After nine months of a grueling trial, jury deliberations were underway on Monday to decide whether a 33-year-old English nurse killed seven newborns and attempted to kill ten others at the hospital where she worked.
• Also read: Nurse accused of killing seven babies worked under pressure at hospital, defense says
Serial killer, “cold and calculating” according to the prosecution, “devoted” and innocent professional according to the defense, the trial of then 25-year-old Lucy Letby sparked horror in England.
The young nurse, who worked in the neonatal intensive care unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital, a town in north-west England, is accused of killing premature babies between June 2015 and June 2016. She would have injected air into her tubes and added insulin to bags of IV feeding solution, moved the tube to allow a premature baby to breathe…
Attacked again and again
In some cases, she would have attempted to kill her small victims multiple times before reaching her goal, and she faced 22 charges, including seven of murder.
During the Manchester (North) trial, she denied killing or attempting to kill the babies.
According to prosecutor Nick Johnson, who carefully reconstructed the mystery surrounding her schedule and the similarities between the deaths, the young blonde woman with the angelic smile acted when her parents had left or when the nurse in charge had moved away. He also said that sometimes she attacked the victims at night when she was alone.
“Cold, calculating, cruel and stubborn,” according to the prosecutor, she even increased the insulin dose for a victim in 2016 after failing to kill a first child in this way in 2015.
Among the victims are twins and even triplets, two of whom will die within 24 hours of returning from vacation in June 2016. The third set of triplets is rescued after their parents have been begging them to be transferred to another hospital.
At that point, she had already killed several babies without attracting attention and had become “uncontrollable,” the prosecutor said at the trial.
He also showed notes that police found on the nurse.
“I don’t deserve to live. I killed her on purpose because I’m not good enough to take care of her. “I’m a terribly bad person,” she had written on a piece of paper. In other documents, however, the nurse arrested in July 2018 has maintained her innocence.
Her attorney, Ben Myers, argued that the neonatology department was “taking in more babies than normal and with greater care needs” during that time, and claimed that some incompetent doctors blamed the young nurse.
In his final argument, the attorney denounced a “presumption of guilt” against his client and urged the jury – eight women and four men – to return to the presumption of innocence. He also denounced the prosecution’s shifting statements, saying there was no evidence against Lucy Letby.
According to prosecutors, Lucy Letby also falsified some of her medical records to cover her tracks.
But gradually suspicion fell on the young nurse who was still on duty during the sudden deterioration in the health of the newborns.
Her alleged victims included a very premature baby, 25 weeks pregnant, whose breathing tube she had disconnected just hours after her birth in February 2016.
At around 4 a.m., a doctor discovered that the breathing tube had been misplaced. Lucy Letby, passively near the incubator, had explained that she wanted to give the little girl the ability to breathe on her own. The baby, attacked several times, will die a few days later.
During the trial, parents testified via video. One mother in particular recounted how upon returning to the cradle room she found her newborn with blood around her mouth but was reassured by Lucy Letby. The baby had actually just been poisoned with insulin and died the next day.
The babies’ identities were not released in order to protect the families. They were named Baby A, Baby B, C, D, etc.