A 33-year-old nurse, who worked in the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital in the United Kingdom, has been convicted of killing 7 babies and attempting to kill 6 ofter infants between June 2015 and June 2016.
Identified as one Lucy Letby, she injected the toddlers with air, force-fed them milk and poisoned two of them with insulin. The guilty verdict came two years after the Cheshire Police began an investigation into the unexplained deaths of infants at the Countess of Chester Hospital.
She was charged in November 2020 with murder and attempted murder. Her trial lasted more than 10 months, starting in October 2022, following which Lucy Letby was convicted of the heinous crime. She will be sentenced on Monday (August 21) by the Manchester Crown Court.
Britain’s worst ever child killer, nurse Lucy Letby, 33, convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder six others, by injecting air into their blood & stomachs, overfeeding them with milk, physically assaulting them & poisoning them with insulin. Pure rotten evil. pic.twitter.com/9qLTCUi8M7
— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) August 18, 2023
While speaking about the matter, senior Crown prosecutor Pascale Jones said, “(Lucy Letby) did her utmost to conceal her crimes, by varying the ways in which she repeatedly harmed babies in her care”.
” (She) sought to deceive her colleagues and pass off the harm she caused as nothing more than a worsening of each baby’s existing vulnerability. She perverted her learning and weaponised her craft to inflict harm, grief and death,” he added.
In a chilling note from 2016, which was recovered from the bedroom of Lucy Letby, she wrote, “I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough. I will never have children or marry or know what it’s like to have a family…I am a horrible evil person. I did this”
Indian doctor raised alarm about Lucy Letby
It has now come to light that a consultant paediatrician at the Countess of Chester Hospital, named Dr Ravi Jayaram, had raised alarms about Lucy Letby and the strange deaths of 7 infants.
In an interview with ITV News, he informed that the hospital management did not pay heed to his concerns and was even forced to apologise to the convicted nurse. “I do genuinely believe that there are four or five babies who could be going to school now who aren’t,” Dr Jayaram lamented.
He was also warned by the then-Chief Executive Tony Chambers to draw a line or face consequences. The paediatrician recounted how he became suspicious of Lucy Letby.
“That is a night that is etched on my memory and will be in my nightmares forever…As I walked towards the incubator, I could see on the monitors that the oxygen saturations were dropping, and they’d dropped to a level that ordinarily the alarms would’ve been going off and the nurse would’ve called for help,” he said.
‘That is a night that is etched on my memory and will be in my nightmares forever.’
— ITV News (@itvnews) August 18, 2023
Dr Ravi Jayaram told ITV News his suspicions about Lucy Letby were confirmed when he walked in on the nurse attending to a baby one eveninghttps://t.co/E6EIvyKTId pic.twitter.com/ms8M293K1J
Dr Jayaram added, “Lucy Letby was standing by the top of the incubator. She didn’t have her hands in the incubator. She was just standing there…Tubes do become dislodged, but this was a twenty-five-week gestation baby, who wasn’t kicking around, who wasn’t vigorous. The only possibility was that that tube had to have been dislodged deliberately.”
It was only in April 2017 that the hospital trust allowed the doctors to talk about the matter to the police. Dr Jayaram recounted, “The police, after listening to us for less than 10 minutes, realised that this is something that they had to be involved with. I could have punched the air.”
The paediatrician is now hoping for a public inquiry into the laxity on the part of the management of the hospital. He is seeking the establishment of a watchdog to hold NHS managers accountable for misconduct.
“I won’t rest and consider any closure for me until they have been put in a position where they can be held to account,” Dr Jayaram concluded.
