Cullen, who is played by Eddie Redmayne in the film, has spoken out about the patients he killed from 1988 to 2003 while working as a nurse at nine hospitals. They all suspected his actions, but never made a move to stop him.
He’s currently serving 18 consecutive life sentences for the killing of 29 patients, though he has admitted to killing 40 patients and authorities suspect he was responsible for the deaths of 400 people.
What Charles Cullen Said About Patient Killings: ‘There Was a Lot of Pain’
Cullen made an appearance on 60 Minutes in 2013, the first time he had spoken publicly about his actions. The program was investigating the murderer in a segment titled “Angel of Death.”
During the interview, Cullen admitted that he had been unable to see himself as a serial killer in the past, but that he had since “accepted it.”
Cullen began killing patients in 1988 when he started working at Saint Barnabas Medical Center in New Jersey, where he would inject IV bags with fatal overdoses of drugs like insulin and digoxin.
Reflecting on his time at his first nursing job, Cullen said: “I worked on a burn unit so there was a lot of pain, a lot of suffering and I didn’t cope with that as well as I thought I would.”
When he was pressed for a reason why he killed patients, including those who were in recovery and weren’t terminally ill, Cullen said: “It’s difficult for me to go back in time and think about what things were running through my mind at the time.”
When asked if he got pleasure or satisfaction from the killings, he later added: “No, I mean I thought people weren’t suffering anymore so in a sense I thought I was helping.”
Reflecting on his crimes against those who weren’t near death, Cullen said: “I can’t… my goal here isn’t to justify, what I did there is no justification. I just think that the only thing I can say is I felt overwhelmed at the time.”
“Like I said I can’t, it was more or less I felt like I needed to do something and I did, and that’s not an answer to anything,” Cullen added when asked for an explanation for his actions.
In an interview with Newsweek, Loughren, the nurse who helped catch Cullen, said that she wanted The Good Nurse viewers to understand that Cullen couldn’t be seen as a “mercy killer” as he appears to have suggested in his 60 Minutes interview.
Speaking at the BFI London Film Festival in October, Loughren said: “I think that Charles Cullen was painted out to be a mercy killer, and there was nothing merciful about what he did.”
Loughren went on: “When we sterilize a victim and make it that ‘oh, well he just gave them some medicine and then they went to sleep,’ that’s not what happened. So I do want people to know that those families deserve to have their day, to say they mattered. They mattered.”
The Good Nurse is out on Netflix now.
