Lucy Letby, according to prosecutors, derived thrill when she saw parents in grief and despair when they found that their newborns had died.
The jurors who were fighting to hold back tears at the Manchester Crown Court were given a number of possible motives by the prosecutors during the infant-killer nurse Lucy Letby’s 10-month trial.
A report by the Guardian said that prosecutor Nick Johnson KC (King’s Counsel) suggested to jurors that Letby, a neonatal nurse, enjoyed “playing God” by harming the newborns. He also highlighted how she was also the first one to inform authorities when the newborns died.
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The nurse was arrested after a string of deaths of newborn babies at the neonatal unit of the Countess of Chester Hospital in northwest England in 2015 and 2016. Two triplet boys, referred to in court as babies O and P, were her final victims.
An Indian-origin doctor and his colleague did warn the hospital’s upper management but the management failed to act on time leading to the deaths of seven newborn babies. Letby also tried to kill six others.
In 2016 when the triplet boy was struggling with his life, Letby, then in her mid-20s told the doctors: “He’s not making it out of here alive, is he?”
“She knew what was going to happen. She was controlling things. She was enjoying what was going on. She, in effect, was playing God,” Johnson was quoted as saying by the Guardian.
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THRILL
Nurse Lucy Letby also got a thrill from the death of the children. The prosecutors pointed out that when Child I (as referred to by the court) died after repeated attacks by Letby, she stood next to the parents and kept “smiling” and repeated how she was present during the child’s first bath and she had loved that experience.
The prosecutors, according to the newspaper, said that Johnson was “getting a thrill” watching what was going on in the room and seeing the parents in grief.
The prosecutors said she would often look up the families of her victims on Facebook. She also would look them up again during the death anniversaries of the children. Letby countered this by saying that she would search for all sorts of people on Facebook.
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AFFAIR
The prosecution also claimed that Letby was in a secret relationship with a married doctor, who worked at the Countess of Chester hospital, but Letby denied this. However, prosecution laid evidence before the court where it was seen that the pair messaged regularly, swapping love heart emojis, and met outside work.
They pointed out that it was significant because the doctor was among the first to be summoned by Letby when one the health of babies suddenly deteriorated. The prosecutors claimed that these acts were committed to grab the attention of the doctor who she may have been in an affair with and whose name was not revealed due to legal reasons.
BORED AT WORK
Letby told jurors that since she was a band 5 nurse, well-equipped to care for very sick children in the neonatal intensive care she did not find work exciting when she was assigned babies not in need of much medical attention.
HANDWRITTEN NOTES
Few Post-it notes allowed investigators to peek into Nurse Letby’s mental state. When she was arrested in 2018, investigators found Post-it notes with Lucy’s scribblings on them which said, “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 says these notes were made after she was suspended from work pending an investigation into the unusual deaths.
