Lucy Letby Is Found Guilty of Murdering Seven Babies at the Countess of Chester Hospital
A Manchester jury convicted the neonatal nurse of seven murders and seven attempted murders of babies in 2015 and 2016. She was cleared of two counts; six were left undecided.
Published
Since October 2022 a jury at Manchester Crown Court had heard the case against Lucy Letby, a neonatal nurse accused of attacking babies in her care at the Countess of Chester Hospital. On Friday, August 18, 2023, it delivered its last verdicts. Letby, 33, was found guilty of murdering seven babies and of seven counts of attempted murder involving six others, all on the hospital's neonatal unit between June 2015 and June 2016.
The jury found her not guilty of two counts of attempted murder and could not reach verdicts on six more. It had deliberated for 22 days. Its first guilty verdicts came on August 8 but could not be reported under a court order until the deliberations were over. Letby wept in the dock when the early verdicts were read. She was not in court to hear the final ones. Prosecutors asked for 28 days to decide whether to seek a retrial on the undecided counts.
Doctors at the hospital, the Crown Prosecution Service said, had noticed a significant rise in the number of babies dying or collapsing without warning, and when they could find no medical explanation the police were called in. Letby was first arrested in July 2018 and charged in November 2020. The prosecution said she had injected air and insulin into the babies' bloodstreams, pushed air into their stomachs, overfed them with milk or fluids and inflicted impact-type injuries, while passing off each collapse as a natural turn for the worse.
The case rested on medical records, staff rotas that showed Letby as the common thread in the deaths and collapses, her text messages and social media activity, and handwritten notes police found during the investigation. "I killed them on purpose because I'm not good enough to care for them," one note read, according to prosecutors. Another said, "I am evil I did this." Letby denied harming any child. She said she wrote the "evil" note after she had been placed on clerical duties, and she suggested that four senior doctors had blamed her to cover the hospital's own failings. Her lawyer, Ben Myers, described her as hardworking and deeply committed to her work.
"Time and again, she harmed babies, in an environment which should have been safe for them and their families," said Pascale Jones of the CPS. "Her attacks were a complete betrayal of the trust placed in her." In a joint statement read outside court, the families said they had been "quite simply stunned" by what had happened. "This justice will not take away from the extreme hurt, anger and distress we have all had," they said.
The babies are identified only by letters, under a court order protecting their identities. Police said they were also reviewing Letby's time at the Countess of Chester and at Liverpool Women's Hospital, where she had worked earlier, going through more than 4,000 neonatal admissions between 2012 and 2016. Sentencing was set for the following Monday.
Letby denied every charge throughout the trial. The six counts on which the jury could not agree were left open when the verdicts were returned, pending the prosecution's decision on a retrial.
Sources
- Lucy Letby found guilty of baby murders, Crown Prosecution Service
- Nurse found guilty of murdering seven newborn babies in UK, Agence France-Presse, via Al Jazeera