What led the serial killer nurse to commit her crimes
may never be fully known, but jurors were told of several possibilities
Josh
Halliday North of England correspondent
Fri 18 Aug
2023 13.57 BST
Lucy
Letby’s reasons for killing and attempting to kill babies at the hospital where
she worked may never be fully explained. But jurors were given a number of
possible motives by the prosecution during the nurse’s 10-month trial at
Manchester crown court.
Letby
enjoyed ‘playing God’
The
prosecutor Nick Johnson KC suggested Letby, a neonatal nurse, enjoyed “playing
God” by harming babies and then being the first to alert her colleagues to
their decline.
She also
made remarks described by the prosecution as “portents of doom” as some of her
victims deteriorated. After her final murder in June 2016, she said to doctors:
“He’s not making it out of here alive, is he?” The days-old triplet boy died
soon after. Letby, who was then in her mid-20s, had made similar comments in
two previous murders.
Johnson
told jurors: “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.”
She ‘got a thrill’ from baby deaths
Parents and
nurses described Letby on more than one occasion acting unusually when babies
suddenly declined. When the baby known as Child I died after repeated attacks
by Letby, the little girl’s parents told police they remembered the nurse
“smiling and going on about how she was present at [Child I’s] first bath and
how much she had loved it”.
Johnson
suggested to Letby that she was “getting a thrill out of what you were
watching, the grief and despair, in that room”. She replied when giving
evidence: “Absolutely not, no.”
Letby also
searched Facebook for the families of her victims. She would often search for a
number of them within minutes of each other, seemingly going one by one hunting
for grief, the prosecution said. She looked them up on the anniversaries of
their babies’ deaths and even carried out searches on Christmas Day. In
evidence, the nurse said she would search for all sorts of people, not just the
parents of babies on the unit.
Letby wanted the attention of an anonymous doctor
The
prosecution claimed Letby was having a secret relationship with a married
doctor, who worked at the Countess of Chester hospital and cannot be named for
legal reasons, though the nurse repeatedly denied this.
Texts shown
to the court revealed the pair messaged regularly, swapping love heart emojis,
and met up several times outside work – including on a day trip to London –
even after Letby was removed from the neonatal unit in July 2016.
The nature
of their relationship was said to be significant: he was one of the doctors who
would be called when babies suddenly deteriorated. She harmed them, it was
suggested, to get his “personal attention”. Letby denied this.
Boredom
As a band 5
nurse, Letby was qualified to care for the sickest babies on the neonatal unit.
This meant she often wanted to be in nursery one, the intensive care suite.
Giving evidence at trial, she agreed that she found work less stimulating when
she was assigned to babies who did not need as much medical attention.
She was ‘not good enough to care for them’
The closest
the prosecution had to a confession came in the form of handwritten Post-it
notes found in Letby’s handbag after her arrest in July 2018. On one she had
written: “I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for
them,” and “I AM EVIL I DID THIS”. She also wrote: “I will never have children
or marry. I will never know what it’s like to have a family.”
Letby told
jurors the notes were the ramblings of someone in mental anguish – she wrote
them after being suspended from work pending an investigation into the unusual
deaths – and that the papers also contained many protestations of innocence.
What is
clear is that the documents gave police officers the first real insight into
the mind of the serial killer nurse. Yet even these were never held up in court
as definitive proof of her motive.
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