A nurse who worked on a special unit for premature babies at the Countess of Chester Hospital in the north of England has been convicted of the murder of seven infants and the attempted murder of another six.
Lucy Letby, 33, had denied any involvement in the deaths but the trial at Manchester Crown Court heard they all occurred at the hospital in Chester on dates and times between June 2015 and June 2016 when she was on shift.
But on Aug. 18 she was found guilty of murder and attempted murder after the jury deliberated for 22 days.
Ms. Letby—who injected air into some of her victims, gave others an overdose of insulin, or interfered with their feeding tubes—faces multiple life terms when she is sentenced at a later date.
The judge will need psychiatric reports, although the defence did not try to claim their client was suffering from any mental illness.
The trial heard managers at the Countess of Chester Hospital were initially wary of going to the police over the deaths which were later attributed to Ms. Letby.
First Arrested in 2018
Cheshire Police launched Operation Hummingbird after they were finally called in and Ms. Letby was arrested in 2018 but it was not until November 2020 that she was finally charged with the murders.
Ms. Letby spent 14 days in the witness box and adamantly insisted she was not responsible for any of the deaths and the defence called only one other witness, a plumber who testified about drainage problems at the aging hospital and said “foul water” had once emerged from a sink in the nursery.
The prosecution suggested Ms. Letby loved “drama” and may have attacked some of the children to get the attention of a married registrar—who cannot be named for legal reasons—who she had a crush on.
The judge banned any of the children involved in the case from being identified and they were referred to throughout the trial as Babies A to Q.
Two of those who died were in a set of identical triplets, Baby O and Baby P, and the court heard the parents begged managers to move their surviving child to another hospital.
Prosecutor Nick Johnson KC suggested a text message sent after Baby O died was a “portent of doom” about Baby P and he suggested she had intended to kill all of the triplets.
Ms. Letby’s callousness and fake empathy for the victims’ parents was highlighted by a series of text messages she sent to friends and colleagues during the period.
Killer Referred to Parent’s Grief as ‘Heartbreaking’
In one, sent on the day after Baby A died, she wrote: “Dad was on the floor crying saying ‘please don’t take our baby away’ when I took him to the mortuary, it’s just heartbreaking.”
She also sent sympathy cards to the parents of several of the babies and photographs of the words she wrote in those cards were found on her phone after her arrest.
Mr. Johnson said nine of the babies had been attacked shortly after their parents left their cots, often to get some food or rest.
Cross-examining Ms. Letby in the witness box, Mr. Johnson asked her about, Child H, a baby girl, whose father had left her cot to go home.
Mr. Johnson said: “(Child H’s father) leaving gave you the opportunity to sabotage (Child H), didn’t it?”
“No,” she replied.
Mr. Johnson said: “Just as in the cases of (Child B), (Child C), (Child E), (Child I), (Child M), (Child N), (Child O), and (Child P), all children who deteriorated shortly after their parents left. Is that something you identified as an opportunity to attack the children?”
‘I Have Never Attacked Any Child’
“No. I have never attacked any child,” she replied.
Ms. Letby sought to blame conditions at the hospital, including staff shortages and poor hygiene, for the deaths but was unable to explain why several of the children appeared to have been injected with air or insulin shortly before they died.
In the case of one child, Baby F, the prosecutor said Ms. Letby and another nurse, Belinda Williamson, were the only staff on night duty when the infant was poisoned.
Under cross-examination, Ms. Letby said she had definitely not poisoned the child, but Mr. Johnson pointed out her defence counsel, Ben Myers KC, had never accused Ms. Williamson when she gave evidence.
“I can’t answer that,” Ms. Letby replied.
The cases have echoes of Beverley Allitt who was jailed for life in 1993 for killing four children and attempting to murder five others at a hospital in Lincolnshire. Ms. Allitt was later diagnosed with Munchausen by proxy syndrome.
The motivation for Ms. Letby’s crimes was not outlined by the prosecution but The Epoch Times has spoken to two experts who say the case has all the classic symptoms of Munchausen by proxy, a syndrome where a parent or carer makes a child in their care ill or, in extreme cases, causes their death in order to get attention.
PA Media contributed to this report.
From The Epoch Times
