The families of Lucy Letby’s victims today told how they been robbed of ever being able to hold their precious babies while they were still alive – as the ‘cowardly’ killer refused to come to court for her sentencing.
The most prolific child serial killer in modern British history faces a whole life order when Mr Justice Goss hands down her sentence at Manchester Crown Court.
More than a dozen bereaved relatives and eight jurors sat in the public gallery for today’s sentencing, but she cowered in her cell rather than face them in the dock in a ‘final act of wickedness’.
The parents of Baby A, was murdered by Letby in 2015, and his twin sister Baby B – who was attacked but survived – told of their pain in a victim impact statement read out to the court.
‘We never got to hold our little boy while he was alive, because you took him away,’ they said. ‘What should have been the happiest time of our lives became our worst nightmare.’
The mother of Child C, who weighed just 1lb 12oz when he was murdered by Letby, broke down in tears as she read her heart-wrenching impact statement to the court, but bravely continued to address the empty dock.
She described the ‘overwhelming emotion’ she felt the first time she held her son: ‘It was like nothing I had ever experienced before. My tiny feisty boy, my firstborn, my son.
‘The trauma of that night will live with us all until the day we die. Knowing now his murderer was watching us… was like something out of a horror story.’
She said she blamed herself for his death and not protecting him: ‘What if I had not gone to bed that night, maybe he would still be here.’
The mother of Child D said Letby’s ‘wicked sense of entitlement’ had led her to claim lives ‘that were not yours to take’.
The mother of Child E, who died, and Child F, who survived, said the trial had felt ‘like a platform for Lucy to relive her crimes’ as she slammed her for ‘repeatedly disrespecting my boy’s memory’.
Child G, who Letby tried to murder while she weighed just 1lb, is now blind and has to be fed through a tube. His father told the court: ‘Every day I would sit there and pray. I would pray for God to save her. He did. He saved her, but the devil found her.’
Earlier today, Nicholas Johnson KC, prosecuting, told Manchester Crown Court Letby’s offending was a ‘very, very clear case’ for a whole-life tariff to be imposed.
He said the murders qualified on a number of grounds, including that they were premeditated and they involved an elements of ‘sadistic conduct’ against children.
Mr Justice Goss has said he has no power to force a defendant to attend a sentencing hearing but the Government has vowed to give judges the power to do so.
Today, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said it is ‘cowardly that people who commit such horrendous crimes do not face their victims’.
Letby has also refused to grant closure to her victims’ families by admitting to her crimes, with the closest she came to acknowledging her guilt being a Post-it note on which she had scrawled: ‘I am evil, I did this.’
Children’s nurse Lucy Letby (pictured in a custody photo, left; and while working in hospital, right) went on a year-long killing spree while working at the Countess of Chester Hospital
Letby cries as she listens to the first guilty verdicts being read out by the foreman of the jury at Manchester Crown Court
An artist’s sketch of empty chairs inside the court after Letby refused to go into the dock to hear the further verdicts against her
The killer preyed on babies small enough to fit in the palm of her hand by injecting them with air or insulin. She targeted one set of triplets and three sets of twins.
In one case, she targeted a baby who survived despite being born at 23 weeks in a hospital toilet. The nurse attacked the tiny 1lbs 2oz infant three times by overfeeding her with milk and injecting milk into her stomach. She survived, but the brain damage she suffered at Letby’s hands means she is unlikely to ever be able to walk or talk.
Letby replaced Myra Hindley and Ian Brady as the most prolific child killer in modern British history after she was found guilty of murdering seven premature babies and attempting to murder six more. The only surviving women to receive whole life orders are Rose West and Joanna Dennehy, who stabbed three men to death.
Police are now reviewing the care of 4,000 babies she may have come into contact with during a spell at the Countess of Chester Hospital from January 2012 to the end of June 2016 and two work placements at Liverpool Women’s Hospital in 2012 and 2015.
More families have already been warned their children may be victims during her five-year NHS career, raising the prospect of Letby appearing again in court.
Detectives are said to have identified 30 other newborns they believe she attacked after a review of incidents at the Countess of Chester hospital where she worked. Letby was on duty for each of the unexplained collapses. All of the babies survived, the Guardian reported.
The nurse, a seemingly ‘goofy’, ‘innocent’ young woman who had Disney cuddly toys on her bed, found different ways to inflict indescribable, inhuman levels of pain, with some of her victims breaking into tortured screams that experienced paediatricians had never heard before. Several had to take time off work to recover from the trauma.
After each of her murders, Letby appeared ‘animated and excited’, offering to bathe, dress and take photographs of her victims’ bodies.
Due to her lack of contrition, her motive remains unclear, but the prosecution believes she got a ‘thrill’ out of ‘playing God’.
They also suggested she had been trying to impress a married doctor, knowing he’d be the one to come and help if she hurt children in her care. Letby would comfort the parents of children she killed – even sending them sympathy cards after their funerals. Before attacking innocent newborns as young as 23-weeks she had told mothers and fathers: ‘Trust me, I’m a nurse’.
After she killed one child she texted a colleague and said: ‘Dad was on the floor crying, saying please don’t take our baby away when I took him to the mortuary, it’s just heart-breaking. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do’.
In one case, a senior nurse on duty had to repeatedly tell Letby to come out of a room where a grieving couple were spending their last moments with their infant son.
The father said Letby came in with a ventilated basket and told them: ‘You’ve said your goodbyes. Do you want me to put him in here?’ This prompted his wife to tell her: ‘He’s not dead yet.’
Letby attacked several babies by shoving hard plastic or wire tubes down their throats. Another suffered a ruptured liver – a violent injury likened by experts to injuries seen only in road accident victims.
Like fellow nurse Beverley Allitt – who was convicted of murdering four infants at two Lincolnshire hospitals in Lincolnshire – Letby used insulin as one of her attack methods.
On one occasion it was also claimed she murdered a tiny, ten-week premature baby boy because she was angry that one of her friends she was texting did not understand why she was upset at being given a break from working in intensive care following the death of another baby.
In several of the cases, it was suggested Letby attacked the babies because she wanted a married paediatrician, who she insisted was just a close friend but was suspected of having an affair with, to be crash called to the neonatal unit so they could try to save the children together, talk about treatments and sympathise with each other after their deaths.
Professor David Wilson, a leading criminologist, told the Mail that this desperation to be acknowledged at work were signs of a ‘hero complex,’ and narcissism in Letby’s personality.
Placing herself at the centre of a crisis was also indicative of the mental condition, Munchausen’s, he said.
None of the parents had any idea their children had been the victims of foul play until they were visited by police up to three years later.
A new photo showing Letby fooling around while out with friends on a hen do
Letby – wearing a blue hoodie with the strings covered in pink glitter – is taken from her house in handcuffs after being arrested by Cheshire Police in July 2018
Letby steps into the police car – telling officers to be careful because she had just had knee surgery
Letby being quizzed in July 2018 by an officer about the rise in deaths on her watch. Letby replies: ‘They told me there had been a lot more deaths and I’d been linked as someone who had been there for a lot of them.’ Asked if she was concerned about the rise in mortality, Letby says – meekly – ‘yes’
An independent inquiry will examine ‘the circumstances surrounding the deaths and incidents, including how concerns raised by clinicians were dealt with’.
It comes as a senior consultant who tried to blow the whistle on her saying he felt ‘intimidated’ by hospital bosses.
Dr John Gibbs, who has since retired, said managers ‘closed their minds’ too soon to the possibility that Lucy Letby was killing or harming babies on the neo-natal unit.
He told the Mail that he was ‘shocked’ when chief executive Tony Chambers called the hospital’s seven consultant paediatricians to a meeting, in January 2017, and told them Letby had not done anything wrong. The hospital boss even ordered medics to write a letter of apology to the nurse.
By this stage Letby, 33, had been working in an office job at the hospital for seven months, having been removed following the death of two triplets on consecutive shifts in June 2016. She was hoping to return to the unit after an internal grievance apparently found no evidence of wrongdoing.
Dr Gibbs said he felt intimidated by Mr Chambers, who told the consultants at the meeting that he was ‘drawing a line’ under the matter. Dr Gibbs’s colleague, Dr Stephen Brearey, told the BBC that medics were warned there would be ‘consequences,’ if they refused to write the apology.
Dr Gibbs said: ‘There was a difficult meeting at the end of January 2017 where all us paediatricians met with senior managers, including the chief executive, the director of nursing and the medical director. We were told how stressful this had all been for Lucy Letby and a letter from her was read out explaining how unfair we paediatricians had been.
‘We were told the chief executive had met with her and her father and we were told to write a letter of apology to Lucy Letby.
‘It seemed inappropriate, but the whole of the meeting shocked me. At the end, I remember the chief executive saying he was drawing a line under this issue and he ran his finger across the desk. He looked at all of us and said: ‘Do you understand?’ I did feel, to some extent, intimidated.’
He said the consultants wrote the letter of apology, but added: ‘We didn’t feel it was justified. We didn’t apologise for raising concerns at all, we didn’t say anything about whether we felt those concerns were true or not, we merely apologised to Lucy Letby for any inappropriate comments that may have been made and for the distress that had been caused. We left it more general.’ The consultants said they felt they had ‘no choice’ but to continue trying to get the police involved for the sake of their patients.
So they wrote to Mr Chambers, to put it on record that they were still worried about the deaths, and the fact that two independent reviews, by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and a specialist neonatologist, from London, had failed to address whether a member of staff could be responsible.
Dr Gibbs added: ‘We began to realise that we were in direct confrontation with managers and we had no choice but to fight and to make sure the police got involved. By that stage, it was us or her.’
Eventually, in April 2017, Mr Chambers agreed to meet the chairman of the local Child Death Overview Panel and a police officer who sat on the panel. Within minutes of listening to the consultants’ fears about Letby, the pair told Mr Chambers he had to call in police.
Texts between Letby and the unnamed doctor were read out in court. They appeared to show the doctor comforting the killer nurse as she feigned upset after the death of one of her victims
And in another exchange over WhatsApp, Letby appeared to chat about her blossoming friendship with the doctor – who prosecutors said she had tried to impress by creating ‘crisis situations’ where they could work alongside each other to save the babies she had poisoned
Killer nurse Letby would often pull funny faces for photos while out with friends. Two of her murders took place shortly after returning from a week-long holiday to Ibiza
Asked why he thought management were so reluctant to involve police for so long, Dr Gibbs said: ‘I think they could not accept and could not believe that a member of staff could be killing a series of patients in hospital. They just couldn’t believe it was possible.
‘I’ve been told that some of the senior nurses were strongly defending Lucy Letby and they just couldn’t believe she had done anything. I think they (managers) closed their minds to the fact she could have done that too soon.
‘It is a shame that, despite all us paediatricians expressing concerns, our clinical experience and our repeated observations that these deaths were outside our normal experience, they were unnatural and unusual, that advice wasn’t heeded.’
Another doctor has told the Mail that it was telling that Mr Chambers was a nurse before moving into management. Alison Kelly and Karen Rees, two other managers on the executive team, were also nurses. ‘You wonder whether they were simply protecting one of their own and became blinkered by that,’ the medic said.
Dr Gibbs said he had ‘mixed emotions’ about the guilty verdicts. ‘I feel some relief that the jury have come to conclusions in most of the cases and that the jury determined the truth. But, of course, it is devastating for the families.’
He said it was telling that, in the seven years since Letby had left, there had been just one death on the neo-natal unit.
Asked if he wished to respond to Dr Gibbs’s claims, Mr Chambers referred to a statement he issued on Friday after the guilty verdicts. He confirmed he would give evidence to the independent inquiry, adding it was ‘the right place to explore these complex issues’.
Letby texting a colleague after the death of Baby A
After the deaths of Baby A and Bay C, says: ‘There are no words, it’s been awful’
In this string of messages, Letby tries to suggest the babies’ deaths was linked to health problems
The nurse describes ‘crying and hugging’ the parents of Baby E, who died in her care
The texts end with Letby crowing that police ‘have nothing or minimal on me’