serial murderer Charlie Cullen.

Contents

Before his apprehension, Cullen and Loughren were friends who both worked the night shift in the intensive care unit at Somerset Medical Center in Somerville, New Jersey. [1] Loughren was a single mother of two children and hiding her cardiomyopathy from her employers, with some help from Cullen, in whom she confided. [1] [2]

In 2003, Loughren was approached by detectives who suspected Cullen of poisoning hospital patients. [3] The patient who triggered law enforcement interest was Florian Gall. As a patient at Somerset Medical, Gall had been improving, then he suddenly died of a massive heart attack. An autopsy showed that he had been administered digoxin. It was not on his prescription list. In small doses, digoxin can improve heart function, but the amount Gall had received was lethal. [4] After consulting with her 11-year-old daughter, Loughren agreed to assist law enforcement. [5]

Independent of the police investigation, Loughren noticed that Cullen's medical charting was irregular. It was at points muddled and hasty, and there were frequent misspellings. The hospital's tracking system also showed Loughren that Cullen spent unusual amounts of time on the files of other nurses' patients. [6]

As part of the investigation into Cullen, Loughren met with him at a diner, wearing a wire. Because she had just had a pacemaker installed, police did not want her to wear the wire, but she insisted. “The truth is I didn’t know how this would affect my heart, but I knew I needed to go in there and get that confession,” she said in an interview with Vanity Fair. During Loughren's meeting with Cullen in the diner, he did not overtly admit to the murders, but he said that he would "go down fighting." [6] The evidence from the meeting allowed police to then arrest Cullen. [7] After he was arrested, Loughren encouraged him to make a full confession, which then supported his convictions for 29 murders. [5]

Loughren struggled with the fact that her friend was a serial murderer and with her role in apprehending him: "And he wasn't a mercy killer. He was a cold-blooded murderer. And for me to not have seen that, I really did struggle." [8]

Personal life

Loughren was a single mother of two daughters, and she is now a grandmother. While employed as a nurse, she developed cardiomyopathy which she hid from her employers, to protect her job and her health insurance, [7] and kept working contrary to medical advice. [8] In 2008, Loughren had an experimental heart surgery, and her health has improved. [8]

The Netflix film The Good Nurse is a biopic about the apprehension of Charles Cullen, but it focuses on Loughren rather than the killer. It is based on the 2013 book The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder by Charles Graeber. [9] Loughren is played by Jessica Chastain in the movie. [5] [2]

Loughren also was featured in the documentary film Capturing the Killer Nurse , which began streaming on Netflix on November 11, 2022. [10]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harold Shipman</span> English doctor and serial killer (1946–2004)

Harold Frederick Shipman Jr, known to acquaintances as Fred Shipman, was an English general practitioner and serial killer. He is considered to be one of the most prolific serial killers in modern history, with an estimated 250 victims. On 31 January 2000, Shipman was found guilty of murdering fifteen patients under his care. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a whole life order. Shipman hanged himself in his cell at HM Prison Wakefield, West Yorkshire, on 13 January 2004, aged 57.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dennis Rader</span> American serial killer (born 1945)

Dennis Lynn Rader, also known as BTK, is an American serial killer who murdered at least ten people in Wichita and Park City, Kansas, between 1974 and 1991. Although Rader occasionally killed or attempted to kill men and children, he typically targeted women. His victims were often bound, sometimes with objects from their homes, and either suffocated with a plastic bag or manually strangled with a ligature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Bodkin Adams</span> British physician and fraudster (1899–1983)

John Bodkin Adams was a British general practitioner, convicted fraudster, and suspected serial killer. Between 1946 and 1956, 163 of his patients died while in comas, which was deemed to be worthy of investigation. In addition, 132 out of 310 patients had left Adams money or items in their wills.

The Toronto hospital baby deaths were a series of suspicious deaths that occurred in the Cardiac Ward of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Ontario, Canada between July 1980 and March 1981. The deaths started after a cardiology ward had been divided into two new adjacent wards. The deaths ended after the police had been called in, and the digitalis-type medication that had possibly been used for the alleged killings (digoxin) had begun to be kept under lock and key. Three nurses were at the centre of the investigation and an apparent attempt to poison nurses' food. One of the nurses, Susan Nelles, was charged with four murders, but the prosecution was dismissed a year later on the grounds that she could not have been responsible for a death excluded from the indictment, which the judge deemed a murder.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Cullen</span> American serial killer (born 1960)

Charles Edmund Cullen is an American serial killer. Cullen, a nurse, murdered dozens—possibly hundreds—of patients during a 16-year career spanning several New Jersey medical centers until being arrested in 2003. He confessed to committing as many as 40 murders at least 29 of which have been confirmed; though interviews with police, psychiatrists and journalists suggest he committed many more.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kristen Gilbert</span> American serial murderer and former nurse

Kristen Heather Gilbert is an American serial killer and former nurse who was convicted of four murders and two attempted murders of patients admitted to the Veterans Affairs Medical Center (VAMC) in Northampton, Massachusetts. She induced cardiac arrest in patients by injecting their intravenous therapy bags with massive doses of epinephrine, commonly known as adrenaline, which is an untraceable heart stimulant. She would then respond to the coded emergency, often resuscitating the patients herself. Prosecutors said Gilbert was on duty for about half of the 350 deaths that occurred at the hospital from when she started working there in 1989, and that the odds of this merely being a coincidence was 1 in 100 million. However, her only confirmed victims were Stanley Jagodowski, Henry Hudon, Kenneth Cutting, and Edward Skwira.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Genene Jones</span> American female serial killer

Genene Anne Jones is an American serial killer, responsible for the deaths of up to 60 infants and children in her care as a licensed vocational nurse during the 1970s and 1980s. In 1984, Jones was convicted of murder and injury to a child. She had used injections of digoxin, heparin, and later succinylcholine to induce medical crises in her patients, causing numerous deaths. The exact number of victims remains unknown; hospital officials allegedly misplaced and then destroyed records of Jones' activities, to prevent further litigation after Jones' first conviction.

Beverley Gail Allitt is an English serial killer who was convicted of murdering four infants, attempting to murder three others, and causing grievous bodily harm to a further six at Grantham and Kesteven Hospital, Lincolnshire between February and April 1991. She committed the murders as a State Enrolled Nurse on the hospital's children's ward.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lucia de Berk</span> Dutch paediatric nurse

Lucia de Berk, often called Lucia de B., is a Dutch licensed paediatric nurse who was the subject of a miscarriage of justice. In 2003, she was sentenced to life imprisonment, for which no parole is possible under Dutch law, for four murders and three attempted murders of patients under her care. In 2004, after an appeal, she was convicted of seven murders and three attempted murders.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Somerset</span> Hospital in Somerville, New Jersey, US

Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Somerset, located in Somerville, New Jersey, is a nationally accredited, 355-bed regional medical center providing a variety of comprehensive emergency, medical/surgical and rehabilitative services to Central New Jersey residents.

An angel of mercy or angel of death is a type of criminal offender who is usually employed as a medical practitioner or a caregiver and intentionally harms or kills people under their care. The angel of mercy is often in a position of power and may decide the victim would be better off if they no longer suffered from whatever severe illness is plaguing them. This person then uses their knowledge to kill the victim. In some cases, as time goes on, this behavior escalates to encompass the healthy and the easily treated.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Colin Norris</span> Scottish serial killer

Colin Campbell Norris is a Scottish serial killer and former nurse who murdered four elderly patients and attempted to murder another in two hospitals in Leeds, England in 2002. Norris, who self-admittedly disliked elderly patients and had previously stolen hospital drugs, was the only person on duty when all the five patients inexplicably fell into sudden hypoglycaemic comas, despite the non-diabetic women only being in minor injury wards with merely broken hips. Suspicions were raised when Norris predicted that healthy Ethel Hall would die at 5:15 am one night, which is when she fell into a catastrophic arrest, and tests revealed that she had been injected with an extremely high level of man-made insulin. Insulin was missing from the hospital fridge and Norris had last accessed it, only half an hour before Hall fell unconscious. Subsequent investigations would find that the unnatural hypoglycaemic attacks followed him when he was transferred to a second hospital, and hospital records revealed that only he could not be eliminated as a suspect. Detectives believed that Norris was responsible for up to six other suspicious deaths where only he was always present, but a lack of post mortem evidence and other factors meant that investigators and the Crown Prosecution Service could not pursue convictions for these deaths. The murder inquiry was led by Chris Gregg and the investigation was praised for its thoroughness.

Jessie Gordon, formerly McTavish, is a Scottish retired nurse who was convicted in 1974 of murdering a patient with insulin, and of administering a variety of substances with intent to cause harm. The conviction was overturned on appeal in 1976. She was dubbed the "Angel of Death" by the press.

Elizabeth Tracy Mae "Bethe" Wettlaufer is a convicted Canadian serial killer and former registered nurse who confessed to murdering eight senior citizens and attempting to murder six others in southwestern Ontario between 2007 and 2016. With a total of 14 victims either killed or injured by her actions, she is described as one of the worst serial killers in Canadian history.

Christina Aistrup Hansen is a former Danish nurse who was charged with the murder of four patients and attempted manslaughter of a fifth at the Nykøbing Falster Hospital.

Krysty Norma Lesley Wilson-Cairns is a Scottish screenwriter. Born and raised in Glasgow, she studied at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the National Film and Television School. During her teenage years, she was a runner on television series including the detective show Taggart. Her script for the unproduced science fiction thriller Aether made the 2014 Black List and led to a staff writer role on the television show Penny Dreadful. Her feature film debut was the screenplay for the Sam Mendes-directed 2019 war film 1917. She co-wrote it with Mendes and received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay.

<i>The Good Nurse</i> 2022 crime drama film by Tobias Lindholm

The Good Nurse is a 2022 American drama film starring Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne and features the serial killer Charles Cullen and the fellow nurse who suspects him. The film is based on the 2013 true-crime book of the same name by Charles Graeber. It is directed by Tobias Lindholm and written by Krysty Wilson-Cairns. The film also stars Nnamdi Asomugha, Kim Dickens, and Noah Emmerich.

Charles Graeber is an American journalist and author. He published two nonfiction books in the 2010s. He wrote the 2013 book The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder about the serial killer Charles Cullen, which was a follow-up to his 2007 article for New York magazine about Cullen, and the 2018 book The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer about cancer immunotherapy.

<i>The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder</i> Book by Charles Graeber

The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder is a 2013 true-crime book about Charles Cullen, a nurse and convicted serial killer, written by American journalist and author Charles Graeber. Graeber documents how Cullen was able to move several times within the health care system in the Northeast of the United States and how police detectives, with the help of a confidential informant, Amy Loughren, were able to bring him to justice. The book also reveals the institutional and moral shortcomings of hospitals and administrators, who enabled Cullen to move from place to place in order to protect bottom lines instead of caring for the well-being of patients. The book is a follow-up to Graeber's 2007 New York magazine article about Cullen.

<i>Capturing the Killer Nurse</i> 2022 documentary by Tim Travers Hawkins

Capturing the Killer Nurse is a 2022 true crime documentary film about serial killer Charles Cullen and how investigators were able to prove Cullen was killing patients while working in hospitals and at a nursing home as a nurse in the United States. The film is based on the 2013 book The Good Nurse by Charles Graeber and is directed by Tim Travers Hawkins, who wrote the screenplay with Robin Ockleford. Produced by Sandpaper Films and Fifty Fifty Post, it was released on November 11, 2022, on the streaming service Netflix.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Lutkin, Aimee (October 27, 2022). "Yes, 'The Good Nurse' Is a Real Person, and Her Name Is Amy Loughren". Elle . Archived from the original on 22 August 2023. Retrieved 30 October 2022.
  2. 1 2 Coyle, Jake (October 21, 2022). "In 'Good Nurse,' a serial killer exposes health care system". Associated Press . Archived from the original on 22 August 2023. Retrieved 1 November 2022.
  3. Alexander, Ella (October 19, 2022). "'How I caught America's most prolific serial killer'". Glamour . Archived from the original on 22 August 2023. Retrieved 1 November 2022.
  4. Miller, Korin. "Where Is Amy Loughren From 'The Good Nurse' Now? All About Her Life After Charles Cullen And Cardiomyopathy". Women's Health . Archived from the original on 22 August 2023. Retrieved 30 October 2022.
  5. 1 2 3 McNiece, Mia (October 19, 2022). "'The Good Nurse': How Amy Loughren Helped Put Her Serial Killer Colleague Behind Bars: 'Nurses Are Badass'". People . Archived from the original on 22 August 2023. Retrieved 1 November 2022.
  6. 1 2 Desta, Yohana. "The Wild True Story of The Good Nurse". Vanity Fair. Archived from the original on 22 August 2023. Retrieved 30 October 2022.
  7. 1 2 Smith, David (November 3, 2022). "'Did I notice a dark side?': the true story behind serial killer drama The Good Nurse". The Guardian . Archived from the original on 22 August 2023. Retrieved 4 November 2022.
  8. 1 2 3 Saunders, Emma. "The Good Nurse: 'I risked everything to make sure he was behind bars'". BBC.com. Great Britain. Archived from the original on 22 August 2023. Retrieved 30 October 2022.
  9. Kuperinsky, Amy. "Meet the Good Nurse". NJ.com. Retrieved 30 October 2022.
  10. Feeney, Mark (October 25, 2022). "In 'The Good Nurse,' on Netflix, the healer as murderer". Boston Globe . Archived from the original on 22 August 2023. Retrieved 1 November 2022.