British nurse guilty of murdering seven babies
A neonatal nurse has been found guilty of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill six more, making her the worst child serial killer in modern British history and raising urgent questions over whether her crimes could have been stopped.
Lucy Letby, 33, was convicted of the “persistent, calculated and cold-blooded” murder of five premature boys and two newborn girls on the unit where she worked at the Countess of Chester hospital in north-west England, The Guardian reported.
As ministers ordered an independent inquiry into how Letby was able to carry out her horrifying campaign, a whistleblower told the Guardian that he believed babies would have been saved if hospital executives had acted sooner on concerns about the nurse.
Stephen Brearey, who was the first to alert executives to Letby’s connection to unusual deaths and collapses, said he felt bosses had been “neglectful” by failing to contact the police earlier.
Letby was in her mid-20s when she preyed on highly vulnerable babies between June 2015 and June 2016, often attacking them just moments after their parents or nurses had left their side. Police were finally contacted in 2017 and she was arrested in 2018.
Her victims included two identical triplet brothers, killed within 24 hours of each other, a newborn weighing less than 1kg who was fatally injected with air, and a girl born 10 weeks premature who was murdered on the fourth attempt.
Bereaved parents gasped and wept in the public gallery as the verdicts were delivered over several dramatic days at Manchester crown court, after one of the longest-running murder trials in recent times.
Outside court, parents of the victims said justice had been served but that no conviction would “take away from the extreme hurt, anger and distress that we have all had to experience.”
Letby is expected to become only the third woman alive in the UK to be handed a whole-life term – meaning she will never be released from prison – when she is sentenced on Monday.
Police believe Letby may have harmed more babies during her six-year career as a children’s nurse and have launched a helpline for parents to call to report concerns.
Detectives have asked specialists to examine the records of more than 4,000 infants born at Liverpool Women’s hospital and the Countess of Chester, the two hospitals where Letby worked between 2010 and 2016.
One mother said on Friday night that she believed Letby attacked her newborn son a day after she made a complaint about an “inappropriate” comment by the nurse.