Her color was beige, and some of her colleagues have described her at trial as a completely ordinary girl. But ordinary, nothing. Behind her angelic face was the biggest serial killer of babies in modern British history, convicted yesterday for the deaths of seven of them and the attempt to kill another six. And the police fear that it is the tip of the iceberg.
A nurse in the neonatal department of the Countess of Chester hospital, in that city in the north of England, she dedicated herself for at least a year (between the summer of 2015 and 2016) to committing the cruelest of crimes. Could there be anything worse than cutting short a life that has just begun? Ending the future before it begins? Inflicting such pain on parents? But Lucy, according to the jury, did it for pleasure, with a smile ahead of her, she even took pictures with the newborns before killing them, and she later offered to prepare their little bodies for burial. Later, she gloated giving her condolences to the relatives and looking for information on social networks about her affliction.
Letby, 33 years old (she was barely in her twenties when she became a serial killer of babies), resorted to the most diverse methods to end the lives of her little victims: injecting them with insulin and other substances, crushing their tiny diaphragm or inserting a tube into them. in the throat. In her sinister hands, among others, two triplets died, and a creature that weighed less than a kilo and was in the incubator. But being saved from her clutches was not in some cases a blessing either, because a survivor suffered severe brain damage that makes it impossible for her to lead a normal life.
On average, only two in every thousand newborns die in the UK. Except for the ones that passed through Lucy Letby's hands. Three died in Chester hospital in 2016 in a matter of fifteen days, and alarms went off, but those in charge of the center wanted to believe that it was a sad coincidence. The murderous nurse has always maintained her innocence, and those who then expressed suspicions about her were forced to write her a letter of apology.
What could lead someone to do something so abominable, in such a calculated way? Lucy is the only child of John and Susan Letby (who have followed the entire trial and cried with the verdicts), a middle-class couple who own a radiator company, and she did not suffer any childhood trauma, quite the opposite. She went to the gym and to salsa classes. She was the first in the family to go to college, and also the first to go to jail. She awaits a life sentence without the possibility of leaving before. She has made a place for herself among the country's greatest murderers, alongside Myra Hindley, who killed five children in Manchester in the 1960s, and Rosemary West, who participated with her husband Fred in the torture, rape, mutilation and death of nine girls, buried in the garden and the cellar of what was dubbed the “house of horrors”.
The trial has lasted ten months and has been one of the longest in the history of the nation, with a hundred hours of testimony (all from the prosecution, because the defense could not find anyone who spoke highly of Lucy, despite having been relatively popular at work and had friends you went away with for the weekend). The parents of the murdered babies issued a statement saying that nothing, not even sentencing, can ease the pain of losing their babies. A sob escaped the nurse and she looked at her parents as the first guilty verdict was handed down. She then did not return to the room to listen to any other. She only cried when she saw the photos of her two cats on the screen, and when a married doctor from the hospital with whom she had an affair appeared.
Precisely that relationship is one of the theories of why the crimes, to get his attention (he was in charge of going to the newborn section if there was an emergency). Another, common in serial killers, is the desire to play God and decide about life and death. Or boredom (he stated that when he was assigned healthy babies without complications, he found the job "unstimulating"). Or, as he wrote in his diary, the feeling of “not being good enough to take care of anyone; I will never marry or have children or my own family.” No one who behaves in such a wild way is normal, but the psychiatrists who examined Letby determined that she was sane.
The investigation is not complete, and the police are now going to look into all the deaths of babies in the hospitals where they have worked. It can be even much worse.
