It was his shyness that struck her first. “He was so soft-spoken that immediately I felt like I needed to protect him and my protective nature kicked in right away,” Amy Loughren recalls of Charles Cullen. “I knew that he was brilliant. His knowledge of medications, his knowledge of critical care was outstanding, and I’m drawn to people that are smarter than me. And he laughed at all my jokes. So we were fast friends.”
What Loughren did not know was that Cullen, a fellow night nurse, was murdering patients by secretly administering drug overdoses. But she would eventually help detectives catch her colleague and friend and put him behind bars. Today he remains, by some estimates, the most prolific serial killer in American history.
