Lucy Letby, 32, who worked at the Countess of Chester Hospital, is accused of multiple baby murders in the hospital’s neonatal unit from June 2015 to June 2016. She denies all charges.
Manchester Crown Court heard how Ms. Letby allegedly attempted to kill the children by injecting them with air, milk, or insulin, including two brothers from a set of triplets and one premature baby girl, who was only 98 minutes old.
Prosecutor Nicholas Johnson KC said the circumstances of the girl’s death were “an extreme example even by the standards of this case.”
“There were four separate occasions on which we allege Lucy Letby tried to kill her,” he said. “But ultimately at the fourth attempt, Lucy Letby succeeded in killing her.”
Attempts to murder the child ‘cold-blooded’ and ‘calculated’, says prosecutor
In the first alleged attempt, Ms. Letby injected the girl, identified for legal reasons as Child I, with air, but she was “resilient,” said Mr. Johnson. After the second attempt, Ms. Letby had stood in the doorway of Child I’s darkened room and commented that she looked pale. The designated nurse then approached and turned on the light, noticing that the child wasn’t breathing. After a third attempt the child was found to have excess air in her stomach, which had affected her breathing. Child I was then transferred to Arrowe Park Hospital, where she was stabilized before she was returned to Chester.
After the fourth attempt, Child I’s medical alarm rang, leading a nurse to spot Ms. Letby by the child’s incubator. Child I died that morning, said Mr. Johnson, who described the nurse’s attacks as premeditated. “It was persistent, it was calculated, and it was cold-blooded.”
The judge, Mr. Justice Goss, and jury heard how shortly after the parents were told of their child’s death, Ms. Letby approached the mother, who testified that the nurse was “smiling and kept going on about how she was present at the baby’s first bath and how much the baby had loved it.” She also sent a sympathy card to the parents, and the prosecutor says she kept an image of the card on her phone.
Doctor interrupted another alleged attempt
Dr. Ravi Jayaram, a paediatric consultant, had become suspicious of Ms. Letby in a number of unexplained child deaths. He later interrupted her as she allegedly tried to kill another baby, identified as Child K. He noticed that the nurse was alone with the baby and walked into the room, seeing Ms. Letby standing over the child’s incubator. He was “uncomfortable” as he had “started to notice a coincidence between unexplained deaths, serious collapses, and the presence of Lucy Letby,” said the prosecutor.
“Dr. Jayaram could see from the monitor on the wall that Child K’s oxygen saturation level was falling dangerously low, to somewhere in the 80s,” said Mr. Johnson. “He said an alarm should have been sounding as Child K’s oxygen levels were falling.” Despite this, the nurse had not called for assistance.
“We allege she was trying to kill Child K when Dr. Jayaram walked in,” Mr. Johnson said, adding that the child’s breathing tube was found dislodged. The prosecutor said it was possible for this to happen in an active baby, but Child K was very premature and had been sedated.
Despite his concerns, Dr. Jayaram did not make a note of his suspicions. Later that morning, Ms. Letby was again at Child K’s incubator calling for help. The nurse was assisting the baby with her breathing and the breathing tube was found to have slipped too far into her throat. The child was transferred to another hospital but later died. Ms. Letby is not accused of Child K’s murder.
However, after the death of Child K, Ms. Letby was moved to day shifts “because the consultants were concerned about the correlation between her presence and unexpected deaths and life-threatening episodes on the night shifts,” said Mr. Johnson. She was removed from the neonatal ward in June 2016 and moved to clerical duties where she would not come into contact with children.