- Tragically, even among the survivors there are children, now aged seven or eight, who will spend the rest of their lives needing round-the-clock care
The cruel mystery remains around why vicious serial baby killer Lucy Letby committed the worst killing spree of newborn babies in British history.
The neonatal nurse, 33, was sentenced to die in jail after being found guilty of killing seven babies at the Countess of Chester hospital where she worked and the attempted murder of seven more.
Tragically, even among the survivors there are children, now aged seven or eight, who will spend the rest of their lives needing round-the-clock care.
But nothing in her background or childhood has been found to explain her killing spree – which started in June 2015.
After each of her murders, Letby appeared ‘animated and excited’, offering to bathe, dress and take photographs of her victims’ bodies.
Due to her lack of contrition, her motive remains unclear, but the prosecution believed she got a ‘thrill’ out of ‘playing God’.
They also suggested she had been trying to impress a married doctor, knowing he’d be the one to come and help if she hurt children in her care.
One book on Letby’s bedside table is a memoir of a doctor’s recovery from a near-fatal miscarriage that serves as an attack on medics’ ‘inability to see and acknowledge the pain of loss and human suffering’.
READ MORE: Senior NHS manager who ‘ignored warnings about serial killer nurse Lucy Letby is SUSPENDED
In Shock, by intensive care doc Dr Rana Awdish, is touted as a ‘searing account of her extraordinary journey from doctor to patient, during which she sees for the first time the dysfunction of her profession’s disconnection from patients’.
The publisher-issued blurb adds: ‘[It is] a call to arms for doctors to see each patient not as a diagnosis but as a human being.’
The second book – by Gavin and Stacey co-creator Ruth Jones – depicts a story about a woman’s affair with a married man.
Letby herself suffered from an underactive thyroid – a condition that can make it difficult to conceive and cause problems during pregnancy.
During the trial she revealed the thyroid medication sometimes made her grumpy, texting one friend ‘everyone peeing me off.’
The real motive of Lucy Letby
But police were quick to point to Letby’s apparent thrill in killing as she carried out her horrific spree as they investigated a motive behind her murders.
Evidence that she became animated and excited after the babies’ deaths, enjoyed the drama of the emergencies when infants collapsed and was quick to tell her colleagues in texts when something unusual and tragic had happened on her shift, pointed to her revelling in the attention, they said.
However, in the absence of a clear motive, Detective Superintendent Paul Hughes, who led the investigation for Cheshire Police, said he believed Letby’s ‘confession’ note provided the only explanation for why she became Britain’s most prolific child killer in modern times.
‘She clearly loves the attention, I think she loved the attention of a trial as well,’ DS Hughes said.
‘But if we are looking for why she’s done this, then to re-use her own words, “she is evil and she did this”.
‘Without her telling us why, if we’re looking for why, then she wrote it down in that note.’
The green Post-it note is an evidence
The green Post-it note was discovered in her diary when police searched her home after she was arrested in July 2018. It was headed: ‘NOT GOOD ENOUGH.’
As well as writing, ‘I AM EVIL, I DID THIS’ in capital letters, Letby also scrawled: ‘There are no words. I am an awful person – I pay every day for that. I can’t breathe. I can’t focus. Kill myself right now.
‘Overwhelming fear/panic. I’ll never have children or marry. I’ll never know what it’s like to have a family. NO HOPE.
‘I haven’t done anything wrong. Police investigation forget slander. Discrimination. Victimisation. All getting too much everything taking over my life.
‘Hate myself so much for what this has . . . I feel very alone and scared. What does the future hold. How can I get through it. How will things ever be like they used. HATE. PANIC. FEAR. LOST. I don’t deserve to live. I DID THIS. WHY ME.
‘I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough for them and I am a horrible evil person. I don’t deserve Mum and Dad. World is better off without me.’
Letby claimed the note was not a confession and that she wrote it after being moved off the unit, in July 2016, because she was struggling with being blamed for something she hadn’t done.
But the prosecution urged the jury to read it ‘literally’ and Mr Hughes said it was his view that Letby deliberately left the note for police to find.
