By Abimbola Ogunnaike with agency report
A British nurse, Lucy Letby, on Friday, 18 August, 2023 was sentenced to whole life imprisonment for killing seven newborns and attempting to kill six more.
A whole-life order means a convicted criminal can never be released from prison.
Letby has been on trial since last October. She was accused of injecting her young victims, who were either sick or born prematurely, with air, overfeeding them milk and poisoning them with insulin.
The jury at Manchester Crown Court in northern England reached all of its verdicts after deliberating for 22 days.
The evil nurse was arrested following a string of baby deaths at the neonatal unit of the Countess of Chester Hospital in northwest England between June 2015 and June 2016.
Described by the prosecution as a “calculating” woman who used methods of killing that “didn’t leave much of a trace”, Letby had repeatedly denied harming the children.
“Lucy Letby was entrusted to protect some of the most vulnerable babies. Little did those working alongside her know that there was a murderer in their midst,” Senior Crown Prosecutor Pascale Jones said in a statement.
“Time and again, she harmed babies, in an environment which should have been safe for them and their families,” the prosecutor added, calling the killings “a complete betrayal of the trust placed in her”.
The court heard that colleagues raised concerns after noticing that Letby was on shift when each of the babies collapsed, with some of the newborns attacked just as their parents left their cots.
Prosecutor Nick Johnson said Letby “gaslighted” her colleagues into believing the string of deaths were “just a run of bad luck”.
Letby’s final victims were two triplet boys, referred to in court as babies O and P.
Child O died shortly after Letby returned from a holiday in Ibiza in June 2016, while child P died a day after their sibling.
Letby was also said to have attempted to kill the third triplet, child Q, but the jury was unable to reach a verdict on the charge.
Johnson said that by that time Letby was “completely out of control”, adding that “she was in effect playing God”.
Letby was arrested and released twice. On her third arrest in 2020 she was formally charged and held in custody.
During searches at her home, police found hospital paperwork and a handwritten note on which Letby had written: “I am evil, I did this.”
Letby later tried to explain the note by saying she wrote it after being placed on clerical duties following the death of the two triplets.
The killer nurse is only the fourth woman to receive such sentence. A whole-life order means a convicted criminal can never be released from prison.
Letby’s name has been inked in books for committing one of the most horrendous crimes in history. The 33-year-old was sentenced to a rare whole-life order, the most severe penalty, typically reserved for the gravest offenses.
