HOSPITAL CASE
A new film starring Eddie Redmayne tells the true story of a nurse who poisoned patients for 16 years. Francesca Angelini talks to scriptwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns
When Charles Cullen turned up at a New Jersey hospital in 2002, his new colleagues were delighted. He was a welcome arrival: a nurse with a solid career behind him who actually wanted to work the hard-to-staff night shifts. What the hospital didn’t know was that it had ushered a serial killer on to its intensive care unit.
Over the next year Cullen murdered between 12 and 15 of the hospital’s patients, spiking saline bags with insulin and injecting lethal doses of the heart medication digoxin. This was only the tip of his toxic iceberg. Cullen, then 42, was found guilty of the murder of 29 patients, though the real figure is feared to push 400.
More so even than the body count, what’s gobsmacking about Cullen’s story is how he got away with it for 16 years. Unlike other prolific serial killers who don’t attract suspicion, Cullen very much did. Colleagues alerted the police to him more than once. Court records show that hospital supervisors were aware of his unorthodox behaviour, which included stealing lethal medication.
He was fired or resigned five times. Yet somehow Cullen passed from job to job at nine different hospitals within a 65km radius.
The story has now been turned into a film, The Good Nurse, with Eddie Redmayne starring as Cullen and Jessica Chastain as Amy Loughren, the nurse who helped to catch him. It’s directed by Tobias Lindholm (best known for Borgen) and the screenplay comes from the Bafta-winning Glaswegian Krysty Wilson-Cairns (1917; Last Night in Soho) in an adaptation of a book of the same title by the American journalist Charles Graeber. Despite the material, the film is less a grisly whydunnit and more an excoriating indictment of a healthcare system that allowed someone like Cullen to fly — and, as such, a shoo-in for the Oscar race.
“I’m particularly excited to see what America thinks,” says WilsonCairns, 35, with a wry smile when we meet at her Soho office, where there’s a well-stocked bar and fridge magnets spelling out “C***S”. She’s fasttalking, dry, extremely sharp, not someone whose scrutiny you want to attract.
And where The Good Nurse will fan flames is with its suggestion, loud and clear, that hospitals covered their backs when they began to suspect Cullen.
“Ultimately those hospitals are run as businesses and it would have been bad for business for it to come out,” she says. “Would you take your kid, your dad, your mum to a hospital where there had been a serial killer?”
I really believe that when you make healthcare for profit you don’t put the patient first.
CULLEN WAS sentenced to 11 consecutive life sentences in 2006. After his conviction, many of the victims’ families sued the hospitals involved. All were settled out of court and the files are sealed.
“I really believe that when you make healthcare for profit you don’t put the patient first. I don’t think it could have happened here — on that scale or having gone on for so long.”
Though there is, of course, Beverley Allitt, a nurse at Rampton Secure Hospital in Nottinghamshire, dubbed “the angel of death”. In 1993 she was convicted of murdering four babies and attacking nine more, often by injecting insulin into their arms. “The NHS has its problems but the difference, I believe, is that it is ultimately here to do its best for patients,” says Wilson-Cairns.
In an age when we exist on a diet of true crime, I can’t believe we haven’t yet had a significant film or series about Cullen. And that it’s a British and Danish pairing who have finally gone there. Americans, I suggest, might not react all too well.
“I’m not a representative of the UK but I think it’s good if countries are critical of each other right now.” Maybe the story needed that external eye, she adds. “Being outside of the system you get to be shocked by it… Patients have barcodes on them where they’re scanned before they get anything. It feels dystopian to me.”
The film barely attempts to make sense of Cullen’s motivations. The focus instead is on Jessica Chastain’s Amy Loughren. She was a single mother hiding a serious heart condition from her employers because she needed to keep working to get healthcare coverage. By speaking out Loughren risked her job, her health and her family’s security — everything. “She did everything she could to save helpless people, and she could have walked away from it the way everyone else did,” WilsonCairns says.
The Good Nurse was a long time in the making. Ten years, in fact. Wilson-Cairns laughs when she remembers that she was just 23 when she rocked up at Loughren’s house in upstate New York and told her she wanted to broadcast her feat to the world. They were “both nervous”, she says, but committed.
Yet other work got in the way. Wilson-Cairns came to fame working with Sam Mendes on the war epic 1917 (which won her a Bafta), and next wrote the slasher-horror
Last Night in Soho with Edgar Wright.
Like her movies, Wilson-Cairns is vivid and compelling. True stories are her fodder, she says, the darker the better. But that didn’t stop studio executives trying to give her romcoms and children’s dramas to write because she was a young woman.
“People were like, ‘So we’ve got this kids animation for you,”’ she recalls. “And I’d say, ‘Can I put waterboarding in it?’ And they’d say, ‘No, you’re so funny.’ I’d say, ‘I’m genuinely not joking.”’
I don’t think she is joking; it’s hard to tell. The jibe that truly riles her, a self-described “war nerd”, is that movies such as 1917 are a man’s game. Does being a woman not skew the stakes at all?
“I don’t think having a vagina changes the story I want to tell.” Though, she adds, in her films there is always a “triumph of humanity”.
She doesn’t struggle to get her opinion heard either: her writing partnerships with Mendes and Wright are ones of equals, she says. Still, I bet she has come up against cynics saying women like her have only got to where they have because of a drive for representation? “Of course I have … There are always those rumours that dog you, there will always be someone who says she only got this job because she’s f ***ing him,” she says with a shrug.
Now she can’t tell me what’s next, though the white of the board in her office is barely visible beneath a sea of colour-coded scene notes. Under a window, a printer is churning out a long script. Spy Kids 4? “Not unless it has waterboarding in it.”
The Good Nurse is available to stream on Netflix from October 26.