UK: Who is Lucy Letby? Nurse accused of ‘killing’ pre-mature babies grilled on ‘I am evil’ note

A 33-year-old nurse from Chester, England accused of murdering seven babies between June 2015 and June 2016 has taken a stand for herself for the first time in years. Lucy Letby from the Countess of Chester hospital was accused of killing seven babies and attempting to murder 10 infants in the neonatal unit.

On Tuesday, she presented evidence at the Manchester Crown Court where she faces the allegations.The nurse broke down in tears in the witness box after being asked how she is coping with her situation. She told the court that her ‘whole world was stopped’ when she was accused of the ‘sickening’ murders of several babies.

During a search operation in her house, police authorities found a Post-it note in her home with the message ‘I am evil, I did this’. When defence barrister Ben Meyers KC asked about this, Letby reasoned, “because I felt at the time I had done something wrong and I thought I’m such an awful, evil person…that I had made mistakes and not known.”

The nurse said she thought “that somehow I had been incompetent and I had done something wrong to affect these babies. I felt I must be responsible in some way.”

Allegations against Lucy Letby

Letby is accused of fatally injecting newborns with insulin, air or milk during a 12-month period in the neo-natal ward at the hospital. It was also alleged that one of the seven babies, was just 24 hours old when Letby reportedly injected him with air, killing him just 90 minutes after she came on shift. The next day, she also allegedly tried to kill her twin sister.

Letby denies all allegations and said that her job was her life and she will never do something like this. ‘I can’t put it into words, it is just, my whole world was stopped,”she said.

“I think it’s completely changed everything about me, about my life, about the hopes I had for the future. Everything is just gone.”

Various notes recovered from Letby’s house

Police recovered another post from her house, in which she had written, “not good enough”, “I can’t breathe, I can’t focus” and “I hate myself.”

She told the court that she wrote all of this as she was diagnosed with depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder and needed medication to help her sleep.

The University of Chester graduate said she wrote them as she tried to cope with being removed from the neonatal unit in 2016. “I felt immense responsibility,” she said. “I felt I had been incompetent or done something wrong that had harmed children.”

In one of the recovered documents from Letby’s house, she wrote, “BASTARDS” about two of her colleagues, Dr Ravi Jayaram and Dr Stephen Breary, who first raised concerns about her to hospital management.

Letby explained that this was not “the language I would use” but that’s “how I felt about some people…because of the things they’d been saying about me”.

Letby wrote a sympathy card for the baby she is accused of killing

Nurse Letby photographed a sympathy card to the grieving parents of a baby girl to remember her “kind words”. She captured the image on her mobile phone ahead of the young one’s funeral.

She is accused of murdering the prematurely-born infant known as Child I, in the early hours of October 23, 2015.

Letby’s Facebook searches tell a different story

The court was told by the police authorities that between June 2015 and June 2016, Letby made 2,381 Facebook searches, out of which some were about the parents of babies she allegedly murdered.

She told jurors it was “just out of curiosity” and “they were obviously on my mind at that point”. She further said that it was “normal” for her to satisfy her “curiosity by searching for friends, colleagues and parents of children she had treated.”

This was for the first time in eight months since her trial started that Letby presented evidence to the court. She had been in prison waiting for her trial for two and a half years.

(With inputs from agencies)

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