The 'beige' angel of death who played God to murder babies

IF SHE hadn't murdered tiny babies, Lucy Letby would be considered an unremarkable woman - 'beige' is how one of the detectives who investigated her terrible crimes described her.

- JOHN SCHEERHOUT

She lived in a modest three-bed semi on the Blacon estate on the outskirts of Chester. She had two teddy bears on her bed, two pet cats, Smudge and Tigger, and was a fan of Take That, Love Island and salsa dancing. Single, she was said to have an active social life. She sometimes went into work in the neonatal unit at the city's hospital carrying a Morrisons shopping bag.

But underneath her veneer of humdrum normalcy was a truth so shocking her own colleagues struggled to believe it. After all, nobody wants to believe a nurse would attack babies.

The sinister, barely conceivable truth is that Letby, who told colleagues it was 'boring' looking after babies who merely needed feeding, gravitated towards sick and extremely premature infants and, in the end, got a sick thrill from cleverly and discreetly attacking infants in her care even when colleagues were close by.

She then quietly watched the carnage she had caused unfold.

Letby had worked as a nurse in the neonatal unit of the Countess of Chester Hospital looking after infants since 2010, many of them born prematurely.

But, quietly and often right under the noses of her colleagues, she was attacking tiny, fragile newborns, some of them born so prematurely they weighed not much more than one pound and could fit on the palm of a hand.

She carried out these crimes between June 2015 and June 2016. The jury in her trial heard some of the attacks came after consultants had raised concerns with managers at the hospital's trust and even after she was taken off night shifts, when many of the attacks happened.

Letby attacked the babies in a variety of ways, but mostly it was by pumping air into their tiny bodies via a tube into their bodies, causing catastrophic injuries or blocking the supply of blood.