Since the Lucy Letby trial reached its conclusion, Kayley Asher has been living in a state of heightened fear. She checks under her bed and in her wardrobe, convinced that Letby is coming to get her.
Kayley was 14 months old when another nurse, Beverley Allitt, tried to kill her in 1991. Allitt was said to have twice injected air under Kayley’s armpit, which made her lungs collapse. The respiratory arrest left her with permanent brain injuries.
Those injuries have trapped Kayley, now 33, in childhood and she is haunted by what Allitt did to her. On Wednesday when the Guardian visited, she had spent the day in tears about Letby. She said of the two nurses: “I want them to be dead. Both of them.”
Allitt was convicted in 1993 of murdering four children and attacking nine others, including Kayley, and she was given 13 life sentences. Until Letby’s conviction, she was considered Britain’s worst serial killer of babies.
Alan and Sharon Asher fostered Kayley in 1993 while Allitt’s trial was under way and later adopted her. They tried to shield Kayley from what had happened but she found out at school when she was 14.
Sharon, 63, said Kayley came home furious, saying: “Mum, you didn’t tell me a nurse tried to kill me.”
Since then, Kayley has been terrified of a repeat incident, but her fear of hospitals had been there since she was a toddler.
“She came to us at two and a half and she was terrified of doctors, nurses, dentists,” Sharon said. “A psychologist said that although she was 14 months old [when she was attacked], it can be there in your subconscious mind. And it just needs something to bring it back again.”
Kayley was born with learning disabilities, and the oxygen starvation of her brain after Allitt’s attacks worsened them.
When Letby was found guilty, Kayley caught the news at a day centre and misunderstood the meaning of her refusal to appear in court.
Sharon said: “She came charging home and said: ‘Mum she’s guilty but she’s not going to be in the courtroom on Monday. That means this weekend she can come and get me.’
“You try to ask her: ‘Why do you think she will come after you? She doesn’t know you. It’s not related to nurse Allitt.’ But in Kayley’s mind, it is. That nurse might want to kill her like nurse Allitt did when she was a baby. She even looks under her pillow and in the drawers under her bed.”
A fear of hospitals has infected the whole family. When Alan caught Covid in 2020, he was “absolutely terrified” of being admitted, he said. He spent seven weeks in intensive care and is immensely grateful to the staff for the life-saving treatment he received, which included a tracheotomy, but he is still uneasy about hospitals.
One of their other daughters is paranoid about leaving her children alone with clinicians despite needing to be in hospital regularly for ongoing health problems.
Reflecting on the parents of Allitt’s victims who were with their children in hospital, Sharon said: “I think those parents must be going through a terrible time to know it happened again and it happened to their child. Parents were told it will never happen again.”
For Alan, the most upsetting thing about reliving the Allitt case again through headlines about Letby is the failure to learn lessons.
An inquiry after the Allitt case found that vital clues were missed over the 58 days she worked on the children’s ward at Grantham and Kesteven hospital in Lincolnshire. It said: “The main lesson is that the Grantham disaster should serve to heighten awareness in all those caring for children of the possibility of malevolent intervention as a cause of unexplained clinical events.”
Twenty-four years later, Letby was able to commit very similar crimes, and serious questions have been raised over the hospital management’s response.
Alan, 66, a former mayor of Grantham, said any new inquiry needed to be statutory so that people could be forced to attend. “I think the way things are, the way [the inquiry] is going to be done, is purely lip service. We need an inquiry that will see action taken against people who were inactive,” he said.
He added: “We just want to try to make sure, like we tried 30 years ago, that this doesn’t happen again. And people who could have helped are brought to account for why they didn’t help.”
