Nurse Lucy Letby guilty of murdering seven babies on neonatal unit
The 33-year-old is convicted of killing babies at the hospital neonatal unit where she worked.
Since she stopped caring for patients, there has been 1 death in 7 years. There were 6 in the year while she was on duty.
Patients*
Sorry
Fixed!
I don’t know if it shows on this photo and I just can’t see it (Lemmios cuts photos off for some reason) but I read somewhere else that the nurse after Lucy that was there for the most attempted/murders were there for just 7 of the 25.
About the murders stopping, it occurred to me that if she were being set up, that would be the perfect time for the real murderer to stop - after someone else had been arrested. Clearly my latest criminal minds re-binge if affecting my brain though - so much evidence points to her it’s beyond unlikely that this is a set up/conspiracy.
Hey, Lemmios developer here, what do you mean by cutting off images? It’s a known bug (I’m not sure that’s the right word because it’s working as intended just looks odd when people embed images in the body of a post) that Lemmios will only show the begging of a text post in the main feed, but once a post is clicked on there shouldn’t be any cut off images? The image loads fine for me and I would love a screenshot of it getting cut off if you can?
Other nurses shared 1,2,5,2,6,2,6, and 5 shifts out of the 17 murders and attempted murders during her shifts.
Geez the judge told the jurors that they would never have to serve jury duty again because the case was so traumatic. I don't even want to imagine what everyone involved went through.
tbh, i don't think it's common to do more than one jury service in your life anyway. My dad is gone 60 and he has only done one recently. i'm 30 and have not done one
Both my dad and partner have done it twice, each time for less than two weeks. I think the jurors in this cause were further excused because of the sheer length of the trial, rather than because the evidence they had to consider was particularly gruesome. Obviously a premature baby serial killer is gruesome, but I think jurors are usually excused from serving again if the trial has been so horrific that they’re offered counselling or something. It’s very very rare for a trial to take more than 6 weeks.
Wow. How horrible do you have to be to murder health premature babies?
Based on the writing pictured in the article, she was seriously mentally ill.
I think that could be guessed without seeing the writing in the article as well, though obviously you're right.
Some killers are just psychopaths/sociopaths (like Ted Bundy) but the vast majority have some serious problems which have unfortunately been missed or more likely hidden and she's received no help for them leading to.... This. It's awful.
I work in a hospital. Management should have been all over this but it sounds very much like they didn't want any trouble so ignored it as much as possible.
Staff should have one to ones with their managers including checking up on their welfare which is done properly could have picked up on something in the killer's behaviour or mental health which wasn't right.
Wards should have high standards of monitoring and if there's an unexpected death the reason why should be fully investigated. If there was any room for doubt they should have at least escalated it to into an independent internal investigation - it's not like there were a lot of potential suspects.
Guilty verdict not a surprise after reading about the case earlier this year. Having a nurse on the wards supposedly looking after the most vulnerable babies in hospital and instead killing them is every parents nightmare.
I always wonder, how many single-time murderers are there for every serial killer? Like how many nurses, doctors or other people with an opportunity just took and murdered once. How many people might get away with that?
Every serial killer has his first kill … but how many people have a first kill and then think … nah, I’d rather not do that but don’t get caught.
I want the say that I saw a statistic saying that murder clearance rates were only about 50%. That coupled with wrong conviction rates makes one wonder.
I genuinely don't know if that's true or not though.
I mean... it's pretty much impossible to know how many undiscovered murders there are. Yes, you can do autopsies on everyone who's declared dead and then figure out how many of them were killed, but there are a lot of ways to kill a person that won't show up in an autopsy, especially in a hospital setting.
You can kill someone in healthcare without it being murder. People just expect some people to die.
Accidents happen if course. If it was a preventable accident it could potentially be classed under incompetence, which is kind of the medical version of manslaughter depending on the situation. But proving that would probably require another professional whistleblowing on a colleague.
Does anyone know if there was a motive? I didn't see one in the article, but maybe I missed it.
Either way, she deserves permanent incarceration away from society. "Fucked up" is an inadequate description.
There's a wiki article on the subject of nurses who kill their patients. It contains some general speculation on motivations.
The motivation for this type of criminal behaviour is variable, but generally falls into one or more types or patterns:[4]
Mercy killer: Believe the victims are suffering or beyond help, though this belief may be delusional.
Sadistic: Use their position as a way of exerting power and control over helpless victims.
Malignant hero: A pattern wherein the subject endangers the victim's life in some way and then proceeds to "save" them. Some feign attempting resuscitation, all the while knowing their victim is already dead and beyond help, but hope to be seen as selflessly making an effort.
None of them seem to fit here. A mercy killer would only work if she views the world as so bad that she spares the babies the suffering in growing up inside of it, but she seems to acknowledge that she's a terrible person. This fact also makes me want to cross out the sadistic one, because I feel a sadistic sociopath wouldn't end up feeling remorse. And from what I can tell she didn't try to be the hero either, not even sure you can with some of the ways she chose to kill them. Could maybe some sort of compulsion or deeper mental issues, like hearing voices or something. There's definitely something very wrong with her.
no real motive has been established
They found this note, it gives us a tiny glimpse into Lucy's mind, at least..
Does someone mind transcribing the chicken scratch handwriting?
I don't know, all other actions seem very competent and very different from the note. Without thorough investigation by professional we can't draw conclusions from that. It may just be that she prefers people thinking that she is crazy rather than a heartless monster. The note seems very deliberately written to look crazy to me but who knows
Wow what a chilling story, never knew about this. How anyone can think they can get away with this is beyond me.
The companion story: Hospital bosses ignored months of doctors' warnings about Lucy Letby suggests that not only did hospital management ignore the problem for almost 9 months, they had no interest in involving the police or outside investigators. They even required two of the doctors to apologize to her for their accusations.
So I guess she was getting away with it just fine.
I don't know how the hospital administrators live with themselves. According to that article, if they had acted when they were warned they could have potentially prevented 5 assaults on infants, including 2 murders. Babies were murdered because they tried to cover up what was going on instead of stopping it. It's truly monstrous and they should face consequences.
There was actually someone similar in the news when I was growing up, Beverly Allit. I remember seeing stuff about that on the local news because it wasn't that far away from where we were. It's pretty terrifying, the idea that you can just be leaving your children in the hands of people like this
I have a child. I read just to the part in the article about what she did and I fucking cried. I never wanna see this picture or hear about her again.
What an irredeemable monster.
Suffer in prison and then rot in hell, you removed
Gallows.
Was going to ask how this woman never showed signs of this possibility before this all harpooned, and then I read this “Her mother sobbed loudly and was heard to say "this can't be right - you can't be serious" while the families of the babies cried and gasped.” Yup, there were definitely signs before, like there always are.
By all accounts your summary shows there were no signs. What about your comment reveals any existing signs?
