The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

The nurses at St. Luke’s notice that their supply of Pronestyl, a rarely used drug, keeps running out every day. They restock it but don’t investigate. Charlie throws the drug away as one of his many forms of protest against the hospital, which he dislikes because he mistakenly believes it’s a Christian institution. He arrives at work on June 1, 2002, and goes through his usual routines of moving chairs and restocking the drugs. He then injects drugs into saline solutions. He’s enraged when he sees that the Pronestyl has been restocked.

Day nurse Kim Wolfe goes to the drug closet and finds the sharps container filled with cardboard. She gets other nurses, who helps empty the sharps container and catalogue the drug containers. They struggle to understand why someone would steal these drugs, which don’t have any street value or addictive capabilities. One of the drugs is a strong paralytic that is very rarely prescribed, and the nurses worry about where it might have been injected. They resolve to watch the drug closet to see if the culprit appears. Kim watches Charlie arrive for his shift early and lock himself in the drug closet; he’s the only person to close the door all day.