A British nurse is being called the worst child serial killer in modern British history. Lucy Letby, a neonatal nurse in a British hospital, attacked and killed the most vulnerable infants in her care for at least a year.
Letby was convicted of the “persistent, calculated and cold-blooded” murder of five premature boys and two newborn girls while she worked at the Countess of Chester hospital in northwest England between June 2015 and June 2016.
UK’s ‘Worst’ Serial Killers
Lucy Letby during her mid-20s preyed on highly vulnerable babies between 2015 and 2016 and attacked them moments after their parents or nurses had left their side. UK Police were finally contacted in 2017 and she was arrested in 2018.
She used a variety of methods including injecting air into babies’ feeding tubes or adding insulin which would poison them or deliberately overfeeding.
She has been convicted of killing two identical triplet brothers, murdered within 24 hours of each other, a newborn weighing less than 1 kg who was fatally injected with air and a girl born 10 weeks premature who was murdered on the fourth attempt, a report in The Guardian said.
Letby is expected to become only the third woman alive in the UK to be handed a whole-life term, where she will never be released from prison.
However, the police suspect that she might have harmed more babies during her six-year career as a children’s nurse. The police have launched a helpline for parents to call to report concerns.
How Did She Killed Infants
Police are already investigating her crime and have asked specialists to examine the records of more than 4,000 infants born at the two hospitals where Letby worked between 2010 and 2016.
According to a mother, Letby attacked her newborn after she made a complaint about an “inappropriate” comment by the nurse.
Lynsey Artell, a nurse who worked with Letby, claimed that she heard the serial killed talking about the progress of her son by saying, “I don’t like parents getting their hopes up because we never know what could happen at this stage.” The next day, her son’s condition deteriorated and his insulin level spiked, just like in the cases of two babies Letby was convicted of poisoning.
According to Pascale Jones, a senior prosecutor, Letby had “perverted her learning and weaponised her craft to inflict harm, grief and death”.
The court was told how the nurse injected the newborns by injecting air into their tiny bodies shattering their diaphragms. In other cases, she pushed a tube down an infant’s throat. She also tried kill two babies by lacing their feeding bags with insulin.
In one of cases, where a baby was born 15 weeks premature had 5% chance of survival. Letby tried to kill the girl twice, the first attempt just hours after she and the family had marked her 100th day of life with a celebratory cake and the second on what would have been her due date two weeks later. Letby was found not guilty of a third count of attempted murder against her.
After the death of two triplet brothers within 24 hours of each other in June 2016, Letby was removed from the neonatal unit and placed on clerical duties.
In total, Letby was found guilty of seven counts of murder and seven counts of attempted murder. The attempted murders relate to six babies as multiple counts apply to some of the infants.
Why Did She Kill Newborns
Lucy Letby was finally arrested two years after was removed from the front-line nursing duties and placed in a non-clinical role in July 2018. She was questioned for hours and denied everything.
During the trial, the prosecution described Letby as a “calculating” woman, who “gaslighted” her colleagues into believing the rise in baby deaths was “just a run of bad luck”.
The jury was told that Letby was on shift when each of the babies collapsed. Some of the newborns were attacked just as their parents left their cots.
The court heard that Letby took an unusual interest in the families of her victims, making searches for them on social media.
The police found rambling from her home that helped police to figure out that she was guilty. “I am evil I did this,” one note read. Another note said, “I don’t deserve to live. I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them.”
Letby repeatedly denied harming the babies and her motives remain unclear. She was charged with eight murders and 10 attempted murders in November 2020. But one of the murder chargers were later dropped.
According to prosecutor Nick Johnson KC, Letby liked “playing God” by attacking babies and then being the first to alert her colleagues about their decline.
“She knew what was going to happen. She was controlling things. She was enjoying what was going on. She was predicting things that she knew was going to happen. She, in effect, was playing God,” Johnson reportedly told the court.
According to some reports, Letby’s motive to kill newborns might have come from a “pathological desire for attention and sympathy”.
Professor Yorker, who studied more than 130 cases of health professionals who kill, said that the murders might be “an act of covert violence or sadism” as the perpetrators found themselves in a position of power.
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