Trial detailed the deaths of newborns and harm done to other babies – but we may never know why she became a murderer
hospital’s neonatal unit in an average year, only between one and three would die. Until 2015.
That night, the boy’s father stood guard over his sleeping daughter’s cot metres from where her twin brother had died. Relatives took it in turns to watch over her for almost 24 hours, staying with her until 8pm the following day. But this was, cruelly, the time Letby came back on shift. Dr Stephen Brearey, the head paediatric consultant at the neonatal unit, reviewed the care of the babies who had died and raised concerns about Letby.Then he looked at who was working at the time. Only one nurse was on duty for each death: Letby. Brearey took the findings to Alison Kelly, the director of nursing, and explained that the mortalities were still unexplained but added, almost as a postscript, that there was one common link. “It can’t be Lucy. Not nice Lucy,” Brearey told her.
It was no secret that Letby was present when the infants suddenly collapsed, yet her crimes were so subtle they were imperceptible. Trainees started referring to her as “the angel of death”, the Guardian has been told, although it was “tongue in cheek” rather than because they suspected her of foul play.
The mother asked Letby what was happening and the nurse, who wore a yellow butterfly sticker on her name badge, reassured her that he was OK and the blood was just from a feeding tube rubbing his throat. She should go back to the postnatal ward and rest, the nurse said. He had been prescribed a tiny dose of insulin to help regulate his blood sugar levels two days after his birth, and was being fed fluid nutrients from a bag connected via an intravenous long line to his leg.
It would be weeks before these results came back, however, and when they were read by doctors on the unit the significance was not immediately clear.ne senior doctor who analysed Letby’s victims said they were selected carefully, not chosen at random. Almost all had other vulnerabilities, such as extreme prematurity or inherited conditions, that gave her plausible deniability when they died.
The three brothers were all in good condition. Letby was given responsibility for two of them: Child O and Child P. Little did they know that Letby, just 13 minutes after murdering Child O, had set about killing one of his brothers. The nurse pumped air into Child P’s stomach as she fed him milk, shortly before the end of her shift.
A transport ambulance team arrived to transfer Child P to a specialist hospital, but it was too late to prevent his next – and final – collapse. He was pronounced dead at 4pm. The boys’ parents “begged” the ambulance team to take their surviving triplet to Arrowe Park hospital, where Child P had been due to go. They agreed.
Prosecutors gave them the germ of a motive, suggesting Letby enjoyed “playing God” – a phrase used for the first time on the 132nd day of the trial – and got a kick out of the “excitement” of resuscitating babies. It was a notion the nurse did not wholly disabuse when she gave evidence. Nicholas Johnson KC, prosecuting, suggested Letby was often simply bored when she attacked her victims. She would scroll Facebook endlessly and send WhatsApp messages to her two best friends, both of whom worked on the unit. They would spend hours sniping about colleagues, chatting about patients and arranging salsa, Zumba or hula-hoop fitness classes.
In the witness box, Letby tearfully described how she had always wanted to work with children and that it was “sickening” to hear the allegations against her.or months, senior doctors on the unit had raised mounting concerns about Letby’s link to the growing number of unexplained deaths. But it wasn’t until early July 2016 that her appalling crimes were finally ended.
If there was a time, during the trial, when Letby’s fate looked sealed, it came on her fifth day in the witness box. Under forensic cross-examination by the prosecutor, she accepted for the first time that someone had deliberately poisoned two babies with insulin. There was no other medical explanation for their blood results, she admitted, though she maintained that she was not responsible.
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