The name Lucy Letby is now enough to make the entire world feel disgusted. The nurse who is employed at the safe haven for children proves herself to be an agent of pure evil. She ended several lives that had just begun at the dawn of their journeys and injured others who would live a life full of medical complexities.
Calling Letby a nurse seems akin to insulting the profession. She misused her powers and knowledge to cause harm to children, an unthinkable act, which has earned her a seat with the biggest serial killers in Britain.
Letby committed numerous coldhearted and calculated murders within the confines of the safest institution of humankind. Enough said as a preface, so let’s delve into the twisted, cruel world of the new-age “baby killer.”
What Did Lucy Letby Do? What Was She Charged With?
Lucy Letby is guilty of murdering seven babies on a neonatal unit, becoming the most prolific child serial killer in the UK in modern times. She has been convicted of attempting to kill six additional infants at the Countess of Chester Hospital.
A total of 17 babies were her victims, and the court passed orders to keep them and their parents anonymous. Some of these children are living with profound disabilities as a result of Letby’s actions. Each baby was allocated a letter from A to Q (in chronological order) to protect their identities.
However, Lucy informed the court via her legal team that she would not appear in court for the remainder of the proceedings. The judge had added that the sentencing hearing would take place regardless of her presence. It is unclear if she will spend a lifetime in jail or a closed psychiatric hospital.
What Did Lucy Letby Do to the Babies?
Lucy Letby deliberately injected several babies with air or force-fed them milk. She even poisoned two of the babies with insulin. Some of her other methods included tampering with feeding tubes, causing trauma to the children’s necks and other body parts.
A deceased child’s father stated, “You could see his veins bright, bright blue, going different colors. He looked like he had prickly heat. You could see something oozing through his veins.” Letby only dismissed the remark by saying she didn’t see anything like that herself.
Some parents recall her as being oddly cheerful while bathing and dressing their dead babies. Only after several years did they find out their child did not die of natural causes and the nurse was the killer.
Even those who survived Letby are still suffering from the aftereffects of the harm caused at such a tender age. Two of her victims, a girl, and a boy, now eight and seven, sustained brain damage. A girl born 15 weeks premature has been diagnosed with quadriplegic cerebral palsy.
Before 2015, the Countess of Chester’s neonatal unit was just like any other hospital’s. Hundreds of premature babies were born every year, but the prospects for such babies were mostly good with the right level of care. According to studies, fewer than two children die out of every 1000 premature kids born in the UK annually.
However, when Letby joined in June 2015, three infants passed away in the span of 14 days. Just minutes after clocking in for work on June 8, she injected air into an intravenous long line of a boy, who was born six weeks premature with his twin sister.
The boy collapsed immediately, and Lucy targeted the sister next but failed to kill her. The girl’s screams alerted the hospital, and doctors saw her skin changing color into purple and white patches, something that they saw with her brother.
She murdered two more babies after the twins, both of whom exhibited the same skin discoloration.
Over the following year, Letby poisoned two newborns with insulin, pumped some more with air, overfed a baby with milk, and caused trauma to a baby’s throat by tampering with his feeding tube.
Most of the newborns were attacked at night after their parents had left. Some were targeted when their nurses went out of the room. She even calculated her actions so the conditions of the babies deteriorated on someone else’s watch.
Most of her victims had vulnerabilities like extreme prematurity of inherited conditions, which let her escape suspicion.
Why Did Lucy Letby Kill Babies?
Lucy Letby’s real motives behind killing and injuring infants have not been completely revealed; however, there are many possibilities that the prosecution has come up with. Letby might have enjoyed hurting the babies or wanted the attention of an anonymous doctor, or she was simply trying to rid her boredom with her perverse acts.
Why Lucy killed these harmless children is the biggest question in the minds of everyone who has heard of the case. There were no signs of a traumatic or abusive childhood, as her parents were fiercely supportive of her throughout the trial.
She is an only child, and her parents were described as well-liked and respected by their neighbors. Those who observed the perpetrator described her as coldly detached from the allegations and stared impassively as her crimes were stacked one after another.
So let’s take a deeper dive into the possible motives of Lucy Letby.
#1 Boredom
Perhaps the biggest reason presented to the court was that Lucy Letby was simply bored. She was a band five nurse as she had the skills and training to tend to the sickest children in the ward. She confessed in the trial that she often found work less stimulating when she was assigned to healthy babies who did not need much attention.
Her different ways of injecting babies with air, insulin, force-feeding, and others show that she was getting more and more creative in hurting the babies. She sought the help of the staff and made it look like the children’s conditions were simply worsening.
#2 Enjoying Hurting Babies
The police found various hospital paperwork at Letby’s home, along with a handwritten note on which Letby had written, “I am evil, I did this.” She also wrote several phrases like “I am an awful person,” “ Despair,” “No Hope,” “Fear,” “Panic,” and “I did this; why me?”
Prosecutors suggested in the trial that Letby was getting a thrill out of the grief and despair that was accumulating whenever a child was killed.
#3 Attention Seeking
One of the other theories is that Letby was secretly in a relationship with an anonymous married doctor at the Countess of Chester Hospital. He was one of the doctors who would rush to the hospital during the rapid deterioration of a baby’s condition.
The prosecutors implied that she hurt them to get his attention. Her texts reveal the two having regular conversations and have met up several times outside work.
The only time she showed emotion during the trial was when the doctor arrived at the courtroom to give evidence. Letby started crying and left her seat to open the door to the cells. After four months of harrowing trials, this was the first time the nurse was seen crying.
#4 “I’m not good enough.”
Prosecutors were presented with several notes by Lucy Letby, which had statements like “I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them.” On yet another note, she wrote, “I will never have children or marry. I will never know what it’s like to have a family.”
However, it is next to impossible to determine if this was her feeling or just a fake justification for her evil acts.
#5 Playing God
According to one of the prosecutors, “She was controlling things. She was enjoying what was going on. She was predicting things that she knew were going to happen. She, in effect, was playing God.”
She harmed the babies and was the first to alert her colleagues, essentially playing as a superior being with their lives and the trust of everyone else around her.
Lucy Letby has harmed children on a never-before-seen scale, and it has shocked the entire world. There is no salvation for someone as cruel as her, someone who has defied everything a human should stand for.
Tell us what you think her verdict should be in the comments below, and let’s hope the affected families can one day recover from the grief.
