In July 2016, the Countess of Chester Hospital stopped accepting premature babies as patients.
The reason was an audit that showed the hospital had inexplicably high death rates among the premature babies.
The colleagues sensed something
Lucy Letby was 25 years old when she started working in the hospital’s neonatal unit as a registered nurse in 2015. She had previously worked in the Countess of Chester’s neonatal unit during training, but now she had her own responsibility for patients.
Letby was outwardly a committed and ambitious nurse who raised money for the hospital and told in an interview how much she enjoyed watching the children develop and giving support to the parents.
But the colleagues sensed that something was wrong. When the emergency alarm rang from the department, they sometimes commented “Is Lucy working tonight or not?”, a colleague tells later in the trial.
Investigation begins
The investigation into the death toll showed that staffing levels on the ward could be better, but not the root cause of the death rate, which was 10 percent higher than expected.
Since they could not find an explanation for the death, the investigation was handed over to the police after a year.
After the police investigated the case for just over a year, Lucy Letby was arrested in 2018 on suspicion of multiple murders.
The notes: “I did this”
It was during the night shifts when Lucy Letby had time alone with the premature children that she allegedly carried out several of the murders and attempted murders. The investigation shows that she gave an infant, only days old, too high a dose of insulin. Another child she tried to kill by injecting air into the bloodstream. Sometimes she tried to kill the same child in several different ways.
When police searched Letby’s home after the arrest, they found notes such as “I murdered with purpose because I’m not good enough to take care of them” and “I’M EVIL, I DID THIS.”
“Angelic Smile”
After a nine-month trial, Lucy Letby was convicted on Friday, despite her denials in court, of seven counts of murder and six counts of attempted murder.
Prosecutor Pascale Jones says of Lucy Letby that she not only betrayed the trust in the healthcare system, but also the trust that the children’s families had.
“Behind that angelic smile was a much darker part of her personality,” says Jones.