- When a disturbed mind gains access to the most vulnerable, things can go horribly wrong.
They say evil is subjective; that what counts as “evil” varies depending on context. Perhaps, sometimes, but there are some people that no one thinks are good people.
By her own admission, Lucy Letby seems to be one of them.
On August 18, the 33-year-old nurse was found guilty of murdering seven newborns and attempting to kill six more. The murders, which Letby carried out during her stint in the neonatal unit of Countess of Chester Hospital, make her the U.K.’s worst serial child killer in modern history.
Yet, she may be guilty of even more. The jury could not come to an agreement on six other suspected attacks.
That sounds pretty evil if you were to ask us. And it seems Letby would agree.
“I am a horrible evil person,” she wrote in a rambling note that was reportedly discovered in her home.
Letby carried out the successful and attempted killings using a variety of lethal injections over a one-year period between 2015 and 2016. Yet, it’s not like there weren’t suspicious eyes on her.
Leading doctors at the neonatal unit began to smell something rotten when the number of dying babies suddenly shot up — with Letby always working the fatal shift. Hospital managers, however, dismissed their concerns, inadvertently allowing the murders to continue.
Letby was finally arrested in 2018. Now, with the jury having found her guilty, she may be looking at a rare full-life sentence.
Let’s take a look at the chilling details of this gruesome case. A fair warning for our sensitive readers, though — this is not a nice story.
The Murders
The neonatal unit of Countess of Chester Hospital near Liverpool is sadly no stranger to dying babies. After all, the unit looks after premature and/or ill babies who have had the deck stacked against them from the beginning.
Yet, the unit had a good record. Prior to June 2015, they had the unfortunate duty to record only two to three baby deaths a year, according to the BBC.
But something changed that summer. Three babies died within a span of two weeks.
By the following October two more babies were dead. Two more died would die by June 2016, and many more suffered non-fatal collapses in their health with no discernible medical reason.
The one thing connecting all these cases was Letby. She had taken it upon herself to end these newborn lives.
To do so, she used a variety of methods. In some cases, she used insulin injections to poison the babies.
In others, she didn’t bother with the insulin — air from an empty syringe was just as lethal. And then there were those babies to whom Letby force-fed milk until they dropped dead.
Letby didn’t target just single babies, either. In June 2016, two of three premature triplets died mysteriously within a span of 24 hours.
During the murder of the twins, one of their parents happened to walk in on Letby while she was… Operating. The clinical murder method allowed her to say, “Trust me, I’m a nurse.”
The parent did.
Some babies were tough, though. On several occasions, she had to commit several attacks. One little girl required four sessions with the nightmare nurse before it was over.
The Suspicions
The jury was told that Letby used cold, calculating professionalism to disguise the murders as unfortunate natural deaths. But not everyone at the hospital was taken in by the act.
When the first three babies died in June 2015, alarm bells went off in Dr. Stephen Brearey’s head. The lead consultant of the neonatal unit found the sudden fatalities strange.
After some sleuthing, he discovered Letby had been on shift during each death. Yet, even he didn’t think she could be a murderer — “Not nice Lucy,” he thought at the time.
Yet, when two more babies died in October, Letby’s name came up again as the connecting factor. This time, Dr. Brearey grew suspicious and he talked to hospital management.
They dismissed his concerns since there was nothing connecting the deaths medically. Dr. Brearey’s colleagues in the neonatal unit, however, were now also starting to put two and two together.
Still, despite repeated warnings and requests to remove Letby from the neonatal unit, the management did nothing. Meanwhile, dead and almost-dead babies kept piling up.
The baby that broke the camel’s back came in June 2016, when yet another baby collapsed. Again, Dr. Brearey and his colleagues demanded the hospital remove Letby.
They didn’t. The next day, another baby nearly died.
After three more shifts, the hospital management finally sent Letby away from the neonatal unit. It had been more than a year since her first murder.
And just like that, the babies stopped getting sick and dying.
The Note
Despite everything, Letby still kept working for Countess of Chester Hospital in a different role. In early 2017, the hospital management even forced Brearey and the other doctors to apologize to Letby.
Police finally became involved in May 2017. A lengthy investigation found that not only had the managers dismissed doctors’ concerns, but they had also failed to carry out proper investigations to the deaths.
Finally, Letby was arrested and is now waiting for the final judgment. One question remains, though — why?
A handwritten note allegedly found in Letby’s home may give us a glimpse into what was going on in her head. It’s not pretty.
“I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to take care of them,” the rambling, disjointed note reads on one line.
Other scribblings don’t form coherent sentences. Yet, you can make out phrases such as “hate myself,” “kill myself right now,” “I can’t breathe,” and “why me?”
Almost in the middle of the note is one word, written much larger than the others and thickly circled in black: “HATE.”
The scrawlings do paint a picture of a disturbed mind. Yet, it also seems to demonstrate — if it is real — that Letby knew exactly what she was doing.
After all, the last line of the note states: “I AM EVIL I DID THIS.”
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