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Nurse Lucy Letby Arrested Over Baby Deaths at the Countess of Chester Hospital

Police held a 28-year-old neonatal nurse on suspicion of murdering eight babies and attempting to murder six, and searched her Chester home.

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Lucy Letby in nurse's scrubs, smiling, in a hospital setting

The police came at six in the morning. On Tuesday, July 3, 2018, officers from Cheshire Constabulary went to a three-bedroom house in Westbourne Road, Chester, and arrested the woman who lived there. Hours later the force announced that it had detained a female "healthcare professional" on suspicion of murdering eight babies and attempting to murder six more at the neonatal unit of the Countess of Chester Hospital. Police would not say whether she was a nurse, a doctor or something else. By the next day she had been named in the press as Lucy Letby, a 28-year-old neonatal nurse.

The arrest was the first in a long-running inquiry that had begun after a high number of baby deaths at the hospital, and by the morning of the arrest detectives said they were examining the deaths of 17 babies and 15 collapses that did not prove fatal, between March 2015 and July 2016. "Asking the police to look into this was not something we did lightly," the hospital's medical director, Ian Harvey, said, adding that the unit was now the equivalent of a basic special care baby unit and "safe to continue in its current form."

The searches went wider than one house. On the same day, officers searched her parents' home in Hereford and the hospital's risk and patient safety office, where she had been moved to work after consultants raised concerns about her presence at the collapses. In Liverpool, the Women's Hospital confirmed that she had done training placements on its neonatal unit, that it was co-operating with the police and reviewing the babies cared for there at the time, and that there was "no suggestion" any of its patients had been harmed.

What the officers took from Westbourne Road that morning would matter years later. Among it, a prosecutor told the jury at her trial in 2023, were three handwritten notes in a handbag and a 2016 diary with a green Post-it note tucked inside, covered in jumbled phrases of guilt and despair that the defence called the anguished outpouring of a frightened young woman.

In July 2018 she was a suspect and nothing more. She was released on bail, arrested again in June 2019 and November 2020, and charged after the third arrest. In August 2023 a jury at Manchester Crown Court convicted her of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder six others; a second jury convicted her in July 2024 of the attempted murder of one more. She denied every allegation.

What this story covers. It reports the first arrest as ITV News described it on July 3 and 4, 2018, with the details of the dawn arrest, the searches and the items found taken from the Chester Standard's report of the trial evidence in April 2023. Cheshire Police's own 2018 statement could not be opened. The babies are not named: a court order protects their identities.

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