The nurse who “loved playing God” led “a violent war” against seven babies in a hospital. She is the most prolific serial killer of children in the United Kingdom.
Lucy Letby was convicted of trying to kill six more babies at the Countess of Chester Hospital neonatal unit during a yearlong killing spree between June 2015 and June 2016.
The prosecution described Letby as a ‘calculated’, ‘devious’, and a ‘cold-blooded killer’.
She is accused of injecting insulin, milk, or air into infants’ bodies, causing their collapse. Police claim that she physically attacked one baby and caused an injury similar to a car crash to the liver.
Letby killed three sets of twins, including one, twice in four separate attempts. He also murdered two triplets within less than 24 hours.
She denied 22 of the charges brought against her. These included seven counts of murder and 15 counts of attempted murder. She was found guilty after a jury deliberated for more than 99 hours on 13 charges.
Letby has been found not guilty of two attempted murder charges, but the jury was unable to decide on four other attempted murder charges.
Letby cried when the verdicts were given in three phases, over several days. Letby refused to attend the courtroom for the final verdicts.
At the start of the trial at Chester Crown Court in October, prosecutors informed the jury that Letby was a “constant and malevolent” presence within the neonatal ward.
They claimed she was the “common denominator” and that the deaths of babies coincided with shifts.
Some babies, who had not been unstable before, suddenly “severely degraded”, and others who had recovered from illness suddenly “degraded without apparent cause”.
Letby was accused of “getting a thrill” out of killing infants, of ‘playing God’, and of murdering infants in order to get the attention of her lover.
The prosecution characterized her as an “opportunist criminal” who took advantage of the vulnerability of sick children to “camouflage attacks”, “patterns”, that were similar.
She was caught twice. She was caught twice, once by the mother who had murdered a baby boy and then by a doctor trying to murder a young girl.
According to the jury, Letby’s crimes went unpunished because her co-workers could not believe that there was a murderer in their unit.
Doctors began to express concern in July 2016 about her involvement in the deaths. In 2018, she was arrested for the first time.
The police found at her home a Post-it note that said: “I don’t want to survive.” “I killed them intentionally because I was not good enough to care for them.”
She said: “I am a horrible evil person.” I AM EVIL. I DID THIS. ”
Letby has been accused of being “a killer who is looking for victims” because she used social media to search for the parents of babies.
She told the jury that she did not harm babies and said: “I tried my best to care for them”.
She claimed that the neonatal units were soiled and accused a “gang of four” consultants of a conspiracy.
The system that wanted to blame her made her an “obvious” victim, it was said.
Due to legal reasons, it was not possible to identify some witnesses and parents as well as the babies (referred to in evidence as Child A through Child Q).
Parents have shared their experiences in seeing their babies collapse.
According to the prosecution, a mother accidentally interrupted Letby as she was attempting to kill one of her twin newborn boys, Child E, on August 4, 2015, by injecting air into his little body.
She was “frightened”, as she knew that “something very wrong” had happened.
Letby told the mother, who was in a panic, that the baby’s bleeding was caused by a feeding tube that had touched her throat. She “got rid” of her by saying, “Trust me, I’m a nurse. ”
When the mother returned to her son’s neonatal unit, she found medics desperately trying to revive him.
Letby attempted to kill Child F the following day, by injecting insulin into a nutrition pouch. He survived.
The court heard that after the tragic death of Child E, she showed an “unusual interest” in the family and searched social media for the twins’ families, including on Christmas Day.
On October 23, 2015, the jury heard that a “smiling Letby”, after injecting air into Child I’s bloodstream and feeding tubes, spoke to her mother.
Letby asked to bathe her daughter’s body after she died and take pictures.
Letby, just hours before her daughter’s funeral, sent the parents a card with the message: “Your loved one will be remembered with many smiles.”
According to the prosecution, a Letby “completely out of control” committed a murder spree after returning from Ibiza in Spain in June 2016.
She is accused of murdering two triplets, Child O and Child P, as well as attempting to kill another baby, Child Q, over three consecutive days.
Letby, according to the prosecutor “got away” from her so many times that she “misplaced trust” in doing whatever she wanted.
Prosecutors claimed that when Letby spoke to a colleague about Child P and asked, “He’s not leaving alive is he?” it was because she knew what was going to happen.
“She was controlling things. She was enjoying what was going on and happily predicting something she knew was going to happen,” said prosecutors.
She played God in reality.
According to the prosecution, Letby’s “campaign” was undetected by her co-workers because they had never considered that a nurse might kill babies or that her methods would be barely visible.
They said she was “calculating and devious” and “gaslighted her staff” by convincing them to explain what they considered as “utterly abnormal”.
Letby denied in her testimony that she “got a thrill” from the “grief and “desperation of parents who lost their children.”
“I believe that she was trying to hide the failings of the hospital. ”
Her attorneys also claimed that the care of the babies was “suboptimal”, adding that it would be unfair and inaccurate to place blame on her.
Letby, a hardworking and dedicated nurse who loved her job, was said to have “fuelled” the prosecution’s case with a presumption of guilt. She had also worked at the unit for years and treated hundreds of children before the alleged incident.
They claimed that her behavior was not different and it had more to do with the babies’ condition, health, the stress on the staff, failures of care, and the fact that the unit had too many babies in need of high-level care.
Pascale J. Jones, Crown Prosecution Service (U.K.), said that Lucy Letby had tried to deceive her colleagues by saying the harm was only aggravation in the vulnerability of every baby.
She used her knowledge to harm and cause death.
In the statement, it is stated that “she injured babies repeatedly in an environment which should have been safe for them and their families.”
Her actions were a betrayal of the trust placed in her. My thoughts are with the families that will never have closure, but who now know the answers to questions they’ve had for years.
The British Government ordered an independent inquiry into the case. To learn “vital lessons”, the British government will conduct a separate investigation.
Steve Barclay said, “I would like to express my sincere sympathies to parents and family members who have been affected by this horrifying case.” He concluded that “this investigation will ensure parents, families, and children are provided with the answers they need.”
