Top NHS staff ignored repeated warnings about baby killer
NHS England will “learn every possible lesson from this awful case”, its chief nursing officer, Dame Ruth May, vowed today after a 33 year-old neonatal nurse from Chester became the most prolific child killer in modern British history.
Following a harrowing ten-month trial, Lucy Letby was found guilty of the “persistent, calculated and cold-blooded” murders of seven premature babies and attempts to murder six more.
When sentenced at the Manchester Crown Court on Monday, she is expected to become only the third woman alive in the UK to be handed a whole-life term, meaning she will never be released from prison. The government has announced an independent inquiry this afternoon into how this tragic series of murders could have occurred.
Letby carried out the killings between June 2015 and June 2016 on the unit where she worked in the Countess of Chester hospital in north-west England. She murdered some newborns by injecting air into their tiny bodies, shattering their diaphragms, while in one instance, she pushed a tube down an infant’s throat. She attempted to kill two babies by lacing their feeding bags with insulin.
“She did her utmost to conceal her crimes, by varying the ways in which she repeatedly harmed babies in her care,” said Crown prosecutor Pascale Jones today. “In her hands, innocuous substances like air, milk, fluids – or medication like insulin – would become lethal.”
Following a marked rise in deaths on the neonatal unit – and growing suspicion among former colleagues who noticed Letby almost always happened to be on shift when a baby died or collapsed – she was finally reported the police in 2017 and arrested in 2018.
When police searched her home, they found a number of handwritten notes on scraps of paper that appeared to be confessions, one of which read: “I am evil I did this.”
The disturbing case raises many questions, perhaps the most obvious one being what drove this young nurse to commit acts of such atrocity?
Letby denies all charges while even crime experts have struggled to come up with any plausible motive.
DCI Nicola Evans, who spent six years analysing Letby as part of the police investigation, described her in one word: “Beige.”
The fact that “there doesn’t seem to be anything to say [to explain] why she committed these crimes” makes this case “completely unprecedented,” says Evans.
Unlike notorious child killers Myra Hindley and Rose West, there has been no suggestion that Letby’s childhood was in any way traumatic. She grew up in a pleasant middle-class neighbourhood in Hereford, seemingly doted on by her parents, had an active social life and is described by old friends as studious and caring.
The multimillion-pound police investigation into Letby is expected to continue for years and may result in further trials as there are other deaths which occurred under her watch still to be investigated.
Today’s verdict raises another thorny question: should Letby’s barbaric acts have been detected sooner?
The lead consultant at the neonatal unit where Letby worked has already offered his own damning conclusion. Speaking to the BBC and The Guardian today, Dr Stephen Brearey accused NHS bosses of “bullying” and “intimidating” senior doctors who repeatedly raised concerns about her as early as 2015 and questioned why Letby was still working on the neo-natal units. Letby went on to attack five more babies after this and killed two more as late as June 2016.
Rob Behrens, the parliamentary and health service ombudsman, described the case as “one of the darkest crimes ever committed in our health service” and “without parallel.”
Even so, he added that: “Too often, we see the commitment to public safety in the NHS undone by a defensive leadership culture.”
This is not the last we will hear of Lucy Letby. Today’s verdict has raised many more questions about how such serious complaints from senior staff are not being followed up within the NHS hierarchy.
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