Her color was beige, and some of her colleagues have described her at the trial as an absolutely normal and ordinary girl.
But normal and ordinary, not at all. Behind her angelic face was the most prominent serial baby killer in modern British history, convicted yesterday of the deaths of seven of them and the attempted murder of six more. 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 this city in the north of England, dedicated herself for at least a year (between the summer of 2015 and 2016) to committing the cruelest of crimes Can there be anything worse than cutting short a life that has just begun? End the future before it begins? To inflict such pain on parents?
But Lucy, the jury heard, did this for pleasure, with a smile on her face, and even posed for photos with the newborns before killing them, and then offered to prepare their bodices for the burial Afterwards, he reveled in offering condolences to family members and searching social media for information about his grief.
33-year-old Letby (she was just a girl in her twenties when she became a serial baby killer) used a variety of methods to end the lives of her young victims: injecting them with insulin and other substances, crush their tiny diaphragm or stick a tube down their neck. Among others, two triplets and a baby that weighed less than a kilo and was in the incubator died at their sinister hands. But escaping their clutches was not a blessing in some cases either, because one survivor suffered severe brain damage that makes it impossible for her to lead a normal life.
On average, only two in a thousand newborns die in the UK. Except those that passed through the hands of Lucy Letby. Three died in Chester hospital in 2016 in a matter of a fortnight, raising the alarm, but those responsible for the center wanted to believe it was a sad coincidence. The murderous nurse has always maintained her innocence, and those who then expressed suspicions 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 watched the whole trial and cried at the verdicts), a middle-class couple who own a radiator company, and suffered no childhood trauma, rather in opposite I was going to the gym and salsa lessons. She was the first in the family to go to university, and also the first to go to prison. He faces a life sentence with no possibility of parole. She has earned a place among the country's great female murderers, along with Myra Hindley, who killed five children in Manchester in the 1960s, and Rosemary West, who took part with her husband Fred in the torture, rape, mutilation and death of nine girls, buried in the garden and in the cellar of what was dubbed the "house of horrors".
The trial lasted ten months and was 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 well of Lucy, despite who had been relatively popular at work and had friends with whom he went on weekends). The parents of the murdered babies issued a statement saying that nothing, not even the sentence, can ease the pain of having lost their children. The nurse sobbed and looked at her parents as the first guilty verdict was delivered. After that he did not return to the room to hear any more. She only cried when she saw pictures 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 about the reason for 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 on life and death. Or boredom (she said that when she was assigned healthy babies without complications, she found the work “unstimulating”). Or, as she wrote in her 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 he is in his right mind.
The investigation has not concluded, and police will now look into all infant deaths at the hospitals where he worked. It could be much worse.
