Sartaj Singh
‘A Nurse’s Revenge’ is a Lifetime thriller that revolves around a nurse’s deadly quest to exact revenge against a group of teens following the accidental death of her child. When the young child she had anonymously given up for adoption tragically dies because of a group of teenagers and their negligence, Sharon enters their lives by using her profession as a nurse. Among them, she is assigned to care for Cassie, a perceptive young woman who begins to believe that her friends are being targeted by someone. Directed by David Benullo, the movie narrates a deadly tale of scheming, deception, and revenge.
A Nurse’s Revenge: A Fictional Caregiver Becoming a Vengeful Killer
Lifetime’s ‘A Nurse’s Revenge’ is a fictional movie that is a part of its 2024 Shocktober slate of thrillers. Written by Daniel West, the original work may feel familiar because of another Lifetime movie that involves a healthcare professional turning deadly. Also penned by West, ‘The Paramedic Who Stalked Me’ centers on Chloe, a young woman who gets into a terrible accident. Two paramedics save her life as they drag her out of the car and stabilize her. Matt, one of the EMTs, becomes fixated on Chloe and her safety. She bears a resemblance to his high school lover, who passed away in a car crash, and he tries to get close to her. However, his care turns to obsession as he stalks and tries to control Chloe, turning her life into a living nightmare. While the fictional films share a parallel of healthcare workers becoming obsessed and dangerous, there have been a few real-life cases of nurses becoming killers.
A Nurse’s Revenge: Comparison to the Case of a Real Killer Nurse
The most infamous case of a nurse using their position to scheme and kill is that of Charles Edmund Cullen, who is estimated to have murdered over a hundred patients during his 16-year career. Working in hospitals across New Jersey and Pennsylvania, Cullen is a serial killer who took his first victim’s life in 1988, and continued to kill patients through a lethal overdose of intravenous medication such as digoxin and insulin. The deaths appeared to be of natural causes in most cases, letting Cullen get away with murder time and time again. Even though some of the medical centers he worked at eventually began suspecting him of killing patients, they simply forced him to resign rather than reporting him. It is suspected that this was done to safeguard the hospitals’ own image and reputation.
In 1992, while working at the Warren Hospital in Phillipsburg, a 91-year-old cancer patient reported that Cullen had come into her room and injected her using a needle, even though he wasn’t her assigned nurse. She died the next day, and her son insisted that an investigation be conducted. Cullen denied the accusations and passed a lie-detector test, continuing to work there for a few more months before joining the Hunterdon Medical Center in Flemington, New Jersey. The serial killer began facing increased scrutiny when he started working at Somerset Medical Center in Somerville, New Jersey, in 2002. Cullen had killed 13 patients until mid-2003 when the institution began to notice the suspicious deaths, with computer records showing him accessing medication that his patients had not been prescribed.
Additionally, the New Jersey Poison Information and Education System warned the hospital that the number of overdoses likely meant that an employee was killing patients. In October 2003, the New Jersey State Police was alerted, and after a thorough investigation and a sting operation, Cullen was arrested on December 12, 2003. He cooperated with the authorities as part of a plea agreement to avoid the death penalty and confessed to 40 murders. In May 2006, he was given 18 consecutive life sentences with eligibility for parole in 2403. The Netflix film, ‘The Good Nurse,’ is based on the true story of how Charles Cullen was caught. While ‘A Nurse’s Revenge’ is a fictional movie, there have been a few terrifying cases of killer nurses in real life, although they rarely involve personal grudges.
Read More: The Life I Can’t Remember: Is the Lifetime Movie Based on a True Story?
