British nurse charged with murdering seven newborns, attempting to murder seven more

Lucy Letby, a 33-year-old nurse in a British hospital was found guilty Friday of killing seven babies and attempting to kill seven others, according to Cheshire Police, that was responsible for the investigation

Letby was charged with the murder of five boys and two girls, attempting to murder seven other infants in a British hospital where she worked as a neonatal nurse. She was first charged in 2020, but was found not guilty on two counts of attempted murder and the jury failed to reach verdicts on six other counts of attempted murder, according to prosecutors.

In a trial that began in October in the Manchester Crown Court, the Hereford native was accused of injecting infants, who were wither sick or born prematurely, with air, overfeeding them milk and poisoning them with insulin. The prosecution argued that Letby was a competent nurse and aware of her actions – choosing to lethalize these products against her young victims.

“Lucy Letby sought to deceive her colleagues and pass off the harm she caused as nothing more than a worsening of each baby’s existing vulnerability. In her hands, innocuous substances like air, milk, fluids – or medication like insulin – would become lethal. She perverted her learning and weaponized her craft to inflict harm, grief and death,” prosecutor Pascale Jones said.

The investigation began in 2017, when the Cheshire Constabulary, the police department responsible for the area, received reports from the hospital for greater-than-average number of baby deaths and non-fatal collapses during the period of June 2015 and June 2016. Letby was formally identified as a suspect and first arrested in July 2018, before being released on bail. This was followed by two further arrests – one in June 2019 and another in November 2020.

At the peak of the investigation, the police had 70 officers and civilian staff members working on the case, gathering around 32,000 documents and interviewing close to 2,000 people as part of the case.

Defendants for Letby cited ‘sub-optimal care’ by the hospital, issues with poor hygiene and a campaign of conspiracy against Letby by senior doctors. The jury ultimately rejected those contentions, after a lengthy and complex trial that discussed each baby’s case in detail and included sequence of events, that occurred during the time, prepared by two of Cheshire Constabulary’s intelligence analysts.

The sequence captured the what, when and where of staff movements on the ward, where each baby was on the unit at the time, how they were monitored and the treatment they received.

“This has been an investigation like no other — in scope, complexity and magnitude,” said a senior police investigator, Paul Hughes, in a statement. “We had to deal with this as 17 separate investigations — we are normally used to dealing with one murder or attempted murder investigation at a time,” he added.

Letby has been remanded into custody and is due to be sentenced at Manchester Crown Court on Monday 21 August, police said.

Rahat Sandhu