Murderers and serial killers have walked the earth for a long time. There are numerous famous cases of such psychopaths. However, killing several newborns requires another level of brutality and an absolute absence of empathy. Lucy Letby is a person who did just that. Lucy Letby, a nurse by profession, slaughtered seven newborns and unsuccessfully attempted to kill seven more.

Here’s The Grisly Tale Of Baby Killer Lucy Letby

There is hardly a moment of greater vulnerability in the life of a human being than that of newborns, especially when complex or premature births occur. That fragility, however, became the focus of bloody murders of newborn babies – even one day old – at the Countess of Chester hospital, in northwest England, which culminated in a nurse, Lucy, being found guilty.

Lucy Letby is a monstrous infant annihilator

Thus, the 33-year-old woman infamously entered the history of the United Kingdom as the worst serial killer of infants in recent years. Her coldness, described by investigators as a series of “persistent, calculated and cold-blooded” murders, contrasts with a personal story that gives little insight into a damaged person or person with previous problems, as occurred in previous cases of serial killers.

Lucy Letby was arrested from her house

Among Lucy Letby’s victims, whose identities have been protected, stand out some triplets, where two of them were murdered 24 hours apart, a newborn child who measured less than the palm of an adult’s hand and weighed less than 1 kilogram, and another 10-week-old girl who, after four attempts, was finally killed. The crimes were allegedly committed between June 2015 and June 2016, when the woman worked in the Countess of Chester neonatal unit. She was reported to the police in 2017, which led to her arrest in 2018.

Lucy Letby has been sentenced to life imprisonment

Lucy Letby transformed the theoretically reassuring image of a young nurse in her classic blue NHS suit into an image of terror and anguish for twenty fathers and mothers, who saw, through tears, the guilty plea of ​​the murderer of their newborn babies. Lucy Letby was found guilty of seven counts of murder and seven counts of attempted murder. She was sentenced to life by the court, making her the third living woman in the United Kingdom to receive such a punishment.

Lucy Letby’s act skewed the infant death figures in her hospital

According to British studies on premature newborn deaths in the country’s health centers, for every 1,000 born into this world in the United Kingdom each year, less than two die. The average death rate for the Countess of Chester hospital’s neonatal unit, where the dramatic crimes occurred, was between one and three. Or so it was until 2015, when hospital authorities noticed a sudden increase in the number of babies who died or suffered an abrupt deterioration in their health, for no apparent reason.

Lucy Letby murdered babies by injecting air bubbles into their veins

While some experienced “severe catastrophic collapses,” saved only by timely medical intervention, others simply died under strange circumstances. “You could see his bright blue veins, of different colors. It seemed like he had a stinging heat. You could see something oozing through his veins,” the triplets’ father said during his court statement. They would later understand that air was intentionally introduced through an intravenous line, in a pattern repeated several more times.

While the father recounted the dramatic situation, Letby stared straight ahead, then discarded the testimony. “I can’t comment on the truth about him. I didn’t see any of that myself.” 

Lucy Letby tried to mother a baby girl twice

Through the injection of air, in some cases the nurse caused the newborns to suffer by breaking their diaphragm, or in other cases she inserted a tube down their throat, even though some of them only weighed 535 grams and had been birthed at 15 weeks. In that case, Letby specifically tried to kill the girl twice. The first occurred hours after her family – like everyone in the place, who celebrate every breath, every breath, and relevant date – commemorated the first 100 days of her life. She failed in that attempt, but it wouldn’t be the last.

Cruelly, on the day on which the premature girl was to be born according to the ideal calendar, she returned unsuccessfully to the task, the prosecutors explained at the trial. Little Ella was saved and is currently eight years old, but she was diagnosed with quadriplegic cerebral palsy and requires care 24 hours a day.

During the initial phase of the investigation, Lucy Letby was not a person of interest. Why would a young woman in her twenties, hard-working and with an active social life, appear in court, and without apparent visible psychological damage or a difficult childhood, commit such a vile act?

Lucy Letby covered her tracks well

“Lucy Letby was entrusted with protecting some of the most vulnerable babies. Little did those working alongside her know that there was a murderess in their midst,” Pascale Jones, senior prosecutor at the Crown Prosecution Service, told the media. “She went to great lengths to conceal her crimes, varying how she repeatedly harmed the babies in her care. “She was trying to deceive her colleagues and pass off the harm she caused as a worsening of each baby’s vulnerability,” she continued.

This apparent harmlessness – the same as air, milk, or insulin, the weapons he used for his mission – was also shared by his co-workers.

When Stephen Brearey, head of pediatrics on the neonatal unit, noticed a common pattern in the deaths, he immediately took the information to Alison Kelly, director of nursing. There was only one nurse on duty present at each unexpected death, Lucy Letby. But Brearey himself would qualify the situation. “It can’t be Lucy. Not good Lucy,” he said. The idea of ​​a neonatal nurse who had specialized precisely in the care of children born with problems was inconceivable, so the suspicion was quickly discarded.

The children’s deaths became too much to ignore

Then, in June 2016 when the pattern continued, Brearey himself told the BBC that he demanded that the hospital managers do something after the last two murders, which would have been denied by the authorities. According to the British media, the top officials even delayed calling the police when a repetition in the modus operandi was detected, but, on the contrary, they required the doctors to write an apology to Letby. Deaths would also not have been correctly reported in the NHS system, so the high mortality rate went undetected, said a manager who took over the hospital after the crisis.

Lucy Letby tried to play God

But despite these questions and possible failures in the regular channel, one question remained – and continues – unanswered: Why did she do it? According to the prosecutors in charge, one of the reasons could be that she enjoyed “playing God” and that she had fun with the “thrill” of resuscitating babies. Another prosecutor, Nicholas Johnson KC, suggested that Letby simply became bored when she attacked her victims. She frantically sent WhatsApp messages to her two best friends and did numerous searches on Facebook, including relatives of the murdered children.

Lucy Letby showed an absolute lack of empathy

This apparent emotional disconnection was captured in a failed murder attempt on a twin during a Saturday shift in which, after injecting him with air and witnessing the subsequent collapse suffered by the child, she saw how she was saved by medical intervention. However, he simply wrote to a friend: “Work has been shit, but… I just won 135 pounds in the Grand National!”.

“We haven’t found anything in his history that is not normal,” Inspector Nicola Evans of Cheshire Police told reporters. “She has acted in a really normal way, but being normal has allowed her to go unnoticed. And she has allowed him to operate in plain sight.”

But a message written by herself – and then denied, just like all murders – revealed her internal struggle. According to The Associated Press, police found a Post-It note in 2018 after she was arrested that read: “I’m evil, I did this.”

Others prayed phrases of the same nature. “I don’t deserve to live,” one said. “I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to take care of them,” she continued. “I AM EVIL, I DID THIS,” she wrote, this time, in capital letters. Her lawyer said they were the anguished words of a woman who had lost confidence in herself, while Letby said she was “destroyed” by the accusations, and that “I just did what I could to take care of them. “I am here to help and care, not to harm.”

Lucy Letby lived by herself

The woman lived alone in a house in Chester, on a quiet street where mostly retirees or families with children live. They rarely saw the young nurse wandering around who arrived in March 2016, after her parents – who accompanied and defended Letby throughout the judicial process – helped him buy her house.

Lucy Letby had a very “normal” life

That facet of normality, being the first professional in the family and with parents present throughout her life, baffled the researchers. She was a normal nurse. She was what you would call a normal twenty-something… but clearly, there was another side that no one saw and that we have unraveled during this investigation,” revealed Nicola Evans, who spent six years researching and analyzing Lucy Letby.