Lucy Letby: who is nurse on trial for murder of seven babies

In an interview with the Chester Standard for an article about the hospital’s 2013 Babygrow Appeal to fund a new neonatal unit, Letby said her role involved “caring for a wide range of babies requiring various levels of support”.

“Some are here for a few days, others for many months and I enjoy seeing them progress and supporting their families,” she added. 

After Letby was arrested, Jordan Sands, who knew the nurse through a former girlfriend, told The Times that she was “quite awkward and geeky but seemed like a kind-hearted person”. A friend who asked not to be named described Letby as “an amazing person”.

The murder case

Letby worked at Countess of Chester Hospital’s neonatal unit from 2011 up until her arrest in 2018. An investigation was launched at the hospital in 2017 following 15 deaths and 17 life-threatening incidents involving babies between June 2015 and June 2016.  

The hospital had carried out a number of independent expert medical reviews into the deaths before calling in police, amid concerns about the neonatal unit’s high mortality rate. It found that “doctors had begun to note similarities in the deaths of the infants” and recommended “a thorough, external independent review of each neonatal death between January 2015 and July 2016”, reported The New York Times.

Opening the prosecution at Manchester Crown Court, Nick Johnson KC said the collapses and deaths of all 17 children concerned between June 2015 and June 2016 were not “naturally occurring tragedies”.

“They were all the work, we say, of the woman in the dock, who we say was the constant malevolent presence when things took a turn for the worse for these 17 children.”

The prosecution also alleged that she wrote notes reading “I am evil” and “I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough”. The passages were written on post-it notes following a search of her home, reported the BBC. Another said: “I haven’t done anything wrong and they have no evidence so why have I had to hide away?”

A medical expert told the trial that he noticed a “quite disturbing and quite unusual” pattern in the deaths of the babies Letby is accused of murdering.

Dr Dewi Evans, who was approached by the National Crime Agency to review the case in 2017, said “there were far more deaths than they would expect” and “collapses in babies that were otherwise quite stable, but in many of the cases resuscitation was not successful”.

Article source: https://www.theweek.co.uk/94757/chester-hospital-baby-deaths-who-is-nurse-lucy-letby