LUCY LETBY VERDICT - 'HORRIBLE AND EVIL'

A NEONATAL NURSE IS CONVICTED OF THE MURDERS OF SEVEN BABIES IN HER CARE

- Michael Crooks

After a mum gave birth to premature twins at England’s Countess of Chester Hospital in August 2015, she would regularly leave the maternity ward to drop off breast milk for her tiny babies in the neonatal unit. But on the evening of August 3, when the mother, who cannot be named for legal reasons, approached the babies’ room where English nurse Lucy Letby was on duty, she heard one of the boys screaming.

“It was like nothing I’d heard before,” she said. “It was horrendous.”

It was the sound of unthinkable cruelty in an unprecedented serial killing case. On August 18, Letby, 33, was found guilty of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder another six at the hospital where she worked in Chester, north-west England. In a case that has shocked Britain, Letby used air, milk, fluids, insulin or physical abuse to kill vulnerable newborns in what should be “the safest place in the world”, as one doctor put it.

“She perverted her learning and weaponised her craft to inflict harm, grief and death,” senior prosecutor Pascale Jones told the court. “Her attacks were a complete betrayal of the trust placed in her.”

The killings make Letby, a university-educated nurse from a “loving” middle-class home, the worst child-killer in British modern history. She denies the murders, and her motive is unknown.

“Little did those working alongside her know that there was a murderer in their midst,” said Jones.